Craiglockhart.1 THE CRAIG HOUSE. ? 43
at Marischal College, Mr. Burton was apprenticed
to a legal practitioner in the Granite City, after
which he became, in 1831, an advocate at the
Scottish Bar. Among the young men who crowd
the Parliament House from year to year he found
little or no practice, and he began to devote his
time to the study of law, history, and political
economy, on all of which subjects he wrote several
papers in the Edinburgh Review and also in the
Westminster Rmiew. He was author of the ?Lives?
of David Hume, Lord Lovat, and Duncan Forbes
of Culloden, ?Narratives of the Criminal Law of
Scotland,? a ?History of Scotland from Agricola
to the Revolution of 1688,? and another history
from that period to the extinction of the last
Jacobite insurrection. ? The Scot Abroad ? he
published in 1864, and ?The Book Hunter.? In
1854 he was appointed secretary to the Scottish
Prison Board, and on its abolition, in 1860, he
was corhnued as manager and secretary in connection
with the Home Office. Soon after the
publication of the first four volumes of his early
?History of Scotland,? the old office in the Queen?s
Scottish Household, Historiographer Royal, being
vacant, it was conferred upon him.
At the quaint old Craig House, which is said
to be haunted by the spectre known as ?The
Green Lady,? he frequently had small gatherings
of literary visitors to the Scottish capital,
which dwell pleasantly in the memory of .those
who took part in them. He was hospitably inclined,
kind of heart, and full of anecdote. ? His
library was a source of never-failing delight,? says
a writer in the Scotsman in 1881 ; ?but his library
did not mean a particular room. At Craig House
the principal rooms are e?z suite, and they were all
filled or covered with books. The shelves were
put up by Mr. Burton?s own hands, and the books
were arranged by himself, so that he knew where
to find any one, even in the dark; and one of the
greatest griefs of his life was the necessity, some
time ago, to disperse this library, which he had
spent his life in collecting. In politics Mr. Burton
was a strong Liberal He took an active part in
the repeal of the Corn Laws, and was brought into
close friendship with Richard Cobden.?
The work by which his name will be chiefly
remembered is, no doubt, his ?History of Scotland,?
though its literary style has not many charms ; but
it is very truthful, if destitute of the brilliant wordpainting
peculiar to Mawulay. ?? It is something
for a man,? says the writer above quoted, to have
identified himself with such a piece of work as the
history of his native country, and that has been
done as completely by John Hill Burton in connection
with the ? History of Scotland? as by any
historiar of any country.?
Immediately under the brow of Craiglockhart,
on its western side, there are-half hidden among
trees and the buildings of a farm-steading-the
curious remains of a very ancient little fortalice,
which seems to be totally without a history, as no
notice of it has appeared in any statistical account,
nor does it seem to be referred to in the ?Retours.?
It is a tower, nearly square, measuring twentyeight
feet six inches by twenty-four feet eight inches
externally, with walls six feet three inches thick,
built massively, as the Scots built of old, for
eternity rather than for time, to all appearance.
A narrow arched doorway, three feet wide, gives
access to the arched entrance of the lower vault
and a little stair in the wall that ascended to the
upper storey. Though without a history, this
sturdy little fortlet must have existed probably
centuries before a stone of the old Craig House
was built.
A little way northward of this tower, on what
must have been the western skirt of the Burghmuir,
stood the ancient mansion of Meggetland, of which
not a vestige now remains but a solitary gate-pillar,
standing in a field near the canal. In the early
part of the eighteenth century it was occupied by a
family named Sievewright ; and Robert Gordon, a
well-known goldsmith in Edinburgh, died there in
A little way westward of Craiglockhart is the old
manor-house of Redhall, which was the property of
Sir Adam Otterburn, Lord Advocate in the time of
James V. ; but the name is older than that age, as
Edward I. of England is said to have been at
Redhall in the August of I 298.
In the records of the Coldstream Guards it is
mentioned that in August 18th and ~ 4 t h ~ before
the battle of Dunbar, in 1650, ten companies of that
regiment, then known as General Monk?s, were
engaged at the siege of Redhall, which was carried
by storm. This was after Cromwell had been
foiled in his attempt to break the Scottish lines
before Edinburgh, and had marched westward from
his camp near the Braid Hills to cut off the supplies
of Leslie from the westward. but was foiled again,
and had to fall back on hnbar, intending to retreat
to England.
Apathway that strikes off across the Links of
Bruntsfield, in a south-easterly direction, leads to
the old and tree-bordered White House Loan,
which takes its name from the mansion on the east
side thereof, to which a curious classical interest
attaches, and which seems to have existed before
the Revolution, as in 1671, James Chrystie, of
1767-
