Once in a while, too, an advocate in wig and gown, hand upon mouth, full of pregnant nods, sweeps to and fro in the arcade listening to an agent; and at certain regular hours a whole tide of lawyers hurries across the space.
The Parliament Close has been the scene of marking incidents in Scottish history.

Thus, when the Bishops were ejected from the Convention in 1688, 'all fourteen of them gathered together with pale faces and stood in a cloud in the Parliament Close:' poor episcopal personages who were done with fair weather for life! Some of the west-country Societarians standing by, who would have 'rejoiced more than in great sums' to be at their hanging, hustled them so rudely that they knocked their heads together.

It was not magnanimous behaviour to dethroned enemies; but one, at least, of the Societarians had groaned in the _boots_, and they had all seen their dear friends upon the scaffold.

Again, at the 'woeful Union,' it was here that people crowded to escort their favourite from the last of Scottish parliaments: people flushed with nationality, as Boswell would have said, ready for riotous acts, and fresh from throwing stones at the author of 'Robinson Crusoe' as he looked out of window.
[Picture: John Knox's House in the High Street] One of the pious in the seventeenth century, going to pass his _trials_ (examinations as we now say) for the Scottish Bar, beheld the Parliament Close open and had a vision of the mouth of Hell.

This, and small wonder, was the means of his conversion.