CHAPTER SECOND.
And thou, great god of aquavitae! Wha sways the empire of this city (When fou we're sometimes capernoity), Be thou prepared, To save us frae that black banditti, The City Guard! Fergusson's _Daft Days._ Captain John Porteous, a name memorable in the traditions of Edinburgh, as well as in the records of criminal jurisprudence, was the son of a citizen of Edinburgh, who endeavoured to breed him up to his own mechanical trade of a tailor.

The youth, however, had a wild and irreclaimable propensity to dissipation, which finally sent him to serve in the corps long maintained in the service of the States of Holland, and called the Scotch Dutch.

Here he learned military discipline; and, returning afterwards, in the course of an idle and wandering life, to his native city, his services were required by the magistrates of Edinburgh in the disturbed year 1715, for disciplining their City Guard, in which he shortly afterwards received a captain's commission.

It was only by his military skill and an alert and resolute character as an officer of police, that he merited this promotion, for he is said to have been a man of profligate habits, an unnatural son, and a brutal husband.

He was, however, useful in his station, and his harsh and fierce habits rendered him formidable to rioters or disturbers of the public peace.
The corps in which he held his command is, or perhaps we should rather say _was,_ a body of about one hundred and twenty soldiers divided into three companies, and regularly armed, clothed, and embodied.