Note 58 — THE OLD BANK CLOSE.

This was the first High School, built in 1578 in the grounds of the Blackfriars’ Monastery, of which David Malloch, or Mallet, was janitor in 1717. The building faced the Canongate. In 1777 it was replaced by the building now facing Infirmary Street and used in connection with the university. It is this later building that is associated with Sir Walter Scott, Lord Brougham, Lord Jeffrey, Lord Cockburn, and other eminent men of the last quarter of the eighteenth and first quarter of the nineteenth century.