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
