On the south side of the city where the old Liberton road branching off enters it by two diverging routes, one by the narrow and ancient Potter Row, and the other by the street of the Bristo Port, a formidable gate in the re-entering angle of the city-wall, which bristled with cannon and overlooked the way that descended to the Grass-market, there stood in 1688 (and yet stands) an antique mansion of very picturesque aspect. It is furnished with numerous outshots and projections, broad, dark, and bulky stacks of chimnies reared up in unusual places, and having over the upper windows circular pediments enriched with initials and devices, but now blackened by age and encrusted with the smoky vapour of centuries.
It is still known as the "General's House," from its having been anciently the residence appropriated to the Commander-in-chief of the Scottish forces. A narrow passage leads to it from that ancient suburban Burgh of Barony, the Potter's Row, where doubtless many a psalm-singing puritan of Monk's Regiment, many a scarred trooper of Leven's Iron Brigade, and many a stern veteran of the Covenant have kept watch and ward, in the pathway which is still, as of old, styled, _par excellence_, THE General's Entry.
Its garden has now become a lumber-yard, and is otherwise encroached upon; its stables have long since vanished, and mean dwellings surround and overtop it; the windows are stuffed with old hats and bundles of straw or rags; brown paper flaps dismally in the broken glasses, and its once gay chambers, where the "cunning George Monk," the grave and stern Leven, Dalyel of the iron-heart, and the gallant Dunbarton feasted royally, and held wassail with their comrades, have, like all the surrounding mansions of the great and noble of the other days, been long since abandoned to citizens of the poorest and humblest class.
Standing then on the very verge of the city, it was deemed in the country, though now the gas lamps extend two miles beyond it, and dense and populous streets occupy the sites of two straggling and unpretending suburbs of thatched cottages and "sclaited lands." To the southward of the road, a narrow rugged horseway, passed through fields and thickets towards the great Loch of the Burgh, and ascending its opposite bank, passed the straggling suburb named the Causeway-side, where there were many noble old villas, the residences of Sir Patrick Johnstone, of the Laird of Westerhall, and others, and sweeping past the ruined convent of St. Catherine of Sienna, wound over the hill (near a gibbet that was seldom unoccupied by sweltering corpses and screaming ravens), towards the Barony of Liberton, a lonely hamlet with a little stone spire, and the tall square tower of the Winrams, in older days the patrimony of a lesser Baron named Macbeth.