[Satan’s Invisible World Contents]
OF that singular “Edinburgh Character,” WILLIAM MITCHEL, ‘The Tincklarian Doctor, who cures Pans and old Lantrens,’ (as he chose to be called), a crazed “White-Irone-Smith,” whose residence was in the “Bow-Head of Edinburgh, at the south side of the Butter Weigh-house,” few particulars are known, except those which are to be gleaned from his various publications. He appears to have been born in the year 1672, and described himself as “a man of a publick spirit, and tells my own mind, and am nothing but a little Black man, dull like, with two scors on my brow, and a mole on my right cheek; with a loving wife and some small children;” remarking, “My wife lives much upon Sense, But I live much upon faith.” He seems to have been altogether a strange mixture of Fanaticism, Humour, and low Cunning. He occasionally held forth as a preacher, and imagined himself much wiser than the Archbishop of Canterbury, all the Clergymen of his native country, and even the Magistrates of Edinburgh. He printed various Addresses to their Majesties Queen Anne, old Louis King of France, and King George, also to George Lockheart, the Laird of Carnwath, Sir John Law, Duke of Tanckerfield in France, Humphry Calchoun of Tillihewn, the Lord Provost and Baillies of Edinburgh, and the noble and wise John Campbel Duke of Argyle, the Pope at Rome, &c., craving for money to help him to print his Divine Books – “which were not to be read as they do Ballads” – or to appoint him to some good post or office, such as a Bishoprick, Corporal in the Foot Guards, Secretary in Scotland, or to be Provost of Edinburgh! To these Appeals he declared “Some of them answered, giving him gold, others laughed at him, and that his Glasgow friend’s thick skulls could not understand him. – They are not the people I took them to be.”
He had been for sixteen years employed by the Magistrates of the City as manager of the lighting of the streets, at the moderate salary of Five Pounds. He represented “that his predecessor in the office had Ten Pounds; but I took but five, for the town was in debt.” The Magistrates, doubtless for reasons satisfactory to themselves, and which it is not difficult to devine, deprived him of his post. In 1711 he remarks in one of his Addresses, “I had a post to give light to the Magistrates. They took a fancie in their heads, and turned me off without a fault!” In front of his shop he “erected a Shovel-Board, on which he might exhibit his wares,” but the magistrates ordered its immediate removal, on account of its being an obstruction to the street, under the penalty of a fine and imprisonment. Continuing, as he imagined, to be daily tormented and persecuted by his neighbours – “The Bow-head Whigs” – and failing to get any redress or justice from the Magistrates and Ministers of the City, he tells us that “he went from Edinburgh to Glasgow to seek justice, but I was out of the Dub in the Mire, I was a fool for my pains, because Solomon told me before I went, that there was not a just man about all Glasgow to give me justice.”
In the year 1719 he appears to have been in great trouble in Glasgow, where he had opened a shop “in the Calton without the Gallowgate,” without “A Burghes-Ticket.” His publications, a “Strange and Wonderfull Discourse to the Magistrates of Glasgow,” and “True Description of the People of Glasgow concerning Justice,” give a most extraordinary account of the treatment he received at the hands of the citizens, and of his strange adventures with various men and women while there, declaring that “Before I leave them I have a mind to kill them as dead as a Glasgow-Brown-Salt-Herring.” Returning in 1720 to Edinburgh, matters in connection with his household seem to have also gone wrong, for he announces “This to give Notice, to all Messengers and Passengers, that my woman Barbary Polston (who was born a Sutors daughter in Inverness) has run away with a great cargo of Money of mine, and if any person can apprehend her, they shall have 10000 Pound out of the King’s Park of Safer, and the Gentleman’s kindness beside that wants her.”
He wrote and printed a number of Pamphlets and Single Sheets, – “strange and wonderful books,” – chiefly in Edinburgh and Glasgow, between the years 1711 and 1739, full of very amusing nonsense, and generally adorned them with a wooden cut of the Mitchel Arms. These are now what may be very properly designated “A singular and remarkably rare collection.” Seldom or never found complete.
In various of the Works of this “Eminent Divine and Historian,” he is not forgetful to impress his professional excellence as a white smith, &c. He says, “If any wants my Wonderful Prophecies, they are to be sold at my shop at the head of the West Bow. The worth of them will never be fully known untill the day of Judgement;” and that “he had a good pennyworth of peuther spoons, fine like silver, none such made in Edinburgh; and silken pocks for wiggs, and French white pearl-beads, – all to be sold for little or nothing,” also “Good old French Brandie for twopence the gil.” – Vide “A part of the Works of the eminent Divine and Historian, Doctor William Mitchel, Professor of Tincklarianism in the University of the Bowhead, being a syse of Divinity, Humanity, History, Philosophy, Law, Physick; composed at various Occasions for his own satisfaction and the World’s illumination, &c.”
One of his latest productions was a pamphlet on the Murder of Captain John Porteous, Edinburgh, which he concludes by saying, in the true spirit of a Cameronian Martyr, “If the King and Clergy gar hang me for writing this, I’m content, because it is long since any man was hanged for religion.” The learned Tincklarian Doctor was destined, however, to die in his bed – an event which came to pass in the year 1740. In the Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh, there are a few of his “Single Sheets” to be found bound up in various volumes of Pamphlets and Broadsides; and in the Library of the Writers to the Signet, Edinburgh, there is a Collection of various of his publications bound up together in a volume, sm. 4to. At a Sale of Books in London, June 1860, there occurred a collection of Eleven of his Tracts, as issued between the years 1731 and 1739. The Auctioneers remarking that “The author appears to have been a Bookseller or petty Chapman in a small way. The most illiterate (and sometimes obscene) language, applied to the Aristocracy, is used in these works, and the most severe animosity is displayed towards the Catholics, because they would not accept, or purchase for a penny, the Light, &c.”
