96 OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH. [Inverleith.
something at once strong and startling in the
consciousness that His Royal Highness the Conimander-
in-Chief, during his recent official visit to
Edinburgh, might have shaken hands with a
veteran who landed with his regiment in Portugal
about the middle of 1808, who took part in
the battle of Vimiera, in the advance into Spain,
in the disastrous retreat upon Corunna, and in the
battle before that town in 1809. It is now (in
1879) seventy years to a day siiice Lieutenanthearts
of half-a-dozen predecessors-their orders
being that twice in every twenty-four hours they
should ascertain by ocular demonstration that the
Emperor was at Longwood.
The latter died while Captain Crokat was
installed in the office, and he was sent home by
Sir Hudson Lowe with the dispatches, announcing
that event j and after serving in India, he retired in
1830, and in spite of war, wounds, and fever, lived
for nearly half a century before he passed away at n
VIEW IN BONNINGTON, 1851. (From a Drawing by WilZiarn Chnnirrg.)
General Crokat, had ?down with fever? written
against his name in the medical report, which
told the same tale of about three-fourths of those
soldiers sent to perish at pestilential Walcheren.?
General Crokat had served in Sicily, in 1807,
before he served in Spain, and received the war
medal with four clasps for Vimiera, Corunna,
Vittoria, and the Pyrenees, where he was severely
wounded. When peace came, the 20th Regiment
was ordered to St. Helena, and with it went then
Captain Crokat, to take part in transactions to a
soldier more trying than the bullets of the recent
war, for as orderly officer he had charge of ? the
caged eagle of St. Helena,? the captive Napoleon;
a task which is said to have well-nigh broken the
green old age, in his villa at Inverleith Row, a hale
old relic of other times.
In this street are the entrances to the Royal
Botanic Gardens, on the west side thereof, when
they were first formed in 1822-4, in lieu of a previous
garden on the east side of Leith Walk, from
which establishment the shrubs and herbs were transferred
without the eventual injury to a single plant.
They are connectedwith the University, in so
far as the Professor of Botany is Regius Keeper,
and delivers his lectures in the class-room in the
gardens, which extend to twenty-seven Scottish
acres, and contain an extensive range of greenhouses
and hothouses, with a palmhouse, 96 feet
long, 70 feet high, and 57 feet broad. There is an
