Taylor the Water-poet has well repaid the pleasure his visit to Edinburgh evidently gave his amiable soul, for he has left not only many a kindly comment, but a legacy of a vivid description of the Edinburgh of that day,--the Edinburgh, therefore, that Ben Jonson saw, and that James VI. showed to his English guests.[53] Almost a hundred years later Defoe was in Edinburgh, editing the _Edinburgh Courant_. This must have been after his release from the State prosecution that followed his publication “The Shortest Way with Dissenters,” and that brought him to prison, the pillory, and temporary ruin. He is supposed to have lived in Salamander Land in the High Street (so called because it survived fires to right of it and fires to left of it). Wilson throws doubt on this; but Defoe must have lived somewhere, and it may as well have been in Salamander Land as anywhere else,--especially as the land is now no longer existing to deny it. Defoe has left his comment, quoted by Mr. Robert Chambers in his _Walks in Edinburgh_. The Old Town, he said, “presents the unique appearance of _one vast castle_.” Steele visited Edinburgh in 1717, and gave the mendicants of the city a supper in Lady Stair’s Close, and afterwards said he had “drunk enough of native drollery to compose a comedy.” Twelve years later the poet Gay spent a few weeks in Edinburgh. He came in the cortège of his patroness, that witty and eccentric Duchess of Queensberry who had already been sung to and of by Pope and Prior. It is said that Gay lived in an attic opposite Queensberry House in the Canongate; but that he wrote the “Beggar’s Opera” there is denied by Mr. Robert Chambers as an “entirely gratuitous assumption.” But there was an alehouse as well as an attic opposite the home of his patroness, and Mr. Chambers evidently did not think it an entirely gratuitous assumption that the poet spent much of his time at “Jennie Ha’s,” drinking the claret from the butt for which she was so famed. On the first flat of “Creech’s Land,” at the end of the Luckenbooths, was Allan Ramsay’s circulating library, the rendezvous of all the Edinburgh _literati_. Here, during the weeks of Gay’s visit, might often have been seen “a pleasant little man in a tye wig.” This was the author of-- How happy could I be with either, Were t’other dear charmer away! who had walked up from the Canongate to enjoy a friendly interchange of ideas with the author of-- Wae’s me! For baith I canna get, To ane by law we’re stented; Then I’ll draw cuts, and take my fate, And be with ane contented. And Allan Ramsay would point out to Gay the leading citizens as they lounged and gossiped round the Cross opposite the library; and Gay in his turn would ask for explanations of Scottish words and customs, that he might, on his return, be able to enlighten Pope, who was already an admirer of the “Gentle Shepherd.”