She heard Colonel Reid (afterwards General Reid and the founder of the chair of Music in the University, where the annual Reid concerts perpetuate his name) play on the flute. “It thrills to your very heart, it speaks all languages, it comes from the heart to the heart. I never could have conceived, it had a dying fall. I can think of nothing but that flute.” Mrs. Cockburn saw Sir Walter Scott when he was six, and was astonished at his precocity. He described her as “a virtuoso like myself,” and defined a virtuoso as “one who wishes and will know everything.”

The other and superior set of The Flowers of the Forest was written by Miss Jean Elliot, who lived from 1727 till 1805. The story is that she was the last Edinburgh lady who kept a private sedan chair in her “lobby.” In this she was borne through the town by the last of the caddies. The honour of the last sedan chair is likewise claimed for Lady Don who lived in George Square; probably there were two “lasts.” Those Edinburgh aristocratic lady writers had many points in common; they mainly got fame by one song, they made a dead secret of authorship, half because they were shy, half because they were proud. Caroline Baroness Nairne was more prolific than the others, for The Land of the Leal, Caller Herrin’ (the refrain to which was caught from the chimes of St. Giles’), The Auld Hoose, and John Tod almost reach the high level of masterpieces, but she was as determined as the others to keep it dark. Her very husband did not know she was an authoress; she wrote as Mrs. Bogan of Bogan. In another direction she was rather too daring. She was one of a committee of ladies who proposed to inflict a bowdlerised Burns on the Scots nation. An emasculated Jolly Beggars had made strange reading, but the project fell through.

Lady Anne Barnard, one of the Lindsays of Balcarres, was another Edinburgh poetess. She is known by her one song, indeed only by a fragment of it, for the continuation or second part of Auld Robin Gray is anti-climax, fortunately so bad, that it has well-nigh dropped from memory. The song had its origin at Balcarres. There was an old Scots ditty beginning, “The bridegroom grat when the sun gaed doon.” It was lewd and witty, but the air inspired the words to the gifted authoress. She heard the song from Sophy Johnstone—commonly called “Suff” or “the Suff,” in the words of Mrs. Cockburn—surely the oddest figure among the ladies of old Edinburgh. Part nature, part training, or rather the want of it, exaggerated in her the bluntness and roughness of those old dames. She was daughter of the coarse, drunken Laird of Hilton. One day after dinner he maintained, in his cups, that education was rubbish, and that his daughter should be brought up without any. He stuck to this: she was called in jest the “natural” child of Hilton, and came to pass as such in the less proper sense of the word. She learned to read and write from the butler, and she taught herself to shoe a horse and do an artisan’s work. 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:

She gave her opinion freely. When ill-pleased her dark wrinkled face looked darker, and the hard lines about her mouth grew harder, as she planted her two big feet well out, and murmured in a deep bass voice, “Surely that’s great nonsense.” One evening at Mrs. Cockburn’s in Crichton Street, the feet of Ann Scott, Sir Walter’s sister, touched by accident the toes of the irascible Suff, who retorted with a good kick. “What is the lassie wabster, wabster, wabstering that gait for?” she growled. When she was an old woman, Dr. Gregory said she must abstain from animal food unless she wished to die. “Dee, Doctor! odd, I’m thinking they’ve forgotten an auld wife like me up yonder.” But all her gaiety vanished near the end. From poverty or avarice she half starved herself. The younger generation of the Balcarres children brought tit-bits to her garret every Sunday. “What hae ye brocht? What hae ye brocht?” she would snap out greedily.

And so the curtain falls on this strange figure of old Edinburgh.

I cannot leave those sweet singers without a passing word on the old ballad, surely of local origin:

Is this a woman’s voice? You cannot tell. It is supposed to commemorate the misfortunes of Lady Barbara Erskine, daughter of the Earl of Mar and wife of the second Marquis of Douglas. A rejected and malignant suitor is rumoured to have poisoned her husband’s mind against her, till he drove her from his company.

Edinburgh has many records of high aristocratic, but very unconventional or otherwise remarkable, dames. Lady Rosslyn sat in the company of her friends one day when a woman whose character had been blown upon was announced. Many of her guests rose in a hurry to be gone. “Sit still, sit still,” said the old lady, “it’s na catchin’.” Dr. Johnson, on his visit to Scotland, met Margaret, Duchess of Douglas, at James’s Court. He describes her as “talking broad Scots with a paralytic voice scarcely understood by her own countrymen.” It was enviously noted that he devoted his attention to her exclusively for the whole evening. The innuendo was that Duchesses in England had not paid much attention to Samuel, and that he was inclined to make as much of a Scots specimen as he could. An accusation of snobbery was a good stick wherewith to beat the sage. The lady was a daughter of Douglas of Maines, and the widow of Archibald, Duke of Douglas, who died in 1761. A more interesting figure was the Duchess of Queensberry, daughter of the Earl of Clarendon. The Act of the eleventh Parliament of James II., providing that “no Scotsman should marry an Englishwoman without the King’s license under the Great Seal, under pain of death and escheat of moveables,” was long out of date. She detested Scots manners, and did everything to render them absurd. She dressed herself as a peasant girl, to ridicule the stiff costumes of the day. The Scots made an excessive and almost exclusive use of the knife at table, whereat she screamed out as if about to faint. It is to her credit, however, that she was a friend and patron of Gay the poet, entertained him in Queensberry House, Canongate. Perhaps his praises of her beauty ought thus to suffer some discount; but Prior was as warm; and Pope’s couplet is classic:

A little coarse, perhaps, but it was “the tune o’ the time.” “Wild as colt untamed,” no doubt; and she got herself into some more or less laughable scrapes; but what would not be pardoned to a beautiful Duchess? Her pranks were nothing to those of Lady Maxwell of Monreith’s daughters. They lived in Hyndford’s Close, just above the Netherbow. One of them, a future Duchess of Gordon, too, chased, captured, and bestrode a lusty sow, which roamed the streets at will, whilst her sister, afterwards Lady Wallace, thumped it behind with a stick. In the mid-eighteenth century, you perceive, swine were free of the High Street of Edinburgh. In after years Lady Wallace had, like other Edinburgh ladies, a sharp tongue. The son of Kincaid, the King’s printer, was a well-dressed dandy—“a great macaroni,” as the current phrase went. From his father’s lucrative patent, he was nicknamed “young Bibles.” “Who is that extraordinary-looking young man?” asked some one at a ball. “Only young Bibles,” quoth Lady Wallace, “bound in calf and gilt, but not lettered.” Not that she had always the best of the argument. Once she complained to David Hume that when people asked her age she did not know what to say. “Tell them you have not yet come to the years of discretion,” said the amiable philosopher. It was quite in his manner. He talked to Lady Anne Lindsay (afterwards Barnard) as if they were contemporaries. She looked surprised. “Have not you and I grown up together; you have grown tall, and I have grown broad.”

Lady Anne Dick of Corstorphine, granddaughter of “Bluidy” Mackenzie, was another wild romp. She loved to roam about the town at night in man’s dress. 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. When she was a girl, a stray hawk alighted on her shoulder as she walked in the garden at Colzean; the Eglinton crest or name was on its bells, and she was entitled to hail the omen as significant. Perhaps the prophecy helped to bring its own fulfilment: at least she refused Sir John Clerk of Eldin for my Lord, though he was much her senior. “Susanna and the elder,” said the wits of the time. She was six feet in height, very handsome and very stately, and she had seven daughters like unto herself. One of the great sights of old Edinburgh were the eight gilded sedan chairs that conveyed those ladies, moving in stately procession from the old Post Office Close to the Assembly Rooms.

Their mansion house, by the way, afterwards served as Fortune’s tavern, far the most fashionable of its kind in Edinburgh. The Countess has her connection with letters: Allan Ramsay dedicated his Gentle Shepherd to her, William Hamilton of Bangour chanted her in melodious verse, and Dr. Johnson and she said some nice things to one another when he was in Scotland. She was a devoted Jacobite, had a portrait of Charles Edward so placed in her bedroom as to be the first thing she saw when she wakened in the morning. Her last place in Edinburgh was in Jack’s Land in the Canongate. We have ceased to think it remarkable, that noble ladies dwelt in those now grimy ways. She had a long innings of fashion and power, for it was not till 1780, at the ripe age of ninety-one, that she passed away. She kept her looks even in age. “What would you give to be as pretty as I?” she asked her eldest daughter, Lady Betty. “Not half so much as you would give to be as young as I,” was the pert rejoinder.

Another high and mighty dame was Catharine, daughter of John, Earl of Dundonald, and wife of Alexander, sixth Earl of Galloway. She lived in the Horse Wynd in the Cowgate, and, it is averred, always went visiting in a coach and six. It is said—and you quite believe it—that whilst she was being handed into her coach the leaders were already pawing in front of the destined door. In youth her beauty, in age her pride and piety, were the talk of the town. Are they not commemorated in the Holyrood Ridotto? A more pleasing figure is that of Primrose Campbell of Mamore, widow of that crafty Lord Lovat whose head fell on Tower Hill in 1747. She dwelt at the top of Blackfriar’s Wynd, where Walter Chepman the old Edinburgh printer had lived 240 years before. She passed a pious, peaceable, and altogether beautiful widowhood; perhaps her happiest years, for old Simon Fraser had given her a bad time. She looked forward to the end with steady, untroubled eyes, got her graveclothes ready, and the turnpike stair washed. Was this latter, you wonder, so unusual a measure? She professed indifference as to her place of sepulchre “You may lay me beneath that hearthstane.” And so, in 1796, in her eighty-sixth year, she went to her rest.

Some of those ladies were not too well off. Two of the house of Traquair lived close by St. Mary’s Wynd. The servant, Jenny, had been out marketing. “But, Jenny, what’s this in the bottom of the basket?” “Oo, mem, just a dozen o’ taties that Lucky, the green-wife, wad hae me to tak’; they wad eat sae fine wi’ the mutton.” “Na, na, Jenny, tak’ back the taties—we need nae provocatives in this house.”

A curious story is narrated of Lady Elibank, the daughter of an eminent surgeon in Edinburgh. She told a would-be suitor, “I do not believe that you would part with a ‘leith’ of your little finger for my whole body.” Next day the young man handed her a joint from one of his fingers; she declined to have anything to do with him. “The man who has no mercy on his own flesh will not spare mine,” which served him right. She was called up in church, as the use was, to be examined in the Assembly’s catechism, as Betty Stirling. “Filthy fellow,” she said; “he might have called me Mrs. Betty or Miss Betty; but to be called bare Betty is insufferable.” She was called bare Betty as long as she lived, which served her right.

The servants of some of those aristocratic ladies were as old-fashioned, as poor, and as devoted as themselves. Mrs. Erskine of Cardross lived in a small house at the foot of Merlin’s Wynd, which once stood near the Tron Kirk. George Mason, her servant, allowed himself much liberty of speech. On a young gentleman calling for wine a second time at dinner, George in a whisper, reproachful and audible, admonished him, “Sir, you have had a glass already.” This strikes a modern as mere impudence, yet passed as proper enough.

The fashionable life of old Edinburgh had its head-quarters in the Assembly Rooms, first in the West Bow and then after 1720 south of the High Street in the Assembly Close. The formalities of the meetings and dances are beyond our scope. The “famed Miss Nicky Murray,” as Sir Alexander Boswell called her, presided here for many years; she was sister of the Earl of Mansfield, and a mighty fine lady. “Miss of What?” she would ask when a lady was presented. If of nowhere she had short shrift: a tradesman, however decked, was turned out at once. Her fan was her sceptre or enchanted wand, with a wave of which she stopped the music, put out the lights, and brought the day of stately and decorous proceedings to a close.

Another lady directress was the Countess of Panmure. A brewer’s daughter had come very well dressed, but here fine feathers did not make a fine bird. Her Ladyship sent her a message not to come again, as she was not entitled to attend the assemblies. Her justice was even-handed. She noted her nephew, the Earl of Cassillis, did not seem altogether right one evening. “You have sat too late after dinner to be proper company for ladies,” quoth she; she then led him to the door, and calling out, “My Lord Cassillis’s chair!” wished him “good-night.” Perhaps my Lord betook himself to the neighbouring Covenant Close, where there was a famed oyster-seller commemorated by Scott, who knew its merits. Was it on this account or because the Covenant had lain for signature there that Sir Walter made it the abode of Nanty Ewart when he studied divinity at Edinburgh with disastrous results? Unfortunate Covenant Close! The last time I peered through a locked gate on its grimy ways I found it used for the brooms and barrows of the city scavengers. But to resume.

The dancing in the Assembly Room was hedged about with various rites that made it a solemn function. When a lady was assigned to a gallant he needs must present her with an orange. To “lift the lady” meant to ask her to dance. The word was not altogether fortunate; it is the technical term still used in the north to signify that the corpse has begun its procession from the house to the grave. “It’s lifted,” whispers the undertaker’s man to the mourners, as he beckons them to follow. Another quaint custom was to “save the ladies” by drinking vast quantities of hot punch to their health or in their honour. If they were not thus “saved” they were said to be “damned.”

There are as racy stories of folk not so well known, and not so exalted. Mrs. Dundas lived on Bunker’s Hill (hard by where the Register House now stands). One of her daughters read from a newspaper to her as to some lady whose reputation was damaged by the indiscreet talk of the Prince of Wales. “Oh,” said old fourscore with an indignant shake of her shrivelled fist and a tone of cutting contempt, “the dawmed villain! Does he kiss and tell?”

This is quaint enough. Miss Mamie Trotter, of the Mortonhall family, dreamt she was in heaven, and describes her far from edifying experience. “And what d’ye think I saw there? De’il ha’it but thousands upon thousands, and ten thousands upon ten thousands o’ stark naked weans! That wad be a dreadfu’ thing, for ye ken I ne’er could bide bairns a’ my days!”

“Come away, Bailie, and take a trick at the cairds,” Mrs. Telfer of St. John Street, Canongate, and sister of Smollett, would exclaim to a worthy magistrate and tallow chandler who paid her an evening visit. “Troth, madam, I hae nae siller.” “Then let us play for a p’und of can’le,” rejoined the gamesome Telfer.

On the other side of the Canongate, in New Street, there lived Christina Ramsay, a daughter of Allan Ramsay. She was eighty-eight before she died. If she wrote no songs she inherited, at any rate, her father’s kindly nature; she was the friend of all animals, she used to remonstrate with the carters when they ill-treated their horses, and send out rolls to be given to the poor overburdened beasts that toiled up the steep street. But she specially favoured cats. She kept a huge number cosily stowed away in band-boxes, and put out food for others round about her house; she would not even permit them to be spoken against, any alleged bad deed of a cat she avowed must have been done under provocation.

Here are two marriage stories. Dugald Stewart’s second wife was Ellen D’Arcy Cranstoun, daughter of the Hon. George Cranstoun, and sister of Lord Corehouse. She had written a poem, which her cousin, the Earl of Lothian, had shown to the philosopher who was then his tutor. The criticism was of a highly flattering nature. The professor fell in love with the poetess, and she loved him for his eulogy; they were married, and no union ever turned out better. The other is earlier and baser. In November 1731 William Crawford, the elderly janitor of the High School, proposed to marry a lady very much his junior. He and his friends arrived at the church. She did not turn up, but there was a letter from her. “William you must know I am pre-engaged I never could like a burnt cuttie I have now by the hand my sensie menseful strapper, with whom I intend to pass my youthful days. You know old age and youth cannot agree together. I must then be excused if I tell you I am not your humble servant.” Crawford took his rebuff quite coolly. “Let us at least,” said he to his friends, “keep the feast as a feast-day. Let us go drink and drive care away. May never a greater misfortune attend any man.” An assemblage numerous, if not choice, graced the banquet; they got up a subscription among themselves of one hundred marks and presented it to Crawford, “with which he was as well satisfied as he who got madam.”

From all those clever and witty people it is almost a relief to turn to some anecdotes of sheer stupidity. Why John Home the poet married Miss Logan, who was not clever or handsome or rich, was a problem to his friends. Hume asked him point-blank. “Ah, David, if I had not who else would have taken her?” was his comic defence. Sir Adam Fergusson told the aged couple of the Peace of Amiens. “Will it mak’ ony difference in the price o’ nitmugs?” said Mrs. Home, who meant nutmegs, if indeed she meant anything at all.

Jean, sister-in-law to Archibald Constable the publisher, had been educated in France and hesitated to admit that she had forgotten the language, and would translate coals “collier” and table napkin “table napkune,” to the amazement and amusement of her hearers. Her ideas towards the close got a little mixed. “If I should be spared to be taken away,” she remarked, “I hope my nephew will get the doctor to open my head and see if anything can be done for my hearing.” This is a masterpiece of its kind, and perhaps too good to be perfectly true. She played well; “gars the instrument speak,” it was said. There was one touch of romance in her life. A French admirer had given her a box of bonbons, wherein she found “a puzzle ring of gold, divided yet united,” and with their joint initials. She never saw or heard from her lover, yet she called for it many times in her last illness. It was a better way of showing her constancy than that taken by Lady Betty Charteris, of the Wemyss family. Disappointed in love, she took to her bed, where she lay for twenty-six years, to the time of her death, in fact. This was in St. John Street in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

The stage was without much influence in Edinburgh save on rare occasions. One of them was when Sarah Siddons was in Edinburgh in 1784. Her first appearance was on the 22nd May of that year, when she scored a success as Belvedere in Venice Preserved. The audience listened in profound silence, and the lady, used to more enthusiasm, got a little nervous, till a canny citizen was moved audibly to admit, “That’s no bad.” A roar of applause followed that almost literally brought down the galleries. She played Lady Randolph in Douglas twice; “there was not a dry eye in the whole house,” observed the contemporary Courant. Shakespeare was not acted during her visit; the folk of the time were daring enough to consider him just so-so after Home! Everybody was mad to hear her. At any rate, the General Assembly of the Church was deserted until its meetings were arranged not to clash with her appearance. There were applications for 2550 places where there were only 630 of that description on hand. The gallery doors were guarded by detachments of soldiers with drawn bayonets, which they are said to have used to some purpose on an all too insistent crowd. Her tragedy manner was more than skin deep, she could never shake it off; she talked in blank verse. Scott used to tell how, during a dinner at Ashestiel, she made an attendant shake with—

Once in Edinburgh she dined with the Homes, and in her most tragic tones asked for a “little porter.” John, the old servant-man, took her only too literally; he reappeared, lugging in a diminutive though stout Highland caddie, remarking, “I’ve found ane, mem; he’s the least I could get.” Even Sarah needs must laugh, though Mrs. Home, we are assured, on the authority of Robert Chambers, never saw the joke.

Another time Mrs. Siddons dined with the Lord Provost, who apologised for the seasoning.

was the solemn response of the tragic muse.

Such tones once heard were not to be forgotten. A servant-lass, by patience or audacity, had got into the theatre and was much affected by the performance. Next day, as she went about the High Street, intent on domestic business, the deep notes of the inimitable Siddons rang in her ears; she dropped her basket in uncontrollable agitation and burst forth, “Eh, sirs, weel do I ken the sweet voice (“vice,” she would say, in the dulcet dialect of the capital) that garred me greet sae sair yestre’n.”

After all, Mrs. Siddons does not belong to Edinburgh, though I take her on the wing, as it were, and here also I take leave both of her and the subject.

Perhaps the sharpest contrast between old Scotland and the Scotland of to-day is the decline of belief in the supernatural. Superstitions of lucky and unlucky things and days and seasons still linger in the south, nay, the byways of London are rich in a peculiar kind of folklore which no one thinks it worth while to harvest. A certain dry scepticism prevails in Scotland, even in the remote country districts; perhaps it is the spread of education or the hard practical nature of the folk which is, for the time, uppermost; or is it the result of a violent reaction? In former days it was far other. Before the Reformation the Scot accepted the Catholic faith as did the other nations of Europe. And there was the usual monastic legend, to which, as far as it concerns Edinburgh, I make elsewhere sufficient reference. Between the Reformation and the end of the eighteenth century, or even later, the supernatural had a stronger grip on the Scots than on any other race in Europe. The unseen world beckoned and made its presence known by continual signs; portents and omens were of daily occurrence; men like Peden, the prophet, read the book of the future, every Covenanter lived a spiritual life whose interest far exceeded that of the material life present to his senses. As a natural result of hard conditions of existence, a sombre temperament, and a gloomy creed, the portents were ever of disaster. The unseen was full of hostile forces. The striking mottoes, that still remain on some of the Edinburgh houses, were meant to ward off evil. The law reports are full of the trials and cruel punishment of wizards and witches, malevolent spirits bent on man’s destruction were ever on the alert, ghostly appearances hinted at crime and suffering; more than all, there was the active personality of Satan himself, one, yet omnipresent, fighting a continual and, for the time, successful war against the saints. Burns, whose genius preserves for us in many a graphic touch that old Scotland which even in his time was fast fading away, pictures, half mirthful, yet not altogether sceptical, the enemy of mankind:

And now for some illustrations. After the monkish legends, one of the earliest, as it is the most famous, story of all is the appearance of the ghostly heralds in the dead of night at the Cross in Edinburgh, before the battle of Flodden, and the summons by them of the most eminent Scotsmen of the day, including King James himself, to appear before Pluto, Lord of the netherworld. A certain gentleman, Mr. Richard Lawson, lay that night in his house in the High Street. He was to follow the King southward, but his heart was heavy with the thought of impending evil; he could not sleep, and roamed up and down the open wooden gallery, which was then so marked a feature on the first floor of Edinburgh houses. It was just in front of the Cross. He saw the dread apparition, he heard his own name amongst the list of those summoned. Loudly, he refused obedience, and protested, and appealed to God and Christ. Lindsay of Pitscottie, whose chronicles preserve many a picturesque tale of old Scotland, had this story at first hand from Lawson himself, who assured him that of all those mentioned he alone had escaped. It is scarce necessary to remind the reader how admirably Scott has told this story in the fifth canto of Marmion. The Cross was the chief place from which a summons must issue to the absent, and the heralds were the persons to make it. The appeal and protest by Mr. Richard Lawson were also quite in order. And there is the figure of St. John the Apostle which appeared in St. Michael’s Church at Linlithgow to warn James IV. from his projected expedition. Again Scott has told this in the fourth canto of Marmion. It has been suggested that neither legend is mere fancy, that both were elaborate devices got up by the peace party to frighten James. This may be true of the Linlithgow apparition, but it does not reasonably account for the other.

It strikes you at first as odd that there are no ghost stories about Holyrood, but there is a substantial reason. These would mar the effect, the illustrious dead with their profoundly tragic histories leave no room for other interest. The annals of the Castle are not quite barren. Here be samples at any rate. It was the reign of Robert III., and the dawn of the fifteenth century. The Duke of Albany, the King’s brother, was pacing, with some adherents, the ramparts of the Castle when a bright meteor flared across the sky. Albany seemed much impressed, and announced that this portended some calamity as the end of a mighty Prince in the near future. Albany was already engaged in plots which resulted, in March 1402, in the imprisonment and death by famine of his nephew, David, Duke of Rothesay, so it may be said that he only prophesied because he knew. However, the age believed in astrology; held as indisputable that the stars influenced man’s life, and that every sign in the firmament had a meaning for those who watched. Not seldom were battles seen in the skies portending disasters to come. As you con over the troubled centuries of old Scots history, it seems that disaster always did come, there was nothing but wars and sieges, and red ruin and wasting.

Before the death of James V. dread warnings from the other world were conveyed to him. Sir James Hamilton, who had been beheaded, appeared with a drawn sword in his hand, and struck both the King’s arms off. Certain portents preceded the murder of Darnley. Some of his friends dreamed he was in mortal danger, and received ghostly admonition to carry help to him. It is easy to rationalise those stories. Many were concerned in the murder, and it is not to be supposed that they all kept quite discreet tongues.

Again, the following picturesque legend is exactly such as a troubled time would evolve. After the coronation of Charles II. at Scone, Cromwell marched towards Scotland. The Castle was put in order under Colonel Walter Dundas. As the sentinel paced his rounds one gloomy night he heard the beat of a drum from the esplanade, and the steady tramp of a great host; he fired his musket to give the alarm, and the Governor hurried to the scene, but there was nothing. The sentinel was punished and replaced, but the same thing happened, till in the end Dundas mounted guard himself. He hears the phantom drummer beating a weird measure, then there is the tramp of innumerable feet and the clank of armour. A mighty host, audible yet invisible, passes by, and the sound of their motion dies gradually away. What could these things mean but wars and rumours of wars? And there followed in quick succession Dunbar and Worcester, commemorated with the victor in a high passage of English literature: