I34 OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH. [West Church.
When peace came, Messrs. McVicar and Pitcairn,
his coadjutor, continued faithfully and successfully
to discharge the duties of the ministry.
In 1247 Mr. McVicar, when about to deliver
one of the old Thursday sermons, suddenly dropped
down dead ; and amid a vast concourse of sorrowing
parishioners was deposited in his tomb, which
has a plain marble monument. A well-painted
portrait of him hangs in the vestry of the present
church.
His colleague, the Rev. Thomas Pitcairn, followed
him on the 13th of June, 1751, and a pyramidal
stone, erected to his memory by his youngest
daughter, stands in the ancient burying-ground.
So early as 1738 attempts were made to violate
graves, for surgical purposes, in the churchyard,
which, of course, was then a lonely and sequestered
place, and though the boundary walls were raised
eight feet high, they failed to be a protection, as
watchers who were appointed connived at, rather
than prevented, a practice which filled the parishioners
with rage and horror.
Hence, notwithstanding all the efforts of the
Session to prevent such violation of tombs, several
bodies were abstracted in 1742. George Haldane,
one of the beadles, was suspected of assisting in this
repulsive practice; and on the 9th of May his
house at Maryfield was surrounded by an infuriated
mob, and burned to the ground.
The old church, which stood for ages,and had been
in succession a Catholic, Presbyterian, Episcopalian,
and finally a Presbyterian place of worship again,
and which had been gutted and pillaged by Reformers
and Cromwellians, and cannon-shotted in
civil wars, was found to be dangerous, and condemned
to be taken down. Although the edifice
was insufficient, and in some parts dangerous, there
was no immediate cause for the growing terror
that pervaded the congregation, and culminated in
a general alarm on Sunday, the 27th September,
1772. Part of a seat in one of the galleries gave
way with a crash, on which the entire assembled
mass rushed to the doors, and in an instant the
church was empty.
A jury of tradesmen met to inspect the church,
which they were of opinion should be taken down
without delay; but this verdict had hardly been
drawn up and read, than a fear seized them that
the old church would fall and bury them in its
ruins, on which they fled to the adjacent charity
work house.
The work of demolition was begun forthwith, and
when removing this venerable fane, the interior of
which now, ? formed after no plan, presented a multitude
of petty galleries stuck fip one above another
to the very rafters, like so many pigeons?-nests,? a
curious example of what is namqd heart-burial came
to light.
The workmen, says the .!!ots Migazine for September,
1773, discovered ? a leaden coffin, which
contained some bones and a leaden urn. Before
opening the urn, a most fragrant smell issued out ;
on inspecting the cause of it, they found a human
heart finely embalmed and in the highest state of
preservation. No inscription was upon the coffin
by which the date could be traced, but it must
have been there for centuries. It is conjectured
that the heart belonged to some person who, in the
time of the Crusades, had gone to the Holy Land,
and been there killed, and the heart, as was customary
in those times, embalmed and sent home
to be buried with some of the family.?
Prior to the erection of the new church, the congregation
assembled in a Methodist Chapel in the
Low Calton.
In 1775 it was completed in the hideous taste
and nameless style peculiar to Scottish ecclesiastical
irchitecture during the times of the first three
Georges. It cost A4,231, irrespective of its equally
hideous steeple, and is seated for about 3,000 persons,
and is now the mother church, associated with
ten others, for a parish which includes a great part
of the parliamentary burgh of the capital, and has
a population of more than 140,000. The church,
says a writer, ? apart from its supplemental steeple,
looks so like a huge stone box, that some wags
have described it as resembling a packing-case, out
of which the neighbouring beautiful toy-like fabric
of St. John?s Church has been lifted?
At the base of the spire is a fine piece of monumental
sculpture, from the chisel of the late Handyside
Ritchie, in memory of Dr. David Dickson, a
worthy and zealous pastor, who was minister of the
parish for forty years.
Some accounts state that Napier of Merchiston,
the inventor of logarithms, was interred in the
cemetery; but from an essay on the subject read
before the Antiquarian Society by Professor William
Wallace in 1832, there is conclusive evidence
given, from a work he quoted, ? that Napier was
buried without the West Port of Edinburgh, in the
church of St. Cuthbert,? and in a vault, in the
month of April, 1617.
The baronial family of Dean had also a vault
in the old church, which still remains under the
new, entering from the north. Above it is a
monumentaI stone from the old church, fo the
memory of Henry Nisbet of that ilk, by whom
we thus learn the vault was built. The arms
of the Dean family are still above this black
