Leith] THE GLASS WORKS. 2 3 9
fashion that the hamlet near Craigmillar was namec
?Little France? from the French servants o
Mary.
U In a small garden attached to one of the house:
in Little London,? says a writer, whose anecdote
we give for what it is worth, ? there was a flowerplot
which was tended with peculiar care long
after its original possessors had gone the way 01
all flesh, and it was believed that the body of a
young and beautiful female who committed suicide
was interred here. The peculiar circumstances
attending her death, and the locality made choice
of for her interment, combined to throw romantic
interest over her fate and fortunes, and
her story was handed-down from one generation
to another.?
In Bernard Street, a spacious and well-edificed
thoroughfare, was built, in 1806, the office of the
Leith Bank, a neat but small edifice, consisting of
two floors ; a handsome dome rises from the north
front, and a projection ornamented with four Ionic
columns, and having thin pilasters of the same.
decorates the building. It is now the National
Bank of Scotland Branch.
Since then, many other banking offices have been
established in the same street, including that of
the Union Bank, built in 1871 after designs by
James Simpson, having a three-storeyed front in the
Italian style, with a handsome cornice and balustrade,
and a telling-room measuring 34 feet by 32 ;
the National Bank of Scotland ; the Clydesdale
and British Linen Company?s Banks; many insurance
offices; and in No. 37 is the house of the
Leith Merchants? Club.
Bernard Street joins Baltic Street, at the southeast
corner of which is the spacious and stately
Corn Exchange, which is so ample in extent as to
be frequently used as a drill-hall by the entire
battalion of Leith Rifle Volunteers.
North of Baltic Street are the old Glass Works
The Bottle House Company, as it was named,
began to manufacture glass vessels in North Leith
in 1746, but their establishment was burnt down
during the first year of the partnership. Thus, in
1747 the new brick houses were built on the sands
of South Leith, near the present Salamander Street,
and as ~e demand for bottles increased, they
built an additional one in 1764, though, according
to Bremner, glass was manufactured in Leith so
early as 1682.
Seven cones, or furnaces, were built, but in later
years only two have been in operation. In the
year 1777 CO less -than 15,8834 cwts. were made
here in Leith, the Government duty on which
amounted to A2,779 odd ; but as there are now
many other bottle manufactories in Scotland, thetrade
is no longer confined to the old houses that.
adjoin Baltic and Salamander Streets.
A writer in the Bet, an old extinct &dinburgh,
periodical, writing in 1792, says that about thirty
years before there was only one glass company in.
Scotland, the hands working one-half the year in
Glasgow, and the other half at Leith, and adds :-
?NOW there are six glass-houses in Leith alone,.
besides many others in different parts of the
tountry. At the time I mention nothing else
than bottles of coarse green glass were made there,
and to that article the Glass House Company in
Leith confined their efforts, till about a dozen yearsagoI
when they began to make fine glass for phials.
and other articles of that nature. About four yearsago
they introduced the manufacture of crown
glass for windows, which they now make in great
perfection, and in considerable quantities. After
they began to manufacture white glass, they fzll
into the way of cutting it for ornament and engraving
upon it. In this last department they havereached
a higher degree of perfection than it hasperhaps
anywhere else ever attained. A young
man who was bred to that business, having discovered
a taste in designing, and an elegance of
execution that was very uncommon, the proprietors
of the works were at pains to give him every aid in
the art of drawing that this place can afford, and
he has exhibited some specimens of his powers in
that line that are believed to be unrivalled. It is.
but yesterday that this Glass House Company (who
are in a very flourishing state), encouraged by their
success in other respects, introduced the art of
preparing glass in imitation of gems, and of cutting
it in facets, and working it into elegant fomis for
chandeliers and other ornamental kinds of furniture.
In this department their first attempts have
been highly successful, and they have now executed
some pieces of work that they need not be ashamed
to compare with the best that can be procured
elsewhere.?
The works of the Glass House Company at
Leith were advertised as for sale in the Courani
of 1813, which stated that they were valued at
~40,000, with a valuable steam-engine of sixteen
horse power, valued at E2 1,000.
Quality Street, and the fine long thoroughfare
named Constitution Street, open into Bernard
Street. Robertson gives us a drawing of an old and
richly-moulded doorway of a tenement, in the
rorrner street, having on its lintel the initials P. P.,
E. G., and the date 1710. At the corner of Quality
Street stands St. John?s Free Church, which was
built in 1870-1, at a cost of about A7,500, and
240 OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH. [Leith
is in the Gothic style, with a tower 130 feet high,
surmounted by an open crown.
On the east side of this street, and near its
northern end, stood the house in which John
Home, the author of ?( Douglas ? and other tragedies,
was born, on the 13th September, 1724. His
father, Alexander Home, was Town Clerk of Leith,
and his mother was Christian Hay, daughter of a
writer in Edinburgh. He was educated at the
Grammar School in the Kirkgate, and subsequently
succeeded in carrying Thomas Barrow, who had
dislocated his ankle in the descent, to Alloa, where
they were received on board the YuZture, sloopofwar,
commanded by Captain Falconer, who landed
them in his barge at the Queen?s Ferry, from
whence Home rFturned to his father?s house in
Leith.
Subsequently he became the associate and friend
of Drs. Robertson and Blair, David Hume, Adam
Fergusson, Adam Smith, and other eminent Ziterati
ST. JAMES?S CHAPEL, 1820. (Aftcr Stow.)
at the university of the capital. His father was a
son of Home of Flass (says Henry Mackenzie, in
his ? Memoirs ?1, a lineal descendant of Sir James
Home of Cowdenknowes, ancestor of the Earls of
Home. He was licensed by the Presbytery of
Edinburgh on the 4th of April, in the memorable
year 1745, and became a volunteer in the corps so
futilely formed to assist in the defence of Edinburgh
against Prince Charles Edward Serving as a
volunteer in the Hanoverian interest, he was taken
prisoner at thevictory of Falkirk, and committed to
the castle of Doune in hlonteith, from whence,
with some others, he effected an escape by forming
ropes of the bedclothes-an adventure which he
details in his own history of the civil strife. They
of whom the Edinburgh of that day could boast ;
and in 1746 he was inducted as minister at Athelstaneford,
his immediate predecessor being Robert
Blair, author of ? The Grab-e," and there he produced
his first drama, founded on the death of
Agis, King of Sparta, which Gamck declined when
offered for representation in I 749.
In 1755 Home set off on horseback to London
from his house in East Lothian, with the
tragedy of ?Ilouglas? in his pocket, says Henry
Mackenzie. ?? His habitual carelessness was strongly
shown by his having thought of no better conveyance
for this MS.-by which he #vas to acquire
all the fame and future success of which his friends
were so confident-than the pocket of the great-
.
