200 OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH. [High Etreet.
the gentlemen?s mansions and goodliest houses are
obscurely founded in the aforesaid lanes. The
walls are eight or ten feet thick, exceeding strong,
not built for a day, a week, a month, or a year, but
from antiquity to posterity-for many ages. There
I found entertainment beyond my expectation or
merit; and there is fish, flesh, bread, and fruit in
such variety, that I think I may offenceless call it
superffuity or satiety.?
The ? PennileSs Pilgrim? came to Scotland in a
more generous and appreciative mind than his
countryman did, 150 years subsequently, and all
he saw filled him with wonder, especially the mountains,
to which he says : ?Shooter?s Hill, Gad?s
Hill, Highgate Hill, and Hampstead Hill, are but
molehills.?
Varied indeed have been the scenes witnessed in
the High Street of Edinburgh. Among these we
may mention a royal banquet and whimsical procession,
formed by order of James VI., in 1587.
Finding himself unable to subdue the seditious
spirit of the ecclesiastics, whom he both feared and
detested, he turned his attention to those personal
quarrels and deadly feuds which had existed for
ages among the nobles and landed.gentry, in the
hope to end them.
After much thought and preliminary negotiation,
he invited the chiefs of all the contending parties
to a royal entertainment in Holyrood, where he
obtained a promise to bury and forget their feudal
dissensions for ever. Thereafter, in the face of
all the assembled citizens, he prevailed upon them
to walk two by two, hand in hand, to the Market
Cross, where a banquet of wines and sweetmeats
was prepared for them, and where they all draIzk
to each other in token of mutual friendship and
future forgiveness. The populace testified their
approbation by loud and repeated shouts of joy.
? This reconciliatione of the nobilitie and diverse
of the gentry,? says Balfour in his Annales, ? was
the gratest worke and happiest game the king
had played in all his raigne heithertills ;? but if
his good offices did not eradicate the seeds of
transmitted hate, they, at leas{ for a time, smothered
them.
The same annalist records the next banquet
at the Cross in 1630. On the birth of a prince,
afterwards Charles II., on the 29th of May, the
Lord Lyon king-at-arms was dispatched by Charles
from London, where he chanced to be, with orders
to carry the news to Scotland. He reached Edinburgh
on the 1st of June, and the loyal joy of the
people burst forth with great effusiveness. The
batteries of the Castle thundered forth a royal
salute ; bells rang and bonfires blazed, and a table
was spread in the High Street that extended half
its entire length, from the Cross to the Tron,
whereat the nobility, Privy Council, and Judges, sat
down to dinner, the heralds in their tabards and
the royal trumpeters being in attendance.
In that same street, a generation after, was seen,
in his old age begging his bread from door to door,
John Earl of Traquair, who, in 1635, had beerk
Lord High Treasurer of Scotland and High Commissioner
to the Parliament and General Assembly,
one of the few Scottish nobles who protested against
the surrender of King Charles to the English, but
who was utterly ruined by Cromwell. A note
to Scotstarvit?s ? Scottish Statesmen,? records that
?he died in anno 1659, in extreme poverty, on the
Lord?s day, and suddenly when taking a pipe of
tobacco; and at his funeral had no mortcloth,
but a black apron; nor towels, but dog?s leishes
belonging to some gentlemen that were present ;
and the grave being two foot shorter than his body,
the assistants behoved to stay till the same was
enlarged, and be buried.?
? I saw him begging in the streets of Edinburgh,?
says another witness, James Fraser, minister of
Kirkhill; ?? he was in an antique garb, wore a
broad old hat, short cloak and panier breeches,
and I contributed in my quarters in the Canongate
towar s his relief. The Master of Lovat, Culbockie
(FraseY), Glenmonston (Grant), and myself were
there, and he received the piece of money from my
hand as humbly and as thankfully as the poorest
supplicant. It is said, that at a time he had not
(money) to pay for cobbling his boots, and died
in a poor cobbler?s house.?
And this luckless earl, so rancorously treated,
was the lineal descendant of James Stuart the
Black Knight of Lome, and of John of Gaunt Duke
of Lancaster.
Nicoll records in his curious diary that in the
October of 1654 a vast number of hares came into
the city, penetrating even to its populous and
central parts, such as the Parliament Close and
the High Street; and in the latter, a few years
subsequently, 1662, we read in the Chronicle qf
Fie of a famous quack doctor setting up his
public stage in the midst of that thoroughfare for
the third time.
John Pontheus was a German, styling himself
professor of music, and his modus operandi affords
a curious illustration of the then state of
medical science in Great Britain, and of what
our forefathers deemed the requisites to a good
physician. On the stage mentioned Pontheus had
one person to play the fool, another to dance
upon a tight rope, in order to gather and amuse
rt
High Street.] THE QUACK DOCTOR?S ACROBATS. 201
an audience. Then he began to vend his drugs
at eightpence per packet. Nicoll admits that they
were both good and real, and describes the antics
of the assistants.
Upon a great rope, fixed from side to side of
the street, a man descended upon his breast with
~ ~ ~~~~
danced seven-score times, without intermission,
lifting himself and vaulting s k quarter high above
his own head and lighting directly upon the tow
(rope) as punctually as if he had been dancing on
the plain stones.?
Four years after a different scene was witnessed
THE NETHER BOW PORT, FROM THE CANONGATE. ( F m an Etcking6y Jams SKrrrc of RdGhw.)
his arms ?stretched out like the wings of a fowl,
to the admiration of many.? Nicoll adds that the
country chirurgeons and apothecaries, finding his
drugs both cheap and good, came to Edinburgh
from all parts of the realm, and bought them for
the purpose of retailing them at a profit. The
antics and rope-dancing were continued for many
days with an agility and nimbleness ?admirable
to the beholders; one of the dancers having
28
in the High Street, when, in 1666, after the battle
of the Pentland Hills-a victory celebrated by
the discharge of nearly as many guns from the
Castle as there were prisoners-the captives were
marched to the Tolbooth. They. were eighty
in number; and these poor Covenanters were
conveyed manacled in triumph by the victor,
with trumpets sounding, kettle-drums beating, and
banners displayed. And Crookshank records in
