early and oft-repeated in those days, and when Marjory Bruce died her husband was still only about twenty-three. It was thus that the crown came to the family of the Stewards of Scotland, the Stewarts of modern times: coming with a "lass" as her descendant said long afterwards, and likely to "go with a lass" when it was left to the infant Mary: though this last, with all her misfortunes, was the instrument not of destruction but transformation, and transferred that crown to a more splendid and enlarged dominion. It was in the reign of Marjory's son, the grandson and namesake of the Bruce, and of his successors, that Edinburgh began to be of importance in the country, slowly becoming visible by means of charters and privileges, and soon by records of Parliaments, laws made, and public acts proceeding from the growing city. Robert Bruce, though he had destroyed the castle, granted certain liberties and aids to the burghers, both in repression and in favour pursuing the same idea, with an evident desire to substitute the peaceful progress of the town for the dangerous domination of the fortress. Between that period and the reign of the second Stewart, King Robert III, the castle had already been re-erected and re-destroyed more than once. Its occupation by the English seemed the chief thing dreaded by the Scots, and it was again and again by English hands that the fortifications were restored--such a stronghold and point of defence being evidently of the first importance to invaders, while much less valuable as a means of defence. In the year 1385 the walls must have encircled a large area upon the summit of the rock, the _enceinte_ probably widening, as the arts of architecture and fortification progressed, from the strong and grim eyrie on the edge of the precipice to the wide and noble enclosure, with room for a palace as well as a fortress, into which the great castles of England were growing. The last erection of these often-cast-down walls was made by Edward III on his raid into Scotland, and probably the royal founder of Windsor Castle had given to the enclosure an amplitude unknown before. The Scots king most likely had neither the money nor the habits which made a great royal residence desirable, especially in a spot so easily isolated and so open to attack; but he gave a charter to his burghers of Edinburgh authorising them to build houses within the castle walls, and to pass in and out freely without toll or due--a curious privilege, which must have made the castle a sort of _imperium in imperio_, a town within a town. The little closets of rooms which in a much later and more luxurious age must have sufficed for the royal personages whom fate drove into Edinburgh Castle as a residence, are enough to show how limited were the requirements in point of space of the royal Scots. The room in which James VI of Scotland was born would scarcely be occupied, save under protest, by a housemaid in our days. But indeed the Castle of