Arthur?s Seat.1 ST. ANTHONY?S CHAPEL. 319
farmers, who are maintained in it for six years;
?whom failing, the sons of respectable master
pnnters or booksellers, and the sons of respectable
servants in the agricultural line,? and who, when
admitted, must be of the age of six, and not more
than eight, years. They are taught the ordinary
branches of education, and Latin, Greek, French,
German, and mathematics.
The management of this institution is in the
survivor of certain individuals nominated by the
founder, and in certain e.T-o@cib trustees, viz., the
Lord Provost, the Principal of the University, the
Rector of the High School, the Ministers of Duddingston,
Liberton, Newton, the Laird of Niddrie,
and the factor of the Duke of Abercorn.
On the north-east side of Arthur?s Seat, overhoked
by those portions of it known as the Whinny
Hill and Sampson?s Grave, is the Mansion House
of Parson?s Green, which was terribly shaken by
three distinct shocks of an earthquake on the 30th
September, 1789, that caused a dinner party there
to fly from the table, while the servants also fled
frm the kitchen.
Here the hand of change has been at work, and
though the mansion house and much of its surrounding
timber have been retained, streets have been
run along the slope and close to Piershill Tollbar,
and westward of these was the great dairy,
long known as the Cow palace, and the temporary
railway station for the use of the royal family.
Above the curious little knoll, named the Fairies?
or Haggis Knowe, on a plateau of rock overlooking
St. Margaret?s artificial loch, on the northern
slope of Arthur?s Seat, we find the ruined
chapel and hermitage of St. Anthony-a familiar
feature in the landscape.
The former, which terminated in a square tower,
with two gables at its summit-as shown in the
view of the city in 15444s 36 feet long by 12
inside the walls, and was roofed by three sets of
groined arches that sprang from corbels. It had
two entrance doors, one on the south and one on
the north, where the hole yet remains for the bar that
secured it. Near it was the elegantly-sculptured
font A press, grooved for shelves, yet remains
in the north-east corner; and a stair ascended
to the tower, which rose on groins about forty feet
high.
Nine yards south-east is the ruin of the hermitage,
partly formed of the rock, irregular in shape, but
about I 7 feet by I z in measurement. The hermit who
abode here must, in the days when it was built, have
ied a lonely life indeed, though beneath him lay a
wealthy abbey and a royal palace, from whence a
busy city,gkt by embattled walls, coveredall theslope
to the castled rock. More distant, he could see on
one side the cheerful fields and woods that spread
away towards the Firth of Forth, but elsewhere only
the black basaltic rocks ; and, as a writer has excellentlyexpressedit,
he had butto step a few pacesfrom
the brow of the rock on which his cell and chapel
stood to immure himself in such a grim mountain
solitude as Salvator Rosa might have thought an appropriate
scene forthe temptationsof that saint of the
desert to whom the chapel was dedicated. Kincaid
says that a handsome stone seat projected from the
outside of the wall at the east end, and the whole
appeared to have been enclosed by a stone wall.
So simple is the architecture of the edifice that it
is difficult to assign any precise date for it. There
remains not a single vestige of record to say when,
or by whom, it was erected or endowed, though it
stands in the centre of a tract that for ages has
been a royai park. No reference to it occurs in
the muniments of the Abbey of Holyrood, nor is
there any evidence-though it has often been
asserted-that it was a chaplaincy or pendicle of
the Knights Hospitallers of St. Anthony in Leith.
Yet it is extremely probable that it was in some
wzy connected with them.
Tradition says it was merely founded for the
guardianship of the holy well in its vicinity, and
that it was a spot for watching vessels, the impost
on which formed part of the revenues of the
adjacent abbey, and also that a light was hung in
the tower to guide mariners in the Birth at night,
that, as Grose says in his ?Antiquities,? they might
be induced to make vows to its titular saint.
At the foot of the rock there still bubbles up the
little spring named St. Anthony?s Well, which flows
pleasantly down through the rich grass of the
valley. Originally the spring flowed from under
the little stone arch, but about the year 1674 it
dried up, and after a time broke out lower down,
where we now find it. The well is referred to in
the old song which begins ? 0 waly, waly !? the
Scottish exclamatior, for ? Alas ! ? In Robert
Chambers?s ?Scottish Songs? there is anote upon it,
from which we may give the following passage :-
?This beautiful old song has hitherto been sup
posed to refer to some circumstance in the life of
Queen Mary, or at least to some unfortuna:e love
affair which happened at her Court. It is now discovered,
from a copy which has been found as
forming part of a ballad in the Pepysian Library at
Cambridge (published in Motherwell?s ? Minstrelsy,?
1827, under the title of ?Lord Jamie Douglas?), to
have been occasioned by the affecting tale of Lady
Barbara Erskine, daughter of John (sixteenth Lord
Erskine), ninth Earl of Mar, and wife of James II.,
