Niddry Street stands nearly on the site of Niddry’s Wynd, of many memories, two of which throw light on the æsthetic side of the social life of Edinburgh. It was here that Lord Grange, a Lord of Session, lived. He had spirited his wife away to the wilds of the Hebrides, where he kept her in captivity till she lost her reason and died; but none the less was he deeply shocked at the immorality of the joyous Jacobite, Allan Ramsay, when he began the first circulating library in Edinburgh. Here St. Cecilia’s Hall still stands. This once beautiful oval concert room was built by Robert Mylne the Master Mason in 1762,[42] after the model of the Theatre Farnese at Parma, and here the music-loving _élite_ of Edinburgh gathered weekly, to listen and criticise. You were lost in Edinburgh, an English visitor complained, unless you were competent to talk about music all night, not only as an art, but as a science. In Anchor Close,[2] on the opposite side of the High Street, was “Dawney Douglas’s Tavern,” where Burns drank and jested among the “Crochallan Fencibles.” Old Stamp Office Close,[43] almost next to it, has had a varied career. The first scene in its history is the brightest: “a long procession of sedans, containing Lady Eglintoune and her daughters, devolve from the Close, and proceed to the Assembly rooms ... eight beautiful women, conspicuous for their stature and carriage, all dressed in the splendid though formal fashions of that period, and inspired at once with the dignity of birth and the consciousness of beauty.”[3] The next scene in the Stamp Office Close is when it was the meeting-place of the famous Poker Club, whose members included all the _literati_ of Edinburgh. In its early days this Club--a Jacobite institution--had an entrance fee of half-a-crown, and its members supped at fourpence-halfpenny per head; but in its Stamp Office Close period it became more showy and less select. Stamp Office Close, like other closes in the Old Town, was once the scene of mock-royal state, when the Earl of Leven was Lord High Commissioner, and held his levées at this same tavern--Fortune’s Tavern--where the Poker Club had been wont to meet. And the last scene of all is one of squalid ghastliness; for it was at the head of Old Stamp Office Close that, in April 1812, a band of young hooligans, who had spent a night in riot and murder, were hanged on a gallows on the scene of their crimes.