Once the “seizers” got emphatically the worst of it. Dr. Archibald Pitcairne, poet, scholar, Jacobite, latitudinarian, was not in sympathy in many points with the Edinburgh of Queen Anne’s day, but he loved his glass as well as any of them. He had sent for some claret one Sunday forenoon, which the seizers had confiscated ere it reached his thirsty palate. The wit was furious, but he had his revenge. He doctored a few bottles of the wine with some strong drug of disagreeable operation, and then he procured its capture by the seizers. As he expected, the stuff went speedily down their throats; the result was all he could have wished. But Burnet came too late for all this, and a nickname was the only punishment for him and his fellows. He was also a prominent member of the Lawnmarket Club—the popular name for certain residents who met every morning about seven to discuss the news of the day, and to take their morning draught of brandy together. Nothing was done in old Edinburgh without the accompaniment of a dram; the “meridian” followed the “morning” (the very bells of St. Giles that chime the hour were known as the “gill” bells), as a matter of course, and both only sustained the citizen for the serious business of the evening. True, a great deal of the drinking was claret, indeed, huge pewter jugs or stoups of that wine were to be seen moving up and down the streets of Edinburgh in all directions, as ale jugs in London. When a ship arrived from Bordeaux the claret hogsheads were carted through the streets, and vessels were filled from the spigot at a very cheap rate. There was always a native-brewed “tippeny.” The curtain was already falling on old Edinburgh ere whisky was introduced as a regular article of consumption. A thin veil of decency was thrown over the dissipation; it was made a matter of aggravation in the charge against a gentleman of rank that he had allowed his company to get drunk in his house before it was dark in the month of July. The peculiar little separate boxes wherein the guests revelled in the Edinburgh taverns threw an air of secrecy and mystery over the proceedings. One of the most famous taverns was Johnny Dowie’s, in Libberton’s Wynd, where George IV. Bridge now stands. Its memories of Burns and Fergusson and a hundred other still famous names make it the _Mermaid_ of Edinburgh. It had many baser clients. A visitor opens a door and finds a room, the floor covered with snoring lads. “Oh,” explains mine host with a tolerant grin, “just twa-three o’ Sir Wullie’s drucken clerks!” (Sir William Forbes the banker is meant). “The clartier the cosier,” says a wicked old Scots apothegm. Wolfe, the hero of Quebec, says that it was not till after Christmas, when the better folk had come into it from the country, that Edinburgh was “in all its perfection of dirt and gaiety.” There could not have been anything like sufficient water wherewith to wash, and all sorts of filth were hurled