arate centre to each of the great occupations or exercises of
mankind. When London was comparatively a small town it had still its
professional distinctions--the Court, the Temple, the City, the place
where law was administered and where money was made, where society had
its abode and poverty found a shelter. But in old Edinburgh all were
piled one on the top of another--the Parliament House within sight of
the shops, the great official and the poor artificer under the same
roof: and round that historical spot over which St. Giles's crown rose
like the standard of the city, the whole community crowded, stalls and
booths of every kind encumbering the street, while special pleaders and
learned judges picked their steps in their dainty buckled shoes through
the mud and refuse of the most crowded noisy market-place, and all the
great personages of Edinburgh paced the "plainstanes" close by at
certain hours, unheeding either smell or garbage or the resounding cries
of the street.

[Illustration: CROWN OF ST. GILES'S]

In such a crowded centre the sheets that were being read so eagerly,
laughed over by the very cadgers at their booths, conned by the women at
the stairheads, lying on every counter, where Allan's new verses would
be pulled to pieces by brother wits who had known him to do better, or
heard a livelier witticism from his lips no farther gone than yestreen,
must very soon have come to the notice of the westland lads at the
college, and from them to the learned professors, and still more
directly to the lively groups that went and came to the Parliament
House. Already the wigmaker's shop had thriven and prospered; the little
man, short and fat and jovial, who had begun to lay out books in his
window under the shadow of the curled and powdered periwigs, found the
results of his double traffic more satisfactory than poets use. He
boasts in one of his rhymed addresses that he thatches the outside and
lines the inside of many a douce citizen, "and baithways gathers in the
cash." He adds--

"And fain would prove to ilka Scot,
That poortith's no the poet's lot."

It must have been altogether an odd little establishment--the wigs set
out upon their blocks, perhaps, who knows, the barber's humbler craft
being plied behind backs; the books multiplying daily on shelves and in
windows, and the ragged boys with their pennies waiting to see if there
was a new piece by Allan Ramsay; while perhaps in the corner, where