366 MEMORIALS OF EDfN3URGH.
Andrew’s ; and the ground on which it and the neighbouring tenements were erected is
styled in a charter of Queen Mary, dated 1569, ‘‘ The liberty of the north side of the Water
of Leith, commonly called Rudeside : ” an epithet evidently resulting from its dependency
on the Abbey of the Holyrood. St Ninian’s Chapel still occupies its ancient site on the
banks of the Water of Leith, but very little of the original structure of the good Abbot
remains ; probably no more than a small portion of the basement wall on the north side,
where a small doorway appears with an elliptical arch, now built up, and partly sunk in
the ground. The remaihder of the structure cannot be earlier than the close of the sixteenth
century, and the. date on the steeple, which closely resembles that of the old Tron Church
destroyed in the Great Fire of 1824, is 1675. A large sculptured lintel, belonging to the
latter edifice, has been rebuilt into a more modern addition, erected apparentIy in the
reign of Queen Anne. It bears on it the following inscription in large Roman characters :
-BLESSED. AR . THEY. PAT. EEIR . YE. VORD . OF. QOD . AND. KEEP. IT. LVK . XI. 1600.
By the charter of Queen Mary, which confirmed the rights that had been purchased by the
inhabitants from Lord Holyroodhause, the Chapel of St Ninian was erected into a church
for the district of Rorth Leith, and endowed with sundry annual rents, and other ecclesiastical
property, including the neighbouring Chapel and Hospital of St Nicolas, and their
endowments. An Act of Parliament was obtained in 1606, oreating North Leith a separate
and independent parish, and appointing the chapel to he called in all time coming the
“parish Kirk of Leith benorth the brig.’’
The celebrated George Wishart-welLknown as the author of the elegant Latin
memoirs of Montrose, which were suspended to the neck of the illustrious cavalier when
he was executed-was minister of this parish in the year 1638, wheu the signing of the
Covenant became the established test of faith and allegiance in Scotland. He was soon
afterwards deposed for refusing to suhscribe, and was thrown into one of the dungeons of
the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, in consequence of the disoovery of his correspondence with the
Royalists. Wishart survived the stormy revolution that followed, and shared in the sunshine
of the Restoration. He was preferred to the See of Edinburgh on the re-establishment
of Episcopacy in Scotland, and died there in 1671, in his seventy-first year. He
was buried in the Abbey Church of Holyrood, where a long and flattering Latin inscription
recorded the whole biography of that oele6ris dooctar SopAocardius, as he is styled,
according to the scholastic punning of that age. The last minister who officiated in the
ancient Chapel of St Ninian was the benevolent and venerable Dr Johnston, the founder
of the Edinburgh Blind Asylum, who held the incumbency for upwards of half a century.
The foundation of the pew parish church of North Leith had been laid so early as
1814, and at length in 1826 its venerable predecessor was finally abandoned as a place
of worship, and soon after converted into a granary. “Thus,” says the historian of
Leith, with indignant pathos, “that edifice which had for npwards of 330 years been
devoted to the sacred purposes of religion, is now the unhallowed repository of pease and
barley I ”
The Hospital and Chapel of St Nicolas, with the neighbouring cemetery, were most
probably founded at a later date than Abbot Ballantyne’s Chapel, as the reasons assigned
by the founder for the building of the latter seem to imply that the inhabitants were without
any accessible place of worship. Nothing, however, is now known of their origin, and
