Edinburgh Tolbooth

“ THE CANONGATE TOLBOOTH, LOOKING WEST On the right of the picture rises the Canongate Tolbooth with its conical roof and projecting clock, reminding one strongly of French architecture. The spire showing in the distance belongs to the Tolbooth Church, at the top of Lawnmarket.
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 ”

“ In two very extraordinary instances an escape from justice has, strange as it may appear, been effected by means of the Old Tolbooth. At the discovery of the Rye-House Plot, in the reign of Charles II., the notorious Robert Fergusson, usually styled ‘The Plotter,’ was searched for in Edinburgh, with a view to his being subjected, if possible, to the extreme vengeance of the law. ”

“ The fiscal had no alternative; and so Mary Mochrie was taken to the Tolbooth, with the ordinary result, in the first place, of the news going up and down the long street which then formed the city, that Mrs Warrender’s servant was imprisoned for the strange crime of abstracting from Miss Warrender’s finger, while bathing, the love-token given to her by her intended. ”

“ Minds like Wilson's, even when exercised in evil practices, sometimes retain the power of thinking and resolving with enthusiastic generosity. His whole thoughts were now bent on the possibility of saving Robertson's life, without the least respect to his own. The resolution which he adopted, and the manner in which he carried it into effect, were striking and unusual.
Adjacent to the tolbooth or city jail of Edinburgh, is one of three churches into which the cathedral of St. Giles is now divided, called, from its vicinity, the Tolbooth Church. ”

“ Mr. Bullock will show you the plan, which I think is very ingenious. He has promised to give it his consideration with respect to the interior; and Mr. Blore has drawn me a very handsome elevation, both to the road and to the river. I expect to get some decorations from the old Tolbooth of Edinburgh, particularly the cope-stones of the doorway, or lintels, as we call them, and a niche or two—one very handsome indeed! ”

“ Back of Canongate Tolbooth—Tolbooth Wynd.
All reference to rank in connection with this house appears trivial in comparison with the fact that it was the residence of Adam Smith from 1778, when he came to live in Edinburgh as{319} a commissioner of the customs, till his death in 1790, when he was interred in a somewhat obscure situation at the back of the Canongate Tolbooth. In his time the house must have seen the most intellectual company to be had in Scotland; but it had not the honour of being the birthplace of any of Smith’s great works. ”

“ Of the once great and wealthy Abbey of Holyrood only a ruined fragment remains, open to the sky; and of the palace only part of the large sixteenth-century royal residence remains, included in a smaller seventeenth-century building.{23}
EDINBURGH FROM THE CASTLE In the foreground of the picture are the embrasured battlements of the Argyle Battery, at the end of which, over the steps, rises the spire of Tolbooth Church. ”

“ This chapel was pulled down during John Knox’s ministry to form the “Outer Tolbooth” for the Lords of Session.
[25] Burgh Records of Edinburgh (1403-1528) , p. 144.
[26] At the end of his life, Knox preached within another division, designated “The Tolbooth Kirk.”
[27] Laud’s Service-Book.
[28] Gordon, Hist. of Scots Affairs (Spalding Club) , i. 7.
[29] History of Scotland, Professor Hume Brown, ii. 301.
[30] The stream of people pouring out of a church-door is called “the church skaling” in Scotland.
[31] History of St. Giles’s, Edinburgh, by the Very Rev. Dr. Cameron Lees. ”

“ Let us linger a few moments before we part, and, turning round, let us climb the steep path that leads over the shoulder of the hill to the village of Corstorphine. As breathless and exhausted we reach the top, we sink gratefully on the seat, which long has been known as "Rest and be thankful," and let our eyes and thoughts stray over the beautiful scene. Before us lies Edinburgh, with its castle and its spires,—beyond is the sea and distant Lammermuirs. Over all the golden light of evening is shining, and the fir-trees throw long shadows at our feet. ”

“ The scenery was very fine, for the country was then more thickly wooded almost than now, and afar off shone the rugged outline of Edinburgh, rearing up on its ridgy hills, with the great square spire of its cathedral, and the lofty towers and bastel-houses of its castle, clustering on lofty and perpendicular rocks. Close by the road, arose the double peaks of Craiglockhart; one covered with pastures of emerald green, the other bluff with whin-tufted basalt, and crowned with gloomy firs; while, following its winding and devious course, the Leith brawled and gurgled over its pebbled bed. ”

“ I was guiltless, but I had indeed drawn down a horrible curse upon my head, as mortal as that of crime.
I visited Edinburgh with languid eyes and mind; and yet that city might have interested the most unfortunate being. Clerval did not like it so well as Oxford; for the antiquity of the latter city was more pleasing to him. But the beauty and regularity of the new town of Edinburgh, its romantic castle, and its environs, the most delightful in the world, Arthur’s Seat, St. Bernard’s Well, and the Pentland Hills, compensated him for the change, and filled him with cheerfulness and admiration. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She played the fiddle, fought the stable boys, swore like a trooper, dressed in a jockey coat, walked like a man, sang in a voice that seemed a man’s, and was believed by half Edinburgh to be a man in disguise. She had strong affections and strong hates, she had great talent for mimicry, which made her many enemies, was inclined to be sceptical though not without misgivings and fears. She came to pay a visit to Balcarres, and stayed there for thirteen years. She had a choice collection of old Scots songs. One lingered in Sir Walter Scott’s memory ”

“ Still, a little trimmed and tamed, an oasis of wooded bank shuts in the rushing stream, now purified and stocked with trout, where we were content to catch loaches and sticklebacks.
What a loss to this city was the classically-minded Gothicism or carelessness through which came to be rooted up so many noble trees that once dotted the parks of Drumsheugh and Bellevue! But Edinburgh has been well endowed afresh with open spaces and shrubberies, those that separate the blocks of the New Town mainly private joint-stock paradises, yet serving for public amenity. ”

“ We become, in a special degree, sensible of this truth when we see the house of a royal personage sunk amidst the impurities of a narrow close in the Old Town of Edinburgh. Such was literally the case of an aged pile of buildings on the north side of the Castle-hill, behind the front line of the street, and accessible by Blyth’s, Nairn’s, and Tod’s Closes, which was declared by tradition to have been the residence of Mary de Guise, the widow of James V., and from 1554 to 1560 regent of this realm. ”

“ The foundation was at length laid of that revolution which has ended in making Edinburgh a kind of double city—first, an ancient and picturesque hill-built one, occupied chiefly by the humbler classes; and second, an elegant modern one, of much regularity of aspect, and possessed almost as exclusively by the more refined portion of society. The New Town, keeping pace with the growing prosperity of the country, had, in 1790, been extended to Castle Street ”

“ Even on a moderately gusty night the noise of the wind amidst the tall lands and narrow closes of the Old Town, as heard from Princes Street, is a sound never to be forgotten; it has a tragic mournful dignity in its infinite wail, the voice of old Edinburgh touched with pity and terror! Some one has said what a charming place Edinburgh would be if you could only put up a screen against the east wind. As that is impossible it may be held to excuse everything from flight to dissipation! ”

“ Long before I knew what geography was I had a fairly intimate knowledge of Edinburgh. Calton Hill, Arthur's Seat, Samson's Ribs, Holyrood Palace, High Street and Princes Street, I had the right location and a true picture of them all. When boy-like I would be building forts with blocks or in the sand, they would always be called Edinburgh Castle.
I knew all his stories except one, and that one was his own life. I heard that too, at last, and it came about in this wise. An important registered letter used to come to father quarterly, containing his soldier's pension. ”

“ The old town, with its irregular houses, stage above stage, seen as we saw it, in the obscurity of a rainy day, hardly resembles the work of men, it is more like a piling up of rocks, and I cannot attempt to describe what we saw so imperfectly, but must say that, high as my expectations had been raised, the city of Edinburgh far surpassed all expectation. ”

“ Who knew better that grimy, witty, sordidly attractive, vanished Edinburgh underworld of tavern and oyster-cellar—and worse? The Gentle Shepherd is all very well, and the Tea-Table Miscellany, with its sentimental faking up of old Scots songs, is often very ill, though you cannot deny its service to Scots literature ”

“ To-day the prospect is a little spoilt by encroaching houses and too many people, but Scotland has few choicer views than that placid water, the old church at the edge, the quaint village, and the mighty Lion Hill that broods over all. Thomson is said to have diligently attended to his clerical duties, but he was hard put to it sometimes, for you believe he was more artist than theologian. He built himself a studio in the manse garden down by the loch. This he called Edinburgh, so that too importunate callers might be warded off with the remark that he was at Edinburgh. ”

“ Even at the first moment of their retreat they seem to have shaken off with the blossoms, which, in the human plant no less than in the vegetable one, alone contain the beauties and sweets of life—the stem being, alas, only at best the custodier of an acid—much of their interest in the busy, gossipping, scandalising, hating, and loving Edinburgh ”

“ On the left of the picture is a glimpse of the Firth of Forth, while to the right, behind the columns, rises Arthur’s Seat.
point and pier and headland is studded with coloured sea-lights; and far out in the measureless mid-Firth flashes the great Eye of the revolving light of Inchkeith.
Brave the “sharp sops of sleet and snipand snaw,” and come to Edinburgh in winter, and you will find all the residents at home and busy: the Law Courts sitting; the University at work ”

“ He was a great classical scholar, and said that no man could write English who did not know Greek, a very palpable hit at Lord Kames, who knew everything but Greek. The suppers he gave at St. John Street, off the Canongate, are still fragrant in the memory, “light and choice, of Attic taste,” no doubt; but the basis you believe was Scots, solid and substantial. And they had native dishes worth eating in quaint eighteenth-century Edinburgh! The grotesque old man had a beautiful daughter, Elizabeth Burnet, whose memory lives for ever in the pathetic lines of Burns. ”

“ No man in Edinburgh can for a moment forget that he is in Scotland.” It is almost startling to look up from the grime of the Canongate to the solitary nooks of Arthur’s Seat, though the sea of houses spreads miles around. Whatever scenic effects remain, the historical effects of the landscape are vanished. With what various emotions the crowd from every point of vantage must have watched Dundee’s progress along the Lang Gate to his interview with the Duke of Gordon on the Castle rock! ”

“ Great welcome I had showed me all my stay at Edinburgh, by many worthy gentlemen, namely, old Master George Todrigg, Master Henry Livingston, Master James Henderson, Master John Maxwell, and a number of others, who suffered me to want no wine or good cheer, as may be imagined. ”

“ Every dark close held the possibility of an exciting adventure. Once she was caught by the heels, and passed the night in the guard-house which, as Scott tells us, “like a huge snail stretched along the High Street near the Tron Kirk for many a long day.” She wrote society verses, light or otherwise. She fancied herself or pretended to be in love with Sir Peter Murray—at least he was a favourite subject for her muse. Your Edinburgh fine lady could be high and mighty when she chose, witness Susanna Countess of Eglinton, wife of Alexander the ninth Earl, and a Kennedy of the house of Colzean. ”

“ The city shall be joined to Leith on the north, and a procession of wise masons shall there lay the foundations of a spacious harbour. Pequin or Nanquin shall not be able to compare with Edinburgh for magnificence. Our city shall be the greatest wonder of the world, and the fame of its glory shall reach the distant ends of the earth. [257] But lament, O thou descendant of the royal Dane, and chief of the tribe of Wilson; for thy shop, contiguous to the porch, shall be dashed to pieces, and its place will know thee no more! ”