AULD REEKIE LONG AGO.

Western Star, Issue 859, 12 July 1884, Page 1 (Supplement)

AULD REEKIE LONG AGO.

Hard by the castle was the Duke of Gordon’s house in Blair’s Close; in this he was shut up prisoner under strict guard. The steps up which he walked that day, for the first time in his life without a sword, are still there; his coronet, with a deer-hound on either side, in dingy stone carving, above the low door. It is one of the doorways worth haunting in Edinburgh. Generations of Dukes of Gordon have troddon its threshold, from the swordless hero of 1089 down to the young lover who, iu George the Third’s day went courting his duchess over in Hyndford’s close, at the foot of High street. She was a famous beauty, daughter of Lady Maxwell; and thauks to one yossip and another, we know a good deal about her bringing up. There was still living in Edinburgh, sixty years ago, an aged aud courtly gentleman, who .recollected well having seen her riding a sow in High street j her sister running behind aud thumping the beast with a stick. Duchesses are not made of such stuff in these days. It almost passes belief what one reads in old leeords of the ways and manners of Scottish nobility in the first half of the eighteenth century. These Maxwells’ fine laces were always drying iu the narrow passage from the front stair to their drawing-room; aud their undergear hanging out on a pole from an upper window, in full sight of passers-by, as is still the custom with the povertystricken people who live in Hyndtord’s close.

There is an endless fascination iu going from house to house, in their old wynds and closes, now. A price has to be paid for it—bad smells, filth underfoot, and, very likely, volleys of ribald abuse from gin-loosened tongues right and left and high up overhead ; but all this only emphasises the picture, and makes one’s mental processions of earls, and countesses all the livelier and more vivid.

la the Stamp Office close, now the refuge of soot-vendors, old-clothes dealers, and hucksters of lowest degree, tramps, beggars, and skulkers of all sorts, still is locked tight every night a big carved door, at foot of the stair down which used to come stately Lady Eglintoune, the third, with her seven daughters, in fine array, It was one of the sights of the town to see the procession of their eight sedan chairs on the way to a dance. The countess herself was six feet tall, and her daughters not much below her ; all strikingly handsome, and of such fine bearing that it went into the traditions of the century as the Eglintoune air.

For half a century, Lady Eglintoune was a prominent figure in Scottish social life. Her comings and goings and doings were all chronicled and handed down. It is even told that when Johnston and Boswell visited her at her country place she was so delighted with Johnston’s conversation that she kissed him on parting—from which we can argue her ladyship’s liking for long words. She lived to be ninety-one, and amused herself in her last days by taming rats, of which she had a dozen or more, in such subjection that at a tap on the oak waiuscottiug of her dining-room they came forth, joined her at her meal, and at a word of command retired again into the wainscot.

Groping and rummaging in Hyndford’s close, one day, for recognizable traces of Lady Maxwell’s house, we had the good fortune to encounter a thrifty housewife, of the better class, living there, She was coming home, with her market basket on her arm. Seeing our eager scenting of the old carvings on lintols and sills, and over-

hearing our mention of the name of the Duchess of G-ordoh, she made bold to address us.

“ It waur a strange place for the nobeelity to be livin’ in, to be sure,” she said. “ I’m livin’ mysel’ in ane o’ the best o’ them, an’ it’s na mair space to’t than ’ud turn a cat. Ye’re welcome to walk up, if ye like to see what their dwellin’s war like in the auld time. It’s a self contained stair, ye see,” she added with pride, as she marshalled us up the twisted stairway, so narrow that even one person, going alone, must go cautiously to avoid grazing elbows and shins on the stone walls at every turn. “ I couldna abide the place but for the self-contained stair; there’s not many has them,” she continued. “ Miud yer heads ! mind yer heads! There’s a stoop!” she cried ; but it was too late. We had reached, unwarned, a point in the winding stair where it was necessary to go bent half double ; only a little child could have stood upright. With heads dizzy from the blow and eyes half blinded by the sudden darkness, we stumbled on, and brought out in a passage-way, perhaps three feet wide and ten long, from which opened four rooms : one the kitchen, a totally dark closet, not over six feet square ; a tiny grate, a chair, table, and a bunk in the wall, where the servant slept, were all its furniture. The woman lighted a candle to show us How convenient was this bunk for the maid “to lie.” Standing in the middle of the narrow passage, one could reach his head into kitchen, parlour, and both bedrooms without changing his position. The four rooms together would hardly have made one goodsized chamber. Nothing but its exquisite neatness and order saved the place from being insupportable. Even those would not save it when herring suppers should be broiling in the closet suruamed kitchen. Tip a still smaller, narrower crevice in the wall led a second “ self-contained ” stair, dark as midnight, and so low-roofed there was no standing upright in it even at the beginning. This led to what the landlady called the “ lodgers’ flairt.” We had not courage to venture up, though she was exceedingly anxious to show us her seven good bedrooms, three double and four single, which were nightly filled with lodgers at a shilling a night. Only the “ verra rayspectable,” she said, came to lodge with her. Her husband was “ verra particular.” Tradespeople from the country were the chief of her customers, “ an’ the same a-comiu’ for seven year, noo.” No doubt she has as lively a pride, and gets as many satisfactions between these narrow walls, as did the lords and ladies of 1700. Evidently not the least of her satisfactions was the fact that those lords and ladies had lived there before her. Nowhere are Auld Reekie’s antitheses of new and old more emphasised than in the Cowgate. In 1530 it was an elegant suburb. The city walls even then extended to enclose it, and it was eloquently described in an old divine’s writings as.the place “ where nothing is humble or rustic but everything magnificent.” In one of its grassy lanes the Earl of Q-alloway built a mansion. His countess often went to pay a visit to her neighbours, in great state, driving six; horses; and it not infrequently happened that when her ladyship stepped into her coach, the leaders were standing opposite the door at which she intended to alight. Here dwelt, in 1617, the famous “ Tam o’ the Cowgate,” Earl of Haddington, boon companion of King James, who came often to dine with him, and gave him the familiar nickname of Tam. Tam was so rich he was vulgarly believed to have the philosopher’s stone j but he himself once gave a more probable explanation of his wealth, sayiug that his only secret lay in two rules: never to put off 1 till to-morrow what can be done to-day,” and “ never to trust to another what his own hand could execute.”

To-day there is not in all the world outside the Spanish Ghetto of Rome, so loathly wretched a street as this same Cowgate. Even at high noon it is not always safe to walk through it; and there are many of its Wynda into which no man would go without protection of the police. Simply to drive through it is harrowing. The place is indescribable. It seems a perpetual and insatiable carnival of vice and misery. The misery alone would be terrible enough to see, but the leering, juggling, insolent vice added makes it indeed hellish. Every curbstone, doorsill, alley mouth, window, swarms with faces out of which has gone every trace of self-respect or decency; babies’ faces as bad as the worst, and the most aged faces worst of all. To pause on tbe sidewalk is to be surrounded, in a moment, by a dangerous crowd of half half-naked boys and girls, whining, begging, elbowing, cursing, and fighting. Giving oi an alms is like pouring oil on a fire. The whole gang is ablaze with envy and attack; the fierce and unscrupulous pillage of the seventeenth century is re-enacted in miniature in the Cowgate every day, when an injudidicious stranger, passing _ through, throws a handful of pennies to the beggars. The general look of hopeless degradation in the spot is heightened by the great number of oldclothes shops along the whole line of the street. In the days when the CoW* gate was an elegant suburb, the citizens were permitted by law ta extend

their upper stories seven feet into the street, provided they would build them of wood cut in the Borough Forest, a forest that harboured robbers dangerous to the town. These projecting upper stories are invaluable now to the old-clothes vendors, who hang from them their hideous wares, in double and treble lines, fluttering over the heads and in the faces of passers-by ; the wood of the Borough Forest thus, by a strange irony of fate, still contining to harbour dangers to public welfare. If these close-packed tiers of dangling rags in the Cowgate were run out in a straight line, they would be miles long; a sad beggars’ arras to behold, The preponderance of tattered finery in it adds to its melancholy ; shreds of damask ; dirty lace ; theatrical costumes ; artificial flowers, so crumpled, broken, and soiled that they would seem to have been trodden in gutters ; there was an indefinable horror in the thought that there could be even in the Cowgate a woman creature who could think herself adorned by such mockeries of blossoms. But I saw more than one poor, soul look at them with longing eyes, finger them, haggle at the price, and walk away disappointed that she could not buy. The quaint mottoes here and there in the grimy walls, built in when the Cowgate people were not only comfortable, but pious, must serve often now to point bitter jests among the ungodly. On one wretched, reeking tenement, is : “Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together. 1613.” On another, “All my trist is in ye Lord.”