202 OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH. [High Street.
his history, that Andrew Murray, an aged Presbyterian
minister, when he beheld the ferocious
Sir Thomas Dalzell of Binns in his rusted headpiece,
with his long white vow-beard which had
never been profaned by steel since the execution
of Charles I., riding at the head of his cavalier
squadrons, who, flushed with recent victory, surrounded
the prisoners with drawn rapiers and
matches lighted; and when he heard the shouts
of acclamation from the changeful mob, became
so overpowered with grief at what he deemed the
downfall for ever of ?the covenanted Kirk ol
God,? that he became ill, and expired.
In 1678 we find a glimpse of modern civilisation,
when it was ordained that a passenger stage
between Leith and Edinburgh should have a fixed
place for receiving complaints, and for departure,
between the heads of Niddry?s and the Blackfriars
Wynds, in the High Street. The fare to Leith
for two or three persons, in summer, was to be
IS. sterling, or four persons IS. qd., the fare to the
Palace gd., and the same returning. Carriages
had been proposed for this route as early as 1610,
when Henry Anderson, a Pomeranian, contracted to
run them at the charge of 2s. a head; but they seem
to have been abandoned soon after. Hackney
camages, which had been adopted in London in the
time of Charles I., did not become common in Scotland
till after the Restoration,and almost the first use
we hear of one being put to was when a duel took
place, in 1667, between William Douglas of Whittingham
and Sir John Home of Eccles, who was
killed. With their seconds they proceeded in a
hackney coach from the city to a lonely spot on the
shore near Leith, where, after a few passes, Home
was run through the body by Douglas, who was
beheaded therefor.
The year 1678 saw the first attempt to start a
.stage from the High Street to Glasgow, when on
the 6th of August a contract was entered into
between the magistrates of that city and a merchant
of Edinburgh, by which it was agreed that ?the
said William Hume shall have in readiness one
sufficient strong coach, to run betwixt Edinburgh
and Glasgow, to be drawn by six able horses ; to
leave Edinburgh ilk Monday morning, and return
again-God willing-ilk Saturday night ; the
burgesses of Glasgow always to have a preference
in the coach.? As the undertaking was deemed
arduous, and not to be accomplished without
assistance, the said magistrates agreed to give Hume
two hundred merks yearly for five years, whether
passengers went or not, in consideration of his
having actually received two years? premium in
advance.
Even with this pecuniary aid the speculation
proved unprofitable, and was abandoned, so little
was the intercourse between place and place in
those days. In the end of the 17th century-and
for long after-it was necessary for persons desirous
of proceeding from.Edinburgh to London by
land, to club for the use of a conveyance; and
about the year 1686, Sir Robert Sibbald, His
Majesty?s physician, relates, that ?? he was forced
to come by sea, for he could not ride, by reason
that the fluxion had fallen on his arme, and that he
could not get companie to come in a coach.?
And people, before their departure, always made
their wills,? took solemn farewell of their friends,
and asked to be prayed for in the churches.
The Edinburgh of 1687, the year before the
Revolution, actually witnessed the sale of a dancinggirl,
a transaction which ended in a debate before
the Lords of the Privy Council.
On the 13th of January, in that year, as reported
by Lord Fountainhall, Reid, a mountebank
prosecuted Scott of Harden and his lady, ?for
stealing away from him a little girl called The
TumbZing Lam+ that danced upon a stage, and
produced a contract by which he had bought
her from her mother for thirty pounds Scots (about Az 10s. sterling). But we have no slaves in
Scotland,? adds his lordship, ?and mothers cannot
sell their bairns; and physicians attested that the
employment of tumbling would kill her, her joints
were even now growing stiff, and she declined to
return, though she was an apprentice, and could
not run away from her master.? Then some of the
Privy Council in the canting spirit of the age,
?? quoted Moses? Law, that if a servant shelter himself
with thee, against his master?s cruelty, thou shalt
not deliver him up.? The Lords therefore assoilzied
(i.e., acquitted) Harden, who had doubtless been
moved only by humanity and compassion.
By the year 1700 the use of privatecarriages in the
streets had increased so much that when the principal
citizens went forth to meet the King?s Commissioner,
there were forty coaches, with 1,200
gentlemen on horseback, with their mounted
lackeys.
In 1702, at 10 o?clock on the evening of the
I zth March, Colonel Archibald Row of the Royal
Scots Fusileers (now zIst Foot), arrived express in
Edinburgh, to announce the death of William of
Orange, at Kensington Palace, on the 8th of the
same month. It consequently took three days and
a half for this express to reach the Scottish capital,
a day more than that required by Robert Cary, to
bring intelligence of the death of Elizabeth, ninetynine
years before. Monteith in his ?Theatre of
High Street.3 CHANGES IN THE HIGH STREET. 203
Mortality,? I 7041 gives us the long inscription on the
tomb of the Colonel?s wife, in the Greyfriars, beginning
:-? Nic $osita Rdiquire Lectissrna rnatronq
Jeanne ]ohnsone, conizcgl?s Archibaldi Row, Re@
Scloppetarz>rum, hpmzis,? &c. She died in
1702.
On the 8th of March Anne was proclaimed
Queen of Scotland, at the Cross, with all the usual
solemnities.
In January, 1703, George Young, merchant in
the High Street, was appointed by the Provost, Si1
Hugh Cunningham, and the Council, to act a
a constable, and along with several other citizen:
of respectable position, ? oversee the manners and
order of the burgh, and the inhabitants thereof,
and on the evening of the 24th, being Sunday, he
went through some parts of the city to see ?that
the Lord?s day, and the laws made for the observance
thereof, were not violated.? ? In the house
of Marjory Thom, a vintner, this new official found,
about 10 P.M., several companies in several rooms,
and expostulated with her on the subject, aftei
which, according to his own account, he quietly
withdrew.
As he proceeded up the close to the High Street,
he and his comrades were followed by Mr. Archi.
bald Campbell, son of the Lord Niel Campbell,
who warned him that if he reported Marjory?s
house to the magistrates, he would repent it. This
affair ended in a kind of riot next day, in Young?:
shop, opposite the Town Guard House, and Campbell
would probably have slain Young, had not the
latter contrived to get hold of his sword and keep
it till the Guard came, and the matter was brought
before the Privy Council, when such was the
influence of family and position, that the luckless
Mr. Young was fined 400 merks, to be paid to
Campbell, and to be imprisoned till the money
was forthcoming.
On the 14th of February, 1705, appeared tlie
first number of the Bdinbwgh Courant, a simple
folio broadsheet, published by James Watson, in
Craig?s Close. Its place was afterwards taken by
MacEwen?s Rdifzburgh Evening Courant, in I 7 18,
a permanent success to this day. It was a Whig
print, and caused the starting of the now defunct
Caledonkn Mercury, in the Jacobite interest,
a little quarto of two leaves.
According to the Courant of April gth, 1724 the
denizens of the High Street, aud other greater
thoroughfares, were startled by ?a bank ? of drums,
beating up for recruits for the King of Prussia?s
-
gigantic regim?ent of Grenadiers. Two guineas as
bounty were offered, and many tall fellows were
enlisted. The same regiment was recruited for
in Edinburgh in 1728.
By the year 1730 great changes had been
effected by the magistrates in enforcing cleanliness
in the streets, and repressing the habit (accompanied
by the temble cry of Gardezl?eau) of throwing slops
and rubbish from the windows. Sir James Dick of
Prestonfield, the wise provost of 1679, transported
away by personal energy a vast stratum of the
refuse of ages, through which people had to make
literal lanes to their shops and house-doors and
therewith enriched his lands by the margin of
Duddingston Loch (Act of Parl. James VII., I.,
cap. IZ), till their fertility is proverbial to the
present day. But still there was no regular system
of cleaning, and though Sir Alexander Brand, a
well-known magistrate and manufacturer of Spanish
leather gilt hangings, made some vigorous proposals
on the subject, they were not adopted, till in
1730 the magistrates endeavoured by the strong arm
of the law to repress the obnoxious habit of
throwing household litter from the windows, a
habit amusingly described by Smollett forty years
after in his ?? Humphrey Clinker.?
On the 6th of September, 1751, the fall of
a great stone tenement on the north of the High
Street, near the Cross, six storeys in height, with
attics, sinking at once from top to bottom, and
occasioning some loss of life, caused a general
alarm in the city concerning the probable state of
many of the more ancient and crumbring houses.
A general survey was made, and many were
condemned, and orderec! to be taken down.
But from 1707 Edinburgh stood singularly still
till 1763, when the citizens seemed to wake
fiom their apathetic lethargy. After that period
the erection of adjuncts to the old city (tcr
be referred to in their own localities) led to the
general desertion of it by all people of position and
wealth. Among the last who lingered there, and
retained his mansion in the High Street, was
James Fergusson of Pitfour, M.P., whose body was
borne thence in October, 1820, for interment in the
Greyfriars Churchyard.
In the March of 1820 the High Street was
iighted with gas for the first time. ? This has been
done,? says a print of the day, ?by the introduction
of a single cockspur light into each of the
old globes, in which the old oil lamps were formerly
suspended.?
