h is the haunted
mausoleum of Sir George Mackenzie: Bloody Mackenzie, Lord Advocate in
the Covenanting troubles and author of some pleasing sentiments on
toleration. Here, in the last century, an old Heriot's Hospital boy once
harboured from the pursuit of the police. The Hospital is next door to
Greyfriars--a courtly building among lawns, where, on Founder's Day, you
may see a multitude of children playing Kiss-in-the-Ring and Round the
Mulberry-bush. Thus, when the fugitive had managed to conceal himself in
the tomb, his old schoolmates had a hundred opportunities to bring him
food; and there he lay in safety till a ship was found to smuggle him
abroad. But his must have been indeed a heart of brass, to lie all day
and night alone with the dead persecutor; and other lads were far from
emulating him in courage. When a man's soul is certainly in hell, his
body will scarce lie quiet in a tomb, however costly; some time or other
the door must open, and the reprobate come forth in the abhorred
garments of the grave. It was thought a high piece of prowess to knock
at the Lord Advocate's mausoleum and challenge him to appear. "Bluidy
Mackenzie, come oot if ye daur!" sang the foolhardy urchins. But Sir
George had other affairs on hand; and the author of an essay on
toleration continues to sleep peacefully among the many whom he so
intolerantly helped to slay.

For this _infelix campus_, as it is dubbed in one of its own
inscriptions--an inscription over which Dr. Johnson passed a critical
eye--is in many ways sacred to the memory of the men whom Mackenzie
persecuted. It was here, on the flat tombstones, that the Covenant was
signed by an enthusiastic people. In the long arm of the churchyard that
extends to Lauriston, the prisoners from Bothwell Bridge--fed on bread
and water, and guarded, life for life, by vigilant marksmen--lay five
months looking for the scaffold or the plantations. And while the good
work was going forward in the Grassmarket, idlers in Greyfriars might
have heard the throb of the military drums that drowned the voices of
the martyrs. Nor is this all: for down in the corner farthest from Sir
George, there stands a monument, dedicated, in uncouth Covenanting
verse, to all who lost their lives in that contention. There is no
moorsman shot in a snow shower beside Irongray or Co'monell; there is
not one of the two hundred who were drowned off the Orkneys; nor so much
as a poor, over-driven, Covenanting slave i