him to Johnson, saying that it was for the sight of his bear, and here Lord Auchinleck, seeing the great man enter, whispered to one of his brethren on the Bench that it was Ursa Major. In the Outer Hall had once sat the ancient Parliament of Scotland. Here it was that Lord Belhaven, at perhaps its last meeting, made that pathetic speech which drew tears from the audience. Here every day during term time there was a very Babel of a Court of Justice. Like Westminster Hall of old it was the tribunal of many judges, as well as the gathering ground of advocates, solicitors, suitors, witnesses, and idlers in general. Here it was that "the Macer shouted with all his well-remembered brazen strength of lungs: "Poor Peter Peebles versus Plainstanes, per Dumtoustie et Tough:—Maister Da-a-niel Dumtoustie." Here it was that a famous but portly wag of later days, "Peter" Robinson, seeing Scott with his tall conical white head passing through, called out to the briefless crowd about the fire-place, "Hush, boys, here comes old Peveril—I see the Peak." Scott looked round and replied, "Ay, ay, my man, as weel Peveril o' the Peak ony clay as Peter o' the Painch" (paunch).[1] Here Thomas Carlyle, a student of the University, not yet fourteen years old, on the afternoon of the November day on which he first saw Edinburgh, "was dragged in to a scene" which he never forgot:
"An immense hall, dimly lighted from the top of the walls, and perhaps with candles burning in it here and there, all in strange chiaroscuro, and filled with what I thought (exaggeratively) a thousand or two of human creatures, all astir in a boundless buzz of talk, and simmering about in every direction, some solitary, some in groups. By degrees I noticed that some were in wig and black gown, some not, but in common clothes, all well dressed; that here and there on the sides of the hall, were little thrones with enclosures, and steps leading up, red-velvet figures sitting in said thrones, and the black-gowned eagerly speaking to them; advocates pleading to judges as I easily understood. How they could be heard in such a grinding din was somewhat a mystery. Higher up on the walls, stuck there like swallows in their nests, sate other humbler figures. These I found were the sources of certain wildly plangent lamentable kinds of sounds or echoes which from time to time pierced the universal noise of feet and voices, and rose unintelligibly above it, as if in the bitterness of incurable woe. Criers of the Court, I gradually came to understand. And this was Themis in her 'Outer House,' such a scene of chaotic din and hurlyburly as I had never figured before."[2]
Here every year, on the evening of the King's birthday, there was a scene of loyal riot. At the cost of the city funds, some fifteen hundred guests, on the invitation of the magistrates, "roaring,
