OLD LEITH STACF.. Leith Walk.]
VIEWS IN PORTOBELLO.
I, Ramsag h e ; n, The Established Church ; & High Street, looking eart; + Town Hall ; 5 Episcopalisn Church.
116
?54 OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH. [Leith Walk.
belonged to different vehicles. It is standing opposite
the Tron Kirk. The warning bell rings a
quarter of an hour before starting ! Shortly a pair
of illconditioned and ill-sized hacks make their
appearance, and are yoked to it ; the harness, partly
of old leathern straps and partly of ropes, bears
evidence of many a mend. A passenger comes
and takes a seat-probably from the Crames or
Luckenbooths-who has shut his shop and affixed
a notice to the door, ?Gone to Leith, and will be
back at 4 of the clock, p.m.? The quarter being
up, and the second bell rung, off starts the coach
at a very slow pace. Having taken three-quarters
of an b u r to get to the Halfway House, the ? ?bus ?
sticks fast in a rut ; the driver whips up his nags,
when 10 ! away go the horses, but fast remains the
stage. The ropes being re-tied, and assistance procured
from the ? Half-way,? the stage is extricated,
and proceeds. What a contrast,? adds the writer,
? between the above pictures and the present ? ?bus ?
with driver and conductor, starting every five
minutes.? But to-day the contrast is yet greater,
the tram having superseded the ?bus.
The forty oil-lamps referred to would seem not to
have been erected, as in the Advertiser for Sep
tember, 1802, a subscription was announced for
lighting the Walk during the ensuing winter season,
the lamps not to be lighted at all until a sufficient
sum had been subscribed at the Leith Bank and
certain other places to continue them to the end
of March, 1803 ; but we have no means of knowing
if ever this scheme were camed out.
? If my reader be an inhabitant of Edinburgh of
any standing,? writes Robert Chambers, ? he must
have many delightful associations of Leith Walk
in connection with his childhood. Of all the streets
in Edinburgh or Leith, the Walk, in former times,
was certainly the street for boys and girls. From
top to bottom it was a scene of wonders and enjoyments
peculiarly devoted to children. Besides the
panoramas and caravan shows, which were comparatively
transient spectacles, there were several
shows upon Leith Walk which might be considered
as regular fixtures, and part of the countv-cousin
sghts of Edinburgh. Who can forget the waxworks
of ?Mrs. Sands, widow of the late G. Sands,?
which occupied a laigh shop opposite to the present
Haddington Place, and at the door of which,
besides various parrots and sundry Birds of Paradise,
sat the wax figure of a little man in the dress
of a French courtier of the ancien r&iaime, reading
one eternal copy of the Edinburgh Advertiser?
The very outsides of these wonderful shops was an
immense treat ; all along the Walk it was one delicious
scene of squirrels hung out at doors and
monkeys dressed like soldiers and sailors, with
holes behind them where their tails came through.
Even the halfpenny-less boy might have got his
appetite for wonders to some extent gratified.?
The long spaces of blank garden or nursery
walls on both sides of the way were then literally
garrisoned with mendicants, organ-grinders, and
cripples on iron or wooden legs, in bowls and
wheelbarrows, by ballad singers and itinerant
fiddlers. Among the mendicants on the east side
of the Walk, below Elm Row (where the last of
the elms has long since disappeared) there was one
noted mendicant, an old seaman, whose figure was
familiar there for years, and whose sobriquet was
? Commodore O?Brien,? who sat daily in a little
masted boat which had been presented to him by
order of George IV. ?The commodore?s ship,?
says the Week0 JournaZ for 1831, ? is appropriately
called the Royal Ggt. It is scarcely 6 f t
long, by 24 breadth of beam, and when rigged for
use her mast is little stouter than a mopstick, her
cordage scarcely stronger than packthread, and
her tonnage is a light burden for two men. In this
mannikin cutter the intrepid navigator fearlessly
commits himself to the ocean and performs long
voyages.? Now the character of the Walk is entirely
changed, as it is a double row of houses from
end to end.
During the railway mania two schemes were projected
to supersede the omnibus traffic here. One
was an atmospheric railway, and the other a subterranean
one, to be laid under the Walk A road
for foot-passengers was to be formed alongside the
railway, and shops, from which much remuneration
was expected, were to be opened along the line ;
but both schemes collapsed, though plans for them
were laid before Parliament.
In April, 1803, there died, in a house in Leith
Walk, James Sibbald, an eminent bookseller and
antiquary, who was educated at the grarnmarschool
of Selkirk, and after being in the shop of
Elliott, a publisher in Edinburgh, in I 78 I acquired
by purchase the library which had once belonged to
Allan Ramsay, and was thereafter long one of the
leading booksellers in the Parliament Square.
One terrible peculiarity attended Leith Walk,
even till long after the middle of the last century
this was the presence of a permanent gibbet at the
Gallow Lee, a dreary object to the wayfarer by
night, when two or three malefactors swung there in
chains, with the gleds and crows perching over
them. It stood on rising ground, on the west side
of the Walk, and its site is enclosed in the precincts
of a villa once occupied by the witty and beautiful
Duchess of Gordon. As the knoll was composed
