254 OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH. [High Street.
where a curiously-carved fleur-de-lis surmounts the
gable, a grotesque gurgoyle of antique form serves
as a gutter to the roof.?
Abbot Andrew Durie, who was nominated to the
abbacy of Afelrose in 1526 by Tames V., resided
here; and Knox assures us that his death was
hastened by dismay and horror occasioned by the
terrible uproar on St. Giles?s day, in 1558.
The Close in earlier time took its name from the
abbots of Melrose j but at a later period was called
Rosehaugh?s Close, from Sir George Mackenzie of
Rosehaugh, King?s Advocate during the reigns of
Charles 11. and Tames II., author of many able
works on Scottish law, and also a successful
cultivator of general literature.
He obtained a charter of the property from Provost
Francis Kinloch and the magistrates in 1677,
and the house he occupied still exists, and seems
to have been a stately-enough edifice for its age.
Sir George has still an unpleasant place in the
local imagination of the Edinburgh people as ? The
Bluidy Mackenzie,? the persecutor of the Covenanters;
and though the friend of Dryden, and the
founder of the first and greatest national library in
Scotland, .he is regarded as a species of ogre in his
native capital.
The mausoleum in which he lies in the Greyfriars?
Churchyard, a domed edifice with ornate
Corinthian columns and niches, is believed by the
urchins of the city to be haunted still, as it was
commonly believed that his body could never rest
in its grave. Hence it used to be deemed a
?brag? or feat, for a boy more courageous than
his fellows to shout through the keyhole intd the
dark and echoing tomb-
? Bluidy Mackenzie, come out if ye daur,
Lift the sneck, and draw the bar ! ?
after which defiance all fled, lest the summoned
spirit might appear, and follow them.
He had a country house, ten miles south of
Edinburgh, called Shank, now in ruins. His granddaughter
was Lady Anne Dick, of Corstorphine,
whose eccentricities were wont to excite much
attention in Edinburgh society, and who was the
authoress of many droll pasquils, and personal
pasquinades in verse, which created many enemies,
who exulted in the follies of which she was guilty.
Among the latter was a fancy for dressing herself
like a gallant of the day, and going about the town
at night in search of adventures and frolics, one of
which ended unpleasantly in her being consigned
to the City Guard House. In many of her verses she
half-banteringly deplores the coldness of Sir Peter
Murray of Balmanno, in Kincardineshire, but more,
it is believed, from whim than actual fancy or regard.
One begins thus :-
? Oh, wherefore did I cross the Forth,
And leave my love behind me?
Why did I venture to the north
With one that did not mind me ?
Had I but visited Carin,
It would have been much better,
Than pique the prudes and make a din
For careless, cold Sir Peter !
<I I?m - anre I?ve seen a better limb,
And twenty better faces ;
But still my mind it ran on him
When I was at the races;
At night when we were at the ball
Were many there discreeter ;
The well-bred duke, and lively Maule,
Panrnure behaved much better.?
In conclusion, she expresses an opinion that she
must be mad ? to follow cold Sir Peter.? She died
in 1741.
During a great part of the eighteenth century
the ancient mansion in Rosehaugh?s Close was
occupied by Alexander Fraser of Strichen, who was
connected by marriage with the descendants of
Sir George RIackenzie, and who gave to the alley
the name it now bears, Strichen?s Close. He was
raised to the bench as Lord Strichen, in 1730, and
occupied a seat there and his residence in the
close for forty-five years subsequent to that date,
and was the direct ancestor of the present Lord
Lovat in the peerage of Great Britain.
The manners and habits of the people of Edinburgh
in those days-say about 173o-were as
different from those of their successors as if
they had been the natives of a foreign country.
From Carlyle?s ,Memoirs we learn that when gentlemen
were invited to dine, each brought his own
knife, fork, and spoon with him in a case (just as
gentlemen did in France prior to the first Revolution),
and a marked peculiarity of the period was
a combination of showy and elegant costume with
much simplicity, coarseness of thought, and roughness
of speech, occasional courtesy, and great
promptness to ire. Intercourse with France, and
the service of so many Scottish gentlemen in the
French army, !ed to a somewhat incongruous ingrafting
of. French politeness on the homely manners?
of the Scottish aristocracy; yet it was no
uncommon thing for a lady to receive gentlemen,
together with lady. visitors, in her bed-room, for
then, within the walled city, the houses had few
rooms without a bed, either openly or screened;
while the seemliness and delicacy now attendant
on marriages and births were almost unknown.
The slender house accommodation in the turn
High Street.] STRICHEN?S CLOSE. 255
pike stairs compelled the use of taverns more than
now. There the high-class advocate received his
clients, and the physician his patients-each practitioner
having his peculiar how$ There, too,
gentlemen met in the evening for supper and conversation
without much expense, a reckoning of a
shilling being deemed a high one, so different then
were the value of money and the price of viands. In
1720 an Edinburgh dealer advertises his liquors at
the following prices :-? Neat claret wine at I Id.,
strong at 15d.; white wine at ~ z d . ; Rhenish at
16d.; old hock at zod., all per bottle; cherrysack
at 28d. per pint; English ale at 4d. per
bottle.?
In those days it was not deemed derogatory for
ladies of rank and position to join oyster parties in
some of those ancient taverns; and while there
was this freedom of manner on one hand, we are
told there was much of gloom and moroseness on
the other; a dread of the Deity with a fear of hell,
and of the power of the devil, were the predominant
feelings of religious people in the age subsequent
to the Revolution; while it was thought, so says
the author of ? I Domestic Annals ? (quoting Miss
Mure?s invaluable Memoirs), a mark of atheistic
tendencies to doubt witchcraft, or the reality of
apparitions and the occasional vaticinative character
of dreams.
A country gentleman, writing in 1729, remarks
on ?? the increase in the expense of housekeeping
which he had seen going on during the past twenty
years. While deeming it indisputable that Edinburgh
was now much less populous.than before the
Union, yet I am informed,? says he, ? that there is
a greater consumption since than before the Union
of all -provisions, especially fleshes and wheat.
bread. The butcher owns that he now kills thret
of every species for one he killed before the Union.
. . . . Tea in the morning and tea in tht
evening had now become established. There
were more livery servants, and better dressed.
and more horses than formerly.?
Lord Strichen did not die in the house in thf
close wherein he had dwelt so long, but at Stricher
in Aberdeenshire, on the 15th January, 1775, ir
his seventy-sixth year, leaving behind him the repu
tation of an upright judge. ? Lord Strichen was i
man not only honest, but highly generous; for
after his succession to the family estates, he paic
a large sum of debts contracted by his prede
cessor, which he was not under any obligation tc
pay.?
One of the last residents of note in Strichen?!
Close was Mr. John Grieve, a merchant in thc
Royal Exchange, who held the office of Lorc
?rovost in 1782-3, and again in 1786-7, and who
ras first a Town Councillor in 1765. When a
nagistrate he was publicly horsewhipped by some
r Edinburgh bucks ? of the day, for placing some
emales of doubtful repute in the City Guard
Xouse, under the care of the terrible Corporal
ihon Dhu--an assault for which they were arrested
.nd severely fined.
The house he 6ccupied had an entrance from
itrichen?s Close ; but was in reality one that beonged
to the Regent hlorton, having an entrance
rom the next street, named the Blackfriars Wynd.
3e afterwards removed to a house in Princes
street, where he became one of the projectors of
he Earthen Mound, which was long-as a mistake
n the picturesque-justly stigmatised as the RIud
Brig,? the east side of which was commenced a
ittle to the eastward of the line of Hanover Street,
ipposite to the door of Provost Grieve?s house,
ong ago turned into a shop.
John Dhu, the personage refTrred to, was a wellmown
soldier of the C;ty Guard, mentioned by Sir
Walter Scott as one of the fiercest-looking men he
lad ever seen. ?That such an image of military
violence should have been necessary at the close of
:he eighteenth century to protect the peace of a
British city,? says the editor of ?( Kay?s Portraits,?
?presents us with a strange contrast of what we
lately were and what we have now become. On
me occasion, about the time of the French Revolution,
when the Town Guard had been signalising
the King?s birthday by firing in the Parliament
Square, being unusually pressed and insulted by
the populace, this undaunted warrior turned upon
one peculiarly outrageous member of the democracy,
and, by one blow of his battle-axe, laid him
lifeless on the causeway.?
The old tenement, which occupied the ground
between Strichen?s Close and the Blackfriars Wynd
(prior to its destruction in the fire of zznd February,
18zj), and was at the head of the latter,
was known as ?Lady Lovat?s Land.? It was
seven storeys in height. There lived Primrose
Campbell of Mamore, widow of Simon Lord
Lovat, who was beheaded on Tower Hill in 1747,
and there, 240 years before her time, dwelt Walter
Chepman of Ewirland, who, with Miller, in 1507,
under the munificent auspices of James IV., introduced
the first printing press into Scotland, and on
the basement of whose edifice a house of the Revolution
period had been engrafted.
Though his abode was here in the High Street,
his printing-house was in the Cowgate, from whence,
in 1508, ?The Knightly Tale of Golagras and
Gawane ? was issued ; and this latter is supposed
He died in 1803.
