strides a tun-bellied charger. The King has his back turned,
and, as you look, seems to be trotting clumsily away from such a
dangerous neighbour. Often, for hours together, these two will be alone
in the close, for it lies out of the way of all but legal traffic. On
one side the south wall of the church, on the other the arcades of the
Parliament House, inclose this irregular bight of causeway and describe
their shadows on it in the sun. At either end, from round St. Giles's
buttresses, you command a look into the High Street with its motley
passengers; but the stream goes by east and west, and leaves the
Parliament Close to Charles the Second and the birds. Once in a while, a
patient crowd may be seen loitering there all day, some eating fruit,
some reading a newspaper; and to judge by their quiet demeanour, you
would think they were waiting for a distribution of soup-tickets. The
fact is far otherwise; within in the Justiciary Court a man is upon
trial for his life, and these are some of the curious for whom the
gallery was found too narrow. Towards afternoon, if the prisoner is
unpopular, there will be a round of hisses when he is brought forth.
Once in a while, too, an advocate in wig and gown, hand upon mouth, full
of pregnant nods, sweeps to and fro in the arcade listening to an agent;
and at certain regular hours a whole tide of lawyers hurries across the
space.

The Parliament Close has been the scene of marking incidents in Scottish
history. Thus, when the Bishops were ejected from the Convention in
1688, "all fourteen of them gathered together with pale faces and stood
in a cloud in the Parliament Close": poor episcopal personages who were
done with fair weather for life! Some of the west-country Societarians
standing by, who would have "rejoiced more than in great sums" to be at
their hanging, hustled them so rudely that they knocked their heads
together. It was not magnanimous behaviour to dethroned enemies; but
one, at least, of the Societarians had groaned in the _boots_, and they
had all seen their dear friends upon the scaffold. Again, at the "woeful
Union," it was here that people crowded to escort their favourite from
the last of Scottish parliaments: people flushed with nationality, as
Boswell would have said, ready for riotous acts, and fresh from throwing
stones at the author of "Robinson Crusoe" as he looked out of window.

One of the pious in the seventeenth century, going to pass his _trials_
(