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QUEEN MARY'S EDINBURGH

On a clear day the inhabitants of Edinburgh, by merely ascending the Calton Hill or any other of the familiar heights in or around their city, can have a view of nearly the whole length of their noble estuary, the Firth of Forth. To the right or east, its entrance from the open sea, between the two shires of Fife and Haddington, is marked most conspicuously on the Haddingtonshire side by a distant conical mound, called Berwick Law, rising with peculiar distinctness from the northward curve of land which there bounds the horizon. It is thither that the eye is directed if it would watch the first appearance of steamers and ships from any part of the world that may be bound up the Firth for Edinburgh by its port of Leith. Moving thence westward, the eye can command easily the twenty miles more of the Firth which these ships and steamers have to traverse. The outlines of both shores, though the breadth between them averages twelve miles, may be traced with wonderful sharpness, pleasingly defined as they are by their little bays and promontories, and by the succession of towns and fishing villages with which they are studded. Of these, Musselburgh on the near side marks the transition from the shire of Haddington to that of Edinburgh; after which point the Firth begins to narrow. Just below Edinburgh itself, where its port of Leith confronts the Fifeshire towns of Kinghorn and Burntisland, with the island of Inchkeith a little to the right between, the breadth is about six miles. There the main maritime interest of the Firth ceases, few ships going farther up; but, for any eye that can appreciate scenic beauty, there remains the delight of observing the continued course of the Firth westward to Queensferry and beyond, a riband of flashing water between the two coasts which are known prosaically as those of Linlithgowshire and West Fifeshire, but which, in their quiet and mystic remoteness, look like a tract of some Arthurian dreamland.

She had left Calais for the homeward voyage on Thursday the 14th August, with a retinue of about 120 persons, French and Scottish, embarked in two French state galleys, attended by several transports. They were a goodly company, with rich and splendid baggage. The Queen's two most important uncles, indeed,--the great Francis de Lorraine, Duke of Guise, and his brother, Charles de Lorraine, the Cardinal,--were not on board. They, with the Duchess of Guise and other senior lords and ladies of the French Court, had bidden Mary farewell at Calais, after having accompanied her thither from Paris, and after the Cardinal had in vain tried to persuade her not to take her costly collection of pearls and other jewels with her, but to leave them in his keeping till it should be seen how she might fare among her Scottish subjects. But on board the Queen's own galley were three others of her Guise or Lorraine uncles,--the Duke d'Aumale, the Grand Prior, and the Marquis d'Elbeuf,--with M. Damville, son of the Constable of France, and a number of French gentlemen of lower rank, among whom one notes especially young Pierre de Bourdeilles, better known afterwards in literary history as Sieur de Brant?me, and a sprightly and poetic youth from Dauphin?, named Chastelard, one of the attendants of M. Damville. With these were mixed the Scottish contingent of the Queen's train, her four famous "Marys" included,--Mary Fleming, Mary Livingstone, Mary Seton, and Mary Beaton. They had been her playfellows and little maids of honour long ago in her Scottish childhood; they had accompanied her when she went abroad, and had lived with her ever since in France; and they were now returning with her, Scoto-Frenchwomen like herself, and all of about her own age, to share her new fortunes.

The Leith people and the Edinburgh people were quite unprepared, the last intimation from France having pointed to the end of the month as the probable time of the Queen's arrival, if she were to be expected at all. But the cannon-shots from the galleys, as they contrived to near Leith harbour, were, doubtless, a sufficient advertisement. Soon, so far as the fog would permit, all Leith was in proper bustle, and all the political and civic dignitaries that chanced to be in Edinburgh were streaming to Leith. Not till the evening, according to one account, not till next morning, according to another, did the Queen leave her galley and set foot on shore. Then, to allow a few hours more for getting her Palace of Holyrood, and her escort thither, into tolerable readiness, she took some rest in the house in Leith deemed most suitable for her reception, the owner being Andrew Lamb, a wealthy Leith merchant. It was in the afternoon of Wednesday, the 20th of August, that there was the procession on horseback of the Queen, her French retinue, and the gathered Scottish lords and councillors, through the two miles of road which led from Leith to Holyrood. On the way the Queen was met by a deputation of the Edinburgh craftsmen and their apprentices, craving her royal pardon for the ringleaders in a recent riot, in which the Tolbooth had been broken open and the Magistrates insulted and defied. This act of grace accorded as a matter of course, the Queen was that evening in her hall of Holyrood, the most popular of sovereigns for the moment, her uncles and other chiefs of her escort with her, and the rest dispersed throughout the apartments, while outside, in spite of the fog, there were bonfires of joy in the streets and up the slopes of Arthur Seat, and a crowd of cheering loiterers moved about in the space between the palace-gate and the foot of the Canongate. Imparting some regulation to the proceedings of this crowd, for a while at least, was a special company of the most "honest" of the townsmen, "with instruments of musick and with musicians," admitted within the gate, and tendering the Queen their salutations, instrumental and vocal, under her chamber-window. "The melody, as she alledged, lyked her weill, and she willed the same to be continewed some nightis after." This is Knox's account; but Brant?me tells a different story. After noting the wretchedness of the hackneys provided for the procession from Leith to Holyrood, and the poorness of their harnessings and trappings, the sight of which, he says, made the Queen weep, he goes on to mention the evening serenade under the windows of Holyrood as the very completion of the day's disagreeables. The Abbey itself, he admits, was a fine enough building; but, just as the Queen had supped and wanted to go to sleep, "there came under her window five or six hundred rascals of the town to serenade her with vile fiddles and rebecks, such as they do not lack in that country, setting themselves to sing psalms, and singing so ill and in such bad accord that there could be nothing worse. Ah! what music, and what a lullaby for the night!" Whether Knox's account of the Queen's impressions of the serenade or Brant?me's is to be accepted, there can be no doubt that the matter and intention of the performance were religious. Our authentic picture, therefore, of Queen Mary's first night in Holyrood after her return from France is that of the Palace lit up within, the dreary fog still persistent outside, the bonfires on Arthur Seat and other vantage-grounds flickering through the fog, and the portion of the wet crowd nearest the Palace singing Protestant psalms for the Queen's delectation to an accompaniment of violins.

The town itself, of which Holyrood was but the eastward terminus, corresponded singularly well. Edinburgh even now is, more than almost any other city in Europe, a city of heights and hollows, and owes its characteristic and indestructible beauty to that fact. But the peculiarity of Old Edinburgh was that it consisted mainly of that one continuous ridge of street which rises, by gradual ascent for a whole mile, from the deeply-ensconced Holyrood at one end to the high Castle Rock at the other, sending off on both sides a multiplicity of narrow foot-passages, called closes, with a few wider and more street-like cuttings, called wynds, all of which slope downward from the main ridge in some degree, while many descend from it with the steepness of mountain gullies into the parallel ravines. Whoever walks now from Holyrood to the Castle, up the Canongate, the High Street, and the Lawnmarket, walks through that portion of the present "Old Town" which figures to us the main Edinburgh of Queen Mary's time, and is in fact its residue. But imagination and some study of old maps and records are necessary to divest this residue of its acquired irrelevancies, and so to reconvert it into the actual Edinburgh of three hundred years ago. The divisions of the great ridge of street from Holyrood to the Castle were the same as now, with the same names; but objects once conspicuous in each have disappeared, and the features of each have been otherwise altered.

The ending of the Canongate and beginning of the High Street of Edinburgh proper was at a cross street, the left arm of which, descending from the ridge into the ravine on that side, was called St. Mary's Wynd, while the arm to the right was called Leith Wynd. Here, to mark more emphatically the transition from the smaller burgh into the greater, one encountered the separating barrier of the Nether Bow Port. It has left no trace of itself now, but was a battlemented stone structure, spanning the entire breadth of the thoroughfare, with an arched gateway in the middle and gates for admission or exclusion. That passed, one was in the lower portion of the High Street, called specifically the Nether Bow. Here, it was not merely the increasing breadth of the thoroughfare and the increasing height of the houses that showed one had come within the boundaries of the real civic and commercial Edinburgh. No such sparseness of building now as in the Canongate; no mere double fringe of houses to a short depth, with entries and closes ending in gardens and vacant ground; but a sense of being between two masses of densely-peopled habitations, clothing the declivities from the ridge to their lowest depths on both sides, and penetrable only by those courts and wynds of which one saw the mouths, but the labyrinthine intricacy of which in the course of their descent baffled conception.

However slight the defences of the Canongate and Holyrood, Edinburgh proper, it could now be seen, was carefully enclosed and bastioned. On the north side, the North Loch, washing the base of the Castle Rock and filling the valley through which the railway now runs, was sufficient protection; but all the rest of the town was bounded in by a wall, called the Flodden Wall. It had been constructed mainly in the panic after the battle of Flodden in 1513 to supersede an older and less perfect circumvallation, but had been much repaired and modified since. It started from the east end of the North Loch and ran thence along Leith Wynd and St. Mary's Wynd, crossing the High Street at the Nether Bow Port, and so shutting out the Canongate; it then went so far south as to include the whole of the Cowgate and some space of the heights beyond the ravine of the Cowgate; and the west bend of its irregular rectangle, after recrossing this ravine a little beyond the Grassmarket, riveted itself to the Castle Rock, on its most precipitous side, at the head of the High Street. There were several gates in the circuit of the wall besides the Nether Bow Port, the chief being the Cowgate Port, which was also to the east, the Kirk of Field Port and Greyfriars Port , both to the south, and the West Port, just beyond the Grassmarket and the sole inlet from the west. When these gates were closed, Edinburgh could rest within herself, tolerably secure from external attack, and conscious of a reserve of strength in the cannon and garrison of the dominating Castle. Even if the town itself should yield to a siege, the Castle could hold out as a separate affair, impregnable, or almost impregnable, within her own fortifications. Successful assaults on Edinburgh Castle were among the rarest and most memorable accidents of Scottish history.

Such having been the fabric or shell of Edinburgh in 1561, what was the contained life?

The overcrowding had its natural consequences. The sanitary condition of most European towns in the sixteenth century, the best English towns included, was incredibly bad; Scottish towns generally were behind most English towns in this respect; but Old Edinburgh had a character all her own for perfume and sluttishness. It could hardly be helped. Impressively picturesque though the town was by site and architecture, its populousness and its structural arrangement were hardly compatible with each other on terms of cleanliness. Individual families, within their own domiciles in the various "lands," might be as tidy as their cramped accommodations would permit; but the state of the common stair in each "land,"--and in the taller lands it was a dark stone "turnpike" ascending in corkscrew fashion from flat to flat,--depended on the united tastes and habits of all the families using it, and therefore on the habits and tastes of the least fastidious. It was worse in the wynds and closes. Not only did all the refuse from the habitations on both sides find its way into these, generally by the easy method of being flung down from the windows overnight; but the occupations of some of the ground-floor tenants, butchers, candle-makers, etc.,--added contributions heterogeneously offensive. Hardly a close that had not its "midding" or "middings" at its foot or in its angles. For generations the civic authorities had been contending with this state of things and uttering periodical rebukes and edicts for cleansing. There were two kinds of occasions on which these cleansing-edicts were apt to be most stringent and peremptory. One was the expected arrival of some illustrious stranger, or company of strangers, from England or from abroad. Then the inhabitants were reminded of the chief causes of offence among them, and put on the alert for their removal, so as not to shame the town. More strenuous still were the exertions made on any of those periodical outbreaks of the Plague, or alarms of its approach, of which we hear so frequently in the annals of Edinburgh, as of other towns, from the fourteenth century to the seventeenth. Then the authorities did bestir themselves, and the inhabitants too. But, after such occasions of spasmodic sanitary effort, there always came the relapse; and, though there was a standing order obliging each householder to see to the tidiness of his own little bit of precinct, the general apathy and obtuseness prevailed. It was providential when the heavens themselves interfered, and some extraordinary deluge of rain sent torrents down the closes.

The Scottish poet Dunbar has left us two pieces picturing very distinctly the Edinburgh of 1500-1513, which he knew so well. He calls it "our nobill toun," as if patriotically proud of it all in all; but it chances that in both the poems he is more sarcastic than complimentary. One is an express address of objurgation to the merchants of Edinburgh for their disgraceful neglect of the "nobill toun" and its capabilities. Why, he asks, do they let its streets be overrun by beggars, so that "nane may mak progress" through them; why do they let the fairest parts be given up to "tailyouris, soutteris, and craftis vyle"; why do they let the vendors "of haddocks and of scaittis," and minstrels with but two wearisome tunes, which they repeat eternally, go everywhere bawling up and down? He complains more particularly of the High Street. He speaks of the projecting fore-stairs there as making "the houssis mirk"; he declares that at the Cross, where one should see "gold and silk," one sees nothing but "crudis and milk," and that nothing is sold in all the rest of that lower piazza but poor shellfish or common tripe and pudding; and he is positively savage on the state of the blocked isthmus between the two piazzas beside St. Giles's Church and the Tolbooth. There, where the merchants themselves most resort, and where the light is held from their Parish Kirk by the stupid obstructions which they permit, they are hampered in a malodorous honeycomb of lanes, which may suit their tastes for exchange purposes, but is hardly to their credit! To these particulars about the High Street from one of the poems we may add, from the other, linen hung out to dry on poles from the windows, cadgers of coals with wheeled carts, cadgers of other articles with creels only slung over their horses, and dogs and boys in any number running in and out among the carts and horses. All in all, Dunbar's descriptions of Edinburgh are satirical in mood, and sum themselves up in this general rebuke to the Edinburgh merchants in the first of the two poems--

Why will ye, merchants of renown, Lat Edinburgh, your noble town, For laik of reformatioun, The common profit tine and fame? Think ye nocht shame That ony other regioun Sall with dishonour hurt your name?

Adieu, Edinburgh! thou heich triumphant town, Within whose bounds richt blithefull have I been, Of true merch?nds the root of this regioun, Most ready to receive Court, King, and Queen! Thy policy and justice may be seen: Were d?votioun, wisdom, and honesty And credence tint, they micht be found in thee.

Thief! Saw thou nocht the great preparatives Of Edinburgh, the noble famous town? Thou saw the people labouring for their lives To mak triumph with trump and clarioun: Sic pleasour never was in this regioun As suld have been the day of her entrace, With great propinis given to her Grace.

Thou saw makand richt costly scaffolding, Depaintit weell with gold and silver fine, Ready preparit for the upsetting; With fountains flowing water clear and wine; Disguisit folks, like creatures divine, On ilk scaffold, to play ane sindry story: But all in greeting turnit thou that glory.

Thou saw there mony ane lusty fresh galland, Weell orderit for ressaving of their Queen; Ilk craftisman, with bent bow in his hand, Full galyartly in short clothing of green; The honest burgess cled thou suld have seen, Some in scarlot, and some in claith of grain, For till have met their Lady Soverane;

Provost, Bailies, and Lordis of the town, The Senatours, in order consequent, Cled into silk of purpur, black, and brown; Syne the great Lordis of the Parliament, With mony knichtly Baron and Banrent, In silk and gold, in colours comfortable: But thou, alas! all turnit into sable.

Syne all the Lordis of Religioun, And Princes of the Priestis venerable, Full pleasandly in their processioun, With all the cunning Clerkis honourable: But, theftuously, thou tyrane treasonable, All their great solace and solemnities Thou turnit intill duleful dirigies.

Syne, next in order, passing through the town, Thou suld have heard the din of instruments, Of tabron, trumpet, shalm, and clarioun, With reird redoundand through the elements; The Heralds, with their aweful vestiments; With Macers, upon either of their hands, To rule the press with burnist silver wands.

This outgoes Scott himself for the possible pomp of Old Edinburgh, and is poetically authentic. Later records, however, enable us to tone down Lindsay's description of the High Street on a great gala day by the sight of it on any ordinary market day.

Whether in one of the piazzas or in both, one has but to imagine the litter that would be left on market days, and to add that to the litter disgorged into the street upwards from the closes, or flung down into the street from the fore-stairs, to see that a good deal of Dunbar's earlier description must be allowed to descend through Lindsay's intermediate and more gorgeous one, as still true of the ordinary Edinburgh of the date of Queen Mary's return.

No one really knows a city who does not know it by night as well as by day. Night obscures much that day forces into notice, and invests what remains with new visual fascinations, but still so that the individuality of any city or town is preserved through its darkened hours. Every town or city has its own nocturnal character. Modern Edinburgh asserts herself, equally by night as by day, as the city of heights and hollows. From any elevated point in her centre or on her skirts, if you choose to place yourself there latish at night, you may look down upon rows of lamps stretched out in glittering undulation over the more level street spaces; or you may look down, in other directions, upon a succession of tiers and banks of thickly edificed darkness, punctured miscellaneously by twinkling window-lights, and descending deeply into inscrutable chasms. More familiar, and indeed so inevitable that every tourist carries it away with him as one of his most permanent recollections of Edinburgh, is the nightly spectacle from Princes Street of the northern face of the Old Town, starred irregularly with window-lights from its base to the serrated sky-line. Perhaps this is the present nocturnal aspect of Edinburgh which may most surely suggest Old Edinburgh at night three hundred years ago. For, though we must be careful, in imagining Old Edinburgh, to confine ourselves strictly and exactly to as much of the present Edinburgh as stands on the ancient site, and therefore to vote away Princes Street, the whole of the rest of the New Town, and all the other accretions, this aspect of the Old Town at night from the north cannot have changed very greatly. A belated traveller passing through the hamlets that once straggled on the grounds of the present New Town, and arriving at the edge of the North Loch, in what is now the valley of Princes Street Gardens, must have looked up across the Loch to much the same twinkling embankment of the High Street and its closes, and to much the same serrated sky-line, lowering itself eastward from the shadowy mass of the Castle Rock. If the traveller desired admission into the town, he could not have it on this side at all, but would have to go round to some of the ports in the town-wall from its commencement at the east end of the North Loch. He might try them all in succession,--Leith Wynd Port, the Nether Bow Port, the Cowgate Port, the Kirk of Field Port, Greyfriars Port, and the West Port,--with the chance of finding that he was too late for entrance at any, and so of being brought back to his first station, and obliged to seek lodging till morning in some hamlet there, or else in the Canongate. He could perform the whole circuit of the walls, however, in less than an hour, and might have the solace, at some points of his walk, of night views down into the luminous hollows of the town, very different from his first view upward from the North Loch.

The Provost of Edinburgh in 1561 was Archibald Douglas of Kilspindie, a well-known laird of the great kin of the Angus Douglases. He had held the office continuously by annual election since 1553, with only two years of break. The four Bailies under him, answering to the Aldermen of an English town, were David Forster, Robert Ker, Alexander Home, and Allan Dickson, all merchant-burgesses. It would be possible, I believe, even at this distance of time, to give the names of as many as 1000 or 1500 other persons of the population, with particulars about not a few of them. In a town of such a size all the principal inhabitants must have been perfectly well acquainted with each other, and must have been known, by figure and physiognomy at least, to the rest of the community. We will name at present but one other inhabitant of the Edinburgh of 1561, who must have been about the best known of all. This was John Knox, the chief minister of the town, and the stated preacher, always on Sundays and often on week-days, in the great Church of St. Giles. His house, or the house of which he occupied a portion, if not then that very conspicuous projecting house of three storeys in the Nether Bow which visitors to Edinburgh now go to see as having been his, was certainly somewhere in that neighbourhood. From this point of what we have called the lower piazza of the High Street there is a direct view upwards to St. Giles's Church, about 300 yards distant; and the walk in the other direction, down the Canongate, to Holyrood Abbey and Palace, is perhaps about twice as much. Divide a half-mile of sloping street into three equal parts, and Knox's residence in Edinburgh, the house in which he sat on the day of young Queen Mary's return among her Scottish subjects in August 1561, is to be imagined as just one-third down such a slope from the great Church of St. Giles, with the other two-thirds descending thence continuously, houses on both sides, to the Palace in which Mary had taken up her abode. Mary and Knox were to meet ere long.

ROBERT ROLLOCK AND THE BEGINNINGS OF EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY

It will be obvious now that, though the newly-founded University of Edinburgh required at least four Philosophy professors or regents before even its Arts Faculty could be considered fully equipped, yet one regent was enough to start with. All that was necessary was that one fit professor should be ready to receive the first set of students that should present themselves. For the first year this single professor could do the whole of the University work; and only when he had carried his students through the first year of their course, and had to pass on to the second year with them, would it be necessary to appoint a second regent, to follow him with the new set of students who would then come to the University doors. The third regent might be appointed the year after that, and the fourth not till a year later.

All this the Magistrates and Town Council of Edinburgh, anxious for the success of the new institution, but bound to be careful of expenses, had calculated beforehand. It was, of course, a most serious question with them who should be the first regent. No one could tell how much depended on that. A bad appointment might wreck the University at the outset.

Fortunately, through the recommendation of that same Mr. James Lawson, Knox's successor in the ministry of Edinburgh, who had already had so much to do with the founding of the University, the Magistrates and Town Council selected a man whose appointment neither the City nor the University had any cause afterwards to regret. This was Mr. Robert Rollock,--the Rev. Robert Rollock would be now the designation,--then one of the Philosophy professors in the University of St. Andrews. He was a Stirlingshire man by birth, had been educated at St. Andrews, was twenty-eight years of age, and had already won good opinions among those who knew him. A deputation having been sent to St. Andrews to invite him to the new post, he came to Edinburgh in September 1583 to offer himself for inspection; and on the 14th of that month an agreement was signed between him and the Lord Provost, Magistrates, and Town Council. Rollock, on his part, agreed to "enter to the Colledge newly foundit within the burgh," and to "exerce the office of the Regent of the said Colledge, in instructioun, governament, and correctioun of the youth and persones whilk sall be committed to his chairge," faithfully attending always to the rules and injunctions to be given him by the Provost, Bailies, and Council; "for the whilkis causis" they, on their part, "binds and oblesis thame and their successoris thankfullie to content and pay to the said Mr. Robert the soume of fortie pundis usual money of this realme, at twa termis in the yeir, Candlemes and Lammes, be twa equall portionis, and sall susteine him and are servand in their ordinar expensis.... Attour the said Mr. Robert sall repare and have, for his labouris to be takin in instructing everie bairne repairing to the said Colledge, yearly, as followis: to wit, fra the bairnes inhabitants of the said burgh, fortie schillings, and fra the bairnes of uthers, nocht inhabitants therein, three pundis, or mair as the bairnes parentis please to bestow of their liberalitie." Further prospects of remuneration and promotion were held forth to Mr. Rollock, and there was every disposition to make him comfortable.

An original portrait of Rollock now hangs in the Senate Hall of Edinburgh University. It is but a poor specimen of the painter's art, and it does not suggest that Mr. Rollock can have been an Apollo. It exhibits, however, a very distinct physiognomy,--a physiognomy so distinct, so unlike anybody's else, that, were Mr. Rollock to reappear any afternoon now in the Canongate or in Princes Street, there would be no difficulty in recognising him. The complexion, as the portrait tells us, and as we learn from a contemporary biographic sketch of him, was ruddy, or ruddy with a mixture of white ; and the hair and beard,--both cut short, so as to give a character of round compactness to the head,--were of reddish hue . The biographic sketch, which is by one who knew him well, adds that he was of middle stature and of rather weakly health, and bears testimony to his piety, conscientiousness, peaceful disposition, and pleasant sociability.

It was on the 1st of October 1583 that this round-headed, reddish-haired man, of Stirlingshire birth, but of St. Andrews training, opened the first session of the University of Edinburgh by an address delivered in the public hall of the new premises in the presence of a crowded audience of citizens and others. Next day, when he received the students who came to enroll themselves in the first class in the new University, their number, what with those supplied by Edinburgh itself, what with those attracted from other parts of the country, was found to be far greater than had been anticipated. Very soon, however, it appeared that this was not altogether a cause for congratulation. The motley body of the entrants had not been manipulated by Rollock for more than a week or two when he had to marshal them into two divisions. A considerable number had broken down in Latin,--were found to be so ill-grounded in that indispensable preliminary that it was hopeless to go on with them as members of the first University class proper, the teaching of which had to be through the medium of Latin. To meet this exigency Rollock proposed to the Town Council that they should at once appoint a second regent, and that this regent should have committed to his charge all who were backward in Latin, to be formed into a preparatory or Humanity class, and drilled as such for a year, while he himself should go on with the others in the first proper Arts or Philosophy class. Were that done, then, next year, when he himself should be carrying on his students into the second class, the other regent might form those that had been kept back, and qualified newcomers with them, into a properly sequent first class; and so the routine would be established. The advice was adopted; and, on Rollock's recommendation, the person chosen to be Humanity teacher in the meantime, and second regent in regular course, was a Mr. Duncan Nairne, a young man from Glasgow University. Thus all was arranged; and the work of the first session of the University of Edinburgh proceeded,--Rollock teaching his "Bajans," and Nairne following with the ragged troop whom he was working up in Latin to fit them for the "Bajan" class of next year.

A still more minute account of what constituted the curriculum of study in the Faculty of Arts during the first age of the University is furnished by an abstract of the "Order of Discipline" in the University, drawn up in the year 1628. One cannot be sure that in every particular this "Order of Discipline" accords with what had been the practice of Rollock; but, as the abstract professes to be mainly a digest of rules and customs that had been already in force, it probably describes substantially the scheme of teaching introduced by Rollock and bequeathed by him to his successors. The scheme may be tabulated thus:--

To return to Rollock personally:--We have spoken of him hitherto as only the first regent or Arts professor of Edinburgh University. In reality, however, since February 1586, when he was in his third session and had Nairne as his single fellow-regent, he had borne, along with his regency, the higher dignity of the PRINCIPALSHIP,--the Town Council having concluded that the time had come for the institution of such an office in the University, and for Rollock's promotion to it. Accordingly, when Rollock had the satisfaction of seeing the forty-seven students who had gone through their full four years' curriculum with him made Masters of Arts, he was not only senior Regent, but also Principal of the University, with a right of superintendence over Colt and Scrimgeour, the other two regents. But no sooner had this first Edinburgh graduation taken place than there was a further change. Rollock, satisfied with having taken one class of students through the full course of four years, resigned his regency or Arts professorship, in order to become Professor of Divinity. As it was desirable that those of the new graduates and others who might be going forward to the Church should have the means of a theological education within Edinburgh, this was a natural arrangement. It amounted to the institution, though on a small scale, of a Theological Faculty in the University, in addition to the general Faculty of Arts or Philosophy. The Theological Faculty was represented solely by Rollock, who was also Principal of the University; while the Arts or Philosophical Faculty was represented for the time in Colt, Scrimgeour, and a third regent, Mr. Philip Hislop, one of Rollock's recent graduates, appointed to the place which Rollock had just left vacant. In 1589, however, Mr. Charles Ferme, also one of Rollock's graduates, was added to the staff of regents, so as to complete the number of four, necessary for the full conduct of the Arts classes.

No need to narrate here the rest of Rollock's life in detail. Enough if we imagine him going on for ten years more in the exercise of the double duties of his Professorship of Theology and his Principalship in the infant University. As Professor of Theology, he may be said to have founded the Divinity School of Edinburgh. He trained up assiduously, not only by his lectures on Dogmatic and Polemical Theology, but also by his personal influence, the first ecclesiastics whom the University of Edinburgh gave to the Kirk of Scotland. Some of these attained subsequent distinction, and, remembering Rollock with reverence, carried his name into the next generation. Nor was his Principalship a sinecure. He visited the Philosophy classes, gave special lectures to them on Theology, and kept them and the regents to their work. Add to this much exertion beyond the bounds of the University. For a time he delivered Sunday evening sermons to crowded congregations in the East Kirk of St. Giles, by way of volunteer assistance to the four city ministers; and, latterly, when these four were increased to eight, and a division of the city-pastorate was made into eight districts or parishes, the full ministerial care of one of these city-charges was entrusted to Rollock. It was an anxious time, too, in the politics of the Kirk. King James had begun those efforts of his for the subversion of the Presbyterian constitution of the Kirk, as it had been established by statute in 1592, in which he was to persevere so unflinchingly through the remainder of his resident reign in Scotland, though it was not till he removed to England, and could act upon his native kingdom from the vantage-ground of his acquired English sovereignty, that the results were fully seen in the abolition of the Presbyterian constitution of the Kirk altogether and the substitution of Episcopacy. Already in Rollock's time all Scotland was in anxious agitation in consequence of this anti-presbyterian policy of the King and the vehement resistance to it offered by the majority of the Scottish clergy and of the Scottish people. Rollock himself, as a public man and leading Edinburgh minister, had to take his part in the controversy. It was a mild part, it would seem, and not entirely satisfactory to the more resolute Presbyterian spirits, but truthful and characteristic. Without following him, however, over this dangerous ground, farther than to say that he was Moderator of the General Assembly held at Dundee in 1597, at which the King was present in person and there were some not unimportant attempts at a compromise, let us pass on to the year 1599, the last year but one of the sixteenth century.

Rollock was then in his forty-fourth year. He could look back on his services in connection with Edinburgh University as the most important work of his life. He had seen fifteen sessions of that University begun and ended, during four of which he had been senior regent or Arts professor, and during the remaining eleven Principal and Professor of Theology. He had seen eleven graduations and a total of 284 Edinburgh Masters of Arts sent forth by these graduations into the world. The University, it is true, remained still but a fragment of what a complete university ought to have been. It contained as yet no Faculty of Law and no Faculty of Medicine. For education in these professions Scottish students had still to resort to foreign universities, as indeed they had to do for more than a century yet to come. But it was something to have established a Theological Faculty and a Faculty of Arts. The Theological Faculty was still represented entire in Rollock's own person; but in the Arts Faculty, on which the University depended most, he had seen thirteen regents after himself appointed. The tenure of office of most of these had been vexatiously short, drawn off as they had been by the more tempting emoluments of parish-charges and the like; but the four who were now in office as regents,--Mr. Henry Charteris, Mr. Charles Ferme, Mr. John Adamson, and Mr. William Craig,--were all graduates of the University itself, and therefore all Rollock's own men. Moreover, the Arts Faculty had just been increased by the institution of a separate Professorship of Humanity, distinct from the four rotating regencies. To this professorship, the first holder of which was a certain excellent Mr. John Ray, fell a part of the work that had formerly been assigned to the regents of the first and second classes: viz. instruction mainly in Latin, but also in elementary Greek and the rudiments of rhetoric. Such was the staff of Edinburgh University as Rollock left it. Though yet but in the prime of manhood, he had been long in ill-health, and was now suffering from a painful and incurable disease. There are affectionate details of his death-bed doings and sayings: how he sent messages to the King, how the ministers and leading citizens of Edinburgh visited him, what advices he gave them, what pious ejaculations he uttered, and how, in especial, he spoke of the University of his love, and recommended it to the care of those who had the power to promote its interests. On the 9th of February 1599, the sixteenth session of the University being then in progress, he breathed his last. There was a great concourse of citizens of all ranks at his funeral, and all over Scotland the rumour ran that the nation was poorer by the loss of the eminent Rollock. Verses in Latin, Greek, and English, by old pupils and others, were showered upon his grave. He left a widow, whom the Magistrates and Town Council of Edinburgh pensioned; and a daughter, posthumously born, was also provided for. In deference to his dying injunctions, the Town Council appointed Mr. Henry Charteris, his favourite pupil, and then one of the regents, to be his successor in the principalship and in the professorship of Divinity.

KING JAMES'S FAREWELL TO HOLYROOD

It is a Saturday evening in Holyrood,--the evening of Saturday, the 26th of March 1603. All is dull and sleepy within the Palace, the King and Queen having retired after supper, and the lights in the apartments now going out one by one. Suddenly, hark! what noise is that without? There is first a battering at the gate, and then the sound of a horse's hoofs in the courtyard, and of a bustling of the palace servants round some late arriver. It is the English Sir Robert Cary, brother of Lord Hunsdon. He had left London between nine and ten o'clock in the forenoon of the 24th; he had ridden as never man rode before, spur and gallop, spur and gallop, all the way, through that day and the next and the next, the two intervening nights hardly excepted; and here he is at Holyrood on the evening of the third day,--an incredible ride! His horse, the last he has been on, is taken from him all a-foam; and he himself, his head bloody with a wound received by a fall and a kick from the horse in the last portion of his journey, makes his way staggeringly, under escort, into the aroused King's presence. Throwing himself on his knees before his half-dressed Majesty, he can but pant out, in his fatigue and excitement, these words in explanation of the cause of his being there so unceremoniously: "Queen Elizabeth is dead, and your Majesty is King of England."

It was the most superb moment of King James's life. He was in the thirty-seventh year of his age, and had been King of Scotland for nearly thirty-six years; but through the last twenty of these,--or, at all events, ever since February 1586-7, when the captivity of his mother came to its tragical close at Fotheringay,--his constant thought had been of the chance he had of being one day King also of England. Latterly the chance had grown into a probability; but it had never become a certainty. Although, according to all ordinary legal construction of the case, his hereditary claim to the English succession was paramount, there were impediments in the way. There were vehement objections to him on the part of large sections of the English community; and that especial and official recognition of his claims which might have gone far to overcome these objections, or to neutralise them, had remained wanting. Queen Elizabeth herself had, or was supposed to have, the right of nominating her successor; but, though her relations to James through the whole of his Scottish reign had been condescendingly kindly,--though she had been in the habit of sending him letters of semi-parental advice, and sometimes of rebuke, in his minority, and had then and since shown her interest in him by allowing him a regular annual pension of English money, of no great amount but very welcome to him as a substantial supplement to his scanty Scottish revenues,--she had always resisted his importunities in what was with him the all-important matter of his succession to her crown. Her declaration on that subject had been tantalisingly postponed; and James had been obliged to content himself with secret negotiations with such of her English statesmen and courtiers as might be able to persuade her to some distinct decision in his favour while there was yet time, or, if that should not be accomplished, might have influence themselves in bringing about the event which she had left undetermined. Such negotiations round the imperious old queen, clinging to life and sovereignty as she did, and regarding as little better than treason all speculation as to what would be after her death, were necessarily perilous; but they had been going on for some time, with the result that a party had been formed in the English Court favourable to the succession of King James, should circumstances make it possible. At the centre of this party was Secretary Sir Robert Cecil, Elizabeth's chief minister since the death of his father, the great Lord Burleigh, in 1598.

Elizabeth died in her palace at Richmond, in the seventieth year of her age, about three o'clock in the morning of Thursday the 24th of March 1602 , after an illness of some days, during the first four of which she lay in great pain on cushions, and partly delirious, refusing to go to bed or to take any food. Her Councillors, Secretary Cecil and Archbishop Whitgift among them, had been in attendance from the first; and they had contrived, on the day before her death, while she was lying speechless in the bed into which they had at last forced her, to extract a sign from her which intimated her consent that James should be her successor, or which they found it convenient to construe to that effect. No sooner was she dead than there was a meeting of the Council in an apartment near that in which the corpse lay, to draft a proclamation of James as the new sovereign, and to take other measures necessary in the crisis. Secrecy was essential for a few hours; and, as the palace was full of people, including the weeping court-ladies and others not of the Council, there were orders that the gates should be shut, and that no one should be permitted either to leave the palace or to enter it without special warrant.

One person managed to evade the order and get in. This was the Sir Robert Cary of whom we have just heard. He was then a man of about forty-three years of age, and well known at Court, both from his high family connections and on his own account. His father, the late Lord Hunsdon, had been distinguished among Elizabeth's councillors by being related to her by cousinship; his brother, the present Lord Hunsdon, was now of the Council; and a sister of his, Lady Scroope, was one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting. His own services in the Queen's employment had been very various and had extended over many years. Among diplomatic missions on which she had sent him in his youth had been several to King James in Scotland; and latterly he had been in charge of one of the English wardenships on the Scottish Borders, and conspicuous for his vigour in the garrisoned defence of those northern parts of England against the cattle-lifting raids of their rough Scottish neighbours. While in this post, he had incurred the Queen's disfavour by marrying,--a fault which she always resented in any of her courtiers; and for a while she had refused to see him or speak with him. He had contrived, however, to pacify her in a skilfully obtained interview; and that cloud had blown over. Hence, having come south on furlough from his wardenship just about the time when the Queen was seized with her fatal illness, and having taken lodgings in Richmond to await the issue, he had been admitted easily enough into the dying Queen's presence. "When I came to Court," he tells us, "I found the Queen ill-disposed, and she kept her inner lodging; yet she, hearing of my arrival, sent for me. I found her in one of her withdrawing chambers, sitting low upon her cushions. She called me to her. I kissed her hand, and told her it was my chiefest happiness to see her in safety, and in health, which I wished might long continue. She took me by the hand, and wrung it hard, and said 'No, Robin, I am not well,' and then discoursed with me of her indisposition, and that her heart had been sad and heavy for ten or twelve days; and in her discourse she fetched not so few as forty or fifty great sighs. I was grieved at the first to see her in this plight; for in all my lifetime before I never knew her fetch a sigh, but when the Queen of Scots was beheaded." This interview was on the night of Saturday, the 19th of March; and it was within the next day or two that, learning from his sister that the Queen had become worse and worse, and that there was no hope of her recovery, and remembering his friendly intercourse with the Scottish King on former occasions, he despatched a letter to James announcing the condition of affairs at Richmond, and resolved moreover that, when the Queen was actually dead, he would be himself the first man to carry the great news to Edinburgh. Once again he was in the death-chamber. It was on the day before the Queen's death,--that Wednesday, the 23d of March, on which, lying speechless in bed, she gave the sign which Cecil and the other councillors construed as they desired. Among those who stood by her bedside on the evening of that day, while Archbishop Whitgift prayed with her several times in succession, was Sir Robert Cary. It was late, he tells us, when the group broke up, and the Queen was left to die, with only her waiting-women around her. Sir Robert had then gone to his lodgings in the town, and had given instructions that he should be called at the proper moment. Accordingly, about three o'clock on the following morning, when he knew for certain that the Queen was dead, he was at the palace gate. The porter had just received his orders not to admit any one that was not privileged; and even the bribe with which Sir Robert had already primed that official would not have been enough, had not one of the councillors, who chanced to be at the gate at the time, taken the responsibility of passing him in. He made his way through the chamber in which the weeping ladies were to that in which the councillors were assembled and were drafting their documents. His brother, Lord Hunsdon, and his sister, Lady Scroope, being already in his confidence, and his purpose having been guessed by Cecil and the rest, he found that they were very angry with him, and were making arrangements of their own for the necessary despatches to Edinburgh. In fact, they laid hold of him, told him he must remain where he was till their pleasure should be known, and, to show that they were in earnest, sent peremptory fresh orders to the porter that no one was to be allowed to pass the gates except the servants that were to be sent presently to get ready the coaches and horses for the conveyance of the councillors themselves to Westminster. For an hour or so, Sir Robert walked about in the palace chagrined and disconcerted. He had got in with difficulty; but his exit seemed impossible. Bethinking himself at last, he went to the private chamber of his brother, Lord Hunsdon. His lordship, overpowered with the fatigues of the preceding days, was asleep, but was soon roused, and willing to assist. The two went together to the porter's gate, where the Council's servants were just making their egress to bring the horses and coaches. The porter could not prevent a great officer like Lord Hunsdon from going out with them; but he stopped Sir Robert. It needed some exertion and some angry words from Lord Hunsdon to cow the man; but this was accomplished, and Sir Robert, to his great relief, found himself outside the gate in the raw air of the dim March morning.

Not even yet were his difficulties over. Speeding from Richmond as fast as he could, he was in Westminster by himself, and in a friend's house there, some time before the Lords of Council arrived in their coaches. Learning, however, after they had arrived, that they were holding a meeting in Whitehall Gardens to make final arrangements for the proclamations of the new sovereign both in Westminster and in the City, he thought it might be as well to try again whether they would employ him for the service on which he had set his heart. He sent them word, therefore, that he was in town, and was waiting their pleasure. It was now past nine o'clock, and the proclamations were to be at ten. The answer of the Council was a request to Sir Robert to come to them immediately; and, as it was conveyed with a kind of intimation that he would find them perfectly agreeable now to his proposal, he hastened to attend them. He was actually between the outer and the inner gate of Whitehall for this purpose, when a word sent out to him by a friendly councillor made him aware that the Council were deceiving him, and that, if he appeared among them, he would be laid fast. Then he hesitated no longer. Giving the Council the slip, and not staying for the proclamations or for anything else, he took horse at once, somewhere near Charing Cross, and was off for his tremendous ride northwards. He himself tells us the successive stages of his ride. He was at Doncaster that night, a distance of 155 miles from London; next night he reached a house of his own at Witherington in Northumberland, about 130 miles from Doncaster; leaving Witherington on Saturday morning, he accomplished some 50 miles more before noon that day, bringing him to Norham, close to the Tweed; after which there were still about 65 miles of that Scottish portion of his ride which lay between Norham and Edinburgh. He had hoped to be at Holyrood House before supper-time; but his dizziness and loss of blood from the fall from his horse in this last portion of his journey delayed him, as we have seen, for an hour or two.

Next day was Sunday; and, whatever whispers of the great event there may have been round King James himself in Holyrood, it does not appear that there was any hint of it that day among the congregations of the lieges in the Edinburgh churches. It is hardly possible that on the following day, when the proclamations of the new sovereign were palpitating northwards through England, with huzzas from town to town, in the very track of Sir Robert's ride , the community of Edinburgh could still have remained ignorant of what had happened. There could be no public recognition of it, however, till the arrival of the authorised envoys from the English Privy Council; and they did not arrive,--the laggards!--till the morning of Tuesday, the 29th of March. They were Sir Charles Percy, brother of the Earl of Northumberland, and Thomas Somerset, Esq., one of the sons of the Earl of Worcester; and they brought with them two documents. One was a copy of the Proclamation of King James that had been made in London and Westminster on the 24th. It was certified by the signatures of the Lord Mayor of London, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Chancellor Egerton, and twenty-seven more of the noblemen, prelates, and knights of the English Council; and it opened thus--"Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God to call to his mercy out of this transitory life our Sovereign Lady, the high and mighty princess, Elizabeth, late Queen of England, France, and Ireland, by whose death and dissolution the Imperial crowns of these realms foresaid are now absolutely, wholly, and solely, come to the high and mighty prince, James the Sixth, King of Scotland, who is lineally and lawfully descended from the body of Margaret, daughter of the high and renowned prince, Henry the Seventh, King of England, France, and Ireland, his great-great-grandfather,--the said Lady Margaret being lawfully begotten of the body of Elizabeth, daughter to King Edward the Fourth, by which happy conjunction both the Houses of York and Lancaster were united, to the joy unspeakable of this kingdom, formerly rent and torn by long dissension of bloody and civil wars,--the same Lady Margaret being also the eldest sister of Henry the Eighth, of famous memory, King of England as aforesaid: We therefore, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of this realm, being here assembled, united and assisted with those of her late Majesty's Privy Council, and with great numbers of other principal gentlemen of quality in the kingdom, with the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Citizens of London, and a multitude of other good subjects and commons of this realm, thirsting now after nothing so much as to make it known to all persons who it is that, by law, by lineal succession, and undoubted right, is now become the only Sovereign Lord and King of these imperial crowns, to the intent that, by virtue of his power, wisdom, and godly courage, all things may be provided for which may prevent or resist either foreign attempts or popular disorder, tending to the breach of the present peace or to the prejudice of his Majesty's future quiet, do now hereby, with one full voice, and consent of tongue and heart, publicly proclaim that the high and mighty prince, James the Sixth, King of Scotland, is now, by the death of our late Sovereign, Queen of England, of famous memory, become also our only lawful and rightful liege lord, James the First, King of England, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith." The other document was a missive letter to King James, signed by nearly the same persons, and expressing their profound allegiance to him individually, and their desire to see him in England as speedily as possible. It contained, however, this paragraph:--"Further, we have thought meet and necessary to advertise your Highness that Sir Robert Cary is this morning departed from hence towards your Majesty, not only without the consent of any of us who were present at Richmond at the time of our late Sovereign's decease, but also contrary to such commandment as we had power to lay upon him, and to all decency, good manners, and respects which he owed to so many persons of our degree; whereby it may be that your Highness, hearing by a bare report of the death of our late Queen, and not of our care and diligence in establishing of your Majesty's right here in such manner as is above specified, may either receive report or conceive doubts of other matter than there is cause you should: which we would have clearly prevented if he had borne so much respect to us as to have stayed for our common relation of our proceedings and not thought it better to anticipate the same; for we would have been loth that any person of quality should have gone from hence who should not, with report of her death, have been able to relate the just effects of our assured loyalties." Both documents were read that day in the Scottish Privy Council in Edinburgh; and their purport was published for the general information.

PROPOSED MEMORIAL TO DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN.

One indubitable exception, the exception in chief, was Drummond of Hawthornden. Born amid a people almost wholly absorbed in their Kirk controversy, it had somehow happened that here was one Scot whose ideal of life differed from the common. Of a meditative and philosophical temperament from his boyhood, a lover of books, art, and music, and with his tastes in such matters educated by foreign travel and by a familiarity with the recent English Elizabethan literature which must have been then excessively rare in North Britain, he had no sooner become Laird of Hawthornden by his father's death in 1610 than, abjuring all other occupations, he schemed out for himself that life of studious leisure which suited him best, and for which there could not, in all Scotland, have been a more beautiful home than the leafy dell of his lairdship and habitation:--

"Dear wood, and you, sweet solitary place, Where from the vulgar I estranged live."

Here, accordingly, it was that, between 1610, when he was in his twenty-fifth year, and 1625, when he was in his fortieth, he wrote at intervals, and uniformly in that southern English which he foresaw was thenceforward to be the general literary tongue of the British Islands, most of the poems by which he is now remembered. The quantity altogether was not large, and the pieces were all short individually; but the quality was genuine. No such poetry of artist-like delight in beauty of scenery, the soft and luscious in colour, form, language, and sound, pervaded at the same time by such a fine and high vein of pensive reflectiveness, had appeared in Scotland for many a day. This was at once recognised among his own countrymen; but the poems, or the rumour of them, went beyond Scotland. Before the close of the reign of the Scottish King James in England, Drummond was certainly the one man living in Scotland who was thought of by the London men of letters round the Court of that King as belonging, by right of real merit, to the poetic brotherhood of the reign. A London Scot or two, it is true, having the advantages of proximity and of Court connection, did divide with Drummond the applauses of the London circle of critics for Scottish merit in English verse-making; but, if the vote had been seriously taken, it was to Drummond that the competent judges would have sent the laurel. Hence, indeed, some of the most memorable incidents in Drummond's biography. Hence it was that the Elizabethan veteran Michael Drayton entered into such loving correspondence with him, addressing him "my dear, noble Drummond"; hence it was that, when any eminent Londoner chanced to make a tour in Scotland, he was sure to seek an introduction to Drummond; and hence that immortal visit of the great Ben Jonson himself, when he was Drummond's guest in Hawthornden for a whole week in the winter of 1618-9, entertained Drummond with all the gossip of London for thirty years back, stunned him with loud talk about everything, and drank an immensity of his wine. Phillips's encomium of 1656, when Drummond had been seven years dead, only expressed, one can see, an opinion already formed while Drummond was still alive, and in the prime of his manhood.

The tradition of Drummond has come down pretty vividly from his own time to the present. This, however, is perhaps less due to continued acquaintance with his writings than to certain aiding circumstances. Few names of literary celebrity, as Charles Lamb used to remark, are so delightful to pronounce as "Drummond of Hawthornden"; and in England, so far as Drummond has been kept in mind at all, it seems to have been chiefly by this conserving efficacy of his gracefully-sounding name. In Scotland, and especially in the vicinity of Edinburgh, the aids in recollecting him have been of a stronger kind:--

"Who knows not Melville's beechy grove, And Roslin's rocky glen, Dalkeith, which all the virtues love, And classic Hawthornden?"

When Scott wrote these lines, ninety-one years ago, the reputation of the valley of the Esk for scenic beauty and picturesqueness, and the fashion of holiday peregrinations to it, on that account and on account of the attractions of its historical associations, by the citizens of Edinburgh or by tourists visiting Edinburgh, had already been fully formed. The reputation and the fashion have been kept up ever since, and Drummond's memory has had the benefit. Whatever the other attractions of the valley of the Esk and its neighbourhood, the twin pre-eminence among them has belonged to Roslin and Hawthornden; and hence it has happened that hundreds and thousands who had never read a line of Drummond's, and knew but vaguely in what century he lived, have looked admiringly at the cliff-socketed and quaintly gabled and turreted edifice, partly built by himself and partly of more ruinous antiquity, where he had his dwelling, have walked round it in the grounds where he once walked, have descended as he used to descend into the leafy dell of the river beneath, and so have taken into their minds some image of the man by the memory of whom the place has been consecrated.

Hawthornden is in the parish of Lasswade; and it is in the churchyard of Lasswade, two miles from the Hawthornden mansion, that one sees the bit of old masonry, called the Drummond Aisle, and once a portion of the church itself, within which is Drummond's grave. Did he foresee that this would be his resting-place, or was he only writing metaphorically, when he penned the lines, now perhaps the most frequently quoted piece of his verse, giving instructions for his epitaph? His most intimate friend and correspondent through his life was Sir William Alexander of Menstrie, eventually Earl of Stirling and Secretary of State for Scotland,--one of those London Scots above mentioned who divided for a while with Drummond in London literary circles the palm of the primacy in Scoto-British poetry. There was no jealousy between them on that account; on the contrary, Alexander, as a man of high Court influence, regarded himself as standing in a relation of patronage to Drummond, while Drummond, acknowledging this relation, and proud of it, looked up to Alexander and admired him hugely. Their friendship, nevertheless, was as close and affectionate as ever bound two men together, and in their letters to each other they always, to signify this, called themselves, in the fashion of the pastoralists, Alexis and Damon. Well, it was in the year 1621, or thereabouts, that Drummond, then only about thirty-five years of age, but hardly recovered from a severe illness which had brought him to the doors of death and left him in a mood of melancholy depression, sent a sonnet to Alexander, containing these lines:--

In the memorial to Drummond now proposed by the influential committee of which Lord Melville is chairman it is intended that this instruction shall be obeyed as faithfully as possible. The bushing of roses round the grave was but a wish, and a bushing of roses round the Drummond Aisle in Lasswade Churchyard is unfortunately not practicable in that situation. But there may be some decoration of the little aisle containing the grave; and on the wall, whether in the interior or outside, there may be a medallion of Drummond or other commemorative sculpture, with room for his own words of epitaph. That, most properly, is to be the first object, the primary object, of the committee that has been formed for the promotion of the memorial. Should the amount of the subscriptions, however, permit something more, the precise form of the addition may be matter for consideration. Should there be a bust or other piece of monumental sculpture besides that which is to decorate the sepulchre at Lasswade, surely Edinburgh is the place for that supplement, and, within Edinburgh, perhaps St. Giles's Cathedral. For was not Drummond one of the earliest alumni of Edinburgh University; was not his donation of books to the University, which is still kept apart in the University Library under the name of The Drummond Collection, a special testimony of his regard and affection for the University in its infancy, and for the whole city; all through the years of his residence at Hawthornden must not the seven miles of road between Hawthornden and Edinburgh have been his most familiar ride or walk; every other week must he not have been actually in Edinburgh for hours and days together, visiting his Edinburgh relatives and friends, seen in colloquy with some of them on the causey of the old High Street near St. Giles's Church, and known to have his favourite lounge in that street in the shop of Andro Hart, bookseller and publisher, just opposite the Cross?

Although the increase among us of late of the practice of such commemorative tributes to eminent personages of the past has provoked cynical criticism in some quarters, it is really one of the creditable signs of our time. The more numerous the objects of interest to any nation in its own history, or in history generally, in times preceding the bustle of the present, the richer the mind of that nation, and the higher its capabilities. Even the range of time to which it will go back for worthy objects of interest must count for something in the reckoning. The recent is only the departing present, and has so left its residues in the present, whether of admirations or of animosities, that participation in testimonies of regard for public men remembered as having recently moved amidst us signifies little more with many than sensitiveness to the common duties of present social life, or sometimes even of present political partisanship. To be susceptible of the commemorative instinct with respect to objects and persons removed from ourselves by a generation or two, or a century or two, is a rarer thing, and implies a larger and finer endowment of historical knowledge and feeling.

ALLAN RAMSAY

In the reign of Queen Anne there were the stirrings of a literary revival in Scotland. No name connects itself more distinctly with this interesting phenomenon than that of Allan Ramsay.

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