CHAPTER IV

STORIES OF THE CLOSES, THE WYNDS, AND THE LANDS

It is, to be sure, more picturesque to lament the desolation of towns on hills and haughs than the degradation of an Edinburgh close; but I cannot help thinking on the simple and cosic retreats where worth and talent, and elegance to boot, were often nestled.

SIR WALTER SCOTT, _Letter to Lady Anne Barnard_.

The long irregular line of slowly ascending mediæval street from Holyrood to the Castle was, and is, the backbone of Old Edinburgh. From this backbone there jut out on either side, forming, as it were, the ribs from the spine, all those narrow wynds and quaint closes so characteristic of the Old Town, and so full of the traditions and stories of Old Town life. The main street itself is in three divisions--the Canongate, nearest to Holyrood, then the main portion, or High Street, and, highest up and nearest to the Castle, the Lawnmarket. Between the Canongate and the High Street there used, in bygone days, to be the famous old city gate, the Netherbow Port, for the Canongate, a separate burgh, was beyond the Flodden wall, which at this point crossed the ridge of the town. At the junction

of the High Street and the Lawnmarket stood the Church of St. Giles, and, right out in the middle of the street and dividing the traffic into two narrow streams, the hoary Tolbooth, or “Heart of Midlothian.”

This, then, was Old Edinburgh, the Edinburgh that Taylor, the Water-poet, so well describes. “So, leaving the castle,” he writes, “as it is both defensive against any opposition and magnificke for lodging and receite, I descended lower to the city, wherein I observed the fairest and goodliest streete that ever mine eyes beheld, for I did never see or heare of a street of that length (which is half an English mile from the castle to a faire port, which they call the Nether-bow); and from that port, the streete which they call the Kenny-hate is one quarter of a mile more, downe to the kings palace, called Holyrood-house; the buildings on each side of the way being all of squared stone, five, six, or seven stories high, and many by-lanes and closes on each side of the way, wherein are gentlemens houses, much fairer than the buildings in the high-street, for in the high-street marchants and tradesmen do dwell, but the gentlemens mansions and goodliest houses are obscurely founded in the aforesaid lanes: the walles are eight or tenne foote thicke, exceeding strong, not built for a day, a weeke, a moneth, or a yeere, but from antiquitie to posteritie, for many ages.”[34]

Edinburgh, before the sudden extension of its boundaries at the end of the eighteenth century, was thus a small, compact city, measuring in its proudest days but a mile in length and a half mile in width; but, though it was small, it was densely populated. Bounded in its growth by deep ravines and by a wall and a great loch--defences against the English--it extended itself in the only way it could, upwards towards the sky, whence it need fear “no enemy, but winter and rough weather.” Some of the highest houses in old Edinburgh were like vertical streets, with a spiral “common stair”; and they contained from floor to roof almost as many families as would a street in another town. The richer and better-born citizens lived in the most comfortable “flats,” and their poorer neighbours carried on their lives and their trades below them; by which means all ranks and sorts of persons were jostled together in a cosy, sociable “hugger-mugger” existence, quite incomprehensible to the modern citizen.

The nobles of Scotland, before the Union drew them away to London, had their fine old town residences in Edinburgh--the “lands”[35] bearing their names. These were generally within closes, “obscurely founded in the aforesaid lanes,” as Taylor has it; but many were in the Cowgate, a fashionable suburb, or in the Canongate, which, being nearest Holyrood, was the court end of the city. It is down this “fairest and goodliest streete” that the tourist of to-day drives from the Castle to Holyrood, or up from Holyrood to the Castle. The driver will point with his whip at a gabled house standing forward into the street, and tell him it is John Knox’s house. At the Church of St. Giles he will probably stop the cab and descend, and, finding the door locked, will wander round the building and gaze down at the heart marked on the stones where once stood the Tolbooth, and at the initials I. K. where Knox is supposed to be buried, though another version has it that his grave is below the equestrian statue of Charles II. And so he will find himself in the precincts of Parliament House, built on ground which in past ages was the graveyard of the parish church. If he enter and have a glimpse of the great hall filled with lawyers in their wigs and gowns, strutting and fretting their hour as past generations did in their time, and as future generations will do in theirs, then he will probably let his mind rest upon Sir Walter Scott, the greatest of them all. And so his day in Edinburgh will leave him with a confused impression of a long squalid street full of draggled women and barefooted children, of groups of soldiers from the Castle, of carts and cries, of open “fore-stairs” and street wells, of ancient gabled roofs and of flapping garments hung out of windows on poles to dry, of pious legends and obliterated carvings, of an appalling number of drunken men, and of dark entries giving glimpses of tortuous obscurities, or leading steeply down some narrow tunnel with a flashing vista of the New Town in a blaze of sunshine at the end of it.

But, in driving down that ridge of street from the Castle to Holyrood, the tourist drives right through the history of Old Edinburgh, through centuries of her stories and traditions, her pride and her romances and her crimes. Down this street have ridden many gay processions, many royal pageants. Often have the “fore-stairs” and windows been crowded to witness a king lead home a foreign bride; or a regiment of brave Scots go by, with music and the tramp of feet; or a prisoner driven to his death; or, most familiar sight of all in ancient Edinburgh, to watch a “tulzie,” a quarrel settled “à la mode d’Edimbourg,” as they said on the Continent,--a duel to the death, or a street fight between armed men, followers of great rival houses, the popular side ably assisted by the fighting burghers with their spears. In the month of August 1503 the ladies of Edinburgh gathered on the decorated fore-stairs, “gay as beds of flowers,” to see King James IV. ride into the town with his Tudor bride on her palfrey. During the minority of James V. the windows were crowded with excited faces, whilst the terrific “Cleanse the Causeway” raged below, and the townspeople handed out spears to the Douglases, and the dead Hamiltons blocked the entries to the closes. Here Queen Mary rode, a dishevelled prisoner, after the battle of Carberry Hill, after she had parted with Bothwell, and “as she came through the town the common people cried out against Her Majesty at the windows and stairs, which it was a pity to hear. Her Majesty again cried out to all gentlemen and others that passed up and down the causeway, declaring how that she was their native princess, and doubted not but all honest subjects would respect her as they ought to do, and not suffer her to be mishandled.”[36]

When one turns aside from the main thoroughfare and penetrates into the closes, one leaves the public life of the city and comes upon the stories of the private lives of Old Edinburgh. Many of the closes, alas! are gone. Sometimes only an entrance remains, with a name above it recalling a hundred memories,--but the entrance leads to nowhere, or to modern buildings. But some closes remain; and, as one makes one’s way down from the Castle to the Canongate one can turn aside here and there, crossing and recrossing the street to dive down some steep entry, and, standing within it, where the broken plaster shows the bare oaken rafters overhead, may read half-obliterated Latin, or trace armorial bearings over doorways, or gaze through the open doors up spiral wooden stairs, or--over the heads of the swarming little children playing in the courts--at ancient gabled roofs and rounded turrets and beautiful old windows, whence once fair ladies peeped, and where now the ever-present “washings” hang suspended on poles, and add impressionist touches of colour to the scene.

Every close and every wynd and every land has its history; and, as nearly a hundred closes even now survive, besides the sites and memories of many more, and as every close contains its lands, it would take several volumes to tell all there is to be told. And so that invidious and vexing thing, a selection, must be made, and a few of the thousand crowding names taken haphazard.

Off the Lawnmarket there is a wide quadrangle called, after its architect, Mylne’s Court. There was a long line of royal master masons of that name, descending from father to son, from the reign of James III. This close, built in 1690 by Robert Mylne, the seventh royal master mason, whose handiwork is to be seen in many of the beautiful bits of Old Town architecture, had a graceful doorway with a peaked arch over it, grateful to the eye of the old master who designed it, but now broken and defaced. When the close was built it enclosed some building of earlier date, for another doorway had 1580 engraved over it, with the legend “Blissit be God in al his Giftis”--the most popular of all the numberless pious mottoes, Latin and English, that embellish the homes of the Old Town. This building is now gone.

James’s Court, close by, is connected with the names of David Hume and of James Boswell, and Boswell’s two guests, Paoli the Corsican, and Dr. Johnson; but the buildings in it where they lived were burnt down in the middle of the nineteenth century. Next to it--leading from it--is Lady Stair’s Close, quite recently restored by Lord Rosebery, after whose ancestress it is named. Originally it was called Lady Gray’s Close, and the coat-of-arms and the initials W G and G S carved under the words “Feare the Lord and depart from evill” are those of the original owners, Sir William (afterwards Lord) Gray of Pittendrum and his wife Egidia Smith, and the date 1622 is the date when they built it.[37] This Lord Gray was a wealthy Scottish merchant in Charles I.’s time, and was one of those who were ruined by their adherence to Montrose. He lost all his wealth by heavy fines, and, after imprisonment in the Castle and in the Tolbooth, died in 1648. Three years before his death, his daughter had died of the plague in this close. Lady Gray survived her husband, but apparently left the house “they had built to be so happy in,” and it then became the residence of the Dowager Lady Stair. It must have been a stately home in those days, with the Lawnmarket in front, and terraced gardens behind, stretching down to the Nor’ Loch. The romantic story of Lady Stair (born Lady Eleanor Campbell, grand-daughter of the Earl of Loudoun, the Covenanting Chancellor of Charles I.’s time, and married first to James, Viscount Primrose, and afterwards to the Earl of Stair) forms the plot of Scott’s _Aunt Margaret’s Mirror_. Scott used to own that he liked to “put a cocked hat” on to a story; and the cocked hat on this one is very evident. Lord Stair died in 1647--the year before Lord Gray; so it was probably just after she became a widow for the second time that Lady Stair came to live in the close that now bears her name; and here she lived for about twelve years, till her death in 1659. She had long reigned as one of the queens of Edinburgh society; in her old age she was noted and much envied for that luxury, a black servant--the only one in Edinburgh; and whatever truth there is in Sir Walter’s story, her troubles had not taken the colour from her life or from her speech. When the Earl of Dundonald accused Lady Stair of libelling Lady Jane Douglas (whose case was then before the Court of Session), and further gave the world leave to call him “a damned villain” if he did not speak the truth, the high-spirited old gentlewoman, Lady Stair, went off straight to Holyrood, where the Duke and Duchess of Douglas were, and there, before them and their attendants, said she had lived to a good old age and never till now got entangled in any “clatters,”[38] and struck the floor thrice with her stick, each time calling the Earl of Dundonald “a damned villain,”--and then retired.

Baxter’s Close, where Burns stayed in 1786, is now part of Lady Stair’s Close, and from the moment the tourist enters James’s Court he is surrounded to-day by a mob of intelligent small Scots, with bare feet and eager eyes, and told by a chorus of voices that “Robbie Burrrns lived in yon hoose”--“It was yonder Robbie Burrrns stoppit”; and, if the tourist linger to read the carvings, he is hastily helped: “Fear the Lorrrd and depairt frae evil--but it’s over yonder Robbie Burrrns’s hoose is!”

On the other side of the street is Brodie’s Close, where Deacon Brodie, the daring burglar, one of Edinburgh’s picturesque criminals, lived. There is a fine old archway inside the close, and a pleasant and innocent odour of burnt treacle from a bakery near by. Riddle’s Close has also been lately renovated, and was

used as a settlement for students. It has a story of sudden death to tell--probably several, were all known, for the enclosed court was evidently intended for defence. Here was the house of Bailie Macmorran, a rich merchant of James VI.’s reign, when rich merchants were held in great repute by a needy king: this special one had more than once banqueted the King and Queen Anne of Denmark in this very house. The High School boys had a “barring out,” and actually held the High School in a state of siege, and Bailie Macmorran was sent to settle the matter, ordered the door to be forced open, and was then and there shot dead by one of the boys. It is said that the boy who fired was the son of the Chancellor of Caithness, and thus the ancestor of the earls of Caithness, and that his gentle blood saved him from his ever being discovered or brought to justice. Another thing to remember of Riddle’s Close is that, two centuries later, David Hume lived up a spiral stair on the east side of it, and there began to write his history of England.

Byers’ Close[39] brings one back from tragedy to comedy. In the old house overhanging this close on the east, with three richly carved windows at its polygonal end, there once lived that Adam Bothwell, Bishop of Orkney, who married Mary, Queen of Scots to Bothwell “with preachings.” A bit of old stair leading to a garden terrace that once overlooked the Nor’ Loch, can be seen from Advocates’ Close. But in Byers’ Close Lord Coalstoun’s wig, to any one who has read the inimitable story in Chambers’s _Traditions of Edinburgh_, still remains, like the coffin of Mahomet, suspended in mid-air. The author tells how in that day (1757) it was the general custom for judges and advocates to don their wigs and gowns in their own houses, and proceed in state, with their cocked hats in their hands, when St. Giles’s bell sounded a quarter to nine, to the Parliament House. Earlier hours must have prevailed then than now, for we are led to understand that, though the legal brethren assembled at nine o’clock instead of at ten, they yet found time to lean over their windows after breakfasting, “enjoying the morning air, and perhaps discussing the news of the day, or the convivialities of the preceding evening, with a neighbouring advocate on the opposite side of the alley.” It so happened that one morning two very young women in the window immediately above that of Lord Coalstoun, were killing time by the somewhat cruel sport of swinging a kitten, suspended by a cord secured round it, up and down out of their window. As the kitten came down, the learned judge popped out his head. In a moment the maidens above saw it, and drew the kitten rapidly up,--but the judge’s wig came with it, firmly fixed in the little angry claws. Imagine the mirth tempered by dread at the upper window! But also imagine the feelings of the senator below,--his wig lifted as by magic from his head, and the morning air blowing “caller” on his exposed cranium! A wild glance upward, and behold, his wig ascending heaven-ward without any visible means of support! The laugh, so to speak, was now on the cat’s side. “The perpetrators did afterwards get many injunctions from their parents never again to fish over the window, with such a bait, for honest men’s wigs”; and the incident was pardoned by Lord Coalstoun,--if not by the kitten.

In Advocates’ Close there existed in the seventeenth century, in an upper storey of the house of John Scougall the artist, a picture-gallery,--the first public exhibition of works of art, it is said, in Scotland; and preceding any such attempt of the same kind, either in England or France.[40]

On the south side of the street the Old Assembly Close and Bell’s Wynd are connected with another phase of polite society in bygone Edinburgh. It was in the Old Assembly Close that those rigid and awe-inspiring functions were held, presided over by some lady of rank and mistress of the unwritten laws of etiquette, of which Goldsmith and Captain Topham have both left such graphic accounts, and which form the theme of one of the chapters in Chambers’s _Traditions of Edinburgh_.

Then the Assembly Close received the fair: Order and elegance presided there, Each gay Right Honourable had her place, To walk a minuet with becoming grace. No racing to the dance with rival hurry-- Such was thy sway, O famed Miss Nicky Murray![41]

Miss Nicky Murray was indeed famed. She was a sister of the Earl of Mansfield, and lived in Bailie Fyfe’s Close, and there “finished” young lady cousins from the country, and introduced them into society. She presided over the Assemblies, seated on a raised throne, and a wave of her fan silenced the musicians. “It is said that Miss Murray,” writes Mr. Robert Chambers, “on hearing a young lady’s name pronounced for the first time, would say: ‘Miss ----, of what?’ If no territorial addition could be made, she manifestly cooled.”

After 1758 the Assemblies were held in Bell’s Wynd, until the building of the New Town, and in 1824 the Assembly rooms, where Miss Nicky Murray had ruled, were burnt down.

Niddry Street stands nearly on the site of Niddry’s Wynd, of many memories, two of which throw light on the æsthetic side of the social life of Edinburgh. It was here that Lord Grange, a Lord of Session, lived. He had spirited his wife away to the wilds of the Hebrides, where he kept her in captivity till she lost her reason and died; but none the less was he deeply shocked at the immorality of the joyous Jacobite, Allan Ramsay, when he began the first circulating library in Edinburgh. Here St. Cecilia’s Hall still stands. This once beautiful oval concert room was built by Robert Mylne the Master Mason in 1762,[42] after the model of the Theatre Farnese at Parma, and here the music-loving _élite_ of Edinburgh gathered weekly, to listen and criticise. You were lost in Edinburgh, an English visitor complained, unless you were competent to talk about music all night, not only as an art, but as a science.

In Anchor Close,[2] on the opposite side of the High Street, was “Dawney Douglas’s Tavern,” where Burns drank and jested among the “Crochallan Fencibles.” Old Stamp Office Close,[43] almost next to it, has had a varied career. The first scene in its history is the brightest: “a long procession of sedans, containing Lady Eglintoune and her daughters, devolve from the Close, and proceed to the Assembly rooms ... eight beautiful women, conspicuous for their stature and carriage, all dressed in the splendid though formal fashions of that period, and inspired at once with the dignity of birth and the consciousness of beauty.”[3] The next scene in the Stamp Office Close is when it was the meeting-place of the famous Poker Club, whose members included all the _literati_ of Edinburgh. In its early days this Club--a Jacobite institution--had an entrance fee of half-a-crown, and its members supped at fourpence-halfpenny per head; but in its Stamp Office Close period it became more showy and less select. Stamp Office Close, like other closes in the Old Town, was once the scene of mock-royal state, when the Earl of Leven was Lord High Commissioner, and held his levées at this same tavern--Fortune’s Tavern--where the Poker Club had been wont to meet. And the last scene of all is one of squalid ghastliness; for it was at the head of Old Stamp Office Close that, in April 1812, a band of young hooligans, who had spent a night in riot and murder, were hanged on a gallows on the scene of their crimes.

On the south side of the High Street a fine old “fore-stair” remains, outside Cant’s Close; and between this and World’s End Close, where the High Street ends and the Canongate begins, and where formerly stood the Nether Bow Port, there are several interesting closes. First comes Strichen’s Close, where the Abbots of Melrose had their dwellings, and where, later on, Sir George Mackenzie lived. Next it is Blackfriars Street which once was Blackfriars Wynd, where was the palace of Cardinal Beaton, and where Queen Mary passed afoot with “licht torches” the night of Darnley’s murder. Next Blackfriars Street is South Gray’s Close, where the Scottish Mint, or “Cunyie House” was, after its removal from Holyrood in Queen Mary’s time until the Union; and here, therefore, were the Scottish coins struck, of native Scottish gold. Next to South Gray’s Close is Hyndford’s Close, where Lady Maxwell of Monreith lived, and her daughters (one of whom was afterwards Duchess of Gordon) used gaily to ride up and down the High Street mounted on the pigs which had their humble dwellings under the fore-stairs. In Hyndford’s Close also lived the Countess of Balcarres, whose eldest daughter was Lady Anne Barnard (_née_ Lindsay), the author of “Young Jamie lo’ed me weel,” and whose letters to Lord Melville from South Africa were lately published. Tweeddale Close, a door or two farther on, once the stately town residence of the Marquises of Tweeddale, is now indissolubly connected with the story of a mysterious crime,--the Begbie murder; for it was just within this close that a bank porter was stabbed to death on a dark November afternoon in 1806. The murderer, in spite of all the hue and cry and horror that followed on his crime, died undiscovered.

On the north side of the High Street, on either side of John Knox’s manse, are two edifices whose outside decorations usually excite the wonder of the stranger. One of these, Bailie Fyfe’s Close (where Miss Nicky Murray “finished” her country cousins in all the airs and graces of the eighteenth century), is the “Heave awa’ Tavern,” and bears the head of a young lad carved in stone, and the words “Heave awa’ chaps, I’m no dead yet!” It was here that, on Sunday morning, 24th November 1861, a fine old dwelling, dating from 1612, sank suddenly, and buried thirty-five people in its ruins. This is the event of which Stevenson speaks in his _Picturesque Notes_,--enveloping it in a haze of gloom and rhetoric, and somehow conveying the impression that the fall was a judgment from Heaven on the city for some sin unknown, but grimly hinted--possibly its climate. But Stevenson omits the touch of heroism that crowns the tragedy: the boy whose brave young voice was heard under the beams and masonry that the rescuers were digging at--“Heave awa’ chaps, I’m no deid yet!” A building on the Canongate side of John Knox’s manse, a little way farther on, bears the enormous figure of what might be thought to be an Ethiopian, did not the name “Morocco Close” prove it intended for a Moor. There are several legends to account for this effigy; but all agree in giving an Edinburgh maiden (some make her the daughter of the Provost) to reign over the harem of the Sultan of Morocco. Some versions say that it was her brother who, having gained wealth by merchant dealings with his Morocco connexions, proudly decorated his house with an imaginary portrait of his brother-in-law, whom he has dressed in a necklace and a turban.

A little farther on is a close commonly called “Bible Close,” from the fact that it has a large open book carved over its entrance, on the pages of which is engraved a verse from the metrical version of the 133rd Psalm:--

Behold, how good a thing it is, And how becoming well, Together such as brethren are In unity to dwell.

This is Shoemakers’ Land; and the sentiment was evidently a favourite one, for the Cordiners’ land in West Port, and a court-house in Potterrow, also bore it.

It is in the Canongate that the most stately buildings remain, a fact not wonderful when one learns that in the eighteenth century, before the Scottish nobles “left their hame,” the Canongate included among its residents no less than two Dukes, sixteen Earls, two Countesses, seven Barons of the Realm, thirteen Baronets, four Commanders-in-Chief, seven Lords of Session, and five “eminent men”; not to mention a bank, a ladies’ school, and two inns. What material for romance! Some of the background remains, though the actors are gone.

On the south side of the Canongate are the three great houses: Moray House; a House “wi’oot a name” or a history, but with three carved Latin mottoes, and the date 1570 right across its frontage; and Queensberry House. Between these are several wonderfully interesting old buildings with rounded turrets containing turnpike stairs, lit by strongly barred windows.

On the north side of the Canongate, besides innumerable closes, all with interesting stories, are the Canongate Tolbooth, Whitehorse Inn, and the Canongate Parish Church.

Moray House was built in the reign of Charles I. by Lady Home (sister of the Countess of Moray), and is beautiful architecturally as well as interesting historically. Here Cromwell stayed during his first visit to Edinburgh in the summer of 1648; and the Cavalier party “talked very loud that he did communicate,” in Moray House, to the Marquis of Argyle and other disloyal peers and clergy, “his design in reference to the King.” But Moray House is chiefly notorious for its Balcony Scene. On Saturday, 15th May 1650, the Marquis of Argyle was attending the marriage festivities of his son, Lord Lorn, and the Earl of Moray’s daughter; and on that day the great Montrose was dragged on a hurdle through the streets of Edinburgh to the Tolbooth, amid all the insults that the cruelty of the Covenanting rabble could devise.

He either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small, Who dares not put it to the touch To gain or lose it all.[44]

As the procession passed Moray House, the entire wedding party stepped out on to the balcony to exult over the fallen hero. It was an incident worthy of the French Revolution--the narrow street packed with a yelling and execrating populace, and in the midst of them that pale, proud, beautiful face of the vanquished royalist, and in the balcony above the gaily dressed group of wedding guests. The enemies looked at each other, and before the steady dignity of Montrose’s gaze Argyle turned away.

It was in a summer-house in the garden of Moray House that some of the signatures were affixed to the Treaty of Union in 1707, though others were signed in the greater secrecy of a cellar in the High Street.

In Queensberry House a horrible tragedy took place

the day the Treaty of the Union was passed. All Edinburgh had gathered at the Parliament House, many in order to mob the promoters of the hated measure, and the Canongate was left silent and deserted. The Marquis of Queensberry was prominent among those who had brought about the Union; and, when he returned home in triumph with his family and household, it was to find that in their absence the gigantic idiot son, Lord Drumlanrig, had escaped from his darkened prison-room, had wandered through the empty house till he came to the kitchen, and had there found the little turnspit turning the joint roasting for dinner. He had taken the joint from the fire, killed and spitted the child, and was devouring the half-roasted body. “This horrid act of his child was, according to the common sort of people, the judgment of God upon him for his wicked concern in the Union.”[45]

A pleasanter memory of Queensberry House is of

... Kitty, beautiful and young, And wild as colt untamed,

who was the patroness of the poet Gay.

The Canongate Tolbooth, with its barred windows, square tower, and turrets, forms to-day a picturesque and noticeable feature just where the Canongate ends.

Close to it is the gem of all the Edinburgh closes,--Whitehorse Close,--with its famous old inn with overhanging timber porches and its flight of steps branching to left and right.[46] This very fine old close is still intact,--has indeed been lately renovated. There is a story told that it was here that the fourteen Covenanting lords gathered to ride to Berwick in obedience to King Charles’s summons, and the Edinburgh citizens filled the court and prevented them, lest evil communications should corrupt good manners, and Montrose was the only one who got through the press and rode to his King. But, as a matter of fact, Loudon and Lothian also went to Berwick; and it is probable that Argyle and the other ten were inspired by other motives than fear of a street crowd for their refusal to go. The palace of John Paterson, the fifth of the Established Episcopalian Bishops of Edinburgh, a stately old mansion with a stone turnpike stair, is within Whitehorse Close. It is still called “the Bishop’s palace,” though many who call it so are unaware what manner of Bishop had his home in it.

Almost the last building, before the street widens out in front of the palace, is the old Canongate Parish Church, where in Catholic days all the ancient Guilds had each its pew, and in whose “God’s acre” so many of Edinburgh’s most famous and worthy citizens lie at rest, at the foot of the town where they spent their days.