the house of Stuart, for it was told of her that a portrait of Prince Charlie was hung in her room so that it should be the first thing that met her sight in the mornings. And the only request she ever refused her son (10th Lord Eglintoun) was when he wished her to walk as a peeress in the Coronation of George III. She was a patroness of poets--if they were Tories (did she ever remember those verses inside a flute?); and to her Allan Ramsay, as Jacobite at heart as ever she was, dedicated his _Gentle Shepherd_. It was not in Stamp Office Close, but at her dower house, Auchans Castle, near Irvine, that she received Boswell and Johnson on their return from the Hebrides. She was then in her eighty-fifth year, and she and the lexicographer found their Church and State principles congenial, and the old lady told him she might have been his mother, and now adopted him. She kissed him at parting, which, it is said, made a lasting impression on him. The next curiosity the old Countess adopted was a large collection of rats, which she also succeeded in taming. To the Jacobite gentlewomen of Edinburgh we owe many of our best-known Scottish songs. Baroness Nairne was of the old Jacobite and Episcopalian family of the Oliphants of Gask, and lived at Duddingston. Her house still stands, and is called Nairne Lodge. Mrs. Cockburn, the author of “The Flowers of the Forest,” lived at one time in a close on the Castle Hill, and then on the first floor of a house at the end of Crichton Street, with windows looking along Potterrow. She, it may be remembered, was a friend of Scott’s mother, and wrote a prophetic letter about him when he was a child of six. Adam Smith, after he came to Edinburgh in 1778 as Commissioner of Customs, lived for twelve years, till he died in 1790, in Panmure’s Close at the foot of the Canongate, and he is buried in Canongate Churchyard. David Hume, born in Edinburgh in 1711, was one of her notable inhabitants through nearly the whole of the eighteenth century. He was a rolling stone, for from 1751 to 1753 his home was in Riddle’s Land; thence he flitted to Jack’s Land, Canongate, was there for nine years, and deserted that for James’s Court. After this, like every one else, he joined in the rush to the New Town. CHAPTER VI SOME FAMOUS VISITORS, AND THEIR COMMENTS Fareweel, Edinburgh, and a’ your daughters fair; Your Palace in the shelter’d glen, your Castle in the air; Your rocky brows, your grassy knowes, and eke your mountains bauld; Were I to tell your beauties a’, my tale wad ne’er be tauld. Now fareweel, Edinburgh, where happy I hae been; Fareweel, Edinburgh, Caledonia’s Queen! Prosperity to Edinburgh, wi’ every rising sun, And blessings be on Edinburgh, till Time his race has run. _Scottish Ballad._[52]