Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/685

663 EDINBURGH 663 her royal daughter, Queen Mary, and the room in which James VI. of Scotland and I. of England was born. Here also is the Crown Room, in which are deposited the Scottish regalia, or &quot; The Honours of Scotland,&quot; as they are called, along with a beautiful sword of state presented to James IV. by Pope Julius II., and the jewels restored to Scotland on the death of Cardinal York, the last of the Stuarts. The arsenal, a modern building on the west side of the castle rock, is capable of storing 30,000 stand of arms. In the armoury a display of arms of various dates is made; and on the Argyll battery, immediately to the south of St Margaret s Chapel, stands a huge piece of ancient artillery, called Mons Meg, of which repeated mention is made in Scottish history. Holyrood Palace, the venerable abode of Scottish royalty, was originally an abbey of canons regular of the rule of St Augustine, founded by David I. in 1128. The ruined nave of the abbey church still retains portions of the original structure. Conjoined to this is a part of the royal palace erected by James IV. and V., including the apartments occupied by Queen Mary, and the scene of the murder of Rizzio in 1566. The abbey suffered in repeated English invasions. It was sacked and burnt by the earl of Hertford in 1544, and again pillaged and left in ruin by the same invaders in 1547, almost immediately after the accession of Edward VI. to the English throne. In a map of 1544, preserved among the Cotton MSS. in the British Museum, the present north-west tower of the palace is shown standing apart, and only joined to the abbey by a low cloister. Beyond this is an irregular group of buildings, which were replaced at a later date by additions more in accordance with a royal residence. But the whole of this later struc ture was destroyed by fire, while in occupation by the soldiers of Cromwell, in 1650; and the more modern parts of the present building were commenced during the Protectorate, and completed in the reign of Charles II. by Robert Mylne, in accordance with a design of Sir William Bruce of Kinross. They include the picture gallery, 150 feet in length, famous for its fanciful array of 106 mythical portraits of Scottish kings, the reputed descendants of King Fergus I., but also adorned with a remarkable triptych, painted about 1484, containing portraits of James III. and his queen, Margaret of Denmark, and believed to have formed the altar-piece of the collegiate church of the Holy Trinity, founded by the widowed queen of James II. in 1462, and only demolished in 1848. The picture gallery is interestingly associated with festive scenes during the brief presence of Prince Charles Edward in Edinburgh in 1745 ; and in it the elections of representative peers for Scotland take place. The exiled Comte d Artois, after wards Charles X. of France, had apartments granted for the use of himself and the emigrant nobles of his suite, on their escape from the first French Revolution, and they continued to reside in the palace till August 1799. When driven from the French throne by the revolution of 1830, the same unfortunate prince once more found a home in the ancient palace of the Stuarts. In the interval between those two visits it was graced by the presence of George IV. in 1822; and it has been repeatedly occupied for brief periods by Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort. A beautiful fountain, the design of which is a restoration of the ruined fountain in the quadrangle of Linlithgow Palace, stands in the centre of the outer court of Holyrood, md forms a memorial of the interest evinced by Prince Albert in the ancient Scottish palace. The Parliament House, in which the later assemblies of the Scottish estates took place, until the dissolution of the Parliament by the Act of Union of 1707, has ever since been set apart as the place of meeting of the supreme courts of law. The great hall, with its fine open-timbered oaken roof, under which the last Scottish Parliament assembled still stands, and forms the ante-room of the advocates and other practitioners, and of their clients, during the session of the supreme courts. But the surrounding buildings, including the court-rooms, the Advocates and the Signet Libraries, are all modern additions. The Advocates Library is the largest and the most valuable library in Scot land. It was founded in 1682, at the instance of Sir George Mackenzie, king s advocate under Charles II., and then dean of the faculty, and has been augmented by important gifts. It is regarded with just pride as the national library, and is one of the five libraries entitled by the Copyright Act to receive a copy of every work printed in Britain. The number of volumes now included in the collection is estimated to amount to 260,000. The Library of the Society of Writers to the Signet contains upwards of 50,000 volumes, and, although more private in its character, it has always been available for research by literary students. The General Register House for Scotland, which stands at the east end of Princes Street, is an important adjunct to the supreme courts ; and, in its ample provisions for the registry and safe-keeping of all deeds and judicial records, it compares favourably with the system in vogue in England. Not only is there adequate accommodation, in fire-proof chambers, for all Scottish title-deeds, entails, contracts, and mortgages, and for general statistics, including births, deaths, and marriages, but there also are deposited all the ancient national records, the full historical value of which is only now beginning to be generally appreciated. The general record department is in charge of the lord clerk register and keeper of the signet, assisted by a deputy clerk register, a deputy keeper of the records, a curator of the historical department, and other officials. The Royal Institution, a fine structure of the Grecian Doric order, surmounted by a colossal statue of the Queen, executed in stone by Sir John Steell, furnishes official accommodation for the Board of Trustees for Manufactures, and the Board of Fishery, and also for the School of Art and Statue Gallery of the Royal Institution, the Museum of National Antiquities, and the libraries and public meet ings of the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. This beautiful building is thus made the centre of varied intellectual activity, in artistic culture and design, scientific, historical, and archaeological research, as well as in the practical application of the fine arts, and of the newest disclosures in science, to the manufacturing and trading interests of the whole nation. Among those the National Museum of Antiquities claims special attention. The Society of Antiquaries of Scotland was founded in the year 1780 by a body of noblemen and gentlemen, who held their first meetings at the house of the earl of Buchan ; and almost immediately after its founda tion they devoted themselves to the formation of an Archaeological Museum. The history of the early years of the society is a curious commentary on the manners of the Scottish capital a century ago. With the dukes of Montrose and Argyle, the earls of Buchan, Bute, Fife, and Kintore, and many of the leading Scottish gentry amorg its active members, a suitable hall secured for the meetings of the society in the Cowgate was successively exchanged for others in Webster s Close, and Gourlay s Close, Lawn- market the reason assigned for abandoning the latter being that the alley was too narrow to allow of the members reaching the society s hall in their sedan chairs. After passing through various vicissitudes, and occupying more than one hall in the New Town, it was found that the collections of the society had attained to a magnitude and value which rendered it no longer possible for a private society to do justice to them. Archaeological investigations,