The trades of Edinburgh in those days were generally conducted by men of small account; but there was one art carried on upon a scale which raised its practitioners to the grade of merchants. This was the craft of the goldsmiths. The habits of the upper classes, partaking so much of an ill-supported ostentation, made this comparatively a great trade. We have all heard much of George Heriot, who was made goldsmith to the queen in 1597, and who, afterwards transplanting himself to London, there completed the fortune which became the means of founding his celebrated hospital. But there was a contemporary Edinburgh goldsmith of even greater importance, in the person of Thomas Foulis, who seems to have been to King James what the Bank of England was to William Pitt two hundred years later. It was a loan from Thomas which enabled the king to march against the rebellious Catholic lords at Aberdeen in 1593. He stood creditor to the king, in the ensuing year, for the sum of £14,598 Scots, and for this James lodged with him two gold drinking-cups, amounting in all to the weight of fifteen pounds five ounces. In May 1601, the royal debt to Thomas amounted to the enormous sum of £180,000 Scots, and a parliamentary arrangement had to be made for its payment. One of the benefits which Thomas Foulis derived from being the king’s creditor to so large an amount, was a grant of the lead-mines of Lanarkshire, which he worked with good result, and handed ultimately to his granddaughter, who married James Hope, the ancestor of the noble family of Hopetoun. Thus, it will be observed, what constituted, and yet in part constitutes, the fortune of the Earls of Hopetoun, came originally from one of our Parliament Close goldsmiths.