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‘Wat ye wha I met yestreen,

Coming down the street, my jo?

My mistress in her tartan screen,

Fu’ bonny, braw, and sweet, my jo.

“My dear,” quoth I, “thanks to the night,

That never wished a lover ill,

Since ye’re out o’ your mother’s sight,

Let’s tak’ a walk up to the hill.”’

A memory of these Sunday promenadings here calls me to introduce what I have to say regarding a man of whom there used to be a strong popular remembrance in Edinburgh.

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The cleverly executed History of Edinburgh, published by Arnot in 1779, and which to this day has not been superseded, gives some respectability to a name which tradition would have otherwise handed down to us as only that of an eccentric gentleman, of remarkably scarecrow figure, and the subject of a few bon-mots.

He was the son of a Leith shipmaster, named Pollock, and took the name of Arnot from a small inheritance in Fife. Many who have read his laborious work will be little prepared to hear that it was written when the author was between twenty and thirty; and that, antiquated as his meagre figure looks in Kay’s Portraits, he was at his death, in 1786, only thirty-seven. His body had been, in reality, made prematurely old by a confirmed asthma, accompanied by a cough, which he himself said would carry him off like a rocket some day, when a friend remarked, with reference to his known latitudinarianism: ‘Possibly, Hugo, in the contrary direction.’