INVERESK. — ROSLYN-CASTLE. 79 



Romans as a praetorian station. The air is considered of a quality so salu- 

 brious, as to have acquired for it the distinctive appellation of the Lothian 

 MontpeUer.* 



A chapel of great antiquity, dedicated to Our Lady of Loretto, but now 

 replaced by a less hallowed edifice, appears to have been much resorted to in 

 former times by pilgrims as a shrine of uncommon sanctity, and where absolution 

 was to be purchased on more advantageous terms than any where else on the 

 coast. But the Reformation, which spared neither the shrine, nor respected 

 the numerous vouchers in favour of its holy confessors, denounced it as a 

 pernicious haunt of superstition, and converted its materials to the more useful 

 accommodation of a prison ! For this rash act, the good people of Musselburgh 

 are said to have been for some time afterwards annually excommunicated by the 

 court of Rome ; but which, on the contrary, ought to have commended an act 

 which transformed the chapel into a place of real, instead of imaginary, penance ; 

 and which, if less attractive to the pilgrim, imposed, at least, a salutary restraint 

 upon the licentious. If several chapels, now so much frequented by the idle 

 and superstitious of other countries, were to undergo a similar transformation, 

 the true interests of society would be promoted, and the broad catalogue of 

 ignorance and fanaticism happily abridged. — But this is a subject with which 

 it is not our province to interfere. 



The principal antiquities discovered in this vicinity, are various coins, an 

 altar with the inscription " ApolUni Granio" and a bath of Roman construc- 

 tion. A causeway, also, leading in the direction of Borthwick, but now obhte- 

 rated by the plough, gives further testimony to the place as having been a 

 favourite port and station long occupied and embellished by the Romans. 



Of the numerous mansions and villas with which the banks of the Esk are 

 so strikingly ornamented, as well as of the beautiful scenery which they com- 

 mand, and the local and historical interest with which they are all, more or 

 less, connected, our account must necessarily be brief. On some of these, 

 however, time, history, and tradition, have thrown so many peculiar attractions, 

 that we turn at once to the classic localities of Roslyn and Hawthornden, as 

 to the more striking features of a landscape over which the genius of poetry 

 and romance has shed hereditary charms. Roslyn Castle — the subject of the 

 fine national melody of that name, crowns a small peninsula over the Esk, 

 and presents, in its isolated and precipitous site — greatly enhanced by the 

 romantic scenery of which it forms the centre — one of the most beautiful and 



* Notwitlistanding this long-established opinion, however, the cholera occasioned a deplorable mortality 

 ill these parts within the last two years; but this, it is to be observed, prevailed only in the lower divisions. 



