There you see the side of Edinburgh that most attracted him. He was no worse than his fellows perhaps, but perhaps he could not stand what they stood. It is said that he once gave as an excuse, “Oh, sirs, anything to forget my poor mother and these aching fingers.” As Mr. H. G. Graham truly says: “It was a poor enough excuse for forgetting himself.” He used to croon over that pleasing little trifle, _The Birks of Invermay_, in Lucky Middlemist’s or elsewhere, and dream of trim rural fields he did not trouble to visit. I have no heart to repeat the melancholy story of his lonely death in the Schelles, hard by the old Darien House at the Bristo Port in 1774, at the age of twenty-four. His interest is as a ghost from the Edinburgh underworld, you catch a glimpse of a more vicious Grub Street. There must have been a circle of broken professional men of all sorts, more or less clever, all needy, all drunken and ready to do anything for a dram. What a crop of anecdotes there was! But no one gathered, and the memory of it passed away with the actors. Local history that chronicled the oddities of Kames or Monboddo refused to chronicle the pranks of lewd fellows of the baser sort. Only when the wastrel happened to be a genius do we piece together in some sort his career. Whatever one says about Fergusson, you never doubt his genius. It is curious how very occasional is the anecdote of this Caledonian Grub Street. Here is rather a characteristic straw which the stream of time has carried down regarding a certain drudge called Stewart. One night, homeless and houseless, he staggered into the ash pit of a primitive steam-engine, and lay down to rest. An infernal din aroused him from his drunken slumber; he saw the furnace opened, grimy black figures stoking the fire and raking the bars of the enormous grate, whilst iron rods and chains clanked around him with infernal din. A tardily awakened conscience hinted where he was. “Good God, has it come to this at last?” he growled in abject terror. Another anecdote, though of a later date, is told in Lockhart’s _Life of Scott_. Constable, the Napoleon of publishers, called the crafty in the _Chaldean Manuscript_, is reported “a most bountiful and generous patron to the ragged tenants of Grub Street.” He gave stated dinners to his “own circle of literary serfs.” At one of these David Bridges, “tailor in ordinary to this northern potentate,” acted as croupier. According to instructions he brought with him a new pair of breeches, and for these Alister Campbell and another ran a race, and yet this same Campbell was editor of _Albyn’s Anthology_, 1816, to which Scott contributed _Jock o’ Hazeldean_, _Pibroch of Donald Dhu_, and better than any, that brilliant piece of extravagance, _Donald Caird’s come again_. Perhaps the story isn’t true, but it is at least significant that Lockhart should tell it.