DBOEMBEU 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.' ' 



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 



' Sir Walter Scott made a slip in tliis couplet. Dundee rode out 

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

 Princes Street. 



