Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 27, 2025
The undaunted and self-denied manner in which he sacrificed himself to redeem his error, and accomplish my escape from the Tolbooth Church, you must have heard of all Scotland rang with it. It was a gallant and extraordinary deed All men spoke of it all men, even those who most condemned the habits and crimes of this self-devoted man, praised the heroism of his friendship.
It would seem that this had been the first of their pilgrimages of sorrow; for they stood some time in a row at the foot of the tolbooth stair, looking up at the remains, and wondering, with tears in their eyes, which were those they had come to see.
Neither the two gentlemen who conversed with the rioters at the Tolbooth, nor those who were sent out by the magistrates to see if they knew any of them, could say they had ever seen any one of them before, though the flames of the fire at the Tolbooth door rendered it as light as noonday; so that it was generally believed no citizen acted any principal part in the tragedy; though, indeed, it is certain that many of the burgesses and inhabitants of Edinburgh, led by curiosity, went to the streets to behold the surprising boldness and incredible extravagance of the scene.
Ratcliffe, among other escapes from justice, was released by the Porteous mob when under sentence of death; and he was again under the same predicament, when the Highlanders made a similar jail-delivery in 1745. He was too sincere a whig to embrace liberation at the hands of the Jacobites, and in reward was made one of the keepers of the Tolbooth. So at least runs constant tradition.
But it is not only pipers who have vanished, many a solid bulk of masonry has been likewise spirited into the air. Here, for example, is the shape of a heart let into the causeway. This was the site of the Tolbooth, the Heart of Midlothian, a place old in story and namefather to a noble book.
With two or three old friends I went into the Tolbooth to see the play for play it was, I must confess, in town Inneraora, when justice was due to a man whose name by ill-luck was not Campbell, or whose bonnet-badge was not the myrtle stem. The Tolbooth hall was, and is to this day, a spacious high-ceiled room, well lighted from the bay-side.
Accordingly, he so set himself, that Mungo Robeson consented to leave the keys of the tolbooth with him; and for several nights everything was so managed that he had no reason to suspect what my wife and I were plotting; for he being of a modest and retiring nature, never spoke to her when she parted from me, save when she thanked him as he let her out; and that she did not do every night lest it should grow into a habit of expectation with him, and cause him to remark when the civility was omitted.
That night the mob broke into the Tolbooth, the prison, commonly called the Heart of Midlothian, dragged the wretched Porteous from the chimney in which he had concealed himself, and carried him off to the Grassmarket, where, as the leader of the rioters, a tall man dressed in woman's clothes said he had spilled the blood of so many innocents. "Let no man hurt him," continued the speaker.
Half Edinburgh was outside the Tolbooth, armed and furious, their one demand for the person of Porteous, their one cry for his life. The tale was strange enough to seem incredible even to minds more sober than those of Porteous and his companions, but it was perfectly true. Edinburgh had risen in the most mysterious way.
And true it is, that he could repose me in that nasty, stinking hole, the Canongate Tolbooth, from which your mother drew me out the Lord reward her for it! or to that cold, unbieldy, marine place of the Bass Rock, which, with my delicate kist, would be fair ruin to me. But I will be valiant in my Master's service.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking