204 OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH. [Moray Place.
~~
reputation, but he was too much a votary of the
regular old rhetorical style of poetry to be capable
of appreciating the Lake school, or any others
among his own contemporaries; and thus he was
apt to make mistakes, draw wrong deductions as
to a writer?s future, and indulge in free-and-easy
condemcation.
He \vas passionately attached to his native city,
Edinburgh, and was always miserable when away
from it. It was all
the same through
life - he never
could reconcile
himself to new
places,new people,
or strange habits ;
and thcs it was
that his letters, in
age, from Oxford,
from London? and
America, teem
with complaints,
and longing for
home. His in.
dustry was indefatigable,
and his
general information
of the widest
range, perfectly
accurate, and alway-
s at command
He died in 1850,
in his seventyseventh
year, and
was borne from
Moray Place to
his last home in
the cemetery at
the Dean.
In No. 34 lived
the Hon. Baron
successively Sheriff of Berwickshire and of West
Lothian, Professor of Scots Law in the University
of Edinburgh, and Baron of Exchequer till the
abolition of the Court in 1830. His great work on
the Criminal Law of Scotland has been deemed the
text-book of that department of jurisprudence, and
is constantly referred to as an authority, by bench
and bar. It was published in 2 vols. quarto in
1799. He died at Edinburgh on the 30th August,
FRANCIS, LORD JEFFRLY. (A/er fhe Pmt7a.i 6y Cnluin Smith, R.S.R.)
David Hume, of the Scottish Exchequer in 1779
and 1780, nephew of the historian, and an eminent
writer on the criminal jurisprudence of the country,
one of the correspondents of the Mirror Club, and
who for many years sat with Sir Walter Scott, at
the Clerks? table in the first Division of the Court
of Session. . No. 47 was long the abode of Sir
James Wellwood Moncreiff, Bart., of Tullibole in
Kinross-shire, who was called to the Scottish bar
in 1799, and was raised to the bench in 1829,
under the title of Lord MoncreifT, and died in
1851.
His contemporary Baron Hume, tilled various
important situations with great ability, having been
1S38, and left in
the hands of the
secretary of the
Royal Society of
Edinburgh a valuable
collection of
MSS. and letters
belonging to, or
relating to his
celebrated uncle,
the historian of
England.
In Forres Street
-a short and
steep one opening
south from Moray
Place-No. 3 was
the residence of
the great Thomas
Chalmers, D.D.,
the leader of the
F r e e C h u r c h
movement, a largehearted,
patriotic,
and devout man,
and of whom it
has been said,
that he was preeminently
in the
unity of an undivided
life, at
once a man of
man of the world. God, a man of science, and a
He was born on the 17th of March, 1780. As a
preacher, it is asserted, that there were few whose
eloquence was capable of producing an effect
so strong and irresistible as his, without his ever
having recourse to any of the arts of common
pulpit enthusiasm.
His language was bold and magnificent; his
imagination fertile and distinct, gave richness to his
style, while his arguments were supplied with a vast
and rapid diversity of illustration, and all who ever
heard him, still recall Thomas Chalmers with serious
and deep-felt veneration.
He is thus described in his earlier years, and
Foms StRet.1 THOMAS CHALMERS. 205
of high entranced enthusiasm. But the shape of
the forehead is perhaps the most singular part of
the whole visage ; and indeed it presents a mixture
so very singular, that I should have required some
little time to comprehend the meaning of it. . . .
In the forehead of Dr. Chalmers there is an arch
of imagination, carrying out the summit boldly and
roundly, in a style to which the heads of very few
poets present acything comparable-while over
this again there is a grand apex of veneration and
love, such as might have graced the bust of Plato
himself, and such as in living men I had never
beheld equalled in any but the majestic head of
Canova. The whole is edged with a few crisp
locks, which stand boldly forth and afford a fine
relief to the death-like paleness of those massive
temples.?
He died on the 3rst May, 1847, since when
his Memoirs have been given to the world by Dr.
William Hanna, with his life and labours in
long before he took the great part he did in the
storm of the Disruption :-
?At first sight his face is a coarse one-but a
mysterious kind of meaning breathes from every
part of it, that such as have eyes cannot be long
without discovering. It is very pale, and the
large halfclosed eyelids have a certain drooping
melancholy about them, which interested me very
much, I understood not why. The lips, too, are
singularly pensive in their mode of falling down
at the sides, although there is no want of richness
and vigour in their central fulness of curve. The
upper lip from the nose downwards, is separated by
a very deep line, which
travels in North America followed; but the work
by which he is best known-his pleasant ? I Fragments
of Voyages and Travels, including Anec
dotes of Naval Life,?in three volumes, he published
at Edinburgh in 1831, during his residence in St.
Colme Street where some of his children were
born. I? Patchwork,? a work in three volumes, he
published in England in 1841. He married Margaret,
daughter of Sir John Hunter, Consul-general
in Spain, and died at Portsmouth in 1844, leaving
behind him the reputation of having been a brave
and intelligent officer, a good and benevolent man,
and a faithful friend.
Ainslie Place is an expansion of Great Stuart
Street, midway between Moray Place and Randolph
Crescent. It forms an elegant, spacious. and
symmetrical double crescent, with an ornamental
garden in the centre, and is notable for containing
the houses in which Dugald Stewart and Dean
Ramsay lived and died, namely, Nos. 5 and 23.
Glasgow, his residence in St. Andrews, and his final
removal to Edinburgh, his Visits to England, and
the lively journal he kept of what he saw and did
while in that country.
St. Colme Street, the adjacent continuation of
Albyn Place, is so named from one of the titles of
the Moray family, a member of which was commendator
of Inchcolm in the middle of the 16th
century.
Here No. 8 was the residence of Captain Bad
Hall, R.N., the popular writer on several subjects.
He was the second son of Sir James Hall of Dunglass,
Sart., and Lady Helena Douglas, daughter
af Dunbar, third Earl of
