I hurry over the other picturesque incidents of the man and the time; the last sermon with a voice that once shook the mighty church, now scarce heard in the immediate circle; the moving account of his last days; the elegy of Morton, or the brief epitaph that Morton set over his grave. He was scarce in accord even with his own age; his best schemes were sneered at as devout imagination. Secretary Maitland’s was the one tongue whose pungent speech he could never tolerate or forgive, and he had voiced with bitter irony the reply of the nobles to Knox’s demand for material help for the church. “We mon now forget our selfis and beir the barrow to buyld the housses of God.” And yet he never lost heart. In 1559, when the affairs of the congregation were at a low ebb, he spoke words of courage and conviction. “Yea, whatsoever shall become of us and of our mortall carcasses, I dowt not but that this caus (in dyspyte of Sathan) shall prevail in the realme of Scotland. For as it is the eternall trewth of the eternall God, so shall it ones prevaill howsoever for a time it be impugned.” And so the strong, resolute man vanishes from the stage of time, a figure as important, interesting, and fateful as that of Mary herself.

I pass to the annals of the Covenant. It was signed on 1st March 1638, in the Greyfriars Church. It is said, though this has been questioned, that when the building could not hold the multitude, copies were laid on two flat gravestones which are shown you to-day, and all ranks and ages pressed round in the fervour of excitement; many added “till death” after their names, others drew blood from their bodies wherewith to fill their pens. The place was assuredly not chosen with a view to effect, yet the theatre had a fitness which often marks the sacred spots of Scots history. The graveyard was the resting-place of the most famous of their ancestors; the Castle, the great centrepiece of the national annals, rose in their view. The aged Earl of Sutherland signed first, Henderson prayed, the Earl of Loudoun spoke to his fellow-countrymen, and Johnston of Warriston read the scroll, which he had done so much to frame. Endless sufferings were in store for those who adhered to the national cause. After Bothwell Brig in 1679 a number were confined in the south-west corner of the churchyard in the open air in the rigour of the Scots climate, and just below in the Grassmarket a long succession of sufferers glorified God in the mocking words of their oppressors. Strange, gloomy figures those Covenanters appear to us, with their narrow views and narrow creeds, lives lived under the shadow of the gibbet and the scaffold: yet who would deny them the virtues of perfect courage and unalterable determination? Let me gather one or two anecdotes that still, as a garland, encircle “famous Guthrie’s head,” as it is phrased on the Martyrs’ Monument. He journeyed to Edinburgh to subscribe the Covenant, encountering the hangman as he was entering in at the West Port; he accepted the omen as a clear intimation of his fate if he signed. And then he went and signed! He was tried before the Scots Parliament for treason. By an odd accident he had “Bluidy Mackenzie” as one of his defending counsel. These admired his skill and law, and at the end seemed more disturbed at the inevitable result than did the condemned man himself. He suffered on the 1st June 1661 at the Cross. One lighter touch strikes a strange gleam of humour. His physicians had forbidden him to eat cheese, but at his last meal he freely partook of it. “The Doctors may allow me a little cheese this night, for I think there is no fear of the gravel now,” he said with grim cynicism. He spoke for an hour to a surely attentive audience. These were the early days of the persecution; a few years later and the drums had drowned his voice. At the last moment he caused the face cloth to be lifted that he might with his very last breath declare his adherence to the Covenants: the loving nickname of Siccarfoot given him by his own party was well deserved! His head was stuck on the Netherbow, his body was carried into St. Giles’, where it was dressed for the grave by some Presbyterian ladies who dipped their handkerchiefs in his blood. One of the other side condemned this as a piece of superstition and idolatry of the Romish church. “No,” said one of them, “but to hold up the bloody napkin to heaven in their addresses that the Lord might remember the innocent blood that was spilt.” So Wodrow tells the story, and he goes on: “In the time that the body was a-dressing there came in a pleasant young gentleman and poured out a bottle of rich oyntment on the body, which filled the whole church with a noble perfume. One of the ladys says, ‘God bless you, sir, for this labour of love which you have shown to the slain body of a servant of Jesus Christ.’ He, without speaking to any, giving them a bow, removed, not loving to be discovered.” A strange legend presently went the round of Edinburgh and was accepted as certain fact by the true-blue party. Commissioner the Earl of Middleton, an old enemy of Guthrie’s, presided at his trial. Afterwards, as his coach was passing under the Netherbow arch some drops of blood from the severed head fell on the vehicle. All the art of man could not wash them out, and a new leather covering had to be provided. Guthrie left a little son who ran with his fellows about the streets of Edinburgh. He would often come back and tell his mother that he had been looking at his father’s head. This last may seem a very trivial anecdote, but to me, at least, it always brings home with a certain direct force the horrors of the time. The years rolled on and brought the Revolution of 1688. A divinity student called Hamilton took down the head and gave it decent burial.

Richard Cameron fell desperately fighting on the 20th July 1680 at Airds Moss, a desolate place near Auchinleck. Bruce of Earlshall marched to Edinburgh with Cameron’s head and hands in a sack, while the prisoners who were taken alive were also brought there. At Edinburgh the limbs were put upon a halbert, and carried to the Council. I must let Patrick Walker tell the rest of the story. “Robert Murray said, ‘There’s the Head and Hands that lived praying and preaching and died praying and fighting.’ The Council ordered the Hangman to fix them upon the Netherbow Port. Mr. Cameron’s father being in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh for his Principles, they carried them to him to add Grief to his Sorrow and enquired if he knew them. He took his son’s Head and Hands and kissed them. ‘They are my Son’s, my dear Son’s,’ and said: ‘It is the Lord, good is the Will of the Lord who cannot wrong me nor mine, but has made Goodness and Mercy to follow us all our Days.’ Mr. Cameron’s Head was fixed upon the Port and his Hands close by his Head with his Fingers upward.”

Of Sir Archibald Johnston of Warriston, bishop Gilbert Burnet, his relative, says: “Presbytery was to him more than all the world.” At the Restoration he knew his case was hopeless and effected his escape to France, but was brought back and suffered at the Cross. You would fancy life was so risky and exciting in those days that study and meditation were out of the question, but, on the contrary, Warriston was a great student (it was an age of ponderous folios and spiritual reflection), could seldom sleep above three hours out of the twenty-four, knew a great deal of Scots Law, and many other things besides; and with it all he and his fellows—Stewart of Goodtrees, for instance—spent untold hours in meditation. Once he went to the fields or his garden in the Sheens (now Sciennes) to spend a short time in prayer. He so remained from six in the morning till six or eight at night, when he was awakened, as it were, by the bells of the not distant city. He thought they were the eight hours bells in the morning; in fact, they were those of the evening.

Another class of stories deals with the stormy lives and unfortunate ends of the persecutors, and there is no name among those more prominent than that of the Archbishop of St. Andrews, him whom Presbyterian Scotland held in horror as Sharp, the Judas, the Apostate. Years before his life closed at Magus Muir he went in continual danger; he was believed to be in direct league with the devil. Once he accused a certain Janet Douglas before the Privy Council of sorcery and witchcraft, and suggested that she should be packed off to the King’s plantations in the West Indies. “My Lord,” said Janet, “who was you with in your closet on Saturday night last betwixt twelve and one o’clock?” The councillors pricked up their ears in delighted anticipation of a peculiarly piquant piece of scandal about a Reverend Father in God. Sharp turned all colours and put the question by. The Duke of Rothes called Janet aside and, by promise of pardon and safety, unloosed Janet’s probably not very reluctant lips. “My lord, it was the muckle black Devil.”

Here is a strange episode of this troubled time. Patrick Walker in his record of the life and death of Mr. Donald Cargill tells of a sect called the sweet singers, “from their frequently meeting together and singing those tearful Psalms over the mournful case of the Church.” To many of the persecuted it seemed incredible that heaven should not declare in some terrible manner vengeance on a community that was guilty of the blood of the Saints, and as this little band sang and mused it seemed ever clearer to them that the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah must fall on the wicked city of Edinburgh. They needs must flee from the wrath to come, and so with one accord “they left their Houses, warm soft Beds, covered Tables, some of them their Husbands and Children weeping upon them to stay with them, some women taking the sucking Children in their arms” (to leave these behind were a counsel of perfection too high even for a saint!) “to Desert places to be free of all Snares and Sins and communion with others and mourn for their own sins, the Land’s Tyranny and Defections, and there be safe from the Land’s utter ruin and Desolations by Judgments. Some of them going to Pentland hills with a Resolution to sit there to see the smoke and utter ruin of the sinful, bloody City of Edinburgh.” The heavens made no sign; Edinburgh remained unconsumed. A troop of dragoons were sent to seize the sweet singers; the men were put in the Canongate Tolbooth, the women into the House of Correction where they were soundly scourged. Their zeal thus being quenched they were allowed to depart one by one, the matter settled. And so let us pass on to a less tragic and heroic, a more peaceful and prosaic time.

After the revolution reaction almost inevitably set in. Religious zeal—fanaticism if you will—died rapidly down, and there came in Edinburgh, of all places, the reign of the moderates, or as we should now say, broad churchmen, learned, witty, not zealous or passionate, “the just and tranquil age of Dr. Robertson.” Principal William Robertson was a type of his class. We come across him in the University, for he was Principal, and we meet him again as man of letters, for the currents of our narrative are of necessity cross-currents. Here the Robertson anecdotes are trivial. Young Cullen, son of the famous doctor, was the bane of the Principal’s life; he was an excellent mimic, could not merely imitate the reverend figure but could follow exactly his train of thought. In 1765, some debate or other occupied Robertson in the General Assembly; Cullen mimicked the doctor in a few remarks on the occasion to some assembled wits. Presently in walks the Principal and makes the very speech, a little astonished at the unaccountable hilarity which presently prevailed. Soon the orator smelt a rat. “I perceive somebody has been ploughing with my heifer before I came in,” so he rather neatly turned the matter off. Certain young Englishmen of good family were boarded with Robertson: one of them lay in bed recovering from a youthful escapade, when a familiar step approached, for that too could be imitated, and a familiar voice read the erring youth a solemn lecture on the iniquities of his walk, talk, and conversation. He promised amendment and addressed himself again to rest, when again the step approached. Again the reproving voice was heard. He pulled aside the curtain and protested that it was too bad to have the whole thing twice over—it was Robertson this time, however, and not Cullen. The Principal once went to the father of this remarkable young man for medical advice. He was duly prescribed for, and as he was leaving the doctor remarked that he had just been giving the same advice for the same complaint to his own son. “What,” said Robertson, “has the young rascal been imitating me here again?” The young rascal lived to sit on the bench as Lord Cullen, a grave and courteous but not particularly distinguished senator. The Principal was also minister of Old Greyfriars’. His colleague here was Dr. John Erskine. The evangelical school was not by any means dead in Scotland, and Erskine, a man of good family and connections, was a devoted adherent. It is pleasant to think that strong bonds of friendship united the colleagues whose habits of thought were so different. You remember the charming account of Erskine in Guy Mannering where the colonel goes to hear him preach one Sunday. He was noted for extraordinary absence of mind. Once he knocked up against a cow in the meadows; in a moment his hat was off his head and he humbly begged the lady’s pardon. The next she he came across was his own wife, “Get off, you brute!” was the result of a conceivable but ludicrous confusion of thought. His spouse observed that he invariably returned from church without his handkerchief; she suspected one of the old women who sat on the pulpit stairs that they might hear better, or from the oddity of the thing, or from some other reason, and the handkerchief was firmly sewed on. As the doctor mounted the stairs he felt a tug at his pocket. “No the day, honest woman, no the day,” said Erskine gently. Dr. Johnson was intimate with Robertson when he was in Edinburgh and was tempted to go and hear him preach. He refrained. “He could not give a sanction by his presence to a Presbyterian Assembly.”

Dr. Hugh Blair (1718-1800), Professor of Rhetoric in the University, was another of the eminent moderates. Dr. Johnson said: “I have read over Dr. Blair’s first sermon with more than approbation; to say it is good is to say too little.” The King and indeed everybody else agreed with Johnson, the after time did not, and surely no human being now-a-days reads the once famous Rhetoric and the once famous Sermons. Blair was vain about everything. Finical about his dress, he was quite a sight as he walked to service in the High Kirk. “His wig frizzed and powdered so nicely, his gown so scrupulously arranged on his shoulders, his hands so pure and clean, and everything about him in such exquisite taste and neatness.” Once he had his portrait painted; he desired a pleasing smile to mantle his expressive countenance, The model did his best and the artist did his best; the resulting paint was hideous. Blair destroyed the picture in a fit of passion. A new one followed, in which less sublime results were aimed at, and the achievement did not sink below the commonplace. An English visitor told him in company that his sermons were not popular amongst the southern divines: Blair’s piteous expression was reflected in the faces of those present. “Because,” said the stranger, who was plainly a master in compliment, “they are so well known that none dare preach them.” The flattered Doctor beamed with pleasure. Blair’s colleague was the Rev. Robert Walker, and it was said by the beadle that it took twenty-four of Walker’s hearers to equal one of Blair’s, but then the beadle was measuring everything by the heap on the plate. An old student of Blair’s with Aberdeen accent, boundless confidence and nothing else, asked to be allowed to preach for him on the depravity of man. Blair possibly thought that a rough discourse would throw into sharp contrast his polished orations; at any rate he consented, and the most cultured audience in Edinburgh were treated to this gem: “It is well known that a sou has a’ the puddins o’ a man except ane; and if that doesna proove that man is fa’an there’s naething will.”

Dr. Alexander Webster, on the other hand, was of the evangelical school, though an odd specimen, since he preached and prayed, drank and feasted, with the same whole-hearted fervour. The Edinburgh wits called him Doctor Magnum Bonum, and swore that he had drunk as much claret at the town’s expense as would float a 74-ton-gun ship. He died somewhat suddenly, and just before the end spent one night in prayer at the house of Lady Maxwell of Monreith, and on the next he supped in the tavern with some of his old companions who found him very pleasant. He was returning home one night in a very unsteady condition. “What would the kirk-session say if they saw you noo?” said a horrified acquaintance. “Deed, they wadna believe their een” was the gleeful and witty answer. This bibulous divine was the founder of the Widows Fund of the Church of Scotland, and you must accept him as a strange product of the strange conditions of strange old Edinburgh.

The material prosperity of the Church, such as it was, did not meet with universal favour. Lord Auchinleck, Boswell’s father, a zealous Presbyterian of the old stamp, declared that a poor clergy was ever a pure clergy. In former times, he said, they had timmer communion cups and silver ministers, but now we were getting silver cups and timmer ministers.

It is alleged of one of the city ministers, though I know not of what epoch, that he performed his pastoral ministrations in the most wholesale fashion. He would go to the foot of each crowded close in his district, raise his gloved right hand and pray unctuously if vaguely for “all the inhabitants of this close.”

Some divines honestly recognise their own imperfections. Dr. Robert Henry was minister of the Old Kirk: his colleague was Dr. James M‘Knight. Both were able and even distinguished men, but not as preachers. Dr. Henry wittily said, “fortunately they were incumbents of the same church, or there would be twa toom kirks instead of one.” One very wet Sunday M‘Knight arrived late and drenched. “Oh, I wish I was dry, I wish I was dry,” he exclaimed; and then after some perfunctory brushing, “Do you think I’m dry noo?” “Never mind, Doctor,” said the other consolingly, “when ye get to the pulpit you’ll be dry enough.”

As the last century rolled on the moderate cause weakened and the evangelical cause became stronger. The Rev. Sir Henry Moncreiff was one of the great figures of that movement. Referring to his power in the Assembly a country minister said: “It puts you in mind of Jupiter among the lesser Gods.” Another was Dr. Andrew Thomson, minister of St. George’s, who died in 1831. An easy-going divine once said to him that “he wondered he took so much time with his discourses; for himself, many’s the time he had written a sermon and killed a salmon before breakfast.” “Sir,” was the emphatic answer, “I had rather have eaten your salmon, than listened to your sermon.”

The evangelical party were much against pluralities. The others upheld them on the ground that only thus could the higher intellects of the church be fostered and rewarded. Dr. Walker had been presented to Colinton in the teeth of much popular opposition. He had obtained a professorship at the same time, and this was urged in his favour. “Ah,” said an old countryman, “that makes the thing far waur; he will just make a bye job of our souls.”

Dr. Chalmers is the great figure of the Disruption controversy, but most of his work lay away from Edinburgh. Well known as he was, there existed a submerged mass to whom he was but a name. In 1845 he began social and evangelical work in the West Port. An old woman of the locality, being asked if she went to hear any one, said, “Ou ay, there’s a body Chalmers preaches in the West Port, and I whiles gang to keep him in countenance, honest man!”

Chalmers was the founder of the Free Church; its great popular preacher for years afterwards was Thomas Guthrie. His fame might almost be described as world-wide; his oratory was marked by a certain vivid impressiveness that brought the scenes he described in actual fact before his hearers. A naval officer hearing him picture the wreck of a vessel, and the launching of the lifeboat to save the perishing crew, sprang from one of the front seats of the gallery and began to tear off his coat that he might rush to render aid. He was hardly pulled down by his mother who sat next him. Guthrie had other than oratorical gifts, he was genial and open-hearted. A servant from the country, amazed at the coming and going and the hospitality of the manse, said to her mistress: “Eh, mem, this house is just like a ‘public,’ only there’s nae siller comes in!”

Another leader, second only to Chalmers, was Dr. Candlish, much larger in mind than in body. “Ay,” said an Arran porter to one who was watching the Doctor, “tak’ a gude look, there’s no muckle o’ him, but there’s a deal in him!” Lord Cockburn’s words are to the like effect. “It requires the bright eye and the capacious brow of Candlish to get the better of the smallness of his person, which makes us sometimes wonder how it contains its inward fire.” The eager spirit of this divine chafed and fretted over many matters; his oratory aroused a feeling of sympathetic indignation in its hearers; afterwards they had some difficulty in finding adequate cause for their indignation. When the Prince Consort died his sorrowing widow raised a monument to him on Deeside, whereon a text from the Apocrypha was inscribed. Candlish declaimed against the quotation with all the force of his eloquence. “I say this with the deepest sorrow if it is the Queen who is responsible, I say it with the deepest indignation whoever else it may be.” These words bring vividly before us an almost extinct type of thought. And this, again, spoken eight days before his death and in mortal sickness, has a touch of the age of Knox: “If you were to set me up in the pulpit I still could make you all hear on the deafest side of your heads.”

Times again change, the leaders of religious thought in Scotland are again broad church, if I may use a non-committal term. They have often moved in advance of their flocks. At a meeting in Professor Blackie’s house in 1882 a number of Liberal divines were present. Among them Dr. Macgregor and Dr. Walter C. Smith. They were discussing the personality of the Evil One in what seemed to an old lady a very rationalistic spirit. “What,” she said in pious horror, “would you deprive us of the Devil?”

With this trivial anecdote may go that of another conservative old woman more than a century earlier. The Rev. David Johnson, who died in 1824, was minister of North Leith. In his time a new church was built, which was crowned with a cross wherein lurked, to some, a suggestion of prelacy if not popery. “But what are we to do?” said the minister to a knot of objecting pious dames. “Do!” replied one of them, “what wad ye do, but just put up the auld cock again!” (no doubt the weather-cock). This cock, or one of its predecessors, crows in history centuries before. On the 21st March 1567 the Castle of Edinburgh was given in charge to Cockburn of Skirling. That day there was a great storm which, among greater feats, blew the tail from the cock on the steeple at Leith. An ancient prophecy ran the round of the town as miraculously fulfilled.

Thus the diary of Robert Birrell, at any rate.

The strictness of old-time Sabbath observance is well known. Lord George Campbell, afterwards Duke of Argyll, was in command of a corps of Fencibles in Edinburgh in the early years of last century. He was skilled in whistling. He sat one Sunday morning at the open window of his hotel in Princes Street, and exercised his favourite art. An old woman passing by to church viewed him with holy horror and shook her fist at him, “Eh! ye reprobate! ye reprobate!” she shouted.

It were easy to accumulate anecdotes of the church officers of Edinburgh. I find space for two. In old days Mungo Watson was beadle of Lady Yester’s Church under Dr. Davidson. His pastime was to mount the pulpit and thunder forth what he believed to be a most excellent discourse to an imaginary audience. Whilst thus engaged he was surprised by Dr. Davidson, who shut him up very quickly: “Come down, Mungo, come down, toom barrels mak’ most sound.” In Jeems the Doorkeeper, a Lay Sermon, Dr. John Brown has drawn a charming picture of the officer of his father’s church in Broughton Place. The building was crowded, and part of the congregation consisted of servant girls, “husseys” as Jeems contemptuously described them. Some were laced to the point of suffocation, and were not rarely carried out fainting to the vestry. Jeems stood over the patient with a sharp knife in his hand. “Will oo rip her up noo?” he said as he looked at the young doctor; the signal was given, the knife descended and a cracking as of canvas under a gale followed, the girl opened her eyes, and closed them again in horror at the sight of the ruined finery. But we are chronicling very small beer indeed, and here must be an end of these strangely assorted scenes and pictures.

The official title of the University of Edinburgh is Academia Jacobi Sexti. So “our James,” as Ben Jonson calls him, gave a name to this great seat of learning, and in the form of a charter he gave it his blessing, and there he stopped! Bishop Reid, the last Roman Catholic Bishop of Orkney, left eight thousand merks for a college in Edinburgh, and though that sum sinks considerably when put into current coin of the realm, it is not to be neglected. It was obtained and applied, but the real patrons, authors, managers and supporters for centuries of the University was the good town of Edinburgh through its Town Council. It was Oure Tounis Colledge. They appointed its professors and ruled its destinies until almost our own time. The Scottish University Act of 1858 greatly lessened, though it by no means destroyed, their influence.

In a country so much under ecclesiastical influence as Scotland of the Reformation, the union between the College and the Kirk was close and intimate; still it was a corporation of tradesmen that managed the University, and though the professors kicked, there is no doubt they managed it very well. There has ever been something homely and unconventional about the college. It was opened on the 14th October 1583; the students were to wear gowns, they were to speak Latin, none was to soil his mouth with common Scots, and none was to go to taverns, or (it was later ordained) to funerals—a serious form of entertainment for which old Scotland evinced a peculiar zest.

Ah, those counsels of perfection! how the years set them at naught! Why they alone of all men in Edinburgh should not go to taverns or funerals was not a question wherewith they troubled themselves; they simply went. Gowns they never wore, and though half-hearted attempts were now and again made to introduce them, these never succeeded. Sir Alexander Grant, the late Principal, tells us that a working man, whose son was a student, wrote to him, pointing out the advantage of gowns in covering up a shabby dress. Sir Alexander seemed rather struck with this point of view, though after all, the gown must cost something, which might have been better applied to the cloak. The students, as now, lived anywhere.

The histories give many quaint details as to the manners of other days. The classes began at five in summer and six in winter; the bursars rung the bell and swept the rooms; the janitor was a student or even a graduate. His it was to lock the door at eleven at night. The early professors, who did not confine themselves to one subject but carried their class right through, were called regents. One of them, James Reid, had taken up the office in 1603; he was popular in the council, in the town, and in the whole city, but after more than twenty years’ service he came to grief on a quarrel with the all-powerful Kirk. In 1626, William Struthers, Moderator of the Presbytery, spoke of philosophy as the dish-clout of divinity. At a graduation ceremony, Reid quoted Aristippus to the effect that he would rather be an unchristian philosopher than an unphilosophical divine! for which innocent retort the regent was forced to throw up his office. One wonders what would have happened if Town Council and Kirk had come to loggerheads, but they never did, and through a college committee and a college bailie they directed the affairs of the University. Creech, best known to fame as Burns’s publisher, and the subject of some kindly or some unkindly half-humorous verse, was in his time college bailie; but Creech was a great many things in his time, though the world has pretty well forgotten him. The Lord Provost was the important figure in University as well as City life. In 1665 he was declared by the council Rector of the College, yet in the years that followed he did nothing in his office. Long afterwards, in 1838, there was a trial of students before the Sheriff, for the part these had taken in a great snowball bicker with the citizens. Witty Patrick Robertson was their counsel, and was clever enough to throw a farcical air over the whole proceedings. “You are Rector of the University, are you not?” he asked the then Lord Provost. “No! I may be, but I am not aware of it,” was the rather foolish answer. A caricature was immediately circulated of the man who does not know he is Rector! This office was not the present Lord Rectorship, which only dates from the Act of 1858.

Edinburgh has never been a rich town. In the old days, it was as poor as poor might be, and so was its college; they had nothing in the way of plate to show visitors, or to parade on great occasions. Their only exhibits were the college mace and George Buchanan’s skull! There was a legend about the mace. In 1683 the tomb of Bishop Kennedy at St. Andrews was opened: it contained five silver maces—quite a providential arrangement, one for each of the Scots Universities, and one to spare! But there was a mace in Edinburgh before this. We have note of it in 1640, and in 1651 the Town Council had it on loan for the use of the public. In 1660 the macer of the Parliament needs must borrow it till his masters get one of their own. There is a quaint, homely touch about this passing on of the mace from one body to another. It had been a valuable and interesting relic, but in the night between 29th and 30th October 1787 the library was forced, and the mace stolen from the press wherein it lay, and was never seen more. Ten guineas reward was offered, but in vain. Every one presently suspected Deacon Brodie, himself a member of the Council, and perhaps the most captivating and romantic burglar on record. Ere a year was over, he was lying in the Tolbooth a condemned felon, but he uttered no word as to the precious bauble. The year after that, very shame induced the Council to procure an elegant silver mace, with a fine Latin inscription, and the arms of James VI., the arms of the City, and the arms of the University itself, invented for the special purpose. It was just in time to be used on the laying of the foundation-stone of the new university buildings in 1789, and it has been used ever since on great occasions only. The loan of it is not asked for any more! every body corporate now has a mace of its own!

The Buchanan skull is still held by the college. That eminent scholar died on the 28th September 1582, and was buried in the Greyfriars Churchyard. John Adamson, Principal of the University between 1623 and 1651, got the skull by bribing the sexton, and bequeathed it to the college. The story rather revolts the taste of to-day, but grim old Scotland had a strange hankering after those elements of mortality. Its remarkable thinness was noted, in fact the light could be seen through it, and anatomists of later years dwelt on the fine breadth of forehead, and remarkable contours. It was judged, moreover, a skull of a Celtic type—Celtic was possibly enough Buchanan’s race. Long afterwards Sir William Hamilton, at the Royal Society in Edinburgh, compared it with the skull of a Malay robber and cut-throat, and showed that, according to the principles of the phrenologists, the Malay had the finer head. This was meant as a reductio ad absurdum of phrenology, though, after all, the evidence of identification could not be satisfactory. If the sexton consented to be bribed he was not likely, in old Greyfriars, to be at a loss for a skull, but it seems irreverent to pursue the subject further.

Robert Leighton, Principal between 1653 and 1662, was afterwards Bishop of Dunblane, and then Archbishop of Glasgow. In 1672 he was still living in his rooms in the college, and was there waited upon one day by Chorley, an English student studying divinity at Glasgow. He brought the compliments of his college and tutor, and invited the prelate to his approaching laureation. He next presented him with the laureation thesis, which was gratefully received, but when the visitor produced a pair of “fine fringed gloves” “he started back and with all demonstrations of humility excused himself as unworthy of such a present.” Chorley, however, whilst humble was persistent, and though the Archbishop refused again and again and retreated backwards, Chorley followed, and at the end fairly pinned Leighton against the wall! His Grace needs must yield, “but it was amazing to see with what humble gratitude, bowing to the very ground, this great man accepted them.” So much for the author of the classic Commentary on the 1st Epistle of St. Peter. Is it not a picture of the time when men were extreme in all things, though Leighton alone was extreme in humility? Was there not (you ask) something ironic in the self-depreciation? I do not think so, for you look as “through a lattice on the soul” and recognise a spirit ill at ease in an evil day, one who might have uttered Lord Bacon’s pathetic complaint multum incola fuit anima mea with far more point and fitness than ever Bacon did.

Of a later Principal, Gilbert Rule (1690-1701), a less conspicuous but very pleasing memory remains. His window was opposite that of Campbell, Professor of Divinity. Now Dr. Rule was ever late at his books, whilst Campbell was eager over them ere the late northern dawn was astir; so the one candle was not out before the other was lighted. They were called the evening and the morning star. Rule died first, and when Campbell missed the familiar light, he said, “the evening star was now gone down, and the morning star would soon disappear,” and ere long it was noted that both windows were dark. Among his other gifts, Gilbert Rule was a powerful preacher. In some ministerial wandering it was his lot to pass a night in a solitary house in a nook of the wild Grampians. At midnight enter a ghost, who would take no denial; Gilbert must out through the night till a certain spot was reached; then the ghost vanished and the Doctor got him back to bed, with, you imagine, chattering teeth and dismal foreboding. Next day the ground was opened, and the skeleton of a murdered man discovered. Gilbert preached on the following Sunday from the parish pulpit, and reasoned so powerfully of judgment and the wrath to come that an old man got up and confessed himself the murderer. In due course he was executed and the ghost walked no more.

William Carstares, Principal between 1703 and 1715, was a great figure in Church and State. “Cardinal” Carstares they nicknamed him at Dutch William’s Court, and both that astute monarch and Queen Anne, Stuart as she was, gave him almost unbounded confidence. In tact and diplomacy he excelled his contemporaries and in the valuable art of knowing what to conceal even when forced to speak. He was put to it, for the most famous anecdote about him tells of his suffering under the thumbikins in 1684. They were applied for an hour with such savage force that the King’s smith had to go for his tools to reverse the screws before it was possible to set free the maimed and bruised thumbs. In Carstares’ picture the thumbs are very prominent, in fact or flattery they show forth quite untouched. At the King’s special request he tried them on the royal digits; His Majesty vowed he had confessed anything to be rid of them. We have a pleasing picture of an annual fish dinner at Leith whereat the Principal was entertained by his colleagues. Calamy the English nonconformist was a guest, and was much delighted with the talk and the fare, and especially “the freedom and harmony between the Principal and the masters of the college,” they expressing a veneration for him as a common father, and he a tenderness for them as if they had all been his children.

Principal Robertson (1762-1793) is still a distinguished figure, but he belongs to Letters in the first place, and the Church in the second; yet even here he was eminent. A charming anecdote tells how as Principal he visited the logic class where John Stevenson, his own old teacher, was still prelecting. He addressed the students in Latin, urging them to profit, as he hoped he had himself profited, by the teaching of Stevenson, whereat “the aged Professor, unable any longer to suppress his emotion, dissolved in tears of grateful affection, and fell on the neck of his favourite pupil, his Principal.”

George Husband Baird (1793-1840) was a much more commonplace figure. His middle name was thought felicitous; he was husband to the Lord Provost’s daughter and there seemed no other sufficient reason to account for his elevation. This play upon names, by the way, has always been a favourite though puerile form of Edinburgh wit. The better part of a century afterwards we had one of our little wars on the Gold Coast, and some local jester asked for the difference between the folk of Ashantee and those of Edinburgh. The first, it was said, took their law from Coffee and the second their coffee from Law! The Ashantee war of the ’seventies is already rather dim and ancient history, but Coffee, it may be remembered, was the name of their king, and the other term referred to a well-known Edinburgh house still to the fore. However, we return to our Baird for a moment. He was Minister of the High Church as well as Principal. Discoursing of the illness of George III., he wept copiously and unreasonably; “from George Husband Baird to George III. greeting,” said one of his hearers.

There is a mass of legendary stories about the ordinary professors, but the figures are dim, and the notes of their lives mostly trivial. For instance, there is Dr. John Meiklejohn, who was Professor of Church History, 1739-1781: “He had a smooth round face, that never bore any expression but good-humour and contentment,” he droned monotonously through his lectures, glad to get away to his glebe at Abercorn, eight miles off. He delighted to regale the students at his rural manse, and pressed on them the produce of the soil, with a heartiness which he never showed in inviting their attention to the fathers of the church. “Take an egg, Mr. Smith,” he would genially insist, “they are my own eggs, for the eggs of Edinburgh are not to be depended on.” Of like kidney was David Ritchie, who was Professor of Logic and Metaphysics and Minister of St. Andrew’s Church, but “was more illustrious on the curling pond, than in the Professor’s chair.” But, then, to him in 1836 succeeded Sir William Hamilton, and for twenty years the chair was the philosophical chair of Britain. The records of his fame are not for this page; his passionate devotion to study, his vast learning, are not material for the anecdotist. He was fond of long walks with a friend into the surrounding country, and in his day it was still very easy to leave the town behind you. Though he started with a companion, he was presently away in advance or on the other side of the road, muttering to himself in Greek or Latin or English, forgetful of that external world which occupied no small place in his philosophy. “Dear me, what did you quarrel about?” asked a lady, to his no small amusement. The Council did not always select the most eminent men. About a century before, in 1745 to wit, they had preferred for the chair of Moral Philosophy William Cleghorn to David Hume. There was no other choice, it was said. A Deist might possibly become a Christian, but a Jacobite could not become a Whig. Ruddiman’s amanuensis, Adam Walker, was a student at this class, where he had listened to a lecture on the doctrine of necessity. “Well, does your Professor make us free agents or not?” said his employer. “He gives us arguments on both sides and leaves us to judge,” was the reply. “Indeed,” was Ruddiman’s caustic comment, “the fool hath said in his heart, there is no God, and the Professor will not tell you whether the fool is right or wrong.”