310 OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH [The West Bow.
by Victoria Terrace, replaced in one part by a
flight of stairs, in another by the Free Church 01
St John, and sloping away eastward into Victoria
Street, it is impossible to realise what the old Wed
Bow, which served as a connecting link between
the High and the Low Town, the Lawnmarket and
the Grassmarket, really was. The pencil of the
artist alone may reproduce its features.
At its lower end were the houses that belonged
to the Knights of the Temple, whereon, to mark
them as beyond the reach of corporation enactments,
the iron cross of St. John was placed sc
lately as the eighteenth century, by the Bailie oj
Lord Torphichen, as proprietor of the !ands of St.
John of Jerusalem ; and there flows, as of old, the
Bowfoot Well, built by Robert Mylne in 1681, jus1
where it is shown in Edgar?s map of the city when
the Bow was then, as it had been centuries before,
the principal entrance to the city from the west.
One of the chief relics in the West Bow wa:
an enormous rustyiron hook, on which hung an
ancient gate of the city wall, the upper Bow Port
built in 1450. It stood in the wall of a house a1
the first angle on the east side, about four feet-from
the ground. When Maitland wrote his history ir
1753, two of these hooks were visible; but by tht
time that Chambers wrote his ? Traditions,? ir
1824, the lower one had been buried by the leve
of the street having been raised.
Among those slain at the Battle of Pinkey, ir
1547, we find the name of John Hamilton (of tht
house of Innerwick), a merchant in the West Bow
This John Hamilton was a gallant gentleman
whose eldest son was ancestor of the Earls 0,
Haddington, and whose second son was a seculai
priest, Rector of the University of Paris, and one
of the Council of the League that offered thc
crown of France to the King of Spain in 1591.
Qpposite St John?s Free. Church and the
General Assembly Hall there stood, till the spring
of I 878 that wonderfully picturesque old tenement,
with a description of which we commenced? the
story of the houses on the south side of the Lawn.
market; and lower down the Bow was another,
demolished about the same time.
The latter was a stone land, without any timbe1
additions, having a dark grey front of polished
ashlar, supposed to have been built in the days
of Charles I. String-courses of moulded stone
decorated it, and on the bed-corbel of its crowstepped
gable was a shield with the lettersI. O.,I. B.,
with a merchant?s mark between them, doubtless
the initials of the first proprietor and of his wife.
From its gloomy history and better architecture,
the next tenement, which stood a little way back
-for every house in the Bow was built without the
slightest reference to the site of its neighbouris
more worthy of note, as the alleged abode of the
temble wizard, and bearing the name of Major
Weir?s Land-but in reality the dwelling of the
major stood behind it.
The city motto appeared on a CU~~OLIS dormer
window over the staircase, and above the elaborately
moulded entrance door, which was only five
feet six inches in height by three feet six i l l
breadth, were the legend and date,
SOLI. DEO. HONOR. ET
CLORIA. D.W. 1604.
In the centre were the arms of David Williamson,
a wealthy citizen, to whom the house belonged.
This legend, so common over the old doorways of
the city, was the fashionable grace before dinner
at the tables of the Scottish noblesse during the
reigns of Mary and James VI., and like others
noted here, was deemed to act as a charm, and to
bar the entrance of evil. But the turnpike stair
within, says Chambers, ?was said to possess a
strange peculiarity-namely, that people who ascended
it felt as if going down, and not up a stair.?
A passage, low-browed, dark, and heavily vaulted,
led, until February, 1878, through this tall tenement
into a narrow court eastward thereof, a
gloomy, dark, and most desolate-looking place,
and there abode of old with his sister, Grizel, the
notorious wizard whose memory is so inseparably
woven up with the superstitions of old Edinburgh.
Major Thomas Weir of Kirktown was a native
of Lanarkshire, where the people believed that his
mother had taught him the art of sorcery, before he
joined (as Lieutenant) the Scottish army, sent by
the Covenanters in 1641 for the protection of the
Ulster colonists, and with which he probably
served at the storming of Carrickfergus and the
battle of Benburb; and from this force he had
been appointed, when Major in the Earl of Lanark?s
Regiment, and Captain-Lieutenant of Home?s
Regiment, to the command of that ancient
gendarmerie, the Guard of Edinburgh, in which
capacity he attended the execution of the great
Montrose in 1650.
He wasa grim-featured man, with a large nose,
and always wore a black cloak of ample dimensions.
He usually carried a staff, the supposed magical
powers of which made it a terror to the community.
He pretended to be a religious man, but was in
reality a detestable hypocrite ; and the frightful
story of his secret life is said to have furnished
Lord Byron with the plot of his tragedy Manfreed;
md his evil reputation, which does not rest on
ibscure allusions in legendary superstition, has left,
