narrow turnpike stairs, imagine the dames of fashion
tilting their vast hoops and silken show-petticoats up and down in
them!

That swine roamed at will in these Elysian fields is to be presumed,
since we have this amusing picture of three High Street belles and
beauties in the "Traditions of Edinburgh:"--

"So easy were the manners of the great, fabled to be so stiff and
decorous," says the author, "that Lady Maxwell's daughter Jane, who
afterward became the Duchess of Gordon, was seen riding a sow up the
High Street, while her sister Eglantine (afterwards Lady Wallace of
Craigie) thumped lustily behind with a stick."

No wonder, in view of all this, that King James VI., when about to
bring home his "darrest spous" Anne of Denmark, wrote to the Provost,
"For God's sake see a' things are richt at our hame-coming; a king
with a new-married wife doesna come hame ilka day."

Had it not been for these royal home-comings and visits of
distinguished foreigners, now and again aided by something still more
salutary, an occasional outbreak of the plague, the easy-going
authorities would never have issued any "cleansing edicts," and the
still easier-going inhabitants would never have obeyed them. It was
these dark, tortuous wynds and closes, nevertheless, that made up the
Court End of Old Edinbro'; for some one writes in 1530, "Via vaccarum
in qua habitant patricii et senatores urbis" (The nobility and chief
senators of the city dwell in the Cowgate). And as for the Canongate,
this Saxon _gaet_ or way of the Holyrood canons, it still sheltered in
1753 "two dukes, sixteen earls, two dowager countesses, seven lords,
seven lords of session, thirteen baronets, four commanders of the
forces in Scotland, and five eminent men,"--fine game indeed for Mally
Lee!

"A' doun alang the Canongate
Were beaux o' ilk degree;
And mony ane turned round to look
At bonny Mally Lee.
And we're a' gaun east an' west,
We're a' gaun agee,
We're a' gaun east an' west
Courtin' Mally Lee!"

Every corner bristles with memories. Here is the Stamp Office Close,
from which the lovely Susanna, Countess of Eglinton, was wont to issue
on Assembly nights; she, six feet in height, with a brilliantly fair
complexion and a "face of the maist bewitching loveliness." Her seven
daughters and stepdaughters were all conspicuously handsome, and it
was deemed a goodly sight to watch the long procession of eight gilded
sedan