Greyfriars Church.] DR ERSKINE. 379
I manhood was a sitter in the Old Greyfriars, and his
parents, Mr. and Mrs. Scott,? says an old tutor of
Sir Walter, writing to Lockhart, ? every Sabbath,
when well and at home, attended with their fine
young family of children and their domestic servants-
a sight so amicable and exemplary as
often to excite in my breast a glow of heart-felt
satisfaction.?
In ? Guy Mannering,? Scott introduces this old
church-now, with St. Giles?s, the most interesting
place of worship in the city-and its two most distinguished
incumbents. When Colonel Mannering
came to Edinburgh (where, as we have already
said, Romance and History march curiously side
from all quarters for the first service, a mass of
. blackened ruins. It has since been repaired at
considerable expense, adorned with several beautiful
memorial windows, the triplet one in the
south aisle being to the Scottish historian, George
Buchanan.
Among the ancient tombs within the church
were those of Sir William Oliphant, King?s Advocate,
who died in 1628 ; and of Sir David Falconer,
of Newton, Lord President of the Court of Session,
who spent the last day of his life seated on the
bench in court.
The antiquity of our Scottish churchyards, and the
care taken of them, greatly impressed Dr. Southey
strangely contrasted with a black wig, without a ?
grain of powder ; a narrow chest and stooping
posture; hands which, placed like props on each
side of the pulpit, seemed necessary rather to support
the person than to assist the gesticulation of
the preacher ; a gown (not even that of Geneva), a
tumbled band, and a gesture which seemed scarcely
voluntary, were the first circumstances which struck
a stranger.?
Dr. Erskine, previously minister of the New
Greyfriars, was the author of voluminous theological
works, which are known, perhaps, in Scotland
only. After ministering at the Greyfriars for fortyfive
years, he died in January, 1803, and was buried
in the churchyard
Principal Robertson pre-deceased him. He died
in June, 1793, in the seventy-first year of his age,
and was interred in the same burying-ground.
The Old Greyfriars was suddenly destroyed on
the morning of Sunday, 19th January, 1845, by a
fire, and presented to the startled people, assembling
greatest, grandest, and most renowned, who have
lived during a period of three hundred years.
In the year 1562 the Town Council made an
application to Queen Mary to grant them the site
and yards of the Greyfriars Monastery, to form a
a new burial-place, as ?? being somewhat distant
from the town.? Mary, in reply, granted their request
at once, and appointed the Greyfriars yard,
or garden, to be devoted in future to the use specified,
and as St Giles?s Churchyard soon after began
to be abandoned, no doubt interments here would
proceed rapidly ; all the more so that the other
burial-places of the city had become desecrated.
?? Before the Reformation,? says Wilson, ?there
were the Blackfriars Kirkyard, where the Surgical
Hospital or old High School now stands ; the
Kirk-of-Field-now occupied by the college,
Trinity College, Holyrood Abbey, St. Roque?s ?
and St. Leonard?s Kirkyards. In all these places
human bones are still found on digging to any
depth.?
