[281] Original with Mr. F. Barker. [282] Original in possession of Mr. Alfred Morrison. [283] Original in possession of Mr. Alfred Morrison. CHAPTER XXI IN EDINBURGH 1778-1790. _Aet._ 55-67 On settling in Edinburgh Smith took a house in the Canongate--Panmure House, at the foot of Panmure Close, one of the steep and narrow wynds that descend from the north side of the Canongate towards the base of the Calton Hill; and this house was his home for the rest of his days, and in it he died. The Canongate--the old Court end of the Scottish capital--was still at the close of last century the fashionable residential quarter of the city, although Holyrood had then long lain deserted--as Hamilton of Bangour called it, A virtuous palace where no monarch dwells. The Scottish nobility had their town-houses in its gloomy courts, and great dowagers and famous generals still toiled up its cheerless stairs. Panmure House itself had been the residence of the Panmure family before Smith occupied it, and became the residence of the Countess of Aberdeen after his death. Most of his own more particular friends too--the better aristocracy of letters and science--lived about him here. If it was to Edinburgh, as Gibbon remarks, that "taste and philosophy seemed to have retired from the smoke and hurry of the immense capital of London," it was in the ancient smoke and leisure of the Canongate they found their sanctuary. Robertson flitted out, indeed, to the Grange House; Black--Smith's special crony in this Edinburgh period--to the present Blind Asylum in Nicolson Street, then a country villa; and Adam Ferguson to a place at the Sciennes which, though scarce two miles from the Cross, was thought so outrageously remote by the people of the compact little Edinburgh of those days, that his friends always called it Kamtschatka, as if it lay in the ends of the earth. But Kames and Hailes still lived in New Street, Sir John Dalrymple and Monboddo and many other notabilities in St. John Street, Cullen in the Mint, and Dugald Stewart in the Lothian Hut (the town-house of the Marquis of Lothian) in the Horse Wynd.