I91 OLD AKD NEW EDINBURGH. [IFeriot Row.
lady weak poems, which were noticed by Lockhart
in the Quarterly Rmim, and to the paper he a p
pended in one copy, which was sent to the senator,
the following distich, by way of epitaph :-
U Here lies the peerless paper lord, Lord Peter,
Who broke the laws of God and man and metre.?
The joke chiefly lay in Robertson being led to suppose
that the lines were in the entire edition, much
to his annoyance and indignation ; but Lockhart
penned elsewhere the following good wishes concerning
him :-
? Oh! Petrus, Pedro, Peter, which you will,
Long, long thy radiant destiny fulfil.
Bright be thy wit, and bright the golden ore
Paid down in fees for thy deep legal lore ;
Bright be that claret, brisk be thy champagne,
Thy whisky-punch, a vast exhaustless main,
With thee disporting on its joyous shore,
Of that glad spirit quaffing ever more ;
Keen be thy stomach, potent thy digestion,
And long thy lectures on ? the general question ;?
While young and old swell out the general strain,
We ne?er shall look upon his like again.?
Lockhart wrote many rhyming epitaphs upon him,
and is reported to have written, ? Peter Robertson
is ?a man,? to use his own favourite quotation,
?cast in Nature?s amplest mould.? He is admitted
to be the greatest corporation lawyer at, the
Scotch bar, and he is a vast poet as well as a great
lawyer.?
Lord Robertson, who lived in No. 32 Drummond
Place, died in 1855, in his sixty-second
year.
No. 38 was for years the abode of Adam Black,
more than once referred to elsewhere as publisher,
M.P., and Lord Provost of the city, who died on
the 24th January, 1874.
Forming a species of terrace facing the Queen
Street Gardens from the north, are Abercrombie
Place and Heriot Row-the first named from the
hero of the Egyptian campaign, and the latter from
the founder of the famous hospital on ground belonging
to which it is erected. The western portion
of the Row, after it was built, was long disfigured
by the obstinacy of Lord Wemyss, who declined to
remove a high stone wall which enclosed on the
north and east the garden that lay before his house
in Queen Street.
Sir John Connel, Advocate and Procurator for
the Church, author of a ?Treatise on Parochial
Law and Tithes,? apd who figures among Kay?s
Portraits as one of the ?Twelve Advocates,?
James Pillans, LL.D., Professor of Humanity in
the University 1820-63, and Sir James Riddel,
Bart., of Ardnaniurchan and Sunart, lived respectively
in Nos. 16, 22, and 30, Abercrombie Place;
while on the west side of Nelson Street, which
opens off it to the north, resided, after 1829, Miss
Susan Edmondston Ferrier, authoress of ? Marriage,?
? Inheritance,? and ? Destiny,? one who
may with truth be called the Zast of the literary
galaxy which adorned Edinburgh when Scott wrote,
Jeffrey criticised, and the wit of Wilson flowed into
the Nodes. She was the friend and confidant of
Scott. She survived him more than twenty years,
as she died in 1854.
In the house numbered as 6 Heriot Row,
Henry Mackenzie, the author. of the 6? Man of
Feeling,? spent the last years of his long life, surviving
all the intimates of his youth, including
Robertson, Hume, Fergusson, and &dam Smith ;
and there he died. on the 14th of January, in the
year 1831, after having been confined to his room
for a considerable period by the general decay
attending old age. He was then in his eightysixth
year.
No. 44 in the same Row is remarkable as
having been for some years the residence of the
Rev. Archibald Alison, ?to whom we have already
referred; in the same house with him lived his
sons, Professor Alison, and Archibald the future
historian of Europe and first baronet of the name.
The latter was born in the year 1792, at the
parsonage house of Kenley,in Shropshire. The Rev.
Archibald Alison (who was a cadet of the Alisons,
of New Hall, in Angus) before becoming incunibent
of the Cowgate Chapel, in 1800, had been
a prebendary of Sarum, rector of Roddington,
and vicar of High Ercal; and his wife was
Dorothea Gregory, grand-daughter of the fourteenth
Lord Forbes of that ilk, a lady whose family
for two centuries has been eminent in mathematics
and the exact sciences.
His sermons were published by Constable in
1817, twenty-seven years subsequent to his work
on ?Taste,? and, according to the Literary
Magazine for that year and other critical periodicals,
since the first publication of Blair?s discourses
there were no sermons so popular in Scotland as
those of Mr. Alison. He enforced virtue and
piety upon the sanction of the Gospels, without
ehtering into those peculiar grounds and conditions
of salvation which constitute the sectarian theories
of religion, regarding his hearers or readers as
having already arrived at that state of knowledge
and understanding when, ? having the principles
of the doctrine of Christ, they should go on unto
perfection.?
Great King Street, a broad and stately thoroughfare
that extends from Drummond Place to the
