When James VI. returned to his native land after fourteen years of reigning in England, he brought with him a group of English nobles. Very anxious must King James have been about the impression that Edinburgh would make on these new friends of his--as anxious as he had been twenty-eight years before when he was bringing back his bride, Anne of Denmark, and wrote to the Provost “for God’s sake see all things are richt at our hamecoming.” This frenzied request applied not only to the street “middens,” for which Edinburgh was so famous then, but also to the hospitalities to be shown. James need have had no fear about the hospitalities, whatever qualms he felt regarding the middens. With the Scotch, hospitality is an instinct; and in Edinburgh they have both time and inclination to obey it. Among the English nobles who attended James in 1617, and who must have wandered curiously about the old capital, and wondered at her long steep street, her tall lands and her mighty castle, and sniffed her odoriferousness superciliously, and fled in their silks and their feathers before the warning cries of “Gardez l’eau!” and who were given the freedom of the city, and whose names are therefore enrolled among her burgesses, was the Earl of Pembroke, the friend of Shakespeare, the supposed hero of the mysterious Sonnets. Had Shakespeare himself been one of Edinburgh’s famous visitors? The obscurity that envelops his life veils this also. Companies of English comedians came to Scotland in 1599, and again in 1601; and Mr. Charles Knight holds that Shakespeare was with this latter company, and that _Macbeth_ is his comment on his Scottish experience. But was he in Edinburgh? It is one of those questions about him that must ever remain unanswered; yet, as the Scotsman said in maintaining the argument that Shakespeare was born in Paisley, “his abeelities would justify the inference.” Other English poets have left clearer records behind them. The year after King James and his courtiers had returned south, Taylor the Water-poet, the “Penniless Pilgrim,” came to Edinburgh; and at the same time Ben Jonson was six months in Scotland, most of which time was spent in the vicinity of Edinburgh. Ben Jonson lived at Leith, and paid his famous week’s visit to Drummond of Hawthornden, and wrote a pastoral drama about Loch Lomond, which no doubt included a rapturous comment on Edinburgh, but which unfortunately perished in the flames when the poet’s house was burnt down after his return home. All the comment Edinburgh can claim from Ben Jonson is the length of his stay there, and the compliments he sent, in a letter to Drummond, to the various friends he had made, and by whom he had been hospitably entertained; but Edinburgh had known how to honour literature, for she had extended to Ben Jonson, during his visit, the public recognition of giving him the freedom of the city.