Poets and authors fashion language and famous Scottish writers are celebrated in Makars Court by quotations inscribed in stone and set in the paving.  This is an excellent example of the closes built between the towering tenements of old Edinburgh, providing access to courtyards behind the main street, all part of an elaborate method to maximize living space in the overcrowded city.

Look for the Robert Burns quotation from the poem Is There for Honest Poverty 1795:

"Man to man the world o'er
Shall brithers be for a that"

Quotation from James Boswell's London Journal: 1762
"I rattled down the High Street in high elevation of spirits"

Quotation from Sir Walter Scott's The Lay of the Last Minstrel 1805:
"This is my own, my native land!"

The Writer's Museum housed in Lady Stairs House celebrates two Enlightenment literary figures, Robert Burns (1759 – 1796), "the ploughman poet" and Sir Walter Scott (1771 - 1832), a member of the elite class of Enlightenment figures. The contrast between them is immense.  Yet both were patriots and romantics and the young sixteen-year old Scott may have been influenced to embark on his literary career by meeting with Burns at Sciennes House in 1786.  In later life, Scott reminisced of this encounter, noting of Burns:

"There was a strong expression of sense and shrewdness in all his lineaments; the eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical temperament. It was large and of a dark cast, and glowed (I say literally glowed) when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men in my time."

On the other side of the High Street, Brodie's Close is located in typical Old Town Edinburgh tenements, named after one of its infamous 18th. century inhabitants, Deacon William Brodie who was a respectable cabinetmaker and locksmith by day, as well as a town council member and deacon of the Incorporation of Wrights and Masons of Edinburgh Trades.  The word "Wright" is Scottish English for a skilled woodworker.  Brodie made use of his day job to research the security arrangements of his wealthy clients' homes and then burgled them at night.  He later recruited three accomplices to expand his criminal activities.  But following a failed armed raid on an excise office further down the Royal Mile, he was eventually caught, sentenced and hanged in the High Street on 1 October 1788.  Brodie was the inspiration for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson.