only considered dangerous--it was unfashionable. And as
there was not accommodation for a tenth part of the inhabitants in the
houses of two, or at most three, storeys which prevailed about the time
of the Reformation, the architects of the Restoration period commenced
the erection of those towering tenements, or _lands_,--twelve, fourteen,
and even sixteen storeys high,--for which Edinburgh has been celebrated
among the cities of Europe. Thus the families of the Scottish metropolis
were packed together, one on the top of the other, like herrings in a
barrel, in those quaint old houses, with their grim timber fronts, their
crow-stepped gables and dormer windows, that remain even until to-day to
show us the circumstances under which our fathers lived and loved.

In circumstances such as these, domestic comfort and the sweet seclusion
of home were out of the question. So criminally overcrowded was the town
that well-born gentlemen and their households were content with two or
three rooms, wherein all the manifold duties of social and domestic life
had to be performed. Robert Chambers, in his charming _Traditions of
Edinburgh_, relates how the family of Mr. Bruce of Kennet, a leading
lawyer, afterwards raised to the Bench, lived in a house of three rooms
and a kitchen--a parlour, a consulting-room for Mr. Bruce, and a
bedroom. The children, with their maid, had beds laid down for them at
night in their father's room, the housemaid slept under the kitchen
dresser, and the one man-servant was turned at night out of the house.
Even a more striking example of the lack of accommodation was to be
found in connection with the household arrangements of Mr. Kerr, the
eminent goldsmith of Parliament Square, who 'stowed his _menage_ in a
couple of small rooms above his booth-like shop, plastered against the
wall of St. Giles Church; the nursery and kitchen, however, being in a
cellar under the level of the street, where the children are said to
have rotted off like sheep.... The town was, nevertheless, a funny,
familiar, compact, and not unlikable place. Gentle and semple living
within the compass of a single close, or even a single stair, knew and
took an interest in each other.'

Such was the kind of home to which Allan Ramsay brought his bride. Two
rooms, with a closet and a kitchen, for many a long year were the extent
of their household accommodation. Such a state of things was not
favourable to the development of the virtues pu