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The exertions of Drummond at length procured an act (1767) for extending the royalty of the city over the northern fields; and a bridge was then erected to connect these with the elder city. The scheme was at first far from popular. The exposure to the north and east winds was felt as a grievous disadvantage, especially while houses were few. So unpleasant even was the North Bridge considered that a lover told a New-Town mistress—to be sure only in an epigram—that when he visited her, he felt as performing an adventure not much short of that of Leander. The aristocratic style of the place alarmed a number of pockets, and legal men trembled lest their clients and other employers should forget them if they removed so far from the centre of things as Princes Street and St Andrew Square. Still, the move was unavoidable, and behoved to be made.

It is curious to cast the eye over the beautiful city which now extends over this district, the residence of as refined a mass of people as could be found in any similar space of ground upon earth, and reflect on what the place was a hundred years ago. The bulk of it was a farm, usually called Wood’s Farm, from its tenant (the father of a clever surgeon, well known in Edinburgh in the last age under the familiar appellation of Lang Sandy Wood). Henry Mackenzie, author of the Man of Feeling, who died in 1831, remembered shooting snipes, hares, and partridges about that very spot to which he alludes at the beginning of the paper on Nancy Collins in the Mirror (July 1779): ‘As I walked one evening, about a fortnight ago, through St Andrew Square, I observed a girl meanly dressed,’ &c. Nearly along the line now occupied by Princes Street was a rough enclosed road, called the Lang Gait or Lang Dykes, the way along which Claverhouse went with his troopers in 1689, when he retired in disgust from the Convention, with the resolution of raising a rebellion in the Highlands. On the site of the present Register House was a hamlet or small group of houses called Mutrie’s Hill; and where the Royal Bank now stands was a cottage wherein ambulative citizens regaled themselves with fruit and curds and cream. Broughton, which latterly has been surprised and swamped by the spreading city, was then a village, considered as so far afield that people went to live in it for the summer months, under the pleasing idea that they had got into the country. It is related that Whitefield used to preach to vast multitudes on the spot which by-and-by became appropriated for the Theatre Royal. Coming back one year, and finding a playhouse on the site of his tub, he was extremely incensed. Could it be, as Burns suggests,