The entire population, the Canongate included, was probably less than 30,000; but, confined as this population was within such strait limits, obliged to accommodate itself to one such ridgy backbone of principal street, with off-going wynds and closes and but one considerable and low-lying parallel, and having to make up, therefore, by the vertical height of the houses for the impossibility of spreading them out, its compression of itself within the houses must have been exceedingly dense. As the political capital of the nation, the seat of Government and of the Central Law Courts, Edinburgh not only counted a number of families of rank among its habitual residents, but drew into it, for part of every year at least, representatives of the Scottish nobility, and of the lairds of mark and substance, from all the Lowland shires. Only a few of the greatest of these, however, had town mansions of their own, with any semblance of sequestered approaches and adjuncts, whether in the Canongate or the Cowgate. The majority of the nobles and lairds from the country, as well as of the habitual residents of highest rank and means, such as the Senators of the College of Justice, had to be content with the better portions of those several-flatted or many-flatted tenements,—_insulæ_ they would have been called in ancient Rome, but “lands” was and is the special Edinburgh word for them,—which rose at the sides of the High Street or in the wynds and closes that ran thence down the slopes. Distributed through the same “lands” were the families of the “merchants” and the “craftsmen,” the two denominations that composed between them the whole body of the burghers proper. There was a chronic rivalry between these two denominations in the elections to the Town Council and in the management of affairs generally. The “merchants,” whose business was ship-owning, the export and import of goods, and the sale of the imported goods at first hand, affected the superiority on the whole. There were individuals among the “craftsmen,” however, as opulent as any of the “merchants.” This was particularly the case with the craft of the goldsmiths, always a prominent craft in Edinburgh, and there, as in London, combining the trade of money-lending with the more especial arts of gold-working, silver-working, and jewellery, and so allying itself with the merchants and their transactions. Among the other “crafts,” all regularly incorporated in brotherhoods, and each with its annually elected head, called the “deacon” of that craft, were the skinners or leather-dressers, the furriers, the wobsters or weavers, the tailors, the bonnet-makers, the hammermen or smiths and armourers, the waulkers or cloth-dressers, the cordiners or shoemakers, the wrights, the masons, the coopers, the fleshers or butchers, the baxters or bakers, the candle-makers, and the barbers or barber-surgeons. Printing had been introduced into Edinburgh