16 EDINBURGH PAST AND PRESENT.
of the gentler memory of Dandie Dinmont with his iron-grey topcoat and
his huge whip, and of Guy Mannering knocking at the door of Paulus
WARRISTON CLOSE. WRITERS‘ COURT.
Pleydell, Esq., and finding that he is away at High Jinks, it being ‘Saturday at
e’en,’ and by the name of Pleydell recalling you a step or two back to his and
his creator‘s chosen haunt, the Parliament House, with its ten thousand
histories of forensic eloquence, lynx-eyed acuteness; deferred hope, mortified
ambition, misapplied genius, worlds of wasted wit, humour, and ingenuity,
personal, legal, and political intrigue, justice often omitted in her own sanctuary
by ‘ special desire,’ or meted out with severest accuracy,-as much the
tempIe of human nature as of law.
Then under the wing of the Tron Church, skirting the Bridges, and showing
to the eye on one hand the Register House and Post-Office, and on the other
the College ; then plunging into the Canongate, once the royal region of the
city, and which, long after kings had ceased to haunt it, was fined with old
hotels which Gom the street opened up into paved courts and gardens, seeming
to retain and conserve the spirit of monarchy and nobility, as the deep cool
recesses of the forest retain the morning dew long after it has melted on the
wide savannas,-and which bore for its arms the proud escutcheon, Sic ifur
