I2 . OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH. [Canongate.
A little gableended house now occupies the
site of the former, and was long known as the
dwelling of a very different personage, a Lucky
Spence, of unenviable notoriety, whose "Last
dow on the ground floor, a cavity was found in
the solid wall, containing the skeleton of a child,
with some remains of fine linen cloth in which it
had been wrapped. Our authority,') says Wilson,
NISBET OF DIRLETON'S HOUSE.
Advice 'I figures somewhat coarsely in the poems
of Allan Ramsay.
About 1833 a discovery was made, during some
alterations in this house, which was deemed illustrative
of the desperate character of its seventeenthcentury
occupant. '( In breaking out a new Win-
'' a worthy shoemaker, who had occupied the house
for forty-eight years, was present when the discovery
was made, and described very graphically
the amazement and horror of the workman, who
threw away his crowbar, and was with difficulty
, persuaded to resume his operations."
Canongate.] MONTROSE.
OF all the wonderful and startling spectacles witnessed
amid the lapse of ages from the windows
of the Canongate, none was perhaps more startling
and pitiful than the humiliating procession which
conducted the great Marquis of Montrose to his
terrible doom.
On the 18th of May, 1650, he was brought across
the Forth to Leith, after his defeat and capture by
:he Covenanters at the battle of Invercarron, where
he had displayed the royal standard; and it is
THE GOLFERS? LAND.
impossible now to convey an adequate idea of the
sensation excited in the city, when the people became
aware that the Graham, the victor in so
many battles, and the slayer of so many thousands
of the best troops of the Covenant, was almost at
their gates.
Placed on a cart-horse, he was brought in by the
eastern barrier of the city, as it was resolved, by
the influence of his rival and enemy, Argyle, to
protract the spectacle of his humiliation as long as
CHAPTER 11.
THE CANONGATE (continpud).
