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I lately inspected Hume’s cheerful and elegant mansion in James’s Court, and found it divided amongst three or four tenants in humble life, each possessing little more than a single room. It was amusing to observe that what had been the dining-room and drawing-room towards the north were each provided with one of those little side oratories which have been described elsewhere as peculiar to a period in Edinburgh house-building, being designed for private devotion. Hume living in a house with two private chapels!

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It appears that one of the immediately succeeding leaseholders of Hume’s house in James’s Court was James Boswell. Mr Burton has made this tolerably clear (Life of Hume, ii. 137), and he proceeds to speculate on the fact of Boswell having there entertained his friend Johnson. ‘Would Boswell communicate the fact, or tell what manner of man was the landlord of the habitation into which he had, under the guise of hospitality, entrapped the arch-intolerant? Who shall appreciate the mental conflict which Boswell may have experienced on this occasion?’ It appears, however, that by the time when Johnson visited Boswell in James’s Court, the latter had removed into a better and larger mansion right below and on the level of the court—namely, that now (1846) occupied by Messrs Pillans as a printing-office. This was an extraordinary house in its day; for it consisted of two floors connected by an internal stair. Here it was that the Ursa Major of literature stayed for a few days, in August 1773, while preparing to set out to the Hebrides, and also for some time after his return. Here did he receive the homage of the trembling literati of Edinburgh; here, after handling them in his rough manner, did he relax in play with little Miss Veronica, whom Boswell promised to consider peculiarly in his will for showing a liking to so estimable a man. What makes all this evident is a passage in a letter of Samuel himself to Mrs Thrale (Edinburgh, August 17), where he says: ‘Boswell has very handsome and spacious rooms, level with the ground on one side of the house, and on the other four stories high.’ Boswell was only tenant of the mansion. It affords a curious idea of the importance which formerly attached to some of these Old Town residences, when we learn that this was part of the entailed estate of the Macdowalls of Logan, one of whom sold it, by permission of an act of parliament, to redeem the land-tax upon his country property.