Such cold fears and calculations were apt to make his writings distasteful in those excited times. The Cevallos article, in which he flatly expressed despair of the vaunted 'regeneration' of Spain, capped the whole. About twenty-five 'persons of consideration' in Edinburgh forbade the _Review_ to enter their doors. The Earl of Buchan, a rather vain and foolish character at the best, did more. He ordered the door of his house in George Street to be set wide open, and the offending number to be laid down on the lobby floor. Then, when all was ready, his lordship solemnly kicked the volume out into the street.
In Scott's _Journal_, April 20, 1829, the death of this eccentric person is noticed: 'Lord Buchan is dead, a person whose immense vanity, bordering upon insanity, obscured, or rather eclipsed, very considerable talents.... I felt something at parting with this old man, though but a trumpery body. He gave me the first approbation I ever obtained from a stranger. His caprice had led him to examine Dr. Adam's class when I, a boy twelve years old, and then in disgrace for some aggravated case of negligence, was called up from a low bench, and recited my lesson with some spirit and appearance of feeling the poetry (it was the apparition of Hector's ghost in the _Aeneid_) amid the noble Earl's applause. I was very proud of this at the time.'
The Calton Jail--Opening of Waterloo Place--Removal of Old Tolbooth--Scott purchases Land at Abbotsford--Professional Income--Correspondence with Byron--Anecdote of the 'Flitting' from Ashestiel.
In 1808-10 the new prison on the Calton Hill was built. It stands on a magnificent site, the old 'Doo Craig.' All will agree with Lord Cockburn's remark on the 'undoubted bad taste' of devoting that glorious eminence, which ought to have had one of our noblest buildings, to a jail. The east end of Princes Street was at that time closed in by a line of mean houses running north and south. Beyond this all to the east was occupied by the burying-ground, of which the south portion is still maintained. The only access to the hill on this side was to go down to the foot of Leith Street, and then climb 'the steep, narrow, stinking, spiral street still to be seen there.' The necessity for an easy access to the jail led to the construction of Waterloo Bridge. The blocking houses were, of course, removed, and a level road carried along to the Calton Hill. 'The effect,' says the author of the _Memorials_, 'was like the drawing up of the curtain in a theatre. But the bridge would never have been where it is except for the jail. The lieges were taxed for the prison; and luckily few of them were aware that they were also taxed for the bridge as the prison's access. In all this magnificent improvement, which in truth gave us the hill and all its decoration, there was scarcely one particle of prospective taste. The houses alongside the bridge were made handsome by the speculators for their own interest; but the general effect of the new level opening into Princes Street, and its consequences, were planned or foreseen by nobody.'