We passed on to the castle across a very narrow bridge over a ravine, but we did not find much there except a modern-looking house built with some of the old stones, under which were four dungeons.  Rosslyn was associated with scenes rendered famous by Bruce and Wallace, Queen Mary and Rizzio, Robert III and Queen Annabella Drummond, by Comyn and Fraser, and by the St. Clairs, as well as by legendary stories of the Laird of Gilmorton Grange, who set fire to the house in which were his beautiful daughter and her lover, the guilty abbot, so that both of them were burnt to death, and of the Lady of Woodhouselee, a white-robed, restless spectre, who appeared with her infant in her arms.  Then there was the triple battle between the Scots and the English, in which the Scots were victorious: 

  Three triumphs in a day! 
  Three hosts subdued by one! 
  Three armies scattered like the spray,
  Beneath one vernal sun.

[Illustration:  ROSSLYN CASTLE.]

Here, too, was the inn, now the caretaker’s house, visited by Dr. Johnson and Boswell in 1773, the poet Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy in 1803, while some of the many other celebrities who called from time to time had left their signatures on the window-panes.  Burns and his friend Nasmyth the artist breakfasted there on one occasion, and Burns was so pleased with the catering that he rewarded the landlady by scratching on a pewter plate the two following verses: 

  My blessings on you, sonsie wife,
    I ne’er was here before;
  You’ve gien us walth for horn and knife—­
    Nae heart could wish for more.

  Heaven keep you free from care and strife. 
    Till far ayont four score;
  And while I toddle on through life,
    I’ll ne’er gang bye your door.

Rosslyn at one time was a quiet place and only thought of in Edinburgh when an explosion was heard at the Rosslyn gunpowder works.  But many more visitors appeared after Sir Walter Scott raised it to eminence by his famous “Lay” and his ballad of “Rosabelle”: 

  Seem’d all on fire that chapel proud. 
  Where Rosslyn’s chiefs uncoffin’d lie.

Hawthornden was quite near where stood Ben Jonson’s sycamore, and Drummond’s Halls, and Cyprus Grove, but we had no time to see the caves where Sir Alexander Ramsay had such hairbreadth escapes.  About the end of the year 1618 Ben Jonson, then Poet Laureate of England, walked from London to Edinburgh to visit his friend Taylor, the Thames waterman, commonly known as the Water Poet, who at that time was at Leith.  In the January following he called to see the poet Drummond of Hawthornden, who was more frequently called by the name of the place where he lived than by his own.  He found him sitting in front of his house, and as he approached Drummond welcomed him with the poetical salutation: 

  “Welcome! welcome!  Royal Ben,”

to which Jonson responded,

  “Thank ye, thank ye, Hawthornden.”