castle Street.] NUMBER THIRTY-NINE CASTLE STREET. 163
lived for a time James Grant of Corrimony,
advocate, who had his town house in Mylne?s
Court, Lawnmarket, in 1783. This gentleman, the
representative of an old Inverness-shire family,
was born in 1743, in the house of Commony in
Urquhart, his mother being Jean Ogilvie, of the
family of Findlater. His father, Alexander Grant,
was induced by Lord Lovat to join Prince Charles,
and taking part in the battle of Culloden, was
wouiided in the thigh. The cave at Corrimony in
which he hid after the battle, is still pointed out to
tourists. His son was called to the bar in 1767,
and at the time of his death, in 1835, he was the
oldest member of the Faculty of Advocates. Being
early distinguished for his liberal principles, he
numbered among his friends the Hon. Henry
Erskine, Sir James Macintosh, Francis Jeffrey, and
many others eminent for position or attainments;
In 1785 he published his ?? Essays on the Origin of
Society,? Src j in 1813, ?Thoughts on the Origin
and Descent of the Gael,? &c: works which, illustrated
as they are by researches into ancient Greek,
Latin, and Celtic literature, show him to have been
a man of erudition, and are valuable contributions
to the early history of the Celtic races.
The next thoroughfare is Castle Street, so called
from its proximity to the fortress. As the houses
spread westward they gradually improved in external
finish and internal decoration. By the French
Revolutionary war, according to the author of
?Old Houses in Edinburgh,? writing in 1824, an
immense accession of inhabitants of a better class
were thrown into.the growing city, All the earlier
buildings of the new town were rubble-work, nnd
so simple were the ideas of the people at that
time, ? that main doors (now so important) were
not at all thought of, and many of the houses in
Princes Street had only common stairs entering
from the Mews Lane behind. But within the last
twenty years a very different taste has arisen, and
the dignity of a front door has become almost
indispensable. The later buildings are, with few
exceptions, of the finest ashlar-work, erected on a
scale of magnificence said to be unequalled ; yet,
it cannot be denied that here and there common
stairs-a nuisance that seems to cling to the very
nature of Edinburgh-have crept in. However,
even that objection has in most cases been got
over by an ingenious contrivance, which renders
them accessible only to the occupants of the various
flats,? it., the crank communicating from eabh,
with the general entrance-door below-a feature
altogether peculiar to Edinburgh and puzzling to
all strangers.
No. I Castle Street, now an hotel, was in 1811
he house of the first Lord Meadowbank, already
.ererred to, who died in 1816. At the same time
:he adjoining front door was occupied by the Hon.
Miss Napier (daughter of Francis; seventh Lord
Napier), who died unmarried in 18zc~. No. 16
,vas the house of Skene of Rubislaw, the bosom
iiend of Sir Walter Scott, and the last survivor of
$e six particdar friends to whom he dedicated
:he respective cantos of ? Marmion.? He possessed
the Bible used by Charles I. on the scaffold, and
which is described by Mr. Roach Smith in his
? Collectanea Antiqua.? Latterly Mr. Skene took
up his residence at Oxford. pis house is now
legal offices.
About 1810 Lady Pringle of Stitchel occupied
No. 20, at the corner of Rose Street. She was the
daughter of Norman Macleod of Macleod, and
widow of Sir James Pringle, Bar!., a lieutenantcolonel
in the army, who died in 1809. At the
opposite corner lived Mrs. Fraser of Strichen; and
No. 27, now all sub-divided, was the residence of
Robert Reed, architect to the king. No. 37, in
1830, was the house of Sir Duncan Cameron, Bart.,
of Fassifem, brother of the gallant Colonel Cameron
who fell at Quatre Bras, and won a baronetcy for
his family. And now we come to the most important
house in New Edinburgh, No. 39, on the east side
of the northern half of the street, in which
Sir Walter Scott resided for twenty-six years prior
to 1826, and in which the most brilliant of his
works were written and he spent his happiest years,
?from the prime of life to its decline.? He considered
himself, and was considered by those about
him, as amassing a large fortune ; the annual profits
of his novels alone had not been less than A;IO,OOO
for several years. His den, or study, there is thus
described by Lockhart :-? It had a single Venetian
window, opening on a patch of turf not much
Larger than itself, and the aspect of the place was
sombrous. . . . A dozen volumes or so, needful
for immediate purposes of reference, were placed
close by him on a small movable form. All the
rest were in their proper niches, and wherever a
volume had been lent its room was occupied by a
wooden block of the same size, having a card with
the name of the borrower and date of the lending
tacked on its front . . . The only table wasa
massive piece of furniture which he had constructed
on the model of one at Rokeby, with a desk and all
its appurtenances on either side, that an arnanuensis
might work opposite to him when he chose, with
small tiers of drawers reaching all round to the
floor. The top displayed a goodly array of session
papers, and on the desk below were, besides the
MS. at which he was working, proof-sheets and so
