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Boswell ceased to be a citizen of Edinburgh in 1785, when he was pleased to venture before the English bar. He is little remembered amongst the elder inhabitants of our city; but the late Mr William Macfarlane, the well-known small-debt judge, told me that there was this peculiarity about him—it was impossible to look in his face without being moved by the comicality which always reigned upon it. He was one of those men whose very look is provocative of mirth. Mr Robert Sym, W.S., who died in 1844, at an advanced age, remembered being at parties in this house in Boswell’s time.

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Before James’s Court was built, its site was occupied by certain closes, in one of which dwelt Lord Fountainhall, so distinguished as an able, liberal, and upright judge, and still more so by his industrious habits as a collector of historical memorabilia, and of the decisions of the Court of Session. Though it is considerably upwards of a century since Lord Fountainhall died,[45] a traditionary anecdote of his residence in this place has been handed down till the present time by a surprisingly small number of persons. The mother of the late Mr Gilbert Innes of Stow was a daughter of his lordship’s son, Sir Andrew Lauder, and she used to describe to her children the visits she used to pay to her venerable grandfather’s house, situated, as she said, where James’s Court now stands. She and her sister, a little girl like herself, always went with their maid on the Saturday afternoons, and were shown into the room where the aged judge was sitting—a room covered with gilt leather,[46] and containing many huge presses and cabinets, one of which was ornamented with a death’s-head at the top. After amusing themselves for an hour or two with his lordship, they used to get each a shilling from him, and retire to the anteroom, where, as Mrs Innes well recollected, the waiting-maid invariably pounced upon their money, and appropriated it to her own use. It is curious to think that the mother of a gentlewoman living in 1839 (for only then did Miss Innes of Stow leave this earthly scene) should have been familiar with a lawyer who entered at the bar soon after the Restoration (1668), and acted as counsel for the unfortunate Earl of Argyll in 1681; a being of an age as different in every respect from the present as the wilds of North America are different from the long-practised lands of Lothian or Devonshire.