Giles, until the year 1640, when the present
Parliament House was completed. Being no longer required for such a
purpose, it was set apart by the Town Council on the 24th December 1641
as a distinct church, with the name of the Tolbooth parish, and
therefore could not have derived the name from its vicinity to the
Tolbooth, as usually stated.]
Gloomy and dismal as it was, the situation in the centre of the High
Street rendered it so particularly well-aired, that when the plague laid
waste the city in 1645, it affected none within these melancholy
precincts. The Tolbooth was removed, with the mass of buildings in which
it was incorporated, in the autumn of the year 1817. At that time the
kindness of his old schoolfellow and friend, Robert Johnstone, Esquire,
then Dean of Guild of the city, with the liberal acquiescence of the
persons who had contracted for the work, procured for the Author of
Waverley the stones which composed the gateway, together with the door,
and its ponderous fastenings, which he employed in decorating the
entrance of his kitchen-court at Abbotsford. "To such base offices may we
return." The application of these relies of the Heart of Mid-Lothian to
serve as the postern-gate to a court of modern offices, may be justly
ridiculed as whimsical; but yet it is not without interest, that we see
the gateway through which so much of the stormy politics of a rude age,
and the vice and misery of later times, had found their passage, now
occupied in the service of rural economy.
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