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Old and New Edinburgh Vol. II

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264 OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH. [High Street. before them with licht torches,? on which Powrie, as if consciencestricken, exclaimed to Wilson, ? Jesu ! Pate ! What na gate is this we are ganging ? About 1780-9 the cardinal?s house was the residence of Bishop Abernethy Drummond, whom we have ,noticed as the theological opponent of Bishop Hay, and hither he must have brought his I trow it be not gude.? wife, -the -heiress of Hawthornden. This divine occupied a high place in the society of his time, and was particularly active in obtaining the repeal of the penal statbtes against his church in Scotland. Latterly the house was divided, like all its neighbours, into a multitude of small lodgings, where squalid poor folks-chiefly Irish -pined on parochial allowance, and slept on beds of straw mingled with rags-?the terrible exponent of our peculiar phasis of civilisation.? But very different was the aspect of society at the time when the Edinburgh Gazette of 19th April, 1703, put forth the following advertisement :- ?There is a boarding- school to be set up in Blackfriars Wynd, in /------ the 1st of August, 1877, the total expenditure was A442,621 18s. 6d. ; receipts, A265,599 18s. gd. j the unrecovered outlay, A177,ozz os. gd. ; and the amount to the credit of the sinking fund account, g6,752 14s. Iod. Blackfriars Wynd was among the places ? improved;? the east side was swept away and replaced by buildings in the old Scottish style, one CARDINAL BEATON?S nousE. Robinson?s Land, upon the west side of the Wynd, near the middle thereof, in the first door of the stair leading to the said land, against the latter end of May, or first of June next, when young ladies and gentlemen may have all sorts of breeding that is to be had in any part of Britain, and great care taken of their conversation.? Nearly all that we have described here has been swept away by the trustees of the Edinburgh Improvement Act, and the ancient Wynd is now designated Blackfriars Street. By that Act, passed in 1867, a tax was imposed, not exceeding fourpence :n the pound, for a period of twenty years, and the trustees were authorised to borrow, on the security of that assessment, a total sum of g;35o,ooo. At of which is the Ediuburgh Industrial School, instituted in July, 1847; but, by a somewhat shartsighted policy perhaps, the west was left untouched,andthe footway there was found to be so far below the level of the street as to necessitate its being fenced off from the camage-way by an open railing, thus imparting an incomplete aspect to the thoroughfare. Between these old houses on the west an extensive area was thrown open betwyeen Cant?s and Dickson?s Closes, thus greatly enhancing the value of the sites, but at the sacrifice of much that belonged to the past and the picturesque. The United Industrial School in Blackfriars Street exhibits in a manner perhaps unexampled, the successful application and development of that great problem, a comprehensive unsectarian system of national education. To those to whom its name may be scarcely known it must appear that there is surely something striking in the character of a ragged school among whose founders were such men as the Earls of Minto and Elgin, Lords Dunfermline, Murray, and Jeffrey, Sir William G. Craig, Adam Black, and William Chambers. In 1847 Dr. Guthrie first drew attention to the condition of the juvenile beggars of Edinburgh, and his noble proposal to establish a ragged school to be supported by ? Christians of all denominations and parties,? was eagerly taken up. The lines upon which the suggestion was practically carried
Volume 2 Page 264
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