st it again now through dismay. The poor wretch had indeed
at the last moment, when it was too late, sought refuge in the chimney
of his room; his flight was stopped by a grating a little way up; to
this grating he clung, and from this grating he was plucked away by his
assailants. In a few moments he was carried into the open air, was
borne, the bewildered, despairing, struggling centre of all that armed
and merciless mass, swiftly towards the Netherbow. In the midst of the
blazing torches, the Lochaber axes, the guns and naked swords, that
hemmed him in, the helpless, hopeless victim was swept along. A rope
was readily found, but a gibbet was not forthcoming; a byer's pole
served at the need. Within a little while after the forcing of the
Tolbooth gate, Porteous was hanged and dead, and his wild judges were
striking at his lifeless body with their weapons. It is said, and we
may well believe it, that Porteous died, when he found that he had to
die, bravely enough, as became a soldier. In that wild, mad life of
his he had faced many perils, and if he pleaded for his life with his
self-ordained executioners while there was any chance that pleading
might prevail, it is likely enough that he accepted the inevitable with
composure. Wilson was avenged; the victims of the fusillade of the
city guard had been atoned for by blood, and Edinburgh had asserted
with a ferocity all her own that England's will was not her will, and
England's law not her law.

{65}

The peculiar characteristics of the crowd that battered down the
Tolbooth gate and carried off Porteous to his death in the Grassmarket
were its orderliness, its singleness of purpose, and the curious
"respectability," if such a term may be employed, of its composition.
Its singleness of purpose and its orderliness were alike exemplified by
the way in which it went about its grim business and by the absolute
absence of all riot or pillage of any kind, or indeed of any sort of
violence beyond that essential to the carrying out of its intent. No
peaceable persons were molested; no buildings other than the Tolbooth
were broken into; the very rope which hanged the unhappy Porteous was
immediately and amply paid for. No one except the central victim of
the conspiracy received harm at the hands of the mob. The
"respectability" of a large proportion of the mob and of those
controlling its actions was afterwards vouched for in many ways.
Ladies told tales of their ca