Stanza XXV. line 521. ‘The Borough, or Common Moor of Edinburgh, was of very great extent, reaching from the southern walls of the city to the bottom of Braid Hills. It was anciently a forest; and, in that state, was so great a nuisance, that the inhabitants of Edinburgh had permission granted to them of building wooden galleries, projecting over the street, in order to encourage them to consume the timber; which they seem to have done very effectually. When James IV mustered the array of the kingdom there, in 1513, the Borough- moor was, according to Hawthornden, “a field spacious, and delightful by the shade of many stately and aged oaks.” Upon that, and similar occasions, the royal standard is traditionally said to have been displayed from the Hare Stane, a high stone, now built into the wall, on the left hand of the highway leading towards Braid, not far from the head of Bruntsfield Links. The Hare Stane probably derives its name from the British word
Stanza XXVI. lines 535-538. The proper names in these lines are Hebrides; East Lothian; Redswire, part of Carter Fell near Jedburgh; and co. of Ross.
Stanza XXVII. line 557. ‘Seven culverins so called, cast by one Borthwick.’-SCOTT.
Stanza XXVIII. line 566. ‘Each ensign intimated a different rank.’-SCOTT.
line 567. As illustrating an early mode of English encampment, Scott quotes from Patten’s description of what he saw after Pinkie, 1547:-
‘As they had no pavilions, or round houses, of any commendable compass, so wear there few other tentes with posts, as the used manner of making is; and of these few also, none of above twenty foot length, but most far under; for the most part all very sumptuously beset, (after their fashion,) for the love of France, with fleur-de- lys, some of blue buckeram, some of black, and some of some other colours. These white ridges, as I call them, that, as we stood on Fauxsyde Bray, did make so great muster toward us, which I did take then to be a number of tentes, when we came, we found it a linen drapery, of the coarser cambryk in dede, for it was all of canvas sheets, and wear the tenticles, or rather cabyns and couches of their soldiers; the which (much after the common building of their country beside) had they framed of four sticks, about an ell long a piece, whereof two fastened together at one end aloft, and the two endes beneath stuck in the ground, an ell asunder, standing in fashion like the bowes of a sowes yoke; over two such bowes (one, as it were, at their head, the other at their feet), they stretched a sheet down on both sides, whereby their cabin became roofed like a ridge, but skant shut at both ends, and not very close beneath on the sides, unless their sticks were the shorter, or their wives the more liberal to lend them larger napery; howbeit, when they had lined them, and stuff’d them so thick with straw, with the weather as it was not very cold, when they wear ones couched, they were as warm as they had been wrapt in horses dung.’-PATTEN’S
line 578. ‘The well-known arms of Scotland. If you will believe Boethius and Buchanan, the double tressure round the shield (mentioned above, vii. 141),
Stanza XXIX. lines 595-9. Cp. the ‘rash, fruitless war,’ &c., of Thomson’s ‘Edwin and Eleonora,’ i. 1, and Cowper’s ‘Task,’ v. 187:-
Stanza XXX. This description of Edinburgh is one of the passages mentioned by Mr. Ruskin in ‘Modern Painters’ as illustrative of Scott’s quick and certain perception of the relations of form and colour. ‘Observe,’ he says, ‘the only hints at form given throughout are in the somewhat vague words “ridgy,” “ massy,” “close,” and “high,” the whole being still more obscured by modern mystery, in its most tangible form of smoke. But the
