DECEMBER 291 



saint bearing the name of Enoch. Of the four Enochs 

 who figure in Holy Writ none was eligible for canonisa- 

 tion not even he who was ' seventh from Adam ' and 

 father of Methuselah for canonisation is a Christian 

 doctrine, and these all lived before Christ. What 

 between the preposterous orthography of the Goidhelic 

 branch of Celts and the happy-go-lucky spelling of 

 mediaeval scribes, the identity, nay the very sex, of 

 our St. Enoch has been so successfully obscured that a 

 clue thereto can only be picked up in the city records 

 of Glasgow in the sixteenth century, wherein mention 

 occurs of ' San Theneukes Kirk,' which name, appear- 

 ing later as St. Tennoch's and passing through various 

 other phases, has become finally and firmly stereotyped 

 in its present perplexing form St. Enoch's. 



In examining the ancient topography of Glasgow 

 one has to remember that the word ' gate ' retained in 

 Scottish speech its original meaning of a road or street 

 long after it had acquired another meaning in southern 

 English. ' Gang your ain gate ' is still good Scotch for 

 ' Mind your own business ' ; and what would now be 

 called a city gate, if any of our cities still had gates in 

 that sense, was known as a ' port.' 



' Throw open the West Port and let us gang free, 

 Ye 've no seen the last o' my bonnets and me.' J 



The street now named Trongate was formerly St. 

 Thenew's Gate leading straight to the chapel and well 

 of St. Thenew, now obliterated. Towards the close of the 

 fifteenth century a public ' trone ' or weighing machine 



1 Sir Walter Scott made a slip itt this couplet. Dundee rode out 

 by the Netherbow Port, and westward along the Lang Dykes, now 

 Princes Street. 



