lAth.1 COBOURG STREET. 255
ing is the inscription on the pedestal-? This memorial
of David Johnston, D.D., who was for fifty-nine
years minister of North Leith, is erected by a few
private friends in affectionate and grateful remembrance
of his fervent piety, unwearied usefuhess,
and truly Christian charity.? ?
Two years after he left it, in 1826, the venerable
church of North Leith was finally abandoned to
sedular uses, and ?thus,? says the historian of
Leith, ?? the edifice which had, for ?upwards of three
hundred and thirty years, been devoted to the
sacred purposes of religion, is now the unhallowed
repository of peas and barley 1
Therein lie
the remains of Robert Nicoll, perhaps one of the
most precocious poets that Scotland has produced,
and for some time editor of the Leeds Times. He
died in Edinburgh, and was laid here in December,
Several tombstones to ancient mariners stud the
uneven turf. One bearing the nautical instruments
of an early period-the anchor, compasses, log,
Davis?s quadrant and cross-staff, with a grotesque
face and a motto now illegible-is supposed to have
been brought, with many others, from the cemetery
of St. Nicholas, when the citadel was built there by
order of Monk in 1656.
Another rather ornate tomb marks the grave of
some old ship-builder, with a pooped threedecker
having two Scottish ensigns displayed. Above it
is the legend-Trahunter. &as. mmhim, carimz,
and below an inscription of which nothing remains
but ?1749 . . aged 59 y . . .?
Another stone bears-? Here lyeth John Hunton,
who died Decon of the Weivars in North Leith, the
.25.?Ap. 1669.?
This burying-ground was granted by the city ol
Edinburgh, in 1664, as a compensation for that
appropriated by General Monk.
The new church of North Leith stands westward
of the oId in Madeira Street. Its foundation was
laid in March, 1814. It is a rather handsome building,
in a kind of Grecian style of architecture, and
was designed by William Bum, a well-known Edinburgh
architect, in the earlier years of the present
century. The front is 78& feet in breadthand
from the columns to the back wall, it measures
116 feet. It has a spire, deemed fine (though
deficient in taste), 158 feet in height.
The proportions of the fourcolumn portico are
szid by Stark to have been taken from the Ionic
Temple on the Ilyssus, near Athens. It cost aboul
~12,000, and has accommodation for above one
thousand seven hundred sitters. The living is said
to be one of the best in the Church of Scotland.
Its ancient churchyard adjoins it.
r837.
North Leith Free Church stands near it, on the
Queensfeny Road, and was built in 1858-9, from
designs by Campbell Douglas ; it is in the German
Pointed style, with a handsome steeple 160 feet
in height
In 1754, Andrew Moir, a student of divinity,
was usher of the old Grammar School in North
Leith, and in that year he published a pamphlet,
entitled ?? A Letter to the Author of the Ecclesiastic
Characteristics,? charging the divinity students
of the university with impious principles and immoral
practices. This created a great storm at the
time, and the students applied to the Principal
ewdie, who summoned the Senatus, before whom
Andrew Moir was brought on the 25th of April ;9
the same year.
He boldly acknowledged himself author of the
obnoxious pamphlet. At a second meeting, on the
30th April, he acknowledged ?that he knew no
students of divinity in the university who held the
principles, or were guilty of the practices ascribed
to some persons in the said printed letter.?
This retractatien he subscribed by his own hand,
in presence of the Principal and Senatus.
The latter taking the whole affair into their
consideration, ?? unanimously found and declared
the said letter to be a scurrilous, false, and malicious
libel, tending, without any ground, to defame
the students of the university ; and, therefore, expeZZea!
and extruded the said Andrew Moir (usher
of the Grammar School of North Leith), author of
the said pamphlet, from this university, and declared
that he is no more to be considered a
student of the same.?
In Cobourg Street, adjoining the old church of
St. Ninian, is North Leith United Presbyterian
Church, while the Free Church of St. Xinian stood
in Dock Street, on a portion of the ground occupied
by the old citadel.
In the former street is a relic of old Leitha
large square stone, representing the carpenters?
arms, within a moulded panel. It ?bears a threedecked
ship with two flags, at stem and stern.
Above it is the motto-
*? God bless fhe curjmters
of No. fiith, wlro hilt thL
Hme, 1715.?
Underneath the ship is the line Trahunter siccas
machimz canhe, said to be misquoted from Horace,
Carm : lib. i 4, where the verse runs :-
?I Solvitur a& hiems gxata vice veris et Favoni :
Trahuntquc sicraS machim carinas ;
Nec prata canis albicant pruinis.?
Ac neque jam stabuliis gandet pecus, aut aritor igni;
This stone stood originally in the wall of a man
256 OLD AND NEW EDINBURGH. [Leith.
sion opposite to the church of St. Ninian, but is
now rebuilt into a modern edifice in Cobourg Street.
In Robertson?s map, depicting Leith with its
fortifications, 1560 (partly based upon Greenville
Collins?s, which we have reproduced on p. 176),
the church of Nicholas is shown between the sixth
and seventh bastions, as a cruciform edifice, with
choir, nave, and transepts, measuring about 150 feet
in length, by 80 feet across the latter, and distant
only IOO feet from the Short Sand, or old sea margin.
the patron of seamen,? says Robertson, ?we may
infer that Leith at a very early period was a sea
St. Nicholas, the confessor, was a native of Lycia,
who died in the year 342, according to the Bollandists.
He was assumedas the patron of Venice
and many other seaports, and is usually represented
with an anchor at his side and a ship in the background,
and, in some instances, as the patron of
commerce, In Mrs. Jameson?s ?Sacred and
port town.?
ST. NINIAN?S CHURCHYARD.
The church, or chapel, with the hospital of
St. Nicholas, is supposed to have been founded
at some date later than the chapel of Abbot Balhntyne,
as the reasons assigned by him for building
it seemed to imply that the inhabitants were
without any accessible place of worship ; but when
or by whom it was founded, the destruction of
neatly all ecclesiastical records, at the Reformation,
renders it even vain to surmise.
Nothing nom can be known of their origin, and
the last vestiges of them were swept away when
Monk built his citadel.
They were, of course, ruined by Hertford in his
first invasion, ?and from the circumstance of the
church in the citadel being dedicated to St. Nicholas,
Legendary Art,? she mentions two : ?? a seaport
with ships in the distance ; St. Nicholas in his episcopal
robes (as Archbishop of Myra), stands by
as directing the whole;? and a storm at sea, in
which ?St. Nicholas appears as a vision above ; in
one hand he holds a lighted taper ; with the other
he appears to direct the course of the vessel.??
To this apostle of ancient manners had the
old edifice in North Leith been dedicated, when
the site whereon it stood was an open and sandy
eminence, overlooking a waste of links to the northward,
and afterwards encroached on by the sea ;
and its memory is still commemorated in a narrow
and obscure alley, called St. Nicholas Wynd,
according to Fullarton?s ?? Gazetteer,? in 1851.
