His last lodging was in ‘the first house in the turnpike above the
tavern,’ and occupied some few cubic feet of space, probably about
twelve feet above the existing causeway blocks of Hunter Square, an
entirely vanished pile of tall, substantial, over-populated masonry,
part of the crest of the High Street once, standing within a quarter
of a mile of the vanished garden in which Darnley was found dead in
his shirt without mark of violence, still nearer to the site of the
vanished house in which Walter Scott was born, and to the vacant
air-space once filled by Johnny Dowie’s vanished tavern, in which
during his Edinburgh sojourn Robert Burns was wont to make merry with
select friends.
The records of the Commissary Court show that Buchanan left no property
except £100 of his Crossraguel pension (gifted by Queen Mary, and
withheld as often and as long as he could by the Earl of Cassilis),
which had been in arrear from the previous Whitsunday. His ‘Inventar’
exhibits him in his true character of an ancient philosopher, whether
Stoic or not. The civic authorities of Edinburgh, who from time
immemorial have been ready and willing to bury scholars, buried his
body the day after his death at the public expense. The ground of
Greyfriars, one of the spoils of the Reformation, was then being turned
into a burying-ground, and Buchanan was the ‘first person of celebrity’
buried in it. The exact spot of his sepulture is, however, in doubt,
though a small tablet was put up by a humble blacksmith to mark where
it is believed to be--a tribute of hero-worship like to that in
Parliament Square which is supposed to mark the burial-place of Knox.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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