F e Tolbooth. 124
as the- martlet did in Macbeth?s castle. Of
later years .these booths have degenerated into
mere toy-shops, where the little loiterers chiefly
interested in such wares are tempted to linger, enchanted
by the rich display of hobby-horses, babies,
and Dutch toys, arranged in artful and gay confusion,
yet half scared by the cross looks of the
withered pantaloon by whom these wares are
superintended. But in the times we write of the
hosiers, glovers, hatters, mercers, milliners, and all
of a hearse, it was calculated to impress all beholders
wit!i a sense of what was meant in Scottish law
Situated in the very heart of the ancient city, it
stood at the north-west corner of the parish church
of St. Giles, and so close to it as to leave only a
narrow footway between the projecting buttresses,
while its tall and gloomy mass extended so far
into the High Street, as to leave the thoroughfare
at that part only 14 feet in breadth. ?Reuben
Butler,? says Scott, writing ere its demolition had
been decreed, ?stood now before the Gothic en-
, by the spudor carccris.?
?
I a collegiate church, and the chapter-house thereof
being of sufficient dimensions, would naturally
lead to the meeting-place of parliaments, though
many were held in Edinburgh long before the
time of James III., especially in the old hall of the
Castle, now degraded into a military hospital.
The first Parliament of James 11. was held in
the latter in 1437 ; in 1438 the second Parliament
was held at Stirling, but in the November of the
same year another in pretonk burgi de Edinburgh,
tnnce of the ancient prison,
which, as is well known to
all men, rears its front in
the very middle of the High
Street, forming, as it were,
the termination to a huge
pile of buildings called the
Luckenbooths, which, for
some inconceivable reason,
our ancestors had jammed
. into the midst of the principzl
stteet of the town,
leaving for passage a narrow
street on the north and on
the south, into which the
. prison opens, a narrow,
cxooked lane, winding betwixt
the high and sombre
walls of the Tolbooth and
the adjacent houses on one
side, and the buttresses and
projections of the old church
upon the other. To give
some gaiety to this sombre
passage (well known by the
name of the Krames), a
number of little booths or
shops, after fhe fashion of
who dealt in the miscellaneous wares now termed
haberdashers? goods, were to be found in this narrow
alley.?
By the year 156r the Tolbooth, or Preforium
burgi de Edinburgi, as it is named in the early Acts
of the Scottish Parliament, had become ruinous,
and on the 6th of February Queen Mary wrote a
letter to the magistrates, charging the Provost to
take it down at once, and meanwhile to provide
accommodation elsewhere for the Lords of Session.
Since the storm of the Reformation the Scottish
revenues had been greatly impaired ; money
and materials were alike
JOHN DOWIE. (After h-uy.)
cobblers? stalls, are plastered, as it were, against
the Gothic projections and abutments, so that it
seemed as if the traders had occupied with
nests-bearing about the same proportion to the
building-every buttress and coign of vantage,
scarce ; hence the magistrates
were anxious, if possible,
to preserve the old
building ; accordingly a new
onewas erected, entirelyapart
froin it, adjoining the southwest
corner of St. Giles?s
church, and the eastern portion
of t!ie old Tolbooth
bore incontestable evidence
of being the work of an age
long anterior to the date of
Queen Mary?s letter, and the
line of demarcation between
the east and west ends of the
edifice is still apparent in all
views of it. The more
ancient portion, which had
on its first floor a large and
deeply-embayed square window,
having rich Gothic
niches on each side, is supposed
to have been at one
time the house of the Pravost
of St. Giles?s church, or some
such appendage to the latter,
while the prebends and
other members of the colleges were accommodated
in edifices on the south side of the church, removed
in 1632 to make way for the present Parliament
House. Thus it is supposed to have been built
about 1466, when James 111. erected St. Giles?s into
EDINBURGH FROM ST CUTHBERT'S TO ST GILE'S
