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Title: Edinburgh sketches & memories
Author: Masson, David
Language: English
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EDINBURGH
SKETCHES & MEMORIES
BY
DAVID MASSON
PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
LONDON AND EDINBURGH
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1892
PREFATORY NOTE
The following Papers, though in their collected state they have a
certain continuity of general subject, were written at different times
and for different purposes. One is a modified reprint of an article
which appeared in the _Westminster Review_ as long ago as 1856. Seven of
the others were contributed, at intervals within the last twelve years,
to _Macmillan’s Magazine_, _The Scotsman_, or _The Scots Observer_, and
are reprinted now with courteous permission. The remaining five are from
manuscript of various dates since 1867, and are now published for the
first time. An occasional small recurrence of fact or of phrase in the
series may be excused in consideration that the Papers, thus written
separately, may still be read separately.
EDINBURGH: _March 1892_.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. QUEEN MARY’S EDINBURGH:—
1. Queen Mary’s Return to Scotland, August 1561 1
2. Plan and Fabric of Edinburgh in 1561 9
3. The Edinburgh Population in 1561 20
II. ROBERT ROLLOCK AND THE BEGINNINGS OF EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY 35
III. KING JAMES’S FAREWELL TO HOLYROOD 61
IV. PROPOSED MEMORIAL TO DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN 76
V. ALLAN RAMSAY 88
VI. LADY WARDLAW AND THE BARONESS NAIRNE 110
VII. EDINBURGH THROUGH THE DUNDAS DESPOTISM 141
VIII. THE LAST YEARS OF SIR WALTER SCOTT 204
IX. CARLYLE’S EDINBURGH LIFE:—
Part I.—1809–1818 226
Part II.—1818–1822 262
Part III.—1822–1828 302
X. CHARLES KIRKPATRICK SHARPE 359
XI. JOHN HILL BURTON 372
XII. DR. JOHN BROWN OF EDINBURGH 384
XIII. LITERARY HISTORY OF EDINBURGH: A GENERAL REVIEW 417
QUEEN MARY’S EDINBURGH[1]
I.—QUEEN MARY’S RETURN TO SCOTLAND, AUGUST 1561
On a clear day the inhabitants of Edinburgh, by merely ascending the
Calton Hill or any other of the familiar heights in or around their
city, can have a view of nearly the whole length of their noble estuary,
the Firth of Forth. To the right or east, its entrance from the open
sea, between the two shires of Fife and Haddington, is marked most
conspicuously on the Haddingtonshire side by a distant conical mound,
called Berwick Law, rising with peculiar distinctness from the northward
curve of land which there bounds the horizon. It is thither that the eye
is directed if it would watch the first appearance of steamers and ships
from any part of the world that may be bound up the Firth for Edinburgh
by its port of Leith. Moving thence westward, the eye can command easily
the twenty miles more of the Firth which these ships and steamers have
to traverse. The outlines of both shores, though the breadth between
them averages twelve miles, may be traced with wonderful sharpness,
pleasingly defined as they are by their little bays and promontories,
and by the succession of towns and fishing villages with which they are
studded. Of these, Musselburgh on the near side marks the transition
from the shire of Haddington to that of Edinburgh; after which point the
Firth begins to narrow. Just below Edinburgh itself, where its port of
Leith confronts the Fifeshire towns of Kinghorn and Burntisland, with
the island of Inchkeith a little to the right between, the breadth is
about six miles. There the main maritime interest of the Firth ceases,
few ships going farther up; but, for any eye that can appreciate scenic
beauty, there remains the delight of observing the continued course of
the Firth westward to Queensferry and beyond, a riband of flashing water
between the two coasts which are known prosaically as those of
Linlithgowshire and West Fifeshire, but which, in their quiet and mystic
remoteness, look like a tract of some Arthurian dreamland.
While something of all this is to be seen on almost any day from any of
the eminences in or near Edinburgh, it is only on rare occasions that it
can be all seen to perfection. Frequently, even in sunny weather, when
the sky is blue above, a haze overspreads the Firth, concealing the
Fifeshire shore, or blurring it into a vague cloud-like bank. Sometimes,
on the other hand, when there is little sunshine, and the day seems
rather sombre in the Edinburgh streets, the view of the Firth and of the
other surroundings of the city from any of the higher spots is amazingly
distinct to the utmost possible distance, though with the distinctness
of a drawing in pen and ink. Worst of all the atmospheric conditions for
a survey of the Firth, or of the scenery generally, from Edinburgh, is
that of the thick, dull, drizzling, chilling, and piercing fog or mist,
called locally a _haar_, which the easterly wind brings up at certain
seasons from the sea. Up the Firth this _haar_ will creep or roll,
converting the whole aerial gap between the opposed shores into a mere
continuous trough of seething and impenetrable mist, or of rain and mist
commingled, drenching the Fifeshire hills on the one side, enveloping
all Edinburgh on the other, and pushing itself still westward and inland
over the higher and narrower reaches of the estuary, till the aforesaid
tract of gleaming Arthurian scenery is absorbed into the long foggy
gloom, and even Alloa and Stirling feel the discomfort. No chance then,
from any height near Edinburgh, of seeing the ships and steamers in any
part of their course from the mouth of the Firth to the port of Leith.
If any there be, they are down in the vast abysm of mist, at anchor for
safety, or piloting their Leithward course slowly and cautiously through
the opaque element, with bells ringing, horns blowing, and now and then
a boom from the cannon on the deck to warn off other vessels or
ascertain their own whereabouts. So even during the day; but, when the
_haar_ lasts through the night, and the opaque gray of the air is
deepened into an equally opaque black or umber, the confusion is still
greater. The sounds of fog-signals from the bewildered vessels are
incessant; the shore-lights from the piers and landing-places can throw
their yellow glare but a little way into the turbid consistency; and, if
any adventurous vessel does manage to warp herself into port in such
circumstances, it is with excited vociferation and stamping among those
on board, and no less hurry-skurry among the men ashore who assist in
the feat. Happily, an Edinburgh _haar_ at once of such dense quality and
of long duration is a rare occurrence. April and May are the likeliest
months for the phenomenon, and it passes usually within twenty-four
hours. It may come later in the year, however, and may last longer.
Just after the middle of August 1561, as we learn from contemporary
records, there was a _haar_ of unusual intensity and continuance over
Edinburgh and all the vicinity. It began on Sunday the 17th, and it
lasted, with slight intermissions, till Thursday the 21st. “Besides the
surfett weat and corruptioun of the air,” writes Knox, then living in
Edinburgh, “the myst was so thick and dark that skairse mycht any man
espy ane other the lenth of two pair of butts.” It was the more
unfortunate because it was precisely in those days of miserable fog and
drizzle that Mary, Queen of Scots, on her return to Scotland after her
thirteen years of residence and education in France, had to form her
first real acquaintance with her native shores and the capital of her
realm.
She had left Calais for the homeward voyage on Thursday the 14th August,
with a retinue of about 120 persons, French and Scottish, embarked in
two French state galleys, attended by several transports. They were a
goodly company, with rich and splendid baggage. The Queen’s two most
important uncles, indeed,—the great Francis de Lorraine, Duke of Guise,
and his brother, Charles de Lorraine, the Cardinal,—were not on board.
They, with the Duchess of Guise and other senior lords and ladies of the
French Court, had bidden Mary farewell at Calais, after having
accompanied her thither from Paris, and after the Cardinal had in vain
tried to persuade her not to take her costly collection of pearls and
other jewels with her, but to leave them in his keeping till it should
be seen how she might fare among her Scottish subjects. But on board the
Queen’s own galley were three others of her Guise or Lorraine
uncles,—the Duke d’Aumale, the Grand Prior, and the Marquis
d’Elbeuf,—with M. Damville, son of the Constable of France, and a number
of French gentlemen of lower rank, among whom one notes especially young
Pierre de Bourdeilles, better known afterwards in literary history as
Sieur de Brantôme, and a sprightly and poetic youth from Dauphiné, named
Chastelard, one of the attendants of M. Damville. With these were mixed
the Scottish contingent of the Queen’s train, her four famous “Marys”
included,—Mary Fleming, Mary Livingstone, Mary Seton, and Mary Beaton.
They had been her playfellows and little maids of honour long ago in her
Scottish childhood; they had accompanied her when she went abroad, and
had lived with her ever since in France; and they were now returning
with her, Scoto-Frenchwomen like herself, and all of about her own age,
to share her new fortunes.
It is to Brantôme that we owe what account we have of the voyage from
Calais. He tells us how the Queen could hardly tear herself away from
her beloved France, but kept gazing at the French coast hour after hour
so long as it was in sight, shedding tears with every look, and
exclaiming again and again, “_Adieu, ma chère France! je ne vous verray
jamais plus!_” He tells us how, when at length they did lose sight of
France, and were on the open sea northward with a fair wind, there was
some anxiety lest they should be intercepted, and the Queen taken
prisoner by an English fleet. In the peculiar state of the relations
between England and Scotland at the time, this was not an impossibility,
and would hardly have been against the law of nations. There had been
some angry correspondence between Elizabeth and Mary respecting the
non-ratification by Mary of a certain “Treaty of Edinburgh” of the
previous year, stipulating that she would desist from her claim to
Elizabeth’s throne of England. Elizabeth had consequently refused Mary’s
application for a safeguard for her homeward journey; and there was
actually an English squadron in the North Sea available for the capture
of Mary if Elizabeth had chosen to give the word. But, though the
English squadron does seem to have waylaid the French galleys, and one
of the transports following the galleys was taken and detained for some
reason or other, the galleys themselves, by rapid sailing or by English
sufferance, threw that danger behind, and approached the Scottish coast
in perfect safety. What then astonished Brantôme, and what he seems to
have remembered all his life with a kind of horror in association with
his first introduction to Queen Mary’s native climate and kingdom, was
the extraordinary fog, the _si grand brouillard_, in which they suddenly
found themselves. “On a Sunday morning, the day before we came to
Scotland,” he says, “there rose so great a fog that we could not see
from the stern to the prow, much to the discomfiture of the pilots and
crews, so that we were obliged to let go the anchor in the open sea, and
take soundings to know where we were.” Brantôme’s measure of time
becomes a little incoherent at this point; and we hardly know from his
language whether it was outside the Firth of Forth altogether, or inside
of the Firth about Berwick Law, that the fog caught them, if indeed he
remembered that there was such a thing as an estuary at all between the
open sea and Leith. He distinctly says, however, that they were a whole
day and night in the fog, and that he and the other Frenchmen were
blaspheming Scotland a good deal on account of it before they did reach
Leith. That, as other authorities inform us, was about ten o’clock in
the morning of Tuesday the 19th.
The Leith people and the Edinburgh people were quite unprepared, the
last intimation from France having pointed to the end of the month as
the probable time of the Queen’s arrival, if she were to be expected at
all. But the cannon-shots from the galleys, as they contrived to near
Leith harbour, were, doubtless, a sufficient advertisement. Soon, so far
as the fog would permit, all Leith was in proper bustle, and all the
political and civic dignitaries that chanced to be in Edinburgh were
streaming to Leith. Not till the evening, according to one account, not
till next morning, according to another, did the Queen leave her galley
and set foot on shore. Then, to allow a few hours more for getting her
Palace of Holyrood, and her escort thither, into tolerable readiness,
she took some rest in the house in Leith deemed most suitable for her
reception, the owner being Andrew Lamb, a wealthy Leith merchant. It was
in the afternoon of Wednesday, the 20th of August, that there was the
procession on horseback of the Queen, her French retinue, and the
gathered Scottish lords and councillors, through the two miles of road
which led from Leith to Holyrood. On the way the Queen was met by a
deputation of the Edinburgh craftsmen and their apprentices, craving her
royal pardon for the ringleaders in a recent riot, in which the Tolbooth
had been broken open and the Magistrates insulted and defied. This act
of grace accorded as a matter of course, the Queen was that evening in
her hall of Holyrood, the most popular of sovereigns for the moment, her
uncles and other chiefs of her escort with her, and the rest dispersed
throughout the apartments, while outside, in spite of the fog, there
were bonfires of joy in the streets and up the slopes of Arthur Seat,
and a crowd of cheering loiterers moved about in the space between the
palace-gate and the foot of the Canongate. Imparting some regulation to
the proceedings of this crowd, for a while at least, was a special
company of the most “honest” of the townsmen, “with instruments of
musick and with musicians,” admitted within the gate, and tendering the
Queen their salutations, instrumental and vocal, under her
chamber-window. “The melody, as she alledged, lyked her weill, and she
willed the same to be continewed some nightis after.” This is Knox’s
account; but Brantôme tells a different story. After noting the
wretchedness of the hackneys provided for the procession from Leith to
Holyrood, and the poorness of their harnessings and trappings, the sight
of which, he says, made the Queen weep, he goes on to mention the
evening serenade under the windows of Holyrood as the very completion of
the day’s disagreeables. The Abbey itself, he admits, was a fine enough
building; but, just as the Queen had supped and wanted to go to sleep,
“there came under her window five or six hundred rascals of the town to
serenade her with vile fiddles and rebecks, such as they do not lack in
that country, setting themselves to sing psalms, and singing so ill and
in such bad accord that there could be nothing worse. Ah! what music,
and what a lullaby for the night!” Whether Knox’s account of the Queen’s
impressions of the serenade or Brantôme’s is to be accepted, there can
be no doubt that the matter and intention of the performance were
religious. Our authentic picture, therefore, of Queen Mary’s first night
in Holyrood after her return from France is that of the Palace lit up
within, the dreary fog still persistent outside, the bonfires on Arthur
Seat and other vantage-grounds flickering through the fog, and the
portion of the wet crowd nearest the Palace singing Protestant psalms
for the Queen’s delectation to an accompaniment of violins.
Next day, Thursday the 21st, this memorable Edinburgh _haar_ of August
1561 came to an end. Arthur Seat and the other heights and ranges of the
park round Holyrood wore, we may suppose, their freshest verdure; and
Edinburgh, dripping no longer, shone forth, we may hope, in her sunniest
beauty. The Queen could then become more particularly acquainted with
the Palace in which she had come to reside, and with the nearer aspects
of the town to which the Palace was attached, and into which she had yet
to make her formal entry.
II.—PLAN AND FABRIC OF THE TOWN IN 1561
Then, as now, the buildings that went by the general name of Holyrood
were distinguishable into two portions. There was the Abbey, now
represented only by one beautiful and spacious fragment of ruin, called
the Royal Chapel, but then, despite the spoliations to which it had been
subjected by recent English invasions, still tolerably preserved in its
integrity as the famous edifice, in Early Norman style, which had been
founded in the twelfth century by David I., and had been enlarged in the
fifteenth by additions in the later and more florid Gothic. Close by
this was Holyrood House, or the Palace proper, built in the earlier part
of the sixteenth century, and chiefly by James IV., to form a distinct
royal dwelling, and so supersede that occasional accommodation in the
Abbey itself which had sufficed for Scottish sovereigns before Edinburgh
was their habitual or capital residence. One block of this original
Holyrood House still remains in the two-turreted projection of the
present Holyrood which adjoins the ruined relic of the Abbey, and which
contains the rooms now specially shown as “Queen Mary’s Apartments.” But
the present Holyrood, as a whole, is a construction of the reign of
Charles II., and gives little idea of the Palace in which Mary took up
her abode in 1561. The two-turreted projection on the left was not
balanced then, as now, by a similar two-turreted projection on the
right, with a façade of less height between, but was flanked on the
right by a continued chateau-like frontage, of about the same height as
the turreted projection, and at a uniform depth of recess from it, but
independently garnished with towers and pinnacles. The main entrance
into the Palace from the great outer courtyard was through this
chateau-like flank, just about the spot where there is the entrance
through the present middle façade; and this entrance led, like the
present, into an inner court or quadrangle, built round on all the four
sides. That quadrangle of chateau, touching the Abbey to the back from
its north-eastern corner, and with the two-turreted projection to its
front from its north-western corner, constituted, indeed, the main bulk
of the Palace. There were, however, extensive appurtenances of other
buildings at the back or at the side farthest from the Abbey, forming
minor inner courts, while part of that side of the great outer courtyard
which faced the entrance was occupied by offices belonging to the
Palace, and separating the courtyard from the adjacent purlieus of the
town. For the grounds of both Palace and Abbey were encompassed by a
wall, having gates at various points of its circuit, the principal and
most strongly guarded of which was the Gothic porch admitting from the
foot of the Canongate into the front courtyard. The grounds so enclosed
were ample enough to contain gardens and spaces of plantation, besides
the buildings and their courts. Altogether, what with the buildings
themselves, what with the courts and gardens, and what with the natural
grandeur of the site,—a level of deep and wooded park, between the
Calton heights and crags on the one hand and the towering shoulders of
Arthur Seat and precipitous escarpment of Salisbury Crags on the
other,—Holyrood in 1561 must have seemed, even to an eye the most
satiated with palatial splendours abroad, a sufficiently impressive
dwelling-place to be the metropolitan home of Scottish royalty.
The town itself, of which Holyrood was but the eastward terminus,
corresponded singularly well. Edinburgh even now is, more than almost
any other city in Europe, a city of heights and hollows, and owes its
characteristic and indestructible beauty to that fact. But the
peculiarity of Old Edinburgh was that it consisted mainly of that one
continuous ridge of street which rises, by gradual ascent for a whole
mile, from the deeply-ensconced Holyrood at one end to the high Castle
Rock at the other, sending off on both sides a multiplicity of narrow
foot-passages, called closes, with a few wider and more street-like
cuttings, called wynds, all of which slope downward from the main ridge
in some degree, while many descend from it with the steepness of
mountain gullies into the parallel ravines. Whoever walks now from
Holyrood to the Castle, up the Canongate, the High Street, and the
Lawnmarket, walks through that portion of the present “Old Town” which
figures to us the main Edinburgh of Queen Mary’s time, and is in fact
its residue. But imagination and some study of old maps and records are
necessary to divest this residue of its acquired irrelevancies, and so
to reconvert it into the actual Edinburgh of three hundred years ago.
The divisions of the great ridge of street from Holyrood to the Castle
were the same as now, with the same names; but objects once conspicuous
in each have disappeared, and the features of each have been otherwise
altered.
The first part of the long ascent from Holyrood was the Canongate.
Though occupying nearly half of the whole, and in complete junction with
the Edinburgh proper up to which it led, it was a separate “burgh of
regality,” which had formed itself, as its name implies, under the
protection of the abbots and canons of Holyrood. By virtue of that
original, it was not yet included in the municipal jurisdiction of the
Edinburgh Magistrates and Town Council, but held out under a magistracy
of its own. Hence some characteristics distinguishing this lower part of
the ascent from the rest. The old Canongate was by no means the dense
exhibition of dingy picturesqueness now known as the Canongate of
Edinburgh, with repulsive entries and closes on both sides, leading to
cages of crammed humanity of the poorer sort, or to inner recesses of
bone-yards, pipe-clay yards, and the like. It had the sparseness and
airiness of a suburb of the Court. The houses, whether of stone or
partly of wood, were pretty thickly put together, indeed, along the
immediate street-margins, with the inevitable access to many of them by
entries and closes, but did not go so deeply back on either side as not
to leave room for pleasant gardens and tracts of vacant ground behind. A
paved and causewayed street, ascending continuously between two rows of
houses, of irregular forms and varying heights, but few of them of more
than three storeys; other houses at the backs of these to some little
depth all the way, reached by closes from the street, and generally set
gablewise to those in front; and, behind these again, garden grounds and
grassy slopes and hollows: such was the ancient Canongate. In token of
its claims to be a separate burgh, it had its own market cross, and,
near this, its own Tolbooth or prison and council-house. The present
Canongate Tolbooth, though an antique object, is only the successor of
the older Canongate Tolbooth of Queen Mary’s time.
The ending of the Canongate and beginning of the High Street of
Edinburgh proper was at a cross street, the left arm of which,
descending from the ridge into the ravine on that side, was called St.
Mary’s Wynd, while the arm to the right was called Leith Wynd. Here, to
mark more emphatically the transition from the smaller burgh into the
greater, one encountered the separating barrier of the Nether Bow Port.
It has left no trace of itself now, but was a battlemented stone
structure, spanning the entire breadth of the thoroughfare, with an
arched gateway in the middle and gates for admission or exclusion. That
passed, one was in the lower portion of the High Street, called
specifically the Nether Bow. Here, it was not merely the increasing
breadth of the thoroughfare and the increasing height of the houses that
showed one had come within the boundaries of the real civic and
commercial Edinburgh. No such sparseness of building now as in the
Canongate; no mere double fringe of houses to a short depth, with
entries and closes ending in gardens and vacant ground; but a sense of
being between two masses of densely-peopled habitations, clothing the
declivities from the ridge to their lowest depths on both sides, and
penetrable only by those courts and wynds of which one saw the mouths,
but the labyrinthine intricacy of which in the course of their descent
baffled conception.
The same sensation accompanied one on advancing still upwards into the
middle and broadest part of the High Street. Here the street had much
the same striking appearance as now. One saw a spacious incline of
oblong piazza, rather than a street, lined by buildings, some of solid
stone throughout and very tall, others lower and timber-fronted, all of
quaint architecture from their basements to their peaked roofs and
chimneys, and not a few with “fore-stairs,” or projecting flights of
steps from doors on the first floor down to the causeway. It was here,
too, that the lateral fringes of habitation down the steep alleys were
of greatest width. That on the right was stopped only at the bottom of
the ravine on that side by a lake called the North Loch, while that on
the left, after reaching the bottom of the other ravine, mingled itself
there with an independent and very aristocratic suburb that had grown up
in the ravine itself, under the name of the Cowgate, as a southern
parallel of relief to the main Edinburgh of the ridge above. This
low-lying, aristocratic suburb, though accessible from the piazza of the
High Street by the wynds and closes on the southern side, did not come
easily into the cognisance of a stranger that might be exploring the
piazza itself. He had enough to arrest his attention where he was. One
difference between the old High Street and the present, despite their
general resemblance, consisted in a huge obstruction, now removed, which
interrupted the old High Street at its very midmost point, immediately
above the Town Cross. Just above the spot now marked in the causeway as
the site of this Town Cross, and beginning exactly where the great
church of St. Giles protrudes its complex pile on the left and raises
into the sky its remarkable tower and open octagonal crown of stonework,
there stood in the old High Street a stack of lofty masonry, stretching
up the centre of the street for a considerable way, and leaving only a
gloomy and tortuous lane for pedestrians along the buttresses of the
church on one side, and a somewhat wider channel,—called the
Luckenbooths,—for shops and traffic, on the other. The lower portion of
this obstructive stack of masonry belonged to the Luckenbooths, and was
included in the name, the basement being let out in shops or stalls for
goods, while the upper floors were parcelled out as dwellings. The
higher and larger portion, separated from the lower by a narrow suture
called “The Kirk Stile,” was nothing less than the famous Heart of
Midlothian itself, or Old Tolbooth, which had served hitherto as the
_prætorium burgi_, at once the jail of Edinburgh, its Town Council
House, the seat of the Supreme Courts of Justice for Scotland, and the
occasional meeting-place of a Scottish Parliament. Little wonder if one
lingered round this core of the High Street and of the whole town. The
channel of the Luckenbooths on one side of the street, the lane between
the Tolbooth and St. Giles’s on the other, and the cross passage or Kirk
Stile, were worth more than one perambulation, if only on account of
their amusing interconnection; at the back of St. Giles’s Church,
overhanging the Cowgate, was St. Giles’s Churchyard, the chief cemetery
of the town; and the Tolbooth alone might well detain one by its look
and the interest of its associations. In 1561 they were voting it to be
too old and decayed, if not too unsightly, for the various and important
purposes which it had hitherto served; and within a few months from our
present date there was to be an order for its demolition, and for the
erection of another building more suitable for those purposes, and
especially for the accommodation of the Lords of Council and Session.
But, though they did then begin to take it down, and though a “New
Tolbooth” or “Council House” was built near it in the same part of the
High Street, the old or original Tolbooth escaped its doom, and was left
standing after all. A little re-edified, it was to survive its more
modern substitute, and to be known till 1817 as at least the Jail of
Edinburgh and real old Heart of Midlothian. Some persons still alive can
remember it.
The Tolbooth having been passed, one was again in an open piazza of tall
or tallish houses, nearly as broad as the former piazza, but farther up
the incline, and known indifferently as the High Street above the
Tolbooth or as the Lawnmarket. Here, also, one could not but note the
number of the closes and wynds on both sides, plunging down the
house-laden slopes with break-neck precipitancy from the vertebral
street. At the head of this piazza, however, where it began to narrow,
and where there was an obstruction across it in the form of a clumsy
building called the Butter Tron or Weigh-House, there was one offshoot
to the left of greater consequence than any mere wynd or close. This was
the West Bow, a steep zigzag or spiral kind of street of antique houses,
bringing one down to the deeply-sunk Grassmarket or Horsemarket, _i.e._
to a large square space opening out from the end of the Cowgate, and
convenient for the country people coming into the town with cattle.
Refraining from this descent by the West Bow, and keeping still to the
vertebral street, one reached the last portion of the long causewayed
and inhabited ridge. This was the Castle Hill, a narrowish continuation
of the High Street, so steep as to require climbing rather than walking,
but up which, nevertheless, there was still a plentiful straggling of
houses, perched anyhow, with closes and paved yards reticulating what
lateral depth of earth they could cling to, and with views of dizzying
profundity from their back windows.
All civic Edinburgh thus left behind, and a military portal having been
passed, one entered the precincts of the Castle itself,—the high, rocky
stronghold which was more ancient than anything recognisable as most
ancient in the Edinburgh beneath, which indeed had fostered that
Edinburgh into its first existence and growth, and in which there were
relics of days older than those of Malcolm Canmore and David I., older
than the infancy of Holyrood Abbey. After the long walk upwards between
the two lines of close-packed houses, with perpetual mouths of mere
wynds and closes for a whole mile, it was something to emerge into the
open air, even in the battlemented exterior esplanade or courtyard of
this Castle, slanting up the hillside to the moat and drawbridge. It was
more to be allowed to pass the drawbridge and the other defences, and so
to pursue the winding, rock-hewn track by which one mounted to the
fortified aggregate of guard-houses, store-rooms, and royal towers,
heaved together on the cliff-bound summit. What a platform then to stand
on, beside the cannon, in any of the ledges of the embrasured parapet!
The feeling for scenery, they say, had not been much developed in the
sixteenth century; but no more in that century than in this could any
human eye have gazed with indifference on the vast panorama of Scottish
land and water that burst into the vision from Edinburgh’s Castle Rock.
To the north there were villages and farmsteads dotting the range of
fields towards the Firth which is now covered with the streets of the
New Town, and beyond these always the unwearying loveliness of the face
of the Firth, with the boundary of the Fifeshire hills; to the west, the
near Corstorphines, and over these also a tract of varied country,
fading away up the course of the Firth into a purple suggestion of
Stirling and the first spurs of the Highlands; to the south, the Braids
and the Pentlands, hiding the pastoral territory of the Esks and the
Upper Tweed, with its sleepy stretch towards the Borders and England.
Scores of castles and keeps, each the residence of some nobleman or
laird of distinction, could be counted within this sweep of the eye,
north, west, and south, over the immediate vicinity of Edinburgh. But,
if one’s interest were still rather in the town itself, it was the
eastward glance that would help most to complete and define the previous
impressions. The whole sea-approach to Edinburgh by the Firth was now
splendidly visible, with the already described curve of the hither coast
from Berwick Law to Leith; the road from Leith to Holyrood was plainly
discernible; and the Canongate and Edinburgh could be looked down upon
together, and seen in connected shape and ground-plan.
However slight the defences of the Canongate and Holyrood, Edinburgh
proper, it could now be seen, was carefully enclosed and bastioned. On
the north side, the North Loch, washing the base of the Castle Rock and
filling the valley through which the railway now runs, was sufficient
protection; but all the rest of the town was bounded in by a wall,
called the Flodden Wall. It had been constructed mainly in the panic
after the battle of Flodden in 1513 to supersede an older and less
perfect circumvallation, but had been much repaired and modified since.
It started from the east end of the North Loch and ran thence along
Leith Wynd and St. Mary’s Wynd, crossing the High Street at the Nether
Bow Port, and so shutting out the Canongate; it then went so far south
as to include the whole of the Cowgate and some space of the heights
beyond the ravine of the Cowgate; and the west bend of its irregular
rectangle, after recrossing this ravine a little beyond the Grassmarket,
riveted itself to the Castle Rock, on its most precipitous side, at the
head of the High Street. There were several gates in the circuit of the
wall besides the Nether Bow Port, the chief being the Cowgate Port,
which was also to the east, the Kirk of Field Port (afterwards Potter
Row Port) and Greyfriars Port (afterwards Bristo Port), both to the
south, and the West Port, just beyond the Grassmarket and the sole inlet
from the west. When these gates were closed, Edinburgh could rest within
herself, tolerably secure from external attack, and conscious of a
reserve of strength in the cannon and garrison of the dominating Castle.
Even if the town itself should yield to a siege, the Castle could hold
out as a separate affair, impregnable, or almost impregnable, within her
own fortifications. Successful assaults on Edinburgh Castle were among
the rarest and most memorable accidents of Scottish history.
III.—THE EDINBURGH POPULATION IN 1561
Such having been the fabric or shell of Edinburgh in 1561, what was the
contained life?
The entire population, the Canongate included, was probably less than
30,000; but, confined as this population was within such strait limits,
obliged to accommodate itself to one such ridgy backbone of principal
street, with off-going wynds and closes and but one considerable and
low-lying parallel, and having to make up, therefore, by the vertical
height of the houses for the impossibility of spreading them out, its
compression of itself within the houses must have been exceedingly
dense. As the political capital of the nation, the seat of Government
and of the Central Law Courts, Edinburgh not only counted a number of
families of rank among its habitual residents, but drew into it, for
part of every year at least, representatives of the Scottish nobility,
and of the lairds of mark and substance, from all the Lowland shires.
Only a few of the greatest of these, however, had town mansions of their
own, with any semblance of sequestered approaches and adjuncts, whether
in the Canongate or the Cowgate. The majority of the nobles and lairds
from the country, as well as of the habitual residents of highest rank
and means, such as the Senators of the College of Justice, had to be
content with the better portions of those several-flatted or
many-flatted tenements,—_insulæ_ they would have been called in ancient
Rome, but “lands” was and is the special Edinburgh word for them,—which
rose at the sides of the High Street or in the wynds and closes that ran
thence down the slopes. Distributed through the same “lands” were the
families of the “merchants” and the “craftsmen,” the two denominations
that composed between them the whole body of the burghers proper. There
was a chronic rivalry between these two denominations in the elections
to the Town Council and in the management of affairs generally. The
“merchants,” whose business was ship-owning, the export and import of
goods, and the sale of the imported goods at first hand, affected the
superiority on the whole. There were individuals among the “craftsmen,”
however, as opulent as any of the “merchants.” This was particularly the
case with the craft of the goldsmiths, always a prominent craft in
Edinburgh, and there, as in London, combining the trade of money-lending
with the more especial arts of gold-working, silver-working, and
jewellery, and so allying itself with the merchants and their
transactions. Among the other “crafts,” all regularly incorporated in
brotherhoods, and each with its annually elected head, called the
“deacon” of that craft, were the skinners or leather-dressers, the
furriers, the wobsters or weavers, the tailors, the bonnet-makers, the
hammermen or smiths and armourers, the waulkers or cloth-dressers, the
cordiners or shoemakers, the wrights, the masons, the coopers, the
fleshers or butchers, the baxters or bakers, the candle-makers, and the
barbers or barber-surgeons. Printing had been introduced into Edinburgh
in 1507; and there had been a lingering of the craft in the town ever
since by patents or permissions, but on the very smallest scale. To the
“merchants” and “craftsmen” and their families there have to be added,
of course, the numerous dependents of both these classes of the
burghers, called in the simple language of that time their “servandis.”
Under that name were included not only the domestic servants of the
wealthier merchants, but also their clerks and business assistants, and
the journeymen and apprentices of the master-craftsmen, the last a very
unruly portion of the community and known collectively as “the
crafts-childer.” Imagine all these domiciled, as was then the habit,
with their masters, and stowed away somehow, “up and down in hole and
bore,” as one old document phrases the fact, in the workshops and
“lands.” Even then there remains to be taken into account the miscellany
of small retail traders, in shops and stalls, which such a town
required, with the peripatetic hucksters of fish and other provisions,
and the rabble of nondescripts, living by erratic and hand-to-mouth
occupations, and hanging on about the hostelries. All these too were
“indwellers” in Edinburgh, and housed in the wynds and closes in some
inconceivable manner. Moreover, as we learn too abundantly from the old
burgh records, actual vagrants and beggars, whether of the able-bodied
and turbulent variety, or of the cripple, diseased, and blind,
soliciting alms by obstreperous whining and by the exhibition of their
deformities, swarmed in Old Edinburgh with a persistency which all the
police efforts of the authorities, with examples of scourgings and
hangings for several generations, had been unable to repress or
diminish. Where _they_ lived in overcrowded Edinburgh only St. Giles’s
steeple could now tell.
The overcrowding had its natural consequences. The sanitary condition of
most European towns in the sixteenth century, the best English towns
included, was incredibly bad; Scottish towns generally were behind most
English towns in this respect; but Old Edinburgh had a character all her
own for perfume and sluttishness. It could hardly be helped.
Impressively picturesque though the town was by site and architecture,
its populousness and its structural arrangement were hardly compatible
with each other on terms of cleanliness. Individual families, within
their own domiciles in the various “lands,” might be as tidy as their
cramped accommodations would permit; but the state of the common stair
in each “land,”—and in the taller lands it was a dark stone “turnpike”
ascending in corkscrew fashion from flat to flat,—depended on the united
tastes and habits of all the families using it, and therefore on the
habits and tastes of the least fastidious. It was worse in the wynds and
closes. Not only did all the refuse from the habitations on both sides
find its way into these, generally by the easy method of being flung
down from the windows overnight; but the occupations of some of the
ground-floor tenants, butchers, candle-makers, etc.,—added contributions
heterogeneously offensive. Hardly a close that had not its “midding” or
“middings” at its foot or in its angles. For generations the civic
authorities had been contending with this state of things and uttering
periodical rebukes and edicts for cleansing. There were two kinds of
occasions on which these cleansing-edicts were apt to be most stringent
and peremptory. One was the expected arrival of some illustrious
stranger, or company of strangers, from England or from abroad. Then the
inhabitants were reminded of the chief causes of offence among them, and
put on the alert for their removal, so as not to shame the town. More
strenuous still were the exertions made on any of those periodical
outbreaks of the Plague, or alarms of its approach, of which we hear so
frequently in the annals of Edinburgh, as of other towns, from the
fourteenth century to the seventeenth. Then the authorities did bestir
themselves, and the inhabitants too. But, after such occasions of
spasmodic sanitary effort, there always came the relapse; and, though
there was a standing order obliging each householder to see to the
tidiness of his own little bit of precinct, the general apathy and
obtuseness prevailed. It was providential when the heavens themselves
interfered, and some extraordinary deluge of rain sent torrents down the
closes.
Fortunately, the population did not need to remain within doors, or in
the obscurities of the wynds and closes, more than it liked. It could
pour itself out of doors into the main street; and it did so daily with
a profusion beyond all modern custom. Any morning or afternoon about the
year 1561 the High Street of Edinburgh, from the Castle to the
Canongate, must have been one of the liveliest and most bustling
thoroughfares in Europe. Need we cite, for witness, that chapter in _The
Abbot_ in which Scott takes occasion to describe it, just about this
date, when he brings young Roland Græme for the first time into
Edinburgh under the convoy of Adam Woodcock the falconer? Scott is so
excellent an authority in such matters that his account may pass as
hardly less authentic than that of a contemporary. We can see, with
Roland Græme, the populace “absolutely swarming like bees on the wide
and stately street”; we can see the “open booths projecting on the
street,” with commodities of all sorts for sale, and especially Flanders
cloths, tapestry, and cutlery; we can pick out in the crowd its most
representative figures, such as the “gay lady, in her muffler or silken
veil,” stepping daintily after her “gentleman usher,” or the group of
burghers standing together, “with their short Flemish cloaks, wide
trousers, and high-caped doublets.” Nor are we much surprised when there
come upon the scene the two parties of richly dressed aristocratic
gallants, with their armed retinues of serving-men, meeting each other
with frowns in the middle of the causeway, and immediately falling upon
each other in a desperate _tulzie_ or street fight, in vindication of
their right of way, and of the hereditary feud between their families.
Scott required such a _tulzie_ for his story, and therefore brought it
in where it suited him best. But, though Edinburgh was famous for its
_tulzies_ or causeway-fights between noblemen and lairds at feud, they
were hardly everyday occurrences. Once a week or once a month was about
the rate in real history. For greater authenticity, therefore, we may
seek glimpses of the High Street of Old Edinburgh in Scottish literature
of earlier date than the _Waverley Novels_.
The Scottish poet Dunbar has left us two pieces picturing very
distinctly the Edinburgh of 1500–1513, which he knew so well. He calls
it “our nobill toun,” as if patriotically proud of it all in all; but it
chances that in both the poems he is more sarcastic than complimentary.
One is an express address of objurgation to the merchants of Edinburgh
for their disgraceful neglect of the “nobill toun” and its capabilities.
Why, he asks, do they let its streets be overrun by beggars, so that
“nane may mak progress” through them; why do they let the fairest parts
be given up to “tailyouris, soutteris, and craftis vyle”; why do they
let the vendors “of haddocks and of scaittis,” and minstrels with but
two wearisome tunes, which they repeat eternally, go everywhere bawling
up and down? He complains more particularly of the High Street. He
speaks of the projecting fore-stairs there as making “the houssis mirk”;
he declares that at the Cross, where one should see “gold and silk,” one
sees nothing but “crudis and milk,” and that nothing is sold in all the
rest of that lower piazza but poor shellfish or common tripe and
pudding; and he is positively savage on the state of the blocked isthmus
between the two piazzas beside St. Giles’s Church and the Tolbooth.
There, where the merchants themselves most resort, and where the light
is held from their Parish Kirk by the stupid obstructions which they
permit, they are hampered in a malodorous honeycomb of lanes, which may
suit their tastes for exchange purposes, but is hardly to their credit!
To these particulars about the High Street from one of the poems we may
add, from the other, linen hung out to dry on poles from the windows,
cadgers of coals with wheeled carts, cadgers of other articles with
creels only slung over their horses, and dogs and boys in any number
running in and out among the carts and horses. All in all, Dunbar’s
descriptions of Edinburgh are satirical in mood, and sum themselves up
in this general rebuke to the Edinburgh merchants in the first of the
two poems—
Why will ye, merchants of renown,
Lat Edinburgh, your noble town,
For laik of reformatioun,
The common profit tine and fame?
Think ye nocht shame
That ony other regioun
Sall with dishonour hurt your name?
This is hardly the Edinburgh of subsequent romance, as we see it in
Scott’s _Abbot_; but that Scott had good warrant for what he wrote
there, other than his own imagination, appears from a supplement to
Dunbar furnished by Sir David Lindsay. The Edinburgh which Sir David
Lindsay knew was the Edinburgh of a later generation than Dunbar’s, say
from 1513 to 1555; and, whether from this lapse of time or from
difference in the tempers of the two poets, Sir David Lindsay’s
Edinburgh is liker Scott’s than Dunbar’s. Thus, in one poem of
Lindsay’s,—
Adieu, Edinburgh! thou heich triumphant town,
Within whose bounds richt blithefull have I been,
Of true merchánds the root of this regioun,
Most ready to receive Court, King, and Queen!
Thy policy and justice may be seen:
Were dévotioun, wisdom, and honesty
And credence tint, they micht be found in thee.
In another of his poems he describes Edinburgh on a gala day, when there
was a procession through its High Street, such as he himself, as Lyon
King of Arms, might have marshalled. The occasion was the entry into
Edinburgh in May 1537 of Magdalene, daughter of Francis I. of France,
the young bride of James V.; and the dirge-like form of the
description,—that of an indignant address to Death,—is accounted for by
the fact that the poet is looking back on the splendours of her welcome
into the Scottish capital when the too swift close of her fair young
life, only a few weeks afterwards, had turned them into matter of
mournful recollection,—
Thief! Saw thou nocht the great preparatives
Of Edinburgh, the noble famous town?
Thou saw the people labouring for their lives
To mak triumph with trump and clarioun:
Sic pleasour never was in this regioun
As suld have been the day of her entrace,
With great propinis given to her Grace.
Thou saw makand richt costly scaffolding,
Depaintit weell with gold and silver fine,
Ready preparit for the upsetting;
With fountains flowing water clear and wine;
Disguisit folks, like creatures divine,
On ilk scaffold, to play ane sindry story:
But all in greeting turnit thou that glory.
Thou saw there mony ane lusty fresh galland,
Weell orderit for ressaving of their Queen;
Ilk craftisman, with bent bow in his hand,
Full galyartly in short clothing of green;
The honest burgess cled thou suld have seen,
Some in scarlot, and some in claith of grain,
For till have met their Lady Soverane;
Provost, Bailies, and Lordis of the town,
The Senatours, in order consequent,
Cled into silk of purpur, black, and brown;
Syne the great Lordis of the Parliament,
With mony knichtly Baron and Banrent,
In silk and gold, in colours comfortable:
But thou, alas! all turnit into sable.
Syne all the Lordis of Religioun,
And Princes of the Priestis venerable,
Full pleasandly in their processioun,
With all the cunning Clerkis honourable:
But, theftuously, thou tyrane treasonable,
All their great solace and solemnities
Thou turnit intill duleful dirigies.
Syne, next in order, passing through the town,
Thou suld have heard the din of instruments,
Of tabron, trumpet, shalm, and clarioun,
With reird redoundand through the elements;
The Heralds, with their aweful vestiments;
With Macers, upon either of their hands,
To rule the press with burnist silver wands.
This outgoes Scott himself for the possible pomp of Old Edinburgh, and
is poetically authentic. Later records, however, enable us to tone down
Lindsay’s description of the High Street on a great gala day by the
sight of it on any ordinary market day.
Since the reign of James III., it appears, there had been an authorised
distribution of the markets for different kinds of commodities through
prescribed parts of the town, with the general effect that, while live
stock and such bulkier commodities as wood and fodder were sold and
bought only in the Grassmarket and its low-lying purlieus, the markets
for all other commodities were divided mainly between the two piazzas of
the High Street, each having its own “tron” or weighing apparatus. Of
late years, however, there had been encroachments by each piazza on the
market rights of the other, with a good deal of mutual complaint and bad
feeling. We hear more particularly that, about 1559, in consequence of
temporary dilapidations in the lower piazza by recent English and French
ravagings of the town, the upper piazza, or High Street above the
Tolbooth, had drawn into it far more than its statutory share of the
market traffic. The complaints of this by the inhabitants of the lower
piazza had been such that the Provost, Bailies, and Council passed an
order on the subject, which may be read in Dr. Marwick’s admirable
Extracts from the Burgh Records. “Upoun consideratioun of the thraing of
mercattis abone the Over Tolbuth, and that the passage upon all mercat
dayis is sa stoppit be confluence of peple that nane may pas by are
uther, as alsua upoun consideratioun that the saidis landis and
fore-tenementis be-eist Nudryis Wynde [_i.e._ in the lower piazza] ar
almaist desolait and nocht inhabitit, beand the fairest and braidest
parts of the toun, for laik of merkattis and resort of peple thairto”:
it was decreed that in all time coming the markets for hides, wool, and
skins should be specifically in the lower piazza. For a while the order
took effect; but, by the “procurment of certane particular personis
having thair landis abone the Tolbuth,” the upper piazza had again
obtained the advantage. Things seem to have rectified themselves
eventually; but about 1561 there was still this war of the markets
between the two piazzas, with a continued overthronging of the upper.
Whether in one of the piazzas or in both, one has but to imagine the
litter that would be left on market days, and to add that to the litter
disgorged into the street upwards from the closes, or flung down into
the street from the fore-stairs, to see that a good deal of Dunbar’s
earlier description must be allowed to descend through Lindsay’s
intermediate and more gorgeous one, as still true of the ordinary
Edinburgh of the date of Queen Mary’s return.
No one really knows a city who does not know it by night as well as by
day. Night obscures much that day forces into notice, and invests what
remains with new visual fascinations, but still so that the
individuality of any city or town is preserved through its darkened
hours. Every town or city has its own nocturnal character. Modern
Edinburgh asserts herself, equally by night as by day, as the city of
heights and hollows. From any elevated point in her centre or on her
skirts, if you choose to place yourself there latish at night, you may
look down upon rows of lamps stretched out in glittering undulation over
the more level street spaces; or you may look down, in other directions,
upon a succession of tiers and banks of thickly edificed darkness,
punctured miscellaneously by twinkling window-lights, and descending
deeply into inscrutable chasms. More familiar, and indeed so inevitable
that every tourist carries it away with him as one of his most permanent
recollections of Edinburgh, is the nightly spectacle from Princes Street
of the northern face of the Old Town, starred irregularly with
window-lights from its base to the serrated sky-line. Perhaps this is
the present nocturnal aspect of Edinburgh which may most surely suggest
Old Edinburgh at night three hundred years ago. For, though we must be
careful, in imagining Old Edinburgh, to confine ourselves strictly and
exactly to as much of the present Edinburgh as stands on the ancient
site, and therefore to vote away Princes Street, the whole of the rest
of the New Town, and all the other accretions, this aspect of the Old
Town at night from the north cannot have changed very greatly. A belated
traveller passing through the hamlets that once straggled on the grounds
of the present New Town, and arriving at the edge of the North Loch, in
what is now the valley of Princes Street Gardens, must have looked up
across the Loch to much the same twinkling embankment of the High Street
and its closes, and to much the same serrated sky-line, lowering itself
eastward from the shadowy mass of the Castle Rock. If the traveller
desired admission into the town, he could not have it on this side at
all, but would have to go round to some of the ports in the town-wall
from its commencement at the east end of the North Loch. He might try
them all in succession,—Leith Wynd Port, the Nether Bow Port, the
Cowgate Port, the Kirk of Field Port, Greyfriars Port, and the West
Port,—with the chance of finding that he was too late for entrance at
any, and so of being brought back to his first station, and obliged to
seek lodging till morning in some hamlet there, or else in the
Canongate. He could perform the whole circuit of the walls, however, in
less than an hour, and might have the solace, at some points of his
walk, of night views down into the luminous hollows of the town, very
different from his first view upward from the North Loch.
While the belated traveller was thus shut out, the inhabitants within
might be passing their hours till bed-time comfortably enough, whether
in the privacy of their domiciles, or in more or less noisy loitering
and locomotion among the streets and wynds. If it were clear moonlight
or starlight, the wynds, and especially the stately length of the High
Street, would be radiantly distinct, and locomotion in them would be
easy. But even in the darkest nights the townsmen were not reduced to
actual groping through their town, if _ennui_, or whim, or business, or
neighbourly conviviality determined them to be out of doors. Not only
would they carry torches and lanterns with them for their own behoof,
especially if they had to find their way down narrow closes to their
homes; not only were there the gratuitous oil-lights or candlelights
from the windows of the fore-tenements in the streets and wynds, sending
down some glimmer into the streets and wynds themselves; but, by public
regulation, the tenants of the fore-stair houses in the principal
thoroughfares were bound to hang out, during certain hours of the
evening, lamps for the guidance of those that might be passing. One has
to remember, however, that people in those days kept very early hours.
By ten o’clock every night Auld Reekie was mostly asleep. By that hour,
accordingly, the house-lights, with some exceptions, had ceased to
twinkle; and from that hour, save for bands of late roysterers here and
there at close-mouths, and for the appointed night-watches on guard at
the different ports, or making an occasional round with drum and
whistle, silence and darkness reigned till dawn.
The Provost of Edinburgh in 1561 was Archibald Douglas of Kilspindie, a
well-known laird of the great kin of the Angus Douglases. He had held
the office continuously by annual election since 1553, with only two
years of break. The four Bailies under him, answering to the Aldermen of
an English town, were David Forster, Robert Ker, Alexander Home, and
Allan Dickson, all merchant-burgesses. It would be possible, I believe,
even at this distance of time, to give the names of as many as 1000 or
1500 other persons of the population, with particulars about not a few
of them. In a town of such a size all the principal inhabitants must
have been perfectly well acquainted with each other, and must have been
known, by figure and physiognomy at least, to the rest of the community.
We will name at present but one other inhabitant of the Edinburgh of
1561, who must have been about the best known of all. This was John
Knox, the chief minister of the town, and the stated preacher, always on
Sundays and often on week-days, in the great Church of St. Giles. His
house, or the house of which he occupied a portion, if not then that
very conspicuous projecting house of three storeys in the Nether Bow
which visitors to Edinburgh now go to see as having been his, was
certainly somewhere in that neighbourhood. From this point of what we
have called the lower piazza of the High Street there is a direct view
upwards to St. Giles’s Church, about 300 yards distant; and the walk in
the other direction, down the Canongate, to Holyrood Abbey and Palace,
is perhaps about twice as much. Divide a half-mile of sloping street
into three equal parts, and Knox’s residence in Edinburgh, the house in
which he sat on the day of young Queen Mary’s return among her Scottish
subjects in August 1561, is to be imagined as just one-third down such a
slope from the great Church of St. Giles, with the other two-thirds
descending thence continuously, houses on both sides, to the Palace in
which Mary had taken up her abode. Mary and Knox were to meet ere long.
ROBERT ROLLOCK AND THE BEGINNINGS OF EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY[2]
The University of Edinburgh dates its existence from the year 1582, when
James VI. was sixteen years of age and had been for fifteen years King
of Scotland. Till that time there had been but three universities in
Scotland,—that of St. Andrews (1413), that of Glasgow (1454), and that
of King’s College, Aberdeen (1494). The want of a university in the
metropolis had been long felt. Especially after the Reformation, people
residing in or near Edinburgh had begun to think it a hardship that they
had to send their sons over to St. Andrews, or away to Glasgow, or as
far off as Aberdeen, to complete their education. Why should not
Edinburgh have a university for itself? The Magistrates and Town Council
of Edinburgh were particularly zealous in the project; and, as far back
as the reign of Mary, they had, with the Queen’s sanction, taken some
steps towards carrying the project into effect. They had fixed on the
site of the intended new College. It was the site on which the
University now stands, but was then a kind of suburb of gardens and
straggling buildings, partly old church edifices, known by the name of
St. Mary in the Fields, or, more shortly, Kirk o’ Field. They had
purchased a certain right of property here; and here, accordingly, amid
the old tenements that have been long swept away, as well as in the
gardens and bits of green field which covered what is now the
thoroughfare of South Bridge Street, we are to fancy the Edinburgh
magistrates and ministers of Queen Mary’s reign, and perhaps John Knox
himself, pottering about sometimes in their afternoon walks, looking at
this and that, and anticipating the College that was to be established.
But years passed on, and there were difficulties in the way. Funds were
wanting, and there was strenuous opposition from the already existing
universities; and, before any college-building could arise on the site
of Kirk o’ Field, that site had been made unexpectedly memorable by one
of the ghastliest of deeds. It was close to what is now the south side
of the University quadrangle that there stood the fatal tenement in
which Darnley was lodged on his return from Glasgow when he was
recovering from the small-pox, and the explosion of which by gunpowder,
on the night between the 9th and 10th of February 1567, hurled his
corpse and that of his servant over the adjacent town-wall, and left
Mary a widow. With other thoughts, therefore, than of the intended seat
of learning, for the uses of which the ground had been partly purchased
when this tragedy blackened it, must the citizens of Edinburgh for many
a year afterwards have sauntered hereabouts in the evenings. But shocks
of the kind are transient; and, when, in the quieter though still
agitated days of King James, certain liberal citizens began to move anew
for the foundation of the much-needed university,—chief among whom were
Mr. James Lawson, Knox’s successor as minister of Edinburgh, Mr. William
Little, afterwards Lord Provost, and his brother, Mr. Clement Little, an
Edinburgh lawyer,—there was no dream of any other site for it than that
which had been already chosen. With creditable quickness the Town
Council proceeded to convert the long-cherished design into a reality.
Masons and carpenters were set to work; and, what with the patching-up
of old buildings already on the ground, what with the erection of frugal
additions, a kind of make-shift beginning of a College was at last
knocked together. A charter from King James, dated “Stirling, 14th April
1582,” made all right. It empowered the Lord Provost, Magistrates, and
Town Council of Edinburgh to found and gradually complete within the
city what should be to all intents and purposes a true University, or
_Studium Generale_. King James, as has been said, was then still in his
boyhood. His unhappy mother was in the fourteenth year of her captivity
in England.
A material fabric for lodging the University of Edinburgh having been
thus roughly provided, all that was further necessary was to procure
teachers. There are now between thirty and forty chairs in the
University of Edinburgh; but it is not to be imagined that the
Magistrates and Town Council of Edinburgh had to make that number of
appointments in 1582 in order that their new College might begin
operations. They were content with a much smaller equipment. They merely
looked about for one qualified man to begin with; and, when they had got
_him_, they could consider the institution fairly launched. This may
require a little explanation.
The Charter of the new College contained provisions for its being
eventually a university of complete dimensions, with not only a General
Faculty or Faculty of Arts (then usually called the Faculty of
Philosophy), but also the three special or professional Faculties of
Theology, Law, and Medicine. But, though the Magistrates and Town
Council looked forward, no doubt, to the attainment of this perfection
by the University at some time or other, they were not so ambitious at
first, and, indeed, had to accommodate their aims to the meagreness of
their means. They thought that, if they succeeded in founding the
general faculty, or Faculty of Arts, the most important part of their
work would be done, and the rest might gradually follow. They gave all
their attention at first, therefore, to the one Faculty of Arts. To set
up this Faculty alone would, according to recent ideas of what is
essential to its equipment, require at least seven appointments. Since
1858 the professorships of Latin, Greek, Mathematics, Natural
Philosophy, Logic and Metaphysics, Moral Philosophy, and Rhetoric and
English Literature have been, as it were, the Seven Golden Candlesticks
of the Arts Faculty in the University of Edinburgh,—the seven chairs in
that faculty privileged coequally above the rest in the curriculum for
graduation. In those old days, however, there was no notion that even as
many as seven separate candlesticks were needed. Latin was pre-eminent
as the _sine qua non_ for all the rest. It was the language in which all
the formal instruction within every university was then given, and with
which, so far as concerned the power of understanding it, speaking it,
and to some extent writing it, all students were supposed to be
acquainted before they commenced their university course. Further, in
the other subjects, which were all taught through this medium of Latin,
there was no such division of labour as at present. Mathematics and
Natural Philosophy had not then attained such dimensions in the world of
knowledge, nor were Moral Philosophy and Rhetoric so extricated from
Logic and Metaphysics, nor was proficiency in any or all of those
subjects deemed so incompatible with a competent knowledge of Greek, but
that one and the same professor could be expected to take students
through the whole series of studies by himself. _Now_ it would be but a
sad jumble of superficialities that would result from such a system of
individual professorships of everything; but in those days the _totum
scibile_ had not come to be so monstrous or heterogeneous an aggregate
but that it might be supposed capable of being carried with tolerable
compactness under one able man’s hat, and of being taught by such a man
more or less effectively by means of a series of established Latin
text-books. The supposition, though absurd enough even then, was the
less absurd because the subjects were made to follow each other in a
regular order through a university course of four years. The professor
began in his first year with the simpler subjects, and then carried the
same students, in their second, third, and fourth years, through the
more difficult subjects, until, at the end of the fourth year, he had
fitted them for their graduation, or, as it was called, their
“laureation,” in Arts. By this method, it will be seen, the number of
Arts professors in every university required to be but four at the
most,—each professor making his four years’ round with the same students
till he had seen them made Masters of Arts, and then returning to
receive a new class of freshmen or entrants with whom to repeat his
round. In fact, in each of the already established universities of
Scotland there _were_ four such principal Arts professors, or Philosophy
professors. In some universities, it is true, there were special
professors in addition, relieving the general professors of particular
kinds of work; but the four general or circulating professors were the
essential complement of the Arts Faculty. They were called “regents,” by
way of distinction.
It will be obvious now that, though the newly-founded University of
Edinburgh required at least four Philosophy professors or regents before
even its Arts Faculty could be considered fully equipped, yet one regent
was enough to start with. All that was necessary was that one fit
professor should be ready to receive the first set of students that
should present themselves. For the first year this single professor
could do the whole of the University work; and only when he had carried
his students through the first year of their course, and had to pass on
to the second year with them, would it be necessary to appoint a second
regent, to follow him with the new set of students who would then come
to the University doors. The third regent might be appointed the year
after that, and the fourth not till a year later.
All this the Magistrates and Town Council of Edinburgh, anxious for the
success of the new institution, but bound to be careful of expenses, had
calculated beforehand. It was, of course, a most serious question with
them who should be the first regent. No one could tell how much depended
on that. A bad appointment might wreck the University at the outset.
Fortunately, through the recommendation of that same Mr. James Lawson,
Knox’s successor in the ministry of Edinburgh, who had already had so
much to do with the founding of the University, the Magistrates and Town
Council selected a man whose appointment neither the City nor the
University had any cause afterwards to regret. This was Mr. Robert
Rollock,—the Rev. Robert Rollock would be now the designation,—then one
of the Philosophy professors in the University of St. Andrews. He was a
Stirlingshire man by birth, had been educated at St. Andrews, was
twenty-eight years of age, and had already won good opinions among those
who knew him. A deputation having been sent to St. Andrews to invite him
to the new post, he came to Edinburgh in September 1583 to offer himself
for inspection; and on the 14th of that month an agreement was signed
between him and the Lord Provost, Magistrates, and Town Council.
Rollock, on his part, agreed to “enter to the Colledge newly foundit
within the burgh,” and to “exerce the office of the Regent of the said
Colledge, in instructioun, governament, and correctioun of the youth and
persones whilk sall be committed to his chairge,” faithfully attending
always to the rules and injunctions to be given him by the Provost,
Bailies, and Council; “for the whilkis causis” they, on their part,
“binds and oblesis thame and their successoris thankfullie to content
and pay to the said Mr. Robert the soume of fortie pundis usual money of
this realme, at twa termis in the yeir, Candlemes and Lammes, be twa
equall portionis, and sall susteine him and are servand in their ordinar
expensis.... Attour [_i.e._ moreover] the said Mr. Robert sall repare
and have, for his labouris to be takin in instructing everie bairne
repairing to the said Colledge, yearly, as followis: to wit, fra the
bairnes inhabitants of the said burgh, fortie schillings, and fra the
bairnes of uthers, nocht inhabitants therein, three pundis, or mair as
the bairnes parentis please to bestow of their liberalitie.” Further
prospects of remuneration and promotion were held forth to Mr. Rollock,
and there was every disposition to make him comfortable.
An original portrait of Rollock now hangs in the Senate Hall of
Edinburgh University. It is but a poor specimen of the painter’s art,
and it does not suggest that Mr. Rollock can have been an Apollo. It
exhibits, however, a very distinct physiognomy,—a physiognomy so
distinct, so unlike anybody’s else, that, were Mr. Rollock to reappear
any afternoon now in the Canongate or in Princes Street, there would be
no difficulty in recognising him. The complexion, as the portrait tells
us, and as we learn from a contemporary biographic sketch of him, was
ruddy, or ruddy with a mixture of white (_colore rubido cui candor
quidam admistus_); and the hair and beard,—both cut short, so as to give
a character of round compactness to the head,—were of reddish hue (_comâ
subrufâ_). The biographic sketch, which is by one who knew him well,
adds that he was of middle stature and of rather weakly health, and
bears testimony to his piety, conscientiousness, peaceful disposition,
and pleasant sociability.
It was on the 1st of October 1583 that this round-headed, reddish-haired
man, of Stirlingshire birth, but of St. Andrews training, opened the
first session of the University of Edinburgh by an address delivered in
the public hall of the new premises in the presence of a crowded
audience of citizens and others. Next day, when he received the students
who came to enroll themselves in the first class in the new University,
their number, what with those supplied by Edinburgh itself, what with
those attracted from other parts of the country, was found to be far
greater than had been anticipated. Very soon, however, it appeared that
this was not altogether a cause for congratulation. The motley body of
the entrants had not been manipulated by Rollock for more than a week or
two when he had to marshal them into two divisions. A considerable
number had broken down in Latin,—were found to be so ill-grounded in
that indispensable preliminary that it was hopeless to go on with them
as members of the first University class proper, the teaching of which
had to be through the medium of Latin. To meet this exigency Rollock
proposed to the Town Council that they should at once appoint a second
regent, and that this regent should have committed to his charge all who
were backward in Latin, to be formed into a preparatory or Humanity
class, and drilled as such for a year, while he himself should go on
with the others in the first proper Arts or Philosophy class. Were that
done, then, next year, when he himself should be carrying on his
students into the second class, the other regent might form those that
had been kept back, and qualified newcomers with them, into a properly
sequent first class; and so the routine would be established. The advice
was adopted; and, on Rollock’s recommendation, the person chosen to be
Humanity teacher in the meantime, and second regent in regular course,
was a Mr. Duncan Nairne, a young man from Glasgow University. Thus all
was arranged; and the work of the first session of the University of
Edinburgh proceeded,—Rollock teaching his “Bajans,” and Nairne following
with the ragged troop whom he was working up in Latin to fit them for
the “Bajan” class of next year.
The “session” in each of the Scottish universities extended then over
ten, or even eleven, months of every year, _i.e._ from the beginning of
October to, or well into, August. The practice was for the students, or
a proportion of them, to reside within the University walls; and, though
this practice soon fell into disuse in Edinburgh, it held good at first
so far that at least some of the students were boarded and lodged in
some rough fashion within the College. The original regulation also was
that students should wear academic costume; but against this regulation
Edinburgh opinion seems from the first to have set its face most
determinedly. It was never really obeyed.
The infant years of the University were years of trial and rough usage.
In the jars between the different political factions round the young
King, and struggling for the possession of him, the infant institution
was much shaken and disturbed. The Magistrates and Town Council,
however, did their best; and Rollock was persevering and judicious. The
severest interruption to his labours came in his second session, or
1584–5. That session had been begun with good prospects, the property of
the College having been increased by a royal grant, and by a collection
of about 300 volumes bequeathed by Mr. Clement Little to form the
nucleus of a college library. Rollock was proceeding, accordingly, with
his second or semi class; and Nairne, having worked up the laggards by
this time, was teaching his first class of Bajans. But in the course of
the winter Edinburgh was visited by that scourge, “The Plague,” of the
frequency of the visits of which in those times, and their paralysing
effects on industry of all kinds, no one can be aware who is not versed
in the old annals of English and Scottish cities. In May 1585, most of
the students having already dispersed, it was necessary to stop the
session entirely. This would not have mattered so much, had not the
alarm of the Plague continued into the following session. That session,
the third in the history of the University, ought to have begun in
October 1585; at which time, as Rollock would then have been carrying
his students into their third or bachelor class, and Nairne would have
been carrying _his_ into their second or semi class, a third regent
would have had to be appointed, to undertake the new class of freshmen.
But it was not till February 1586, or four months after the proper
beginning of the session, that the College was reopened, and then it was
deemed best not to attempt a new Bajan class at all that year, but
simply to go on with the semies and bachelors. Even in this arrangement
there came a difficulty. Scarcely were the classes begun when the
promising young Mr. Duncan Nairne died, and, in order that the semi
class might be carried on at all, the Town Council had to elect a
professor in his room. They chose Mr. Charles Lumsden, a young man who
had been one of Rollock’s pupils at St. Andrews. The services of this,
the third regent or Professor of Philosophy in the University, did not,
however, outlast the remainder of the session in which he had been
appointed. A College professorship was not then a post of such
attraction that it could be thought strange that Mr. Lumsden should
resign it when, in the following October, he received a call to be
minister of Duddingston parish. By his resignation at that moment,
however, the College would have been left crippled, had not two new
regents been at once appointed. These new regents, chosen by competitive
trial out of six candidates, were Mr. Adam Colt and Mr. Alexander
Scrimgeour. The last of these, Scrimgeour, took charge of the new class
of entrants or Bajans; as there had been no class of Bajans in the
former year, the semi class was this year a blank; the former pupils of
Lumsden and Nairne, now in the third or bachelor class, were entrusted
to Mr. Colt; and Rollock himself, proceeding with the pupils who had
already been continuously in his charge for three years, carried them
through the last or magistrand class.
In August 1587, six months after the execution of Queen Mary at
Fotheringay, the fourth session of Edinburgh University was brought to a
close by the first act of laureation or graduation in its annals.
Forty-seven of Rollock’s pupils, who had remained with him steadily
through the entire four years, were then made masters of arts,—a larger
number than was to be seen at any subsequent graduation for more than
half a century. The signatures of the forty-seven are still to be seen
in the preserved graduation-book, appended to a copy of that Scottish
Confession of the Reformed Faith to which it was the rule that all
graduates should swear everlasting fidelity. Several of the names are
those of persons afterwards of some note in Scotland. To three of them
is affixed in the graduation-book, in later handwriting, the dreadful
word _Apostata_, signifying that those three disciples of Rollock
afterwards apostatised from the Protestant religion.
Having thus followed Rollock through one complete cycle of his regency
or professorship in Arts, one would like to know something as to the
nature and methods of his teaching. On this head the information is as
follows:—He began, as we have seen, by testing his students in the
indispensable Latin. But, though ability to read ordinary Latin authors,
to write in Latin, and also to speak Latin in some fashion and
understand spoken Latin, were prerequisites to his course, the business
of that course itself included necessarily much reading in particular
Latin classics, whether for their matter or for their style. Very soon
in his first class, however, he attacked Greek, teaching it from the
grammar upwards, until easy Greek authors could be read. Greek was
continued, for its own sake, into the second and third years of the
course; but the chief business of those years, and of the fourth, was
“Philosophy,” as divided into Logic, Ethics, and Physics. In each of
these departments the philosophical teaching consisted chiefly of
expositions of Aristotle. Whether in the original Greek, or, as is more
probable, in Latin versions, Rollock, we are expressly told, read
Aristotle daily with his pupils, beginning with the _Organon Logicum_,
and then going through the _Nicomachean Ethics_ and the _Physics_. The
_Physics_ came probably in the last year, and in this year also (for
mathematics and physical science were then usually delayed till the end)
certain additions to Aristotle: to wit, the principles of Arithmetic, a
sketch of the Anatomy of the human body, Astronomy as taught in the then
standard treatise of Joannes a Sacro Bosco _De Sphæra_, and finally
Geography. Conceive the routine so sketched; conceive the steady
plodding on day after day, for some hours every day, through four
sessions of ten or eleven months each; and conceive also the
disputations in Latin among the students themselves every Saturday, and
the express catechisings of them in religion on Sundays: and you will
have an idea of what it was to be under Rollock in the first years of
the University of Edinburgh.
A still more minute account of what constituted the curriculum of study
in the Faculty of Arts during the first age of the University is
furnished by an abstract of the “Order of Discipline” in the University,
drawn up in the year 1628. One cannot be sure that in every particular
this “Order of Discipline” accords with what had been the practice of
Rollock; but, as the abstract professes to be mainly a digest of rules
and customs that had been already in force, it probably describes
substantially the scheme of teaching introduced by Rollock and
bequeathed by him to his successors. The scheme may be tabulated thus:—
FIRST YEAR: _Latin, Greek, and the Elements of Logic_—(1) _Latin_:
Exercises in turning English into Latin and in translation from Latin;
with readings in Latin authors, chiefly Cicero. There seems also to
have been practice in Latin verse-making. (2) _Greek_: The Greek
Grammar of Clenardus; Readings in the New Testament, in the Orations
of Isocrates, and, for poetry, in Phocylides, Hesiod, and Homer; also
translation of Latin themes into Greek, and of Greek into Latin.
Passages of the Greek authors read were got by heart, and publicly
recited on Saturdays. (3) _Logic_: This was reserved till near the end
of the session, and Ramus was the author used.—There were disputations
on Saturdays, and catechisings on Sundays.
SECOND YEAR: _Recapitulation of previous studies, with Rhetoric,
Logic, and Arithmetic_—(1) _Recapitulation_: For the first month, with
a final examination in Greek. (2) _Rhetoric_: Talæus’s Rhetoric (a
short and very flimsy compend on the figures of speech, with
instructions in delivery), and portions of other manuals, such as
Cassander’s _Rhetoric_ and Aphthonius’s _Progymnasmata_ (a collection
of specimens of Greek composition to illustrate various styles); also
oratorical exercises by the students themselves. (3) _Logic_:
Perphyry’s Introduction to Aristotle’s _Organon_, and then, in the
_Organon_ itself, the Categories, the Prior Analytics, and portions of
the Topics and the Sophistics. (4) _Arithmetic_: towards the end of
the session.—Disputations and declamations on Saturdays, and
catechisings on Sundays.
THIRD YEAR: _Recapitulation of previous studies, with Hebrew Grammar,
Logic, Ethics, and Physical Science_—(1) _Recapitulation_: This went
back upon the Greek, and included examinations in Rhetoric and in
Logical Analysis. (2) _Hebrew Grammar_: taught apparently from the
beginning of the session. (3) _Logic_: The two Books of Aristotle’s
_Posterior Analytics_. (4) _Ethics_: The first, second, half of the
third, and the fourth and fifth Books of Aristotle’s _Ethics_. (5)
_Physical Science_: Aristotle’s _Acroamatics_, taught partly
textually, partly in compend, followed, at the close of the session,
by a descriptive sketch of Human Anatomy.—Disputations on prescribed
theses on Saturdays, and theological instruction on Sundays.
FOURTH YEAR: _Recapitulation of previous studies, with Astronomy,
Cosmography, and other portions of Physics, and Disputations and other
preparations for the Laureation_. Among the books used in this year
were the _Sphæra_ of Joannes a Sacro Bosco, the books of Aristotle _De
Cælo_, _De Ortu_, _De Meteoris_, and _De Anima_, and Hunter’s
_Cosmography_. Atlases and the celestial globe were also in
requisition, and the most notable constellations were pointed out in
the heavens themselves. But much of the work of this session consisted
in logical disputations in the evenings, whether among the
magistrands, or between them and the third year’s men.—On Sundays,
instruction in Dogmatic and Polemical Theology.
To return to Rollock personally:—We have spoken of him hitherto as only
the first regent or Arts professor of Edinburgh University. In reality,
however, since February 1586, when he was in his third session and had
Nairne as his single fellow-regent, he had borne, along with his
regency, the higher dignity of the PRINCIPALSHIP,—the Town Council
having concluded that the time had come for the institution of such an
office in the University, and for Rollock’s promotion to it.
Accordingly, when Rollock had the satisfaction of seeing the forty-seven
students who had gone through their full four years’ curriculum with him
made Masters of Arts, he was not only senior Regent, but also Principal
of the University, with a right of superintendence over Colt and
Scrimgeour, the other two regents. But no sooner had this first
Edinburgh graduation taken place than there was a further change.
Rollock, satisfied with having taken one class of students through the
full course of four years, resigned his regency or Arts professorship,
in order to become Professor of Divinity. As it was desirable that those
of the new graduates and others who might be going forward to the Church
should have the means of a theological education within Edinburgh, this
was a natural arrangement. It amounted to the institution, though on a
small scale, of a Theological Faculty in the University, in addition to
the general Faculty of Arts or Philosophy. The Theological Faculty was
represented solely by Rollock, who was also Principal of the University;
while the Arts or Philosophical Faculty was represented for the time in
Colt, Scrimgeour, and a third regent, Mr. Philip Hislop, one of
Rollock’s recent graduates, appointed to the place which Rollock had
just left vacant. In 1589, however, Mr. Charles Ferme, also one of
Rollock’s graduates, was added to the staff of regents, so as to
complete the number of four, necessary for the full conduct of the Arts
classes.
No need to narrate here the rest of Rollock’s life in detail. Enough if
we imagine him going on for ten years more in the exercise of the double
duties of his Professorship of Theology and his Principalship in the
infant University. As Professor of Theology, he may be said to have
founded the Divinity School of Edinburgh. He trained up assiduously, not
only by his lectures on Dogmatic and Polemical Theology, but also by his
personal influence, the first ecclesiastics whom the University of
Edinburgh gave to the Kirk of Scotland. Some of these attained
subsequent distinction, and, remembering Rollock with reverence, carried
his name into the next generation. Nor was his Principalship a sinecure.
He visited the Philosophy classes, gave special lectures to them on
Theology, and kept them and the regents to their work. Add to this much
exertion beyond the bounds of the University. For a time he delivered
Sunday evening sermons to crowded congregations in the East Kirk of St.
Giles, by way of volunteer assistance to the four city ministers; and,
latterly, when these four were increased to eight, and a division of the
city-pastorate was made into eight districts or parishes, the full
ministerial care of one of these city-charges was entrusted to Rollock.
It was an anxious time, too, in the politics of the Kirk. King James had
begun those efforts of his for the subversion of the Presbyterian
constitution of the Kirk, as it had been established by statute in 1592,
in which he was to persevere so unflinchingly through the remainder of
his resident reign in Scotland, though it was not till he removed to
England, and could act upon his native kingdom from the vantage-ground
of his acquired English sovereignty, that the results were fully seen in
the abolition of the Presbyterian constitution of the Kirk altogether
and the substitution of Episcopacy. Already in Rollock’s time all
Scotland was in anxious agitation in consequence of this
anti-presbyterian policy of the King and the vehement resistance to it
offered by the majority of the Scottish clergy and of the Scottish
people. Rollock himself, as a public man and leading Edinburgh minister,
had to take his part in the controversy. It was a mild part, it would
seem, and not entirely satisfactory to the more resolute Presbyterian
spirits, but truthful and characteristic. Without following him,
however, over this dangerous ground, farther than to say that he was
Moderator of the General Assembly held at Dundee in 1597, at which the
King was present in person and there were some not unimportant attempts
at a compromise, let us pass on to the year 1599, the last year but one
of the sixteenth century.
Rollock was then in his forty-fourth year. He could look back on his
services in connection with Edinburgh University as the most important
work of his life. He had seen fifteen sessions of that University begun
and ended, during four of which he had been senior regent or Arts
professor, and during the remaining eleven Principal and Professor of
Theology. He had seen eleven graduations and a total of 284 Edinburgh
Masters of Arts sent forth by these graduations into the world. The
University, it is true, remained still but a fragment of what a complete
university ought to have been. It contained as yet no Faculty of Law and
no Faculty of Medicine. For education in these professions Scottish
students had still to resort to foreign universities, as indeed they had
to do for more than a century yet to come. But it was something to have
established a Theological Faculty and a Faculty of Arts. The Theological
Faculty was still represented entire in Rollock’s own person; but in the
Arts Faculty, on which the University depended most, he had seen
thirteen regents after himself appointed. The tenure of office of most
of these had been vexatiously short, drawn off as they had been by the
more tempting emoluments of parish-charges and the like; but the four
who were now in office as regents,—Mr. Henry Charteris, Mr. Charles
Ferme, Mr. John Adamson, and Mr. William Craig,—were all graduates of
the University itself, and therefore all Rollock’s own men. Moreover,
the Arts Faculty had just been increased by the institution of a
separate Professorship of Humanity, distinct from the four rotating
regencies. To this professorship, the first holder of which was a
certain excellent Mr. John Ray, fell a part of the work that had
formerly been assigned to the regents of the first and second classes:
viz. instruction mainly in Latin, but also in elementary Greek and the
rudiments of rhetoric. Such was the staff of Edinburgh University as
Rollock left it. Though yet but in the prime of manhood, he had been
long in ill-health, and was now suffering from a painful and incurable
disease. There are affectionate details of his death-bed doings and
sayings: how he sent messages to the King, how the ministers and leading
citizens of Edinburgh visited him, what advices he gave them, what pious
ejaculations he uttered, and how, in especial, he spoke of the
University of his love, and recommended it to the care of those who had
the power to promote its interests. On the 9th of February 1599, the
sixteenth session of the University being then in progress, he breathed
his last. There was a great concourse of citizens of all ranks at his
funeral, and all over Scotland the rumour ran that the nation was poorer
by the loss of the eminent Rollock. Verses in Latin, Greek, and English,
by old pupils and others, were showered upon his grave. He left a widow,
whom the Magistrates and Town Council of Edinburgh pensioned; and a
daughter, posthumously born, was also provided for. In deference to his
dying injunctions, the Town Council appointed Mr. Henry Charteris, his
favourite pupil, and then one of the regents, to be his successor in the
principalship and in the professorship of Divinity.
Looked back upon now through the dense radiance of the subsequent
history of the University of Edinburgh, expanded as that University has
been in the course of centuries into its present four-facultied
completeness, each faculty of larger dimensions than Rollock could ever
have dreamt of, and each with its memories of scores or hundreds of more
or less shining celebrities that have belonged to it in past
generations, Rollock himself, it must be admitted, dwindles into a mere
telescopic star. That he is remembered at all now is due mainly to the
fact that he was the first president of one of the most important
institutions of the Scottish nation, and charged with the affairs of
that institution in its struggling commencement, its “day of small
things.” This in itself would be something. Many men have merited well
of society simply because they have performed diligently the routine
duties of the office they chanced to hold, and so have woven something
of their own personality, though it may be hardly distinguishable
afterwards, into the context of passing affairs and exigencies. Is this
all, however, that we can say of Rollock? Not quite. Though the best of
him is probably imbedded in the beginnings of the University of
Edinburgh, and much of that even in the unrecorded beginnings, he _has_
left some memorials of himself besides. His writings, all or nearly all
of a theological nature, some published during his life, and others
edited after his death by admiring friends, are so considerable in bulk
that even the selection of them reprinted by the Wodrow Society fills
two thick volumes. The more important and formal of them were dogmatic
treatises or analytical Latin commentaries on portions of Scripture,
some of which were of sufficient ability, after their kind, to have won
recognition from Beza and other foreign theologians. More interesting,
however, now are the specimens that remain of Rollock’s popular sermons
in the vernacular English, or rather the vernacular Scots, of his day.
Two extracts from one of these sermons will enable us to know Rollock
somewhat more intimately, and will give an idea at the same time of the
tastes of the Edinburgh folks of those days in the matter of pulpit
oratory.
Understand that the text of the discourse is _2 Cor. v. 1, 2_, running
thus in the old version then in use: “For we knaw that, gif our earthly
hous of this tabernacle be destroyit, we have a buylding given of God;
that is, a house nocht made with hands, bot eternall in the heavens. For
therefore we sigh, desiring to be clothed with our hous whilk is from
heaven.” The thoughts suggested by this text being those of the
evanescence of the present life and the aspiration after another life of
higher expansion, Rollock’s handling of them takes this form:—
“The Apostle having spoken this, that his eye was set on that hevinly
glory, it micht have been said, ‘Thou settis thine eye upon ane life
above; bot tak heid, Paul! Thou sall die in the mean time; is not life
and deith twa contrares? thou mon die, and that body of thine mon be
dissolvit. Luikis thou ever to rise again? thinkis thou any other
thing bot to be disappointed of life? Luikis thou that that body of
thine, being dissolvit in dust, sall rise again to glory?’ This is are
fair tentatioun, and sundry thinkis efter this maner.... Leirne ane
lesson here. Ye see, while ane man is luiking to hevin, he will not be
without tentatioun,—nay, not Paul himself, nor nae other man nor woman
that hes their conversatioun in hevin. And the special tentatioun of
him wha wald fain have life is deith, and the dreidful sicht of deith;
and deith is ever in his eye. He was never born bot deith will tempt
him, deith will be terrible to flesh and blude; and, when he is
luiking up to that licht and glory in hevin, it will come in betwixt
his eye and the sicht of hevin, as it were ane terrible black cloud,
and some time will twin [sunder] him and that licht of hevin. As, when
ane man is luiking up to the sun, ane cloud will come in on ane
suddenty and tak the sicht of the sun frae him, sae when ane man is
luiking up to the Sun of Richteousness, Christ Jesus, that cloud of
deith will come in and cleik [catch] the sicht of Christ frae him.
This is our estate here, and there is nane acquainted with hevinly
things bot he will find this in experience as Paul did. But what is
the remedy? In the first word of the text that we have read he says
‘we _knaw_,’ that is, ‘we are assured’; for the word imparts ane full
assurance, and faith, and are full persuasion. Then the remedy aganis
this tentatioun of deith is only faith, ane full persuasion and licht
in the mind of the knawledge of God in the face of Christ, with ane
gripping and apprehension thereof. This is the only remedy.”
“Thou mon have ane warrand of thy salvation in this life, or ellis I
assure thee in the name of God thou sall never get to hevin. It is ane
strait way to come to hevin, and it is wonder hard to get the
assurance of it: it is nae small matter to get ane assurance of life
everlasting efter death. Then luik what warrandis this man Paul had,
that thou may preis to have the like. The first ground of his
assurance is in this second verse. ‘For,’ says he, ‘this cause we
sigh, desiring to be clothed’ (to put on as it were ane garment).
Wherewith? ‘With our house whilk is frae hevin.’ Thir [these] are his
wordis. Then his first warrand and ground of his assurance is ane
_desire_ of that samin glory. What sort of desire? Ane _earnest_
desire, with siching and sobbing; not ane cauld desire, but day and
nicht crying and sobbing for life. Trowis thou sae easily to get hevin
that can never say earnestly in thy heart, ‘God give me that hevinly
life!’ Na, thou will be disappointed; it is the _violent_ that enters
in hevin (Matt. xi. 12), as ye will see ane man violently thring
[squeeze] in at are yett [gate]. Thou that wald gang to hevin, make
thee for thringing through while [until] all thy guttis be almaist
thrustit out. Paul, in the viii. chapter to the Romans, the 22 and 23
verses, usis thir argumentis againis those wickit men that cannot sich
for hevin. First he takis his argument frae the elementis, the
senseless and dumb creaturis, wha sobbis and groanis for the
revelation of the sonnis of God. O miserable man, the eirth sall
condemn thee; the flure thou sittis on is siching, and wald fain heave
that carcase of thine to hevin. The waters, the air, the hevinis, all
siching for that last deliverance, the glory apperteinis to _thee_;
and yet _thou_ is lauchand. What sall betide thee?”
There is evidence here that Rollock cannot have been merely a stiff
scholastic and pedagogue, but was a man of some real, if coarsish,
fervour of heart, of whom it might be expected that he would have the
power on occasion of putting his hand on the shoulders of any promising
youth among his pupils, and doing him good by some earnest words of
moral and spiritual stimulus. On the whole, however, the impression from
the sermons and the other writings is that he was by no means a man of
such extraordinary calibre intellectually as it was desirable, and
perhaps possible, that the University of Edinburgh should have had for
its first regent and principal, the shaper of its methods and its
tendencies from the outset. High forms of study and speculation were
then asserting themselves in the intellectual world of the British
Islands, the influence of which had never reached Rollock, or to which,
in his place and circumstances, he remained necessarily impervious. His
administration of the University could only be according to the lights
in which he had himself been educated, and which he brought with him
from St. Andrews. What if the Town Council of Edinburgh, instead of
sending to St. Andrews for Rollock to be the first head of the new
University, had invited their neighbour, Napier of Merchiston, to the
post? He was Rollock’s senior by five years, the one man in all Scotland
supremely fitted for the post; and, as he was to outlive Rollock
eighteen years, how different might have been the infancy of the
University had _he_ been in Rollock’s place! But Napier was a layman and
a laird; and the heavens would have fallen on the Edinburgh Town Council
of 1583, as indeed they would have fallen on any subsequent Edinburgh
Town Council till 1858, if they had thought of choosing any one but an
ecclesiastic for the University Principalship. Besides, it is possible
that the Laird of Merchiston, a man of many acres, and the owner and
inhabitant of one of the finest turreted mansions near Edinburgh, would
have regarded the offer as a joke.
It is in accordance with our estimate of Rollock all in all that,
though, among the students sent forth from the University of Edinburgh
during his Principalship, there were some who distinguished themselves
subsequently by their force and hard-headedness in the routine affairs
of the Scottish Kirk and State, we do not find any among them whom the
historian of the higher thought and literature of Britain cares to
remember now. Among the 284 Masters of Arts who left the University
before Rollock died, the most memorable are perhaps these: Henry
Charteris and Patrick Sands, pupils of Rollock’s own regency, and his
successors in the principalship; Alexander Gibson of Durie, afterwards a
judge of the Court of Session; James Sandilands, afterwards commissary
of Aberdeen; Thomas Hope, afterwards Sir Thomas Hope, and of celebrity
as a lawyer and as King’s Advocate; David Calderwood, the Presbyterian
historian of the Kirk; and Robert Boyd of Trochrig, sometime minister in
France, and afterwards Principal successively of the Universities of
Glasgow and Edinburgh. To these may be added, as memorable on another
ground, John Ruthven, Earl of Gowrie, and his brother Alexander Ruthven,
the two young chiefs or victims of the mysterious Gowrie conspiracy of
1600. The elder brother, a favourite of Rollock’s, was a graduate of
1593, and the younger graduated in 1598. Other names of some interest to
the Scottish literary antiquarian may be found in the list of the
Edinburgh graduates of Rollock’s time, but hardly one now interesting to
the general British muses. But, indeed, Scotland had then entered on a
period of her history during which the higher and more meditative muses
found themselves dismissed from her territory for a while. Precisely at
the time when the University of Edinburgh was founded, the age of
Scotland’s richest outburst in all forms of a thoroughly native
literature had come to an end,—closed, we may say, by the deaths of Knox
and Buchanan, save that in Napier of Merchiston there was one peculiar
survivor. From that date onwards through the whole of the seventeenth
century the energies of Scotland were to be locked up all but
continually and exclusively in one protracted business of political and
ecclesiastical controversy. From that date, accordingly, the successive
batches of graduates sent forth from the four Scottish Universities,—or
rather, we should now say, from the _five_ Scottish Universities, for
the University of Marischal College, Aberdeen, was added as a fifth in
1593,—were absorbed, as clerics, lawyers, soldiers, and what not, into
the service of a troubled social element requiring labours that left
little sap in them for literary delights or for purely speculative
exertions. Exceptions, of course, there are; and the two most notable of
these belong to the University of Edinburgh. Drummond of Hawthornden was
a graduate of that University in 1605, six years after Rollock’s death.
Robert Leighton, so dear to Coleridge as one of the finest Platonic
spirits among the British theologians of the seventeenth century, was an
Edinburgh graduate of 1631, and was Rollock’s sixth successor in the
Principalship of the University, and known for ten years in that
capacity before they induced him to become Bishop and Archbishop.
KING JAMES’S FAREWELL TO HOLYROOD[3]
It is a Saturday evening in Holyrood,—the evening of Saturday, the 26th
of March 1603. All is dull and sleepy within the Palace, the King and
Queen having retired after supper, and the lights in the apartments now
going out one by one. Suddenly, hark! what noise is that without? There
is first a battering at the gate, and then the sound of a horse’s hoofs
in the courtyard, and of a bustling of the palace servants round some
late arriver. It is the English Sir Robert Cary, brother of Lord
Hunsdon. He had left London between nine and ten o’clock in the forenoon
of the 24th; he had ridden as never man rode before, spur and gallop,
spur and gallop, all the way, through that day and the next and the
next, the two intervening nights hardly excepted; and here he is at
Holyrood on the evening of the third day,—an incredible ride! His horse,
the last he has been on, is taken from him all a-foam; and he himself,
his head bloody with a wound received by a fall and a kick from the
horse in the last portion of his journey, makes his way staggeringly,
under escort, into the aroused King’s presence. Throwing himself on his
knees before his half-dressed Majesty, he can but pant out, in his
fatigue and excitement, these words in explanation of the cause of his
being there so unceremoniously: “Queen Elizabeth is dead, and your
Majesty is King of England.”
It was the most superb moment of King James’s life. He was in the
thirty-seventh year of his age, and had been King of Scotland for nearly
thirty-six years; but through the last twenty of these,—or, at all
events, ever since February 1586–7, when the captivity of his mother
came to its tragical close at Fotheringay,—his constant thought had been
of the chance he had of being one day King also of England. Latterly the
chance had grown into a probability; but it had never become a
certainty. Although, according to all ordinary legal construction of the
case, his hereditary claim to the English succession was paramount,
there were impediments in the way. There were vehement objections to him
on the part of large sections of the English community; and that
especial and official recognition of his claims which might have gone
far to overcome these objections, or to neutralise them, had remained
wanting. Queen Elizabeth herself had, or was supposed to have, the right
of nominating her successor; but, though her relations to James through
the whole of his Scottish reign had been condescendingly kindly,—though
she had been in the habit of sending him letters of semi-parental
advice, and sometimes of rebuke, in his minority, and had then and since
shown her interest in him by allowing him a regular annual pension of
English money, of no great amount but very welcome to him as a
substantial supplement to his scanty Scottish revenues,—she had always
resisted his importunities in what was with him the all-important matter
of his succession to her crown. Her declaration on that subject had been
tantalisingly postponed; and James had been obliged to content himself
with secret negotiations with such of her English statesmen and
courtiers as might be able to persuade her to some distinct decision in
his favour while there was yet time, or, if that should not be
accomplished, might have influence themselves in bringing about the
event which she had left undetermined. Such negotiations round the
imperious old queen, clinging to life and sovereignty as she did, and
regarding as little better than treason all speculation as to what would
be after her death, were necessarily perilous; but they had been going
on for some time, with the result that a party had been formed in the
English Court favourable to the succession of King James, should
circumstances make it possible. At the centre of this party was
Secretary Sir Robert Cecil, Elizabeth’s chief minister since the death
of his father, the great Lord Burleigh, in 1598.
Elizabeth died in her palace at Richmond, in the seventieth year of her
age, about three o’clock in the morning of Thursday the 24th of March
1602 (so in the English reckoning, but in the Scottish it was 1603),
after an illness of some days, during the first four of which she lay in
great pain on cushions, and partly delirious, refusing to go to bed or
to take any food. Her Councillors, Secretary Cecil and Archbishop
Whitgift among them, had been in attendance from the first; and they had
contrived, on the day before her death, while she was lying speechless
in the bed into which they had at last forced her, to extract a sign
from her which intimated her consent that James should be her successor,
or which they found it convenient to construe to that effect. No sooner
was she dead than there was a meeting of the Council in an apartment
near that in which the corpse lay, to draft a proclamation of James as
the new sovereign, and to take other measures necessary in the crisis.
Secrecy was essential for a few hours; and, as the palace was full of
people, including the weeping court-ladies and others not of the
Council, there were orders that the gates should be shut, and that no
one should be permitted either to leave the palace or to enter it
without special warrant.
One person managed to evade the order and get in. This was the Sir
Robert Cary of whom we have just heard. He was then a man of about
forty-three years of age, and well known at Court, both from his high
family connections and on his own account. His father, the late Lord
Hunsdon, had been distinguished among Elizabeth’s councillors by being
related to her by cousinship; his brother, the present Lord Hunsdon, was
now of the Council; and a sister of his, Lady Scroope, was one of the
Queen’s ladies-in-waiting. His own services in the Queen’s employment
had been very various and had extended over many years. Among diplomatic
missions on which she had sent him in his youth had been several to King
James in Scotland; and latterly he had been in charge of one of the
English wardenships on the Scottish Borders, and conspicuous for his
vigour in the garrisoned defence of those northern parts of England
against the cattle-lifting raids of their rough Scottish neighbours.
While in this post, he had incurred the Queen’s disfavour by marrying,—a
fault which she always resented in any of her courtiers; and for a while
she had refused to see him or speak with him. He had contrived, however,
to pacify her in a skilfully obtained interview; and that cloud had
blown over. Hence, having come south on furlough from his wardenship
just about the time when the Queen was seized with her fatal illness,
and having taken lodgings in Richmond to await the issue, he had been
admitted easily enough into the dying Queen’s presence. “When I came to
Court,” he tells us, “I found the Queen ill-disposed, and she kept her
inner lodging; yet she, hearing of my arrival, sent for me. I found her
in one of her withdrawing chambers, sitting low upon her cushions. She
called me to her. I kissed her hand, and told her it was my chiefest
happiness to see her in safety, and in health, which I wished might long
continue. She took me by the hand, and wrung it hard, and said ‘No,
Robin, I am not well,’ and then discoursed with me of her indisposition,
and that her heart had been sad and heavy for ten or twelve days; and in
her discourse she fetched not so few as forty or fifty great sighs. I
was grieved at the first to see her in this plight; for in all my
lifetime before I never knew her fetch a sigh, but when the Queen of
Scots was beheaded.” This interview was on the night of Saturday, the
19th of March; and it was within the next day or two that, learning from
his sister that the Queen had become worse and worse, and that there was
no hope of her recovery, and remembering his friendly intercourse with
the Scottish King on former occasions, he despatched a letter to James
announcing the condition of affairs at Richmond, and resolved moreover
that, when the Queen was actually dead, he would be himself the first
man to carry the great news to Edinburgh. Once again he was in the
death-chamber. It was on the day before the Queen’s death,—that
Wednesday, the 23d of March, on which, lying speechless in bed, she gave
the sign which Cecil and the other councillors construed as they
desired. Among those who stood by her bedside on the evening of that
day, while Archbishop Whitgift prayed with her several times in
succession, was Sir Robert Cary. It was late, he tells us, when the
group broke up, and the Queen was left to die, with only her
waiting-women around her. Sir Robert had then gone to his lodgings in
the town, and had given instructions that he should be called at the
proper moment. Accordingly, about three o’clock on the following
morning, when he knew for certain that the Queen was dead, he was at the
palace gate. The porter had just received his orders not to admit any
one that was not privileged; and even the bribe with which Sir Robert
had already primed that official would not have been enough, had not one
of the councillors, who chanced to be at the gate at the time, taken the
responsibility of passing him in. He made his way through the chamber in
which the weeping ladies were to that in which the councillors were
assembled and were drafting their documents. His brother, Lord Hunsdon,
and his sister, Lady Scroope, being already in his confidence, and his
purpose having been guessed by Cecil and the rest, he found that they
were very angry with him, and were making arrangements of their own for
the necessary despatches to Edinburgh. In fact, they laid hold of him,
told him he must remain where he was till their pleasure should be
known, and, to show that they were in earnest, sent peremptory fresh
orders to the porter that no one was to be allowed to pass the gates
except the servants that were to be sent presently to get ready the
coaches and horses for the conveyance of the councillors themselves to
Westminster. For an hour or so, Sir Robert walked about in the palace
chagrined and disconcerted. He had got in with difficulty; but his exit
seemed impossible. Bethinking himself at last, he went to the private
chamber of his brother, Lord Hunsdon. His lordship, overpowered with the
fatigues of the preceding days, was asleep, but was soon roused, and
willing to assist. The two went together to the porter’s gate, where the
Council’s servants were just making their egress to bring the horses and
coaches. The porter could not prevent a great officer like Lord Hunsdon
from going out with them; but he stopped Sir Robert. It needed some
exertion and some angry words from Lord Hunsdon to cow the man; but this
was accomplished, and Sir Robert, to his great relief, found himself
outside the gate in the raw air of the dim March morning.
Not even yet were his difficulties over. Speeding from Richmond as fast
as he could, he was in Westminster by himself, and in a friend’s house
there, some time before the Lords of Council arrived in their coaches.
Learning, however, after they had arrived, that they were holding a
meeting in Whitehall Gardens to make final arrangements for the
proclamations of the new sovereign both in Westminster and in the City,
he thought it might be as well to try again whether they would employ
him for the service on which he had set his heart. He sent them word,
therefore, that he was in town, and was waiting their pleasure. It was
now past nine o’clock, and the proclamations were to be at ten. The
answer of the Council was a request to Sir Robert to come to them
immediately; and, as it was conveyed with a kind of intimation that he
would find them perfectly agreeable now to his proposal, he hastened to
attend them. He was actually between the outer and the inner gate of
Whitehall for this purpose, when a word sent out to him by a friendly
councillor made him aware that the Council were deceiving him, and that,
if he appeared among them, he would be laid fast. Then he hesitated no
longer. Giving the Council the slip, and not staying for the
proclamations or for anything else, he took horse at once, somewhere
near Charing Cross, and was off for his tremendous ride northwards. He
himself tells us the successive stages of his ride. He was at Doncaster
that night, a distance of 155 miles from London; next night he reached a
house of his own at Witherington in Northumberland, about 130 miles from
Doncaster; leaving Witherington on Saturday morning, he accomplished
some 50 miles more before noon that day, bringing him to Norham, close
to the Tweed; after which there were still about 65 miles of that
Scottish portion of his ride which lay between Norham and Edinburgh. He
had hoped to be at Holyrood House before supper-time; but his dizziness
and loss of blood from the fall from his horse in this last portion of
his journey delayed him, as we have seen, for an hour or two.
After his first abrupt salutation of King James in Holyrood that
Saturday night, there was naturally a longish colloquy between them. In
the course of this colloquy the King’s first excitement of joy was
damped for a moment by the reflection that the messenger had come of his
own motive merely, and without letters from the English Privy Council.
The production of a sapphire ring by Sir Robert removed, he tells us,
all doubts. The ring, it appears, had been thrown to him out of one of
the windows of Richmond Palace, just before he left, by his sister Lady
Scroope; and one account makes it out that it had been a gift by King
James himself to Queen Elizabeth, and that Lady Scroope took it off the
withered finger of the Queen after her death, to serve as a token that
could not be mistaken. Sir Robert’s own account does not quite imply
this, but _may_ be so interpreted. All the members of the Hunsdon
family, one gathers, were known to King James as having been for some
time active in his interest. It was late before the colloquy ended, and
Sir Robert was dismissed by the King for his much-needed rest of some
days, in or near Holyrood, in charge of the Master of the Household, and
under care of a surgeon.
Next day was Sunday; and, whatever whispers of the great event there may
have been round King James himself in Holyrood, it does not appear that
there was any hint of it that day among the congregations of the lieges
in the Edinburgh churches. It is hardly possible that on the following
day, when the proclamations of the new sovereign were palpitating
northwards through England, with huzzas from town to town, in the very
track of Sir Robert’s ride (he had himself ordered them in
Northumberland), the community of Edinburgh could still have remained
ignorant of what had happened. There could be no public recognition of
it, however, till the arrival of the authorised envoys from the English
Privy Council; and they did not arrive,—the laggards!—till the morning
of Tuesday, the 29th of March. They were Sir Charles Percy, brother of
the Earl of Northumberland, and Thomas Somerset, Esq., one of the sons
of the Earl of Worcester; and they brought with them two documents. One
was a copy of the Proclamation of King James that had been made in
London and Westminster on the 24th. It was certified by the signatures
of the Lord Mayor of London, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord
Chancellor Egerton, and twenty-seven more of the noblemen, prelates, and
knights of the English Council; and it opened thus—“Forasmuch as it hath
pleased Almighty God to call to his mercy out of this transitory life
our Sovereign Lady, the high and mighty princess, Elizabeth, late Queen
of England, France, and Ireland, by whose death and dissolution the
Imperial crowns of these realms foresaid are now absolutely, wholly, and
solely, come to the high and mighty prince, James the Sixth, King of
Scotland, who is lineally and lawfully descended from the body of
Margaret, daughter of the high and renowned prince, Henry the Seventh,
King of England, France, and Ireland, his great-great-grandfather,—the
said Lady Margaret being lawfully begotten of the body of Elizabeth,
daughter to King Edward the Fourth, by which happy conjunction both the
Houses of York and Lancaster were united, to the joy unspeakable of this
kingdom, formerly rent and torn by long dissension of bloody and civil
wars,—the same Lady Margaret being also the eldest sister of Henry the
Eighth, of famous memory, King of England as aforesaid: We therefore,
the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of this realm, being here assembled,
united and assisted with those of her late Majesty’s Privy Council, and
with great numbers of other principal gentlemen of quality in the
kingdom, with the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Citizens of London, and a
multitude of other good subjects and commons of this realm, thirsting
now after nothing so much as to make it known to all persons who it is
that, by law, by lineal succession, and undoubted right, is now become
the only Sovereign Lord and King of these imperial crowns, to the intent
that, by virtue of his power, wisdom, and godly courage, all things may
be provided for which may prevent or resist either foreign attempts or
popular disorder, tending to the breach of the present peace or to the
prejudice of his Majesty’s future quiet, do now hereby, with one full
voice, and consent of tongue and heart, publicly proclaim that the high
and mighty prince, James the Sixth, King of Scotland, is now, by the
death of our late Sovereign, Queen of England, of famous memory, become
also our only lawful and rightful liege lord, James the First, King of
England, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith.” The other document
was a missive letter to King James, signed by nearly the same persons,
and expressing their profound allegiance to him individually, and their
desire to see him in England as speedily as possible. It contained,
however, this paragraph:—“Further, we have thought meet and necessary to
advertise your Highness that Sir Robert Cary is this morning departed
from hence towards your Majesty, not only without the consent of any of
us who were present at Richmond at the time of our late Sovereign’s
decease, but also contrary to such commandment as we had power to lay
upon him, and to all decency, good manners, and respects which he owed
to so many persons of our degree; whereby it may be that your Highness,
hearing by a bare report of the death of our late Queen, and not of our
care and diligence in establishing of your Majesty’s right here in such
manner as is above specified, may either receive report or conceive
doubts of other matter than (God be thanked) there is cause you should:
which we would have clearly prevented if he had borne so much respect to
us as to have stayed for our common relation of our proceedings and not
thought it better to anticipate the same; for we would have been loth
that any person of quality should have gone from hence who should not,
with report of her death, have been able to relate the just effects of
our assured loyalties.” Both documents were read that day in the
Scottish Privy Council in Edinburgh; and their purport was published for
the general information.
What commotion in Edinburgh through the next few days! The King’s
leave-taking had to be hurried; and it was on Sunday the 3d of April
that, rising from his place in St. Giles’s Church after the sermon, he
made what had to pass as his farewell speech to all his Scottish
subjects. It was a speech intended to console them for their grievous
loss. “There is no more difference,” he said, “betwixt London and
Edinburgh, yea, not so much, as betwixt Inverness or Aberdeen and
Edinburgh; for all our marches are dry, and there be no ferries betwixt
them”; and, after dilating somewhat further on the undeniable fact of
the geographical continuity of his new kingdom with his old, he
mentioned one of its probable consequences. “Ye mister [need] not
doubt,” he said in conclusion, “but, as I have a body as able as any
king in Europe, whereby I am able to travel, so I sall visie you every
three year at the least, or ofter as I sall have occasion.” On Tuesday,
5th April, all being ready for his departure, there was the long
procession, amid thunders of cannon from the Castle, which conducted him
out of Edinburgh towards Berwick, there to begin the very leisurely tour
through the northern and midland counties of England by which he came to
London early in May. Many Scottish lords and gentlemen were in his
retinue, but none of the royal family. The Queen, Prince Henry, and the
Princess Elizabeth were to follow soon; and Prince Charles, afterwards
Charles I., then a rickety child in his third year, and unfit to travel,
was to remain in Scotland for about a year longer, under the charge of
Lord and Lady Fyvie, afterwards known as Earl and Countess of
Dunfermline.
From and after the 5th of April 1603 Holyrood, though not quite left to
the rats, was no longer the home of royalty. King James’s parting
promise that he would revisit his native kingdom at least once every
three years passed out of his mind; and not till 1617, fourteen years
after the ecstatic delight of his removal to the banks of the Thames,
did he find it worth while to recross the Tweed. Holyrood, with the
other royal palaces of Scotland, was then refurbished for his temporary
accommodation; but with that exception, and the further exception of two
subsequent visits of Charles I. to Edinburgh, there was to be no sight
of a sovereign face for many a day in the towered edifice under Arthur
Seat. For Scotland as a whole, indeed, the five-and-thirty years which
intervened between 1603 and 1638 may be described as that period of her
history during which, though still retaining a nominal apparatus of
independent autonomy, in the shape of a resident Scottish Privy Council
and an occasional meeting of a Scottish Parliament, she was governed
essentially and in the main from London through the post. “This I must
say for Scotland, and may truly vaunt it,” said King James in a speech
of rebuke to his somewhat troublesome English Parliament on the 31st of
March 1607: “here I sit and govern it with my pen; I write, and it is
done; and by a clerk of the council I govern Scotland now,—which my
ancestors could not do by the sword.” The words were perfectly true; and
they remained true for his son and successor, Charles I., till that
point in his reign when the soul of Scotland flashed out again in her
“National Covenant,” electrifying the dormant Puritanism of England, and
initiating the great Seventeenth Century Revolution in all the British
Islands.
It is so long ago now, and so much has happened between, that one almost
forgets to ask what became of Sir Robert Cary. Should there be any
interest in that subject, however, here are the facts in brief:—Though
appointed by King James, before he left Edinburgh, to be one of the
gentlemen of his bedchamber, and promised further promotion, he did not
at first benefit so much as he had expected from his signal piece of
service to that King. After accompanying the King to England, he lost
even his place in the bedchamber, and, probably from the grudge which
Secretary Cecil and the other English councillors still owed to him, was
kept otherwise in the background for some time. Gradually, however, he
recovered favour. His first considerable rise was when Lord and Lady
Dunfermline brought the sickly Prince Charles into England. Sir Robert
Cary’s wife was then selected as the fittest person to succeed Lady
Dunfermline in the charge of the delicate boy; and the honour to Sir
Robert and his wife was the less envied them because it was generally
expected that the boy would die in their hands. But he grew up under
their careful tending, with evident improvement of his health year after
year from his fifth year to his eleventh; and this ensured their future
fortunes. Queen Anne always stood their friend, and influenced the King
in their favour; Prince Henry, while he lived, treated them with
respect; and after Prince Henry’s death in 1612, when Prince Charles
became heir-apparent in his room, who but Sir Robert Cary could be the
chief man about the heir-apparent and the chamberlain of his household?
There were ups and downs still; but Sir Robert and his wife had gifts
and pensions, saw their sons and daughters suitably married, and found
themselves in the English peerage at last. In 1621 Sir Robert became
Baron Leppington. This was his last honour from King James; but in March
1626, at the coronation of Charles I., he was created Earl of Monmouth.
He was then about sixty-six years of age; and he lived in that dignity
till 1639, when he died at the age of about eighty. His _Memoirs_,
written by himself, were first published from the manuscript in 1759.
PROPOSED MEMORIAL TO DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN.[4]
It is two centuries and a half since Drummond of Hawthornden died; but
he is still one of the most interesting figures in Scottish history. “A
genius the most polite and verdant that ever the Scottish nation
produced” was the character given of him in 1656 by Milton’s nephew and
pupil, Edward Phillips, in the preface to a collective edition of
Drummond’s poems brought out in London that year under Phillips’s
editorial care. Very possibly the words are Milton’s own; for Phillips
derived his notions of poetry from Milton, and there is other evidence
of Milton’s familiarity with the poetry of Drummond. At all events the
words are singularly exact for their purpose. They imply, it is true, an
imperfect recollection, if not a total ignorance, of the previous wealth
of Scottish poetry, represented in such predecessors of Drummond as
Barbour, James I., Henryson, Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, and Sir David
Lindsay; but, even had Phillips’s recollection of these been clearer and
stronger than it was, his selection of the words “polite” and “verdant”
as descriptive of those characteristics of Drummond’s genius which were
surest to strike Englishmen would not have been so much amiss, while for
the range of Scottish time actually within Phillips’s retrospect at the
moment the wording of the eulogy was perfect.
The famous series of the older Scottish poets had come to an end on the
death of Lindsay just before the Reformation; and from that time it
seemed as if the Literary Muses had all but vanished from Scotland,
dispossessed and superseded by quite another order of Muses, if that
name can be stretched so as anyhow to include them,—the rougher and
angrier Muses of vexed national questions, and especially of the Kirk
Controversy. Call them Muses or what else you will, they were very
momentous powers, and he is but a feeble Scot who will speak of them
with contumely, or will ignore the great effects for Scotland and for
all Britain that came out of their turmoil. Not the less it is
depressing to Scottish patriotism nowadays to remember how long the
turmoil lasted, how all-engrossing it was, and how much of native
faculty and aspiration of the finer, deeper, and quieter sorts it must
have stifled and extinguished. For the first twenty years after the
Reformation there is the compensation, indeed, of the oratory and
pre-eminent prose energy of Knox, and of the great literary fame and
exquisite Latinity of Buchanan; but from the year 1580 onwards till
1725, or thereabouts, what a long tract of sterility in the literary
annals of Scotland! Through that century and a half England prodigiously
surpassed her former self, first astonishing the world by the outburst
of her Elizabethan splendours, and then continuing the astonishment by
the rich and varied literary activity of three succeeding ages, the
latest of which was that of the Queen Anne wits. Scotland, on the other
hand, had sunk incredibly below the promise of _her_ former self. The
Scottish pre-Reformation poets had been comparable, or more than
comparable, with the very best of their English coevals, Chaucer alone
deducted; but, when the literary historian, leaving the crowded series
of lustrous names, from those of Spenser, Bacon, and Shakespeare at one
end, to those of Dryden and Pope at the other, which represent the
literature of South Britain between 1580 and 1725, seeks in North
Britain for equivalents, what does he find? No equivalents in the
highest degree; but, at the utmost, if he mixes any strictness of
conscience with his kindliness, only such an exception here and there to
the general sterility that, if it is of the racy vernacular sort, it can
be noted apart with pleasure on that account, or, if it is cognate with
anything in the English series, it can be moved along that series till
the proper interstice is found into which it can be fitted.
One indubitable exception, the exception in chief, was Drummond of
Hawthornden. Born amid a people almost wholly absorbed in their Kirk
controversy, it had somehow happened that here was one Scot whose ideal
of life differed from the common. Of a meditative and philosophical
temperament from his boyhood, a lover of books, art, and music, and with
his tastes in such matters educated by foreign travel and by a
familiarity with the recent English Elizabethan literature which must
have been then excessively rare in North Britain, he had no sooner
become Laird of Hawthornden by his father’s death in 1610 than, abjuring
all other occupations, he schemed out for himself that life of studious
leisure which suited him best, and for which there could not, in all
Scotland, have been a more beautiful home than the leafy dell of his
lairdship and habitation:—
“Dear wood, and you, sweet solitary place,
Where from the vulgar I estranged live.”
Here, accordingly, it was that, between 1610, when he was in his
twenty-fifth year, and 1625, when he was in his fortieth, he wrote at
intervals, and uniformly in that southern English which he foresaw was
thenceforward to be the general literary tongue of the British Islands,
most of the poems by which he is now remembered. The quantity altogether
was not large, and the pieces were all short individually; but the
quality was genuine. No such poetry of artist-like delight in beauty of
scenery, the soft and luscious in colour, form, language, and sound,
pervaded at the same time by such a fine and high vein of pensive
reflectiveness, had appeared in Scotland for many a day. This was at
once recognised among his own countrymen; but the poems, or the rumour
of them, went beyond Scotland. Before the close of the reign of the
Scottish King James in England, Drummond was certainly the one man
living in Scotland who was thought of by the London men of letters round
the Court of that King as belonging, by right of real merit, to the
poetic brotherhood of the reign. A London Scot or two, it is true,
having the advantages of proximity and of Court connection, did divide
with Drummond the applauses of the London circle of critics for Scottish
merit in English verse-making; but, if the vote had been seriously
taken, it was to Drummond that the competent judges would have sent the
laurel. Hence, indeed, some of the most memorable incidents in
Drummond’s biography. Hence it was that the Elizabethan veteran Michael
Drayton entered into such loving correspondence with him, addressing him
“my dear, noble Drummond”; hence it was that, when any eminent Londoner
chanced to make a tour in Scotland, he was sure to seek an introduction
to Drummond; and hence that immortal visit of the great Ben Jonson
himself, when he was Drummond’s guest in Hawthornden for a whole week in
the winter of 1618–9, entertained Drummond with all the gossip of London
for thirty years back, stunned him with loud talk about everything, and
drank an immensity of his wine. Phillips’s encomium of 1656, when
Drummond had been seven years dead, only expressed, one can see, an
opinion already formed while Drummond was still alive, and in the prime
of his manhood.
The encomium included, or ought to have included, more than Drummond’s
performances in verse. His fine and verdant genius is no less
discernible in his prose writings. His little essay entitled “A Cypress
Grove” is a piece of prose so superlatively excellent that one wonders
how it should be so little known,—why, in fact, it should not have had a
prominent place in all professed collections of the flowers of English
seventeenth-century prose. For high-toned philosophic thoughtfulness,
ingenuity of artistic phantasy, musical beauty of style, and perfection
of literary taste and finish, there is nothing superior, of the same
length, if anything quite equal, in all Sir Thomas Browne, or in all
Jeremy Taylor. That essay was published in 1623, as an adjunct to one of
his volumes of poems; and, though there is a good deal of other and
later prose from Drummond, it is mainly of a character less readable
now, and less acceptable in some quarters where it may still receive
attention. For the _quæstiones vexatæ_ did at last coil themselves round
Drummond, and in his later years, in his own despite, he had to become a
polemical politician. King James had been succeeded by King Charles; on
the 23d of July 1637 Jenny Geddes hurled her stool in St. Giles’s; and
Scotland then passed into that trebly troubled period of her always
troubled history which, commencing with her own defiance to Charles and
Laud in her National Scottish Covenant, and proceeding thence to her
alliance with the English Parliamentarians in the Solemn League and
Covenant, includes Montrose’s brief year of Royalist outblaze and
anti-Covenanting triumph, and all the rest of the chequered sequel till
the English Republicans brought Charles to the block. No Scot through
that long agony was permitted to be neutral; if any one had tried, he
would have been torn from his retirement, and obliged to declare
himself. Drummond did declare himself, and it was on what was then, and
still is, among his countrymen, the unpopular side. In a series of prose
tracts, circulated surreptitiously, some of them of the nature of
satirical squibs, he advocated views of Scottish politics which were
very much those of Montrose and the Hamiltons. Even where this may be
remembered, in a general way, to his discredit now, there is much,
however, in the tracts themselves to arrest the unfavourable judgment
and turn it into respect. Their literary ability and clever wit may
count for little with those who resent their purport; but there are
passages of high-minded and eloquent earnestness that must startle any
reader in such a context. While inculcating upon his countrymen an
effete and impracticable political philosophy of passive obedience, and
while indicating a preference on Drummond’s own part for something of
that florid Anglican ecclesiasticism against which his countrymen were
fighting, he flings out to the right and to the left remonstrances much
needed on both sides, and especially a doctrine of religious toleration
far beyond the apprehension of either, or of the time generally. Laud he
virtually shoves aside as an interloper; and, on the whole, the
substance of the tracts, in one of the two directions to which they were
addressed, is like a message to Charles that he had been unfortunately
wrong in his Scottish policy from the first, inasmuch as Scotland always
had been Scotland, was Scotland still, and could not be drilled by any
mortal force against her own will into anything else. Here, in fact,
Drummond reveals his very heart. A disciple though he was of the English
Elizabethans in literature, deploring the low condition of Scottish
literature in comparison, and practising in his own writings the
accepted book-English of the south, he was yet thoroughly a Scot by his
strongest personal and private affections. No Scot of his generation
more fond of the antiquities and legends of his country, or more learned
in that kind of lore; his chief pastime all through his life was in
researches into Scottish records and family genealogies back to Malcolm
Canmore and beyond; and his special recreation amid the troublesome
party-pamphleteering of his later years was the composition of his
_History of the Five Jameses_. This was not published till some years
after his death, and, though of some interest as a specimen of the
silvering effect of his ornate English upon very savage matters, is the
poorest of all his writings in respect of real worth. But what of that
other relic of Drummond, if it be really his, which did not come to
light till thirty years after his decease, and then in the surprising
form of a piece of broad Fifeshire farce in dog-Latin hexameters,
entitled _Polemo-Middinia inter Vitarvam et Nebernam_,—_i.e._ “The
Midden-Fecht between Tarvet and Newbarns”? If that really _is_
Drummond’s (which is possible, or even probable, though not absolutely
certain), it is one excellent feather more in his cap. It would be proof
positive that the stately and pensive Laird of Hawthornden was a typical
Scot also, no less than Dunbar and Lindsay before him, or Burns after
him, in the Scottish faculty of uproarious fun, and could give and take,
when he chose, with any Newhaven fishwife, or any Gilmerton carter, in
their own roughest vocabulary.
The tradition of Drummond has come down pretty vividly from his own time
to the present. This, however, is perhaps less due to continued
acquaintance with his writings than to certain aiding circumstances. Few
names of literary celebrity, as Charles Lamb used to remark, are so
delightful to pronounce as “Drummond of Hawthornden”; and in England, so
far as Drummond has been kept in mind at all, it seems to have been
chiefly by this conserving efficacy of his gracefully-sounding name. In
Scotland, and especially in the vicinity of Edinburgh, the aids in
recollecting him have been of a stronger kind:—
“Who knows not Melville’s beechy grove,
And Roslin’s rocky glen,
Dalkeith, which all the virtues love,
And classic Hawthornden?”
When Scott wrote these lines, ninety-one years ago, the reputation of
the valley of the Esk for scenic beauty and picturesqueness, and the
fashion of holiday peregrinations to it, on that account and on account
of the attractions of its historical associations, by the citizens of
Edinburgh or by tourists visiting Edinburgh, had already been fully
formed. The reputation and the fashion have been kept up ever since, and
Drummond’s memory has had the benefit. Whatever the other attractions of
the valley of the Esk and its neighbourhood, the twin pre-eminence among
them has belonged to Roslin and Hawthornden; and hence it has happened
that hundreds and thousands who had never read a line of Drummond’s, and
knew but vaguely in what century he lived, have looked admiringly at the
cliff-socketed and quaintly gabled and turreted edifice, partly built by
himself and partly of more ruinous antiquity, where he had his dwelling,
have walked round it in the grounds where he once walked, have descended
as he used to descend into the leafy dell of the river beneath, and so
have taken into their minds some image of the man by the memory of whom
the place has been consecrated.
Hawthornden is in the parish of Lasswade; and it is in the churchyard of
Lasswade, two miles from the Hawthornden mansion, that one sees the bit
of old masonry, called the Drummond Aisle, and once a portion of the
church itself, within which is Drummond’s grave. Did he foresee that
this would be his resting-place, or was he only writing metaphorically,
when he penned the lines, now perhaps the most frequently quoted piece
of his verse, giving instructions for his epitaph? His most intimate
friend and correspondent through his life was Sir William Alexander of
Menstrie, eventually Earl of Stirling and Secretary of State for
Scotland,—one of those London Scots above mentioned who divided for a
while with Drummond in London literary circles the palm of the primacy
in Scoto-British poetry. There was no jealousy between them on that
account; on the contrary, Alexander, as a man of high Court influence,
regarded himself as standing in a relation of patronage to Drummond,
while Drummond, acknowledging this relation, and proud of it, looked up
to Alexander and admired him hugely. Their friendship, nevertheless, was
as close and affectionate as ever bound two men together, and in their
letters to each other they always, to signify this, called themselves,
in the fashion of the pastoralists, Alexis and Damon. Well, it was in
the year 1621, or thereabouts, that Drummond, then only about
thirty-five years of age, but hardly recovered from a severe illness
which had brought him to the doors of death and left him in a mood of
melancholy depression, sent a sonnet to Alexander, containing these
lines:—
“Amidst thy sacred cares and courtly toils,
Alexis, when thou shalt hear wandering fame
Tell death hath triumphed o’er my mortal spoils,
And that on earth I am but a sad name,
If thou e’er held me dear, by all our love,
By all that bliss, those joys, Heaven here us gave,
I conjure thee, and by the Maids of Jove,
To carve this short remembrance on my grave:—
‘Here Damon lies, whose songs did sometime grace
The murmuring Esk: may roses shade the place!’”
In the memorial to Drummond now proposed by the influential committee of
which Lord Melville is chairman it is intended that this instruction
shall be obeyed as faithfully as possible. The bushing of roses round
the grave was but a wish, and a bushing of roses round the Drummond
Aisle in Lasswade Churchyard is unfortunately not practicable in that
situation. But there may be some decoration of the little aisle
containing the grave; and on the wall, whether in the interior or
outside, there may be a medallion of Drummond or other commemorative
sculpture, with room for his own words of epitaph. That, most properly,
is to be the first object, the primary object, of the committee that has
been formed for the promotion of the memorial. Should the amount of the
subscriptions, however, permit something more, the precise form of the
addition may be matter for consideration. Should there be a bust or
other piece of monumental sculpture besides that which is to decorate
the sepulchre at Lasswade, surely Edinburgh is the place for that
supplement, and, within Edinburgh, perhaps St. Giles’s Cathedral. For
was not Drummond one of the earliest alumni of Edinburgh University; was
not his donation of books to the University, which is still kept apart
in the University Library under the name of The Drummond Collection, a
special testimony of his regard and affection for the University in its
infancy, and for the whole city; all through the years of his residence
at Hawthornden must not the seven miles of road between Hawthornden and
Edinburgh have been his most familiar ride or walk; every other week
must he not have been actually in Edinburgh for hours and days together,
visiting his Edinburgh relatives and friends, seen in colloquy with some
of them on the causey of the old High Street near St. Giles’s Church,
and known to have his favourite lounge in that street in the shop of
Andro Hart, bookseller and publisher, just opposite the Cross?
Although the increase among us of late of the practice of such
commemorative tributes to eminent personages of the past has provoked
cynical criticism in some quarters, it is really one of the creditable
signs of our time. The more numerous the objects of interest to any
nation in its own history, or in history generally, in times preceding
the bustle of the present, the richer the mind of that nation, and the
higher its capabilities. Even the range of time to which it will go back
for worthy objects of interest must count for something in the
reckoning. The recent is only the departing present, and has so left its
residues in the present, whether of admirations or of animosities, that
participation in testimonies of regard for public men remembered as
having recently moved amidst us signifies little more with many than
sensitiveness to the common duties of present social life, or sometimes
even of present political partisanship. To be susceptible of the
commemorative instinct with respect to objects and persons removed from
ourselves by a generation or two, or a century or two, is a rarer thing,
and implies a larger and finer endowment of historical knowledge and
feeling.
ALLAN RAMSAY[5]
In the reign of Queen Anne there were the stirrings of a literary
revival in Scotland. No name connects itself more distinctly with this
interesting phenomenon than that of Allan Ramsay.
Born in 1686, of humble parentage, in the village of Leadhills, in the
wild inland parish of Crawfordmuir in Lanarkshire, and educated in the
ordinary fashion at the parish school there, Ramsay was brought to
Edinburgh in 1701, when he was in his fifteenth year, and was
apprenticed to a periwig-maker. The statement sometimes made that he
began life as a barber is therefore incorrect. The crafts of the barber
and the wig-maker were then distinct. _Wig_ and _periwig_ are one and
the same thing, and both are derived, it seems, though one would hardly
suppose so, from the Latin _pilus_, hair. Thus,—Latin, _pilus_, hair;
old Italian, _pilucca_, a mass of hair or head of hair; this, still in
old Italian, corrupted into _perucca_; whence the French _perruque_;
that word adopted into English, but generally twirled into _periwig_ to
make it native; from which word _periwig_ if you lop off the _peri_, the
sole remnant of the original _pilus_, you have the mere twirl or
termination _wig_, standing as a substantive word and answering the
whole purpose. Now a wig-maker, periwig-maker, or _perruquier_, was no
mean tradesman in those old times, extending from the middle of the
seventeenth century to near the end of the eighteenth, when it was the
strange custom, in all civilised European countries, for people to wear
artificial heads of hair, not as mere substitutes for the natural
growths in cases of necessity (which had been a usage everywhere from
time immemorial), but as fashionable adornments of bulging volume and
fantastic device. An essay might be written on the fact that there was
such a wig-wearing age in Europe, nearly the same in range of time in
every country of that continent; in which essay it might be plausibly
argued that there was an inherent congruity between the strange
wig-wearing habit and the intellectual and spiritual characteristics,
and consequently the literary capabilities and products, of the age
distinguished by the habit. One can hardly conceive Addison or Dr.
Johnson, for example, without a wig, or Wordsworth, or Byron, or Sir
Walter Scott, with one.
Be that as it may,—and there are curious intricacies in the
speculation,—Allan Ramsay not only belonged to the wig-wearing age in
Scotland, but was brought up to the business of wig-making and
wig-dressing for the Edinburgh lieges. It was no bad employment in a
population of between 30,000 and 40,000 inhabitants, including resident
noblemen and lairds, and a good many professional men and merchants, all
of whom wore wigs, and liked them to be handsome. Accordingly, when, in
or about the year 1708, or just after the Union, young Ramsay, having
concluded his apprenticeship, started in business for himself, in some
shop in the High Street, or one of its offshoots, his prospects were
fair enough. Skipping four years, and coming to the year 1712, when he
was twenty-five years of age, we find him just married to the daughter
of a respectable Edinburgh lawyer, and in very comfortable circumstances
otherwise. It was then that he was beginning to be known in the cosy
society of old Edinburgh as not only an expert wig-maker but also
something besides.
“Whenever fame, with voice of thunder,
Sets up a chield a warld’s wonder,
Either for slashing folk to dead,
Or having wind-mills in his head,
Or poet, or an airy beau,
Or ony twa-legged rary-show,
They wha have never seen’t are busy
To speer what-like a carlie is he.”
The words are Ramsay’s own, by way of preface in one of his poems to an
account of his personal appearance and general character. The
description, though not written till 1719, will do very well for 1712:—
“_Imprimis_, then, for tallness, I
Am five feet and four inches high;
A black-a-viced, snod, dapper, fallow,
Nor lean nor overlaid with tallow;
With phiz of a Morocco cut,
Resembling a late man of wit,
Auld-gabbit Spec., wha was sae cunning
To be a dummie ten years running.
Then, for the fabric of my mind,
’Tis mair to mirth than grief inclined:
I rather choose to laugh at folly
Than show dislike by melancholy,
Well judging a sour heavy face
Is not the truest mark of grace.”
Elsewhere, more briefly, he describes himself as
“A little man that lo’es my ease,”
and again as one who much enjoyed, in good company,
“An evening and guffaw.”
This kind of pleasure he was in the habit of enjoying more particularly
in one of those many clubs into which the citizens of dense Auld Reekie
then distributed themselves for the purposes of conviviality. It
consisted of about a dozen kindred spirits calling themselves “The Easy
Club,” professing literary tastes, and making it a rule that each of
them should be known within the club by some adopted name of literary
associations. Ramsay’s first club-name was “Isaac Bickerstaff,” but he
changed it after a while for “Gavin Douglas.” There is a significance in
both names, and in the exchange of the one for the other.
Through Ramsay’s apprenticeship, and also after he had set up in
business for himself, he had been a diligent reader of all accessible
books. Recollecting what books _were_ then accessible to one in his
circumstances, we can see, however, that his readings had been mainly in
two directions. In the first place, there was the current English or
London literature of his own time, or as much of it as was wafted to
Edinburgh in the shape of the last or recent publications, in prose or
verse, by Defoe, Prior, Swift, Steele, Colley Cibber, Addison, Rowe,
Aaron Hill, Gay, and others of the Queen Anne wits; among whom is not to
be forgotten the youthful Pope, then rising to the place of poetic
supremacy that had been left vacant by Dryden. Of Ramsay’s cognisance of
this contemporary English literature of the south, his admiration of it,
and enjoyment of it, there is abundant evidence. He had become aware,
however, of another literature, indigenous to his own Scotland, though
lying far back, for the most part, in an obscure Scottish past. Through
Watson’s _Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems_, Ruddiman’s
edition of Gavin Douglas’s _Translation of Virgil_, and Sage’s edition
of Drummond of Hawthornden, he had been attracted to the old Scottish
poets, finding in them a richness of antique matter that came home to
his heart amid all his readings in Steele, Pope, and Addison:—
“The chiels of London, Cam., and Ox.,
Hae raised up great poetic stocks
Of _Rapes_, of _Buckets_, _Sarks_, and _Locks_,
While we neglect
To shaw their betters. This provokes
Me to reflect
On the learn’d days of Gawn Dunkell:
Our country then a tale could tell;
Europe had nane mair snack and snell
At verse or prose;
Our Kings were poets too themsell,
Bauld and jocose.”
In this double direction of Ramsay’s literary likings,—his respectful
obeisance to the literary merits of his London contemporaries, and his
fonder private affection for the old poets of his Scottish
vernacular,—we have the key to his own literary life.
Between 1712 and 1718, or between Ramsay’s twenty-sixth and his
thirty-third year, just when the reign of Queen Anne was passing into
that of George I., the Edinburgh public became more and more alive to
the fact that they had a poet among them in the guise of a wig-maker. A
number of little pieces of verse, with Ramsay’s name attached, came out
in succession in the form of humbly printed leaflets, some of them with
the sanction of “The Easy Club,” as having been originally written for
that convivial fraternity, but others independently, when that club had
ceased to exist. On examining these earliest pieces of Ramsay, one finds
that, while some of them are satires or moralisings in a rather crude
English, in imitation of the London poetry then in vogue, the best are
occasional poems in the colloquial Scotch of Ramsay’s own day, suggested
by local incidents, characters, and humours. In these he was evidently
connecting himself as well as he could with the broken chain of those
older vernacular poets to whom he looked back with so much interest. We
can even detect those predecessors of his in this broken chain whom he
took more immediately for his models. They were the two later Semples of
Beltrees,—Robert Semple (1595–1659), the author of “The Piper of
Kilbarchan,” and his son Francis Semple (died about 1685), author of
“Fye, let us a’ to the bridal,” “Maggie Lauder,” and other Scottish
songs. Not that these were poets of anything like the dimensions of the
older Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, and Lindsay, but that they had exhibited
the literary capabilities of the Scottish tongue in that more recent and
less archaic stage from which one might make a fresh start. That he had
still a hankering, however, after the greater and older Scots was shown
by the boldest, and in point of length most considerable, of his
attempts at authorship during the time now under notice. This was the
publication, in 1717, of a new edition of the old Scotch poem, in
complex rhyming stanzas, called _Christ’s Kirk on the Green_, attributed
by some to King James V., and by others, with utter improbability, to
the poet-king James I. To the original of this old poem of Scottish
humour, the language of which is so difficult that it had puzzled
previous editors, there was added a continuation by himself, in the form
of a second canto, carrying on the story; and, the demand having been
such that another edition was called for in the following year, he then
added a third canto. Ramsay was no philologist, and his edition of the
old poem was of no value for scholars; but his appreciation of the
poetic merit of the old piece must have been beyond the common, and his
two cantos of continuation were something of a feat. “Nothing so rich,”
says a modern critic, “had appeared since the strains of Dunbar or
Lindsay”; and of the opening of the third canto the same critic says
that it is “an inimitable sketch of rustic life,—coarse, but as true as
any by Teniers.” The judgment is perhaps too favourable; but this
venture of Ramsay’s in the archaic Scotch deservedly increased the
reputation he had won by his easier and shorter pieces in the ordinary
colloquial Scotch of his own day, and by some of their English
companions.
Before the year 1718, when _Christ’s Kirk on the Green_ appeared with
its completed continuation, Ramsay had begun to combine the business of
bookselling with that of wig-making. For this purpose he had transferred
himself and his family to a house in the High Street, just opposite
Niddry’s Wynd, for which he had adopted the sign of “The Mercury”; and
it was from this house that the completed edition of the old poem was
published. The house still stands, now numbered 153 in the street,
glass-fronted to a great extent in the two storeys above the basement,
and with the old stone stair of entrance to these storeys, but bereft of
an upper storey and attics which once belonged to it and gave it a more
imposing look. To understand, however, the dignity of the house and its
situation in Allan Ramsay’s days, one has to remember that the Edinburgh
of those days consisted all but entirely of that one long descending
ridge or backbone of edifices from the Castle to Holyrood of which the
High Street proper was the main portion. One must remember further that
the High Street was not then the continued clear oblong from the
Lawnmarket to the Netherbow which we now see, but that up a portion of
the middle of it, along the face of St. Giles’s Church, there ran an
obstructive block of buildings,—consisting of the Old Tolbooth or “Heart
of Midlothian” at the upper end, and a tall pile of dwelling-houses and
shops, called the Luckenbooths, at the lower end,—the effect of which
was to choke the traffic at that part, and divide it between a narrow
tortuous foot-passage along the buttresses of the church on the one side
and a somewhat wider causey for vehicles on the other. Now, as Ramsay’s
new house was a good way below this obstruction, and in that open space
of the High Street where there was plenty of room to breathe, it was in
an excellent position for bookselling or any similar business. There was
actually a temptation for a citizen lingering in this spot to ascend
Allan Ramsay’s stone stair to have a look at the books on sale,
especially if he could have his wig dressed at the same time. That this
was possible we have Ramsay’s own word. It is generally represented in
memoirs of him that he had given up wig-making when he entered his new
shop of the Mercury opposite to Niddry’s Wynd, and there took to
bookselling; but these lines, appended to the description of his
personal appearance and character in the poem already quoted, settle the
question—
“Say, wad ye ken my gate of fending,
My income, management, and spending?
Born to nae landship,—mair’s the pity,—
Yet denizen of this fair city,
I make what honest shift I can,
And in my ain house am good-man;
Which stands in Ed’nburgh’s street the sun-side.
I theek the out and line the inside
Of mony a douce and witty pash,
And baith ways gather in the cash.”
Ramsay remained in this house in the High Street about eight years. They
were busy and prosperous years. During the first three of them, or from
1718 to 1721, he continued to send forth miscellaneous little pieces,
some in English but most in Scotch, in sheets or half-sheets, to be
bought separately. There were songs, satirical sketches and squibs,
elegies, metrical epistles to friends or to public persons, odes on
Edinburgh events or on such national occurrences as the collapse of the
South Sea Bubble, and a few essays in a more general and serious vein,
chiefly in the English heroic couplet, such as _The Morning Interview_,
_Tartana or the Plaid_, and _Content_. The sheets or half-sheets were
bought eagerly. It was at this time, indeed, according to the tradition,
that the good-wives of Edinburgh were in the habit of sending out their
children, with a penny or twopence, to buy “Allan Ramsay’s last piece,”
whatever it might be. His popularity, however, did not rest on such
humble demonstrations of liking. He was now one of the most respected of
the citizens of Edinburgh, spoken of universally among them as their
poet, and on terms of personal intimacy with the most distinguished of
them. He had become a notability even beyond the bounds of
Edinburgh,—through the south of Scotland, if not yet in all Scotland.
His name had even been carried to London, with the effect of some vague
notion of him among the English wits there as a poet in the colloquial
Scotch possessing all the north part of the island by himself. This
recognition of him in the south seems to have begun about the year 1720,
and to have been occasioned by a little Scottish pastoral elegy,
entitled _Richy and Sandy_, which he had written on the death of Addison
in the previous year. The “Richy” of this piece is Sir Richard Steele,
and the “Sandy” is Mr. Alexander Pope; and they are represented as two
fellow-shepherds of the famous deceased bewailing his loss in a
colloquy. Steele and Pope could hardly avoid hearing of such a thing;
and, indeed, pirated copies reached London, and there was a reprint of
the elegy there from Lintot’s press, with the Scotch dreadfully mangled.
It seems to have been with a view to prevent such piracy and misprinting
of his productions in future, as well as to confirm his reputation by
putting all his writings before the public in permanent form, that
Ramsay, in the course of 1720, sent out subscription papers for a
collected edition of his works. The appeal was most successful; and in
July 1721 the collected edition did appear, in a handsome quarto volume,
of about 400 pages, with the title POEMS BY ALLAN RAMSAY, “printed by
Mr. Thomas Ruddiman for the Author.” The “Alphabetical List of
Subscribers” prefixed to the volume contains nearly 500 names, most of
them Scotch, but with a sprinkling of English. Among the Scottish names
are those of nearly all the Scottish nobility of the day, in the persons
of seven dukes, five marquises, twenty-one earls, one viscount, and
twenty-three lords, while the columns are crowded with the names of the
best-known baronets, knights, lairds, judges, lawyers, merchants, and
civic functionaries in and round about Edinburgh and in other parts of
Scotland. Among the few names from England one reads with special
interest, besides that of the literary Scoto-Londoner “John Arbuthnot,
M.D.,” these three,—“Mr. Alexander Pope,” “Sir Richard Steele” (for two
copies), and “Mr. Richard Savage.” The volume was dedicated to the
Ladies of Scotland in a few gallant and flowery sentences; and there was
a preface, addressed specially to the critics, full of shrewd sense, and
showing Ramsay’s command of an easy and light style of English prose.
Another distinction of the volume was a portrait of the author,
excellently engraved after a painting by an Edinburgh artist-friend. It
represents a youngish man, with a bright, knowing, clever face, a
smallish and sensitive nose, and fine and lively eyes. One observes that
there is no wig, or semblance of a wig, in the portrait, but only the
natural hair, closely cropped to the shape of the head, and surmounted
by a neat Scotch bonnet, cocked a little to one side. As it is
impossible to suppose that a man who lived by making wigs did not wear
one himself, the inference must be that, in a portrait which was to
represent him in his poetical capacity, the wig was rejected by artistic
instinct. In later portraits of Ramsay it is the same, save that the
small Scotch bonnet is superseded in these by a kind of cloth turban of
several folds. In proof that this deviation in the portraits from the
usual habit of real life was suggested by artistic instinct, one may
note that there is the same deviation in the portraits of most of the
other real British poets of the wig-wearing age. Pope, Prior, Gay, and
Thomson all appear in their portraits with something like Allan Ramsay’s
turban or night-cap for their head-dress; and it descended to the poet
Cowper.
Very likely, however, about the date at which we are now arrived, Allan
Ramsay, though he still continued to wear a wig when off poetic duty,
had ceased to make wigs for others. The collected edition of his poems
had brought him 400 guineas at once, worth then about 1000 guineas now;
and his bookselling,—including now a steady sale of that volume in a
cheaper edition for the general public, and also the sale of the new
pieces of an occasional kind which he continued to issue in separate
form as fast as before,—was becoming a sufficient trade in itself. By
the year 1724, at all events, when he had added a considerable number of
such stray occasional pieces to those bound up in the collected volume,
he seems to have been known in the little business world of Edinburgh no
longer as “wig-maker,” but simply as “bookseller,” or sometimes more
generally as “merchant.” Two enterprises of that year, both in the way
of editorship rather than authorship, must have occupied a good deal of
his time. These were THE TEA TABLE MISCELLANY: A COLLECTION OF CHOICE
SONGS, SCOTS AND ENGLISH, and THE EVERGREEN: A COLLECTION OF SCOTS POEMS
WROTE BY THE INGENIOUS BEFORE 1600. The first, originally in two
volumes, but subsequently extended to four, was a collection of what
might be called contemporary songs of all varieties, with the inclusion
of floating popular favourites from the seventeenth century, deemed
suitable, according to the somewhat lax standard of taste in those days,
for musical eveningparties in families, or for companies of gentlemen by
themselves. The purpose of the other, as the title indicates, was more
scholarly. It was to recall the attention of his countrymen to that
older Scottish poetry which he still thought too little regarded by
furnishing selected specimens of Henryson, Dunbar, Kennedy, Scott,
Montgomery, the Wedderburns, Sir Richard Maitland, and others certainly
or presumably of earlier centuries than the seventeenth. The intention
was creditable, and the book did good service, though the editing of the
old Scotch was inaccurate and meagre. In reality, Ramsay’s exertions for
the two publications were not merely editorial. The TEA TABLE
MISCELLANY, when completed, besides containing about thirty songs
contributed by “some ingenious young gentlemen” of Ramsay’s
acquaintance,—among whom we can identify now Hamilton of Bangour, young
David Malloch, a William Crawford, and a William Walkinshaw,—contained
about sixty songs of Ramsay’s own composition. Similarly, among several
mock-antiques by modern hands inserted into THE EVERGREEN, were two by
Ramsay himself, entitled _The Vision_ and _The Eagle and Robin
Redbreast_.
The time had come for Ramsay’s finest and most characteristic
performance. More than once, in his miscellanies hitherto, he had tried
the pastoral form in Scotch, whether from a natural tendency to that
form or induced by recent attempts in the English pastoral by Ambrose
Philips, Pope, and Gay. Besides his pastoral elegy on the death of
Addison, and another on the death of Prior, he had written a pastoral
dialogue of real Scottish life in 162 lines, entitled _Patie and Roger_,
introduced by this description:—
“Beneath the south side of a craigy bield,
Where a clear spring did halesome water yield,
Twa youthfu’ shepherds on the gowans lay,
Tending their flocks ae bonny morn of May:
Poor Roger graned till hollow echoes rang,
While merry Patie hummed himsel a sang.”
This piece, and two smaller pastoral pieces in the same vein, called
_Patie and Peggy_ and _Jenny and Meggie_, had been so much liked that
Ramsay had been urged by his friends to do something more extensive in
the shape of a pastoral story or drama. He had been meditating such a
thing through the year 1724, while busy with his two editorial
compilations; and in June 1725 the result was given to the public in THE
GENTLE SHEPHERD: A SCOTS PASTORAL COMEDY. Here the three pastoral
sketches already written were inwoven into a simply-constructed drama of
rustic Scottish life as it might be imagined among the Pentland Hills,
near Edinburgh, at that time, still within the recollection of very old
people then alive, when the Protectorates of Cromwell and his son had
come to an end and Monk had restored King Charles. The poem was received
with enthusiastic admiration. There had been nothing like it before in
Scottish literature, or in any other; nothing so good of any kind that
could be voted as even similar; and this was at once the critical
verdict. It is a long while ago, and there are many spots in Edinburgh
which compete with one another in the interest of their literary
associations; but one can stand now with particular pleasure for a few
minutes any afternoon opposite that decayed house in the High Street,
visible as one is crossing from the South Bridge to the North Bridge,
where Allan Ramsay once had his shop, and whence the first copies of THE
GENTLE SHEPHERD were handed out, some day in June 1725, to eager
Edinburgh purchasers.
The tenancy of this house by Ramsay lasted but a year longer. He had
resolved to add to his general business of bookselling and publishing
that of a circulating library, the first institution of the kind in
Edinburgh. For this purpose he had taken new premises, still in the High
Street, but in a position even more central and conspicuous than that of
“The Mercury” opposite Niddry’s Wynd. They were, in fact, in the
easternmost house of the Luckenbooths, or lower part of that obstructive
stack of buildings, already mentioned, which once ran up the High Street
alongside of St. Giles’s Church, dividing the traffic into two narrow
and overcrowded channels. It is many years since the Luckenbooths and
the whole obstruction of which they formed a part were swept away; but
from old prints we can see that the last house of the Luckenbooths to
the east was a tall tenement of five storeys, with its main face looking
straight down the lower slope of the High Street towards the Canongate.
The strange thing was that, though thus in the very heart of the bustle
of the town as congregated round the Cross, the house commanded from its
higher windows a view beyond the town altogether, away to Aberlady Bay
and the farther reaches of sea and land in that direction. It was into
this house that Ramsay removed in 1726, when he was exactly forty years
of age. The part occupied by him was the flat immediately above the
basement floor, but perhaps with that floor in addition. The sign he
adopted for the new premises was one exhibiting the heads or effigies of
Ben Jonson and Drummond of Hawthornden.
Having introduced Ramsay into this, the last of his Edinburgh shops, we
have reached the point where our present interest in him all but ends.
In 1728, when he had been two years in the new premises, he published a
second volume of his collected poems, under the title of POEMS BY ALLAN
RAMSAY, VOLUME II., in a handsome quarto matching the previous volume of
1721, and containing all the pieces he had written since the appearance
of that volume; and in 1730 he published _A Collection of Thirty
Fables_. These were his last substantive publications, and with them his
literary career may be said to have come to a close. Begun in the last
years of the reign of Queen Anne, and continued through the whole of the
reign of George I., it had just touched the beginning of that of George
II., when it suddenly ceased. Twice or thrice afterwards at long
intervals he did scribble a copy of verses; but, in the main, from his
forty-fifth year onwards, he rested on his laurels. Thenceforward he
contented himself with his bookselling, the management of his
circulating library, and the superintendence of the numerous editions of
his _Collected Poems_, his _Gentle Shepherd_, and his _Tea Table
Miscellany_ that were required by the public demand, and the proceeds of
which formed a good part of his income. It would be a great mistake,
however, to suppose that, when Allan Ramsay’s time of literary
production ended, the story of his life in Edinburgh also came to a
close, or ceased to be important. For eight-and-twenty years longer, or
almost till George II. gave place to George III., Ramsay continued to be
a living celebrity in the Scottish capital, known by figure and
physiognomy to all his fellow-citizens, and Ramsay’s bookshop at the end
of the Luckenbooths, just above the Cross, continued to be one of the
chief resorts of the well-to-do residents, and of chance visitors of
distinction. Now and then, indeed, through the twenty-eight years, there
are glimpses of him still in special connections with the literary, as
well as with the social, history of Edinburgh. When the English poet
Gay, a summer or two before his death in 1732, came to Edinburgh on a
visit, in the company of his noble patrons, the Duke and Duchess of
Queensberry, and resided with them in their mansion of Queensberry House
in the Canongate,—now the gloomiest and ugliest-looking house in that
quarter of the old town, but then reckoned of palatial grandeur,—whither
did he tend daily, in his saunterings up the Canongate, but to Allan
Ramsay’s shop? One hears of him as standing there with Allan at the
window to have the city notabilities and oddities pointed out to him in
the piazza below, or as taking lessons from Allan in the Scottish words
and idioms of the _Gentle Shepherd_, that he might explain them better
to Mr. Pope when he went back to London.
Some years later, when Ramsay had reached the age of fifty, and he and
his wife were enjoying the comforts of his ample success, and
rejoicing in the hopes and prospects of their children,—three
daughters, “no ae wally-draggle among them, all fine girls,” as Ramsay
informs us, and one son, a young man of three-and-twenty, completing
his education in Italy for the profession of a painter,—there came
upon the family what threatened to be a ruinous disaster. Never
formally an anti-Presbyterian, and indeed regularly to be seen on
Sundays in his pew in St. Giles’s High Kirk, but always and
systematically opposed to the unnecessary social rigours of the old
Presbyterian system, and of late under a good deal of censure from
clerical and other strict critics on account of the dangerous nature
of much of the literature put in circulation from his library, Ramsay
had ventured at last on a new commercial enterprise, which could not
but be offensive on similar grounds to many worthy people, though it
seems to have been acceptable enough to the Edinburgh community
generally. Edinburgh having been hitherto deficient in theatrical
accommodation, and but fitfully supplied with dramatic entertainments,
he had, in 1736, started a new theatre in Carrubber’s Close, near to
his former High Street shop. He was looking for great profits from the
proprietorship of this theatre and his partnership in its management.
Hardly had he begun operations, however, when there came the
extraordinary statute of 10 George II. (1737), regulating theatres for
the future all over Great Britain. As by this statute there could be
no performance of stage-plays out of London and Westminster, save when
the King chanced to be residing in some other town, Ramsay’s
speculation collapsed, and all the money he had invested in it was
lost. It was a heavy blow; and he was moved by it to some verses of
complaint to his friend Lord President Forbes and the other judges of
the Court of Session. While telling the story of his own hardship in
the case, he suggests that an indignity had been done by the new Act
to the capital of Scotland:—
“Shall London have its houses twa
And we doomed to have nane ava’?
Is our metropolis, ance the place
Where langsyne dwelt the royal race
Of Fergus, this gate dwindled down
To a level with ilk clachan town,
While thus she suffers the subversion
Of her maist rational diversion?”
However severe the loss to Ramsay at the time, it was soon tided over.
Within six years he is found again quite at ease in his worldly
fortunes. His son, for some years back from Italy, was in rapidly rising
repute as a portrait-painter, alternating between London and Edinburgh
in the practice of his profession, and a man of mark in Edinburgh
society on his own account; and, whether by a junction of the son’s
means with the father’s, or by the father’s means alone, it was now that
there reared itself in Edinburgh the edifice which at the present day
most distinctly preserves for the inhabitants the memory of the Ramsay
family in their Edinburgh connections. The probability is that, since
Allan had entered on his business premises at the end of the
Luckenbooths, his dwelling-house had been somewhere else in the town or
suburbs; but in 1743 he built himself a new dwelling-house on the very
choicest site that the venerable old town afforded. It was that quaint
octagon-shaped villa, with an attached slope of green and
pleasure-ground, on the north side of the Castle Hill, which, as well
from its form as from its situation, attracts the eye as one walks along
Princes Street, and which still retains the name of Ramsay Lodge. The
wags of the day, making fun of its quaint shape, likened the
construction to a goose-pie; and something of that fancied resemblance
may be traced even now in its extended and improved proportions. But
envy may have had a good deal to do with the comparison. It is still a
neat and comfortable dwelling internally, while it commands from its
elevation an extent of scenery unsurpassed anywhere in Europe. The view
from it ranges from the sea-mouth of the Firth of Forth on the east to
the first glimpses of the Stirlingshire Highlands on the west, and again
due north across the levels of the New Town, and the flashing waters of
the Firth below them, to the bounding outline of the Fifeshire hills.
When, in 1743, before there was as yet any New Town at all, Allan Ramsay
took up his abode in this villa, he must have been considered a
fortunate and happy man. His entry into it was saddened, indeed, by the
death of his wife, which occurred just about that time; but for fourteen
years of widowerhood, with two of his daughters for his companions, he
lived in it serenely and hospitably. During the first nine years of
those fourteen he still went daily to his shop in the Luckenbooths,
attending to his various occupations, and especially to his circulating
library, which is said to have contained by this time about 30,000
volumes; but for the last five or six years he had entirely relinquished
business. There are authentic accounts of his habits and demeanour in
his last days, and they concur in representing him as one of the most
charming old gentlemen possible, vivacious and sprightly in
conversation, full of benevolence and good humour, and especially fond
of children and kindly in his ways for their amusement. He died on the
7th of January 1758, in the seventy-second year of his age, and was
buried in Greyfriars Churchyard.
Ramsay had outlived nearly all the literary celebrities who had been his
contemporaries during his own career of active authorship, ended nearly
thirty years before. Swift and Pope were gone, after Gay, Steele,
Arbuthnot, and others of the London band, who had died earlier. Of
several Scotsmen, his juniors, who had stepped into the career of
literature after he had shown the way, and had attained to more or less
of poetic eminence under his own observation, three,—Robert Blair, James
Thomson, and Hamilton of Bangour,—had predeceased him. Their finished
lives, with all the great radiance of Thomson’s, are wholly included in
the life of Allan Ramsay. David Malloch, who had been an Edinburgh
_protégé_ of Ramsay’s, but had gone to London and Anglicised himself
into “Mallet,” was about the oldest of his literary survivors into
another generation; but in that generation, as Scotsmen of various ages,
from sixty downwards to one-and-twenty, living, within Scotland or out
of it, at the date of Ramsay’s death, we count Lord Kames, Armstrong,
Reid, Hume, Lord Monboddo, Hugh Blair, George Campbell, Smollett,
Wilkie, Blacklock, Robertson, John Home, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Lord
Hailes, Falconer, Meikle, and Beattie. Such of these as were residents
in Edinburgh had known Allan Ramsay personally; others of them had felt
his influence indirectly; and all must have noted his death as an event
of some consequence.
The time is long past for any exaggeration of Allan Ramsay’s merits.
But, call him only a slipshod little Horace of Auld Reekie, who wrote
odes, epistles, satires, and other miscellanies in Scotch through twenty
years of the earlier part of the eighteenth century, and was also, by a
happy chance, the author of a unique and delightful Scottish pastoral,
it remains true that he was the most considerable personality in
Scottish literary history in order of time after Drummond of
Hawthornden, or, if we think only of the vernacular, after Sir David
Lindsay, and that he did more than any other man to stir afresh a
popular enthusiasm for literature in Scotland after the Union with
England. All in all, therefore, it is with no small interest that, in
one’s walks along the most classic thoroughfare of the present
Edinburgh, one gazes at the white stone statue of Allan Ramsay, from the
chisel of Sir John Steell, which stands in the Gardens just below the
famous “goose-pie villa.” It looks as if the poet had just stepped down
thence in his evening habiliments to see things thereabouts in their
strangely changed condition. By the tact of the sculptor, he wears, one
observes, not a wig, but the true poetic night-cap or turban.
LADY WARDLAW AND THE BARONESS NAIRNE[6]
In 1719 there was published in Edinburgh, in a tract of twelve folio
pages, a small poem, 27 stanzas or 216 lines long, entitled _Hardyknute,
a Fragment_. It was printed in old spelling, to look like a piece of old
Scottish poetry that had somehow been recovered; and it seems to have
been accepted as such by those into whose hands the copy had come, and
who were concerned in having it published. Among these were Duncan
Forbes of Culloden, afterwards Lord President of the Court of Session,
and Sir Gilbert Elliott of Minto, afterwards Lord Justice-Clerk; but
there is something like proof that it had come into their hands
indirectly from Sir John Hope Bruce of Kinross, baronet, who died as
late as 1766 at a great age, in the rank of lieutenant-general, and who,
some time before 1719, had sent a manuscript copy of it to Lord Binning,
with a fantastic story to the effect that the original, in a much
defaced vellum, had been found, a few weeks before, in a vault at
Dunfermline.
The little thing, having become popular in its first published form, was
reproduced in 1724 by Allan Ramsay in his _Evergreen_, which professed
to be “a collection of Scots Poems wrote by the ingenious before 1600”;
but it there appeared with corrections and some additional stanzas. In
1740 it had the honour of a new appearance in London, under anonymous
editorship, and with the title “Hardyknute, a Fragment; being the first
Canto of an Epick Poem: with general remarks and notes.” The anonymous
editor, still treating it as a genuine old poem, of not later than the
sixteenth century, praises it very highly. “There is a grandeur, a
majesty of sentiment,” he says, “diffused through the whole: a true
sublime, which nothing can surpass.” It was but natural that a piece of
which this could be said should be included by Percy in his _Reliques of
Ancient English Poetry_, published in 1765. It appeared, accordingly, in
the first edition of that famous book, still as an old poem and in
antique spelling; and it was reprinted in the subsequent editions issued
by Percy himself in 1767, 1775, and 1794, though then with some added
explanations and queries.
It was through Percy’s collection that the poem first became generally
known and popular. Even there, though in very rich company, it was
singled out by competent critics for special admiration. But, indeed,
good judges, who had known it in its earlier forms, had already made it
a favourite. The poet Gray admired it much; and Thomas Warton spoke of
it as “a noble poem,” and introduced an enthusiastic reference to it
into one of his odes. Above all, it is celebrated now as having fired
the boyish genius of Sir Walter Scott. “I was taught _Hardyknute_ by
heart before I could read the ballad myself,” he tells us, informing us
further that the book out of which he was taught the ballad was Allan
Ramsay’s _Evergreen_ of 1724, and adding, “It was the first poem I ever
learnt, the last I shall ever forget.” In another place he tells us more
particularly that it was taught him out of the book by one of his aunts
during that visit to his grandfather’s farmhouse of Sandyknowe in
Roxburghshire on which he had been sent when only in his third year for
country air and exercise on account of his delicate health and lameness,
and which he remembered always as the source of his earliest impressions
and the time of his first consciousness of existence. He was accustomed
to go about the farmhouse shouting out the verses of the ballad
incessantly, so that the Rev. Dr. Duncan, the minister of the parish, in
his calls for a sober chat with the elder inmates, would complain of the
interruption and say, “One may as well speak in the mouth of a cannon as
where that child is.” _Hardyknute_, we may then say, was the first thing
in literature that took hold of the soul and imagination of Scott; and
who knows how far it may have helped to determine the cast and direction
of his own genius through all the future? Afterwards, through his life
in Edinburgh, Ashestiel, and Abbotsford, he was never tired of repeating
snatches of the strong old thing he had learnt at Sandyknowe; and the
very year before his death (1831) we find him, when abroad at Malta in
the vain hope of recruiting his shattered frame, lamenting greatly, in a
conversation about ballad-poetry, that he had not been able to persuade
his friend Mr. John Hookham Frere to think so highly of the merits of
_Hardyknute_ as he did himself.
What _is_ the piece of verse so celebrated? It must be familiar to many;
but we may look at it again. We shall take it in its later or more
complete form, as consisting of 42 stanzas or 336 lines; in which form,
though it is still only a fragment, the conception or story is somewhat
more complex, more filled out, than in the first published form of 1719.
The fragment opens thus:—
“Stately stept he east the wa’,
And stately stept he west;
Full seventy years he now had seen,
With scarce seven years of rest.
He lived when Britons’ breach of faith
Wrocht Scotland mickle wae;
And aye his sword tauld, to their cost,
He was their deadly fae.
High on a hill his castle stood,
With halls and towers a-hicht,
And guidly chambers fair to see,
Whare he lodged mony a knicht.
His dame, sae peerless ance and fair,
For chaste and beauty deemed,
Nae marrow had in a’ the land,
Save Eleanour the Queen.
Full thirteen sons to him she bare,
All men of valour stout;
In bluidy fecht with sword in hand
Nine lost their lives bot doubt:
Four yet remain; lang may they live
To stand by liege and land!
High was their fame, high was their micht,
And high was their command.
Great love they bare to Fairly fair,
Their sister saft and dear:
Her girdle shawed her middle jimp,
And gowden glist her hair.
What waefu’ wae her beauty bred,
Waefu’ to young and auld;
Waefu’, I trow, to kith and kin,
As story ever tauld!”
Here we see the old hero Hardyknute in peace in the midst of his family,
his fighting days supposed to be over, and his high castle on the hill,
where he and his lady dwell, with their four surviving sons and their
one daughter, Fairly Fair, one of the lordly boasts of a smiling
country. But suddenly there is an invasion. The King of Norse, puffed up
with power and might, lands in fair Scotland; and the King of Scotland,
hearing the tidings as he sits with his chiefs, “drinking the blude-red
wine,” sends out summonses in haste for all his warriors to join him.
Hardyknute receives a special message.
“Then red, red grew his dark-brown cheeks;
Sae did his dark-brown brow;
His looks grew keen, as they were wont
In dangers great to do.”
Old as he is, he will set out at once, taking his three eldest sons with
him, Robin, Thomas, and Malcolm, and telling his lady in his farewell to
her:—
“My youngest son sall here remain
To guaird these stately towers,
And shoot the silver bolt that keeps
Sae fast your painted bowers.”
And so we take leave of the high castle on the hill, with the lady, her
youngest son, and Fairly fair, in it, and follow the old lord and his
other three sons over the moors and through the glens as they ride to
the rendezvous. On their way they encounter a wounded knight, lying on
the ground and making a heavy moan:—
“‘Here maun I lie, here maun I die,
By treachery’s false guiles;
Witless I was that e’er gave faith
To wicked woman’s smiles.’”
Hardyknute, stopping, comforts him; says that, if he can but mount his
steed and manage to get to his castle on the hill, he will be tended
there by his lady and Fairly fair herself; and offers to detach some of
his men with him for convoy.
“With smileless look and visage wan
The wounded knicht replied:
‘Kind chieftain, your intent pursue,
For here I maun abide.
‘To me nae after day nor nicht
Can e’er be sweet or fair;
But soon, beneath some drapping tree,
Cauld death sail end my care.’”
Farther pleading by Hardyknute avails nothing; and, as time presses, he
has to depart, leaving the wounded knight, so far as we can see, on the
ground as he had found him, still making his moan. Then, after farther
riding over a great region, called vaguely Lord Chattan’s land, we have
the arrival of Hardyknute and his three sons in the King of Scotland’s
camp, minstrels marching before them playing pibrochs. Hardly have they
been welcomed when the battle with the Norse King and his host is begun.
It is described at considerable length, and with much power, though
confusedly, so that one hardly knows who is speaking or who is wounded
amid the whirr of arrows, the shouting, and the clash of armour. One
sees, however, Hardyknute and two of his sons fighting grandly in the
pell-mell. At last it is all over, and we know that the Norse King and
his host have been routed, and that Scotland has been saved.
“In thraws of death, with wallert cheek,
All panting on the plain,
The fainting corps of warriors lay,
Ne’er to arise again:
Ne’er to return to native land;
Nae mair wi’ blythesome sounds
To boist the glories of the day
And shaw their shinand wounds.
On Norway’s coast the widowed dame
May wash the rock with tears,
May lang look ower the shipless seas,
Before her mate appears.
Cease, Emma, cease to hope in vain:
Thy lord lies in the clay;
The valiant Scats nae reivers thole
To carry life away.
There, on a lea where stands a cross
Set up for monument,
Thousands full fierce, that summer’s day,
Filled keen war’s black intent.
Let Scots, while Scots, praise Hardyknute;
Let Norse the name aye dread;
Aye how he foucht, aft how he spared,
Sall latest ages read.”
Here the story might seem to end, and here perhaps it was intended at
first that it should end; but in the completer copies there are three
more stanzas, taking us back to Hardyknute’s castle on the high hill. We
are to fancy Hardyknute and his sons returning joyfully thither after
the great victory:—
“Loud and chill blew the westlin wind,
Sair beat the heavy shower;
Mirk grew the nicht ere Hardyknute
Wan near his stately tower:
His tower, that used with torches’ bleeze
To shine sae far at nicht,
Seemed now as black as mourning weed:
Nae marvel sair he sich’d.
‘There’s nae licht in my lady’s bower;
There’s nae licht in my hall;
Nae blink shines round my Fairly fair,
Nor ward stands on my wall.
What bodes it? Robert, Thomas, say!’
Nae answer fits their dread.
‘Stand back, my sons! I’ll be your guide!’
But by they passed wi’ speed.
‘As fast I have sped ower Scotland’s faes.’
There ceased his brag of weir,
Sair shamed to mind oucht but his dame
And maiden Fairly fair.
Black fear he felt, but what to fear
He wist not yet with dread:
Sair shook his body, sair his limbs;
And all the warrior fled.”
And so the fragment really ends, making us aware of some dreadful
catastrophe, though what it is we know not. Something ghastly has
happened in the castle during Hardyknute’s absence, but it is left
untold. Only, by a kind of necessity of the imagination, we connect it
somehow with that wounded knight whom Hardyknute had met lying on the
ground as he was hurrying to the war, and whom he had left making his
moan. Was he a fiend, or what?
It is quite useless to call this a historical ballad. There was a
reference, perhaps, in the author’s mind, to the battle of Largs in
Ayrshire, fought by the Scots in 1263, in the reign of Alexander III.,
against the invading King Haco of Norway; and there is a Fairly Castle
on a hill near Largs which may have yielded a suggestion and a name.
But, in truth, any old Scottish reign, and any Norse invasion, will do
for time and basis, and the ballad is essentially of the romantic kind,
a story snatched from an ideal antique, and appealing to the pure poetic
imagination. A battle is flung in; but what rivets our interest is the
hero Hardyknute, a Scottish warrior with a Danish name, and that stately
castle of his, somewhere on the top of a hill, in which he dwelt so
splendidly with his lady, his four sons, and their sister Fairly fair,
till he was called once more to war, and in which there was some ghastly
desolation before his return. Such as it is, we shall all agree, I
think, with Gray, Warton, Scott, and the rest of the best critics, in
admiring the fragment. It has that something in it which we call
_genius_.
It seems strange now that any critic could ever have taken the ballad
for a really old one, to be dated from the sixteenth century or earlier.
Apart from the trick of old spelling, and affectation of the antique in
a word or two, the phraseology, the manner, the cadence, the style of
the Scotch employed, are all of about the date of the first publication
of the ballad, the first quarter of the eighteenth century. The phrase
“Let Scots, while Scots, praise Hardyknute,” and the phrase “And all the
warrior fled,” are decisive; and, while there might be room for the
supposition that some old legend suggested the subject to the author,
the general cast of the whole forbids the idea that it is merely a
version of some transmitted original.
Suspicions, indeed, of the modern authorship of _Hardyknute_ had arisen
in various quarters long before any one person in particular was
publicly named as the author. That was first done by Percy in 1767, in
the second edition of his _Reliques_, when he gave his reasons for
thinking, from information transmitted to him from Scotland by Sir David
Dalrymple, Lord Hailes, that the ballad was substantially the
composition of a Scottish lady, who had died in 1727, eight years after
it had first appeared in its less perfect form, and three years after it
had appeared with the improvements and the additional stanzas. That lady
was Elizabeth Halket, born in 1677, one of the daughters of Sir Charles
Halket of Pitfirran in Fifeshire, baronet, but who had changed her name
to Wardlaw in the year 1696, when she became the wife of Sir Henry
Wardlaw of Pitreavie, also a Fifeshire baronet. All subsequent evidence
has confirmed the belief that this Lady Wardlaw was the real author of
_Hardyknute_, though, to mystify people, it was first given out by her
relatives as an ancient fragment. This was the statement more especially
of the already-mentioned Sir John Hope Bruce of Kinross, who was one of
her brothers-in-law.
Of Lady Wardlaw herself we hear nothing more distinct than that she was
“a woman of elegant accomplishments, who wrote other poems, and
practised drawing and cutting paper with her scissors, and who had much
wit and humour, with great sweetness of temper.” So we must be content
to imagine her,—a bright-minded and graceful lady, living in Fifeshire,
or coming and going between Fifeshire and Edinburgh, nearly two
centuries ago, and who, while attending to her family duties and the
duties of her station, could cherish in secret a poetic vein peculiarly
her own, and produce at least one fine ballad of an ideal Scottish
antique. This in itself would be much. For that was the age of Queen
Anne and of the first of the Georges, when poetry of an ideal or
romantic kind was perhaps at its lowest ebb throughout the British
Islands, and the poetry most in repute was that of the modern school of
artificial wit and polish represented by Addison and Pope.
But this is not all. In the year 1859 the late Mr. Robert Chambers
published a very ingenious and interesting essay entitled “The Romantic
Scottish Ballads: their Epoch and Authorship.” The ballads to which he
invited critical attention were the particular group which includes _Sir
Patrick Spens_, _Gil Morrice_, _Edward Edward_, _The Jew’s Daughter_,
_Gilderoy_, _Young Waters_, _Edom o’ Gordon_, _Johnnie of Braidislee_,
_Mary Hamilton_, _The Gay Goss Hawk_, _Fause Foodrage_, _The Lass of
Lochryan_, _Young Huntin_, _The Douglas Tragedy_, _Clerk Saunders_,
_Sweet William’s Ghost_, and several others. With but one or two
exceptions, these were first given to the world either in Percy’s
_Reliques_ in 1765, or in the subsequent collections of Herd (1769),
Scott (1802), and Jamieson (1806); but, since they were published, they
have been favourites with all lovers of true poetry,—the “grand ballad”
of _Sir Patrick Spens_, as Coleridge called it, ranking perhaps highest,
on the whole, in general opinion. There is a certain common character in
all the ballads of the group, a character of genuine ideality, of
unconnectedness or but hazy connectedness with particular time or place,
of a tendency to the weirdly, and also of a high-bred elegance and
lightsome tact of expression, distinguishing them from the properly
historical Scottish Ballads, such as the _Battle of Otterbourne_, or the
Border Ballads proper, such as _Kinmont Willie_, or the homely rustic
ballads of local or family incident of which so many have been
collected. Hence the distinctive name of “romantic,” usually applied to
them.
Respecting these ballads the common theory was, and still is, that they
are very old indeed,—that they are the transmitted oral versions of
ballads that were in circulation among the Scottish people before the
Reformation. This theory Mr. Chambers challenged, and by a great variety
of arguments. Not only was it very suspicious, he said, that there were
no ancient manuscripts of them, and that, save in one or two cases, they
had never been heard of till the eighteenth century; but the internal
evidence, of conception, sentiment, costume, and phraseology,—not in
lines and passages merely, where change from an original might be
supposed, but through and through, and back to the very core of any
supposed original,—all pointed, he maintained, to a date of composition
not farther back than the beginning of the century in which they first
came into print. He maintained farther that they all reveal the hand of
some person of superior breeding and refinement, with a cultivated
literary expertness and sense of the exquisite, and that, just as the
difference of age would be seen if one of them were placed side by side
with an authentic piece of old Scottish poetry of the sixteenth century,
so would this other difference of refined or cultured execution be at
once seen if one of them were placed side by side with a genuine popular
ballad of lowly origin, such as used to please in sheets on
street-stalls and in pedlars’ chap-books. Farther still, in all or most
of the ballads concerned, there are, he argued, traces of feminine
perception and feeling. And so, still pressing the question, and noting
the recurrence of phrases and ideas from ballad to ballad of the group,
not to be found in other ballads, but looking like the acquired devices
of one and the same writer’s fancy,—some of the most remarkable of which
recurring ideas and phrases he chased up to the ballad of
_Hardyknute_,—he arrived at the conclusion that there was a “great
likelihood” that all or most of the ballads he was considering were
either absolutely the inventions of Lady Wardlaw of Pitreavie, or such
complete recasts by her of traditional fragments that she might be
called the real author. He would not advance the conclusion as more than
a “great likelihood,” and he allowed that it might be still
controverted; but he cited in its favour the fact that so high an
authority as Mr. David Laing had previously intimated his impression
that _Hardyknute_ and _Sir Patrick Spens_ were by the same hand.
Were Mr. Chambers’s conclusion to be verified, it would be a sore wrench
to the patriotic prejudices of many to have to abandon the
long-cherished fancy of the immemorial, or at least remote, antiquity of
so many fine Scottish favourites. But what a compensation! For then that
Lady Wardlaw whom we can already station, for her _Hardyknute_ alone, as
undoubtedly one woman of genius in the poverty-stricken Scotland of the
beginning of the eighteenth century, would shine out with greatly
increased radiance as the author of a whole cycle of the finest
ballad-pieces in our language, a figure of very high importance in
Scottish literary history, a precursor or sister of Burns and of Scott.
For my own part, I would willingly submit to the wrench for a
compensation so splendid. I am bound to report, however, that Mr.
Chambers’s speculation of 1859 was controverted strenuously at the time,
has been pronounced a heresy, and does not seem to have been anywhere
generally accepted. It was controverted especially, within a year from
its appearance, in a pamphlet of reply by Mr. Norval Clyne of Aberdeen,
entitled “The Scottish Romantic Ballads and the Lady Wardlaw Heresy”;
and I observe that Professor Child of America, in his great Collection
of English and Scottish Ballads, pays no respect to it, treats it as
exploded by Mr. Clyne’s reply, and expressly dissociates _Sir Patrick
Spens_ and other ballads of the class from _Hardyknute_. It may be
enough, in these circumstances, merely to intimate my opinion that the
controversy is by no means closed. There were shrewder and deeper
suggestions, I think, in Mr. Chambers’s paper of 1859 than Mr. Clyne was
able to obviate; and, having observed that most of the lore on the
subject used by Mr. Clyne in his reply, his adverse references and
quotations included, was derived from Mr. Chambers’s own Introduction
and Notes to his three-volume edition of Scottish Songs and Ballads in
1829, I cannot but presume that Mr. Chambers had all that lore
sufficiently in his mind thirty years afterwards, and found nothing in
it to impede or disconcert him then in his new speculation. Apart,
however, from the special question of Lady Wardlaw’s concern in the
matter, Mr. Chambers seems to me to have moved a very proper and
necessary inquiry when he started his theory of the comparatively recent
origin of all or most of the Scottish Romantic Ballads. In what
conception, what kind of language, does the opposite theory couch
itself? In the conception that, besides the series of those literary
products of past Scottish generations, the work of learned or
professional writers, from the time of Barbour onwards, that have come
down to us in books, or in old manuscript collections like that of
Bannatyne, there was always a distinct literature of more lowly origin,
consisting of ballads and songs recited or sung in Scottish households
in various districts, and orally transmitted from age to age with no
names attached to them, and indeed requiring none, inasmuch as they were
nobody’s property in particular, but had “sprung from the heart of the
people.” Now, this phrase, “sprung from the heart of the people,” I
submit, is, if not nonsensical, at least hazy and misleading. Nothing of
fine literary quality ever came into existence, in any time or place,
except as the product of some individual person of genius and of
somewhat more than average culture. Instead of saying that such things
“spring from the heart of the people,” one ought rather to say therefore
that they “spring _to_ the heart of the people.” They live after their
authors are forgotten, are repeated with local modifications, and so
become common property. It is, of course, not denied that this process
must have been at work in Scotland through many centuries before the
eighteenth. The proof exists in scraps of fine old Scottish song still
preserved, the earliest perhaps the famous verse on the death of
Alexander III., and in lists, such as that in _The Complaint of
Scotland_, of the titles of clusters of old Scottish songs and tales
that were popular throughout the country in the sixteenth century, but
have perished since. The very contention of Mr. Chambers respecting _Sir
Patrick Spens_ and the other ballads in question was that the fact that
there is no mention of them in those old lists is itself significant,
and that they have a set of special characteristics which came into
fashion only with themselves.
If Lady Wardlaw _was_ the author of those ballads, or of some of them,
we have lost much by her secretiveness. We have been put in a perplexity
where perplexity there ought to have been none. The cause, on her part,
was perhaps less a desire for mystification than an amiable shrinking
from publicity, dislike of being talked of as a literary lady. This was
a feeling which the ungenerous mankind of the last century,—husbands,
brothers, uncles, and brothers-in-law,—thought it proper to foster in
any feminine person of whose literary accomplishments they were
privately proud. It affected the careers of not a few later Scottish
women of genius in the same century, and even through part of our own.
Passing over several such, and among them Lady Anne Barnard, the
authoress of _Auld Robin Gray_, let me come to an instance so recent
that it can be touched by the memories of many that are still living.
In the year 1766, seven years after the birth of Burns, and five before
that of Scott, there was born, in the old house of Gask in Strathearn,
Perthshire, a certain Carolina Oliphant, the third child of Laurence
Oliphant the younger, who, by the death of his father the next year,
became the Laird of Gask and the representative of the old family of the
Oliphants.
They were a Jacobite family to the core. The Laird and his father had
been out in the Rebellion of 1745; they had suffered much in consequence
and been long in exile; and not till a year or two before the birth of
this little girl had they been permitted to return and settle on their
shattered estates. They were true to their Jacobitism even then,
acknowledging no King but the one “over the water,” praying for him,
corresponding with him, and keeping up the recollection of him in their
household as almost a religion. Carolina was named Carolina because, had
she been a boy, she was to have been named Charles, and she used to say
that her parents had never forgiven her for having been born a girl. But
two boys were born at last, and there were sisters both older and
younger; and so, among Oliphants, and Robertsons of Struan, and Murrays,
and other relatives, all Jacobite, and all of the Scottish Episcopal
persuasion, Carolina grew up in the old house of Gask, hearing Jacobite
stories and Highland legends from her infancy, and educated with some
care. The mother having died when this, her third, child was but eight
years of age, the Laird was left with six young ones. “A poor
valetudinary person,” as he describes himself, he seems, however, to
have been a man of fine character and accomplishments, and to have taken
great pains with his children. King George III., hearing somehow of his
unswerving Jacobitism and the whimsicalities in which it showed itself,
is said to have sent him this message by the member for Perthshire:
“Give my compliments, not the compliments of the King of England, but
those of the Elector of Hanover, to Mr. Oliphant, and tell him how much
I respect him for the steadiness of his principles.”
Somewhat stately and melancholic himself, and keeping up the ceremonious
distance between him and his children then thought proper, the Laird of
Gask had those liberal and anti-morose views of education which belonged
especially to Scottish nonjuring or Episcopalian families. A wide range
of reading was permitted to the boys and the girls; dancing, especially
reel-dancing, was incessant among them,—at home, in the houses of
neighbouring lairds, or at county-balls; in music, especially in
Scottish song, they were all expert, so that the rumour of a coming
visit of Neil Gow and his violin to Strathearn, with the prospect it
brought them of a week extraordinary of combined music and reel-dancing,
would set them all madly astir; but the most musical of the family by
far was Carolina. She lived in music, in mirth, legend, Highland
scenery, and the dance, a beautiful girl to boot, and called “the Flower
of Strathearn,” of tall and graceful mien, with fine eyes, and fine
sensitive features, slightly proud and aquiline. And so to 1792, when
her father, the valetudinary laird, died, some of his children already
out in the world, but this one, at the age of twenty-six, still
unmarried.
For fourteen years more we hear of her as still living in the old house
of Gask with her brother Laurence, the new Laird, and with the wife he
brought into it in 1795,—the even tenor of her existence broken only by
some such incident as a visit to the north of England. During this time
it is that we become aware also of the beginnings in her mind of a deep
new seriousness, a pious devoutness, which, without interfering with her
passionate fondness for song and music, or her liking for mirth and
humour and every form of art, continued to be thenceforth the dominant
feeling of her life, bringing her into closer and closer affinity with
the “fervid” or “evangelical” in religion in whatever denomination it
appeared. All this while, or for the greater part of it, there was an
engagement between her and a half-cousin of hers, Captain Nairne. He was
of Irish birth, but of the Scottish family of the Perthshire Nairnes,
and heir, after his elder brother’s death, to the Nairne peerage, should
that peerage, which had been attainted after the Jacobite Rebellion of
1715, be ever revived. Of that there seemed no hope, and Captain
Nairne’s fortunes and prospects were of the poorest. Not till the year
1806, therefore, when he was promoted to the brevet rank of Major, and
obtained the appointment of Assistant-Inspector-General of Barracks in
Scotland, were the betrothed cousins able to marry, she then in her
fortieth year, and he nine years older.
Their married life of four-and-twenty years was spent almost wholly in
Edinburgh. Residing first in a cottage in one of the suburbs of the
town, they were known for a good while there as a gentleman and lady of
slender means, but distinguished family connections, having an only son,
of delicate constitution, whom they were educating privately, and on
whose account they lived in a rather retired manner, cultivating a few
select friendships, but not going much into general society. Ravelston
House, at the foot of the Corstorphine Hills, of which Mrs. Nairne’s
younger sister became mistress in 1811 by her marriage with the then
Keith of Ravelston, was one of the few places in which Mrs. Nairne and
her husband were regularly to be seen at parties. Though this and
occasional meetings elsewhere must have brought her into talking
acquaintance with Scott,—in whose life Ravelston House was so dear and
familiar that it became the suggestion of his castle of Tullyveolan in
_Waverley_,—there is no evidence of any intimacy between the two; nor
does Mrs. Nairne’s name once occur, I think, in Lockhart’s _Life of
Scott_, full though that book is of allusions to persons and things
memorable in Edinburgh while the great wizard was its most illustrious
inhabitant. One of the many kindly acts of Scott’s life, however, had
some influence on the fortunes of Mrs. Nairne. During the visit of
George IV. to Edinburgh in 1822, Scott took occasion to suggest to him
that the restoration of the attainted Jacobite families to their titles
would be a graceful and popular act of his reign, and the consequence
was a Bill for the purpose which passed Parliament and received the
royal assent in 1824. Thus, at the age of sixty-seven, Major Nairne
became Baron Nairne of Nairne in Perthshire, and his wife, at the age of
eight-and-fifty, Baroness Nairne. It seems to have been about this date,
or shortly afterwards, though I am not quite sure, that they had a
temporary residence in Holyrood Palace. At all events, I have been
informed that at one time they had apartments there.
In 1830, six years after the recovery of his title, Lord Nairne died.
This broke Lady Nairne’s domiciliary tie to Edinburgh. She removed first
to the south of England, to be with some of her relatives; thence to
Ireland, where she lived a year or two; and thence in 1834 to the
Continent, on account of the ill-health of her son, the new Lord Nairne,
then a young man of six-and-twenty. For the next three years, she, her
son, and her widowed sister Mrs. Keith, moved about, through France,
Switzerland, Italy, and Germany, mainly for the recreation and
recruiting of the sickly young Lord, who, however, died at Brussels in
December 1837, in his thirtieth year, and was there buried.
The widowed Baroness, thus childless and lonely in the world, continued
to live abroad for a year or two longer, chiefly in Germany and in
Paris. Her consolations in her bereavement were in correspondence with
her nephews and nieces at home, in readings in religious and other good
books, in her interest in Christian missions and other movements of
Protestant Evangelism, and in secret acts of charity in aid of such
missions and movements, or in relief of private distresses. A foreign
waiting-maid, who was long in her service abroad, described her
afterwards in these words: “My lady was as near to an angel as human
weakness might permit.” But she was not to die abroad. In the year 1843,
just after the Disruption of the Scottish Church,—in which event, though
she remained a loyal Scottish Episcopalian as before, her interest was
remarkably deep,—she was persuaded to return to Scotland and take up her
residence once more at Gask: not now in the old house in which she had
been born, but in the new mansion that had been built by her nephew,
James Blair Oliphant, then Laird of Gask. Here she lived two years more,
in the serene piety of a beautiful old age, and in deeds, every week or
every day, of benevolence and mercy. She was able to visit Edinburgh
once or twice; and it was there, in the year 1844, that she consulted
Dr. Chalmers, whom she admired greatly and with whom she had already
been in correspondence, as to fit objects for such charitable donations
as her thrift enabled her to spare. She gave him, besides other smaller
sums, the £300 which enabled him to accomplish the object he had then
most at heart by acquiring a site for the schools and church he had
resolved to plant, and did plant, amid what he called the “heathenism”
of the West Port, in the very labyrinth of closes in that rank
neighbourhood which had been made hideous by the Burke and Hare murders
of 1828. Dr. Chalmers alone knew of the gift; no one else. A few months
more of invalid existence at Gask House, with failing memory, and
somewhat paralytic, and the saintly lady’s life was over. She died
October 27, 1845, in the house of Gask, at the age of seventy-nine. Her
remains rest in a chapel near that house, erected for Episcopal service
on the site of the old parish church, in the midst of the scenery of her
native Strathearn, which she loved in life so well.
That this woman had ever written a line of verse was a secret which she
all but carried to the grave with her. And yet for fifty years, no less,
people all round her had been singing her songs and talking about them
with admiration, and phrases from them had become household words
throughout Scotland, and some of them were universally spoken of as the
finest Scottish songs, the songs of keenest and deepest genius, since
those of Burns.
At how early a period in her life she, who could sing songs so well and
who knew so many, may have tried to write one, we cannot tell; but it
was in or about the year 1793, when Burns was in the full flush of his
fame, and his exertions for improving and reforming Scottish Song by
providing new words for old airs had kindled her enthusiasm, that she
penned her first known lyric. It was called _The Pleughman_, and was
written to be sung by her brother at a dinner of the Gask tenantry.
Having been successful in that form, it was afterwards circulated by
him, but with every precaution for keeping it anonymous. Had Burns lived
a year longer than he did, he might have heard not only of this
_Pleughman_, but also of another song from the same unknown hand that
would have touched him a thousand times more, as it has touched all the
world since,—_The Land o’ the Leal._ That song was written, it is
believed, by Carolina Oliphant in 1797, when she was in her
thirty-second year. Had the fact been known, how she would have been
honoured and pointed at everywhere, all her life after, wherever she
went! But the secret was kept; _The Land o’ the Leal_ came to be
attributed to Burns, and was printed at last in editions of Burns as
indubitably his; and the true authoress came into Edinburgh, to live in
that city, close to Scott, for four-and-twenty years; and through all
that time _he_, who would have limped across the room with beaming eyes
to single her out in chief had he been aware of the reality, remained
ignorant that the handsome, but no longer young, lady whom he sometimes
met at Ravelston had any other distinction than that of being the
sister-in-law of Sandy Keith, and the wife of Major Nairne,
Assistant-Inspector-General of Barracks. Yet this very time of her
residence in Edinburgh as Mrs. Nairne was the time also, it appears, of
the production of not a few additional songs of hers, some of them
nearly as popular, with all or most of which Scott must have been
familiar. Here particularly it was that in 1821, as we learn from the
slight memoirs of her now extant, she, in concert with a small committee
of other Edinburgh ladies, all sworn to secrecy, became a contributor,
under the name of “Mrs. Bogan of Bogan” or under other _aliases_, to a
collection of national airs, called _The Scottish Minstrel_, brought out
in parts by Mr. Robert Purdie, a music-publisher of the city. She
continued to contribute; and the work was completed in six volumes in
1824, the year in which she became Baroness Nairne. Mr. Purdie himself
never knew who this valuable contributor to his collection was, nor did
any one else out of the circle of her most intimate lady-friends. Her
own husband, Lord Nairne, I am credibly informed, remained ignorant to
his dying day that his wife had been guilty of song-writing or of any
other kind of literary performance. Nor was silence broken on the
subject through the subsequent fifteen years of Lady Nairne’s widowhood.
Away in England, Ireland, or abroad, through thirteen of those years,
she would still pen a little Scottish lilt occasionally, when some
feeling moved her; and so till, returning to Scotland in her old age,
with no one knows what memories of private sadness under her
semi-aristocratic reticence and her gentle Christian faith, she lingered
out her last year or two, and then died. Her secretiveness as to the
authorship of the songs that might have made her famous when living was
preserved to the last. Just before her death she _had_ consented that a
collective edition of them should be published, but without her name.
Two months after her death, when Dr. Chalmers thought himself absolved
from his promise of secrecy as to the name of the donor of the £300 for
his church and schools in the West Port, he announced at a public
meeting that the donor, then in her grave, had been “Lady Nairne, of
Perthshire.” Even he cannot have then known of any other title of hers
to regard; for, if he had, and if I know Dr. Chalmers, he would have
added, with all the emotion of his great heart, “authoress of _The Land
o’ the Leal_.” It occurs to me sometimes that in that very year 1844,
when this Scottishwoman of genius was on her last visit to Edinburgh,
and in occasional conferences with Dr. Chalmers in his house in
Morningside, I might myself have seen her in his company or
neighbourhood. But, with the rest of the world, I knew nothing then of
her literary claims; and, when I read or heard _The Land o’ the Leal_, I
thought the words were by Burns.
Only since 1846, the year after Lady Nairne’s death, can she be said to
have taken her place by name in the literature of her country. In that
year, her surviving sister Mrs. Keith thinking there could be nothing
wrong now in letting the truth be known, there appeared the projected
collective edition of the songs in the form of a thin folio, with this
title-page: “_Lays from Strathearn, by Caroline, Baroness Nairne, Author
of ‘The Land o’ the Leal,’ etc.: Arranged, with Symphonies and
Accompaniments, for the Pianoforte, by Finlay Dun._” In a subsequent
edition several pieces that had been omitted in this one were added; and
now perhaps the most complete collection of the songs is that edited by
Dr. Charles Rogers in 1869 in a small volume containing the words
without the music, and having a memoir prefixed. The number of pieces
there printed as Lady Nairne’s is ninety-eight in all.
What strikes one first on looking at the ninety-eight is the variety of
their moods and subjects, the versatility of mind they exhibit. There
are Jacobite songs; and, what is remarkable in one brought up in
Jacobite sentiments and traditions, there are songs of sympathy with
Knox, the Covenanters, and the old Scottish Presbyterians and Whigs, the
very contradictories of Scottish Jacobitism. Then there are lovesongs,
satirical songs, humorous songs and songs of Scottish character and
oddity, nonsense songs and songs of philosophic “pawkiness” and good
sense, songs of scenery and places, and songs of the most tearful
pathos. A few are of a distinctively religious character. Passing from
matter or subject to quality, one may say that there is a real _moral_
worth in them all, and that all have that genuine characteristic of a
song which consists of an inner _tune_ preceding and inspiring the
words, and coiling the words as it were out of the heart along with it.
Hence there is not perhaps one of them that, with the advantage they
have of being set to known and favourite airs, would not please
sufficiently if sung by a good singer. Apart from this general
melodiousness or suitability for being sung, the report for _all_ of
them might not be so favourable; but, tried by the standard of strict
poetic merit, about twenty or twenty-five of the whole number, I should
say, might rank as good, while eight or ten of these are of supreme
quality. Would not this, though written by a woman, serve for the
rallying of a thousand men for any cause, right or wrong?
“The news frae Moidart cam yestreen
Will soon gar mony ferly,
For ships o’ war hae just come in
And landit Royal Charlie.
Come through the heather, around him gather;
Ye’re a’ the welcomer early;
Around him cling wi’ a’ your kin;
For wha’ll be King but Charlie?
Come through the heather, around him gather,
Come Ronald, come Donald, come a’ thegither,
And crown your rightfu’, lawfu’ King!
For wha’ll be King but Charlie?”
And what a _birr_ and sense of the situation in the song on Charlie’s
entry into Carlisle preceded by a hundred pipers, though that, on the
whole, is not one of the best:—
“Dumfoundered, the English saw, they saw;
Dumfoundered, they heard the blaw, the blaw;
Dumfoundered, they a’ ran awa, awa,
From the hundred pipers an’ a’, an’ a’.
Wi’ a hundred pipers an’ a’, an’ a’,
Wi’ a hundred pipers an’ a’, an’ a’,
We’ll up and gie them a blaw, a blaw,
Wi’ a hundred pipers an’ a’, an’ a’.”
Then, in the way of humorous character-sketching, what can surpass the
_Laird o’ Cockpen_, or the immortal _John Tod_? So well known are these
throughout Scotland that it would be absurd to quote them if only
Scottish readers were concerned; but, for the convenience of other
readers, here they are, each entire:—
THE LAIRD O’ COCKPEN.
“The Laird o’ Cockpen, he’s proud and he’s great:
His mind is ta’en up wi’ the things o’ the state:
He wanted a wife his braw house to keep:
But favour wi’ wooin’ was fashious to seek.
Doun by the dyke-side a lady did dwell;
At his table-head he thocht she’d look well:
McClish’s ae dochter o’ Claverse-ha’ Lea,—
A pennyless lass wi’ a lang pedigree.
His wig was weel pouther’d, and as guid as new;
His waistcoat was white, and his coat it was blue;
He put on a ring, a sword, and cock’d hat:
And wha could refuse the Laird wi’ a’ that?
He took the gray mare and rade cannilie,
And rapp’d at the yett o’ Claverse-ha’ Lea:
‘Gae tell Mistress Jean to come speedily ben;
She’s wanted to speak wi’ the Laird o’ Cockpen.’
Mistress Jean she was makin’ the elder-flower wine:
‘And what brings the Laird at sic a like time?’
She put aff her apron, and on her silk goun,
Her mutch wi’ red ribbons, and gaed awa’ doun.
And, when she cam ben, he bowed fu’ low;
And what was his errand he soon let her know:
Amazed was the Laird when the lady said ‘Na,’
And wi’ a laich curtsey she turned awa’.
Dumfoundered he was, but nae sigh did he gie:
He mounted his mare, and he rade cannilie;
And aften he thocht, as he gaed through the glen,
‘She’s daft to refuse the Laird o’ Cockpen!’”
JOHN TOD.
“He’s a terrible man, John Tod, John Tod;
He’s a terrible man, John Tod.
He scolds in the house; he scolds at the door;
He scolds in the vera high road, John Tod;
He scolds in the vera high road.
The weans a’ fear John Tod, John Tod;
The weans a’ fear John Tod:
When he’s passing by, the mithers will cry:—
‘Here’s an ill wean, John Tod, John Tod;
Here’s an ill wean, John Tod.’
The callants a’ fear John Tod, John Tod;
The callants a’ fear John Tod:
If they steal but a neep, the laddie he’ll whip;
And it’s unco’ weel done o’ John Tod, John Tod;
And it’s unco’ weel done o’ John Tod.
And saw ye nae wee John Tod, John Tod?
O saw ye nae wee John Tod?
His bannet was blue, his shoon maistly new;
And weel does he keep the kirk road, John Tod;
And weel does he keep the kirk road.
How is he fendin’, John Tod, John Tod?
How is he fendin’, John Tod?
He’s scourin’ the land wi’ a rung in his hand,
And the French wadna frichten John Tod, John Tod;
And the French wadna frichten John Tod.
Ye’re sun-brint and battered, John Tod, John Tod;
Ye’re tautit and tattered, John Tod:
Wi’ your auld strippit coul, ye look maist like a fule,
But there’s nous i’ the lining, John Tod, John Tod;
But there’s nous i’ the lining, John Tod.
He’s weel respeckit, John Tod, John Tod;
He’s weel respeckit, John Tod:
He’s a terrible man; but we’d a’ gae wrang
If e’er he sud leave us, John Tod, John Tod;
If e’er he sud leave us, John Tod.”
Again, in another key, how would Edinburgh, how would Newhaven, how
would all the coasts of the Forth, like to lose that famous song of the
fisherwomen, written long ago for Neil Gow, and sent to him anonymously
for the purposes of his concerts?
“Wha’ll buy my caller herrin’?
They’re bonnie fish and halesome farin’.
Wha’ll buy my caller herrin’,
New drawn frae the Forth?
When ye were sleepin’ on your pillows,
Dreamed ye aught o’ our puir fellows,
Darkling as they faced the billows,
A’ to fill the woven willows?
Buy my caller herrin’,
New drawn frae the Forth.
Wha’ll buy my caller herrin’?
They’re no brocht here without brave darin’:
Buy my caller herrin’,
Hauled through wind and rain.
Wha’ll buy my caller herrin’?
Oh! ye may ca’ them vulgar farin’:
Wives and mithers, maist despairin’,
Ca’ them lives o’ men.”
Yet in another strain take this little advice of ethical wisdom, which,
simple though it is, might have been written by Goethe:—
“Saw ye ne’er a lanely lassie,
Thinkin’, gin she were a wife,
The sun o’ joy wad ne’er gae doun,
But warm and cheer her a’ her life?
Saw ye ne’er a weary wifie,
Thinkin’, gin she were a lass,
She wad aye be blithe and cheery,
Lightly as the day wad pass?
Wives and lasses, young and aged,
Think na on each other’s state:
Ilka ane it has its crosses;
Mortal joy was ne’er complete.
Ilka ane it has its blessings;
Peevish dinna pass them by;
But, like choicest berries, seek them,
Though amang the thorns they lie.”
Another and another still might be quoted, each with its peculiarity,
hardly any two alike; and I am not sure but some of those that would be
selected as of the highest quality were among the earliest. Certainly
among the very earliest was that with which Lady Nairne’s name will ever
be most fondly associated, though even that can hardly be called a song
of her youth. While there is death in the world, and the heart will
think of what may be beyond death, or the tears will come at the thought
of parting with loved ones, or at the memory of their vanished faces in
the mystic musings of the night, will not this song, wherever the
Scottish tongue is spoken, be the very music of resignation struggling
with heart-break?—
“I’m wearin’ awa’, Jean,
Like snaw-wreaths in thaw, Jean,
I’m wearin’ awa’
To the land o’ the leal.
There’s nae sorrow there, Jean;
There’s neither cauld nor care, Jean;
The day is aye fair
In the land o’ the leal.
Our bonnie bairn’s there, Jean;
She was baith gude and fair, Jean;
And oh! we grudged her sair
To the land o’ the leal.
But sorrow’s sel’ wears past, Jean;
And joy’s a-comin’ fast, Jean,
The joy that’s aye to last
In the land o’ the leal.
Then dry that tearfu’ e’e, Jean;
My soul langs to be free, Jean;
And angels wait on me
To the land o’ the leal.
Now, fare ye weel, my ain Jean!
This warld’s care is vain, Jean;
We’ll meet and aye be fain
In the land o’ the leal.”
In quoting this song I have given the words as it has been universally
voted, by men at least, that they should be accepted. Lady Nairne wrote
“I’m wearin’ awa’, _John_,” meaning the song to be the supposed address
of a dying wife to her husband; and so the words still stand, with other
differences of text, in the authentic original. I know not by what
warrant the change was introduced; though, for my own part, I join in
the vote for adopting it, and so making the song the address of a dying
husband to his wife. Had there been such a various reading in the text
of one of the odes of Horace, what comments there would have been upon
it, what dissertations! But, though the song of _The Land o’ the Leal_
is more touching than any in Horace, the modification of its original
form has passed hitherto without much comment. The most obvious comment
perhaps is that, whatever _Jean_ may produce, it will be appropriated by
_John_, if he likes it, to his own use.
EDINBURGH THROUGH THE DUNDAS DESPOTISM[7]
Will anybody give us a history of Scotland from the year 1745 onwards to
the present time? It is not likely that anybody will. For it is
precisely from the year 1745 that Scotland ceases to have that sort of
history which, according to our ordinary ideas of history, it is easy or
necessary to write.
Some forty years before that time, Scotland had parted with her
independent autonomy by the Treaty of Union. There was an end of “an
auld sang”; and the smaller country, though nominally only united to the
larger, was virtually, for purposes of general history, incorporated
with it. Scotsmen have recently been complaining that Literature has not
even paid Scotland the poor compliment of remembering the fact of her
union with England so far as to use the word “Britain,” then specially
provided by law as the designation of the composite kingdom, but has
gone on speaking of “England” and “English History,” as if the linking
of the smaller country to the larger had produced no change of fact
worth commemorating by a change of name. The practice is as unscholarly
as it is unconstitutional, and is a recent and violent departure from
the established usage of the best English writers of the eighteenth
century and the earlier part of the present. But the continuity of
English life _was_ too little disturbed perhaps by the mere admission
into the Parliament at Westminster of sixteen peers and forty-five
members for counties and burghs from the other side of the Tweed, to
make it reasonable to expect that all Englishmen would for ever
thenceforth keep to the correct and legal usage, employing the words
“England” and “English” only in their proper historical senses, but
saying “Britain,” “British,” “Britannic,” etc., whenever the aggregate
unity should be in view. It was actually proposed, in the first draft of
an inscription to be engraved on a public memorial to a famous statesman
recently deceased, to include among his mentioned distinctions that of
his having been “twice Prime Minister of England”; and the absurdity had
to be stopped by pointing out that for several ages there had been no
such office or entity anywhere in the world. Even patriotic Scottish
writers,—for example, Sir Archibald Alison,—have given way to the habit
of using the word “England” for the conjunct community oftener than the
legal word “Britain.” Apart, however, from all controversy in the matter
of names, it is plain that from the date of the Union Scotsmen
themselves have considered their national history, in all ordinary
senses, as then concluded. Our text-books of Scottish History close at
the year 1707. For about forty years after that date, indeed, Scotland
contrived by vigorous exertions to make her separate existence still
felt. The fierce flutter of the tartans in the two Rebellions of 1715
and 1745 drew the historians hurriedly back to her after they thought
they had done with her; and so it is not uncommon in books of Scottish
History to find the narrative continued, by way of appendix, as far as
to 1745. But then the historian takes his final leave. With the furious
Cumberland and the Government whom Cumberland served, he scatters the
tartans for the last time; he breaks up the Highlands by forts and
roads; he abolishes hereditary jurisdictions; he grubs up, so to speak,
all the roots and relics of the old Scottish autonomy which since the
Union had been left in the ground and had proved troublesome; and, when
he turns his back on Scotland again, it is with an assurance that he
will never be recalled, and that from that hour all on the north side of
the Border will be, like cleared land, left quiet and fallow. Scotland
_is_, then, thought of as but a part of Great Britain.
And yet, in another sense, what do we see? Why, that this very period of
the historical non-existence of Scotland is the period of her most
energetic, most peculiar, and most various life! What Scotland was in
the world before 1745 is as nothing compared with what, even purely as
Scotland, she has been in the world since 1745. Till 1745 she was cooped
up within herself, a narrow nation leading a life of intense internal
action; and the most thrilling facts of her history,—such as the Wars of
Independence against England, and the Presbyterian Reformation under
Knox,—were of a kind the contemporaneous interest of which was confined
within her own bounds. Even after the Union of the Crowns in 1603, it
was only indirectly and collaterally, as in the Scottish episodes of the
Great Civil War and its sequel, that the influence of Scotland in
general history became very notable. But since 1745 the Scottish element
has visibly acquired a proportion in the general mass of things which it
never had before. Not only since that period has Scotland still stood
where it did, inhabited by the same race of men, living on according to
their old habits, and the same in all respects, their lost autonomy
excepted; not only, therefore, has there been a distinct history of
Scottish society since that time, capable of being written by itself, if
any one chose to take up the subject: but the circumstance that at that
time Scotland burst its bounds has reacted on its history, so as vastly
to increase its dimensions, and in many ways also to vary its character.
Since 1745, Scotland has quadrupled her population. The commercial
prosperity of Scotland, with all that this involves, dates from the same
period. It is since that period that Scotland has sent forth most of
that series of eminent men who have left their names memorable in the
various walks of active and industrial life, at home and abroad. From
that period, with some allowance for those numerous Scottish thinkers
who taught philosophy in the European Universities in earlier centuries,
dates the rise and development of what is known as the Scottish
Philosophy. From that period, still more conspicuously, dates the
manifestation of Scottish intellect, in any degree compelling attention
beyond Scottish limits, in the departments of literature and art. Before
1745, if we except the poet Thomson (for only recently have English
literary historians reverted with any adequate interest to the older
poetry and other literature of the real Scottish vernacular), Scotland
had not given birth to a single poet or other man of letters able to
command distinct recognition by his English contemporaries. It was
precisely about this time, however, that such men as Hume and Smollett,
and Robertson and Adam Smith, and Blair and Kames,—all of them born
after the Union, and most of them between the two Rebellions,—began that
literary activity of the Scottish mind which, kept up by such of their
immediate successors as Burns, Henry Mackenzie, and Dugald Stewart, has
been continued, with ever-increasing effect, to our own time, by writers
whose name is legion. In short, however we look at the matter, it is a
remarkable fact that the most productive period of the History of
Scotland is that which has elapsed since Cumberland tore the last relics
of autonomy out of her soil, and left her, passive and Parliamentless,
to the mere winds and meteors.
One reason why, despite this interesting progress of Scottish society
since 1745, the Scottish history of the intervening period has not been
written is that, according to our common notions, only where there is
autonomy can there be proper history. It is over parliaments, monarchs,
and seats of government, with an occasional excursion after embassies or
in the route of armies to great battle-fields, that the Muse of History
hovers; where there is no parliament, monarch, or seat of government,
and no embassy or march of armies to make up for the want, she finds it
unnecessary to stay, and thinks it sufficient if she leaves other and
minor muses as her substitutes. Hence, as we have said, the Muse of
History left Scotland in 1707, and returned only hastily and on
compulsion to attend to the Highland Rebellions. Whatever claim on her
attention Scotland since that time has possessed she considers herself
to have amply satisfied by hovering over the Parliament of Westminster,
as the centre of British interests in general, or by following those
trains of military and international action, emanating from that centre,
in which Scotsmen have had part side by side with Englishmen and
Irishmen. The task of recording purely Scottish events in their sequence
during the last hundred and fifty years,—of taking note of all the
flitting social phenomena of which during that period the land north of
the Tweed has been the scene,—has accordingly devolved on the muse of
individual biography, aided by the muse of economical dissertation and
statistics; and it seems somewhat problematical, as has been said,
whether the materials which these subordinate muses have gathered, in
the shape of miscellaneous lives of remarkable Scotsmen since 1745, and
miscellaneous sketches of Scottish life and society since then, will
ever be organised into a regular History. To a writer capable of
combining the scattered elements of interest lying in such materials the
thing would certainly be possible.
Of the various recent works having anything of the character of
contributions to a history of Scottish society during the period in
question, the richest by far, both in fact and in suggestion, are the
two which bear the name of the late Lord Cockburn. Rich enough in this
respect was his _Life of Jeffrey_ published in 1852; but richer still
are the _Memorials of his Time_, now published posthumously.
Lord Cockburn was born in 1779, and died in 1854. Consequently, it is
not over the whole of the period under notice, but only over seventy
years of it, that his reminiscences could in any case have extended. In
fact, however, the period over which they do extend is still more
limited. The _Memorials_ begin about the year 1787, when the author was
a boy at school, and they do not come farther down than 1830. We think,
too, that all readers of the volume will agree with us in regarding the
earlier portion of it,—that which contains Lord Cockburn’s recollections
of the time of his boyhood and youth,—as by far the most interesting.
Nowhere else is there such a vivid and racy account of the state of
Scottish society from about 1790 to about 1806. Fixing on the latter
year, and remembering that Lord Cockburn’s recollections refer chiefly
to Scottish society as it was represented in Edinburgh, we have in these
“Memorials,” therefore, the best text possible for our present paper.
First of all, the _Memorials_, taken in connection with the _Life of
Jeffrey_, bring more distinctly before us than had ever been done
previously, or, at all events, since the time of the Reform Bill
agitation, the anomalous system of polity by which Scotland was governed
not so very long ago. Such a system of polity, maintained so quietly and
with such results, was probably never seen elsewhere under the sun.
Nominally, Scotland was under a free representative government; but
actually she was under the absolute rule of a single native. Ever since
the Union of 1707, when the Scottish autonomy ended and Westminster
became the seat of the one Imperial Government for England and Scotland
together, that Government, except in a few instances when attempts were
made to rule Scotland directly by English methods, and the attempts
raised storm and whirlwind, had found it convenient to entrust the sole
management of Scottish affairs to a single minister, who, by his
Scottish birth and connections on the one hand, and his connections with
the Cabinet and the Parliament at Westminster on the other, could act as
a kind of responsible middleman. Knowing the character and habits of his
countrymen, he could carry out the intentions of Government in Scotland
far better than Government could do for itself; and, by his command of
the Scottish votes in Parliament, he could serve the Cabinet in British
and Imperial questions so effectively as to be able to dictate to it in
all purely Scottish questions. This kind of depute-sovereignty, or rule
by contract, was long exercised in Scotland by the powerful Whig family
of Argyle. During the Whig and Tory alternations of the early part of
the reign of George III., however, the sovereignty was shifted from the
Argyle family to others, till at last, about the time of the formation
of the ministry of the younger Pitt in 1783, it settled permanently in
the Tory family of Dundas, whose patrimonial property as lairds, and
whose professional craft as lawyers, connected them more immediately
with Edinburgh.
For two centuries or more these “Dundases of Arniston,” as they were
called and are still called, had been an important family in the
politics and the jurisprudence of Scotland. Since the Restoration four
of them in succession had been on the Scottish Bench, two of these in
the supreme place on that Bench: viz. Robert Dundas, Lord President of
the Court of Session from 1748 to 1753, and his eldest son, Robert
Dundas, Lord President of the same from 1760 onwards. It was in a
younger brother of this last that the family was to start up into its
highest distinction. This was Henry Dundas, known afterwards as 1st
Viscount Melville. Born in 1741, and educated at the University of
Edinburgh, he had betaken himself, like so many of his ancestors, to the
profession of the Law, and had already become eminent at the Scottish
Bar, when, having been sent to the House of Commons as member for
Edinburghshire, he began in 1774 his career of Parliament-man and
party-politician. It was the time of the Tory administration of Lord
North; and, having gradually fallen into rank with the supporters of
that administration, he was appointed under it in 1775 to the office of
Lord Advocate of Scotland. He had held this office through the remainder
of Lord North’s administration, and also through the brief Rockingham
and Shelburne ministries of 1782–83, latterly with the Treasurership of
the Navy in addition, but had resigned office in April 1783 on the
formation of the Coalition Ministry of North and Fox. He had been
observing with admiration the steady conduct of the youthful Pitt
through so many shiftings of the political scenery; the youthful Pitt
had also been observing _him_; they had found an unusually strong bond
of attachment to each other in their common fondness for port wine and
their coequal powers of consuming it in large quantities; and so it
happened that, on the break-up of the Coalition Ministry in December
1783, and the formation of a new and more lasting ministry under Pitt
himself, it was to Dundas that Pitt looked chiefly for help and
comradeship. Pitt was then but four and twenty years of age, while
Dundas was in his forty-third year; but through all the future
Premiership of the younger man, and indeed through all the rest of his
life, Dundas was to be his most trusted colleague, his _alter ego_.
From 1783 to 1806 this Henry Dundas, the colleague of Pitt, was
virtually King of Scotland. When the history of Scotland during that
period shall come to be written, this will be recognised and he will be
the central figure. All in all, though within a narrower field, he was
as remarkable a man, as able a man, as either Pitt or Fox; and his life,
from the absoluteness with which it was identified with the career of
his native country during so long a period, possesses elements of
biographical interest which theirs want. Both Lord Brougham and Lord
Cockburn have sketched the character of this important man, of whom, in
their youth, Scotsmen were continually speaking as subjects speak of
their liege lord. In the House, says Lord Brougham, he could not be
called an orator; he was “a plain, business-like speaker,” and “an
admirable man of business.” Personally, Lord Brougham adds, he was of
“engaging qualities”; “a steady and determined friend”; “an agreeable
companion, from the joyous hilarity of his manners”; “void of all
affectation, all pride, all pretension”; “a kind and affectionate man in
the relations of private life”; “in his demeanour hearty and
good-humoured to all.” Lord Cockburn, as became a nephew speaking of an
uncle, is even more enthusiastic in his descriptions. “Handsome,
gentlemanlike, frank, cheerful, and social,” says Lord Cockburn, “he was
a favourite with most men, and with all women”; “too much a man of the
world not to live well with his opponents when they would let him, and
totally incapable of personal harshness or unkindness.” “He was,”
continues Lord Cockburn, “the very man for Scotland at that time, and is
a Scotchman of whom his country may be proud.” Such was the Henry Dundas
in whom, partly because of those personal qualifications, the entire
management of Scottish affairs was vested through the seventeen closing
years of last century and the first five or six years of the present.
This era of Scottish history may, in fact, be remembered by the name of
The Dundas Despotism.
What was the method of the despotism? It was very peculiar, and at the
same time very simple and natural. Mr. Dundas, sitting in the House of
Commons, first as member for the shire of Edinburgh, but from 1787
onwards as member for Edinburgh itself, was a leading power in the Pitt
Administration. On joining that administration he had not resumed his
old office of Lord Advocate (which was given to his friend Hay
Campbell), but had been content with resuming his former post of the
Treasurership of the Navy; to which were subsequently added in
succession the Presidency of the Board of Control for Indian Affairs
(_i.e._ the Ministry for India), the Home-Secretaryship, the
Secretaryship for War, and the First Lordship of the Admiralty. It was
perhaps as Minister for India that he most usefully distinguished
himself in his capacity as a British statesman. But it was in his other
capacity as sovereign minister for Scotland that he laboured most
characteristically. Continually going and coming, shuttle-wise, between
London and Edinburgh, he was known to carry all Scotland in his pocket.
His colleagues, on the one hand, made Scotland entirely over to him; and
he, on the other, contracted to keep Scotland quiet for them, and to
give them the full use of the united Scottish influence in Parliament.
His means, as regarded his countrymen, were very efficient. They
consisted, apart from the mere power of his own tact and talent, in the
uncontrolled use of patronage. The population of Scotland at that time
did not exceed a million and a half,—a population in which, according to
the ordinary calculation, there could not be more than about three
hundred and fifty thousand adult males. This was a nice little compact
body to keep in order, and not above one man’s strength, if he had
offices enough at his disposal. But it was not even necessary to deal
with all this little mass directly. There was no popular representation
in Scotland. Fifteen out of the five-and-forty Scottish members of the
House of Commons were members for burghs; and these were elected by the
town-councils, who were themselves self-elected, and nearly permanent.
Nay, the Edinburgh town-council alone returned a member directly; the
other burgh-members were for “districts of burghs,” and were elected by
delegates from the various town-councils included in the several
districts. The county constituencies, on the other hand, who elected the
thirty county members, did not exceed fifteen hundred or two thousand
persons for all Scotland. Accordingly, Government, through Dundas, had
only to deal directly with an upper two thousand or so, including the
town-councils,—a body not too large, as Lord Cockburn says, to be held
completely within Government’s hand. Gratitude for places conferred,
fear of removal from place, and hope of places to be obtained for
themselves and their relations or dependents, were the forces by which
they _were_ held. Nobody could get a place or could hold a place except
through Harry Dundas; and he had places enough at his disposal to give
all the necessary chance. There was, first, all the patronage of
Scotland itself, including judgeships, sheriffships, professorships,
clerical livings, offices of customs and excise, and a host of minor
appointments, all within the control of Dundas, to be distributed by him
according to his personal knowledge, or the representations of his
friends. Then there were commissions in the army and navy, appointments
in the India service, medical appointments, and posts in the various
departments of the public service in England,—all excellent as openings
for young Scotsmen who could not be provided for at home, and in the
patronage of which Dundas had his full share by official right or as a
member of the general Ministry. The political faith of Scotland was,
therefore, simply _Dundasism_; and it was in a great measure the result
of Dundas’s own political position that this _Dundasism_ was equivalent
to _Toryism_. As the colleague and friend of Pitt, the member of a
government whose main feeling was hatred to the French Revolution, and
to everything at home that savoured of sympathy with that Revolution,
Dundas willed that his subjects should be Tories; and they were. At last
Toryism became the ingrained national habit. Lord Cockburn describes
feelingly the utter political abjectness of Scotland during the Dundas
reign. As in England, so in Scotland, “everything rung and was connected
with the Revolution in France; everything, not this or that thing, but
literally everything, was soaked in this one event.” But in Scotland,
more than in England, horror of the French Revolution and of every
doctrine or practice that could be charged with the remotest suspicion
of connection with it, became the necessary creed of personal safety. To
resent every idea of innovation or of popular power,—nay, every
recognition of the existence of the people politically,—as blasphemy,
Jacobinism, and incipient treason, was the same thing as allegiance to
Dundas; and this, again, was the same thing as having any comfort in
life. Hence, three-fourths of the entire population, and almost all the
wealth and rank of the country, were of the Tory party; and no names of
abuse were hard enough, no persecution was harsh enough, for the daring
men, consisting perhaps of about a fourth of the middle and working
classes, with a sprinkling of persons of a higher grade, who formed the
small Opposition. Though the opinions of these were of the most moderate
shade of what would now be called “liberalism,” the slightest expression
of them was attended with positive risk. Spies were employed to watch
such of them as had any social position; in several cases there were
trials for sedition, with sentences of transportation; and only the
impossibility of finding grounds for indictment prevented more. The
negative punishment of exclusion from office, and from every favour of
Government and its supporters, was the least; and it was universally
applied. Burns nearly lost his excisemanship for too free speaking; and
a letter is extant, addressed by him to one of the commissioners of the
Scottish Board of Excise, in which, without denying his Liberalism, he
protests that it is within the bounds of devout attachment to the
Constitution, and implores the commissioner, as “a husband and a father”
himself, not to be instrumental in turning him, with his wife and his
little ones, “into the world, degraded and disgraced.” Part of the
poet’s crime seems to have been his having subscribed to an Edinburgh
Liberal paper which had been started by one Captain Johnstone. This
Johnstone was imprisoned after the publication of a few numbers; and the
very printer of the paper, though himself a Tory, was nearly ruined by
his connection with it. No subsequent attempt was made during the Dundas
reign to establish an Opposition newspaper. From 1795 to as late as
1820, according to Lord Cockburn, not a single public meeting on the
Opposition side of politics was, or could be, held in Edinburgh.
Elections of members of Parliament, whether for burghs or for counties,
in Scotland, were a farce: they were transacted quietly, by those whose
business it was, in town-halls or in the private rooms of hotels; and
the people knew of the matter only by the ringing of a bell, or by some
other casual method of announcement. Abject Toryism, or submission to
Dundas and the existing order of things, pervaded every department and
every corner of established or official life in Scotland,—the Church,
the Bench, the Bar, the Colleges and Schools; and so powerfully were any
elements of possible opposition that did exist kept down by the pressure
of organised self-interest, and by the fear of pains and penalties, that
the appearance at last from the Solway to Caithness was that of
imperturbable political stagnation.
Once, indeed, a crisis occurred which put the Scottish people nearly out
in their calculations. This was in March 1801, when Pitt resigned
office, and Dundas along with him, and a new ministry was formed under
Pitt’s temporary substitute, Mr. Addington, afterwards Lord Sidmouth.
Dundas out of power was a conception totally new to the Scottish
mind,—an association, or rather a dissociation, of ideas utterly
paralysing. “For a while,” says Lord Brougham, “all was uncertainty and
consternation; all were seen fluttering about like birds in an eclipse
or a thunderstorm; no man could tell whom he might trust; nay, worse
still, no man could tell of whom he might ask anything.” Dundasism,
which had hitherto meant participation in place and patronage, now
seemed in danger of losing that meaning; and the bulk of the Scottish
population feared that they might have to choose between the name and
the thing. They were faithful to Dundas, however; and they were
rewarded. The Addington ministry, which had come into power principally
to conclude peace with France by the Treaty of Amiens, came to an end
after that Treaty had been rendered nugatory by the recommencement of
the war; and in May 1804 Pitt returned to the helm. Dundas, who had in
the interim been raised to the peerage by the title of Viscount
Melville, then resumed his place in his friend’s cabinet, to yield his
Parliamentary service thenceforward in the Upper House, and official
service mainly in the First Lordship of the Admiralty. Scotland then
rolled herself up comfortably once more for her accustomed slumber,—the
only difference being that her bedside guardian had to be thought of no
longer as her Harry Dundas, but less familiarly now as her Lord
Melville. So for another year; but then what a reawakening! It was in
April 1805 that, in consequence of the report of a Committee of the
House of Commons that had been appointed for the investigation of
alleged abuses in the naval service, the Whigs, through Mr. Whitbread as
their spokesman, opened an attack on Lord Melville on charges of
malversation of office, and misappropriation of public moneys, during
his former Treasurership of the Navy, either directly, or by collusion
with his principal financial subordinate. The attack grew fiercer and
fiercer, as well as more extensive in its scope; and, although it was
evidently inspired mainly by the political vindictiveness of a party
made furious by long exclusion from office, it became more formidable
from the fact that some of Pitt’s own friends either abetted it fully or
thought that the irregularities in account-keeping which had been
disclosed ought not to pass without Parliamentary censure. Pitt reeled
under such a blow at once to his private feelings and his
administration; and, after doing his best to resist, he had to consent
that Lord Melville should quit office, and that Lord Melville’s name
should be struck off from the list of His Majesty’s Privy Council till
the charges against him were formally and publicly tried. The trial was
to be in the shape of an impeachment before the House of Lords. Before
it could come on Pitt was dead. He died on the 23d of January 1806; and
the longexcluded Whigs had then their turn of power for somewhat more
than a year in what is remembered as the Fox and Grenville ministry,—a
name accurate only till the 13th of September 1806, when Fox followed
his great rival to the grave, and Lord Grenville became Premier singly.
It was in April and May 1806, when this Fox and Grenville ministry was
new in office, that the great trial of Lord Melville in Westminster Hall
was begun and concluded. The charges against him had been formulated
into ten articles; and he was acquitted upon all the ten,—unanimously on
the only one which vitally impeached his personal integrity, by
overwhelming majorities on five of the others, and by smaller but still
decisive majorities on the remaining four. On the whole, it was a
triumphant acquittal; and it was received as such throughout
Scotland,—where, at one of the dinners held in honour of the event by
the jubilant Scottish Tories, there was sung a famous song beginning
with this stanza:—
“Since here we are set in array round the table,
Five hundred good fellows well met in a hall,
Come listen, brave boys, and I’ll sing as I’m able
How innocence triumphed and pride got a fall.
But push round the claret,—
Come, stewards, don’t spare it;
With rapture you’ll drink to the toast that I give:
Here, boys,
Off with it merrily:
‘Melville for ever, and long may he live!’”
Melville did live for some time longer, restored to his place in the
Privy Council, and rehabilitated in honour, but never again in office,
hardly caring to concern himself further with politics, and spending his
last years mainly in Scotland. He died on the 27th of May 1811, in the
seventieth year of his age.
That system of the government of Scotland by proconsulship of which he
had been so conspicuously the representative did not by any means die
with him. It was continued, with variations and modifications, through
those successive ministries of the later part of the reign of George
III. and the whole of the reign of George IV. which fill up the interval
between the death of Pitt and the eve of the Reform Bill; nay, not only
so continued, but continued with the accompanying phenomenon that it was
still a Dundas that exercised, occasionally at least, what did remain of
the proconsulship. Robert Dundas, 2d Viscount Melville, who died as late
as 1851, was a member of most of the successive administrations
mentioned, from Perceval’s of 1809–12, through Liverpool’s of 1812–27,
to Canning’s and the Duke of Wellington’s of 1827–30, holding one or
other of his father’s old posts in these administrations, and so or
otherwise maintaining the hereditary Dundas influence in Scottish
affairs while Toryism kept the field. But, while this prolongation of
the Dundas influence in the second Lord Melville is not to be forgotten,
it is the father, Henry Dundas, 1st Lord Melville, that has left the
name of Dundas most strikingly impressed upon the history of Scotland,
and it is the stretch of two-and-twenty years between 1783 and 1806,
during which this greatest of the Dundases exercised the proconsulship,
that has to be remembered especially and distinctively in Scottish
annals as the time of the Dundas Despotism.
* * * * *
“The Dundas Despotism!” O phrase of fear, unpleasing to a modern ear!
What a Scotland that must have been which this phrase describes! A
country without political life, without public meetings, without
newspapers, without a hustings: could any endurable existence be led in
such a set of conditions,—could any good come out of it?
Incredible as it may seem, there is evidence that the Scottish people
did contrive, in some way or other, to lead not only an endurable but a
very substantial and jolly existence through the Dundas Despotism, and
that not only a great deal of good, but much of what Scotland must now
regard as her best and most characteristic produce, had its genesis in
that time, though the exodus has been later. The various liberties of
the human subject may be classified and arranged according to their
degrees of importance; and a great many of them may exist where the
liberty of voting for members of parliament and of openly talking
politics is absent. So it was in Scotland through the reign of Henry
Dundas and his Toryism. The million and a half of human beings who then
composed Scotland, and were scattered over its surface, in their various
parishes, agricultural or pastoral, and in their towns and villages,
went through their daily life with a great deal of energy and enjoyment,
notwithstanding that Dundas, and the lairds and the provosts and bailies
as his agents, elected the members of parliament and transacted all the
political business of the country; nay, out of the lairds and the
bailies themselves, and all the business of electioneering, they
extracted a good deal of fun. What mattered it to them that now and then
some long-tongued fellow who had started a newspaper was stowed away in
jail, or that an Edinburgh lawyer like Muir was transported for being
incontinent in his politics? Could not people let well alone, obey the
authorities, earn their oatmeal, and drink their whisky in peace? Few of
Scott’s novels come down so far as to this period of Scottish life, and
it has not been much described in our other literature of fiction; but
till lately there were many alive who remembered it, and delighted in
recalling its savageries and its humours. O the old Scottish times of
the lairds, the “moderate” ministers, the provosts and the bailies!—the
lairds speaking broad Scotch, farming their own lands, carousing
together, seeing their daughters married, and writing to London for
appointments for their sons; the “moderate” ministers making interest
for _their_ sons, preaching “Blair and cauld morality” on Sundays, and
jogging to christenings or to Presbytery dinners through the week; the
provosts and bailies in their shops in the forenoon, or meeting in the
morning at their “deid-chack” after a man was hanged! Every considerable
town then had its hangman, who was frequently a well-to-do person that
sold fish or some such commodity. And then, all through society, the
flirtations, the friendships, and the long winter evenings at the
fireside, with the cracks between the “gudeman” and his neighbours, and
the alternative of a hand at cards or a well-thumbed book for the young
folks! What stalwart old fellows, both of the douce and of the humorous
type, oracular and respected in their day, and whose physiognomies and
maxims are still preserved in local memory, lived and died in those days
and made them serve their turn! Nay, of the Scotsmen who have been
eminent in the intellectual world, what a number belong by their birth
to the reign of Dundas, and were nurtured amid its torpid influences!
Burns closed his life in the midst of it; Dugald Stewart and James Watt
lived through it; Scott, Jeffrey, Chalmers, Wilson, Hamilton, and
Carlyle are all, more or less, specimens of what it could send forth.
_Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona_: there was pith in Scotland before there
was Parliamentary Reform.
Naturally it was in Edinburgh that the various elements of Scottish life
at this time were seen in their closest contact and their most intimate
union or antagonism. It was here that Dundas lived when he was in
Scotland; and here were the central threads of that official network by
which, through Dundas, Scotland was connected with the English
Government. Edinburgh was then still the chief city of Scotland, even in
population; for, though now Glasgow has far outstripped it in that
particular, then the two cities were happy in numbering little more than
80,000 each. At least, in the census of 1801 Edinburgh stands for
82,000, or almost exactly neck to neck with Glasgow, which stands for
83,000. Dundee, which came next, reckoned but 29,000; Aberdeen, 27,000;
and Leith and Paisley each about 20,000. Few other Scottish towns had a
population of more than 10,000.
Was there ever another such city to live in as Edinburgh?
“And I forgot the clouded Forth,
The gloom that saddens heaven and earth,
The bitter east, the misty summer,
And gray metropolis of the North.”
One regrets that this is all that our noble Laureate’s experience of
Edinburgh enabled him to say. The east winds do bite there fearfully now
and then, and blow a dust of unparalleled pungency in your eyes as you
cross the North Bridge; but, with that exception, what a city! Gray!
why, it is gray, or gray and gold, or gray and gold and blue, or gray
and gold and blue and green, or gray and gold and blue and green and
purple, according as the heaven pleases, and you choose your ground!
But, take it when it is most sombrely gray, where is another such gray
city? The irregular ridge of the Old Town, with its main street of lofty
antique houses rising gradually from Holyrood up to the craggy Castle;
the chasm between the Old Town and the New, showing grassy slopes by
day, and glittering supernaturally with lamps at night; the New Town
itself, like a second city spilt out of the Old, fairly built of stone,
and stretching downwards over new heights and hollows, with gardens
intermixed, till it reaches the flats of the Forth! Then Calton Hill in
the midst, confronted by the precipitous curve of the Salisbury Crags;
Arthur Seat looking over all like a lion grimly keeping guard; the
wooded Corstorphines lying soft away to the west, and the larger
Pentlands looming quiet in the southern distance! Let the sky be as gray
and heavy as the absence of the sun can make it, and where have natural
situation and the hand of man combined to exhibit such a mass of the
city picturesque? And only let the sun strike out, and lo! a burst of
new glories in and around. The sky is then blue as sapphire overhead;
the waters of the Forth are clear to the broad sea; the hills and the
fields of Fife are distinctly visible from every northern street and
window; still more distant peaks are discernible on either horizon; and,
as day goes down, the gables and pinnacles of the old houses blaze and
glance with the radiance of the sunset. It is such a city that no one,
however familiar with it, can walk out in its streets for but five
minutes at any hour of the day or of the night, or in any state of the
weather, without a new pleasure through the eye alone. Add to this the
historical associations. Remember that this is the city of ancient
Scottish royalty; that there is not a close or alley in the Old Town,
and hardly a street in the New, that has not memories of the great or
the quaint attached to it; that the many generations of old Scottish
life that have passed through it have left every stone of it, as it
were, rich with legend. To an English poet all this might be
indifferent; but hear the Scottish poets:—
“Edina! Scotia’s darling seat!
All hail thy palaces and towers!”
was the salutation of Burns, when first brought from his native Ayrshire
to behold the Scottish capital. “Mine own romantic town,” was the
outburst of Scott, in that famous passage where, after describing
Edinburgh as seen from the Braids, he makes even an English stranger
beside himself with rapture at the sight:—
“Fitz-Eustace’ heart felt closely pent;
As if to give his rapture vent,
The spur he to his charger lent,
And raised his bridle hand,
And, making demi-volte in air,
Cried, ‘Where’s the coward that would not dare
To fight for such a land?’”
Here, though it is an Englishman that is supposed to speak, it is a
Scotsman that supplies the words; but there can be no such objection in
the case of the following lines from a sonnet, entitled “Written in
Edinburgh,” by Tennyson’s friend, Arthur Hallam:—
“Even thus, methinks, a city reared should be,
Yea, an imperial city, that might hold
Five times a hundred noble towns in fee ...
Thus should her towers be raised; with vicinage
Of clear bold hills, that curve her very streets,
As if to indicate, ’mid choicest seats
Of Art, abiding Nature’s majesty,—
And the broad sea beyond, in calm or rage
Chainless alike, and teaching liberty.”
At the time with which we are concerned this city had the advantage of
containing, as has been said, only about eighty thousand people. For
comfortable social purposes, that is about the extreme size to which a
city should go. The size of London is overwhelming and paralysing. There
can be no intimacy, no unity of interest, in such a vast concourse.
Ezekiel might be preaching in Smithfield, Camberwell might be swallowed
up by an earthquake, and the people of St. John’s Wood would know
nothing of either fact till they saw it announced in the newspapers next
morning. Hardly since the days of the Gordon Riots has London ever been
all agitated simultaneously. In Ancient Athens, on the other hand, we
have an illustration of what a town of moderate size could be and
produce. That such a cluster of men as Pericles, Socrates, Æschylus,
Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Phidias, Alcibiades,
Xenophon, and others,—men of an order that we only expect to see now far
distributed through space and time, _nantes rari in gurgite
vasto_,—should have been swimming contemporaneously or nearly so in such
a small pond as Athens was, and that this affluence in greatness should
have been kept up by so small a population for several ages, seems
miraculous. The peculiar fineness of the Hellenic nerve may have had
something to do with the miracle; but the compactness of the place,—the
aggregation of so many finely and variously endowed human beings
precisely in such numbers as to keep up among them a daily sense of
mutual companionship,—must also have had its effect. In “Modern Athens”
the conditions of its ancient namesake are not _all_ reproduced. To say
nothing of any difference that there may be in respect of original
brain-and-nerve equipment between the modern and the ancient Athenian,
“Modern Athens” is, unfortunately, not a separate body-politic, with
separate interests and a separate power of legislation. There are no
walls now round the Edinburgh territory; nor have the Edinburgh people
the privilege of making wars and concluding treaties with even the
nearest portions of the rest of Great Britain. They cannot meet
periodically on the Castle Esplanade to pass laws for themselves in
popular assembly, and hear consummate speeches beginning “O men of
Edinburgh.” But, with many such differences, there are some
similarities. Everybody in Edinburgh knows, or may know, everybody else,
at least by sight; everybody meets everybody else in the street at least
once every day or two; the whole town is within such convenient compass
that, even to go from one extremity of it to the other extremity, there
is no need to take a cab unless it rains. It is a city capable of being
simultaneously and similarly affected in all its parts. An idea
administered to one knot of the citizens is as good as administered to
the whole community; a joke made on the Mound at noon will ripple
gradually to the suburbs, and into the surrounding country, before the
evening. If such is the case even now, when the population is over
260,000, must it not have been still better when the population was only
80,000, and that population was more shut in within itself by the
absence as yet of telegraphs and railroads?
Moreover, the eighty thousand people who were in Edinburgh when Henry
Dundas ruled Scotland were people of a rather peculiar, and yet rather
superior, mixture of sorts. There never has been any very large amount
of trade or of manufacture in Edinburgh, nor much of the wealth or
bustle that arises from trade and manufacture. For the roar of mills and
factories, and for a society ranging correspondingly from the great
millionaire uppermost to crowds of operatives below, all toiling in the
pursuit of wealth, one must go to Glasgow. In Edinburgh the standard of
the highest income is much lower, and the standard of the lowest is
perhaps higher, than in Glasgow; nor is wealth of so much relative
importance in the social estimate. Roughly classified, the society of
Edinburgh in the days to which we are now looking back consisted, as the
society of Edinburgh still consists, of an upper stratum of lawyers and
resident gentry, college officials, and clergy, reposing on, but by no
means separated from, a community of shopkeepers and artisans sufficient
for the wants of the place. Let us glance at these components of the
society of Old Edinburgh in succession:—
First, _The Lawyers and Resident Gentry_.—These two classes may be
taken together, as to a certain extent identical. From the time of the
Union, such of the old nobility of Scotland as had till then remained
in their native country, occupying for a part of the year the homely
but picturesque residences of their ancestors in the Old Town of
Edinburgh, had gradually migrated southwards, leaving but a few
families of their order to keep up their memory in the ancient capital
of Holyrood and St. Giles. In the room of this ancient nobility, and,
indeed, absorbing such families of the old nobility as had remained,
there had sprung up,—as might have been expected from the fact that
Edinburgh, though it had parted with its Court and Legislature, was
still the seat of the supreme Scottish law-courts,—a new aristocracy
of lawyers. The lawyers,—consisting, first, of the judges as the
topmost persons, with their incomes of several thousands a year, and
then of the barristers, older and younger, in practice or out of
practice, but including also the numerous body of the “Writers to the
Signet” and other law-agents,—are now, and for the last century or two
have been, the dominant class in the Edinburgh population. From the
expense attending education for the legal profession, the members of
it, till within a time comparatively recent, were generally scions of
Scottish families of some rank and substance; and, indeed, it was not
unusual for Scottish lairds or their sons to become nominally members
of the Scottish bar, even when they did not intend to practise. The
fact of the substitution of the legal profession for the old Scottish
aristocracy in the dominant place in Edinburgh society is typified by
the circumstance that the so-called “Parliament House,”—retaining that
name because it enshrines the hall where the Estates of the Scottish
Kingdom held their meetings during the last eighty years of the time
when Scotland had no Parliaments but her own,—is now the seat of the
supreme Scottish law-courts, and the daily resort of the interpreters
of the laws in these courts. Any day yet, while the courts are in
session, the Parliament House, with its long oaken ante-room, where
scores of barristers in their wigs and gowns, accompanied by writers
in plainer costume, are incessantly pacing up and down, and its
smaller inner chambers, where the judges on the bench, in their
crimson robes, are trying cases, is the most characteristic sight in
Edinburgh. Even now the general hour of breakfast in Edinburgh is
determined by the time when the courts open in the morning; and,
dispersed through their homes, or at dinner-parties, in the evening,
it is the members of the legal profession that lead the social talk.
In the old Dundas days it was the same, with the addition that then
the lawyers were perhaps more numerous in proportion to the rest of
the community than they are now, and were more closely inter-connected
by birth and marriage with the Scottish nobility and lairds.
Of hardly less importance socially was the _Academical Element_. As
Edinburgh possesses a University, as its University has long been in
high repute, and as, by reason of the comparative cheapness of board and
education in Edinburgh, many families, after a residence in England or
the Colonies, have been attracted thither for the sake of the education
of their sons, or, without going thither themselves, have sent their
sons thither, the business of education has always been prominent, if
not paramount, among the industries of the city. The teachers of the
public and of other schools have always formed a considerable class
numerically, as well as in rank; while to the University professors,
partly from the higher nature of their teaching-duties, partly from the
traditional dignity conferred on them by the great reputation of some of
their body in past times, and partly from some superiority in their
emoluments, there has alway been accorded a degree of social
consideration not attached to the same function anywhere out of
Scotland. The reputation of the Medical School of Edinburgh, in
particular, has always invested the professors in the Medical Faculty of
the University with special distinction; and, as these professors have
been generally also at the head of the medical practice of the city, the
Medical element, and with it the Scientific element, in Edinburgh
society have from times long past been, to a considerable extent, in
union with the professorial.
In all Scottish cities _The Clergy_ have, from time immemorial,
exercised an amount of social influence not willingly allowed to any
other class of persons. This arises partly from the same causes which
give the clergy influence in other parts of Britain, but partly from the
peculiar affection of the Scottish people for the national theology with
which they have been saturated through so many centuries of clerical
teaching. In Edinburgh, in consequence of the perpetuation there of
relics of that old Scottish aristocracy which never was completely
brought into subjection to Presbytery, and in consequence of the
presence in society of a distinct intellectual element in the lawyers,
the clergy have not perhaps had, relatively, the same weight as in other
towns. Still they were powerful even in the old Edinburgh of the Dundas
rule. At the very least, a negative respect was paid to them by the
preservation throughout the place of an external Presbyterian decorum
and strictness; and in all houses “the minister” was treated with
distinction. Add to this that there generally were among the Edinburgh
clergy men possessing claims to respect in addition to those belonging
to their profession. Some, even in that age of “Moderatism,” were
remarkable for their eloquence and zeal as preachers and as pastors;
others had literary pretensions; and others were professors in the
University as well as parish clergymen. More, indeed, than now, the
professorial and the clerical elements were then intermixed in
Edinburgh. Perhaps, however, that which gave the greatest dignity to the
clerical or ecclesiastical element in Edinburgh was the annual meeting
in that city, every May, of the General Assembly of the Church of
Scotland. In the history of Scottish society since the Union there is,
perhaps, no one fact of greater importance than the regular and
uninterrupted succession of those annual “General Assemblies” in
Edinburgh for the discussion of the affairs of the National Church. Let
an Englishman fancy that during the last two centuries there had been no
Parliament in England, no meetings of the House of Lords or of the House
of Commons, but that regularly during that period there had been annual
convocations of representatives of the whole body of the English Clergy,
together with such leading members of the laity as churchwardens or the
like from all the English parishes, and that these convocations had sat
ten days in every year, discussing all public matters in any way bearing
on the Church, and making laws affecting the entire ecclesiastical
organisation of England, and he will have an idea of the extent to which
the national history of Scotland since her union with England is bound
up in the records of her “General Assemblies.” The General Assembly, in
fact, from the year 1707 to the Disruption of the Scottish Church in
1843, was, to some extent, a veritable Parliament, in which, though the
secular Parliament had been abolished, the united people of Scotland
still saw their nationality preserved and represented. All through the
year the clergy individually, in the thousand parishes or so into which
Scotland was divided, managed their own parochial affairs with the
assistance of select laymen called elders; these clergymen, again, with
some of their elders, held frequent district meetings, called
“presbyteries,” in order to regulate by deliberation and voting the
church affairs of their districts; there were still larger meetings,
periodically held, called “provincial synods”; but the grand rendezvous
of all, the supreme court of appeal and ecclesiastical legislation, was
the annual General Assembly in Edinburgh. The time of its meeting was
one of bustle and excitement. Black coats swarmed in the streets; the
Assembly was opened with military pomp and circumstance by a Lord High
Commissioner representing the Crown; this Commissioner sat on a throne
during the meetings, and held levees and dinner-parties in Holyrood
Palace all through the ten days; the clergy, with lay representatives,
some of whom were usually noblemen or baronets, deliberated and debated
during those ten days, under a president of their own choosing called
the “Moderator”; the proceedings were in parliamentary form, and the
decisions by a majority of votes; and in many cases,—as in trials of
clergymen for moral or ecclesiastical misdemeanour,—barristers were
called in to plead professionally, as they did in the secular
law-courts. As was natural in a deliberative assembly almost all the
members of which were of the speaking class, the speaking was of a very
high order,—far higher, indeed, than has ever been heard in these later
days in the British Parliament; while at the same time there was ample
opportunity for the exercise of business talent and of all the tact and
skill of party-leadership. Much of the general politics of Scotland took
necessarily the form of church politics; and, indeed, the connections
between church politics and state politics were pretty close. The vast
majority of the clergy were adherents of Dundas in general politics, and
bent on swaying church polity in the same direction; while the small
minority of “Evangelicals” or “High-Fliers,” as they were called,
corresponded to the proscribed “Liberals” in secular politics. The
leading clergymen of both parties were to be found in or near Edinburgh.
Respecting the _Mercantile and Artisan classes_ it need only be repeated
that they were by no means separated by any social demarcation from the
fore-mentioned classes, but were intertwined with these by
family-relationships, and often also by the sympathies belonging to
superior natural intelligence and superior education. Booksellers and
printers were more numerous in Edinburgh proportionally than in any
other British town.
In a population of such dimensions, composed as has been described,
there was necessarily a good deal of leisure; and leisure leads to
sociability. Edinburgh in those days was one of the most sociable towns
in the world. By that time “society,” in the conventional sense, had,
with a few lingering exceptions, shifted itself out of the Old Town into
the New, or into the suburbs; and, with this change, there had been a
considerable change of manners. Much of the formality, and at the same
time much of the coarseness, of an older stage of Scottish life had been
civilised away,—the absurd etiquette of the old dancing assemblies, for
example, and the more monstrous excesses of hard drinking. But the
convivial spirit, and many of the old convivial forms, remained. Dinner
parties were frequent; and the old custom of “toasts” and “sentiments”
by the hosts and the guests over their wine was still in fashion. Lord
Cockburn’s description of those dinner parties of his youth is one of
the best passages in his book. But it is on the supper parties that he
dwells with most evident affection. There were various kinds of supper
parties: the oyster supper at taverns, the bachelor supper in lodgings,
and the real domestic supper, to which both sexes were invited; which
last Lord Cockburn vaunts as a delightful institution of Edinburgh,
which the advancing lateness of the dinner-hour had unhappily
superseded. In short, in every form and way, from the set dinner party,
with its immense consumption of claret, in the houses of the more
wealthy, to the homely tea parties of gentlewomen of moderate means,
living in the suburbs of the Old Town, or in _flats_ in the New Town,
and the roystering suppers of young men, where culinary deficiencies
were compensated by good humour and the whisky punch, people were in the
habit of incessantly meeting to spend the evenings together. Lord
Cockburn mentions, as illustrative of the continuance of those sociable
habits of the Edinburgh folks to a somewhat later period than that with
which we are immediately concerned, the fact that for a great many years
after his marriage, which was in 1811, he had not spent above one
evening in every month, on the average, in solitude, _i.e._ without
either being out as a guest, or having friends with him at home. Even
Sydney Smith, though not native and to the manner born, and, with his
English tastes, more fastidious in his ideas of conviviality, retained
to the last a pleasant recollection of those Edinburgh hospitalities, as
experienced by him during his stay in Edinburgh from 1797 to 1802. “When
shall I see Scotland again?” he says in one of his letters: “never shall
I forget the happy days passed there, amidst odious smells, barbarous
sounds, bad suppers, excellent hearts, and the most enlightened and
cultivated understandings.”
Sydney Smith’s allusion to “the enlightened and cultivated
understandings” he encountered amid such roughish surroundings, suggests
the mention of what was, all in all, the most characteristic feature of
Edinburgh society at the close of the eighteenth century and the
beginning of the nineteenth—its _intellectualism_. In a community
composed in so large a measure of practitioners of the learned
professions, it was inevitable that there should be more of interest in
matters intellectual than is common, more of a habit of reasoning and
discussion, more play and variety in the choice of topics for
conversation. What mattered it that many of the most intellectual men
and women gave expression to their ideas in broad Scotch? Ideas may be
expressed in broad Scotch, and yet be the ideas of cultivated minds; at
all events, it was so then in Edinburgh, where many excellent lawyers,
University professors, and medical men kept up the broad Scotch in their
ordinary conversation, though the majority had gone over to the English
in all save accent, and some were sedulous in trying to Anglicise
themselves even in that. But, whether the dialect was English or Scotch,
there was a great deal of very pleasant and very substantial talk. True,
in Sydney Smith’s recollection of the conversation of the Edinburgh
people at the time he moved among them, two great faults are specified.
It ran too much, he records, to that species of jocosity, perfectly
torturing to an Englishman, which the Scotch themselves called _wut_;
and it also ran too much, he records, into disputation and dialectics.
“Their only idea of wit,” he says, speaking of the Scotch generally, but
of the Edinburgh people in particular, “or rather of that inferior
variety of the electric talent which prevails occasionally in the North,
and which, under the name of _wut_, is so infinitely distressing to
people of good taste, is laughing immoderately at stated intervals.” And
again—“They are so imbued with metaphysics that they even make love
metaphysically: I overheard a young lady of my acquaintance, at a dance
in Edinburgh, exclaim, in a sudden pause of the music, ‘What you say, my
lord, is very true of love in the _abstract_, but——,’ here the fiddlers
began fiddling furiously, and the rest was lost.” This is somewhat
unfair. _Wut_, in its place, is as good as _wit_, and may be a great
deal heartier. As practised in the north, it corresponds more with what
is properly _humour_. It consists in a general openness to the ludicrous
view of things, a general disposition to call each other Tam and Sandy,
a general readiness to tell and to hear Scottish stories the fun of
which lies in the whole series of conceptions (often too local) that
they call up, rather than in any sudden flash or quip at the close. At
all events, the Scotch like their _wut_, and find it satisfying. As for
the dialectics, there _is_, perhaps, too much of that. The excess in
this direction is due, doubtless, in part to the omnipresence of the
lawyers. But _wut_ and _dialectics_ make a very good mixture; and,
dashed as this mixture is and always has been in Edinburgh with finer
and higher ingredients, there has been no town in Britain for the last
century and a half of greater deipnosophistic capabilities, all things
considered.
One element which Englishmen who do not know Edinburgh always imagine as
necessarily wanting in it never has been wanting. Whether from the
influence of the lawyers, and of the relics of the old Scottish baronage
and baronetage, acting conjointly as a counterpoise to the influence of
the clergy, or from other less obvious causes, there has always been in
Edinburgh a freer undercurrent of speculative opinion, a tougher
traditional scepticism, a greater latitude of jest at things clerical
and Presbyterian, than in other Scottish towns. From the early part of
the eighteenth century, when Allan Ramsay, Dr. Archibald Pitcairn, and
others, did battle with the clergy in behalf of theatrical
entertainments and other forms of the festive, there has never been
wanting a strong anti-clerical and even free-thinking clique in
Edinburgh society; and towards the end of the century, when David Hume
and Hugo Arnot were alive or remembered, no city in Britain sheltered
such a quantity of cosy infidelity. Of hundreds of stories illustrative
of this, take one of the mildest:—Pitcairn, going about the streets one
Sunday, was obliged by a sudden pelt of rain to take refuge in a place
he was not often in,—a church. The audience was scanty; and he sat down
in a pew where there was only another sitter besides,—a quiet,
grave-looking countryman, listening to the sermon with a face of the
utmost composure. The preacher was very pathetic; so much so that at one
passage he began to shed tears copiously, and to use his
pocket-handkerchief. Interested in this as a physiological phenomenon
for which the cause was not apparent, Pitcairn turned to the countryman,
and asked in a whisper, “What the deevil gars the man greet?” “Faith,”
said the man, slowly turning round, “ye wad maybe greet yoursel’ if ye
was up there and had as little to say.” Pitcairn was the type of the
avowed Edinburgh infidel; of which class there were not a few whose
esoteric talk when they met together was of an out-and-out kind; but the
countryman was the type of a still more numerous class, who kept up
exterior conformity, but tested all shrewdly enough by a pretty tough
interior instinct. Indeed, long after Pitcairn’s time, a kind of sturdy
scepticism, quite distinct from what would be called “infidelity,” was
common among the educated classes in Edinburgh. Old gentlemen who went
duly to church, who kept their families in great awe, and who preserved
much etiquette in their habits towards each other, were by no means
strait-laced in their beliefs; and it was not till a considerably later
period, when a more fervid religious spirit had taken possession of the
Scottish clergy themselves, and flamed forth in more zealous expositions
of peculiar Calvinistic doctrine from the pulpit than had been customary
in the days of Robertson and Blair, that evangelical orthodoxy obtained
in Edinburgh its visible and intimate alliance with social
respectability. Moreover, even those who were then indubitably orthodox
and devout by the older standard were devout after a freer fashion, and
with a far greater liberty both of conduct and of rhetoric, than would
now be allowable in consistency with the same reputation. There is no
point on which Lord Cockburn lays more stress than on this. “There is no
contrast,” he says, “between those old days and the present that strikes
me so strongly as that suggested by the differences in religious
observances, not so much by the world in general, as by deeply religious
people. I knew the habits of the religious very well, partly through the
piety of my mother and her friends, the strict religious education of
her children, and our connection with some of the most distinguished of
our devout clergymen. I could mention many practices of our old pious
which would horrify modern zealots. The principles and feelings of the
persons commonly called evangelical were the same then that they are
now; the external acts by which these principles and feelings were
formerly expressed were materially different.”
Among the differences, Lord Cockburn notes in particular the much laxer
style, as it would now be called, in which Sunday was observed by pious
people and even by the most pious among the clergy. There seems also to
have been more freedom of speech, in the direction of what would now be
called profane allusion, among the admittedly pious. One of the gems of
Lord Cockburn’s book is his portrait of one venerable old lady, a
clergyman’s widow, sitting neatly dressed in her high-backed leather
chair, with her grandchildren round her, the very model of silver-haired
serenity, till one of her granddaughters, in reading the newspaper to
her, stumbled on a paragraph which told how the reputation of a certain
fair one at the court of the Prince Regent had suffered from some
indiscreet talk of his about his own relations with her, but then
starting up, and exclaiming, with an indignant shake of her shrivelled
fist,—“The dawmed villain! does he kiss and tell?” There were not a few
old ladies of this stamp in Edinburgh in Lord Cockburn’s boyhood and
youth; some of whom survived far into the present century, too old to
part with their peculiarities, even to please the clergy. “Ye speak,
sir, as if the Bible had just come oot,” said one such old lady, who
lingered long in Edinburgh, to a young clergyman who was instructing her
on some point of Christian practice on which she was disposed to differ
from him. The continuation in the society of Edinburgh of a considerable
sprinkling of such free-speaking gentlewomen of the old Scottish school,
intermingled with as many of the other sex using a still rougher
rhetoric, imparted, we are told, a flavour of originality to the
convivial conversation of the place for which there is now no exact
equivalent.
Presided over by such seniors, the young educated men of the time did
not stint themselves in the choice or the range of _their_ convivial
topics. They discussed everything under the sun and down to the centre.
Who has not heard of the Speculative Society of Edinburgh, founded in
1764 in connection with the University, and kept up from that time to
this by successive generations of students; of which Lord Cockburn says
that it “has trained more young men to public spirit, talent, and
liberal thought, than all the other private institutions in Scotland”?
Between 1780 and 1800 this society was in all its glory, discussing,
week after week, as its minutes inform us, such topics as these:—“Ought
any permanent support to be provided for the poor?” “Ought there to be
an established religion?” “Was the execution of Charles I. justifiable?”
“Should the slave trade be abolished?” “Has the belief in a future state
been of advantage to mankind, or is it ever likely to be so?” “Is it for
the interest of Britain to maintain what is called the balance of
Europe?” Here surely was scepticism enough to keep thought alive; and
that such questions, discussed not only in the Speculative Society, but
also in minor associations of the same kind, and carried doubtless also,
with other more scientific topics, into private assemblages, should have
been ventilated in Edinburgh at that day, shows that, even under the
Dundas Despotism, there was no lack of _intellectual_ freedom.
It is but a continuation of what we have been saying to add that the old
Edinburgh of those defunct decades had already an established reputation
as a literary metropolis. The rise of the literary reputation of
Edinburgh may date, for all purposes except such as shallow present
scholarship would call merely antiquarian, from the time when Allan
Ramsay set up his circulating library in the High Street, and supplied
the lieges furtively with novels, plays, and song-books, including his
own poems. This was about the year 1725, when his countryman, Thomson,
was publishing in London the first portion of his _Seasons_. Thomson
himself, and his contemporaries or immediate successors, Mallet,
Smollett, Armstrong, Meikle, Macpherson, and Falconer, all rank in the
list of literary Scots; but they were _Scoti extra Scotiam agentes_, and
had, most of them, but an incidental connection with Edinburgh. The
poets Robert Blair and James Beattie, the philosopher Reid, and the
theologian and critic Dr. George Campbell, were not only literary Scots,
but literary Scots whose lives were spent on their own side of the
Tweed; but, with the exception of Blair, none of them were natives of
Edinburgh, and even Blair did not live there. After Ramsay, in short,
the early literary fame of Edinburgh is associated with the names of a
cluster of men who, born in different parts of Scotland, had, from
various chances, taken up their abode in Edinburgh, and who resided
there, more or less permanently, during the latter half of the
eighteenth century. The most prominent men of this cluster were
these:—David Hume (1711–1776), known as a philosophical writer since the
year 1738, and who, though he spent a good many years of his literary
life in England and in France, was for the last twenty years of it, and
these the most busy, a resident in Edinburgh; Hume’s senior and
survivor, Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782), one of the judges of the
Court of Session, still remembered for the contrast between the coarse
Scottish facetiousness of his manners and the studied fineness of his
writings; the learned and eccentric Burnet, Lord Monboddo (1714–1799),
also a judge of Session, at whose Attic suppers in the Old Town all the
talent and beauty of Edinburgh were for many years regularly assembled;
the pompous but sensible Dr. Hugh Blair (1718–1799), Professor of Belles
Lettres in the University, and one of the clergymen of the city; his
more celebrated colleague, Dr. Robertson the historian (1722–1793),
Principal of the University, and likewise one of the city clergymen; the
minor historical writers and antiquarians, Tytler of Woodhouselee
(1711–1792), Dr. Henry (1718–1790), Lord Hailes (1726–1792), Dr. Adam
Ferguson (1724–1816), and Dr. Gilbert Stuart (1742–1786); the poet John
Home, author of the tragedy of _Douglas_ (1722–1808), once the Rev. Mr.
Home, but long bereft of that title, and known since 1779 as a retired
man of letters in Edinburgh; the illustrious Adam Smith (1723–1790),
settled in Edinburgh during the last twenty years of his life in the
post of commissioner of customs; the hardly less illustrious Dugald
Stewart (1753–1828), elected Professor of Mathematics in the University
as early as 1774, but thence transferred in 1785 to the chair of Moral
Philosophy, where he completed his fame; and, lastly, not to overburden
the list, the novelist and essayist Henry Mackenzie (1745–1831), an
acknowledged literary celebrity ever since 1771, when he had published
his _Man of Feeling_. In a class by himself, unless we choose to
associate him with the Creeches, Smellies, and other “wuts” of a lower
grade, whose acquaintance Burns made in his leisure hours during his
first visit to Edinburgh in 1786, we may mention Burns’s immediate
predecessor in the poetry of the Scottish vernacular, the unfortunate
Robert Fergusson (1751–1774). He was a native of Edinburgh, and his
brief life was squandered in its taverns.
It was by virtue of the residence in the Scottish capital through the
latter half of the eighteenth century of this cluster of men,—a
tolerably brilliant cluster, it will be admitted,—that the city first
assumed that position of literary rivalry with London which the names of
Scott, Jeffrey, and Wilson enabled it to maintain for thirty or forty
years longer. And here we may be permitted, parenthetically, a remark on
a subject of some interest to Scotsmen generally. A not unfrequent
question is whether Edinburgh will continue to maintain her former
activity as a literary capital, or whether in literature, as in other
things, the tendency is not to absolute centralisation in London. A
little fact involved in the list of names just given is of some
pertinence in relation to this inquiry. Let the list be examined, and it
will be found that hardly one of the men mentioned in it as having begun
the literary celebrity of Edinburgh was _professionally_ a man of
letters. They were all lawyers, or clergymen, or university professors,
or retired gentlemen who had posts and pensions. Even poor Fergusson the
poet owed his living to his industry as copying-clerk to a lawyer. In
this respect the literary society of Edinburgh at that date contrasts
with that of London. Johnson, Goldsmith, and most of their set were
writers by profession; and it was chiefly by such professional writers
that the literary reputation of London was then supported. Nay, whenever
a Scotsman of that time was led by circumstances to adopt literature as
an occupation, it will be observed that, almost of course, he migrated
into England, and attached himself to the skirts of the literary world
of London. There was there a literary _market_, whereas in Edinburgh
there were merely so many resident citizens who were at the same time
authors. Thomson, Mallet, Smollett, Macpherson, and many other Scots of
less note connected with the British literature of the last century as
writers by profession, betook themselves necessarily to London as their
proper field. Hence a difference between the literary society of
Edinburgh and that of London, not indicated in the mere fact that the
one city was the Scottish, and the other the English, capital. The
literary society of Edinburgh did consist chiefly of authors of Scottish
birth, but there might have been Englishmen in it without essentially
changing its character; and, on the other hand, the literary society of
London included Scotsmen and Irishmen as well as Englishmen. The
difference, therefore, was not so much that the one society consisted of
Scottish and the other of English elements. It was rather that the one
consisted of men independently resident in the place as lawyers,
clergymen, and what not, and employing their leisure in literature,
while the other consisted, to far greater extent, of authors by
profession. This difference is pointed out by one of the old Edinburgh
set itself, as serving to account for what he considered the greater
geniality and cordiality of the habits of that set in their intercourse
with each other in comparison with the contemporary habits of London
literary society under the dogmatic presidency of Johnson. “Free and
cordial communication of sentiments, the natural play of good humour,”
says Henry Mackenzie, in his memoir of his friend John Home, “prevailed
among the circle of men whom I have described. It was very different
from that display of learning, that prize-fighting of wit, which
distinguished a literary circle of our sister country of which we have
some authentic and curious records.” And the reason, he thinks, lay in
the different constitutions of the two societies. “The literary circle
of London was a sort of sect, a _caste_ separate from the ordinary
professions and habits of common life. They were traders in talent and
learning, and brought, like other traders, samples of their goods into
company, with a jealousy of competition which prevented their enjoying,
as much as otherwise they might, any excellence in their competitors.”
There is some truth in this, though it is expressed somewhat carpingly;
and even at the present day the remark may be taken as describing a
certain difference which the Edinburgh “wuts” think they see between
themselves and the London “wits.” But may not the fact under notice have
some bearing also on the centralisation question? If from the first, and
at the very time when the literary reputation of Edinburgh was at its
height, Edinburgh was not a centre of professional literary industry,
then,—despite the subsequent establishment of important newspapers and
some important periodicals in the city, and the generation in it by
their means of some amount of professional literary industry,—it is
hardly likely that it can long resist with visible success the tendency
which threatens to centralise British literary industry of that sort
mainly in London. If, indeed, in literature, as in other kinds of
production, the manufacture might be carried on at a distance from the
market, the tendency _might_ be resisted; in other words, authors might
live in Edinburgh and the publishing machinery might be in London. In
literature, however, less than in most trades, is such an arrangement
possible. But let not Edinburgh despair. Only let her still have within
her, as hitherto, a sufficient number of the right kind of persons,
distributed through her official appointments, or in other ways
habitually resident, and it is pretty certain that books of all
varieties will continue to be shot out from her at intervals, some of
them the more valuable perhaps because they will not have been made to
order.
To return to our more immediate subject:—It will enable us more
distinctly to conceive the state of Edinburgh society ninety or
ninety-five years ago if we enumerate the more important of the
individuals, old and young, who then figured in it. In doing so, it will
be well to fix on some one year, at which to take our census. For
various reasons the year 1802 may be selected. It was the first year of
the short peace, or “armed truce,” which intervened between the two wars
with France; it was the first year, also, of that short and perplexing
interregnum in home affairs during which Addington was prime minister
and Pitt and Dundas were out of office.
Few of the intellectual chiefs of the former generation were now
alive in Edinburgh. David Hume and the poet Fergusson had been dead
more than a quarter of a century; Kames and Gilbert Stuart for
nearly twenty years. Dr. Henry, Adam Smith, the physician Cullen,
Blacklock, Lord Hailes, the elder Tytler of Woodhouselee, and
Robertson the historian, had disappeared more recently, and were
still remembered. Fresher still was the local recollection of Lord
Monboddo, Dr. Hugh Blair, the chemist Black, whose death had
occurred in 1799, and of such minor celebrities as the Rev. Dr.
Macknight and Dr. Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk. Of nearly all these
men Lord Cockburn could remember something, either as having known
them domestically in his boyhood, or as having watched them taking
their daily walk in the “Meadows”; and it was one of the
gratifications of his after-life to think that, while privileged to
live into the splendours of a new age, he had been born early enough
to see the departing skirts of the old. Some remnants of the old
age, however, did survive as connecting links between it and the
new. Home, the author of “Douglas,” was alive in 1802, an infirm
veteran of eighty, with flashes of his former spirit in him, and
still capable of his claret. Another survivor was Dr. Adam Ferguson,
two years the junior of Home and much of an invalid, but with
fourteen years of life still before him. Henry Mackenzie, called
“The Man of Feeling,” but as shrewd a man of the world as there was
in Edinburgh, was another of the veterans,—fifty-seven years old,
but destined to reach the age of eighty-six. Dugald Stewart was
verging on his fiftieth year, and his philosophical reputation was
still on the increase. To these survivors in the world of philosophy
and letters add, as notables in the department of science, Robison,
the Professor of Natural Philosophy, and Playfair, the Professor of
Mathematics, and, as the ablest remaining specimens of the old
Edinburgh clergy, Dr. John Erskine and Sir Henry Moncreiff. Passing
into the miscellaneous society amid which those men moved, and which
they linked intellectually with the past, we may distribute their
Edinburgh contemporaries of the year 1802 into three categories:—(1)
_The Old Worthies._—This category includes a considerable number of
surviving citizens, belonging, by their age, habits, and costume, to
the same past generation as the notabilities above named, and many
of them, indeed, older than the younger notabilities of that list.
Most conspicuous among them were the old dons of the Parliament
House; of some of whom Lord Cockburn gives wonderful portraits. The
awful Braxfield was dead; but his successor on the bench, David Rae,
Lord Eskgrove,—more familiarly known as “Esky,”—was keeping the
Parliament House in a constant roar with the daily rumour of his
last absurdities. What a blessing for a moderately-sized community
to have at its heart such a preventive against insipidity, such a
clove or cassia-bud of all-diffusive relish, as this famous Lord
Justice-Clerk Esky; whom Lord Cockburn once heard sentence a tailor
to death for the murder of a soldier in these terms,—“Not only did
you murder him, whereby he was berea-ved of his life, but you did
thrust, or push, or pierce, or project, or propell the le-thall
weapon through the belly-band of his regimen-tal breeches, which
were his Majes-ty’s,” and of whom Lord Cockburn further vouches that
his customary formula of address to a criminal in concluding the
sentence of death was,—“Whatever your religi-ous persua-shon may be,
or even if, as I suppose, you be of no persua-shon at all, there are
plenty of reverend gentlemen who will be most happy to show you the
way to yeternal life.” Of the rest of the fifteen judges, the most
remarkable for their talents and their character were the Lord
President Hay Campbell, Lord Glenlee, Lord Hermand, Lord Meadowbank
the first, and Lord Cullen. After Esky, Hermand was the most
notorious oddity of the bench. At the bar, the witty Harry Erskine,
and Charles Hay, afterwards Lord Newton, might be ranked among the
older men. Coevals of these dons of the Parliament House, were
Andrew Dalzel, the Professor of Greek in the University, and Dr.
Finlayson, the Professor of Logic; with whom may be mentioned the
simple-hearted Dr. Adam, Rector of the High School, the Rev. Dr.
Struthers, a distinguished preacher of the Secession Church, and the
veteran bookseller Creech. (2) _The Middle-Aged Men._—Taking this
class to include all who, while old enough to have obtained some
standing in life, were still not past their maturity, we may
enumerate in it such leading lawyers as Robert Dundas of Arniston
(nephew of the great Dundas, and promoted to the office of Chief
Baron of the Exchequer in 1801, after having been Lord Advocate for
twelve years), and Robert Blair, Charles Hope, Adam Gillies, John
Clerk of Eldin, David Cathcart, and David Boyle, all of whom
subsequently rose to the Bench; Malcolm Laing, then also an
advocate, but subsequently better known as an antiquarian and
historian; James Gibson, Writer to the Signet, afterwards Sir James
Gibson Craig; the Presbyterian clergyman, Dr. John Inglis, and the
Rev. Archibald Alison of the Scottish Episcopal Church; in the
medical profession, Dr. Andrew Duncan, Dr. James Gregory, and Dr.
John Bell; and, among miscellaneous residents, Nasmyth, the portrait
painter, and George Thomson, the correspondent of Burns. (3) _Young
Edinburgh._—Here also the Bar had the preponderance. Reckoning among
the juniors at the bar all who had been called after 1790, one has
to include these in the list,—John Macfarlan, Archibald Fletcher,
Walter Scott, William Erskine, Thomas Thomson, George Cranstoun,
George Joseph Bell, James Grahame, James Moncreiff, Francis Jeffrey,
Francis Horner, J. A. Murray, John Richardson, Henry Cockburn, and
Henry Brougham. Of this group of young advocates, all afterwards
locally eminent, some had already revealed the faculties which were
to make them known far beyond the precincts of the Parliament House.
Brougham was about the youngest of them, being then only in his
twenty-third year; but he was the recognised dare-devil of the whole
group, the most vehement of the orators of the Speculative, and the
terror of old Esky. “That man Broom or Broug-ham,” Esky used to say,
“is the torment of my life.” Older than Brougham by a year, Horner
was already a leader among his associates by the solid strength and
integrity of his character. Jeffrey was in his twenty-ninth year, a
married young barrister, waiting for briefs. Scott, then also
married and past his thirtieth year, was more comfortably settled:
he was Sheriff of Selkirkshire, had some practice at the bar, and
had already some literary reputation by metrical translations from
the German, a few Scottish ballads, and his edition of _The Border
Minstrelsy_. But the bar did not include all the young talents.
Among the hopes of the medical profession were John Allen, John
Thomson, and Thomas Brown, the future meta-physician. Leyden, the
poet and linguist, was then one of the rising stars of Edinburgh;
and Thomas Campbell, whose _Pleasures of Hope_ had been for three
years before the public, was for the time a resident. Nor was a
sprinkling of English residents wanting, to exchange ideas with so
many fervid young Scots, and banter them about their dialect and
their prejudices. Had not the philosophic Lord Webb Seymour chosen
Edinburgh for his home; and was not Sydney Smith there on his
memorable visit? Finally, if any one in Edinburgh wanted to have his
portrait splendidly painted, to whom could he go but to Henry
Raeburn? Or, if any one wanted information about books which old
Creech, or Miller, or Bell and Bradfute could not give, from whom
was he so likely to obtain it as from the energetic and ambitious
young bookseller, Archibald Constable?
Looking down in fancy on the sea of 80,000 heads which in the year 1802
constituted the population of Edinburgh,—some gray with age, many wigged
and powdered, and many more wearing the brown or light locks of natural
youth,—it is on the above-named sixty or seventy that the instructed eye
now rests as the most conspicuous in the crowd. But the instructed eye
sees something more than the mere mass of heads, with here and there one
of the conspicuous sixty. It sees the mass swaying to and fro,—here
solid and restful, there discomposed and in motion, and the conspicuous
heads unequally distributed amid the wavering parts. In other words, the
society of Edinburgh in 1802, like every other society before or since,
presented the phenomenon of division into two parties,—the party of rest
and conservation, and the party of change or progress. The main fact in
the history of Edinburgh at that time was that an incessant
house-to-house battle was going on in it between old Scottish Toryism
and a new and vigorous Scottish Whiggism. Numerically, the Tories were
immensely in the majority, and the Whigs were but in small proportion.
But it is not by the numerical measure in such cases that History judges
or portions out her interest. The party that is largest may be the lump,
and that which is smallest may be the leaven. So it was most remarkably
in the Edinburgh of 1802. To any one surveying the society of Edinburgh
then, with something of that knowledge which we now possess, two facts
would have seemed significant: first, that, though the majority were on
the Tory side, most of the conspicuous heads were on the Whig side;
secondly, and still more obviously, that among the conspicuous heads the
Whigs claimed nearly all the young ones. If, for example, Toryism could
claim a full half of the veterans that have been named, the potent old
chiefs of the Parliament House included, yet even of those veterans a
few, such as Erskine, Dugald Stewart, Playfair, old Dr. Adam, and Sir
Henry Moncreiff, were Whigs; if among the middle-aged Toryism was
equally strong, yet here also Whiggism could count representatives in
Gillies, Clerk of Eldin, Malcolm Laing, and the resolute James Gibson;
and, if still, after surveying those two classes, there had been any
doubt which of the two political parties had the higher pretensions
intellectually, it was only necessary to descend among the young and
adolescent to see that among _them_ at least Whiggism had most recruits.
Of the younger men of Edinburgh then entering life who afterwards rose
to be something in the world’s eye, Scott alone, remarks Lord Cockburn,
was unmistakably a Tory. The exception is certainly a weighty one; and
there are some,—myself among them,—who would willingly take one Walter
Scott at any time as a sufficient offset against a Jeffrey, a Horner, a
Sydney Smith, a Brougham, an Allen, a Thomas Brown, and a Tom Campbell,
all put together. If the standard of judgment, however, is to be that of
the right and the wrong in politics, this will hardly be now the general
opinion.
We do not now associate Whiggism with any idea of the heroic. But in the
year 1802 one had to judge otherwise. Whiggism all over Britain, but
especially Scottish Whiggism, then required some courage, some spirit of
self-sacrifice, in its adherents. The actual creed of the Scottish Whigs
was moderate enough. It consisted in believing that there were a great
many remediable abuses in the Scottish political and administrative
system, that the people had too little power and the lairds too much,
that the Revolution in France had not been unmitigated madness, that at
any rate the dread of its effects on this country had been monstrously
exaggerated, and that, on the whole, the policy of Fox and his
associates was a policy to be supported in preference to that of his
rival, Pitt. The creed, we say, was moderate; and it was, undoubtedly,
in large measure, true. What made it heroism to hold to it was that the
holding of it involved serious personal consequences,—exclusion from all
share in the good things going, and even, to a considerable extent, from
popular confidence and favour; with no prospect either (for who could
tell when George III. might die, or how his son might act when he came
to the throne?) that this state of things would soon end. That in such
circumstances so many men in Scotland, and especially so many men of the
legal profession, should have maintained the obnoxious creed, and
maintained it with such tenacity and mutual fidelity in spite of all
temptation, is a fact of which Scotland may well be proud. As a body,
the Scottish Whigs of 1802 seem to have been as courageous and
pure-minded a set of men as there were in Great Britain. Theirs, in the
most literal sense, was “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence
of things not seen.” Most creditable of all, perhaps, was the
persevering Whiggism of so many of the younger men. Beating their heels
idly in a particular corner of the Parliament House, where no agents
came to them with briefs, and whiling away the rest of their time with
essays and debates in the Speculative Society, ambitious dreams in
secret, convivial meetings at each others’ houses, and eternal jokes
about Esky, those light-hearted young Whig lawyers had not even that
sense of social consequence to support them which their seniors on the
same side of politics could feel as an inspiration. They formed a little
band by themselves, cherishing their Whiggism for its own sake, and not
even visited by much countenance from their Whig seniors. And yet upon
them, to a greater extent than they or their seniors were aware,
depended the future history of Scotland.
The moving force in Scottish society at that time was consciously
possessed by the Whigs. Though by far the smaller party numerically over
Scotland as a whole, they could not but feel that they must eventually
win. The great want of the party hitherto had been some voice or organ,
some public means of proclaiming collectively the views which they
entertained individually, of propagating these views in new quarters,
and of exhibiting them again and again in contrast with those of their
opponents. No such means of utterance existed. The senior Edinburgh
Whigs had been in the habit of dining together on Fox’s birthday, on
which occasions constables were stationed at the doors by the
authorities to take down the names of the guests as they entered; they
also occasionally fought their opponents on a temporary local question.
This, however, was all; and Scottish Whiggism, though working as a
social ferment, had no organisation and no flag. The year 1802,—the
country then, as we have seen, in the lull of the brief peace with
France, and Pitt and Dundas out of office,—was a time when it began to
seem possible to supply this want. “Events,” says Lord Cockburn, “were
bringing people into somewhat better humour. Somewhat less was said
about Jacobinism, though still too much; and sedition had gone out.
Napoleon’s obvious progress towards military despotism opened the eyes
of those who used to see nothing but liberty in the French Revolution.
Instead of Jacobinism, Invasion became the word.” In short, though the
old habits and all the old abuses still remained, the state of the
public mind was such that it became more easy to establish a means for
publicly attacking them and advocating reform.
Whence was the expected demonstration to come, and what form was it to
take? Where in Scotland was the standard of Scottish Whiggism to be
first raised, and who was to step forth as the standard-bearer?
Scotland had recently lost one man who, had he lived till 1802, might
have been called on to act this part. Six or eight years before, when it
was most dangerous to be a Scottish Whig,—when to be too zealous a
Scottish Whig, unless one were powerfully connected, meant to run a risk
of trial for sedition,—there had not been a more daring Whig in Scotland
than the poet Burns. True, he was a Whig, as he was everything else,
after an uncovenanted fashion of his own, which did not keep touch with
any of the current definitions of Whiggism; but, for all that, he was,
and he called himself, a Scottish Whig. “Go on, sir,” he wrote from
Dumfries, in the end of 1792, to the Whig, or rather Whig-Radical,
editor of the shortlived _Edinburgh Gazetteer_, to which he had become a
subscriber: “Go on, and lay bare, with undaunted heart and steady hand,
that horrid mass of corruption called politics and statecraft. Dare to
draw in their native colours those ‘calm-thinking villains whom no faith
can fire,’ whatever be the shibboleth of their pretended party.” This
was Whiggism and a vast deal more; but the following song, written at
the same time, or not long after, shows that, all in all, as matters
then stood, it pleased Burns to be known as a Whig of the Fox school:—
“Here’s a health to them that’s awa,
Here’s a health to them that’s awa;
And wha winna wish guid luck to our cause,
May never guid luck be their fa’!
It’s guid to be merry and wise,
It’s guid to be honest and true,
It’s guid to support Caledonia’s cause
And bide by the buff and the blue.
Here’s a health to them that’s awa,
Here’s a health to them that’s awa;
Here’s a health to Charlie, the chief o’ the clan,
Although that his band be sma’!
May liberty meet wi’ success!
May prudence protect her frae evil!
May tyrants and tyranny tine in the mist,
And wander their way to the Devil!”
Had Burns lived till 1802, who knows to what his politics might have led
him? He would then have been still only in his forty-fourth year; and
what fate more imaginable for him, had he been still alive, than that,
deprived of his gaugership, or throwing it up, he should have left
Dumfries for Edinburgh, and, associating himself there with the many who
would have welcomed him, and with whom, whatever their rank, there was
no fear that his relations would have ever been other than those of
perfect equality, he should have become the editor, mayhap, of a Whig
newspaper? If so, who can doubt that prose would have become easier to
him, that he would have been a power among the Scottish Whigs, and that
his influence would have been felt, in his new character, by them and by
the nation? Ah! and, had he lived on through all their coming struggles,
would he not have been but seventy-three years of age at the time of the
passing of the Reform Bill; and, in gratitude to him as a veteran Whig
and ex-editor, might not his fellow-citizens at last have returned him
to the House of Commons as the senior colleague of young
Macaulay?—“Profanation! profanation!” is the cry that will rise to all
Scottish lips on the mere muttering of such a fancy. Nature herself had
been of that opinion. Burns had died in 1796, in the thirty-eighth year
of his age, a broken-down exciseman, in Dumfries; and he was to be
remembered to all eternity,—thank God!—simply as Robert Burns.
The required party-standard was raised by the young Whigs of Edinburgh.
It was in Jeffrey’s humble domicile, in an upper storey in one of the
houses of Buccleuch Place, that, on one memorable day in the year 1802,
Sydney Smith first started the idea of a new periodical, combining
literature with politics, to be published quarterly, and kept up by
contributions from the teeming minds of the members of the Speculative
Society. No sooner said than done: Constable at once undertook the
publication; and on the 10th of October 1802 the first number of the
_Edinburgh Review_ saw the light. For a number or two the editorship was
the joint-occupation of Sydney Smith, Jeffrey, Horner, Brougham, and a
few others,—Sydney Smith officiating in chief; but, on Smith’s return to
London soon afterwards, the management fell exclusively on Jeffrey.
The establishment of the _Edinburgh Review_, as all the world knows, was
the beginning of a new era in the history of British politics. For a
while, indeed, it was rather as a power in the general thought and
literature of the country than as a direct force in politics that the
new organ made itself felt. For its success in the latter function
circumstances for the first two or three years were not very propitious.
The war with France having been renewed in 1803, and the Addington
ministry having resigned in May 1804, and Pitt having then resumed the
Premiership with Dundas (now Lord Melville) as again his principal
colleague and at the head of the Admiralty, not only were the Scottish
Tories once more in a mood of placid satisfaction over this change, and
over the prospect which it brought of a reassured term of the Dundas
proconsulship in Scotland; but the very occasion of the recall of Pitt
to power, the very nature of the business in which Pitt and Dundas had
to exert themselves, tended for the time to a modification, or at least
a postponement, of party differences. Napoleon was now Emperor of the
French; what he threatened now was an actual invasion of Britain; how
could party differences continue operative in any virulent degree in
face of such a common danger?
Party differences did subside for the while. All over the island Whigs
and Tories alike were in a ferment of volunteering and drilling for
resistance to the French when they should land; and was it not a Whig
admiral that, having won for all Britain the glory, willingly bequeathed
to a Tory Government the usufruct, of the great battle of Trafalgar?
People were at no leisure to listen with sufficient attention at such a
time to expositions of the superiority of Whig principles, even from
such an organ as the _Edinburgh Review_.
In 1806, however, the face of things was suddenly altered. The death of
Pitt in the January of that year, when his second administration was
already tottering under the blow inflicted upon it by the impeachment of
Lord Melville, brought it to an abrupt close; and the Whigs, no less to
their own surprise than to that of the country, found themselves again
in power, after an interval since their last real experience of that
ecstasy which could be spanned by the memory only of old people then
living. The accession to office of the Whig ministry of Fox and
Grenville was startling enough, even had there been no especially
Whiggish acts to correspond. But, during the thirteen months of the Fox
and Grenville ministry (January 1806—March 1807), there _were_ acts to
correspond, over and above the prosecution of the Melville Impeachment
to its conclusion. As places fell vacant, Whigs were appointed to them;
an attempt was made to open negotiations for peace with Napoleon; and
various measures of domestic reform were introduced into Parliament. To
the Scottish Tories it was as if chaos had come again. Could they have
foreseen that the crisis was to be so short,—could they have foreseen
that the new Whig ministry, after having been weakened by the death of
Fox in September 1806, would be able to struggle on but for six months
more, and that then the Whigs would be driven back into their accustomed
place as a minority in opposition, with another quarter of a century of
uninterrupted Tory administration for Britain, and of a modified Dundas
rule in Scotland, to intervene before they should again rise to
supremacy,—it is possible that the consternation would have been less.
But this at the time could not have been foreseen. The accession of the
Whigs to power, and their retention of it during a whole year, were a
rude awakening to men who had been asleep; and from that moment Toryism
had bad dreams.
The crisis was powerfully felt in Edinburgh; and all that remains for us
in this paper is to move forward from 1802 to 1806, for a glance at the
state of Edinburgh in this latter year, when the effects of the crisis
there were most acute.
As was natural, the mere lapse of time, independently of the special
events that had been happening, had produced some changes. Of the
seniors, both of the Whig and of the Tory party, that have been noted as
alive in 1802, some had been removed by death; and, by these and other
deaths, those who in 1802 had occupied junior positions in their
respective parties found themselves promoted to higher places, and to
more active concern in party affairs. Among the Tories of the Parliament
House the most active heads, besides Robert Dundas of Arniston as Chief
Baron of Exchequer, were Hope, now Lord Justice-Clerk in the place of
old Esky, and Blair, afterwards Lord President; but among the younger
men who acted with these there was no one whose name stood higher, or
whose Toryism was more enthusiastic, than Scott. During the four years
that had elapsed since 1802 his literary reputation had been gradually
rising; and the publication in 1805 of his _Lay of the Last Minstrel_
had given him rank among the most popular poets of his age, and diffused
among his countrymen for the first time some adequate conception of the
nature and the measure of his genius. His literary celebrity had not
been without its effect on his worldly circumstances; for, besides
retaining his Sheriffship, he was now settled for life in the Clerkship
of the Court of Session. Very similar to the position which Scott thus
held among the Edinburgh Tories in 1806 was the position which Jeffrey
then held among the Edinburgh Whigs. The active heads of the Whig party
in the Parliament House were such seniors as Harry Erskine, John Clerk
of Eldin, and Adam Gillies. On the accession of the Fox and Grenville
Ministry to office, Erskine had become Lord Advocate, Clerk had been
made Solicitor-General, and Hay, another of the older set of Whig
lawyers, had been raised to the bench. But, under those men, Jeffrey was
now a person of far more consequence than he had been in 1802. Then he
was only a rising junior in that set of independent young Whigs whom
their elders were disposed rather to slight than to encourage; but his
rapidly increasing distinction at the Bar, not to speak of the
distinction accruing to him from the fame of the _Edinburgh Review_, had
broken down the reserve of his seniors and compelled them to yield him
due respect. Had Horner and Brougham remained in Edinburgh, they and
Jeffrey might have been a kind of triumvirate, dividing among them the
increased consideration which was now accorded to the younger portion of
the Whig bar. But Horner and Brougham, as well as Allen and others of
the little band of 1802, had by this time migrated to London, whence
they kept up their connection with Edinburgh chiefly by correspondence
and by contributions to the _Review_; and, as Cockburn and Murray had
not yet attained a standing at the bar equal to Jeffrey’s, there was no
doubt as to _his_ individual supremacy among the younger resident
Edinburgh Whigs.
Scott and Jeffrey: these names represent, therefore, the heartiest
Toryism of Scotland and its most hopeful and opinionative Whiggism, as
they stood opposed to each other in Edinburgh society in the year 1806.
Remembering this, and with the well-known portraits of the two men in
our minds, we can read the following passage in Lockhart’s _Life of
Scott_ with a new sense of its significance:—
“Scott’s Tory feelings appear to have been kept in a very excited
state during the whole of the short reign of the Whigs. He then, for
the first time, mingled keenly in the details of county
politics—canvassed electors—harangued meetings; and, in a word, made
himself conspicuous as a leading instrument of his party. But he was,
in truth, earnest and serious in his belief that the new rulers of the
country were disposed to abolish many of its most valuable
institutions; and he regarded with special jealousy certain schemes of
innovation with respect to the courts of law and the administration of
justice which were set on foot by the crown-officers for Scotland. At
a debate of the Faculty of Advocates on some of these propositions he
made a speech much longer than he had ever before delivered in that
assembly; and several who heard it have assured me that it had a flow
and energy of eloquence for which those who knew him best were quite
unprepared. When the meeting broke up, he walked across the Mound, on
his way to Castle Street, between Mr. Jeffrey and another of his
reforming friends, who complimented him on the rhetorical powers he
had been displaying, and would willingly have treated the
subject-matter of the discussion playfully. But his feelings had been
moved to an extent far beyond their apprehension. He exclaimed ‘No,
no—’tis no laughing matter; little by little, whatever your wishes may
be, you will destroy and undermine, until nothing of what makes
Scotland Scotland shall remain.’ And, so saying, he turned round to
conceal his agitation—but not until Mr. Jeffrey saw tears gushing down
his cheek,—resting his head, until he recovered himself, on the wall
of the Mound.”
Edinburgh in 1806 is painted for us in that incident. Of the two men
seen standing together on the Mound, under the tall clump of old houses
which still on that spot arrests the eye of the visitor, the stalwart
fair-haired one, leaning his head on the wall to conceal his tears, is
the genius of the Scottish past, while his less moved companion, of
smaller stature, with dark keen features and piercing hazel eyes, is the
confident spirit of the Scottish future. There was, indeed, one element,
then in making for the Scottish future, no representation of which was
discernible in Jeffrey, and which was not logically involved in any
ostensible form of Scottish Political Whiggism. This was that fervour of
a revived Evangelicism in Theology the effects of which on the national
character and the national polity of Scotland have been so strikingly
visible through the last two generations and more. But this was a
manifestation of later date, which even the closest observer of 1806
could hardly have pre-imagined. The traditional germ existed in Sir
Henry Moncreiff; but the full development was to come with the combative
Calvinistic and Presbyterian energy of Andrew Thomson, and the grander
and richer genius of Thomas Chalmers.
THE LAST YEARS OF SIR WALTER SCOTT[8]
After the death of Sir Walter Scott in 1832, a private journal of his,
extending over the greater part of the last seven years of his life, and
consisting of two thick vellum-bound volumes of close writing, carefully
clasped and locked, came into the hands of his son-in-law Lockhart, to
be used at his discretion for the biography of his great relative.
Accordingly, when that biography was published in 1837, the last portion
of it contained a large selection of extracts from this Diary.
Naturally, however, the matter in many places being of a kind which it
would have been premature then to make public, it was only a selection
that _could_ be given by Lockhart. For more than half a century,
therefore, the original manuscript volumes have remained at Abbotsford,
waiting for the time when it should be judged fit to make that more
complete publication of their contents which Scott himself had
contemplated as inevitable at some time or other. The time has now
arrived; and one of the most interesting literary events of the present
season is the publication, by Mr. David Douglas of Edinburgh, of the
great Sir Walter’s Journal in perfect form and with all requisite
annotations.
The Journal is a record, in the first place, of indomitable manliness,
and of prodigious industry. When it was begun, in November 1825, Scott
was at the very height of his enormous prosperity and popularity. He had
not advanced far in it, however,—had not, in fact, got through the first
month of his entries in it,—when there came upon him the ominous signs
of that commercial crash in which he and his fortunes were to be
overwhelmed. In several entries, day after day, there are anticipations
of this disaster, mixed with still struggling hopes that it might be
averted; but by the middle of January 1826 all hope had ceased, and he
was a ruined man. “Skene, this is the hand of a beggar,” was his
salutation in his room in Castle Street, at seven o’clock in the morning
of one of those cold January days, as he held out his hand to the
confidential friend whom he had asked to call upon him at that early
hour that they might consult over the news. All that he had possessed
was swept away; and he was liable for debts, as it turned out, to the
amount of about £130,000.
It is at this point that one may turn back, if one chooses, to the
retrospect of that in Scott’s previous life for which, amid boundless
admiration of him otherwise, strict opinion will probably always
pronounce him blameworthy. What but his worldly ambition, it is asked,
what but his passion for money-making on such a large scale as might
enable him to practise lavish social hospitalities, and to found and
support a hereditary Scottish lairdship of high rank and name,—what but
this had led him to be dissatisfied with his merely literary earnings,
and to link the pursuits and pleasures of authorship with the activities
and anxieties of a clandestine partnership in hazardous forms of
commerce? From one jotting in his Diary it would appear as if, in this
matter, even the ruin in which he found himself at last had not taught
him real repentance. Quoting a saying of a defunct old Scottish worthy
which had been reported to him in these words,—“No chance of opulence is
worth the risk of a competence,”—he appends this comment: “It was not
the thought of a _great_ man, but perhaps that of a _wise_ one.”
Evidently, the ruling passion in Scott had not yet been killed; and, had
the hazards of his previous life been still to run, he would have dared
them all over again.
More satisfactory it is to leave that retrospective question, and to
read the story which the journal tells of his unparalleled exertions to
right himself with the world, and with his own sense of honour, to the
last farthing of his huge responsibilities. For a while, indeed,—the new
shock of his wife’s death having come upon him in the very midst of the
first troubles of his ruined condition, and his ability to sustain the
load of his distresses being at the same time impaired by serious
ill-health and frequent and intense bodily pains,—it is as if the
downfall had been complete. Gloom seems to have settled on his spirits;
and, though he bears a brave face to the world, we see him, in hours
when he was alone, depressed secretly by crowding recollections of his
happy past in comparison with the woeful present, and sunk sometimes in
mere sobbings and tears. Gradually, however, he rouses himself; and what
is it that we see then? Either still at Abbotsford, when his official
duties in the Court of Session will allow him to leave town (for, by a
family-prearrangement, he had still a life-rent tenure of Abbotsford,
and could sequester himself there, when he chose, on a greatly reduced
establishment), or else in one or other of those Edinburgh residences to
which he removed after his house in Castle Street had been sold,—first,
lodgings in North St. David Street, then a furnished house in Walker
Street, and finally a house in Shandwick Place,—we see the widowed
veteran struggling on in the vast enterprise to which he had set himself
of the discharge ultimately of all his debts, dashing cares aside as
well as he could, and, though liable still to solitary hours of
melancholy and to interrupting worries with lawyers and creditors, yet
always pen in hand, and working, working, working. Extend the view over
the six years from 1826 to 1831, and what a prolonged labour of
Hercules! The voluminous _Life of Napoleon Bonaparte_; the novel of
_Woodstock_; the double series of “The Chronicles of the Canongate,”
including _The Two Drovers_, _The Highland Widow_, _The Surgeons
Daughter_, and _The Fair Maid of Perth_; the separate extra novels of
_Anne of Geierstein_, _Count Robert of Paris_, and _Castle Dangerous_;
the quadruple series of _The Tales of a Grandfather_, with a collateral
_History of Scotland_; the _Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft_; the
completion and publication of the verse-dramas called _The Doom of
Devorgoil_ and _The Ayrshire Tragedy_; a collective edition of the
Miscellaneous Prose Works; the commencement of the author’s _magnum
opus_, as it was termed, in the shape of the revised and annotated
reissue of the whole of the Waverley Novels: these, together with a
number of more casual performances, such as the Malachi Malagrowther
Letters and contributions to Reviews, formed the astonishing total of
Scott’s literary achievements during those six years, in addition to the
previous total at which the world had already wondered. What it is most
pleasing now to observe in the progress through this dense forest of
labour, as it is recorded month after month in the Diary, is the
evidence there furnished of Scott’s elasticity of spirits, and of his
ready resumption of his old habits of generous sociability, in exact
proportion to the success of his exertions. It is as if the immense mass
of his debts had stood before him as a huge black rock, and as if, on
beholding portion after portion of this rock blasted away by the
successive charges of dynamite, large or small, which he was able to
insert into its clefts in the shape of successive deposits of new
money-earnings,—now, as in the case of his _Life of Napoleon_, a £10,000
or so at once, and again a more moderate sum of £1000 or £2000 only,—he
watched each explosion, and each fall of detached slab or block, with a
gleeful “Hurrah! the whole big brute will be down at last!” And, as he
thus became himself again, Abbotsford became _itself_ again,—its old
hospitalities renewed in as frank and gallant a fashion as was
consistent with proper economy in the circumstances, and relays of
visitors arriving, and sometimes occupying his working-time too
inconsiderately, while at other times it was his happiness to scribble
on uninterruptedly, through whole mornings or whole rainy days, with no
other recreation than a trudge through his plantations, accompanied by
his dogs, and leaning on the arm of his faithful Tom Purdie. In
Edinburgh the revival of his old habits in the prospect of his retrieved
fortunes was much the same. Though he had not now such accommodation for
his own hospitalities there as had been afforded by his former house in
Castle Street, Edinburgh society could delight in the full possession of
him once more after his temporary seclusion and eclipse. At select
dinner-parties, or in other evening gatherings, he was present again
hardly less often than had been his previous custom,—the life of every
such company still by his overflowing good humour and endless stock of
anecdotes and good stories; and, through the day, as he limped along
Princes Street, on his way to or from the Parliament House, all heads
were turned to look at him,—a greater and more popular Sir Walter than
ever, now that it was no longer a mere accepted conjecture that he was
the author of the Waverley Novels, but the mask had been thrown aside
and the secret had been publicly divulged. He records, by the way, in
his Diary, that it was a real addition to his comfort when they
presented him with a key of the Princes Street Gardens, then a private
property of the Princes Street householders, so that he might walk to or
from the Parliament House on soft velvet turf, amid quiet green
shrubbery, and thus lessen the trouble caused by his stiffened joints
and the increasing pain of his lameness. Nor was it within the circuit
of Edinburgh only, or at Abbotsford only, that there was restored
sunshine round his path. We hear of occasional excursions to the country
seats of Scottish friends of his north of Edinburgh; and twice we follow
him on leisurely posting journeys into England, for the purpose of a
week or two in London again, and a round of calls and engagements in the
busy whirl of London society. Once he crosses the Channel, revisits
Paris, and spends some time amid the gaieties of that capital. Hardly
from the entries in his Diary relating to those journeys,—so modest
always are his mentions of himself,—should we learn what a pressure of
admiring curiosity, rising sometimes into tumults of enthusiasm and
applause, gathered about him wherever he went. Whosoever else might be
present,—ambassador, statesman, peer, scion of royalty, or even (as
happened several times) the great Duke of Wellington himself,—it was
always to Sir Walter Scott in chief, the contemporary memoirs tell us,
that the eyes of the assembly were turned. New veneration for him, by
reason of the diffused knowledge of the heroic contest which he had
begun and was still maintaining with adverse fortune, mingled now, it
seems, with all the former feelings which his name and recollections of
his writings called up; and for thousands on thousands, whether at home
or abroad, he was the most interesting man in all Europe.
What need to continue this sketch farther? The rest is known, in a
general way, to every one. He had reached his sixtieth year,—not
absolutely victorious as yet over the whole of the mass of debt against
which he had been exerting himself, but with absolute victory within
sight if he should live but a few years longer,—when it became evident
that no such extension of his life was to be looked for. Signs of
premature old age had become manifest in the complete whitening of his
hair and the worn aspect of his visage; there had been distinct
premonitions of failing powers in the inferior literary quality of some
of his later productions; and three paralytic or apoplectic seizures in
rapid succession, the last in April 1831, finished the process of wreck.
A journey to the Mediterranean was recommended; and thither he
went,—conveyed first to London by land, and then, by sea-voyage in a
Government frigate, to Malta. From Malta, which he reached late in
November 1831, he removed, about the middle of December, to Naples;
whence the proposal was that he should pass northwards through the rest
of Italy, visiting Rome and other famous Italian cities. All in vain! He
grew worse and worse; brain and speech lost their normal functions; his
restlessness and impatience became ungovernable. The Mediterranean,
Italy, Rome, blue skies and classical cities,—what are they all to _me_?
Give me back one hour of Scotland;
Let me see it ere I die.
They conveyed him back by slow stages, seeing this and that continental
sight on his homeward-route, but hardly knowing what he saw. He was in
London again for a week or two in June and July 1832, attended medically
in a hotel in Jermyn Street. Brought thence by sea to Edinburgh, he
passed a night, a day, and another night, in a hotel in St. Andrew
Square, in a state of utter unconsciousness; and on the 11th of July
they took him to Abbotsford. On their way thither through the old
familiar scenery he began to recognise places and objects, and to mutter
their names,—Gala Water, Buckholm, Torwoodlee; and, when they approached
Abbotsford itself, and he caught sight of its towers, he sprang up in
such a state of excitement that they could hardly hold him in the
carriage. “Ha! Willie Laidlaw! O man, I have often thought of _you_,”
were his first words, after his old friend and amanuensis Laidlaw, who
was waiting in the porch, had assisted the rest in carrying him into the
house, and seating him in a chair in the dining-room. The return of
consciousness which this recognition signified became more and more
marked, at least at intervals, in the two months and ten days through
which he still lingered. He talked with those of his family who were
about him, could be shifted from room to room or even wheeled in a Bath
chair through parts of his grounds, and could listen to readings and
seem to take an interest in them. Once he insisted on being placed at
his writing-table, with paper, pens, and ink before him in the
accustomed order, and wanted to be left to himself; but, when the pen
had been put into his hand and his fingers refused to hold it, tears
trickled down his cheeks, and he gave up the attempt. There were, as
often in such cases of brain-paralysis, some days of almost frantic
vehemence, when it was painful to be near him; but these were succeeded
by a feeble quietude and a gradual ebbing-away of life. On the 21st of
September 1832, with the ripple of the Tweed heard by those who stood
round his bed, Sir Walter Scott, then only in the sixty-second year of
his age, breathed his last.
In the Diary itself the narrative of those closing years of Scott’s life
is broken short at the point where they were bringing him back from
Italy as a dying invalid. The last few months are a total blank in the
Diary; where, indeed, the entries for the later years of the included
seven are scantier and more intermittent than those for the earlier. But
it is not solely as an exact autobiographic record of the incidents of
so many memorable years of a memorable life that the Diary is now of
interest. Implicated in that main interest, and catching the attention
of the reader again and again as he advances through the pages, are
certain recurring particular informations as to Scott’s character and
ways which possess an independent interest, and may be reverted to
separately.
Bound up, for example, with the proofs furnished by the Diary of Scott’s
prodigious literary industry, there is plenty of minute information as
to his habits of composition and his rate of composition. I do not like
that word “composition” in any such application, thinking it a miserable
word for the description of the process by which a great writer marshals
the contents of his mind and commits them to paper; but the word is
current, and may serve for the nonce. Well, Scott’s rate of composition
was about the fastest known in the history of literature. Of all his
predecessors in the literary history of the British Islands, Shakespeare
seems to have been the likest to him in this particular of fluent
facility and swiftness of production. “His mind and hand went together,”
is the well-known report concerning Shakespeare by his literary
executors and editors: “his mind and hand went together, and what he
thought he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from
him a blot in his papers.” One has an impression, however, that
Shakespeare, with all his facility when he had the pen in his hand, had
it less constantly in his hand, was less “_eident_” in the use of it (as
our good northern phrase goes), than Scott,—whether because he had less
actual need to be “eident,” or because verse, which was Shakespeare’s
main element, is intrinsically more difficult, takes more out of a man
in a given time, and so is less favourable to “eidency,” than the prose
element in which, latterly, Scott worked all but exclusively. At all
events, “eidency” and “facility” taken together, the result, in the mere
matter of quantity, was larger from Scott’s industry than from
Shakespeare’s. But it is with the “facility” that we are now concerned,
and with the proofs of this “facility” which are furnished by the
Journal in particular. The mere look of the handwriting is one of
these,—that rapid _currente calamo_ look, without hesitation, and with
hardly an erasure, stoppage to point, or any such thing, and with the
words almost running into each other in their hurry, which is familiar
to all who have seen facsimile reproductions of any portions of the copy
of Scott’s novels, when they were written with his own hand, and not
dictated. That, however, is a characteristic common to all his writings;
and the specific interest of the Diary in this connection is that it
gives us definite information as to the amount of writing per day which
Scott usually got through in his _currente calamo_ style. In entry after
entry there is note of the number of pages he had prescribed to himself
as a sufficient day’s “task” or “darg,” with growls when for any reason
he had fallen short of it, and smiles of satisfaction when he had
exceeded it; and from one entry we ascertain that his _maximum_ per day
when he was in good vein was eight pages of his own close manuscript,
making forty pages of the usual type in which his copy was set up by the
printers. One can compute the difference between that rate and any other
rate of which one may happen to have knowledge or experience; but there
is no need to conclude that Scott’s rate is to be passionately desired
or universally aimed at, or that, because it suited Scott, it would suit
others. On the contrary, one sees some disadvantages, even in Scott’s
own case, counterbalancing the advantages of such extreme rapidity. He
was aware of the fact himself; and he once quotes, with some
approbation, an admirable maxim of Chaucer on the subject:—
“There n’ is no werkman, whatsoever he be,
That may both werken well and hastily.”
That Scott was an exception,—that he was, like Shakespeare, one of those
workmen who _could_ work both well and hastily,—was owing doubtless to
the fact that, in this also resembling Shakespeare, he brought always to
the act of writing a mind already full of matter, and of the very kinds
of matter required for his occasions. One has but to recollect the
extraordinary range and variety of his readings from his earliest youth,
the extraordinary range and variety also of his observations of men and
manners, and the extraordinary retentiveness of his memory, to see that
never since he had begun authorship could he have had to spin, as so
many have to do, the threads of his ideas or imaginations out of a
vacuum. At the same time, and this notwithstanding, there is something
more to be said, when the comparison is between Scott as an
exceptionally rapid worker and Shakespeare as the same. Scott had a
standard of the kind of matter that would answer for the purposes of
_his_ literary productions; and, though a very good standard, it was
lower than Shakespeare’s standard for _his_ writings. When Shakespeare
was in the act of writing, or was meditating his themes by himself in
the solitude of his chamber, or in his walks over the fields, before he
proceeded to the act of writing, we see his mind rolling within itself,
like a great sea-wash that would rush through all the deeps and caverns,
and search through all the intricacies, of its prior structure and
acquisitions,—so ruled and commissioned, however, that what the reflux
should fetch back for use should not be any wreckage whatsoever that
might be commonly relevant and interesting, but only things of gleaming
worth and rarity, presentable indeed to all, but appreciable in full
only by kings and sages. Hear, on the other hand, in Scott’s own words,
the definition of what satisfied _him_ in his dealings with the public.
“I am sensible,” he wrote, “that, if there be anything good about my
poetry, or prose either, it is a hurried frankness of composition which
pleases soldiers, sailors, and young people of bold and active
disposition.” That Scott was grossly unfair to himself in this
under-estimate will be the verdict now of universal opinion; and I shall
have to touch again upon that point presently. Meanwhile there is one
other difference to be noted between the two men in respect of that very
circumstance of their marked similarity in one characteristic which has
led us to view them together. Shakespeare’s boundless ease and fluency
in writing did not prevent perfection in his literary execution. His
grammar, with all its impetuosity and lightness of spring, is logical
and accurate to the utmost demands of the most fastidious English
scholarship; and, though he would have repudiated with scorn the name
“stylist,” invented of late as a title of literary honour by some of our
critics, and it would be profane to think of him under that execrable
and disastrous appellation, he wrote always with the sure cunning of a
disciplined artist in verbal expression,—an artist so highly
self-disciplined that his art in such matters had become an instinct.
Scott’s habitual style, on the other hand,—his style when he is not
strongly moved either by vehement feeling or by high poetic
conception,—is a kind of homely and comfortable slipshod, neglectful of
any rule of extreme accuracy, and careless even of the most obvious
grammatical solecisms. It is not exactly with reference to this
difference between himself and Shakespeare that there occurs in one
passage in his Diary a protest against being compared with Shakespeare
at all. But the protest is worth quoting. “_Like_ Shakespeare!” he
exclaims, noticing the already formed habit of this perilous comparison
among his most ardent admirers in his own lifetime,—“_like_ Shakespeare!
Not fit to tie his brogues!” It was the superlative of compliment on
Scott’s side; but its very wording may be construed into a certain
significance in connection with that point of dissimilarity between the
two men to which I have just adverted. Shakespeare never wore “brogues.”
In our present metaphorical sense, I mean; in the literal sense, I would
not be sure but he may have found such articles convenient quite as
often as Scott did. There were muddy roads about Stratford-on-Avon as
well as about Abbotsford.
It would be wrong not to mention, however briefly, the confirmation
furnished by the Journal of all our previous impressions of Scott’s high
excellence among his fellow-men, not only in the general virtues of
integrity, honour, courage, and persevering industry, but also in all
those virtues which constitute what we call in a more particular sense
_goodness_. “Great and good” is one of our common alliterative phrases;
and it is a phrase which we seem to require when we would characterise
the kind of human being that is entitled to supreme admiration. We feel
that either adjective by itself would be inadequate in such a case, but
that the doubling suffices. Another of our alliterative phrases, nearly
the same in meaning at root, is “head and heart.” Only when there is a
conjunction in a human being of what we call “heart” with what we call
“intellect” are we quite satisfied even in cases of ordinary experience;
and only when there is the conjunction of “great heart” with “great
intellect” do we bow down with absolute veneration before this man or
that man of historical celebrity. Common and simple though this word
“heart” is, there is a world of unused applicability in it yet in many
directions. In the criticism of literature, for example, it supplies a
test that would make havoc with some high reputations. There have been,
and are, writers of the most indubitable ability, and of every variety
of ability, in whose writings, if you search them through and through,
though you may find instruction in abundance, novelties of thought in
abundance, and amusement in abundance, you will find very little of real
“heart.” There is no such disappointment when you turn to Scott.
Benevolence, charitableness, tolerance, sympathy with those about him in
their joys and their sorrows, kindly readiness to serve others when he
could, utter absence of envy or real ill-will,—these are qualities that
shine out everywhere in his life and in the succession of his writings,
and that receive, though they hardly need, additional and more intimate
illustration in his Journal. Positively, when I contemplate this
richness of heart in Scott, and remember also how free he was all
through his life from those moral weaknesses which sometimes accompany
and disfigure an unusually rich endowment in this species of
excellence,—for, born though he was in an old Scottish age of roughish
habits and not over-squeamish speech, and carrying though he did the
strong Scottish build of that age, and somewhat of its unabashed
joviality, to the very last, his life was exemplary throughout in most
particulars of personal conduct,—positively, I say, with all this in my
mind, I can express my feeling about Scott no otherwise than by
declaring him to have been one of the very best men that ever breathed.
Of the interest of the miscellaneous contents of the book, as including
individual incidents in Scott’s life, sketches of the physiognomies and
characters of his Edinburgh contemporaries and London contemporaries,
descriptions of scenes and places, curious Scottish and other anecdotes,
literary criticisms, and expressions of Scott’s opinions on public
questions and on men and things in general, no adequate idea can be
formed except from itself. As to Scott’s opinions on all the various
questions, public or private, on which he had occasion to make up his
mind and express what he felt, we may venture on one general remark.
They are shrewd opinions, and often or generally just,—the judgments of
a man of strong natural sagacity, and mature business-experience,
adhering in the main to use and wont, but ready for an independent
consideration of exigencies as they arose, and for any clear and safe
improvement. Even in politics, though his partisanship in that
department was obdurate, avowed, unflinching, and sometimes uproarious,
his shrewdness in the forecast of what was possible, or his private
determination in favour of what he thought just and desirable, led him
sometimes,—especially where Scottish nationality was concerned, and the
Thistle seemed to be insulted,—into dissent from his party, and the
proclamation of opinions peculiarly his own. It is when we leave the
plain ground of such practical and everyday questions, and either ascend
to those higher levels, or descend to those deeper, at which the human
intellect finds its powers more hardly tasked,—it is then that we
observe what is usually reckoned a defect in Scott in comparison with
many who have been far inferior to him in other intellectual respects.
There was little in his mind of what may be called the purely _noetic_
organ, that faculty which speculates, investigates, deals with difficult
problems of science or philosophy, and seeks in every subject for
ultimate principles and a resting-ground of final conclusions. He either
refrained from such exercises of mind entirely, or was content with
proximate and easily accessible axioms. Even in literary criticism,
where he might be supposed to have been most at home, it is sagacious
_extempore_ judgments that he offers, honest expressions of his own
immediate likings or dislikings, rather than suggestions or deductions
from any code of reasoned principles. So in matters of higher and more
solemn concern. From that simpler kind of philosophy which has been
defined as a constant Meditation of Death Scott did not refrain, because
no good or serious man can. There is evidence in his Journal that in his
solitary hours he allowed himself often enough to lapse into this
profoundest of meditations, and rolled through his mind the whole
burthen of its everlasting mysteries. But the inscrutable for Scott, in
this subject as in others, began at a short distance from his first
cogitations or his inherited creed. “I would, if called upon, die a
martyr for the Christian Religion,” he writes once in his Diary; and no
one can doubt that the words were written with the most earnest
sincerity. But, when we interpret them duly by the light of other
passages, and of all that we know independently, it is as if we saw
Scott standing upright with flushed face and clenched hands, and saying
to those about him who might want to trouble him too much on so sacred a
subject,—“This is the faith that has been transmitted to us from
far-back generations; this is the faith in which millions of abler men
than I am, or than you are, have lived and died; I hold by that faith,
without seeking too curiously to define it or to discuss its several
tenets; and, if you come too near me, to pester me with your doubts and
questionings, and new inquiries and speculations, and all the rest of
your clever nineteenth-century metaphysics, I warn you that the soul of
all my fathers will rise in me, and I shall become dangerous.” In
plainer words, on this subject, as on others, it was in Scott’s
constitution to rest in that kind of wisdom which declines thinking
beyond a certain distance.
Here, again, and in a new connection, we come round to Shakespeare. In
_him_, no one needs to be reminded, the noetic faculty existed in
dimensions absolutely enormous, working wonderfully in conjunction with
his equally enormous faculty of imagination, and yet with the incessant
alertness, the universal aggressiveness, and the self-enjoying mobility,
of a separate mental organ. Hence those glances from heaven to earth and
to the underworld which earth conceals, those shafts of reasoned insight
into the roots of all things, those lightning gleams of speculation to
its last extreme, that wealth of maxims of worldly prudence outrivalling
and double-distilling the essence of all that is in Bacon’s Essays,
those hints and reaches towards an ultimate philosophy both of nature
and of human life, which have made Shakespeare’s writings till now, and
will make them henceforth, a perennial amazement. Well, after what has
just been said of Scott, are we bound, on this account, to give up the
customary juxtaposition of the two men? Hardly so, I think; for there is
a consideration of some importance yet in reserve. I will introduce it
by a little anecdote taken from the Journal itself.
People are still alive who have had personal acquaintance with Miss
Stirling Graham,—the lady who died as recently as 1877 at the venerable
age of ninety-five years, and who, some fifty or sixty years before
that, was famous in Edinburgh society for what were called her
_mystifications_. These consisted in her power of assuming an imaginary
character (generally that of an old Scottish lady), dressing up in that
character, appearing so dressed up unexpectedly in any large company in
a drawing-room, or even in the private study of some eminent lawyer or
judge, and carrying on a long rigmarole conversation in the assumed
character with such bewildering effect that her auditor or auditors were
completely deceived, and supposed the garrulous intruder to be some
crazy eccentric from a country-house or some escaped madwoman. It was on
the 7th of March 1828 that Sir Walter Scott witnessed, in the house of
Lord Gillies, after dinner, one of those “mystifications” of Miss
Stirling Graham; and he describes it in his Journal thus:—“Miss Stirling
Græme, a lady of the Duntroon family, from whom Clavers was descended,
looks like thirty years old, and has a face of the Scottish cast, with a
good expression in point of good sense and good-humour. Her
conversation, so far as I have had the advantage of hearing it, is
shrewd and sensible, but noways brilliant. She dined with us, went off
as if to the play, and returned in the character of an old Scottish
lady. Her dress and behaviour were admirable, and her conversation
unique. I was in the secret, of course, and did my best to keep up the
ball; but she cut me out of all feather. The prosing account which she
gave of her son, the antiquary, who found an auld wig in a slate-quarry,
was extremely ludicrous; and she puzzled the Professor of Agriculture
with a merciless account of the succession of crops in the parks around
her old mansion-house. No person to whom the secret was not entrusted
had the least guess of an imposture, except one shrewd young lady
present, who observed the hand narrowly, and saw that it was plumper
than the age of the lady seemed to warrant.” From a note appended to
this entry by Mr. Douglas we learn what Sir Walter said to Miss Stirling
Graham on this occasion, by way of complimenting her on her performance
after it was over. “Awa’, awa’!” he said; “the Deil’s ower grit wi’
you.” There was, he saw, something supernatural in her when she was in
the mood and attitude of her one most congenial function. All the gifts
that were latent in the shrewd and sensible-looking, but noways
brilliant lady, flashed out upon others, and were revealed even to
herself, in the act of her personations.
With the lesson in our minds which this little story supplies, we may
return to the matter of Scott’s reputed deficiency in the speculative or
purely noetic faculty:—Noetic faculty! Noetic fiddlestick! This faculty,
with a score of others perhaps for which our meagre science of mind has
no names, you will find in Scott too, if you know how to look for them.
When and where would you have looked for the noetic faculty in Nelson?
Not, certainly, as he was to be seen in common life, a little man of
slouching gait, with his empty right arm-sleeve pinned to his breast,
and gravely propounding as an unanswerable argument in his own
experience for the immateriality of the soul the fact that, though there
was now an interval of half a yard from the stump of his lost arm and
the place where his fingers had been, he could still sometimes feel
twitches of rheumatism in those merely spectral finger-tips. No! but see
him on his own great wooden three-decker, as he was taking her into
action between the enemy’s lines, when the battle-roar and the
battle-flashes had brought the electric shiver through his veins, and he
stood among his sailors transmuted into the real Nelson, seamanship
incarnate and a fighting demigod! So, with the necessary difference for
the purpose now in view, in the case of Scott. His various faculties of
intellect were involved inextricably somehow in that imaginative faculty
which he did possess, and also in enormous degree, in common with
Shakespeare. When Scott was engaged on any of his greater works,—a _Lay
of the Last Minstrel_, a _Marmion_, a _Lady of the Lake_, a _Waverley_,
a _Guy Mannering_, an _Antiquary_, an _Old Mortality_, a _Heart of
Midlothian_, an _Ivanhoe_, or a _Redgauntlet_,—when he was so engaged,
and when the poetic phrenzy had seized him strongly,—then what happened?
Why, then that imaginative faculty which seemed to be the whole of him,
or the best of him, revealed itself somehow as not a single faculty, but
a complex composition of various faculties, some of them usually
dormant. This it did by visibly splitting itself, resolving itself, into
the multiplicity of which it was composed; and then the plain everyday
man of the tall upright head, sagacious face, and shaggy eyebrows, was
transmuted, even to his own surprise, into a wizard that could range and
speculate,—range and speculate incalculably. It was, I say, as if then
there were loosened within him, out of his one supposed faculty of
phantasy, a simultaneous leash of other faculties, a noetic faculty
included, that could spring to incredible distances from his ordinary
self, each pursuing its appropriate prey, finding it, seizing it,
sporting with it, and coiling it back obediently to the master’s feet.
In some such way, I think, must be explained the splendour of the actual
achievements of Scott’s genius, the moderate dimensions of his purely
reasoning energy in all ordinary circumstances notwithstanding. His
reasoning energy was locked up organically, let us say, in his
marvellous imagination. And so, remembering all that Scott has left
us,—those imperishable tales and romances which no subsequent successes
in the British literature of fiction have superseded, and by the glamour
of which his own little land of brown heath and shaggy wood, formerly of
small account in the world, has become a dream and fascination for all
the leisurely of all the nations,—need we cease, after all, from
thinking of him in juxtaposition, due interval allowed, with England’s
greatest man, the whole world’s greatest man, of the literary order, or
abandon the habit of speaking of Sir Walter Scott as our Scottish
Shakespeare?
CARLYLE’S EDINBURGH LIFE[9]
PART I.—1809–1818
Early in November 1809 two boys walked together from Ecclefechan in
Dumfriesshire to Edinburgh, to attend the classes in the University
there. The distance, as the crow flies, is about sixty miles; and the
boys took three days to it. The elder, who had been at College in the
previous session, and therefore acted as the guide, generally stalked on
a few paces ahead, whistling an Irish tune to himself. The younger, who
was not quite fourteen years of age, and had never been out of
Dumfriesshire before, followed rather wearily, irritated by the eternal
Irish tune in front of him, but mainly given up to his own “bits of
reflections in the silence of the moors and hills.” The elder of the two
boys was a Thomas Smail, afterwards of some note as a Burgher minister
in Galloway; the younger was Thomas Carlyle.
Of the arrival of the two boys in Edinburgh on the 9th of November 1809,
after their third day’s walk of twenty miles, and of Carlyle’s first
stroll, that afternoon, under Smail’s convoy, through some of the main
streets, to see the sights, one may read in his own _Reminiscences_.
What he remembered best of that first stroll was the look of the Old
High Street, with St. Giles’s Kirk on one side and the old Luckenbooths
running up the middle in its broadest part, but chiefly the amazing
spectacle to which he was introduced when Smail pushed open a door
behind St. Giles’s Kirk, and he found himself in the outer house of the
Court of Session, amid the buzz of the lawyers and others walking up and
down, with the red-robed judges hearing cases in their little throned
enclosures.
Content with the description of that first stroll, he leaves us to
imagine how, in the first days and weeks of his residence in the city,
he gradually extended his acquaintance with it by further rambles, and
by inspection of this and that interesting to a young stranger. The task
is not difficult. The lodging which Smail and he had taken between them
was, he says, “a clean-looking, most cheap lodging,” in the “poor
locality” called Simon Square. The locality still survives under that
name, though hardly as a square any longer, but only a poor street, at
the back of Nicolson Street, on the left hand as one goes southwards
from the University, and accessible most directly by an arched passage
called Gibb’s Entry. From that obscure centre, by walks from it in the
mornings, and returns to it during the day and in the evenings, we can
see the little Dumfriesshire fellow gradually conquering for himself
some notion of the whole of that Edinburgh into which he had come. It
was the old Edinburgh, of less than 100,000 inhabitants, which we think
of so fondly now as the Edinburgh of Scott before his novels had been
heard of and when his fame depended chiefly on his poems, of Jeffrey in
the early heyday of his lawyership and editorship of the _Edinburgh
Review_, and of the other local celebrities, Whig and Tory, immortalised
in tradition and in Cockburn’s _Memorials_.
It was chiefly of the externals of the city that the boy was making his
notes; for the living celebrities, as he tells us, were hardly even
names to him then. Scott and Jeffrey, he says, may have been in the
peripatetic crowd of wigged and gowned lawyers he had seen in the hall
of the Parliament House on the day of his arrival; but the only
physiognomy he had marked there so as to know it again was that of John
Clerk of Eldin. A reminiscence which I have heard from his own lips
enables me, however, to connect his first days in Edinburgh with the
memory of at least one Edinburgh worthy of a still elder generation. It
was on the 18th of December 1809, or just six weeks after Carlyle’s
arrival in Edinburgh, that the well-known Dr. Adam, Rector of the High
School, died; and I have heard Carlyle tell how the event impressed him,
and how he went to see the funeral procession of the old scholar start
from the High School yard at the foot of Infirmary Street. With a number
of other boys, he said, he hung on by the railings outside, looking in
upon the gathered assemblage of mourners. He seemed to remember the
scene with peculiar vividness; for, after picturing himself as a boy
hanging on by the High School railings, and watching the incidents
within, he added, “Ay me! that moment then, and this now, and nothing
but the rushing of Time’s wings between!”[10] He had a liking to the
last for old Dr. Adam. I have heard him say that any Scotsman who was at
a loss on the subject of _shall_ and _will_ would find the whole
doctrine in a nutshell in two or three lucid sentences of Dr. Adam’s
Latin Grammar; and I had an idea at the time that he had used this brief
precept of Dr. Adam’s little book in his own early practice of English.
At the date of Dr. Adam’s death Carlyle had been for six weeks a student
in the University, with pupils of Dr. Adam among his fellow-students on
the same benches. One can see his matriculation signature, “Thomas
Carlyle,” in his own hand,—a clear and good boyish hand, differing
considerably from that which he afterwards wrote,—in the alphabetically
arranged matriculation list of the Arts Students of the session 1809–10.
It is the sixth signature under the letter C, the immediately preceding
signature being that of a Dumfries youth named “Irvine Carlyle” (spelt
so, and not “Irving Carlyle,”) of whom there is mention in the
_Reminiscences_. It is clear that the two Carlyles were drawn to each
other by community of name and county, if not by kin, and had gone up
for matriculation together.
The College of those days was not the present complete quadrangle, but a
chaotic jumble of inconvenient old class-rooms, with only parts of the
present building risen among them, and finished and occupied. The
classes which Carlyle attended in his first session were the 1st
Humanity Class, under Professor Alexander Christison, and the 1st Greek
Class, under Professor George Dunbar. From an examination of the records
I find that among his class-fellows in both classes were the aforesaid
Irving Carlyle, and Lord Inverurie, afterwards seventh Earl of Kintore,
and that among his class-fellows in the 1st Greek Class was the late
venerable Earl of Wemyss, then Lord Elcho. Neither from the records nor
from the _Reminiscences_ can anything be gathered of the history of the
two classes through the session, or of the place taken in each by the
young Dumfriesshire boy among the medley of his fellow-students, from
150 to 200 in number. The Latin class-room, we do learn from the
_Reminiscences_, was a very dark room, so that Professor Christison,
having two students of the name of Carlyle, never succeeded in
distinguishing the one from the other; which was all the harder, Carlyle
thought, because the other Carlyle, Mr. Irving Carlyle, was not only
different physically, being “an older, considerably bigger boy, with red
hair, wild buck teeth, and scorched complexion,” but was also the worst
Latinist in the whole class. Carlyle himself had been so well grounded
in Latin at Annan School that probably he could have held his own in the
class even against Dr. Adam’s pupils from the Edinburgh High School. To
the end of his life, at all events, he was a fair Latinist. To Greek he
never in later life made any pretence; and whatever Greek he did learn
from Dunbar,—which can have been but small in quantity,—must have faded
through disuse. He retained, however, a high admiration for the
_Elementa Linguæ Græcæ_ of Dr. James Moor of Glasgow,—which was, I
suppose, the Greek grammar then used in Dunbar’s class,—thinking it the
very best grammar of any language for teaching purposes he had ever
seen.
While we know so little of Carlyle’s Greek and Latin studies in his
first University session, it is something to know that he was a pretty
diligent reader of books that session from the College Library. Having
examined a dusty old folio of the library receipts and outgoings, which
chances to have been preserved, I am able to report that Carlyle had
duly paid, before December 1809, his deposit or security of one guinea,
entitling him to take books out, and that, in that month and the
succeeding month of January 1810, he had out the following books, in
parcels or in succession, in the following order:—Robertson’s _History
of Scotland_, vol. ii.; Cook’s _Voyages_; Byron’s _Narrative_, _i.e._
“the Hon. John Byron’s Narrative of the Great Distresses suffered by
Himself and his Companions on the Coast of Patagonia, 1740–6”; the first
volume of Gibbon; two volumes of Shakespeare; a volume of the _Arabian
Nights_; Congreve’s Works; another volume of the _Arabian Nights_; two
volumes of Hume’s _England_; _Gil Blas_; a third volume of Shakespeare;
and a volume of the _Spectator_. This is a sufficiently remarkable
series of volumes for a boy of fourteen to have had out from the College
library; and other books from other libraries may have been lying at the
same time on the table in the small room in Simon Square which he shared
with Tom Smail. What is most remarkable is the run upon books of voyages
and travels, and on classic books of English literature, or books of
mere literary amusement, rather than on academic books. Clearly there
had been a great deal of previous and very miscellaneous reading at
Ecclefechan and Annan, with the already formed result of a passion for
reading, and very decided notions and tastes as to the kinds of books
that might be worth looking after. But how, whether at Ecclefechan or in
Annan, had the sedate boy been attracted to Congreve?
At the close of Carlyle’s first college session in April 1810 he
returned to Ecclefechan. He was met on the road near the village, as he
tells us so touchingly in his _Reminiscences_, by his father, who had
walked out, “with a red plaid about him,” on the chance of seeing Tom
coming; and the whole of the vacation was spent by him at home in his
father’s house. It is not, therefore, till the beginning of the session
of 1810–11 that we again hear of him in Edinburgh. He then duly
matriculated for his second session, his signature again standing in the
alphabetical Arts matriculation-list immediately after that of his
namesake “Irving Carlyle” (now spelt so). His classes for this session
were the 1st Mathematical Class, under Professor John Leslie, and the
Logic Class, under Professor David Ritchie; and I have found no note of
his having gone back that year, or any other, for a second course of
Latin from Professor Christison. In the 1st Mathematical Class,
consisting of seventy students, he had again Irving Carlyle on the
benches with him; in the Logic Class, consisting of 194 students, the
same Irving Carlyle was one of his fellow-students, and the late Earl of
Wemyss was another. What he made of the Logic Class we have not the
least intimation; and it is only by inference that we know that he must
have distinguished himself in the Mathematical Class and given evidences
there of his unusual mathematical ability. As before, however, he found
variation, or diversion, from his work for the classes by diligent
reading in his lodgings. Between Saturday the 1st December 1810 and
Saturday 9th March 1811, I find, he took from the University library the
following books in the following order:—_Voyages and Travels_, the 15th
volume of some collection under that name; a volume of Fielding’s works;
a volume of Smollett; Reid’s _Inquiry into the Human Mind_; a book
called _Scotland Described_; two more volumes of Fielding’s works;
Locke’s _Essay_ in folio; another volume of Fielding; a volume of
_Anacharsis_, _i.e._, of an English Translation of the Abbé Barthélémy’s
Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece during the middle of the
Fourth Century before the Christian Era; and a volume of some
translation of _Don Quixote_. His choice of books, it will be seen, is
still very independent. Reid’s _Inquiry_ and Locke’s _Essay_ connect
themselves with the work in the Logic Class; but the other volumes were
evidently for mere amusement. Whether it was still in the lodging in
Simon Square, and with Smail for his chum, that these books were read,
is uncertain. His comradeship with Smail continued, indeed, he tells us,
over two sessions; but the lodging may have been changed. It was still,
doubtless, somewhere near the University.
For the session of 1811–12 the Matriculation Book is not alphabetically
in Faculties, but general or mixed for the three Faculties of Arts, Law,
and Medicine. There were 1475 students for those three Faculties
conjointly; and “Thomas Carlyle, Ecclefechan,” appears among them, his
matriculation number being 966. That session, his third at the
University, he attended the 2d Greek Class, under Dunbar, the 2d
Mathematical Class, under Leslie, and the Moral Philosophy Class, under
Dr. Thomas Brown. In the Greek Class, which consisted of 189 students,
he had among his class-fellows the late venerable Sir Robert Christison,
Sir Robert’s twin-brother, Alexander Christison, the late Earl of Wemyss
again, his brother, the Honourable Walter Charteris, a Thomas Murray
from Kirkcudbrightshire, afterwards a well-known citizen of Edinburgh,
the inextinguishable Irving Carlyle, and an Andrew Combe, whom I
identify with the subsequently well-known Dr. Andrew Combe, the brother
of George Combe the phrenologist. In the Mathematical Class, which
numbered forty-six, there were several Dumfriesshire students besides
himself; and it was in this 2d Mathematical Class, if the tradition is
correct, that Carlyle took the first prize,—another Dumfriesshire youth,
who lived in the same lodging with him, taking the second. I have turned
with most interest, in this session, to the “List of Students attending
Dr. Thomas Brown’s Class,” preserved in the peculiarly neat, small
handwriting of Dr. Brown himself. It was the second session of Brown’s
full tenure of the Professorship of Moral Philosophy in succession to
Dugald Stewart, and the fame of his lectures was at its highest. The
class consisted of 151 students; and among them, besides Carlyle and his
inseparable Irving Carlyle, and a Robert Mitchell and a Paulus Aemilius
Irving, both from Dumfriesshire, there were Duncan McNeill, afterwards
Lord Colonsay, his brother, John McNeill, Sir Andrew Agnew, David Welsh,
afterwards Dr. David Welsh and Professor of Church History, and a James
Bisset from Aberdeenshire, whom I identify with the late Rev. Dr. Bisset
of Bourtie. Some of these were outsiders, already in the Divinity or Law
Classes, who had returned to the Moral Philosophy Class for the benefit
of Dr. Brown’s brilliant lectures,—notably young David Welsh, who had
already attended the class for two sessions, but was full of enthusiasm
for Brown, whose biographer and editor he was to be in time. Carlyle, I
am sorry to say, was not one of the admirers of the brilliant Brown.
Over and over again I have heard him speak of Brown, and always with
mimicry and contempt, as “a finical man they called Brown, or sometimes
Missy Brown, that used to spout poetry.” This can hardly have been out
of disregard for metaphysics as such, for he had much respect for Dugald
Stewart, the then retired professor. The dislike seems to have been
partly personal, partly to the new kind of highly ingenious metaphysics
which Brown was trying to substitute for the older and more orthodox
Scottish Philosophy of Reid and Stewart. At all events, it is worthy of
note that those brilliant lectures of Thomas Brown, which James Mill and
John Stuart Mill admired so much in their published form, regarding them
as an introduction to much that is best in modern British Philosophy,
had no effect, in their actual delivery, on the hard-headed young
Carlyle, but fell upon him as mere dazzle and moonshine.
As Carlyle tells us incidentally that he was in Edinburgh in the summer
of 1812, it is to be supposed that he spent less of that vacation than
usual in his Dumfriesshire home. I find also that he matriculated rather
late in our books for the session of 1812–13, his name not appearing in
the first or main matriculation list, but only in a supplementary list,
and then as “Thomas Carlyle, Hoddam, Dumfriesshire.” His father had by
that time given up his trade of mason, and had left Ecclefechan to try a
small farm in the neighbourhood. The number of students matriculated
that year in the three faculties of Arts, Law, and Medicine, was 1503;
and Carlyle’s matriculation number was 1403. The classes in which he was
enrolled for that session, his fourth and last in Arts, were Leslie’s 2d
Mathematical Class (attended a second time, we may suppose, for such
higher instruction as might be fit for very advanced students), and the
Natural Philosophy Class, under Professor John Playfair. In this last
session, accordingly, as a student only of Mathematics and Physics, with
no distraction towards either Classics or Mental Philosophy, Carlyle may
be said to have been in his element. He worked very hard in both
classes, and distinguished himself in both. My own impression, from
talks with him on the subject, is that he was, by acknowledgment of
professors and fellow-students, easily supreme in both. Leslie’s second
class that year numbered but forty-one students, and it was natural that
his most distinguished student in two previous sessions should now be
familiar with him and receive his especial notice. Certain it is that of
all the Professors of Edinburgh University in Carlyle’s time Leslie was
the only one of whom he spoke always with something of real gratitude
and affection. The affection was mixed, indeed, with a kind of laughing
remembrance of Leslie’s odd, corpulent figure, and odd rough ways; and
he would describe with particular gusto the occasional effects of
Leslie’s persistent habit of using hair-dyes, as when a streak of pink
or green would be observable amid the dark-brown or black on those less
accessible parts of his head where the chemicals had been too liberally
or too rashly applied. But he had a real esteem for Leslie’s great
abilities, and remembered him as a man to whose mathematical
instructions, and to whose private kindness, he owed much.——A greater
Hero with him in Pure Mathematics than even Leslie, I may mention
parenthetically, was the now totally-forgotten John West, who had been
assistant-teacher of Mathematics in the University of St. Andrews for
some time from about 1780 onwards, and of whom Leslie, Ivory, and all
the other ablest mathematicians sent forth from that University, had
been pupils. Of this man, whom he knew of only by tradition, but whom he
regarded as, after Robert Simson of Glasgow, the most original
geometrical genius there had been in Scotland, I have heard him talk I
know not how often. He would sketch West’s life, from the time of his
hard and little-appreciated labours at St. Andrews to his death in the
West Indies, whither he had emigrated in despair for some chaplaincy or
the like; he would avow his belief that Leslie had derived some of his
best ideas from that poor man; and he expressed pleasure at finding I
knew something of West independently, and had a copy of West’s rare
_Elements of Mathematics_, published in 1784. That book, obsolete now,
was, I have no doubt, a manual with Carlyle while he was studying
Mathematics in Edinburgh University, as I chance to know it had been
with Dr. Chalmers at St. Andrews in _his_ earlier mathematical days.——Of
Leslie’s colleague, the celebrated Playfair, formerly in the
Mathematical Chair, but since 1805 in that of Natural Philosophy,
Carlyle had a less affectionate recollection personally than of Leslie.
Sharing, I believe, the common opinion of Playfair’s great merits, and
minutely acquainted with the facts of his life, as indeed he was with
the biographies of all persons of any mark with whom he had come into
contact, he rather resented a piece of injustice which he thought
Playfair had done to himself. There were 131 students in the Natural
Philosophy Class in 1812–13; and Carlyle, as he assured me, was single
in that whole number for having performed and given in every one of all
the prescribed exercises, mathematical or other. Another Dumfriesshire
student, who came next to him, had failed in one, and that the most
difficult. Naturally, at the end of the session, he expected that his
certificate would correspond to his distinction in the class; and it was
of some consequence to him that it should. But, when he called at
Playfair’s house for the certificate, and it was delivered to him by a
man-servant, he was a good deal disappointed. The usual form of the
wording for a good student was to the effect that the Professor
certified that so-and-so had attended the class in such and such a
session and had “made good proficiency in his studies.” In Carlyle’s
case there was a certain deviation from this form, but only to the
effect that he had attended the class and that the Professor “_had
reason to know_ that he had made good proficiency in his studies.” I can
remember Carlyle’s laugh as he told me of this delicate distinction; and
I have always treasured the anecdote as a lesson for professors. They
ought to be very careful not only in noting talent on the benches before
them, but also in _signifying_ what they have noted, if only because, as
in Playfair’s case, they may be sometimes entertaining an angel
unawares, and some angels have severe memories.
We have thus brought Carlyle to the summer of 1813, when he had
completed his Arts course in the University of Edinburgh, and was in the
eighteenth year of his age. Though qualified, according to the present
standard, for the degree of M.A., he did not take it; but in that he was
not in the least singular. In those days hardly any Edinburgh student
ever thought of taking a degree in Arts; as far as Edinburgh University
was concerned, the M.A. degree had fallen into almost complete disuse;
and not till within very recent memory has it become customary again.
After his course in Arts, therefore, Carlyle, with 95 per cent of those
of his contemporaries who had passed the same course, was in the
position merely of a _virtual_ M.A., who had obtained the best education
in Literature, Science, and Philosophy that the Edinburgh University
could afford. His own estimate of the worth of that was not very high.
Without assuming that he meant the university described in _Sartor
Resartus_ to stand literally for the Edinburgh University of his own
experience, we have seen enough to show that any specific training of
much value he considered himself to owe to his four years in the Arts
classes in Edinburgh University was the culture of his mathematical
faculty under Leslie, and that, for the rest, he acknowledged merely a
certain benefit from having been in so many class-rooms, where matters
intellectual were professedly in the atmosphere, and where he learnt to
take advantage of books. “What I have found the University did for me,”
he said definitely in his _Rectorial Address_ of 1866, “is that it
taught me to read, in various languages, in various sciences, so that I
could go into the books which treated of these things, and gradually
penetrate into any department I wanted to make myself master of, as I
found it suit me.” Similarly, in his _Sartor Resartus_, he made
Teufelsdröckh declare that his chief benefit at the University had been
from his private use of the University library. “From the chaos of that
library I succeeded in fishing up more books perhaps than had been known
to the very keepers thereof. The foundation of a literary life was
hereby laid: I learned, on my own strength, to read fluently in almost
all cultivated languages, on almost all subjects and sciences.” This may
describe Carlyle’s own use of the University library all in all, but
hardly his use of it during the four years of his Arts course. Only in
Latin and French, and to some small extent in Greek, could he then have
ranged beyond English in his readings; nor can his readings, in whatever
language, have been then so vast and miscellaneous as Teufelsdröckh’s.
We have seen, on the irrefragable evidence of preserved registers, what
were the books, numbering between twenty and thirty volumes in all,
which he actually took out from the University library in the first two
winter-sessions of his course; and, though the series is very
interesting, with some signs even of oddity, it contains hardly a book
that the librarians would have had any difficulty in “fishing up.” I
regret that, from the destruction or at least the disappearance of the
library registers for a considerable lapse of years immediately after
Carlyle’s second session, I am unable to exhibit his readings in his
third and fourth sessions. The list for those two sessions, when he was
passing from his sixteenth year to his eighteenth, and had been bitten
by mathematics and physical science, would doubtless have been even more
interesting, and probably more extensive and various, than that for the
two sessions preceding. That he did continue to be a very diligent
reader from the College library I positively know. He used to draw a
ludicrous picture of the library accommodations of those days, when the
books were in one of the surviving old buildings on one side of the
present quadrangle. As I understood him, the students came at definite
hours, and ranged themselves in _queue_ in some passage, or at some
entry, waiting for the opening of the door, and perhaps battering at it
when the sub-librarian inside was dilatory. He was a sulky gentleman, of
Celtic blood and stout build, who regarded the readers as his natural
enemies; and, when he did open the door, he generally presented himself
in _rear_ to the impatient crowd, taking care to bend his body at the
final moment so as to administer one last impediment of contempt for the
entrants and send some of them sprawling. That was the kind of
encouragement to reading, by Carlyle’s account, that he and other
University students had in those days. To the end of his life he was all
but savage in his resentment of difficulties thrown in the way of access
to books by those who had charge of them; and the great Panizzi of the
British Museum came in for a good deal of his wrath in private on this
account.
“Entertaining an angel unawares” is the phrase I have used to indicate
the relations of Carlyle’s teachers in the University to the then
unknown young man that sat in their class-rooms. In fact, Carlyle, when
he left the University in 1813, a virtual M.A., aged seventeen years and
four months, was already potentially the very Carlyle we now revere, in
consequence of his subsequent life, as one of the greatest and noblest
spirits of his generation. Not yet at his full stature (which, when I
knew him first in his yet unbent manhood, was over five feet eleven
inches), and of thin, lean, rather gaunt frame (he told me himself he
had never weighed more than about ten stone), he was a youth of as great
faculty, as noble promise, as Scotland had produced since her Burns,
born in 1759, and her Scott, born in 1771. This, or something very
little short of this, seems to have been already recognised by those who
knew him intimately. They were not many; for he was of peculiarly proud,
shy, and reserved ways, if not even morose and unsocial. Poverty also
kept him back. It was not for an Ecclefechan lad, chumming with one or
two others in like circumstances in a poor lodging in Simon Square, or
some other Old Town locality, and receiving his meagre supplies from
home, to mix much with general Edinburgh society. The celebrities of
that society, indeed, were no longer strangers to him by name or sight,
as they had been on his first Edinburgh walk with Smail in 1809. He
mentions particularly that Jeffrey’s face and figure had been quite
familiar to him since 1811 by visits to the Parliament House; and the
same visits, or walks in Princes Street, must have made him familiar
with the face and figure of Scott, and the faces and figures of not a
few others that were among the civic somebodies of their time. But it
was by sight only, and by no more introduction than he had to Arthur
Seat or Holyrood House, that he knew those important personages; and
into the circles in which they moved he had never entered. Even the
Professors of the University, if we except Leslie, seem to have been
known to him only by their aspects in college or the vicinity. Further,
his acquaintanceships among his fellow-students do not appear to have
been numerous. He is not known to have been a member of any of the
literary and debating societies which in those days, as in these, were
so important an appendage to the apparatus of lectures, class-rooms, and
library, and which draw young men together so congenially for the
exchange of ideas, the exercise of oratory, and the formation of lasting
friendships between kindred souls. His habits were those of solitary
reading and musing, with intercourse only with a few companions,
clannishly selected for the most part from among the Dumfriesshire or
Galloway lads who could claim him as their district-compatriot, whose
families he knew, and with one or other of whom he had made his
pedestrian journeys homewards at the ends of the sessions. Smail has now
vanished from his side; and we hear chiefly of James Johnstone,
afterwards schoolmaster of Haddington, the Robert Mitchell already
mentioned as one of his fellow-students in the Moral Philosophy class, a
Thomas Mitchell, afterwards one of the classical masters in the
Edinburgh Academy, and the Thomas Murray already mentioned as having
been with him in the 2d Greek class. To these has to be added, on the
faith of certain extant letters, a certain clever and whimsical
fellow-student of the name of Hill, who used to delight in signing
himself “Peter Pindar.” In the circle of these, and of others whose
names are forgotten, young Carlyle, at the time of his leaving college,
was already an object of admiration and respect passing all that is
ordinary in such cases of juvenile _camaraderie_. Intellectually and
morally, he had impressed them as absolutely _unique_ among them
all,—such a combination of strength of character, rugged independence of
manner, prudence, great literary powers, high aspirations and ambition,
habitual despondency, and a variety of other humours, ranging from the
ferociously sarcastic to the wildly tender, that it was impossible to
set limits to what he was likely to become in the world.
The proofs are extant in documents of a date only a few months in
advance of our present point. On the 1st of January 1814, the
above-mentioned Hill, who seems to have been the freest and most jocose
in his style of address to Carlyle, and had nicknamed him “The Dean” or
“The Doctor,” by some implied comparison with Dean Swift, wrote to him
as follows.—“You mention some two or three disappointments you have met
with lately. For shame, sir, to be so peevish and splenetic! Your
disappointments are trifles light as air when compared with the
vexations and disappointments _I_ have experienced.” Again, in a letter
dated the 9th of May in the same year, he begins:—“Dear Doctor, I
received yours last night; and a scurrilous, blackguardly, flattering,
vexing, pernickety, humorous, witty, daft letter it is. Shall I answer
it piecemeal, as a certain Honourable House does a speech from its
sovereign, by echoing back each syllable? No; this won’t do. Oh! how I
envy you, Dean, that you can run on in such an off-hand way, ever
varying the scene with wit and mirth, while honest Peter must hold on in
one numskull track to all eternity, pursuing the even tenor of his way,
so that one of Peter’s letters is as good as a thousand.”[11] More
significant and serious is the following from one of the preserved
letters to Carlyle by his friend Thomas Murray, the date “July 27,” and
presumably of the year 1814:—“I have had the pleasure of receiving, my
dear Carlyle, your very humorous and friendly letter, a letter
remarkable for vivacity, a Shandean turn of expression, and an
affectionate pathos, which indicate a peculiar turn of mind, make
sincerity doubly striking, and wit doubly poignant. You flatter me with
saying my letter was good; but allow me to observe that among all my
elegant and respectable correspondents there is none whose manner of
letter-writing I so much envy as yours. A happy flow of language, either
for pathos, description, or humour, and an easy, graceful current of
ideas appropriate to every subject, characterise your style. This is not
adulation; I speak what I think. Your letters will always be a feast to
me, a varied and exquisite repast; and the time, I hope, will come, but
I trust is far distant, when these, our juvenile epistles, will be read
and publicly applauded by a generation unborn, and the name of Carlyle
at least will be inseparably connected with the Literary History of the
Nineteenth Century.”[12] Strangely enough, Carlyle’s answer to this
letter has survived, and it is no less memorable:—“Oh Tom!” it says,
“what a foolish flattering creature thou art! To talk of future eminence
in connection with the Literary History of the Nineteenth Century to
such a one as me! Alas! my good lad, when I and all my fancies and
reveries and speculations shall have been swept over by the besom of
oblivion, the Literary History of no century will feel itself the worse.
Yet think not, because I talk thus, I am careless about literary fame.
No, Heaven knows that, ever since I have been able to form a wish, the
wish of being known has been the foremost. O Fortune! thou that givest
unto each his portion on this dirty planet, bestow, if it shall please
thee, coronets and crowns, and principalities and purses, and pudding
and power, upon the great and noble and fat ones of the earth; grant
_me_ that, with a heart of independence, unyielding to thy favours and
unbending to thy frowns, I may attain to literary fame,—and, though
starvation be my lot, I will smile that I have not been born a
King.”[13]
Brave words these from the moody lad we saw, not five years ago,
plodding up to Edinburgh from Ecclefechan, hardly fourteen years of age,
with Tom Smail for pilot. From these words, and from the letters from
Hill and Murray with which they connect themselves, we learn two things
which I think we should have hardly known otherwise. One is the fact of
Carlyle’s decisive passion for literature at this early period of his
life, and of his reputation then among his intimates for great powers
and acquirements of the purely literary kind. My own fancy, confirmed by
one particular talk I had with him during a walk along the Thames
Embankment and in the Temple Gardens, had rather been that the passion
for literature came latish in his case, and that his original bent had
been wholly the mathematical. He certainly did tell me that he had not
cared much for poetry, or thought much about matters verbal, till the
enthusiasm of an older companion, who used to recite Campbell’s lyrics
and dwell with ecstasy on their beauties, came as a revelation to him
and set him on fire with a similar passion. My mistake must have been in
post-dating the reminiscence. He must have referred, I now see, not to
so late a period as that of his college life in Edinburgh, but to the
previous days of his mere boyhood in Ecclefechan and at Annan school.
Indeed, we have already seen, in the list of his readings from the
college library in his first two sessions, that he must have brought
with him to the University some strongly formed literary tastes and
likings of Ecclefechan and Annan origin. Connecting this piece of
evidence with that of the just-quoted letters of himself and his friends
in 1814, we are entitled, I think, now to assume the literary stratum to
have been the deeper and more primitive in Carlyle’s constitution, and
the mathematical vein to have been a superposition upon that. At all
events, it is clear that in 1814, when he had concluded his Arts course
in the University, it was for his literary powers that he was the wonder
of his little circle, and it was on those powers that he set most store
himself. For the letters reveal to us yet a second contradiction of what
we might have supposed otherwise. No man was ever more contemptuous of
fame, and especially of literary fame, than Carlyle was in conversation
in his later life. The very phrase “desire for fame,” or any synonym for
it, if used in his presence as the name of a worthy motive to exertion
of any kind, would have provoked his most scathing scorn. He had no
patience for “that last infirmity of noble mind,” and would have
regarded even such a designation for the feeling as much too honourable.
Yet, as we have seen, he had not escaped the malady himself. Call the
ambition after fame by the homeliest name of sarcasm you please,—call it
the measles of budding genius,—and the fact, on the evidence of
Carlyle’s own confession, is that the attack in his case had been even
more severe than it had been in the case of Burns, much more severe than
we know it to have been in the case of Scott, and quite as severe as the
records show it to have been in the case of young Chalmers. The
condition of his mind, in his nineteenth year, with all his moodiness,
all his self-despondency, was that of settled literary ambition, an
appetency after literary distinction all but enormous. That this rested
on honest consciousness of his own extraordinary powers, and was
accompanied by a resolve, as deep as was ever in any young man’s heart,
that the fame for which he craved should be won, if won at all, only by
noble and manly methods, there is no room for doubt. There we see him
standing, an unknown youth, teeth clenched and face determined, fronting
the world, and anticipating his own future in it, with something of that
feeling which, call it what we may, and smile at it as any one may in
the retrospect, has probably, by God’s own ordinance, filled every great
and honest heart at the outset of a great career:—
Lay the vain impostors low!
Blockheads fall in every foe;
Splendour comes with every blow;
Let me do or die.
Meanwhile the near future was not very inspiring. Hardly by any wish of
his own, but in deference to the fond hopes of his father and mother,
and to those social necessities which made the clerical career the only
natural and possible one in those days for an educated Scottish youth
from the humbler ranks, Carlyle had proceeded to qualify himself for the
ministry. Not, however, for the ministry in that Nonconforming
communion, called “the Burgher Seceders,” to which his parents belonged,
but, apparently with no objection on their part, in the Established or
National Scottish Church.[14] Now, the regular qualification for the
ministry of the Scottish Church in those days, after a student had
passed his Arts course in the University, consisted in further
attendance for four winter-sessions in the Divinity Hall of one of the
Universities, for instruction in Theology, Hebrew, and Church History,
and for the delivery of so many trial-discourses, one in Latin and the
rest in English, at appointed intervals. But, to accommodate students
whose means made it difficult for them to reside in town during four
consecutive winters, there was a device of “partial sessions,” by which
a certain small amount of personal appearance in the Divinity Hall, if
protracted over six sessions, and duly signalised by delivery of the
required discourses, was accepted as sufficient. By the former plan,
Carlyle, entering the Divinity Hall in Edinburgh in the session 1813–14,
immediately after his last session in Arts, would have been a qualified
probationer or preacher in the Scottish Church, and eligible for a fixed
parochial charge, in 1817, _i.e._ in his twenty-second year. The other
plan, however, permitting him to find some occupation out of Edinburgh,
if it could be had, and so to spare his parents further expense in his
education, was altogether the more convenient. His connection with
Edinburgh was not yet over; but it was to be continued only in the form
of such occasional visits through six years as might enable him to pass
as “licentiate” or “probationer” in 1819, _i.e._ in his twenty-fourth
year. _That_, however he may have reconciled it to his ambition or to
his conscience, was his immediate worldly outlook.
Divinity students did not need to register in the general Matriculation
Book of the University, as the Arts, Medicine, and Law students did; and
so we have not that means of tracing Carlyle’s connection with the
University during his Divinity course. Another Thomas Carlyle, indeed,
is found in the matriculation lists and in the Arts classes, just after
_our_ Carlyle had left those classes; but he is a Thomas Carlyle from
Galloway, and is probably the person to whom Carlyle refers angrily as
his troublesome _double-goer_, about whom and himself mistakes were
constantly occurring, from this early period in the lives of both, on
even to the time when this Thomas Carlyle was an “Angel” in the
Irvingite Church and an author of books, and took the precaution of
distinguishing himself always on his title-pages as “Thomas Carlyle,
_Advocate_.” It is in the special Divinity Hall Registers that we should
look now for _our_ Carlyle. Unfortunately, these Registers are
defective. I have not found a list of the Divinity Hall students for
1813–14, though I believe it must have been in that session that Carlyle
entered himself in the books of Dr. William Ritchie, the chief Divinity
Professor, as going on nominally in the Divinity course, if not
attending lectures. The only sessions in which I do find his name
registered are those of 1814–15 and 1817–18, both times as “Thomas
Carlyle, Hoddam,” and both times as one of 183 students then attending
the Divinity Hall. Whether this means that his attendance in those two
sessions amounted to something more real than in those in which his name
is not found, I cannot determine, though I should like to be able to do
so. It would be a pleasure to me to know to what real extent Carlyle
attended the lectures of Dr. Ritchie in Divinity and of Dr. Hugh
Meiklejohn in Church History; and it would be a greater pleasure to me
to know whether he ever sat in the Hebrew class-room and was called up
by Dr. Alexander Brunton to read a bit from the Hebrew Bible. For I had
the fortune to be a disciple of this “Rabbi Brunton” myself in the same
Hebrew class a great many years afterwards, when he was a very old
gentleman, a wonder of antique clerical neatness in his dress, and with
a great bald head, and large, pink, bland face, which it did one good to
look at. That was all the good you got, however; for, though he
professed to teach Hebrew in two sessions, with the elements of Chaldee
and Syriac, and, I think, Arabic in addition, the amount of linguistic
instruction he gave, or was capable of giving, was as if you had boiled
ten chapters of the Hebrew Bible in the same kettle with three or four
leaves of Hebrew and Chaldee grammar, and drunk the concoction in a
series of doses. Carlyle on Rabbi Brunton’s benches would have been a
picture for my fancy worth a thousand; and I wish now I had asked him
whether he _did_ attend the Hebrew class. Once I spoke to him of
Brunton’s predecessor in the Hebrew chair, Dr. Alexander Murray, a real
linguist, and one of the finest minds of his time in Scotland, as any
one may see who will read his letters published in that most delightful
of recent books of literary anecdote, _Archibald Constable and his
Literary Correspondents_, edited by the late Thomas Constable. This fine
scholar and thinker had died in 1813, after having held the Hebrew chair
only one year; and Brunton, who had been a rival candidate with him, had
stepped into his place. That had been in the last year of Carlyle’s Arts
course, and he retained no more than a vague recollection of Murray’s
figure as seen about the College.
What makes it all the likelier that Carlyle did begin his Divinity
course in 1813–14, and did give some attendance in the Divinity Hall
that session, is that he informs us in his _Reminiscences_ that he was
in Edinburgh in May 1814, and was among the audience in the General
Assembly of the Kirk for that year, when he heard Jeffrey plead, and
Drs. Hill and Inglis, and also Dr. Chalmers, speak. The annual meeting
of the General Assembly in May was then, as it is now, a great affair;
and it would have been the most natural thing in the world for a young
student of Divinity, fresh from his first session at the Hall, to be in
the gallery of the Assembly, to see the physiognomies of the leaders,
Moderate or Evangelical, and to hear the debates. If he _had_ resided in
Edinburgh through the preceding session, the probability is that he had
teaching engagements which helped to pay his expenses. We do not,
however, hear definitely of any such teaching employment in Edinburgh in
1813–14, but only that, later in 1814, he applied for the vacant
mathematical mastership in his own school of Annan, won the post by
competition in Dumfries, and settled in Annan to perform the duties.
The Annan mathematical mastership lasted about two years, or from the
autumn of 1814 to the autumn of 1816, bringing Carlyle from his
nineteenth year to his twenty-first. His receipts were between £60 and
£70 a year; and he boarded in the house of Mr. Glen, the Burgher
minister of Annan, where he read prodigiously at nights in all sorts of
books, latterly sitting up till three in the morning over Newton’s
_Principia_. But, though the Glens were pleasant, kind people, and he
was not far from his father’s house, and had two or three good friends
in the neighbourhood,—one of them the Rev. Henry Duncan of Ruthwell, a
man of many accomplishments, and the real founder of Savings Banks,—he
found himself, on the whole, “lonesome, uncomfortable, and out of
place.” His character among the Annan people was that of “morose
dissociableness,” and he detested his school-work.
The two visits which he paid to Edinburgh in the course of the two years
were bright interruptions in his dull routine. The first was about the
Christmas of 1814, only a few months after he had gone to Annan. His
purpose was to read the first of his trial-discourses in the Divinity
Hall,—that being, as we have supposed, his second session in Divinity,
and one of the two sessions in which, as we have seen, his name occurs
in the Divinity Hall lists. The discourse was an English sermon on the
text (Psalm cxix. 67): “_Before I was afflicted I went astray; but now
have I kept Thy Word._” It was, he says, “a very weak, flowery, and
sentimental piece,”—which we may believe if we like. The second visit
was in the Christmas-time of 1815, for the delivery of his second
discourse, a Latin exegesis on the question, “_Num detur Religio
Naturalis?_” (“Is a Natural Religion possible?”) This too, he supposes,
was “weak enough,” though the writing of the Latin had given him some
satisfaction, and there had been some momentary pleasure in “the bits of
compliments and flimsy approbation from comrades and professors” which
greeted this performance, as indeed had been the case with the previous
year’s sermon. But this visit of the Christmas of 1815 was memorable to
him for something more than the delivery of his exegesis. That trouble
off his mind, he was taking a holiday week, and looking up old Edinburgh
acquaintances; and it was one night, when he was in Rose Street, sitting
rather silently in the rooms of a certain Waugh, a distant cousin of his
own, and his predecessor in the Annan mastership, that the door opened,
and there stepped in Edward Irving, accompanied by an Edinburgh
mathematical teacher named Nichol. Carlyle had once seen Irving casually
long before in the Annan schoolroom, when Irving called there as a
former boy of the school, home from the University with prizes and
honours; he had heard much of Irving since,—especially of his continued
University triumphs and his brilliant success in schoolmastering, first
in the new academy he had set up in Haddington, and more recently in a
similar academy at Kirkcaldy; but this was their first real meeting. It
was, as Carlyle tells us, by no means promising. Irving, in a somewhat
grandiose way, asked Carlyle this and that about what was going on in
Annan. Carlyle, irritated a little by his air of superiority, answered
more and more succinctly, till at last to such questions as “Has Mrs. ——
got a baby? Is it a son or daughter?” his answers were merely that he
did not know. “You seem to know nothing,” said Irving, after one or two
rebuffs of the kind. “To which,” says Carlyle, “I, with prompt emphasis,
somewhat provoked, replied, ‘Sir, by what right do you try my knowledge
in this way? Are you the grand inquisitor, or have you authority to
question people and cross-question at discretion? I have had no interest
to inform myself about the births in Annan, and care not if the process
of birth and generation there should cease and determine altogether.’”
There might be worse subjects for a painter than this first meeting
between Irving and Carlyle. The very room in Rose Street, I suppose,
still exists, and there would be little difficulty in imagining the
group. On one side, staggering from the blow he has just received, we
see the Herculean Irving, three-and-twenty years of age, with coal-black
hair, and handsome and jovial visage, despite his glaring squint; seated
on the other side we see the thinner and more bilious figure of the
stripling Carlyle, just after he has delivered the blow; and Waugh and
Nichol stand between, looking on and laughing.[15]
The next meeting of Carlyle and Irving was in Annan about six months
afterwards. In the interval the Kirkcaldy people, many of whom were
dissatisfied with Irving’s conduct in the new academy there, and
especially with the severity of his discipline among the young ones, had
resolved on resuscitating their regular or Burgh School; and, on the
recommendation of Professors Leslie and Christison, Carlyle had been
offered the mastership of that school. If Carlyle accepted and went to
Kirkcaldy, it would thus be as Irving’s rival. The meeting, therefore,
might have been awkward but for Irving’s magnanimity. He invited Carlyle
cordially to be his guest in the preliminary visit he meditated to
Kirkcaldy for the purpose of inquiry; said that his books were at
Carlyle’s service, that two Annandale men must not be strangers in
Fifeshire, etc. Accordingly, when Carlyle did accept the appointment,
and transfer himself from Annan to Kirkcaldy in the autumn of 1816, the
two became inseparable. They were the David and Jonathan of Kirkcaldy
town; and one of the pleasantest parts of Carlyle’s _Reminiscences_ is
his description of those Kirkcaldy days, from 1816 to the end of 1818,
when he and Irving were constantly together, walking on the Kirkcaldy
sands, or making Saturday excursions to Fifeshire places round about, or
boating expeditions on the Firth, or longer rambles in holiday time to
the Lochlomond country and the West, or to their native Dumfriesshire by
Moffat and the Yarrow. Irving was by this time a licensed preacher in
the Scottish Church; and Carlyle attended him in his occasional
preachings in Kirkcaldy or the neighbourhood, or accompanied him to hear
other preachers,—once, for example, to Dunfermline to hear Dr. Chalmers.
This was the time too of some memorable incidents of more private mark
in the lives of the two young men. It was the time of Irving’s intimacy
with the Martins of Kirkcaldy Manse, and of his engagement to a daughter
of that family, though his heart was with the Jane Welsh who had been
his pupil at Haddington; and it was also the time of Carlyle’s
frustrated first love,—the object of which was a Margaret Gordon, an
orphan girl, then residing in Kirkcaldy with her widowed Aberdeenshire
aunt. Though it is with the Edinburgh connections of Carlyle during his
two years at Kirkcaldy that we are concerned here, I cannot refrain from
this episode of his acquaintance with Margaret Gordon.
This girl, interesting long ago to all inquirers into Carlyle’s
biography as the nameless original of the “Blumine” of his _Sartor
Resartus_, has become even more interesting since the revelation of her
name and the description of her by Carlyle himself in his
_Reminiscences_. Even this description, however, falls far short of the
impression made by that fragment of her own farewell letter to Carlyle
which Mr. Froude published in his _Nineteenth Century_ article on
Carlyle’s Early Life. Nothing finer than that letter has come to light,
or ever can come to light, in all Carlyle’s correspondence:—
“And now, my dear friend, a long, long adieu! One advice; and, as a
parting one, consider, value it. Cultivate the milder dispositions of
your heart. Subdue the more extravagant visions of the brain. In time
your abilities must be known. Among your acquaintance they are already
beheld with wonder and delight. By those whose opinion will be
valuable they hereafter will be appreciated. Genius will render you
great. May virtue render you beloved! Remove the awful distance
between you and ordinary men by kind and gentle manners. Deal gently
with their inferiority, and be convinced they will respect you as
much, and like you more. Why conceal the real goodness that flows in
your heart?... Again adieu! Pardon the freedom I have used; and, when
you think of me, be it as of a kind sister, to whom your happiness
will always yield delight, and your griefs sorrow.... I give you not
my address, because I dare not promise to see you.”
Valuable as an additional attestation of the enormous impression made by
Carlyle upon all who came near him even at this early date, and of the
prodigious expectations entertained of his future career, these words
reveal also such a character in the writer herself as almost to compel
speculation as to what might have happened if she had become his wife.
That there was real affection on both sides is evident. The obstacle was
partly in circumstances. In the opinion of her aunt and guardian, and of
others, Margaret Gordon, who, though the daughter of a poor colonial,
and left with little or nothing, was one of the aristocratic family of
the Aberdeenshire Gordons, could hardly marry a Kirkcaldy schoolmaster.
But perhaps some dread on her own part, arising from those perceptions
of the harder side of his character which she communicated to himself so
tenderly and frankly, may have aided in the separation. Her subsequent
history could be told in some detail by persons still living. She became
the wife of Alexander Bannerman of Aberdeen, a man of note in the
commerce of that city, and of a family of old standing and landed
estates in the shire. There were traditions of him in his youth as
“Sandy Bannerman,” one of the wild Maule of Panmure and Duke of Gordon
set, who filled the north with their pranks; but my own recollection of
him in his more mature days is of the staid and highly respectable
Alexander Bannerman, latterly Sir Alexander Bannerman, who was long the
Whig M.P. for Aberdeen, and in that capacity was very attentive to the
interests of the city, and very kind to old pensioners and the like who
had any grievances or claims on the Government. The Whigs promoted him
at last to a colonial governorship; and I think he died in that post. I
might have seen Carlyle’s “Blumine” myself when she was Lady Bannerman,
if only when she drove through the streets of Aberdeen to grace one of
her husband’s elections; but I have no recollection that I ever did.
To my surprise, Carlyle did not seem indisposed to talk of the “Blumine”
episode in his life at Kirkcaldy. He used to make inquiries about the
Aberdeenshire Bannermans; and he once sketched the whole story to me, in
a shadowy way and without naming names (though I then knew them for
myself), but dwelling on various particulars, and especially on those
casual meetings with his first love in her married state which he has
described in his _Reminiscences_. Though he talked prettily and tenderly
on the subject, the impression left was that the whole thing had become
“objective” to him, a mere dream of the past. But fifty years had then
elapsed since those Kirkcaldy days when Margaret Gordon and he were
first together.
Among Carlyle’s Edinburgh connections in the Kirkcaldy days, one comes
to us in a book form. It was in 1817 that Professor Leslie, not yet Sir
John Leslie, brought out the third edition of his _Elements of Geometry
and Plane Trigonometry_, being an improvement and enlargement of the two
previous editions of 1809 and 1811. The geometrical portion of the
volume consists of six books, intended to supersede the traditional six
books of Euclid, and containing many propositions not to be found there.
The seventeenth proposition of the sixth book is the problem “_To divide
a straight line, whether internally or externally, so that the rectangle
under its segments shall be equivalent to a given rectangle_.” The
solution, with diagrams, occupies a page; and there is an additional
page of “scholium,” pointing out in what circumstances the problem is
impossible, and calling attention to the value of the proposition in the
construction of quadratic equations. So much for the text of the
proposition at pp. 176–177; but, when we turn to the “Notes and
Illustrations” appended to the volume, we find, at p. 340, this note by
Leslie:—
“The solution of this important problem now inserted in the text was
suggested to me by Mr. Thomas Carlyle, an ingenious young
mathematician, formerly my pupil. But I here subjoin likewise the
original construction given by Pappus; which, though rather more
complex, has yet some peculiar advantages.”
Leslie then proceeds to give the solution of Pappus, in about two pages,
and to add about three pages of further remarks on the application of
the problem to the construction of quadratics. The mention of Carlyle by
Leslie in this volume of 1817 is, I believe, the first mention of
Carlyle by name in print; and it was no small compliment to prefer, for
text purposes, young Carlyle’s solution of an important problem to the
old one that had come down from the famous Greek geometrician. Evidently
Carlyle’s mathematical reputation was still kept up about the Edinburgh
University, and Leslie was anxious to do his favourite pupil a good
turn.[16]
More personal were the connections with Edinburgh which Carlyle still
kept up by visits from Kirkcaldy, either by himself or with Irving. As
it was not much to cross the Firth on a Saturday or occasional holiday,
such visits were pretty frequent. Carlyle notes them, and the meetings
and little convivialities which he and Irving had in the course of them
with nondescript and clerical Edinburgh acquaintances, chiefly Irving’s,
here and there in Edinburgh houses and lodgings. Nothing of consequence
came of these convivialities, passed mostly, he says, in “gossip and
more or less ingenious giggle,” and serving only to make Irving and him
feel that, though living in Kirkcaldy, they had the brighter Edinburgh
element close at hand. One Edinburgh visit of Carlyle’s from Kirkcaldy
deserves particular record:—“On one of these visits,” he says, “my last
feeble tatter of connection with Divinity Hall affairs or clerical
outlooks was allowed to snap itself and fall definitely to the ground.
Old Dr. Ritchie ‘not at home’ when I called to enter myself. ‘Good!’
answered I; ‘_let the omen be fulfilled_.’” In other words, he never
went back to Dr. Ritchie, and ceased to be a Divinity student. Such is
the account in the _Reminiscences_, confirmed by a private note in
Carlyle’s hand, published in Mr. Froude’s article:—“The theological
course, which could be prosecuted or kept open by appearing annually,
putting down your name, but with some trifling fee, in the register, and
then going your way, was,” he says, “after perhaps two years of this
languid form, allowed to close itself for good. I remember yet being on
the street in Argyll Square, Edinburgh, probably in 1817, and come over
from Kirkcaldy with some intent, the languidest possible, still to put
down my name and fee. The official person, when I rang, was not at home,
and my instant feeling was, ‘_Very good, then, very good; let this be
finis in the matter._’ And it really was.” This is precise enough, but
perhaps with a slight mistake in the dating. The name, “Thomas Carlyle,
Hoddam,” as we have seen, does stand in the register of the Edinburgh
Divinity Hall students for the session 1817–18, its only previous
appearance in the preserved lists being in 1814–15, though it is likely
he had begun his Divinity course in 1813–14. It must, therefore, have
been after 1817 that he made the above-mentioned call on Dr. Ritchie in
Argyll Square. The probability is that it was late in 1818, in
anticipation of the coming session of 1818–19.
PART II.—1818–1822
From the year 1818, when Carlyle was two-and-twenty years of age, the
Church of Scotland had lost the chance of seeing him among her clergy.
In his _Reminiscences_ he speaks of his dropping off as but the natural,
and in a manner accidental, termination of the languid, half-willing,
half-reluctant, state of mind in which he had himself always been on
that subject of his clerical calling which his parents had so much at
heart. There can be little doubt, however, that stronger forces were at
work.
In Kirkcaldy he had been reading omnivorously, not only laying Irving’s
library under contribution, but getting over books from the Edinburgh
University library as well. Bailly’s _Histoire de l’Astronomie_ was one
of those received from Edinburgh; and among those from Irving’s library
he mentions “Gibbon, Hume, etc.,” besides a number of the French
classics in the small Didot edition. He dwells on his reading of
_Gibbon_, informing us that he read the book with “greedy velocity,”
getting through a volume a day, so as to finish the twelve volumes of
which Irving’s copy consisted in just as many days. He adds:—“It was, of
all the books, perhaps the most impressive on me in my then stage of
investigation and state of mind. I by no means completely admired
Gibbon, perhaps not more than I do now; but his winged sarcasms, so
quiet and yet so conclusively transpiercing and killing dead, were often
admirably potent and illuminative to me.” In one of the most intimate
conversations I ever had with Carlyle he spoke even more distinctly of
this his first complete reading of Gibbon in Kirkcaldy. The conversation
was in his back-garden in Chelsea, and the occasion was his having been
reading Gibbon, or portions of him, again. After mentioning, rather
pathetically, as he does in his _Reminiscences_, his wonder at the
velocity of his reading in his early days as compared with the slow rate
at which he could now get through a book, he spoke of Gibbon himself in
some detail, and told me that it was from that first well-remembered
reading of Gibbon in twelve days, at the rate of a volume a day, that he
dated the extirpation from his mind of the last remnant that had been
left in it of the orthodox belief in miracles. This is literally what he
said, and it is of consequence in our present connection. The process of
extirpation can hardly have been complete at the moment of the call on
Dr. Ritchie,—else the call would not have been made; but there can be no
doubt that it was not mere continued languor that stopped Carlyle in his
clerical career. There were the beginnings in his mind of the crash of
that system of belief on which the Scottish Church rested, and some
adherence to which was imperative on any one who would be a clergyman of
that Church in any section of it then recognised or possible.
Although he kept that matter for the present to himself, not admitting
even Irving yet to his confidence, the fact that he had given up the
clerical career was known at once to all his friends.[17] It was a sore
disappointment, above all, to his parents; but they left him to his own
course, his father with admirable magnanimity, his mother “perhaps still
more lovingly, though not so silently.”
It was another disappointment to them, about the same time, to know that
he had resolved to quit the Kirkcaldy schoolmastership. His relations
with the Kirkcaldy people, or with some of them, had not been absolutely
satisfactory, any more than Irving’s; both had “got tired of
schoolmastering and its mean contradictions and poor results,” and had
even come to the conclusion “Better die than be a schoolmaster for one’s
living”; and in the end of 1818 they had both thrown up their Kirkcaldy
engagements and were back in Edinburgh to look about for something else.
Irving, then twenty-six years of age and comparatively at ease in the
matter of pecuniary means, had preachings here and there about Edinburgh
to occupy him, and the possibility of a call to some parish-charge at
home, or heroic mission abroad, for his prospect. Carlyle, just
twenty-three years of age, was all at sea as to his future, but had
about £90 of savings on which to rest till he could see light.
The six months or so from December 1818 to the summer of 1819 form a
little period by itself in the Edinburgh lives of Irving and Carlyle.
They lodged in the Old Town, not far from each other. Carlyle’s rooms
were at No. 15 Carnegie Street, in the suburb called “The Pleasance”;
Irving’s, which were the more expensive, were in Bristo Street, close to
the University,—where, says Carlyle, he “used to give breakfasts to
intellectualities he fell in with, I often a guest with them.” Irving
also renewed his connection with the University by attending Hope’s
Class of Chemistry, which was always in those days the most crowded of
the classes by far, and the Natural History Class under Jameson. I find
no proof of any similar attendance on any University Class by Carlyle
through the session 1818–19; but we learn from Mrs. Oliphant’s _Life of
Irving_ that he was for this session a member of a certain
_Philosophical Association_ which Irving had started “for the mutual
improvement of those who had already completed the ordinary academic
course.” It was one of those small and ephemeral societies of which
there have been so many in the history of the University, distinct from
the larger and more famous societies,—such as the _Speculative_, the
_Theological_, the _Dialectic_, and the _Diagnostic_,—which established
themselves permanently, and still exist. We hear a little of Irving’s
doings in the semi-academic brotherhood, especially of an essay which he
read to them; but of Carlyle’s doings, if there were any, we hear
nothing. The mere membership, however, was a kind of continued bond
between him and his _Alma Mater_ through that session; and we can
imagine also some renewed intercourse with Professor Leslie, and an
occasional dropping in, as an outsider, at one or other of the
class-rooms, to hear a stray lecture. Meanwhile, he found no occupation.
Irving, besides his preachings, had an hour or two a day of private
mathematical teaching, at the rate of two guineas a month per hour; but
nothing of the sort came to Carlyle. Once, indeed, recommended by
Nichol, the mathematical schoolmaster of whom we have already heard, he
did call on a gentleman who wanted mathematical coaching for some
friend; but the result was that the gentleman,—whom he describes in the
letter as “a stout, impudent-looking man with red whiskers,”—thought two
guineas a month “perfectly extravagant,” and would not engage him. In
these circumstances, and as his weekly bills for his lodgings and board
amounted to between 15s. and 17s.,—which he thought unreasonable for his
paltry accommodations, with badly-cooked food, and perpetual disturbance
from the noises of a school overhead,—he resolved to leave Edinburgh,
for a time at least, and return to his father’s farmhouse at Mainhill.
On the 29th of March 1819 he intimated this intention in a letter to his
mother thus:—“A French author, d’Alembert (one of the few persons who
deserve the honourable epithet of honest man), whom I was lately
reading, remarks that one who has devoted his life to learning ought to
carry for his motto ‘_Liberty, Truth, Poverty_,’ for he who fears the
latter can never have the former. This should not prevent one from using
every honest effort to attain to a comfortable situation in life; it
says only that the best is dearly bought by base conduct, and the worst
is not worth mourning over. We shall speak of all these matters more
fully in summer; for I am meditating just now to come down to stay a
while with you, accompanied with a cargo of books, Italian, German, and
others. You will give me yonder little room, and you will waken me every
morning about five or six o’clock. Then _such_ study! I shall delve in
the garden too, and, in a word, become not only the wisest, but the
strongest, man in those regions. This is all _claver_, but it pleases
one.”[18]
It seems to have been about June 1819 that the migration from
Edinburgh to Mainhill was carried into effect. It is thus mentioned in
one of Irving’s letters from Bristo Street to the Martins of
Kirkcaldy:—“Carlyle goes away to-morrow, and Brown the next day. So
here I am once more on my own resources, except Dickson, who is better
fitted to swell the enjoyment of a joyous than to cheer the solitude
of a lonely hour. For this Carlyle is better fitted than any one I
know. It is very odd indeed that he should be sent for want of
employment to the country. Of course, like every man of talent, he has
gathered around this Patmos many a splendid purpose to be fulfilled,
and much improvement to be wrought out. ‘I have the ends of my
thoughts to bring together, which no one can do in this thoughtless
scene. I have my views of life to reform, and the whole plan of my
conduct to new-model; and, into all, I have my health to recover. And
then once more I shall venture my bark upon the waters of this wide
realm; and, if she cannot weather it, I shall steer west, and try the
waters of another world.’ So he reasons and resolves; but surely a
worthier destiny awaits him than voluntary exile.”[19]
Within a few weeks after the writing of this letter, viz. on a late
Sunday in July 1819, there occurred the incident which was to lead to
Irving’s own removal from Edinburgh, and affect the whole future course
of his life. This was his appearance in the pulpit of St. George’s
church, by the friendly arrangement of Dr. Andrew Thomson, the minister
of that church, in order that Dr. Chalmers, then on a visit to
Edinburgh, and looking out for an assistant to himself in his great
Glasgow church and parish of St. John’s, might have a private
opportunity of hearing Mr. Irving and judging of his fitness.
Let the autumn of 1819 be supposed to have passed, with Carlyle’s
studies and early risings in his father’s house at Mainhill in
Dumfriesshire,[20] and those negotiations between Irving and Dr.
Chalmers which issued in the definite appointment of Irving to the
Glasgow assistantship. It was in October 1819 that this matter was
settled; and then Irving, who had been on a visit to his relatives in
Annan, and was on his way thence to Glasgow, to enter on his new duties,
picked up Carlyle at Mainhill, for that walk of theirs up the valley of
the Dryfe, and that beating-up of their common friend, Frank Dickson, in
his clerical quarters, which are so charmingly described in the
_Reminiscences_.
Next month, November 1819, when Irving was forming acquaintance with Dr.
Chalmers’s congregation, and they hardly knew what to make of him,—some
thinking him more like a “cavalry officer” or “brigand chief” than a
young minister of the Gospel,—Carlyle was back in Edinburgh. His
uncertainties and speculations as to his future, with the dream of
emigration to America, had turned themselves into a vague notion that,
if he gave himself to the study of law, he might possibly be able to
muster somehow the two or three hundreds of pounds that would be
necessary to make him a member of the Edinburgh Bar, and qualify him for
walking up and down the floor of the Parliament House in wig and gown,
like the grandees he had seen there in his memorable first visit to the
place, with Tom Smail, ten years before. For that object residence in
Edinburgh was essential, and so he had returned thither. His lodgings
now seem to be no longer in Carnegie Street, but in Bristo
Street,—possibly in the rooms which Irving had left.
No portion of the records relating to Carlyle’s connection with our
University has puzzled me more than that which refers to his law studies
after he had abandoned Divinity. From a memorandum of his own, quoted by
Mr. Froude, but without date, it distinctly appears that he attended
“Hume’s Lectures on Scotch Law”; and Mr. Froude adds that his intention
of becoming an advocate, and his consequent perseverance in attendance
on the “law lectures” in the Edinburgh University, continued for some
time. Our records, however, are not quite clear in the matter. In our
Matriculation Book for the session 1819–20, where every law student, as
well as every arts student and every medical student, was bound to enter
his name, paying a matriculation-fee of 10s., I find two Thomas
Carlyles, both from Dumfriesshire. One, whose signature, in a clear and
elegant hand, I should take to be that of _our_ Carlyle at that date,
enters himself as “Thomas Carlyle, Dumfries,” with the addition “5
Lit.,” signifying that he had attended the Literary or Arts Classes in
four preceding sessions. The matriculation number of this Thomas Carlyle
is 825. The other, whose matriculation number is 1257, enters himself,
in a somewhat boyish-looking hand, as “Thomas Carlyle, Dumfriesshire,”
with the addition “2 Lit.,” signifying that he had attended one previous
session in an Arts Class. Now, all depends on the construction of the
appearances of those two Carlyles in the independent class-lists that
have been preserved, in the handwritings of the Professors, for that
session of their common matriculation and for subsequent sessions.
Without troubling the reader with the puzzling details, I may say that
the records present an alternative of two suppositions: viz. either (1)
Both the Thomas Carlyles who matriculated for 1819–20 became law
students that session; in which case the “Thomas Carlyle,
Dumfriesshire,” notwithstanding the too boyish-looking handwriting, and
the gross misdescription of him as “2 Lit.,” was _our_ Carlyle; or (2)
Only one of the two became a law student; in which case he was the
“Thomas Carlyle, Dumfries,” or _our_ Carlyle, using “Dumfries” as the
name of his county, and correctly describing himself as “5 Lit.” On the
first supposition it has to be reported that Carlyle’s sole attendance
in a law class was in the Scots Law Class of Professor David Hume for
the session 1819–20, while the other Carlyle was in the Civil Law Class
for “the Institutes” that session, but reappeared in other classes in
later sessions. On the second supposition (which also involves a mistake
in the registration), Carlyle attended both the Scots Law Class and the
“Institutes” department of the Civil Law Class in 1819–20, and so began
a new career of attendance in the University, which extended to 1823
thus:—
_Session 1819–20_: Hume’s Scots Law Class, and Professor Alexander
Irving’s Civil Law Class (“Institutes”).
_Session 1820–21_: Irving’s Civil Law Class (“Pandects”), and Hope’s
Chemistry Class (where the name in the Professor’s list of his
vast class of 460 students is spelt “Thomas Carlisle”).
_Session 1821–22_: No attendance.
_Session 1822–23_: Scots Law Class a second time, under the new
Professor, George Joseph Bell (Hume having just died).[21]
With this knowledge that Carlyle did for some time after 1819
contemplate the Law as a profession,—certain as to the main fact, though
a little doubtful for the present in respect of the extent of time over
which his law studies were continued,—let us proceed to his Edinburgh
life in general for the five years from 1819 to 1824. He was not,
indeed, wholly in Edinburgh during those five years. Besides absences
now and then on brief visits, _e.g._ to Irving in Glasgow or elsewhere
in the west, we are to remember his stated vacations, longer or shorter,
in the summer and autumn, at his father’s house at Mainhill in
Annandale; and latterly there was a term of residence in country
quarters of which there will have to be special mention at the proper
date. In the main, however, from 1819 to 1824 Carlyle was an Edinburgh
man. His lodgings were, first, in Bristo Street, but afterwards and more
continuously at No. 3 Moray Street,—not, of course, the great Moray
Place of the aristocratic West End, but a much obscurer namesake, now
re-christened “Spey Street,” at right angles to Pilrig Street, just off
Leith Walk. It was in these lodgings that he read and mused; it was in
the streets of Edinburgh, or on the heights on her skirts, that he had
his daily walks; the few friends and acquaintances he had any converse
with were in Edinburgh; and it was with Edinburgh and her affairs that
as yet he considered his own future fortunes as all but certain to be
bound up.
No more extraordinary youth ever walked the streets of Edinburgh, or of
any other city, than the Carlyle of those years. Those great natural
faculties, unmistakably of the order called _genius_, and that unusual
wealth of acquirement, which had been recognised in him as early as 1814
by such intimate friends as Murray, and more lately almost with awe by
Margaret Gordon, had been baulked of all fit outcome, but were still
manifest to the discerning. When Irving speaks of them, or thinks of
them, it is with a kind of amazement. At the same time that strange
moodiness of character, that lofty pride and intolerance, that roughness
and unsociableness of temper, against which Margaret Gordon and others
had warned him as obstructing his success, had hardened themselves into
settled habit. So it appeared; but in reality the word “habit” is
misleading. Carlyle’s moroseness, if we let that poor word pass in the
meantime for a state of temper which it would take many words, and some
of them much softer and grander, to describe adequately, was an innate
and constitutional distinction. It is worth while to dwell for a moment
on the contrast between him in this respect and the man who was his
immediate predecessor in the series of really great literary Scotsmen.
If there ever was a soul of sunshine and cheerfulness, of universal
blandness and good fellowship, it was that with which Walter Scott came
into the world. When Carlyle was born, twenty-four years afterwards, it
was as if the Genius of Literature in Scotland, knowing that vein to
have been amply provided for, and abhorring duplicates, had tried almost
the opposite variety, and sent into the world a soul no less richly
endowed, and stronger in the speculative part, but whose cardinal
peculiarity should be despondency, discontentedness, and sense of pain.
From his childhood upwards, Carlyle had been, as his own mother said of
him, “gey ill to deal wi’” (“considerably difficult to deal with”), the
prey of melancholia, an incarnation of wailing and bitter broodings,
addicted to the black and dismal view of things. With all his studies,
all the development of his great intellect, all his strength in humour
and in the wit and insight which a lively sense of the ludicrous
confers, he had not outgrown this stubborn gloominess of character, but
had brought it into those comparatively mature years of his Edinburgh
life with which we are now concerned. His despondency, indeed, seems
then to have been at its very worst. A few authentications may be
quoted:—
_April, 1819._—“As to my own projects, I am sorry, on several
accounts, that I can give no satisfactory account to your friendly
inquiries. A good portion of my life is already mingled with the past
eternity; and, for the future, it is a dim scene, on which my eyes are
fixed as calmly and intensely as possible,—to no purpose. The
probability of my doing any service in my day and generation is
certainly not very strong.”[22]
_March, 1820._—“I am altogether an —— creature. Timid, yet not humble,
weak, yet enthusiastic, nature and education have rendered me entirely
unfit to force my way among the thick-skinned inhabitants of this
planet. Law, I fear, must be given up: it is a shapeless mass of
absurdity and chicane.”[23]
_October, 1820._—“No settled purpose will direct my conduct, and the
next scene of this fever-dream is likely to be as painful as the last.
Expect no account of my prospects, for I have no prospects that are
worth the name. I am like a being thrown from another planet on this
terrestrial ball, an alien, a pilgrim among its possessors; I have no
share in their pursuits; and life is to me a pathless, a waste and
howling, wilderness,—surface barrenness, its verge enveloped under
dark-brown shade.”[24]
_March 9, 1821._—“Edinburgh, with all its drawbacks, is the only scene
for me. In the country I am like an alien, a stranger and pilgrim from
a far-distant land. I must endeavour most sternly, for this state of
things cannot last; and, if health do but revisit me, as I know she
will, it shall ere long give place to a better. If I grow seriously
ill, indeed, it will be different; but, when once the weather is
settled and dry, exercise and care will restore me completely. I am
considerably clearer than I was, and I should have been still more so
had not this afternoon been wet, and so prevented me from breathing
the air of Arthur Seat, a mountain close beside us, where the
atmosphere is pure as a diamond, and the prospect grander than any you
ever saw,—the blue, majestic, everlasting ocean, with the Fife hills
swelling gradually into the Grampians behind; rough crags and
precipices at our feet, where not a hillock rears its head unsung;
with Edinburgh at their base, clustering proudly over her rugged
foundations, and covering with a vapoury mantle the jagged, black,
venerable masses of stonework that stretch far and wide, and show like
a city of Fairyland.... I saw it all last evening when the sun was
going down, and the moon’s fine crescent, like a pretty silver
creature as it is, was riding quietly above me.”[25]
_Reminiscence in 1867._—“Hope hardly dwelt in me ...; only fierce
resolution in abundance to do my best and utmost in all honest ways,
and to suffer as silently and stoically as might be, if it proved (as
too likely!) that I could do _nothing_. This kind of humour, what I
sometimes called of “desperate hope,” has largely attended me all my
life. In short, as has been indicated elsewhere, I was advancing
towards huge instalments of bodily and spiritual wretchedness in this
my Edinburgh purgatory, and had to clean and purify myself in penal
fire of various kinds for several years coming, the first and much the
worst two or three of which were to be enacted in this once-loved
city. Horrible to think of in part even yet!”[26]
What was the cause of such habitual wretchedness, such lowness of
spirits, in a young man between his five-and-twentieth and his
seven-and-twentieth year? In many external respects his life hitherto
had been even unusually fortunate. His parentage was one of which he
could be proud, and not ashamed; he had a kindly home to return to; he
had never once felt, or had occasion to feel, the pinch of actual
poverty, in any sense answering to the name or notion of poverty as it
was understood by his humbler countrymen. He had been in honourable
employments, which many of his compeers in age would have been glad to
get; and he had about £100 of saved money in his pocket,—a sum larger
than the majority of the educated young Scotsmen about him could then
finger, or perhaps ever fingered afterwards in all their lives. All this
has to be distinctly remembered; for the English interpretations of
Carlyle’s early “poverty,” “hardships,” etc., are sheer nonsense. By the
Scottish standard of his time, by the standard of say two-thirds of
those who had been his fellows in the Divinity Hall of Edinburgh,
Carlyle’s circumstances so far had been even enviable. The cause of his
abnormal unhappiness was to be found in _himself_. Was it, then, his
ill-health,—that fearful “dyspepsia” which had come upon him in his
twenty-third year, or just after his transit from Kirkcaldy to
Edinburgh, and which clung to him, as we know, to the very end of his
days? There can be no doubt that this was a most important factor in the
case. His dyspepsia must have intensified his gloom, and may have
accounted for those occasional excesses of his low spirits which verged
on hypochondria. But, essentially, the gloom was there already, brought
along with him from those days, before his twenty-third year, when, as
he told the blind American clergyman Milburn, he was still “the healthy
and hardy son of a hardy and healthy Scottish dalesman,” and had not yet
become “conscious of the ownership of that diabolical arrangement called
a stomach.”[27] In fact, as Luther maintained when he denounced the
Roman Catholic commentators as gross and carnal fellows for their
persistently physical interpretation of Paul’s “thorn in the flesh,” as
if there could be no severe enough “thorn” of a spiritual kind, the mere
pathological explanations which physicians are apt to trust to will not
suffice in such instances. What, then, of those spiritual distresses,
arising from a snapping of the traditional and paternal creed, and a
soul left thus rudderless for the moment, which Luther recognised as the
most terrible, and had experienced in such measure himself?
That there must have been distress to Carlyle in his wrench of himself
away from the popular religious faith, the faith of his father and
mother, needs no argument. The main evidence, however, is that his clear
intellect had cut down like a knife between him and the theology from
which he had parted, leaving no ragged ends. The main evidence is that,
though he had some central core of faith still to seek as a
substitute,—though he was still agitating in his mind in a new way the
old question of his Divinity Hall exegesis, _Num detur Religio
Naturalis?_, and had not yet attained to that light, describable as a
fervid, though scrupulously unfeatured, Theism or Supernaturalism, in
the blaze of which he was to live all his after-life,—yet he was not
involved in the coil of those ordinary “doubts” and “backward
hesitations” of which we hear so much, and sometimes so cantingly, in
feebler biographies. There is, at all events, no record in his case of
any such efforts as those of Coleridge to rest in a theosophic
refabrication out of the wrecks of the forsaken orthodoxy. On the
contrary, whatever of more positive illumination, whatever of moral or
really religious rousing, had yet to come, he appears to have settled
once for all into a very definite condition of mind as to the limits of
the intrinsically possible or impossible for the human intellect in that
class of considerations.
Yet another cause of despondency and low spirits, however, may suggest
itself as feasible. No more in Carlyle than in any other ardent and
imaginative young man at his age was there a deficiency of those
love-languors and love-dreamings which are the secrets of many a
masculine sadness. There are traces of them in his letters; and we may
well believe that in his Edinburgh solitude he was pursued for a while
by the pangs of “love disprized” in the image of his lost Margaret
Gordon.
Add this cause to all the others, however, and let them all have their
due weight and proportion, and it still remains true that the main and
all-comprehending form of Carlyle’s grief and dejection in those
Edinburgh days was that of a great sword in too narrow a scabbard, a
noble bird fretting in its cage, a soul of strong energies and ambitions
measuring itself against common souls and against social obstructions,
and all but frantic for lack of employment. Schoolmastering he had given
up with detestation; the Church he had given up with indifference; the
Law had begun to disgust him, or was seeming problematical. Where others
could have rested, happy in routine, or at least acquiescent, Carlyle
could not. What was this Edinburgh, for example, in the midst of which
he was living, the solitary tenant of a poor lodging, not even on
speaking terms with those that were considered her magnates, the very
best of whom he was conscious of the power to equal, and, if necessary,
to vanquish and lay flat? We almost see on his face some such defiant
glare round Edinburgh, as if, whatever else were to come, it was this
innocent and unheeding Edinburgh that he would first of all take by the
throat and compel to listen.
Authentication may be again necessary, and may bring some elucidation
with it. “The desire which, in common with all men, I feel for
conversation and social intercourse is, I find,” he had written to a
correspondent in November 1818, “enveloped in a dense, repulsive
atmosphere, not of vulgar _mauvaise honte_, though such it is generally
esteemed, but of deeper feelings, which I partly inherit from nature,
and which are mostly due to the undefined station I have hitherto
occupied in society.”[28] Again, to a correspondent in March 1820, “The
fate of one man is a mighty small concern in the grand whole in this
best of all possible worlds. Let us quit the subject,—with just one
observation more, which I throw out for your benefit, should you ever
come to need such an advice. It is to keep the profession you have
adopted, if it be at all tolerable. A young man who goes forth into the
world to seek his fortune with those lofty ideas of honour and
uprightness which a studious secluded life naturally begets, will in
ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, if friends and other aids are
wanting, fall into the sere, the yellow leaf.”[29] These feelings were
known to all his friends, so that Carlyle’s despondency over his poor
social prospects, his enormous power of complaint, or, as the Scots call
it, “of pityin’ himsel’,” was as familiar a topic with them as with his
own family.
No one sympathised with him more, or wrote more encouragingly to him
than Irving from Glasgow; and it is from some of Irving’s letters that
we gather the information that certain peculiarities in Carlyle’s own
demeanour were understood to be operating against his popularity even
within the limited Edinburgh circle in which he did for the present
move. “Known you must be before you can be employed,” Irving writes to
him in December 1819. “Known you will not be,” he proceeds, “for a
winning, attaching, accommodating man, but for an original, commanding,
and rather self-willed man.... Your utterance is not the most
favourable. It convinces, but does not persuade; and it is only a very
few (I can claim place for myself) that it fascinates. Your audience is
worse. They are, generally (I exclude myself), unphilosophical,
unthinking drivellers, who lie in wait to catch you in your words, and
who give you little justice in the recital, because you give their
vanity or self-esteem little justice, or even mercy, in the encounter.
Therefore, my dear friend, _some other way is to be sought for_.”[30] In
a letter in March 1820 Irving returns to the subject. “Therefore it is,
my dear Carlyle,” he says, “that I exhort you to call in the finer parts
of your mind, and to try to present the society about you with those
more ordinary displays which they can enjoy. The indifference with which
they receive them [your present extraordinary displays], and the
ignorance with which they treat them, operate on the mind like gall and
wormwood. I would entreat you to be comforted in the possession of your
treasures, and to study more the times and persons to which you bring
them forth. When I say your treasures, I mean not your information so
much, which they will bear the display of for the reward and value of
it, but your feelings and affections; which, being of finer tone than
theirs, and consequently seeking a keener expression, they are apt to
mistake for a rebuke of their own tameness, or for intolerance of
ordinary things, and too many of them, I fear, for asperity of
mind.”[31] This is Margaret Gordon’s advice over again; and it enables
us to add to our conception of Carlyle in those days of his Edinburgh
struggling and obstruction the fact of his fearlessness and
aggressiveness in speech, his habit even then of that lightning
rhetoric, that boundless word-audacity, with sarcasms and stinging
contempts falling mercilessly upon his auditors themselves, which
characterised his conversation to the last. This habit, or some of the
forms of it, he had derived, he thought, from his father.[32]
Private mathematical teaching was still for a while Carlyle’s most
immediate resource. We hear of two or three engagements of the kind at
his fixed rate of two guineas per month for an hour a day, and also of
one or two rejected proposals of resident tutorship away from Edinburgh.
Nor had he given up his own prosecution of the higher mathematics. My
recollection is that he used to connect the break-down of his health
with his continued wrestlings with Newton’s _Principia_ even after he
had left Kirkcaldy for Edinburgh; and he would speak of the grassy
slopes of the Castle Hill, then not railed off from Princes Street, as a
place where he liked to lie in fine weather, poring over that or other
books. His readings, however, were now, as before, very miscellaneous.
The Advocates’ Library, to which he had access, I suppose, through some
lawyer of his acquaintance, afforded him facilities in the way of books
such as he had never before enjoyed. “Lasting thanks to _it_, alone of
Scottish institutions,” is his memorable phrase of obligation to this
Library; and of his appetite for reading and study generally we may
judge from a passage in one of his earlier letters, where he says, “When
I am assaulted by those feelings of discontent and ferocity which
solitude at all times tends to produce, and by that host of miserable
little passions which are ever and anon attempting to disturb one’s
repose, there is no method of defeating them so effectual as to take
them in flank by a zealous course of study.”
One zealous course of study to which he had set himself just after
settling in Edinburgh from Kirkcaldy, if not a little before, was the
study of the German language. French, so far as the power of reading it
was concerned, he had acquired sufficiently in his boyhood; Italian, to
some less extent, had come easily enough; but German tasked his
perseverance and required time. He was especially diligent in it through
the years 1819 and 1820, with such a measure of success that in August
in the latter year he could write to one friend, “I could tell you much
about the new Heaven and new Earth which a slight study of German
literature has revealed to me,” and in October of the same year to
another, “I have lived riotously with Schiller, Goethe, and the rest:
they are the greatest men at present with me.” His German readings were
continued, and his admiration of the German Literature grew.
Was it not time that Carlyle should be doing something in Literature
himself? Was not Literature obviously his true vocation,—the very
vocation for which his early companions, such as Murray, had discerned
his pre-eminent fitness as long ago as 1814, and to which the failure of
his successive experiments in established professions had ever since
been pointing? To this, in fact, Irving had been most importunately
urging him in those letters, just quoted, in which, after telling him
that, by reason of the asperity and irritating contemptuousness of his
manner, he would never be rightly appreciated by his usual appearances
in society, or even by his splendid powers of talk, he had summed up his
advice in the words “_Some other way is to be sought for._” What Irving
meant, and urged at some length, and with great practicality, in those
letters, was that Carlyle should at once think of some literary
attempts, congenial to his own tastes, and yet of as popular a kind as
possible, and aim at a connection with the _Edinburgh Review_ and
_Blackwood_.
Carlyle himself, as we learn, had been already, for a good while,
turning his thoughts now and then in the same direction. It is utterly
impossible that a young man who for five years already had been writing
letters to his friends the English style of which moved them to
astonishment, as it still moves to admiration those who now read the
specimens of them that have been recovered, should not have been
exercising his literary powers privately in other things than letters,
and so have had beside him, before 1819, a little stock of pieces
suitable for any magazine that would take them. One such piece, he tells
us, had been sent over from Kirkcaldy in 1817 to the editor of some
magazine in Edinburgh. It was a piece of “the descriptive tourist kind,”
giving some account of Carlyle’s first impressions of the Yarrow
country, so famous in Scottish song and legend, as visited by him in one
of his journeys from Edinburgh to Annandale. What became of it he never
knew, the editor having returned no answer.[33] Although, after this
rebuff, there was no new attempt at publication from Kirkcaldy, there
can be little doubt that he had then a few other things by him, and not
in prose only, with which he could have repeated the trial. It is very
possible that several specimens of those earliest attempts of his in
prose and verse, published by himself afterwards when periodicals were
open to him, remain yet to be disinterred from their hiding-places; but
two have come to light. One is a story of Annandale incidents published
anonymously in Fraser’s Magazine for January 1831, under the title
“_Cruthers and Jonson, or the Outskirts of Life: a True Story_,” but
certified by Mr. William Allingham, no doubt on Carlyle’s own
information, to have been the very first of all his writings intended
for the press.[34] The other is of more interest to us here, from its
picturesque oddity in connection with Carlyle’s early Edinburgh life. It
is entitled “_Peter Nimmo_,” and was published in Fraser’s Magazine for
February 1831, the next number after that containing _Cruthers and
Jonson_.
Within my own memory, and in fact to as late as 1846, there was known
about the precincts of Edinburgh University a singular being called
PETER NIMMO, or, by tradition of some jest played upon him, SIR PETER
NIMMO. He was a lank, miserable, mendicant-looking object, of unknown
age, with a blue face, often scarred and patched, and garments not of
the cleanest, the chief of which was a long, threadbare, snuff-brown
great-coat. His craze was that of attending the University class-rooms
and listening to the lectures. So long had this craze continued that a
University session without “Sir Peter Nimmo” about the quadrangle, for
the students to laugh at and perpetrate practical jokes upon, would have
been an interruption of the established course of things; but, as his
appearance in a class-room had become a horror to the Professors, and
pity for him had passed into a sense that he was a nuisance and cause of
disorder, steps had at last been taken to prevent his admission, or at
least to reduce his presence about college to a minimum. They could not
get rid of him entirely, for he had imbedded himself in the legends and
the very history of the University.——Going back from the forties to the
thirties of the present century, we find Peter Nimmo then already in the
heyday of his fame. In certain reminiscences which the late Dr. Hill
Burton wrote of _his_ first session at the University, viz. in 1830–31,
when he attended Wilson’s Moral Philosophy Class, Peter is an important
figure. “A dirty, ill-looking lout, who had neither wit himself, nor any
quality with a sufficient amount of pleasant grotesqueness in it to
create wit in others,” is Dr. Hill Burton’s description of him then; and
the impression Burton had received of his real character was that he was
“merely an idly-inclined and stupidish man of low condition, who, having
once got into practice as a sort of public laughing-stock, saw that the
occupation paid better than honest industry, and had cunning enough to
keep it up.” He used to obtain meals, Burton adds, by calling at various
houses, sometimes assuming an air of simple good faith when the students
got hold of the card of some civic dignitary and presented it to him
with an inscribed request for the honour of Sir Peter Nimmo’s company at
dinner; and in the summer-time he wandered about, introducing himself at
country houses. Once, Burton had heard, he had obtained access to
Wordsworth, using Professor Wilson’s name for his passport; and, as he
had judiciously left all the talk to Wordsworth, the impression he had
left was such that the poet had afterwards spoken of his visitor as “a
Scotch baronet, eccentric in appearance, but fundamentally one of the
most sensible men he had ever met with.”[35]——Burton, however, though
thus familiar with “Sir Peter” in 1830–1, was clearly not aware of his
real standing by his University antecedents. Whatever he was latterly,
he had at one time been a regularly matriculated student. I have traced
him in the University records back and back long before Dr. Burton’s
knowledge of him, always paying his matriculation-fee and always taking
out one or two classes. In the _Lapsus Linguæ, or College Tatler_, a
small satirical magazine of the Edinburgh students for the session
1823–24, “Dr. Peter Nimmo” is the title of one of the articles, the
matter consisting of clever imaginary extracts from the voluminous
notebooks, scientific and philosophical, of this “very sage man, whose
abilities, though at present hid under a bushel, will soon blaze forth,
and give a very different aspect to the state of literature in
Scotland.” In the session of 1819–20, when Carlyle was attending the
Scots Law Class, Peter Nimmo was attending two of the medical classes,
having entered himself in the matriculation book, in conspicuously large
characters, as “PETRUS BUCHANAN NIMMO, ESQUIRE, &C., DUMBARTONSHIRE,”
with the addition that he was in the 17th year of his theological
studies. Six years previously, viz. in 1813–14, he is registered as in
the 8th year of his literary course. In 1811–12 he was one of Carlyle’s
fellow-students in the 2d Mathematical Class under Leslie; and in
1810–11 he was with Carlyle in the 1st Mathematical Class and also in
the Logic Class. Peter seems to have been lax in his dates; but there
can be no doubt that he was a known figure about Edinburgh University
before Carlyle entered it, and that the whole of Carlyle’s University
career, as of the careers of all the students of Edinburgh University
for another generation, was spent in an atmosphere of PETER NIMMO. What
Peter had been originally it is difficult to make out. The probability
is that he had come up about the beginning of the century as a stupid
youth from Dumbartonshire, honestly destined for the Church, and that he
had gradually or suddenly broken down into the crazed being who could
not exist but by haunting the classes for ever, and becoming a fixture
about the University buildings. He used to boast of his high family.
Such was the pitiful object that had been chosen by Carlyle for the
theme of what was perhaps his first effort in verse. For the essential
portion of his article on Peter Nimmo is a metrical “Rhapsody,”
consisting of a short introduction, five short parts, and an epilogue.
In the introduction, which the prefixed motto, “_Numeris fertur lege
solutis_,” avows to be in hobbling measure, we see the solitary bard in
quest of a subject:—
Art thou lonely, idle, friendless, toolless, nigh distract,
Hand in bosom,—jaw, except for chewing, ceased to act?
Matters not, so thou have ink and see the Why and How;
Drops of copperas-dye make There a Here, and Then a Now.
Must the brain lie fallow simply since it is alone,
And the heart, in heaths and splashy weather, turn to stone?
Shall a living Man be mute as twice-sold mackerel?
If not speaking, if not acting, I can write,—in doggerel.
For a subject? Earth is wonder-filled; for instance, PETER NIMMO:
Think of Peter’s “being’s mystery”: I will sing of him O!
In the first part Peter is introduced to us by his physiognomy and
appearance:—
Thrice-loved Nimmo! art thou still, in spite of Fate,
Footing those cold pavements, void of meal and mutton,
To and from that everlasting College-gate,
With thy blue hook-nose, and ink-horn hung on button?
Six more stanzas of the same hobbling metre inform us that Peter is
really a harmless pretender, who, for all his long attendance in the
college-classes, could not yet decline τιμή; after which, in the second
part, there is an imagination of what his boyhood may have been. A
summer Sabbath-day, under a blue sky, in some pleasant country
neighbourhood, is imagined, with Peter riding on a donkey in the
vicinity, and meditating his own future:—
Dark lay the world in Peter’s labouring breast:
Here was he (words of import strange),—_He_ here!
Mysterious Peter, on mysterious hest:
But Whence, How, Whither, nowise will appear.
Thus meditating on the “marvellous universe” into which he has come, and
on his own possible function in it, Peter, caught by the sight of the
little parish-kirk upon a verdant knoll, determines, as the donkey
canters on with him, that God calls him to be a priest. His transition
from Grammar School to College thus accounted for, the third part sings
of his first collegeraptures in three stanzas. In the fourth part he is
the poor mendicant Peter who has become the Wandering Jew of the
University, and whose mode of living is a problem:—
Where lodges Peter? How his pot doth boil,
This truly knoweth, guesseth, no man;
He spins not, neither does he toil;
Lives free as ancient Greek or Roman.
Whether he may not roost on trees at nights is a speculation; but
sometimes he comes to the rooms of his class-fellows. The fifth part of
the rhapsody tells of one such nocturnal visit of his (mythical, we must
hope) to the rooms of the bard who is now singing:—
At midnight hour did Peter come;
Right well I knew his tap and tread;
With smiles I placed two pints of rum
Before him, and one cold sheep’s-head.
Peter, thus made comfortable, entertains his host with the genealogy of
his family, the far-famed Nimmos, and with his own great prospects of
various kinds, till, the rum being gone and the sheep’s head reduced to
a skull, he falls from his chair “dead-drunk,” and is sent off in a
wheel-barrow! The envoy moralizes the whole rather indistinctly in three
stanzas, each with this chorus in italics:—
_Sure ’tis Peter, sure ’tis Peter:
Life’s a variorum._
Verse, if we may judge from this grim specimen,[36] was not Carlyle’s
element. Hence, though he had not yet abandoned verse altogether, and
was to leave us a few lyrics, original or translated, which one would
not willingly let die, it had been to prose performances that he looked
forward when, on bidding farewell to Kirkcaldy, he included “writing for
the booksellers” among the employments he hoped to obtain in Edinburgh.
Scientific subjects had seemed the most promising: and among the books
before him in “those dreary evenings in Bristo Street” in 1819 were
materials for a projected life of the young astronomer Horrox. Irving’s
letter of December 1819 was the probable cause of that attempt upon the
_Edinburgh Review_, in the shape of an article on M. Pictet’s Theory of
Gravitation, of which we hear in the _Reminiscences_. The manuscript,
carefully dictated to a young Annandale disciple who wrote a very
legible hand, was left by Carlyle himself, with a note, at the great
Jeffrey’s house in George Street; but, whether because the subject was
not of the popular kind which Irving had recommended, or because editors
are apt to toss aside all such chance offers, nothing more was heard of
it.
This was in the cold winter of 1819–20; and, to all appearance, Carlyle
might have languished without literary employment of any kind for a good
while longer, had he not been found out by Dr. David Brewster,
afterwards Sir David. The _Edinburgh Encyclopædia_, which Brewster had
begun to edit in 1810, when he was in his twenty-ninth year, and which
had been intended to be in twelve volumes, thick quarto, double-columns,
had now, in 1820, reached its fourteenth volume, and had not got farther
than the letter _M_. Among the contributors had been, or were, these:
Babbage, Berzelius, Biot, Campbell the poet, the second Herschel,
Dionysius Lardner, Lockhart, Oersted, Peacock of Cambridge, Telford, and
other celebrities at a distance; besides such lights nearer at hand as
Brewster himself, Graham Dalzell, the Rev. Dr. David Dickson, Sir Thomas
Dick Lauder, the Rev. Dr. Duncan of Ruthwell, Professor Dunbar, the Rev.
Dr. John Fleming, the Rev. Dr. Robert Gordon, David Irving, Professor
Jameson, the Rev. Dr. John Lee, Professor Leslie, and the Rev. Dr.
Andrew Thomson. This was very good company in which to make a literary
_début_, were it only in such articles of hackwork as might be intrusted
conveniently to an unknown young man on the spot. The articles intrusted
to Carlyle were not wholly of this kind; for I observe that he came in
just as the poet Campbell had ceased to contribute, and for articles
continuing the line of some of Campbell’s. _Lady Mary Wortley Montagu_,
_Montaigne_, _Montesquieu_, _Montfaucon_, _Dr. Moore_, _Sir John Moore_,
were his first six, all under the letter _M_, and all supplied in 1820,
with the subscribed initials “T.C.”; and between that year and 1823 he
was to contribute ten more, running through the letter _N_, and ending
in the sixteenth volume, under the letter _P_, with _Mungo Park_,
_William Pitt the Elder_, and _William Pitt the Younger_. It was no bad
practice in short, compact articles of information, and may have brought
him in between £35 and £50 altogether,—in addition to something more for
casual bits of translation done for Brewster. More agreeable to himself,
and better paid in proportion, may have been two articles which he
contributed to the _New Edinburgh Review_, a quarterly which was started
in July 1821, by Waugh and Innes of Edinburgh, as a successor to the
previous _Edinburgh Monthly Review_, and which came to an end, as might
have been predicted from its title, in its eighth number in April 1823.
In the second number of this periodical, in October 1821, appeared an
article of 21 pages by Carlyle on _Joanna Baillie’s Metrical Legends_,
to be followed in the fourth number, in April 1822, by one of 18 pages
on _Goethe’s Faust_.
Even with these beginnings of literary occupation, there was no
improvement, as far as to 1822 at least, in Carlyle’s spirits. “Life was
all dreary, ‘eerie,’” he says, “tinted with the hues of imprisonment and
impossibility.” The chief bursts of sunshine, and his nearest approaches
to temporary happiness, were in the occasional society of Irving,
whether in visits to Irving in Glasgow, or in the autumn meetings and
strolls with Irving in their common Annandale, or in Irving’s visits now
and then to Edinburgh. It was in one of the westward excursions, when
the two friends were on Drumclog Moss, and were talking together in the
open air on that battle-field of the Covenanters, that the good Irving
wound from Carlyle the confession that he no longer thought as Irving
did of the Christian Religion. This was in 1820.
More memorable still was that return visit of Irving to Edinburgh, in
June 1821, when he took Carlyle with him to Haddington, and introduced
him, at the house of the widowed Mrs. Welsh, to that lady’s only child,
Jane Baillie Welsh. Irving’s former pupil, and thought of by him as not
impossibly to be his wife even yet, though his Kirkcaldy engagement
interfered, she was not quite twenty years of age, but the most
remarkable girl in all that neighbourhood. Of fragile and graceful form,
features pretty rather than regular, with a complexion of creamy pale,
black hair over a finely arched forehead, and very soft and brilliant
black eyes, she had an intellect fit, whether for natural faculty or
culture, to be the feminine match of either of the two men that now
stood before her.——Thirty years afterwards, and when she had been the
wife of Carlyle for four-and-twenty years, I had an account of her as
she appeared in those days of her girlhood. It was from her old nurse,
the now famous “Betty”; to whom, on the occasion of a call of mine at
Chelsea as I was about to leave London for a short visit to Edinburgh,
she asked me to convey a small parcel containing some present. The
address given me was in one of the little streets in the Old Town, on
the dense slope down from the University to the back of the Canongate;
and, on my call there to deliver the parcel, I found the old Haddington
nurse in the person of a pleasant-mannered woman, not quite so old as I
had expected, keeping a small shop. Naturally, she talked of her
recollections of Mrs. Carlyle before her marriage; and these, as near as
possible, were her very words:—“Ah! when she was young, she was a
fleein’, dancin’, licht-heartit thing, Jeannie Welsh, that naething
would hae dauntit. But she grew grave a’ at ance. There was Maister
Irving, ye ken, that had been her teacher: and he _cam_ aboot her. Then
there was Maister——[I forget who this was]. Then there was Maister
Carlyle himsel’; and _he_ cam to finish her off, like. I’m told he’s a
great man noo, and unco’ muckle respeckit in London.”——That was
certainly a memorable day in 1821 when there stood before the graceful
and spirited girl in Haddington not only the gigantic, handsome,
black-haired Irving, whom she had known since her childhood, but also
the friend he had brought with him,—less tall than Irving, of leaner and
less handsome frame, but with head of the most powerful shape, thick
dark-brown hair several shades lighter than her own, and an intenser
genius than Irving’s visible in his deep eyes, cliff-like brow, and sad
face of a bilious ruddy. It was just about this time that Irving used to
rattle up his friend from his desponding depths by the prophecy of the
coming time when they would shake hands across a brook as respectively
first in British Divinity and in British Literature, and when people,
after saying “Both these fellows are from Annandale,” would add “Where
_is_ Annandale?” The girl, looking at the two, may have already been
thinking of Irving’s jocular prophecy.
A most interesting coincidence in time with the first visit to
Haddington would be established by the dating given by Mr. Froude to a
memorandum of Carlyle’s own respecting a passage in the _Sartor
Resartus_.
In that book, it may be remembered, Teufelsdröckh, after he has deserted
the popular faith, passes through three stages before he attains to
complete spiritual rest and manhood. For a while he is in the state of
mind called “The Everlasting No”; out of this he moves on to a middle
point, called “The Centre of Indifference”; and finally he reaches “The
Everlasting Yes.” The particular passage in question is that in which,
having long been in the stage of “The Everlasting No,” the prey of the
most miserable and pusillanimous fears, utterly helpless and abject,
there came upon him, all of a sudden, one sultry day, as he was toiling
along the wretched little street in Paris called _Rue Saint Thomas de
l’Enfer_, a kind of miraculous rousing and illumination:—
“All at once, there rose a thought in me, and I asked myself: ‘What
_art_ thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou for ever pip
and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! what is
the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee? Death? Well, death;
and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may,
will, or can do against thee! Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not
suffer whatso it be; and, as a child of freedom, though outcast,
trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it
come, then; I will meet it and defy it!’ And, as I so thought, there
rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base Fear
away from me for ever. I was strong, of unknown strength; a spirit,
almost a god. Ever from that time, the temper of my misery was
changed: not Fear or whining Sorrow was it; but Indignation and grim
fire-eyed Defiance. Thus had the EVERLASTING NO (_das Ewige Nein_)
pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my Being, of my Me;
and then was it that my whole Me stood up, in native God-created
majesty, and with emphasis recorded its Protest. Such a Protest, the
most important transaction in Life, may that same Indignation and
Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly called. The
Everlasting No had said, ‘Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and
the Universe is mine (the Devil’s)’; to which my whole Me made answer:
‘_I_ am not thine, but Free, and for ever hate thee!’ It is from this
hour that I incline to date my Spiritual New-birth, or Baphometic
Fire-baptism; perhaps I directly thereupon began to be a Man.”
In the memorandum of Carlyle’s which Mr. Froude quotes, he declares
that, while most of _Sartor Resartus_ is mere symbolical myth, this
account of the sudden spiritual awakening of the imaginary Teufelsdröckh
in the Rue St. Thomas de l’Enfer in Paris is a record of what happened
literally to himself one day in Leith Walk, Edinburgh. He remembered the
incident well, he says in the memorandum, and the very spot in Leith
Walk where it occurred. The memorandum itself does not date the
incident; but Mr. Froude, from authority in his possession, dates it in
June 1821. As that was the month of the first visit to Haddington, and
first sight of Jane Welsh, the coincidence is striking. But, whatever
was the amount of change in Carlyle’s mind thus associated with his
recollection of the Leith Walk incident of June 1821, it seems an
exaggeration to say, as Mr. Froude does, that this was the date of
Carlyle’s complete “conversion,” or spiritual “new birth,” in the sense
that he then “achieved finally the convictions, positive and negative,
by which the whole of his later life was governed.” In the first place,
we have Carlyle’s own most distinct assurance in his _Reminiscences_
that his complete spiritual conversion, or new-birth, in the sense of
finding that he had conquered all his “scepticisms, agonising doubtings,
fearful wrestlings with the foul and vile and soul-murdering mud-gods,”
and was emerging from a worse than Tartarus into “the eternal blue of
Ether,” was not accomplished till about four years after the present
date: viz. during the year which he spent at Hoddam Hill between 26th
May 1825 and 26th May 1826. In the second place, it would be a mistake
to suppose that the spiritual change which Carlyle intended to describe,
whether in his own case or in Teufelsdröckh’s, by the transition from
the “Everlasting No,” through the “Centre of Indifference,” to the
“Everlasting Yes,” was a change of intellectual theory in relation to
any system of theological doctrine. The parting from the old theology,
in the real case as well as in the imaginary one, had been complete;
and, though there had been a continued prosecution of the question as to
the possibility of a Natural Religion, the form in which that question
had been prosecuted had not been so much the theoretical one between
Atheism or Materialism on the one hand and Theism or Spiritual
Supernaturalism on the other, as the moral or practical one of personal
duty on either assumption. That the “theory of the universe” which
Carlyle had adopted on parting with the old faith was the spiritualistic
one, whether a pure Theism or an imaginative hypothesis of a struggle
between the Divine and the Diabolic, can hardly be doubted. No
constitution such as his could have adopted the other theory, or rested
in it long. But, let the Theistic theory have been adopted however
passionately and held however tenaciously, what a tumult of mind, what a
host of despairs and questionings, before its high abstractions could be
brought down into a rule for personal behaviour, and wrapt with any
certainty or comfort round one’s moving, living, and suffering self! How
was that vast Inconceivable related to this little life and its world;
or was there no relation at all but that of merciless and irresistible
power? What of the origin and purpose of all things visible, and of man
amid them? What of death and the future? It is of this course of mental
groping and questioning, inevitable even after the strongest general
assumption of the Theistic theory, that Carlyle seems to have taken
account in his description of a progress from the “Everlasting No” to
the “Everlasting Yes”; and what is most remarkable in his description is
that he makes every advance, every step gained, to depend not so much on
an access of intellectual light as on a sudden stirring at the roots of
the conscience and the will. Teufelsdröckh’s mental progress out of the
mood of the “Everlasting No” is a succession of _practical
determinations as to the conduct of his own spirit_, each determination
coming as an inspired effort of the will, altering his demeanour from
that moment, and the last bringing him into a final condition of freedom
and self-mastery. The effort of the will does indeed diffuse a
corresponding change through the intellect; but it is as if on the
principle, “Henceforth such and such a view of things _shall_ be my
view,”—which is but a variation of the Scriptural principle that it is
by doing the law that one comes to know the gospel.
The Leith Walk incident, accordingly, is to be taken as the equivalent
in Carlyle’s case to that first step out of the “Everlasting No” of
which he makes so much in the biography of Teufelsdröckh. It was not by
any means his complete conversion or emancipation, but it was a
beginning. It was, to use his own words, a change at least “in the
temper of his misery,” and a change for the better, inasmuch as it
substituted indignation and defiance for what had been mere fear and
whimpering. His mood thenceforth, though still miserable enough, was to
be less abject and more stern. On the whole, if this construction of the
Leith Walk incident of June 1821 does not make so much of it as Mr.
Froude’s does, it leaves enough of reason for any Edinburgh youth, when
he next chances to be in that straggling thoroughfare between Edinburgh
and Leith, to pause near the middle of it, and look about him. The spot
must have been just below Pilrig Street, which was Carlyle’s
starting-point from his lodgings in Moray Street (now Spey Street) on
his way to Leith.
There was, at all events, no very _obvious_ change in Carlyle’s mood
and demeanour in Edinburgh in the latter part of 1821. His own report
in the _Reminiscences_ is still of the dreariness of his life, his
gruff humours, and gloomy prognostications. But, corroborated though
this report is in the main by contemporary letters, it would be a
mistake, I believe, to accept it absolutely, or without such
abatements as mere reflection on the circumstances will easily
suggest. It is impossible to suppose that Carlyle, at this period of
his life or at any other, can have been all unhappy, even when he
thought himself most unhappy. There must have been ardours and glows
of soul, great joys and exhilarations, corresponding to the complexity
of nervous endowment that could descend to such depths of sadness.
From himself we learn, in particular, how the society of Irving,
whether in their Annandale meetings, or in Irving’s visits to
Edinburgh, had always an effect upon his spirits like that of
sunrising upon night or fog. Irving’s letters must have had a similar
effect: such a letter, for example, as that from Glasgow in which
Irving had written, “I am beginning to see the dawn of the day when
you shall be plucked by the literary world from my solitary, and
therefore more clear, admiration,” and had added this interesting note
respecting Dr. Chalmers: “Our honest Demosthenes, or shall I call him
Chrysostom?—Boanerges would fit him better!—seems to have caught some
glimpse of your inner man, though he had few opportunities; for he
never ceases to be inquiring after you.”[37]
Whether such letters brought Carlyle exhilaration or not, there must
have been exhilaration for him, or at least roused interest, on Irving’s
own account, in the news, which came late in 1821, that Irving was not
to be tied much longer to the great Glasgow Demosthenes and his very
difficult congregation. After two years and a half of the Glasgow
assistantship to Dr. Chalmers, there had come that invitation to the
pastorship of the Scotch Church, Hatton Garden, London, which Irving
received as exultingly, as he afterwards said, as if it had been a call
to the Archbishopric of Canterbury. He passed through Edinburgh on his
way to London to offer himself on probation to the little colony of
London Scots that thought he might suit them for their minister; and
Carlyle was the last person he saw before leaving Scotland. The scene of
their parting was the coffee-room of the old Black Bull Hotel in Leith
Street, then the great starting-place for the Edinburgh coaches. It was
“a dim night, November or December, between nine and ten,” Carlyle tells
us; but Mrs. Oliphant’s _Life of Irving_ helps us to the more precise
dating of December 1821, a day or two before Christmas. They had their
talk in the coffee-room; and Carlyle, on going, gave Irving a bundle of
cigars, that he might try one or two of them in the tedium of his
journey next day on the top of the coach. Who smoked the cigars no one
ever knew; for Irving, in the hurry of starting next morning, forgot to
take them with him, and left them lying in a stall in the coffee-room.
That meeting at the Black Bull in Leith Street, however, was to be
remembered by both. Irving had gone to London to set the Thames on fire;
Carlyle remained in Edinburgh for his mathematical teaching, his private
German readings, his hackwork for Brewster’s _Edinburgh Encyclopædia_,
and the chances of continued contributorship to the _New Edinburgh
Review_. Thus the year 1821 ended, and the year 1822 began.
PART III.—1822–1828
By Carlyle’s own account, and still more distinctly by the evidence of
other records, the beginning of the year 1822 was marked by a break in
his hitherto cloudy sky. How much of this is to be attributed to the
continuance of the change of mental mood which has to be dated from June
1821, and associated with the Leith Walk revelation of that month, one
can hardly say. One finds causes of an external kind that must have
contributed to the result.
One was the Charles Buller engagement. Carlyle’s dating of this very
important event in his life is rather hazy. In his _Reminiscences_ he
gives us to understand that, after his parting with Irving at the Black
Bull in Edinburgh, just before the Christmas of 1821, he lost sight of
Irving altogether for a while, and was chagrined by Irving’s silence. He
thought their correspondence had come to an end; accounted for the fact
as well as he could by remembering in what a turmoil of new occupation
Irving was then involved in London; and only came to know how faithful
his friend had been to him all the while when the Buller tutorship at
£200 a year emerged, “in the spring and summer of 1822,” as the product
of Irving’s London exertions in his behalf. In reading this account, one
fancies Irving already established in London, In fact, however, as Mrs.
Oliphant’s _Life of Irving_ makes clear, Irving’s journey from the Black
Bull to London in December 1821 had been on a trial visit only. He was
back in Glasgow early in February 1822,—whence, on the 9th of that
month, he wrote a long letter to his “dear and lovely pupil,” Miss Jane
Welsh, sending it under cover to his friend “T. C.” in Edinburgh,
because he was not sure but _she_ might be then in Edinburgh too; and it
was not till July 1822, and after some difficult negotiation, that
Irving, ordained by his native Presbytery of Annan, took his farewell of
Glasgow and the West of Scotland, and settled in London definitely. The
good turn he had done Carlyle in the matter of the Buller tutorship must
have been done, therefore, in his preliminary London visit of January
1822, within a month after his parting from Carlyle at the Black Bull,
and before Carlyle’s cigars, if Irving had taken them with him, could
have been smoked out. It must have been in those January weeks of his
probationary preachings before the Hatton Garden people that Irving,
moving about as a new Scottish lion in the drawing-room of the English
Stracheys of the India House, was introduced to Mrs. Strachey’s sister,
Mrs. Buller, and, after some meetings with that lady, helped her in a
“domestic intricacy.” This was that her eldest son, Charles Buller, a
very clever and high-spirited boy, of about fifteen years of age, “fresh
from Harrow,” but too young to go to Cambridge, was somewhat
troublesome, and she and her husband were at a loss what to do with him.
Irving’s advice had been to send the boy for a session or two to the
University of Edinburgh, and to secure for him there the private
tutorship of a certain young literary man, Mr. Thomas Carlyle, whom
Irving knew thoroughly and could highly recommend. Mrs. Buller must have
been a rapid lady, for the thing was arranged almost at once. Carlyle
had been communicated with; and he had accepted the tutorship on the
terms stipulated by Irving. It must have been on an early day in the
spring of 1822 that he made that call at the house of the Rev. Dr.
Fleming in George Square, to receive his new pupil, Charles Buller, with
Charles’s younger brother Arthur, on their arrival in Edinburgh, and had
that first walk with them by the foot of Salisbury Crags, and up the
High Street from Holyrood, of which there is such pleasant mention in
the _Reminiscences_. Dr. Fleming, a fellow-contributor with Carlyle to
Brewster’s _Encyclopædia_, and a much respected clergyman of Edinburgh,
had interested himself greatly in Irving’s London prospects, and had
tried to smooth the way for him by letters to London friends; and it was
in his house in George Square that the two English boys were to
board,—Carlyle coming to them daily from his lodgings in Moray Street.
He had already, before the arrival of the boys, he tells us, entered
Charles Buller in Dunbar’s “third Greek class” in the University. The
information agrees with the University records; for in the
matriculation-book of the session 1821–22 I find one of the very latest
matriculations to have been that of “Charles Buller, Cornwall,” and I
find him to have been all but the last student enrolled for that session
in Dunbar’s senior class. This of itself would imply that Carlyle’s
tutorship of the boys must have begun in February 1822; for, as the
University session ends in the beginning of April, it would have hardly
been worth while to enroll the young Buller in a class after February.
The tutorship was a settled thing, therefore, while Irving was still in
Glasgow, and it had been going on for some months before Irving’s
permanent removal to London. Carlyle himself seems to have become aware
of the haziness of his dating of the transaction; for he inserts, by way
of afterthought, a dim recollection of one or two sights of Irving
somewhere shortly after the Black Bull parting, and of talks with him
about the Buller family while the tutorship was in its infancy. Anyhow,
the Buller tutorship, with its £200 a year, was “a most important thing”
to Carlyle in “the economies and practical departments” of his life at
the time; and he owed it “wholly to Irving.” The two boys, Charles
Buller especially, took to their new tutor cordially at once, and he
cordially to them; and there were no difficulties. In the classics,
indeed, and especially in Greek, Charles Buller, fresh from his Harrow
training, was Carlyle’s superior; but Carlyle could do his duty for both
the boys by getting up their Latin and Greek lessons along with them,
teaching them as much mathematics as they would learn, and guiding them
generally into solid reading, inquiry, and reflection.
Another gleam of sunshine in Carlyle’s life early in 1822, or what ought
to have been such, was the correspondence with Haddington. Since the
visit of the previous June _that_ had gradually established itself, till
it had become constant, in the form of “weekly or oftener sending books,
etc., etc.,” with occasional runs down to Haddington in person, or
sights of Miss Welsh, with her mother, in Edinburgh. How far matters had
gone by this time does not distinctly appear; but there is some
significance in the fact that Irving, writing from Glasgow to Miss Welsh
immediately after his return from the trial-preachings before the Hatton
Garden congregation in London, had sent the letter through “T. C.” The
impression made by that letter, as it may be read in Mrs. Oliphant’s
_Life of Irving_, certainly is that Irving’s own feelings in the
Haddington quarter were still of so tender a kind that the advancing
relations of “T. C.” to the “dear and lovely pupil” were not indifferent
to him. Doubtless there were obstacles yet in the way of any definite
engagement between Carlyle and the young lady who was heiress of
Craigenputtock,—criticisms of relatives and others who “saw only the
outside of the thing”; but the young lady “had faith in her own
insight,” as she afterwards told Miss Jewsbury, and was likely to act
for herself. Meanwhile, to be “aiding and directing her studies,” and
have a kind of home at Haddington when he chose to go there on a
Saturday, was surely a tinge of gold upon the silver of the Buller
tutorship.
Moreover, Carlyle’s occupations of a literary kind were becoming more
numerous and congenial. “I was already getting my head a little up,” he
says, “translating _Legendre’s Geometry_ for Brewster; my outlook
somewhat cheerfuller.” All through the preceding year, it appears from
private letters, he had been exerting himself indefatigably to find
literary work. Thus, in a letter of date March 1821 to an old college
friend: “I have had about twenty plans this winter in the way of
authorship: they have all failed. I have about twenty more to try; and,
if it does but please the Director of all things to continue the
moderate share of health now restored to me, I will make the doors of
human society fly open before me yet, notwithstanding. My _petards_ will
not burst, or make only _noise_ when they do. I must mix them better,
plant them more judiciously; they shall burst, and do execution
too.”[38] Again, in a letter of the very next month: “I am moving on,
weary and heavy-laden, with very fickle health, and many
discomforts,—still looking forward to the future (brave future!) for all
the accommodation and enjoyment that render life an object of desire.
_Then_ shall I no longer play a candle-snuffer’s part in the great
drama; or, if I do, my salary will be raised.”[39] From Mr. Froude we
learn that one of the burst petards of 1821 had been the proposal to a
London publishing firm of a complete translation of Schiller’s Works.
That offer having been declined, with the twenty others of which Carlyle
speaks, the only obvious increase of his literary engagements at the
time of the beginning of the Buller tutorship in 1822 consisted, it
would appear, in that connection with the _New Edinburgh Review_ of
which mention has been already made, and in the translation of
_Legendre_ which he had undertaken for Brewster. But there was more in
the background. There is significance in the fact that his second
contribution to the _New Edinburgh_, published in April 1822, when the
Buller tutorship had just begun, was an article on Goethe’s _Faust_. The
German readings which had been going on since 1819 had influenced him
greatly; and he was now absorbed in a passion for German Literature.
Schiller, Goethe, and Jean Paul were the demigods of his intellectual
worship, the authors in whose works, rather than in those of any of the
same century in France or Britain, he found suitable nutriment for his
own spirit. He had proposed, we see, to translate the whole of Schiller.
Of his studies in Goethe and their effects we have a striking
commemoration in the passage of his _Reminiscences_ where he tells of
that “windless, Scotch-misty, Saturday night,” apparently just about our
present date, when, having finished the reading of _Wilhelm Meister_, he
walked through the deserted streets of Edinburgh in a state of agitation
over the wonders he had found in that book. Henceforth, accordingly, he
had a portion of his literary career definitely marked out for him.
Whatever else he was to be, there was work enough before him for a while
in translation from the German and in commentary on the great German
writers for the behoof of the British public. There were but three or
four men in Britain competent for that business, and he was one of them.
The translation of _Legendre’s Geometry_ for Brewster deserves a passing
notice. Though not published till 1824,—when it appeared, from the press
of Oliver and Boyd of Edinburgh, as an octavo of nearly 400 pages, with
the title _Elements of Geometry and Trigonometry; with Notes. Translated
from the French of A. M. Legendre, Member of the Institute, etc. Edited
by David Brewster, LL.D., etc. With Notes and Additions, and an
Introductory Essay on Proportion_,—it was begun by Carlyle in 1822, and
continued to occupy him through the whole of that year. His authorship
of this Translation remained such a secret, or had been so forgotten,
that the late Professor De Morgan, specially learned though he was in
the bibliography of mathematics, did not know the fact, and would hardly
believe it, till I procured him the evidence. It was one day in or about
1860, if I remember rightly, and in the common room of University
College, London, that De Morgan, in the course of the chats on all
things and sundry which I used to have with him there, adverted to the
Legendre book. He knew, he said, that Brewster himself could not have
done the translation; but he had always been under the impression that
the person employed by Brewster had been a certain Galbraith, a noted
teacher of mathematics in Edinburgh. Recently, however, he had heard
Carlyle named as the man; and, being very doubtful on the point, he
wanted very much to be certain. To back my own statement, I undertook to
obtain an _affidavit_ from head-quarters. “Tell De Morgan,” said
Carlyle, when I next saw him, “that every word of the book is mine, and
that I got £50 for the job from Brewster; which was then of some
consideration to me.” He went on to speak, very much as he does in the
_Reminiscences_, of the prefixed little Essay on Proportion, retaining a
fond recollection of that section of the book,—begun and finished, he
says, on “a happy forenoon (Sunday, I fear)” in his Edinburgh lodgings,
and never seen again since he had revised the proof. De Morgan, who had
some correspondence on the subject with Carlyle after I had conveyed
Carlyle’s message, paid it a compliment afterwards in his _Budget of
Paradoxes_, by calling it “as good a substitute for the Fifth Book of
Euclid as could be given in speech”; and a glance at the Essay in the
volume itself will confirm the opinion. It fills but eight printed
pages, and consists of but four definitions and three theorems, wound up
with these concluding sentences:—“By means of these theorems, and their
corollaries, it is easy to demonstrate, or even to discover, all the
most important facts connected with the Doctrine of Proportion. The
facts given here will enable the student to go through these Elements
[Legendre’s] without any obstruction on that head.”
The Translation of _Legendre_, with this Essay on Proportion, was
Carlyle’s farewell to Mathematics. To the end of his life, however, he
would talk with great relish of mathematical matters. Once, in the
vicinity of Sloane Street, when I mentioned to him a geometrical theorem
which Dr. Chalmers had confided to me, with the information that he had
been working at it all his life and had never accomplished the solution,
Carlyle became so eager that he made me stop and draw a diagram of the
theorem for him on the pavement. Having thus picked up the notion of it,
he branched out, in the most interesting manner, as we walked on, into
talk and anecdote about mathematics and mathematicians, with references
especially to Leslie, West, Robert Simson, and Pappus. A marked
similarity of character between Carlyle and Chalmers was discernible in
the fact that they both avowed a strong personal preference for the old
pure geometry over the more potent modern analytics. “In geometry, sir,
you are dealing with the _ipsissima corpora_,” Chalmers used to say; and
Carlyle’s feeling seems to have been something of the same kind.
There was a variation of Carlyle’s Edinburgh existence, not altogether
disagreeable, when the seniors of the Buller family followed the two
boys, and made Edinburgh for some time their residence. They took up
house in India Street, giving dinners and seeing a good deal of company;
and Carlyle, while continuing his lessons to young Charles and Arthur,
was thus a good deal in India Street, observing new society, and
becoming acquainted with Mr. Buller senior, the sprightly Mrs. Buller,
and their third and youngest child, Reginald. As he makes this advent of
the Bullers to Edinburgh to have been “towards the autumn” in 1822, we
are able to connect it with another advent.
It was on the 15th of August 1822, after several weeks of enormous
expectation, that George IV. arrived in Edinburgh, welcomed so memorably
on board his yacht before landing by Sir Walter Scott; and thence to the
29th, when his Majesty took his departure, all Edinburgh was in that
paroxysm of loyal excitement and Celtic heraldry and hubbub of which Sir
Walter was the soul and manager, and a full account of which is to be
found in his Life by Lockhart. It is hardly a surprise to know that what
the veteran Scott, with his great jovial heart, his Toryism, and his
love of symbols, thus plunged into and enjoyed with such passionate
avidity, tasking all his energies for a fortnight to make the business a
triumphant success, the moody young Carlyle, then a Radical to the core,
fled from in unmitigated disgust. He tells us in his _Reminiscences_
how, on seeing the placard by the magistrates of Edinburgh, a day or two
before the King’s arrival, requesting all the citizens to appear in the
streets well-dressed on the day of his Majesty’s entry, the men in
“black coats and white duck trousers,” he could stand it no longer, and
resolved to be absent from the approaching “efflorescence of the
flunkeyisms.” The tutorial duties with the Bullers being naturally in
abeyance at such a time, and rooms in Edinburgh being so scarce that the
use of Carlyle’s in Moray Street was a welcome gift to his merchant
friends, Graham and Hope, who were to arrive from Glasgow for the
spectacle, he himself was off for a run in Annandale and Galloway before
his Majesty made his appearance; and he did not return till all the
hubbub of the fortnight was “comfortably rolled away.” I have heard him
describe this flight of his from George IV., and from the horrors of
that fortnight of feastings, processionings, huzzaings, and bagpipings,
round his Majesty in Edinburgh, at more length and in greater detail
than in the passage incidentally given to the subject in the
_Reminiscences_; and one of the details may be worth relating:—On the
first stage out of Edinburgh he put up for the night at some village
inn. Even at that distance the “efflorescence of the flunkeyisms” from
which he had fled seemed to pursue him; for the talk of the people at
the inn, and the very papers that were lying about, were of nothing but
George IV. and the Royal Visit. Taking refuge at last in his bedroom, he
was fighting there with his habitual enemy, sleeplessness, when, as if
to make sleep absolutely impossible for that night, there came upon his
ear from the next room, from which he was separated only by a thin
partition, the moanings and groanings of a woman, in distress with
toothache or some other pain. The “oh! oh!” from the next room had
become louder and louder, and threatened to be incessant through the
whole night, so that each repetition of it became more and more
insufferable. At last, having knocked to solicit attention, he addressed
the invisible sufferer through the partition thus: “For God’s sake,
woman, be articulate. If anything can be done for you, be it even to
ride ten miles in the dark for a doctor, tell me, and I’ll do it; if
not, endeavour to compose yourself.” There ensued a dead silence, and he
was troubled no more.
The Edinburgh University records show that “Charles Buller, Cornwall,”
matriculated again for the session 1822–3 (one of the very earliest
students to matriculate that year, for he stands as No. 8 in a total of
2071 matriculations), and that he attended the 2nd Latin class, under
Professor James Pillans, who had succeeded Christison as Humanity
Professor in 1820. A later name in the matriculation list (No. 836) is
that of “Arthur Buller,” who had not attended the University with his
brother in the previous year, but now joined him in the 2nd Latin class,
and also took out Dunbar’s 2nd Greek class. In the same matriculation
list of 1823–3 (No. 21), as entering the University for the first time,
and attending Pillans’s 2nd Latin class with the two Bullers, appears
“John Carlyle, Dumfriesshire.” This was Carlyle’s younger brother, the
future Dr. John Carlyle, translator of Dante, and the only other of the
family who received a University education. He had been for some time a
teacher in Annan School, in succession to his brother; and, as he was to
choose the medical profession, his present attendance in the Arts
classes was but preliminary to attendance in the medical classes in the
sessions immediately to follow. He lodged, as the _Reminiscences_ tell
us, with his brother, in the rooms in Moray Street, Pilrig Street.
The winter of 1822–3 was passed by Carlyle in the Edinburgh routine of
his daily walks from those rooms to the house of the Bullers in India
Street, his tutorship of the two young Bullers and other intercourse
with the Buller family and their guests, and his own German and other
readings and literary efforts and schemings. It was in that winter, and
not at the earlier date hazily assigned in the _Reminiscences_, that the
cessation of correspondence with Irving became a matter of secret
vexation to him. The good Irving, now in the full whirl of his activity
with the Hatton Garden congregation and of the London notoriety to which
that led, was too busy to write; and it was only by rumour, or by
letters from others, that Carlyle heard of Irving’s extraordinary doings
and extraordinary successes in the metropolis, of the crowds that were
flocking to hear him in the little Scotch chapel, and of the stir he and
his preachings were making in the London fashionable world. “People have
their envies, their pitiful self-comparisons,” says Carlyle, admitting
that the real joy he felt at the vast and sudden effulgence of his
friend into a fame commensurate with his powers was tempered by a sense
of the contrast between himself, still toiling obscurely in Edinburgh, a
“poor, suffering, handcuffed wretch,” and the other Annandale fellow,
now so free and glorious among the grandees on the Thames. There was, he
adds, just a speck of another feeling. Would Irving be able to keep his
head in the blaze of such enormous London popularity? Had he strength
enough to guide and manage himself in that huge element with anything
like the steadiness that had characterised the behaviour of the more
massive and more simple-hearted Chalmers in Glasgow? This feeling, he
seems to hint, was increased rather than lessened when Irving’s first
publication came into his hands,—the famous _Orations and Arguments for
Judgment to Come_, by which, early in 1823, the cooler and more critical
world was enabled to judge of the real substance of those
pulpit-discourses which were so amazing the Londoners. Meanwhile, as
Irving himself was still silent, Carlyle could only plod on at his own
work. It seems to have been late in 1822, or early in 1823, that, having
closed his contributions to Brewster’s _Encyclopædia_, and got the
Legendre translation off his hands, he set himself to his _Life of
Schiller_.
If, however, the _Life of Schiller_ was begun in Edinburgh, it was not
finished there. The University session of 1822–3 over, and the spring
and summer of 1823 having come, the Bullers, with that aptitude for
change of residence which characterises retired Indians and people with
plenty of money, had removed to the mansion of Kinnaird in Perthshire,
situated on the river Tay, some miles to the north of Dunkeld. Carlyle
and his tutorship of young Charles and Arthur Buller had, accordingly,
been transferred thither. He must have been there early in June 1823;
for a letter of his is extant, dated from Kinnaird House on the 17th of
that month, in which he describes his first sight of Dunkeld and its old
cathedral, with Dunsinane Hill, and the position of old Birnam Wood in
the neighbourhood, and his thoughts in those spots of “the immortal
link-boy” that had made them famous. The same letter gives an
interesting glimpse of his own mood in the first month of his Tayside
residence with the Bullers. “Some time hence,” he says to his
correspondent, Thomas Mitchell, “when you are seated in your peaceful
manse,—you at one side of the parlour fire, Mrs. M. at the other, and
two or three little M.’s, fine chubby urchins, hopping about the
carpet,—you will suddenly observe the door fly open, and a tall, meagre,
careworn figure stalk forward, his grave countenance lightened by
unusual smiles in the certainty of meeting a cordial welcome. This
knight of the rueful visage will, in fact, mingle with the group for a
season, and be merry as the merriest, though his looks are sinister. I
warn you to make provision for such emergencies. In process of time I
too must have my own peculiar hearth; wayward as my destiny has hitherto
been, perplexed and solitary as my path of life still is, I never cease
to reckon on yet paying scot and lot on my own footing.”[40] From the
_Reminiscences_, where we learn that he was at this time persevering
with his _Life of Schiller_, we have his later recollection of those
summer and autumn months, and on into late autumn, in Kinnaird House:—
“I was nightly working at the thing in a serious, sad, and totally
solitary, way. My two rooms were in the old mansion of Kinnaird, some
three or four hundred yards from the new, and on a lower level,
overshadowed with wood. Thither I always retired directly after tea,
and for most part had the edifice all to myself,—good candles, good
wood fire, place dry enough, tolerably clean, and such silence and
total absence of company, good or bad, as I never experienced before
or since. I remember still the grand _sough_ of those woods, or,
perhaps, in the stillest times, the distant ripple of the Tay. Nothing
else to converse with but this and my own thoughts, which never for a
moment pretended to be joyful, and were sometimes pathetically sad. I
was in the miserablest dyspeptic health, uncertain whether I ought not
to _quit_ on that account, and at times almost resolving to do it;
dumb, far away from all my loved ones. My poor _Schiller_, nothing
considerable of a work even to my own judgment, had to be steadily
persisted in, as the only protection and resource in this inarticulate
huge wilderness, actual and symbolical.”[41]
It was in October 1823 that the first part of _Schiller’s Life and
Writings_ appeared, without the author’s name, in the then celebrated
_London Magazine_ of Messrs. Taylor and Hessey. It was the most
important of the metropolitan magazines of that time, counting among its
contributors, since its foundation in 1820, such writers as Charles
Lamb, Hazlitt, Allan Cunningham, the Rev. Henry Francis Cary, Hamilton
Reynolds, Bryan Waller Procter, Thomas Noon Talfourd, young Thomas Hood,
and De Quincey. The admission of Carlyle into such company, the opening
of such a London connection at last, ought to have been some
gratification to him in his recluse life at Kinnaird; and, doubtless, it
was, to a far greater extent than he could remember when he wrote the
_Reminiscences_. He does vaguely mention there that, though his own
judgment of the merits of his performance was not very high, he had
compliments from the editor of the magazine,—_i.e._, we must suppose,
from Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, who were their own editors, unless
indeed young Thomas Hood, who was a kind of assistant editor, was the
medium of the communication. What is more important is that the _Life of
Schiller_, if not all in the editor’s hands complete when the first part
appeared, must have been reported as complete, or as approaching
completeness, in Carlyle’s own hands at Kinnaird. This, accordingly,
fixes October 1823, or thereabouts, as the date of his passing on from
_Schiller_ to the new work which he had prescribed for himself as a
sequel, viz. the _Translation of the Wilhelm Meister_. It must have been
in one of those nocturnal sittings in the late autumn of 1823 in the old
mansion of Kinnaird, amid “the grand _sough_ of those woods” outside,
when his _Schiller_ manuscript lay finished beside him, and he had
Goethe before him, that there happened that “Tragedy of the Night-Moth”
which he has commemorated in one of his metrical fragments—
“’Tis placid midnight; stars are keeping
Their meek and silent course in heaven;
Save pale recluse, for knowledge seeking,
All mortal things to sleep are given.
But see! a wandering night-moth enters,
Allured by taper gleaming bright;
A while keeps hovering round, then ventures
On Goethe’s mystic page to light.
With awe she views the candle blazing
A universe of fire it seems
To moth-_savante_ with rapture gazing,
Or fount whence life and motion streams.
What passions in her small heart whirling,
Hopes boundless, adoration, dread?
At length, her tiny pinions twirling,
She darts, and,—puff!—the moth is dead.”
Carlyle’s own distinct statement in the _Reminiscences_ is that Irving
had encouraged him in the _Life of Schiller_, and had “prepared the way”
for it in the _London Magazine_. How is this to be reconciled with his
repeated references to the total cessation of correspondence between
himself and Irving from the date of Irving’s definite settlement in
London to that week, “late in autumn 1823,” when Irving, having married
Miss Martin of Kirkcaldy, was on his marriage-jaunt with her in
Scotland, and generously determined to pass near Kinnaird, so as to pick
up his old friend and have a day or two of his society? One might have
thought that it was in this renewed meeting of the two friends in
Irving’s honeymoon jaunt that there came from Irving the suggestion of
the _London Magazine_ as a place for the _Schiller_, or the intimation
that he had already arranged for it and knew it would be welcome there.
This supposition, however, will not cohere with the date of Irving’s
marriage. It took place at Kirkcaldy on the 13th of October 1823, after
the number of the _London Magazine_ containing the first part of the
_Schiller_ had been out for a fortnight; and Irving’s marriage-tour in
Scotland lasted through the rest of that month and the whole of
November. There must, therefore, have been renewed correspondence
between Irving and Carlyle, with arrangements about the _Schiller_, some
while before October 1823, though Carlyle’s memory had become hazy about
that matter too. It is pleasant to be sure of the main fact,—which is
that it was to the ever-friendly Irving that Carlyle owed this second
great service of his introduction to the _London Magazine_, just as he
had already owed him the Buller tutorship.
The winter of 1823–4 seems to have been passed wholly at Kinnaird. At
least, there was no re-appearance of the Bullers in Edinburgh that
winter, and no re-attendance that winter of Charles Buller or his
brother Arthur in any of the classes of Edinburgh University. What we
gather from the _Reminiscences_ is that, towards the end of the winter,
the Bullers had begun to weary of Kinnaird life, and indeed of life in
Scotland, and were meditating a return to England, possibly for ultimate
settlement in Cornwall, but certainly with a view to London as their
intermediate head-quarters. He hints also that they had by this time
been a good deal exercised by the moodiness and miserable bad health of
the strange tutor they had with them, and whom they respected and
admired so much. Might it not be the best arrangement that he should go
for a month or two to his native Annandale to recruit his health, and
then rejoin them in London, there again to take charge of his pupils?
Taking leave of Kinnaird with that understanding, Carlyle, it appears,
rode, either directly thence or very soon afterwards from his father’s
house at Mainhill, all the way to Edinburgh, to consult a doctor about
his dyspepsia. Was it chronic, and incurable except by regimen? or could
it be removed by medical treatment? “_It is all tobacco, sir; give up
tobacco_,” was the physician’s answer; on which Carlyle’s comment is
that, having instantly and absolutely followed the advice, and
persevered for “long months” in total abstinence from tobacco, without
the slightest sign of improvement, he came to the conclusion that he
might as well have ridden sixty miles in the opposite direction, and
poured his sorrows into the “long hairy ear of the first jackass” he
met, as have made that ride to Edinburgh to consult the great authority.
This story of the tobacco consultation was a favourite one with Carlyle
in later days. I have heard it from him several times, with two
additions to what appears in the _Reminiscences_. One was that, the
doctor having asked him whether he _could_ give up tobacco, “Give it up,
sir?” he replied; “I can cut off my left hand with an axe, if _that_
should be necessary!” The other was an account of his months of
probation of the new no-tobacco regimen. The account took the form of a
recollection of himself as staggering for months from tree-trunk to
tree-trunk in a metaphorical wood, tobaccoless and dreary, without one
symptom of benefit from his self-denial, till at last, sinking at the
foot of one of the tree-trunks, and seeing a long clay and a
tobacco-pouch providentially lying on the turf, he exclaimed “I will
endure this diabolical farce and delusion no longer,” and had a good
smoke then and there once more, in signal of reverting for ever to his
old comfort. Tobacco and a very little good brandy, he used to say to
the end of his life, were the only two drugs in the whole pharmacopœia
that he had found of any real utility to the distressed human
organism.[42]
It was during the two or three spring months of 1824, spent at Mainhill
in Dumfriesshire, under the care of that “best of nurses and of
hostesses,” his mother, that the _Translation of Wilhelm Meister_ was
finished. It was in the June of the same year that, having revised the
proofs of the three volumes of that book for Messrs. Oliver and Boyd of
Edinburgh, who had agreed to be the publishers, as they were also of his
translation of _Legendre’s Geometry_, and having run up to Edinburgh
himself with the last proofs and the preface, and received from Messrs.
Oliver and Boyd £180 for the labour, and having taken a farewell at
Haddington the purport of which may be guessed, he embarked in the Leith
smack that was to carry him to London. He was then in his twenty-ninth
year, and it was his first visit to the Great Babylon. The second part
of his _Life of Schiller_ had appeared in the number of the _London
Magazine_ for January 1824; but the rest had still to be published, and
would probably appear in the magazine when he was himself in London and
had formed personal acquaintance with the editorial powers. Copies of
the _Wilhelm Meister_ from the press of Messrs. Oliver and Boyd would
follow him from Edinburgh; and it would thus be as the anonymous author
of the _Life of Schiller_ and of the _Translation of Wilhelm Meister_
that he would first step into London literary society. For the rest, his
prospects were utterly undefined. Whether he should remain in London
permanently, or return to Scotland, depended on events not yet
calculable. All that was certain was that the Buller tutorship would
still be his anchorage for a time in London, as it had been for the last
two years in Scotland, and that he had Irving’s house for his London
home so long as he might choose. It was, in fact, to Irving’s house in
Myddelton Terrace, Islington, where Irving and his wife were living as a
newly-married couple, that Carlyle was to steer himself after the Leith
smack had landed him in London river.
* * * * *
From this point there is a break of two years and four months in
Carlyle’s life, during which he had nothing to do with Edinburgh. The
incidents of that interval may be filled in briefly thus:—
NINE MONTHS IN LONDON AND BIRMINGHAM (_June 1824–March 1825_).—Residing
with the Irvings at Islington, or in lodgings near them, Carlyle in
those months made his first acquaintance with London, and with various
persons in it of greater or less note. Introduced at once to the
Stracheys, and to the then celebrated Mr. and Mrs. Basil Montagu of
Bedford Square, it was through them, or otherwise directly or indirectly
through Irving, that he saw something of Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Allan
Cunningham, Bryan Waller Procter, Crabb Robinson, and others of literary
name, besides such commercial London Scots of Irving’s congregation as
Sir Peter Laurie, Mr. William Hamilton, and Mr. Dinwiddie, and the young
English manufacturing chemist, Mr. Badams of Birmingham. After Mrs.
Strachey and the queenly Mrs. Basil Montagu, his most valued new friends
in this list, he tells us, were Procter, Allan Cunningham, and Badams.
This last, indeed, under pretext of putting him on a regimen that would
cure his dyspepsia, lured him away to Birmingham for three months; which
three months of residence with Badams in Birmingham, and of rambles with
Badams hither and thither in Warwickshire and sights of Joe Parkes and
other Birmingham notabilities, have to be interpolated therefore in the
general bulk of the London visit. There was also a trip to Dover, in the
company of the Stracheys and the Irvings, with a run of some of the
party, Carlyle one of them, to Paris, for ten days of Parisian
sight-seeing. Altogether, the London visit had been so successful that,
when the tutorial engagement with the Bullers came to an end in the
course of it,—which it did from the impossibility of an adjustment of
Carlyle’s views with Mrs. Buller’s ever-changing plans,—the notion among
his friends was that he could not do better than remain in London and
take his chances as a London man of letters. The concluding portions of
his _Schiller_ had appeared in the _London Magazine_ during the first
months of his visit; and before the end of 1825 the five portions into
which the work had been cut up for magazine purposes had been gathered
together, and published by Messrs. Taylor and Hessey in the form of an
octavo volume, with the title _The Life of Friedrich Schiller_, bringing
the author £100. It was during his stay in London also that he received
his first communication from Goethe, in the form of a brief letter of
thanks for a copy of the _Translation of Wilhelm Meister_ which had been
sent to Weimar some months before. But, though things seemed thus to
conspire in favour of the detention of Carlyle in London, he had made up
his mind to the contrary; and in March 1825 he turned his back upon the
great city, and was on his way once more to his native Dumfriesshire.
NINETEEN MONTHS OF DUMFRIESSHIRE FARM-LIFE (_March 1825–October
1826_):—For about two months Carlyle was at his father’s farmhouse of
Mainhill, near Ecclefechan, resting from his return-tour through
England, and preparing for the adventure which he had planned. This was
an attempt at tenant-farming on his own account in that neighbourhood. A
letter of his to Mrs. Basil Montagu, of date May 20, 1825, is still from
Mainhill; but on the 26th of that month he entered on the possession of
the adjacent little farm of Hoddam Hill, which he had taken on lease
from his father’s landlord, General Sharpe,—“a neat, compact little
farm, rent £100,” with “a prettyishlooking cottage.” Here for a whole
year he lived, nominally a tenant-farmer, as his father was, and close
to his father, but in reality entrusting the practical farm-work to his
brother Alick, while he himself, with his mother or one of his sisters
for his housekeeper, delved a little for amusement, rode about for
health, and pursued his studies and literary tasks,—chiefly his
projected translation of _Specimens of German Romance_ for the
bookseller Tait of Edinburgh. There were letters to and from his London
friends; there was once a sight in Annan of poor Irving, whose London
troubles and aberrations were by this time matters of public notoriety;
there were visits to and from neighbours; but, on the whole, the year
was one of industrious loneliness. Though he tells us but little of it,
what he does tell us enables us to see that it was a most important and
memorable year in his recollection. Perhaps in all Carlyle’s life no
other year is so important intrinsically. “I call that year idyllic,” he
tells us, “in spite of its russet coat.” This is general; but he gives
us vital particulars. It was the time, he distinctly says, of his
complete spiritual triumph, his attainment once and for ever to that
state of clear and high serenity, as to all the essentials of religion
and moral belief, which enabled him to understand in his own case “what
the old Christian people meant by _conversion_,” and which he described
afterwards, in the Teufelsdröckh manner, as the reaching of the harbour
of the “Everlasting Yes” at last. The word _happiness_ was no favourite
one in Carlyle’s vocabulary, with reference to himself at least; but he
does not refuse even this word in describing his new mental condition
through the year at Hoddam Hill. What he felt, he says, was the
attainment of “a constant inward happiness that was quite royal and
supreme, in which all temporal evil was transient and insignificant.”
Even his bodily health seemed to be improving; and the effect extended
itself most manifestly to his temper and disposition towards others. “My
thoughts were very peaceable,” he says, “full of pity and humanity as
they had never been before.” In short, he was no longer the moody,
defiant, mainly despondent and sarcastic Carlyle he had been, or had
seemed to be to superficial observers, through the past Edinburgh days,
but a calmer, wiser, and more self-possessed Carlyle, with depths of
tenderness under all his strength and fearlessness,—the Carlyle that he
was to be recognised as being by all who knew him through the next
twenty years of his life, and that indeed he continued to be essentially
to the very end. To what agency does he attribute this “immense
victory,” as he calls it, which he had thus permanently gained over his
own spirit in this thirtieth year of his age, passed at Hoddam Hill?
“Pious musings, communings silent and spontaneous with Fact and Nature
in those poor Annandale localities,”—these, including the sound on
Sundays of the Hoddam kirk-bell coming to him touchingly from the plain
below, “like the departing voice of eighteen centuries,” are mentioned
as accounting for much, but not for all. “I then felt, and still feel,
endlessly indebted to Goethe in the business. He, in his fashion, I
perceived, had travelled the steep rocky road before me, the first of
the moderns.” Not to be forgotten either, as that which tinged the year
to perfection in its “idyllic” character, was the flitting across the
scene of the presence that was dearest to him. His pledged bride, no
longer at Haddington, but residing with her relatives in Nithsdale, made
her first visit to his family in this year; they rode about together for
ten days; and the future was arranged. After exactly one year at Hoddam
Hill, a difference with General Sharpe, his father’s landlord and his
own, led to the giving up of the Hoddam farm and of the Mainhill farm at
the same time, and to the transference of the whole Carlyle family to
Scotsbrig, a much better farm, out of General Sharpe’s territories, but
still in the vicinity of Ecclefechan. This was in May 1826. At
Scotsbrig, however, Carlyle remained little more than four months; for,
“as turned out,” he married and went to Edinburgh in the following
October.
* * * * *
Carlyle was now for the first time an Edinburgh householder. Comely
Bank, where he had his domicile for the first eighteen months of his
married life, is a single row of very neat houses, situated in a quiet
road leading from the north-western suburb of Edinburgh to Craigleith
Quarry, and uniting itself there with the great Dean Road, which has
started from the west end of the city at a considerably higher level.
The houses lie back a little from the footpath, within railings, each
house with its iron gate and little strip of flower-garden in front,
while each has a larger bit of walled garden behind. The entire
row,—though within a walk of two minutes from the dense suburb from
which it is detached, and of not more than fifteen minutes from the
fashionable heart of the city, by the steep slopes of streets ascending
from that suburb,—has even yet a certain look of being out in the open.
There are fields before the windows, and there is a stretch of fields to
the back; and fifty years ago there must have been less of incipient
straggling of other buildings in the neighbourhood than there is now.
Carlyle’s house was No. 21, the last but two at the outer or country end
of the row. His natural daily walks thence, when they were not into town
up the steep sloping streets spoken of, would be to Craigleith Quarry
and the Corstorphine Hills, or past these on the great road towards
Queensferry, or aside northwards to the beautiful strip of the shore of
the Firth of Forth between Cramond and Granton.
No contemporary record yet accessible gives so distinct a general idea
of Carlyle’s state of mind and mode of life during his eighteen months
at Comely Bank as the following portion of a letter of his to Mrs. Basil
Montagu, dated on Christmas Day 1826, or just after he had settled
there:—
“Of my late history I need not speak, for you already know it: I am
wedded; to the best of wives, and with all the elements of enjoyment
richly ministered to me, and health—rather worse than even it was wont
to be. Sad contradiction! But I were no apt scholar if I had not
learned long ago, with my friend Tieck, that ‘in the fairest sunshine
a shadow chases us, that in the softest music there is a tone which
chides.’ I sometimes hope that I shall be well: at other times I
determine to be _wise_ in spite of sickness, and feel that wisdom is
better even than health; and I dismiss the lying cozener Hope
entirely, and fancy I perceive that even the rocky land of Sorrow is
not without a heavenly radiance overspreading it, lovelier than aught
that this Earth, with all its joys, can give. At all events, what
right have we to murmur? It is the common lot: the Persian King could
not find three happy men in the wide world to write the names of on
his queen’s tomb, or the Philosopher would have recalled her from
death. Every son of Adam has his task to toil at, and his stripes to
bear for doing it wrong. There is one deadly error we commit at our
entrance on life, and sooner or later we must lay it aside, for till
then there is neither peace nor rest for us in this world: we all
start, I have observed, with the tacit persuasion that, whatever
become of others, we (the illustrious all-important we) are entitled
of _right_ to be _entirely fortunate_, to accumulate all knowledge,
beauty, health, and earthly felicity in _our_ sacred person, and to
pass _our_ most sovereign days in rosy bowers, with distress never
seen by us, except as an interesting shade in the distance of our
landscape.... But I must descend from life in general to life in
Edinburgh. In spite of ill-health, I reckon myself moderately happy
here, much happier than men usually are, or than such a fool as I
deserves to be. My good wife exceeds all my hopes, and is, in truth, I
believe, among the best women that the world contains. The philosophy
of the heart is far better than that of the understanding. She loves
me with her whole soul, and this one sentiment has taught her much
that I have long been vainly at the schools to learn. Good Jane! She
is sitting by me knitting you a purse: you must not cease to love her,
for she deserves it, and few love you better. [Mrs. Carlyle and Mrs.
Montagu had never yet met, but are here considered as already fast
friends, through Carlyle’s talks with each about the other.] Of
society, in this Modern Athens, we have no want, but rather a
superabundance; which, however, we are fast and successfully reducing
down to the fit measure. True it is, one meets with many a Turk in
grain among these people; but it is some comfort to know beforehand
what Turks are, have been, and for ever will be, and to understand
that from a Turk no Christian word or deed can rationally be expected.
Let the people speak in the Turkish dialect, in Heaven’s name! It is
their own, and they have no other. A better class of persons, too, are
to be found here and there,—a sober, discreet, logic-loving,
moderately well-informed class: with these I can talk and enjoy
myself; but only talk as from an upper window to people in the street;
into the house (of my spirit) I cannot admit them; and the unwise
wonderment they exhibit when I do but show them the lobby warns me to
lose no time in again slamming-to the door. But what of society? Round
our own hearth is society enough, with a blessing. I read books, or,
like the Roman poet and so many British ones, ‘disport on paper’; and
many a still evening, when I stand in our little flower-garden (it is
fully larger than two bed-quilts) and smoke my pipe in peace, and look
at the reflection of the distant city lamps, and hear the faint murmur
of its tumult, I feel no little pleasure in the thought of ‘my own
four walls’ and what they hold. On the whole, what I chiefly want is
occupation; which, when ‘the times grow better’ or my own ‘genius’
gets more alert and thorough-going, will not fail, I suppose, to
present itself. Idle I am not altogether, yet not occupied as I should
be; for to dig in the mines of Plutus, and sell the gift of God (and
such is every man’s small fraction of intellectual talent) for a piece
of money, is a measure I am not inclined to; and for _invention_, for
Art of any sort, I feel myself too helpless and undetermined. Some
day,—oh that the day were here!—I shall surely speak out those things
that are lying in me, and give me no sleep till they are spoken! Or
else, if the Fates would be so kind as to show me—that I had nothing
to say! This, perhaps, is the real secret of it after all; a hard
result, yet not intolerable, were it once clear and certain.
Literature, it seems, is to be my trade; but the present aspects of it
among us seem to me peculiarly perplexed and uninviting. I love it
not: in fact, I have almost quitted modern reading: lower down than
the Restoration I rarely venture in English. Those men, those Hookers,
Bacons, Brownes, were _men_; but, for our present ‘men of letters,’
our dandy wits, our utilitarian philosophers, our novel, play, and
sonnet manufacturers, I shall only say, May the Lord pity us and them!
But enough of this! For what am I that I should censure? Less than the
least in Israel.”
The mood here, though philosophic, pensive, and critical, is on the
whole even cheerful, and accords undeniably with what we should expect
from his own statement as to the remarkable change of spirit that had
been effected in him during the late idyllic year at Hoddam Hill. It
accords also with all that I have been able to learn independently of
Carlyle in those now distant days of his early married life.
From two persons in particular I have had intimate accounts of his
habits and demeanour in the Comely Bank period. One was the late Rev.
David Aitken, D.D., once minister of a Scottish country parish, but in
the later part of his life resident in Edinburgh. He was a relative of
the Carlyles, and had seen a great deal of them in their own house, and
at the tables of various friends, in those old Edinburgh days. His
report was that perhaps the most observable thing about Carlyle then was
the combination of extraordinary frankness, a habit of speaking out most
strikingly and picturesquely whatever was in his mind, with the most
perfect command of temper in meeting objections, evading attempted
slights or provocations to anger, or changing the subject when
opposition was becoming noisy, or the opponent was evidently a fool.
Again and again Dr. Aitken had observed this, and wondered at Carlyle’s
tact and suavity, especially when he had propounded something startling
to commonplace people, and the expression on the faces of some of his
auditors was “Who are _you_ that dare thus advance notions discomposing
to your seniors?” To the same effect is the information I had from
another Edinburgh friend of Carlyle in those days, the late Dr. John
Gordon. He was most methodic in his arrangement of his time, Dr. Gordon
informed me, always reserving the solid hours of the day for his
literary work in Comely Bank, but very accessible and sociable in the
afternoons and evenings. To Dr. Gordon I definitely put the question,
“Was he gloomy and morose, or noted for asperity and sarcastic
bitterness in talk?” The answer was: “Not a bit of it, not a bit of it;
the pleasantest and heartiest fellow in the world, and most excellent
company.” It is evident that, whether from more smiling circumstances,
or from that drill in self-control which had been imposed upon him by
his experience at Hoddam Hill, he was a considerably different being
now, in his social demeanour and aspects, from what he had been some
years before, when Irving had thought it necessary to remonstrate with
him on his fitful and forbidding manners with strangers. But, indeed,
they mistake Carlyle utterly who do not know that to the end, with all
his vehemence in indignation and invective, and with a stately dignity
of manner which repelled irreverent familiarity, and with which the most
impudent did not dare to trifle, there was a vast fund in him of what
could be described as the homeliest and most genial good-fellowship and
the richest old Scottish heartiness. It was not only his faculty of
humour,—though those who have never heard Carlyle’s laugh, or known how
frequently it would interrupt the gathered tempests of his verbal rage
and dissipate them in sudden sunburst, can have no idea of his
prodigious wealth in this faculty, or of the extent to which it
contributed to the enjoyment and after-relish of every hour spent in his
society. I have heard the echoes of Sloane Street ring with his great
laugh many and many a night between ten and eleven o’clock, and more
than once have had to stop by a lamp-post till the grotesque phrase or
conception had shaken me to exhaustion in sympathy with him and the peal
had ended. But better still was the proof of the depths of pleasant
kindliness in his nature, his power of being actually happy himself and
of making others happy, in some of those evening hours I have spent with
him in the well-remembered dining-room in Chelsea. Then, both of us, or
one of us, reclining on the hearth-rug, that the wreaths of pipe-smoke
might innocently ascend the chimney, and Mrs. Carlyle seated near at
some piece of work, and public questions laid aside or his vehemences
over them having already subsided for that evening, how comfortable he
would be, how simple, how husbandly in his looks round to his wife when
she interjected one of her bright and witty remarks, how happy in the
flow of casual fireside chat about all things and sundry, the quoting of
quaint snatches of ballad or lyric, or the resuscitation of old Scottish
memories! This mood of pleasant and easy sociability, which always
remained with him as one into which he could sink when he liked out of
his upper moods of wrath and lamentation, must have been even more
conspicuous and common, more nearly habitual, in those Comely Bank days
when he felt himself for the first time a full citizen and householder
of the Modern Athens, and was not disinclined to friendly intimacy with
the other Athenians. Then, as always, the basis of his nature was a
profound constitutional sadness, a speculative melancholy, in the form
of that dissatisfaction with all the ordinary appearances and courses of
things, that private philosophy of protest and nonconformity, which made
him really a recluse even when he seemed most accessible and frank. His
talk with most of the Edinburgh people, even when apparently the
friendliest, was therefore, as he told Mrs. Montagu, like talk from an
upper window to people passing in the streets; and into the real house
of his spirit few were admitted farther than the lobby. But he had at
least disciplined himself into all the requisite observances of
good-humoured courtesy, and learnt to practise in his own demeanour the
maxim he had about this time thrown into verse:—
“The wind blows east, the wind blows west,
And there comes good luck and bad;
The thriftiest man is the cheerfulest;
’Tis a thriftless thing to be sad, sad;
’Tis a thriftless thing to be sad.”
What he lacked most, as he told Mrs. Montagu, was a fit occupation. His
four volumes of _Specimens of German Romance_, consisting of
translations from Musæus, La Motte Fouqué, Tieck, Hoffman, Jean Paul,
and Goethe, with biographical and critical notices of these authors, had
been already printed, and stored in Ballantyne’s warehouses, before he
had settled in Comely Bank, and were published by Tait early in 1827. As
they had been done originally on commission, they may have brought
something more considerable in the way of payment than if they had been
a voluntary labour. But, when these were out, what was he to do next?
Fortunately, that question was soon answered.
It was in the spring of 1827 that, by means of a friendly letter of
introduction sent from London by Mrs. Montagu’s son-in-law, Procter,
_alias_ “Barry Cornwall,” Carlyle formed his memorable acquaintance with
Jeffrey. The incidents of that acquaintance, from Carlyle’s first call
on Jeffrey in George Street with Procter’s note, when Jeffrey received
him so kindly, and said “We must give you a lift,” on to the ripening of
the acquaintance by Jeffrey’s calls at Comely Bank, his pretty
gallantries and wit-encounters with the fascinating young bride, and the
frequent colloquies and amicable little disputations between Jeffrey and
Carlyle in Jeffrey’s leisurely rides to his country-house at Craigcrook,
or in that picturesque old mansion itself, have all been immortalised in
the _Reminiscences_. Nowhere is there such a sketch of Jeffrey in our
literature, such perfect portraiture and appreciation of that celebrated
man; and the only question that remains is whether Carlyle has quite
done justice there to Jeffrey’s kindness to himself. No doubt he wrote
with a strict conscience, and knew better what he was about than readers
can now know for him. Still one does carry away an impression that very
seldom has there been so much attention by a celebrity of fifty-three
years of age to a rising junior, or so much of care in befriending him
practically, as the good Jeffrey bestowed, in 1827 and for some
subsequent years, on a young man of letters so utterly different from
himself in character, so intractable to his Whig teaching, and so wrapt
up in a certain foreign and unintelligible Mr. Goethe. Something of this
feeling, indeed, does appear in many passages of Carlyle’s sketch, as
when he says: “Jeffrey’s acquaintanceship seemed, and was for the time,
an immense acquisition to me, and everybody regarded it as my highest
good fortune.” And no wonder. From being a mere translator from the
German, or writer of hack articles in obscure places, Carlyle became a
contributor to the _Edinburgh Review_. In June 1827, or within a month
or two after his introduction to Jeffrey, appeared his first article in
the Review, _Jean Paul Friedrich Richter_, in twenty pages; and in the
very next number, in October 1827, appeared his more full and elaborate
article, in forty-eight pages, entitled _State of German Literature_.
They caused, as he tells us, “a sensation among the Edinburgh buckrams,”
and were widely criticised in the newspapers, with the effect of setting
“many tongues wagging” about the strange fellow in Comely Bank to whom
Jeffrey had given such unusual licence of innovation on the established
doctrines of the Review, and who was trying to found a school of “German
Mysticism.” At all events, people who liked that kind of matter and were
interested in German Literature knew thenceforth where to apply; and, a
so-called _Foreign Review and Continental Miscellany_ having been
started in London, Carlyle was eagerly invited to contribute. In the
first number of this new periodical, in January 1828, appeared his _Life
and Writings of Werner_, in forty-seven pages; and in the second number,
in April 1828, his _Goethe’s Helena_, in forty pages. These two articles
in the _Foreign Review_, with the two already contributed to the
_Edinburgh_, form the whole of Carlyle’s known writings during the
Comely Bank period.
One of the most interesting men in Edinburgh during Carlyle’s eighteen
months at Comely Bank was Sir William Hamilton. The name of Sir William,
and his reputation for universal erudition and for devotion to
philosophy and metaphysics, had been known to Carlyle from the later
days of his studentship in Edinburgh University. In then passing the
house where Sir William lived, and seeing the light burning in Sir
William’s room late at nights, he would think to himself: “Ay, _there_
is a real scholar, a man of the right sort, busy with his books and
speculations!” Since then he had formed some slight personal
acquaintance with Sir William by meetings with him in the Advocates’
Library; but it was after the settlement in Comely Bank in 1826, when
Sir William was thirty-eight years of age, and had been nominally for
five years Professor of History in Edinburgh University, that the
acquaintanceship reached the stage of familiarity. Carlyle has
commemorated it in a few pages contributed to Professor Veitch’s
_Memoirs of Sir William Hamilton_, published in 1869, thirteen years
after Sir William’s death. “I recollect hearing much more of him,”
Carlyle there writes, “in 1826 and onward than formerly: to what depths
he had gone in study and philosophy; of his simple, independent,
meditative habits, ruggedly athletic modes of exercise, fondness for his
big dog, etc. etc.: everybody seemed to speak of him with favour, those
of his immediate acquaintance uniformly with affectionate respect. I did
not witness, much less share in, any of his swimming or other athletic
prowesses. I have once or twice been on long walks with him in the
Edinburgh environs, oftenest with some other companion, or perhaps even
two, whom he had found vigorous and worthy: pleasant walks and
abundantly enlivened with speech from Sir William.” He proceeds to
describe a peculiarity of Sir William’s talk, when, in expounding some
difficult point perfectly lucid to himself, he would say “_The fact
is_,” and then, after plunging for a while through a tough jungle of
words and distinctions, would repeat “_The fact is_,” and so go on
again, without ever quite succeeding in clutching “the fact” so as to
bring it out to his satisfaction. There is also an account of a debate
on Craniology between Sir William and Mr. George Combe one evening at a
great meeting of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, when Sir William, in
Carlyle’s opinion, utterly demolished Combe and his phrenology by
exhibiting two skulls, one the skull of a Malay murderer and the other
the skull of George Buchanan, and showing that by the phrenological
measurements the Malay murderer was much the superior man. That presence
of Carlyle in the Royal Society rooms seems, however, to have been on a
winter visit to Edinburgh a year or two after the time of his residence
in Comely Bank. That he knew those rooms by more attendances in them
than one I am positively certain; for he recollected the excellent and
rare quality of the tea that, from some exceptional opportunity of
correspondence with China, used then to be served to members and
visitors of the Edinburgh Royal Society after the business of the
meetings.
Another Edinburgh acquaintanceship of the Comely Bank time was that with
John Wilson, the everfamous “Christopher North.” He had been lord of
_Blackwood_ since 1817, and since 1820 the admired and adored of all the
youth of Edinburgh University, for his magnificent mien and stature, and
the legends of his feats of strength, pedestrianism, and pugilism, no
less than for his eloquent prelections in the Moral Philosophy
professorship. To know the great Wilson by his figure and face as he
strode, yellow-haired and white-hatted, along Princes Street or George
Street, was a mere privilege of being in the same city with him. You
could not miss him if you were in either of those streets, and on the
outlook for him, any three days in succession; and once seen he was in
your memory for ever. That amount of cognisance of Wilson in Edinburgh
had been Carlyle’s, as everybody else’s, for not a few years; but it was
now, in Wilson’s forty-second or forty-third year, and Carlyle’s
thirty-second or thirty-third, that they first met in private and shook
hands. It was in the rooms of the Dr. John Gordon already mentioned as
one of Carlyle’s most intimate friends of those days. Carlyle once
described to me the meeting, and how late they sat, and in what a glory
of talk, though the details had been forgotten, they spun out the hours,
not without hospitable aids on the table, whether of the foreign ruby
and amber sorts or of the more potent native crystal. It was so very
late, or rather such early morning, before they parted, I heard
afterwards from Dr. Gordon himself, that, when Wilson rose and threw
open the window, clear daylight had come, and the birds were singing.
Regular to strictness as were Carlyle’s habits always, and obliged as he
was to such strictness by the state of his health, he would venture now
and then on such exceptionally late conviviality on sufficient occasion
or in fit company, and did not find himself any the worse for it. Other
instances of it are within my knowledge, when he sat for long hours with
far humbler companions than Christopher North, and was the life and soul
of their little symposium.[43]
De Quincey had not made Edinburgh definitively his home in 1827 and
1828; but, his connection with _Blackwood_ having then begun, he was a
good deal in Edinburgh through those years, astray for reasons of
finance from his family in Grasmere, and quartered with his friend
Wilson, or in Edinburgh lodgings of his own. In recollection of his
severe review of Carlyle’s Translation of _Wilhelm Meister_ in the
_London Magazine_ for August and September 1824, there was considerable
shyness on his part in meeting Carlyle now; but, a meeting having
happened somehow, and that disagreeable recollection having been sunk,
no one was a more welcome visitor to Carlyle and his wife in Comely Bank
than the weird little Opium-eater. The passage in the _Reminiscences_ in
which Carlyle gives his own and Mrs. Carlyle’s impressions of De Quincey
as they then knew him reveals on the whole, with all its qualifications
of critical estimate, a lingering regard to the last for De Quincey as
one of the most remarkable British men of genius in his generation; and
there is perfectly conclusive evidence that in the Comely Bank days his
regard for De Quincey was something still higher and more affectionate.
But, indeed, all through those days Carlyle’s literary sympathies,
politically a Radical _sui generis_ though he was, and the _protégé_
though he was of the Whig potentate Jeffrey, were rather with that Tory
set of Edinburgh intellectualities of whom De Quincey was one, and of
whom Wilson in _Blackwood_ was the public chief, than with Jeffrey’s
more narrow-laced clientage of the Blue-and-Yellow. His acquaintance
with Lockhart, who had been in London since 1826 as editor of the
_Quarterly Review_, can hardly date from this period; but among those I
have heard him speak of as Edinburgh friends of his, almost certainly of
this period, was the accomplished George Moir, then one of the young
Tory lawyers of literary note about the Parliament House, and afterwards
Professor of Belles Lettres in the University. How many other persons,
Whig or Tory, distinguished or undistinguished, came about him in Comely
Bank, who can tell now? Miss Jewsbury, indeed, in her notes of Mrs.
Carlyle’s talks with her, is very comprehensive and summary on that
subject. “Whilst they were in Edinburgh,” says Miss Jewsbury of Carlyle
and his wife, “they knew everybody worth knowing: Lord Jeffrey was a
great admirer of hers, and an old friend; Chalmers, Guthrie, and many
others.” Miss Jewsbury is all wrong in her dates here. Guthrie was then
a young man living totally unheard of in his native Forfarshire, and not
yet even a parish minister; and the great Chalmers, who had left Glasgow
and its excitements in 1823 for the quiet leisure of the Moral
Philosophy Professorship at St. Andrews, can have been but an occasional
visitor to Edinburgh from that date till 1828, when they invited him to
the more national post of the Professorship of Theology in Edinburgh
University. Carlyle’s distinct statement in the _Reminiscences_ is that,
after his casual meetings with Chalmers in Glasgow in Irving’s company
in 1820 and 1821, he “never saw him again” till May 1847, when the noble
old man, in his final visit to London a week or two before his death,
called upon him, and sat an hour with him, in his house in Chelsea.
More precious by far to Carlyle than all the acquaintanceships Edinburgh
afforded, or could afford, was his correspondence with Goethe. It was to
this great intellect, this German soul of light and adamant, now verging
on his eightieth year, and whom he was never to behold in the flesh,
that his thoughts turned incessantly in his domestic musings in Comely
Bank, or in his walks anywhere, with or without Jeffrey, between Arthur
Seat and the Corstorphines.
Besides the four Review articles of 1827 and 1828, there had appeared,
since that _Translation of Wilhelm Meister_ in 1824 which Goethe had
acknowledged in the note from him received by Carlyle in London, the
_Life of Schiller_ in 1825, and the _Specimens of German Romance_ in
1827, this last completing the translation of the _Meister_ by the
addition of the “Meister’s Travels” to “Meister’s Apprenticeship.” These
had been sufficient texts for new communications between the sage at
Weimar and his Scottish admirer; and such accordingly there had been.
Already there had been a beginning of the series of graceful little
presents from Mrs. Carlyle to Goethe and from Goethe to Mrs. Carlyle of
which we hear in the Goethe-Carlyle story as a whole; and there had been
more letters between the two men. Nay, Carlyle and his writings had
become a topic of frequent talk with Goethe in Weimar. It was on
Wednesday, the 25th of July 1827, for example, that Goethe, having just
received a letter from Sir Walter Scott, dated from Edinburgh on the 9th
of that month, in reply to a letter of compliment and admiration which
he had addressed to Scott circuitously in the preceding January, used
these memorable words to Eckermann, after showing him Scott’s letter and
expressing his delight with it:—“I almost wonder that Walter Scott does
not say a word about Carlyle, who has so decided a German tendency that
he must certainly be known to him. It is admirable in Carlyle that, in
his judgment of our German authors, he has especially in view the
_mental and moral core_ as that which is really influential. Carlyle is
a _moral force of great importance_: there is in him much for the
future, and we cannot foresee what he will produce and effect.” To the
same purport were Goethe’s words on again speaking to Eckermann about
Carlyle some time afterwards,—“What an earnest man he is! and how he has
studied us Germans! he is almost more at home in our literature than we
ourselves.”
Goethe’s surprise at Scott’s silence about Carlyle was an acute thrust,
though made a little in the dark. Who does not regret to have it to say
now that Carlyle never exchanged a word with Sir Walter? Yet this is the
fact. That man of men in Edinburgh, of greater importance and interest
to her than all her other celebrities put together, remained a stranger
to the fellow-citizen that was worthiest to know him and that would fain
have known him well. How did this happen?
Any time for the last fifteen or sixteen years Carlyle had, of course,
been familiar with the stalwart figure of Scott, as he might be seen in
the legal crowd in the Parliament House, or in his slow walk homewards
thence, by the Mound and Princes Street, to his house in Castle Street.
Further, it must have been in the Comely Bank days that Carlyle and his
wife, when they chanced now and then to be in Princes Street together,
would bestow those more particular glances of curiosity on Scott’s
approaching figure of which I have heard Carlyle speak. The little dogs
that were passing would jump up, they observed, to fawn on the kindly
lame gentleman whom they knew by instinct to be a friend to all their
species; and Scott, they observed, would stoop to pat the animals, or
would look down on them benevolently from beneath his shaggy eyebrows.
Observing this so admiringly more than once, why should they themselves
have had to pass the great man on such occasions without interchange of
personal greetings?
Recently, it is true, circumstances had been less propitious than
formerly for access to Scott by persons desiring his acquaintance. When
Carlyle and his wife took up house in Edinburgh, that fatal year for
Scott was just closing in which there had come the sudden crash of his
fortunes. This, followed by the death of Lady Scott, had converted him
into a lonesome and bankrupt widower, incapable any longer of his
customary hospitalities in Castle Street, and indeed bereft of that
house, as of all else, for the behoof of his creditors, and toiling to
redeem himself by his _Life of Napoleon_ and other colossal drudgery in
lodgings in North St. David Street. But that crisis of his downfall had
passed; and the year 1827 had seen him more like himself, and domiciled
again, more in household fashion, first in Walker Street, and then in
Shandwick Place. There had been the great Theatrical Fund Dinner in
Edinburgh on the 23d of February 1827, when Sir Walter was in the chair,
and when, in responding to the toast of his health, he divulged
formally, amid plaudits such as had never been heard in that hall
before, the already open secret that he was the sole author of the
Waverley Novels. Later in the same year the voluminous _Life of
Napoleon_ was published, with the first series of the _Chronicles of the
Canongate_ besides, and the _Tales of a Grandfather_ had been begun. Any
time, therefore, shortly before or shortly after that month of July 1827
when Goethe was so much gratified by the receipt of Scott’s letter,
there was nothing but the most untoward fate to hinder such a meeting
between Scott and Carlyle as would have been pleasant to both. Untoward
fate did intervene, however, and with almost diabolic malignity. The
story is as follows:—
Struck with the anomaly that two such men should be living together in
Edinburgh without knowing each other, Goethe himself had taken very
special pains to put the matter right. On the 1st of January 1828,
resuming his correspondence with Carlyle after a break of some months,
he sent off from Weimar a letter to Carlyle about various matters then
in discussion between them, but chiefly to announce that it was to be
followed speedily by a box containing several parcels of presents. Most
of the presents were to be for Carlyle himself or Mrs. Carlyle, in the
form of volumes or sets of volumes selected for them; but one of the
parcels was to consist of six bronze medals, respecting which Carlyle
was requested to take some special trouble. “I send also six medals,
three struck at Weimar and three at Geneva,” Goethe wrote; “two of which
please present to Sir Walter Scott, with my best regards; and, as to the
others, distribute them to well-wishers.” A fortnight afterwards, _i.e._
on the 15th of January, the box was duly dispatched from Weimar; but not
till the 12th of April did it reach the Carlyles at 21 Comely Bank,
though they had received the letter announcing it about two months
before. On being opened, it was found to contain, besides the promised
medals and other parcels, all neatly and separately packed, another
letter from Goethe by way of continuation of the former post-letter. “If
you see Sir Walter Scott,” were the first words of this second missive,
“pray offer him my warmest thanks for his valued and pleasant letter,
written frankly in the beautiful conviction that man must be precious to
man. I have also received his _Life of Napoleon_; and during these
winter evenings and nights I have read it through attentively from
beginning to end.” Then follows an expression at some length of Goethe’s
enjoyment of the great book and high appreciation of its merits. These
are characterised glowingly and yet carefully; and altogether the
criticism was calculated to please Scott extremely, and to be received
by him as a most friendly acknowledgment of his attention in having sent
a copy of his _Life of Napoleon_ to his great German contemporary. What
interests us, however, is Goethe’s obvious purpose in having made
Carlyle the medium of communication between himself and Scott. He wanted
to bring the two men together; and with what delicacy of courteous
invention he had manœuvred for his object! It was Carlyle that was to
deliver to Scott the two medals intended as Goethe’s recognition of
Scott’s supremacy in the Literature of Great Britain; and it was Carlyle
to whom Goethe sent his first impressions of Scott’s latest large work,
and that in a manner almost amounting to an injunction that they should
be reported to Scott textually.
If Goethe’s purpose failed, it was not through any fault or negligence
on Carlyle’s part. On the 13th of April 1828 he wrote the following
letter to Sir Walter:
EDINBURGH: 21 COMELY BANK:
_13th April 1828_.
SIR,—In February last I had the honour to receive a letter from Von
Goethe, announcing the speedy departure from Weimar of a packet for
me, in which, among other valuables, should be found “two medals,” to
be delivered, _mit verbindlichsten Grüssen_, to Sir Walter Scott. By a
slow enough conveyance this _Kästchen_, with its medals in perfect
safety, has at length yesterday come to hand, and now lays on me the
enviable duty of addressing you.
Among its multifarious contents, the Weimar Box failed not to include
a long letter,—considerable portion of which, as it virtually belongs
to yourself, you will now allow me to transcribe. Perhaps it were
thriftier in me to reserve this for another occasion; but, considering
how seldom such a Writer obtains such a Critic, I cannot but reckon it
a pity that this friendly intercourse between them should be anywise
delayed.
[Carlyle here extracts from Goethe’s second letter, in the original
German, the whole of the portion relating to Scott’s _Napoleon_.]
With regard to the medals,—which are, as I expected, the two
well-known likenesses of Goethe himself,—it could be no hard matter to
dispose of them safely here, or transmit them to you, if you required
it, without delay; but, being in this curious fashion appointed as it
were Ambassador between two Kings of Poetry, I would willingly
discharge my mission with the solemnity that beseems such a business;
and naturally it must flatter my vanity and love of the marvellous to
think that by means of a Foreigner whom I have never seen I might now
have access to my native Sovereign, whom I have so often seen in
public, and so often wished that I had claim to see and know in
private and near at hand.
Till Whitsunday I continue to reside here, and shall hope that some
time before that period I may have opportunity to wait on you, and, as
my commission bore, to hand you these memorials in person. Meanwhile I
abide your further orders in this matter; and so, with all the regard
which belongs to one to whom I, in common with other millions, owe so
much, I have the honour to be, sir, most respectfully your servant,
THOMAS CARLYLE.
Besides the _two_ medals specially intended for you, there have come
_four_ more, which I am requested generally to dispose of amongst
“_Wohlwollenden_.” Perhaps Mr. Lockhart, whose merits in respect of
German Literature, and just appreciation of this its Patriarch and
Guide, are no secret, will do me the honour to accept of one, and
direct me through your means how I am to have it conveyed?
As the wording of this letter shows, Carlyle was aware when he wrote it
that Sir Walter was not then in Edinburgh. He had gone off, exactly ten
days before, _i.e._ on the 3d of April, for a tour in England, and a
plunge once more, partly on business and partly for mere pleasure, into
the world of London. It would have been better if Carlyle had delayed
till he came back; but, thinking the matter too important for that, he
had gone, it would appear, to Scott’s house, then in Shandwick Place,
ascertained his London address, and seen the letter dispatched. That it
did reach Scott in London is certain; for the autograph is still extant,
with the London post-mark of 17th April 1828 upon it, just as Scott must
have had it in his hands that day in the house of his son-in-law
Lockhart in Regent’s Park. He must have glanced at it carelessly,
however,—so carelessly as hardly to have mastered its purport; for in
his jottings in his Diary for that day, where he would naturally have
taken note of so interesting an occurrence as a new message from Goethe,
there is no mention of it whatever. The omission is explained perhaps by
one phrase which does occur among those jottings. “In this
phantasmagorical place the objects of the day come and depart like
shadows” were the words with which, trying to record in his journal late
that night the incidents of an unusually busy day,—beginning with a
round of forenoon and afternoon calls, and ending with a dinner at
Samuel Rogers’s and an appearance afterwards at an evening party at Lady
Davy’s,—he almost gave up the attempt as hopeless, so difficult was it
to recall coherently what one had done or seen during any twelve hours
in such a vast and brain-dizzying place as London. Carlyle’s letter,
delivered to him that morning, or possibly lying on his table for him at
the moment of his writing those words, may have been one of the
“objects” that had slipped his cognisance. And, if so that day, the
chance was poor enough of its being remembered sufficiently on any
subsequent day during the rest of Scott’s stay in the great metropolis.
Day after day till the 26th of May, as the Journal shows, there was a
continued succession of lionisings for him in the shape of calls on him
from notabilities, dinners in his honour, applications to him to sit for
his portrait or his bust, etc. etc. One of the dinners was with his
Majesty King George IV. himself; another was at the Duchess of Kent’s,
where he was presented to “the little Princess Victoria,” and looked at
her with keen interest, wondering whether the little lady, then not nine
years of age, had yet been made aware of her great destiny; several
times he was with the Duke of Wellington; and of the other celebrities
whom he saw, or among whom he moved, in the course of his
stay,—statesmen, bishops, lawyers, men of letters, artists, etc.,—he
could keep no complete reckoning. For a man in the fifty-seventh year of
his age the whirl of such a series of London excitements might not, in
ordinary cases, have been too much; but Sir Walter had been obviously in
failing health already for the last year or two, and there had been
symptoms even, recognisable by himself and his Edinburgh friends, of
jaded mental energy. In his case the £250 which, as he tells us, his
visit to London cost him, may not have been the only damage. Little
wonder, at all events, that one of his letters from Edinburgh, even
though it contained a message from Goethe, should have escaped his
attention.
Meanwhile Carlyle was growing anxious about the fate of the letter. On
the 18th of April, five days after he had sent it to Scott, he had
written to Goethe, informing him that this had been done. “To Sir Walter
Scott, who is at present in London,” the letter said, “I have already
written, announcing so delightful a message, and even transcribing for
him what you say of his _Life of Napoleon_: a friendly criticism which,
from such a quarter, must gratify him highly”; and, after a sentence or
two more on the subject of that criticism, these words were added: “Ere
long I expect to see Sir Walter and present to him your medals in
person.” The expectation was never to be fulfilled. Week after week had
passed, and no reply to his first letter had been received, when the
Whitsunday term arrived at which, as he had informed Scott, he was to
leave Edinburgh. In these circumstances he addressed a brief note to
Scott, referring to his former letter, and explaining that, as he could
not now hope for the honour of presenting the Goethe medals in person,
he had left them in charge of Mr. Jeffrey, who would doubtless deliver
them to Sir Walter on the first convenient opportunity. This note, dated
the 23d of May, was, in fact, written in Jeffrey’s own house in Moray
Place, where Carlyle and his wife were residing for a few days by
invitation before their departure for Craigenputtock. They had left
Comely Bank a day or two before, had sent on their furniture to
Craigenputtock in carts, and were to follow immediately themselves.
The note must have reached Sir Walter on the 27th of May, the very last
day of his stay in London. Leaving London that day, as his journal
shows, he began the homeward journey through the middle and northern
English counties which was to bring him to Abbotsford on the 2d of June,
and thence to Edinburgh on the 4th of June. The Carlyles were then gone;
and any acknowledgment that Carlyle could now receive of either of his
two missives could only be by letter from Sir Walter in Edinburgh to
Craigenputtock. Something of the sort seems to have been expected by
Carlyle; for it was not till the 25th of September that he wrote that
first of his letters to Goethe from Craigenputtock in which he told
Goethe of the ending of the business of the medals. “Sir Walter Scott,”
he then wrote, “has received your Medals several months ago,—not through
me directly, for he had not returned to Edinburgh when I left it, but
through Mr. Jeffrey, our grand ‘British Critic’; to whom, as I learn,
Sir Walter expressed himself properly sensible of such an honour from
one of his masters in Art.” This leaves no doubt that the medals
actually came into Sir Walter’s hands as soon as he had returned to
Edinburgh; and the only question that remains is how it could have
happened that the two letters from Carlyle heralding the medals, and
connected with them so vitally, received no acknowledgment, and so that
Goethe’s design of bringing Carlyle into contact with Sir Walter Scott
was miserably frustrated.
To this day the affair remains somewhat of a mystery. That Scott, the
largest-hearted of men, the kindliest, the most courteous, the most
attentive to every punctilio of business or of social etiquette, should
have deliberately, of his own accord, left such letters unanswered, it
is next to impossible to suppose; and it is hardly less difficult to
suppose that, if any one had tried to prejudice him against Carlyle in
connection with them, he would have allowed the interference to prevent
him from doing what was independently proper. All things considered, one
must revert, I think, to the opinion already suggested by the fact that
there is no mention in Scott’s journal during his weeks in London either
of the Carlyle letters or of the message they conveyed from Goethe. In
the bustle and hurry of his London engagements, and then of his
leave-taking for his return journey to Scotland, he had never, we are to
conclude, read the letters, or at all events the first and principal
one, with sufficient attention to apprehend the contents, and so, having
set them aside on their first receipt, had forgotten all about them. To
be sure, the medals were ultimately delivered to him by Jeffrey; but one
can imagine that they were delivered in a casual manner, and without
such explanation of the relative circumstances as might have brought the
missing letters to his recollection and caused him to look for them.
What is certain is that they lay among his papers, to be found there
after his death, and are still preserved. That Lockhart had read them is
proved by a reference in his _Life of Scott_. So slight is the
reference, however, and so vaguely worded, that it told virtually
nothing. Not till the publication in 1887 of the _Correspondence between
Goethe and Carlyle_, edited by Mr. C. E. Norton, was any real light
thrown on the subject; and not till the appearance in 1890 of _The
Journal of Sir Walter Scott from the Original Manuscript_, edited and
published by Mr. David Douglas of Edinburgh, and containing a copy of
Carlyle’s first letter to Scott, were the facts fully revealed.[44]
The removal of Carlyle from Edinburgh to Craigenputtock, while
connecting itself rather remarkably with the abortive issue of Goethe’s
attempt to introduce him to Sir Walter Scott, is of such importance
otherwise in his biography that a word or two as to the causes and
circumstances may not be superfluous.
Carlyle’s later memories of the eighteen months, or more strictly
nineteen, spent in Comely Bank, are summed up by him in the
_Reminiscences_ in one doleful sentence. “Comely Bank,” he says, “except
for one darling soul, whose heavenly nobleness, then as ever afterwards,
shone on me, and should have made the place bright (ah me, ah me! I only
now know how noble she was!), was a gloomy intricate abode to me, and in
retrospect has little or nothing of pleasant but her.” So far as this is
not a picture tinged, like all the rest of his life, by the final
darkness in which it was painted, and to be corrected by the facts as
they are otherwise ascertained, the reference may be to the causes which
made him suddenly give up his Comely Bank house and remove himself again
from Edinburgh. These, there can be no doubt, were economical
perplexities. Thrift, frugality, abhorrence from debt or extravagance,
was always one of Carlyle’s characteristics; and he had found the
expenses of married life in Edinburgh beyond his means. On this point
some light can be thrown by information from himself, and an annexed
calculation.
He told me once of a ride of his into Dundee, in the dusk of evening,
with £300 in his pocket, all he had in the world, and of a certain
nervousness that came over him, in consequence of the disturbed state of
the times and the roughness of the neighbourhood, lest he should be
attacked and robbed. The story had no special significance for me at the
moment, save that I wondered what Carlyle could have been doing so far
north out of his usual track as Dundee. It seems to me now, however,
that the date must have been the spring of 1824, when he parted with the
Buller family at Kinnaird House, on his way southwards, to recruit
himself, if possible, for meeting them again in London and there
resuming the tutorship. Dundee or Perth would then be a likely station
on his southward journey; and he had been in the receipt by this time of
two years of his salary from the Bullers. On that supposition,
remembering that his intermediate receipts before his marriage and
settlement in Edinburgh had been £180 for his _Wilhelm Meister_,
together with something further of the Buller salary for resumption of
duty in London,—but that there had been expenses for his nine months in
London and Birmingham, some loss in the year’s farming speculation at
Hoddam Hill, and the necessary costs of his removal and marriage, and of
furnishing the house in Comely Bank,—we may fairly conclude that he
cannot have begun housekeeping in October in 1826 with more than a clear
£100 or so. His literary earnings in the next eighteen months, if the
whole of his remuneration for the _German Romance_ fell in then, may
have been about £300 for that work, together with about £150 for his
four articles in the _Edinburgh_ and the _Foreign Review_. Compute the
expense of the Comely Bank household, rent included, as necessarily not
less than about £300 a year; and it will be seen that, in the beginning
of 1828, Carlyle may well have felt that if he remained in Edinburgh he
was in danger of running aground.
He had been anxious, in fact, to obtain some post of fixed and certain
income that would relieve him from precarious dependence on the press.
Two such chances had offered themselves. The new “University of London”
(now “University College, London”) had been founded in 1826; and in the
course of 1827 the authorities of the new institution had been looking
about for professors, in view of the opening of the classes for teaching
in October 1828. Carlyle had thought that the Professorship of English
Literature would suit him and that he would suit it, and had hoped that
Jeffrey’s influence with Brougham might secure him the post. Then, while
that matter was still pending, there was the still more desirable chance
of the succession to Dr. Chalmers in the Moral Philosophy Professorship
at St. Andrews. It was known in January 1828 that Dr. Chalmers was to be
removed to Edinburgh; candidates were already in the field for the
succession, the gift of which was with the Professors of St. Andrews;
and Carlyle is found in that month making very energetic exertions as
one of them. A letter of his to Procter in London is extant, dated the
17th of that month, explaining the circumstances, informing Procter that
Jeffrey is his mainstay in the business, and that he may “also reckon on
the warm support of Wilson, Leslie, Brewster, and other men of mark,”
and requesting a testimonial from Procter and one from Mr. Basil
Montagu.[45]
Both projects having failed, and the certainty having come that he must
depend still on his earnings by literature, his resolution was taken.
Away in his native Dumfriesshire, but in a much more wild and solitary
part of it than his previous residences of Mainhill, Hoddam Hill, and
Scotsbrig, was his wife’s little property of Craigenputtock, worth from
£200 to £250 a year. It was not in his wife’s possession as yet,—her
mother, Mrs. Welsh, having a life-interest in it; but, besides the
farmhouse upon it, occupied by the farmer who rented it, there was
another and superior house, the humble mansion-house of the property,
with sufficient appurtenances of garden, stabling, etc. Why not remove
thither? One could live there at half the cost of living in Edinburgh,
and yet have excellent milk, poultry, eggs, etc., of one’s own, a horse
to ride on, and healthy moors to scamper over! Jeffrey and others
thought Carlyle mad in making such a proposal; but late in May 1828, as
we have seen, it was carried into effect.
* * * * *
Here, then, in Carlyle’s thirty-third year, his Edinburgh life properly
ends, and there begins that extraordinary Craigenputtock period of six
years, the literary products of which were five more articles for the
_Edinburgh Review_, six more for the _Foreign Review_, three articles
for the _Foreign Quarterly Review_, one for the _Westminster Review_,
about a score of contributions of various lengths to _Fraser’s
Magazine_, several little papers elsewhere, and, above all, the _Sartor
Resartus_. There were, indeed, two considerable breaks in the six years
of Craigenputtock hermitship. One was that second visit to London, from
August 1831 to April 1832, in which he heard of his father’s death, and
in which, while endeavouring to get his _Sartor Resartus_ published in
book-form, he added Leigh Hunt, young John Stuart Mill, and others, to
the number of his London acquaintances. The other was in the winter of
1832–33, when he and his wife were again in Edinburgh for some months,
renewing old ties. That winter in Edinburgh, however,—just after the
death of Scott, and some months after the death of Goethe,—furnishes
nothing essentially new in the way of incident. Then, in the summer of
1834, when Carlyle was in his thirty-ninth year, and his _Sartor
Resartus_ was appearing at last by instalments in _Fraser’s Magazine_,
there was the great final migration to London, beginning the forty-six
years of Carlyle’s life that were to be associated for ever with No. 5
(now No. 24) Cheyne Row, Chelsea. During those forty-six years there
were, of course, frequent trips to Scotland, with chance returns for a
few days to Edinburgh. Most memorable of all was the visit to Edinburgh
in April 1866, for his installation in the Rectorship of Edinburgh
University. Of that visit, perhaps the crowning glory of his old age,
and reconnecting him so conspicuously with Edinburgh at the last, but
saddened for him so fatally by the death of his wife in his absence, I
have not a few intimate recollections; as also of those later, almost
furtive, visits now and again in his declining autumns, to his eightieth
year and beyond, when his real purpose was pilgrimage to his wife’s
grave in Haddington Church, and he would saunter, or almost shuffle,
through the Edinburgh streets as a bowed-down alien, disconsolate at
heart, and evading recognition. Any such recollections may be reserved.
All that is properly the Edinburgh Life of Carlyle has been described
here.
CHARLES KIRKPATRICK SHARPE[46]
To as late as the winter of 1850–51 there was to be seen occasionally in
the streets of Edinburgh an old gentleman, very peculiarly attired in a
faded surtout of utterly antique fashion, with a large and bulging
cravat round his throat, the lower curls of a light-brown wig visible
between his hat and his smooth and still ruddy cheeks, pumps on his
thread-stockinged feet instead of shoes or boots, and in his hand a
green silk umbrella. This, you were told, if you did not know it
already, was Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe. The mere name probably conveyed
some information to you; and on a little inquiry you could learn more.
For nearly forty years, you could learn, he had been one of the
notabilities of Edinburgh: resident since about 1843 in his present
house, No. 28 Drummond Place, where he lived in a recluse manner, with a
wonderful museum of antiquities and artistic curiosities about him; but
remembered for his more active connection with Edinburgh society in that
prior period, between 1813 and 1840, when his house had been in No. 93
Princes Street.
It was mainly in this Princes Street portion of Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s
Edinburgh life, bringing him from the thirty-third year of his age to
the sixtieth, that he had made his reputation. A strange and mixed
reputation it was. A zealot in Scottish antiquities and editor of some
Scottish historical books, an occasional scribbler also in other and
semi-private ways on his own account, a dilettante in art and collector
of pictures and engravings, a facile master of the pencil in portrait
and whimsical caricature, a Tory of the most pronounced old type and
hater of everything Whiggish in the past or the present, he was
notorious above all as a Sir Mungo Malagrowther _redivivus_, delighting
in scandalous anecdote and reminiscence, and in a habit of cynical
sarcasm on all sorts of persons, living or dead. A special distinction
of a large segment of this portion of his life, you could not fail to be
told, had been his intimacy with Sir Walter Scott. The death of Scott in
1832, removing as it did the one man whose companionship he had always
prized most, and whose influence on him had been strongest, had, in
fact, turned the rest of his life in Edinburgh into a comparative blank.
Still in friendly enough relations, however, with some of the best-known
of Scott’s survivors in the literary society of Edinburgh, especially
Thomas Thomson, David Laing, and Robert Chambers, and admitting to his
acquaintance now and then a junior of kindred antiquarian tastes, such
as Hill Burton, he had continued to prefer “New Athens,” as he liked to
call it satirically, to any other home. And so, quitting No. 93 Princes
Street in 1840, he had, after a brief intervening habitation somewhere
in the Old Town, taken up his final abode, in 1843, as has been said, in
No. 28 Drummond Place, becoming more and more of an invalid and a
recluse there, till at last he had shrunk into that “lean and slippered
pantaloon,” or rather that old gentleman in the antique blue surtout and
light-brown wig, who is remembered as Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe by most
of those now living in Edinburgh that can remember him at all. He was
not so very old a gentleman, either; for, when he died in March 1851, he
had not quite completed his seventieth year.
The best sketch of Kirkpatrick Sharpe in his prime is that given in
Lockhart’s _Life of Scott_, in the form of an extract from Scott’s
Diary, under the date of Sunday, the 20th November 1825. It chanced that
William Clerk and Kirkpatrick Sharpe had dined with Scott that day in
his house in Castle Street; and the Diary, after describing Clerk, thus
describes the other:—
“Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe is another very remarkable man. He was
bred for a clergyman, but never took orders. He has infinite wit, and
a great turn for antiquarian lore, as the publications of _Kirkton_,
etc., bear witness. His drawings are the most fanciful and droll
imaginable,—a mixture between Hogarth and some of those foreign
masters who painted temptations of St. Anthony and other grotesque
subjects. As a poet he has not a very strong touch. Strange that his
finger-ends can describe so well what he cannot bring out clearly and
firmly in words. If he were to make drawing a resource, it might raise
him a large income. But, though a lover of antiquities, and therefore
of expensive trifles, C. K. S. is too aristocratic to use his art to
assist his revenue. He is a very complete genealogist, and has made
detections in _Douglas_ and other books on pedigree, which our nobles
would do well to suppress if they had an opportunity. Strange that a
man should be curious after scandal of centuries old! Not but Charles
loves it fresh and fresh also; for, being very much a fashionable man,
he is always master of the reigning report, and he tells the anecdote
with such gusto that there is no helping sympathising with him,—a
peculiarity of voice adding not a little to the general effect. My
idea is that C. K. S., with his oddities, tastes, satire, and high
aristocratic feelings, resembles Horace Walpole; perhaps in his person
also in a general way.”
This description, which C. K. S. must have himself read on its first
appearance in _Lockhart_,[47] had to serve as a sufficient account of
him for the general public so long as he lived, except in so far as it
might be filled up by impressions from his own writings. After his death
there were obituary sketches of him, of course, in the Edinburgh
newspapers; and he figured posthumously, under the thin disguise of
“Fitzpatrick Smart, Esq.,” as one of the typical Edinburgh bibliomaniacs
so cleverly described by Hill Burton in his _Book-Hunter_, published in
1862. Not till 1869, however, was there any adequate commemoration of
him. In that year there was published by Messrs. Blackwood a sumptuous
large quarto entitled _Etchings by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, with
Photographs from Original Drawings, Poetical and Prose Fragments, and a
Prefatory Memoir_. The volume sufficed in every respect for those who
still felt an interest in Kirkpatrick Sharpe and his memory, save that
it contained hardly any representation of his extensive epistolary
correspondence. The defect has been amply supplied in the two large new
volumes now before us. The _Memoir_ which they contain is substantially
a reproduction of that in the now scarce volume of 1869; but they
consist chiefly of a selection of Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s preserved
letters, and of letters to him, through the long period of fifty-two
years extending from 1798 to 1850. The careful editor, Mr. Allardyce,
has erred rather by excess than by defect in his selection. A good many
of the letters of Sharpe’s correspondents which he has thought worth
giving might well have been spared. With that exception, however, the
editing is admirable; and in the main, the collection is as variously
amusing, and here and there as startlingly and laughably odd, as
anything of the kind that has been published in Great Britain for many a
day.
By far the largest proportion of the letters belong to what has been
hitherto the least known period of Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s life: to wit,
the period preceding his definite settlement of himself in Edinburgh in
1813. From these, together with Mr. Bedford’s prefixed _Memoir_, we
obtain the following facts:—
Born in 1781, at Hoddam Castle, in Dumfriesshire, the third son of
Charles Sharpe, Esq., of Hoddam, and with a pedigree, both on the
father’s side and on the mother’s, of specially marked connections with
some of the oldest houses of the Scottish aristocracy, and some of the
most memorable events of Scottish history, the boy had grown up to his
sixteenth year, one of a large family of well-educated brothers and
sisters, imbibing the family tastes, and strongly influenced also by the
traditions and legends of the antique family-dwelling itself, and of the
adjacent scenery of that old West Border region. Drawing, howsoever
learnt, must have been one of his earliest accomplishments; and one of
the most interesting memories of his boyhood was that, in consequence of
his father’s friendly relations with the poet Burns, he himself had seen
and spoken with the poet familiarly more than once. It was in the winter
after the poet’s death that Kirkpatrick Sharpe added to his home
education by attending a class or two in the University of Edinburgh.
The intention for the time, however, being that he should become an
English clergyman, he was sent, in 1798, at the age of seventeen, to
Christ Church, Oxford. Mainly here we see him for the next eight years,
taking his B.A. degree in 1802 and his M.A. in 1806, and meanwhile
forming intimacies with a select number of his young College and
University coevals. Chief among these were Earl Gower, afterwards Duke
of Sutherland, Viscount Newtown, afterwards Earl of Lanesborough, Lord
Lewisham, afterwards Earl of Dartmouth, the Rev. J. J. Conybeare,
afterwards Oxford Professor of Poetry, Mr. R. A. Inglis, afterwards the
well-known Sir Robert Inglis, and Elijah B. Impey, son of the famous
Indian Chief-Justice Impey. In the society of these, and of other young
Oxonians, he seems to have made a strong mark, and to have been greatly
liked,—a dandyish young fellow, but with eccentric ways and bookish
tastes, a very shrill voice and abundant sarcasm in the use of it, no
end of knowledge of art subjects, and an inimitable power of
portrait-sketching and caricaturing. Incidents of the same college
period at Oxford were some contributions by Sharpe to the
_Anti-Jacobin_, and the beginning of his acquaintance with Scott, first
by correspondence, and then personally. Through the next seven years,
when he was passing out of his twenties into his thirties, we see him,
though he still kept up his connection with Oxford and was occasionally
in residence there, yet moving about a good deal,—sometimes at Hoddam,
sometimes in Edinburgh, sometimes in London, but with frequent visits to
the country-houses of his aristocratic friends. His habits of
letter-writing were now at their briskest; and among his correspondents
through those seven years, besides the Oxonian friends already
mentioned, none of whom forgot him wherever he was, one notes the
Margravine of Anspach, and her son, the Hon. Keppel Craven, the
Marchioness of Stafford, the Countess of Dalkeith, the Count de Gramont,
the Marchioness of Queensberry, Lady Charlotte Campbell (afterwards Lady
Charlotte Bury), Miss Campbell of Monzie, and the Duchess of Buccleuch.
What ended this desultory life of wandering and fashionable
acquaintance-making in England was the death of Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s
father in 1813. The lairdship of Hoddam having then descended to the
eldest son, General Matthew Sharpe,[48] the old Hoddam household was
broken up, and Kirkpatrick Sharpe, at the age of thirty-two, began, on
an allowance from his brother, that long residence in Edinburgh which
has been sketched sufficiently already.
If we were to regard Kirkpatrick Sharpe as a kind of Scottish Horace
Walpole, it would not be because his correspondence furnishes, to
anything like the same extent as Walpole’s, a continuous comment of
gossip on what was most central in the history of his time. Even the
Edinburgh portion of it will disappoint, if what is looked for in it is
a record of the most important occurrences in Edinburgh through the time
traversed. Some of the most notable persons in the society of Edinburgh,
and even in its literary society, between 1813 and 1851, are either
barely mentioned or not mentioned at all. The truth is that Kirkpatrick
Sharpe moved through the world in a track, or in a series of tracks,
determined by a few affinities of his own constitution, which led him
sometimes into social companionship, but at other times left him
stranded, and at leisure to find amusement in counting over the stray
beads of past memories. Hence, though his correspondence does contain a
good deal of historical gossip at intervals, its chief interest will be
missed by those who read it only for that kind of recompense, and do not
also find pleasure in it as a revelation of Kirkpatrick Sharpe himself.
Kirkpatrick Sharpe was, as we have hinted, a born Sir Mungo
Malagrowther. From his first youth, whether in consequence or not of
some constitutional peculiarity, such as might be supposed to be
indicated by his thin and shrill voice,—by the bye, Sir Walter, when he
introduces the original Sir Mungo in his _Nigel_, expressly notes that
the voice of that original was “high-pitched and querulous,”—the lad of
elegant accomplishments from Hoddam Castle was marked by a disposition
to snarl at things, express shrill and sarcastic views of things,
ventilate the absurdest little momentary animosities. In the very first
of his letters, which is of date November 1798, and announces to his
mother his entry into Christ Church College, his description of the
young men of the college he has yet seen is that they “are all ugly,
conceited, and putting themselves in postures like Mr. Don, and have the
worst legs I ever beheld, crooked thirty different ways, east, west,
north, south, that it is a very shame to be seen”; and in a later letter
the Rev. Dr. Cyril Jackson, the head of the college, is described as “an
inspired swine.” These irreverences and causticities, characteristic
from the first of the conversation and the letters of a young fellow of
indubitable natural talent otherwise, and of gentlemanly tastes and
belongings, must, in fact, have been one cause of that zest for his
society when it could be had, and for continued epistolary intercourse
at other times, which was felt by so many of his college comrades of the
most aristocratic set, and communicated by them to the seniors of their
families. In English country-houses, and among great ladies, what more
privileged person than the weak-voiced young Kirkpatrick Sharpe, with
his witty cynicisms and budget of queer stories? And so to the end, with
only the difference made by change of residence back to Scotland,
increasing age, and increasing carelessness in dress,—always a
privileged person, just because he was recognised as so amusing a
Malagrowther. Here, from the abundance in the volumes before us, are a
few of his characteristic Malagrowtherisms, arranged in the
chronological order of their subjects:—
_Character of the Countess of Mar, his own ancestress._—“Her good
qualities were not proportioned, as is generally the case, to her
rank. She basked all her life in the beams of royalty, with a pension
from the Crown, and yet cultivated the Kirk, and hounded out her
whelps to bark and bite in favour of the Solemn League and Covenant.”
_Milton._—“I think Milton’s _Paradise Lost_ a heap of blasphemy and
obscenity, with, certainly, numberless poetical beauties. Milton was a
Whig, and in my mind an Atheist. I am persuaded his poem was composed
to apologise for the Devil, who certainly was the first Whig on
record.”
_Mrs. Siddons._—“I met Mrs. Siddons at dinner one day, just before the
death of her spouse,—’twas at Walter Scott’s,—and you cannot imagine
how it annoyed me to behold Belvidera guzzle boiled beef and mustard,
swill streams of porter, cram up her nose with handfuls of snuff, and
laugh till she made the whole room shake again.”
_Madame de Stäel._—“Her face was that of a blackamoor attempted to be
washed white. She wore a wig like a bunch of withered heather, and
over that a turban which looked as if it had been put on in the dark;
a short neck, and shoulders rising so much behind that they almost
amounted to a hump. With all this ugliness all the airs of a
beauty,—for ever tormenting her shawl into new draperies, and
distorting her fingers as you see them in the ridiculous French
portraits by Mignard and his followers.”
_Queen Caroline._—“Her eyes projected, like those of the royal family.
She made her head large by wearing an immense wig; she also painted
her eyebrows, which gave her face a strange, fierce look. Her
skin,—and she showed a great deal,—was very red. She wore very
high-heeled shoes, so that she bent forward when she stood or walked:
her feet and ankles were dreadful.”
_Shelley._—“We have lately had a literary sun shine forth upon us here
[at Oxford], before whom our former luminaries must hide their
diminished heads,—a Mr. Shelley, of University College, who lives upon
arsenic, aquafortis, half-an-hour’s sleep in the night, and is
desperately in love with the memory of Margaret Nicholson.”
_The Rev. Dr. M’Crie._—“The villainous biographer of John Knox.” “That
villain, Dr. M’Crie.”
_The Rev. H. Philpotts (afterwards Bishop of Exeter)._—“A hideous
fellow of the name of Fillpot.”
_Sir Walter Scott_:—(1) _First Sight of Scott at Oxford in 1803._—“The
Border Minstrel paid me a visit some time since on his way to town,
and I very courteously invited him to breakfast. He is dreadfully
lame, and much too _poetical_. He spouts without mercy, and pays
compliments so high-flown that my self-conceit, though a tolerable
good shot, could not even wing one of them.” (2) _Opinion of the
Waverley Novels in 1839, seven years after Scott’s death._—“As to Sir
Walter’s harmless _romances_,—not harmless, however, as to bad
English,—they contain _nothing_: pictures of manners that never were,
are, or will be, besides ten thousand blunders as to chronology,
costume, etc. etc., which must mislead the million who admire such
captivating comfits.”
_Rachel and Jenny Lind._—“I have seen and heard Misses Rachel and J.
Lind. The Jewess has a good voice,—far inferior, however, to that of
Mrs. Siddons,—but an ungraceful and often vulgar action. As to Miss
Jenny, she sings very prettily; but her highest note is a downright
squall, and the buzz like a bee she can make (I have heard boys in
Annandale do something like it) is a trick,—not music.”
These are specimens of what may be called the Malagrowtherism of
Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s disposition,—his readiness to snarl and snap at
everything; but they leave unrepresented the two special forms of his
Malagrowtherism which strike one most constantly and startlingly in his
correspondence. Like Swift, one of his constitutional resemblances to
whom was an extreme personal fastidiousness,—an extreme sensitiveness to
anything about himself that was offensive to eye, ear, or nostril,—he
tended, in a most inordinate degree, in his writings and letters, as if
by revenge against this constitutional nicety, to descriptions and
imaginations of the physically nasty; and, like Swift also, and probably
from some similar radical cause, he tended, in a most inordinate degree,
to sexual allusions, and to all scandals and speculations of the sexual
order. Illustrations will not be expected here, but will be found in
sufficient number in the volumes which Mr. Allardyce has edited. Mr.
Allardyce has been a bold editor; for there are in the volumes passages
of both the specified kinds that verge on the bounds of what many people
nowadays might regard as the unpublishable. Some of these passages, it
is curious to observe, occur in letters to Sharpe’s lady-correspondents;
one or two of whom, it is also curious to remark, do not seem at all
discomposed, but even,—those were the days of the Regency!—reciprocate
with due elegance. The worst of the matter is that poor Sir Walter
himself, honest man! does not escape uninvolved. In one or two frank
moments, knowing his friend’s tastes, he had sent him communications
which he thought would suit them; and lo! these now in printed black and
white! Hurrah for old Peveril all the same! What can ever smirch _him_?
It would be wrong to leave our readers with the impression that Charles
Kirkpatrick Sharpe was nothing more than a Sir Mungo Malagrowther of the
first half of the present century. At the back of his Malagrowtherism,
as appears from plenty of testimony in these volumes, there was much
gentlemanly courtesy, a good deal of kindliness and willingness to
oblige, a highly cultivated critical judgment in minute matters of art
and literature, a sensitiveness to whatever of the fine and poetical in
Scottish tradition he could discern amid the gross and scandalous, and,
most especially, a real sense of humour. In this last particular his
fondness for little scraps of whimsical or nonsensical verse may be
taken as a sure sign. There must have been some heart of intrinsic fun
in the man who could go about in the streets, or sit alone in his room,
repeating to himself, as we know he did, such scraps as these:—
“Yours till death, till death doth come,
And shut me up in the cold _tum_.”
“What is impossible can’t be,
And never, never comes to pass.”
“Hey, the haggis o’ Dunbar,
Fatharalinkum feedle;
Mony better, few waur,
Fatharalinkum feedle.”
Above all, we must remember how many attached friends Kirkpatrick Sharpe
had drawn around him in the course of his life, and how all that
survived of the earliest of these kept up their liking for him, and an
affectionate intercourse with him, to the last. In September 1831, when
the dying Scott was departing on his final journey to the Mediterranean
in quest of health, almost the last friend he wrote to was his “Dear
Charles”: and the letter contained these words—“I should like to have
shaken hands with you, as there are few I regret so much to part with.
But it will not be. I will keep my eyes dry if possible, and therefore
content myself with bidding you a long, perhaps an eternal, farewell.”
That, surely, is a testimony by itself. All in all, then, need we wonder
at the rumour that there are some persons in Edinburgh now so peculiarly
tempered, or so ill-satisfied with their present mercies, that they
would be willing to exchange any three or four of those whom they are
pleased to characterise as the more insipid present celebrities of the
town for the re-apparition among us of that crabbed old gentleman who
was to be seen forty years ago in the Edinburgh streets, with his
light-brown wig, faded blue surtout, ribbon-tied pumps, and green silk
umbrella?
JOHN HILL BURTON[49]
Dr. Hill Burton used to be a little annoyed by the praises bestowed on
him for his _Book-Hunter_. He had written books far more laborious and
important, he thought; and why should the public, why should his own
friends even, be always paying him such special compliments on account
of a mere piece of literary bye-play?
The feeling was natural on Dr. Burton’s part; and it is certainly not to
this casual production of his, published originally in 1862, that one
would now point as the most solid exhibition of his powers. Yet the
public were not wrong in their extraordinary fondness for _The
Book-Hunter_. Not only was it a book of deliciously amusing matter, such
as one prays for on a dull evening or a rainy day; but it was pervaded,
in an unusual degree, by the flavour of the author’s own peculiar
character. If not the most valuable of Dr. Burton’s writings, it is the
most thoroughly Burtonian. Hence a real propriety in the form of the
present republication. If any one of Dr. Burton’s books was to be
converted, by the care of his publishers, into a memorial of himself,
and set forth, therefore, in all the beauties of quarto size, thick
ribbed paper, wide margins, and gilt binding, and with the
accompaniments of a portrait, illustrative vignettes, and a prefixed
biography, which could it be but _The Book-Hunter_? Messrs. Blackwood
have done well in perceiving this, and in making reaccessible such a
famous book about books, unfortunately so long out of print, in a new
edition devised so expressly, in the first place, for book-lovers of
very æsthetic tastes and correspondingly superior purses.
No need at this time of day to revert to the book itself for description
of the richly humorous variety of its contents, or for specification of
the parts that are most fascinating and memorable. No need either to
point out the errors into which the author sometimes fell in his hurry,
and some of which remain in the present text,—as, for example, the
extraordinary blunder of making Gilbert Rule “the founder and first
Principal of the University of Edinburgh.” We prefer attending to what
is really the most important, as well as the most charming, feature of
distinction between this new edition of _The Book-Hunter_ and the older
and smaller editions. Biographic sketches of Dr. Burton, some of them in
the shape of obituary notices, have already made the public acquainted
with the main facts of his life; but there has been no such full,
intimate, or interesting account of him as that furnished in the “Memoir
of the Author” which opens the present volume, and bears the signature
of his widow, “Katharine Burton.” Consisting of no fewer than 104 pages,
and sketching the whole life with sufficient continuity, and with a
pleasant abundance of personal detail, it is exactly the kind of
biographical introduction that one would desire to see prefixed to the
most characteristic work, or to the collected works, of any deceased
author. We should have been grateful for so much information about Dr.
Burton and his habits in whatever form it had been communicated; but the
form itself deserves praise. Although there has been evidence of Mrs.
Burton’s literary ability and skill in former writings of hers, in none
of them has she been more successful than in this. The style is easy;
and the narrative is managed throughout with an admirable combination of
fidelity to fact, dutiful affection for the subject, and artistic
perception of what is historically significant, or racy, or picturesque.
One is struck, also, by the frank candour of the writer, her abstinence
from exaggeration, her resolution that Dr. Burton should be seen in her
pages exactly as he was. In two or three passages this honesty of the
writer, so rare in biographies by relatives, comes upon the reader with
the effect of a surprise.
In the first portion of the Memoir we are with young Burton in Aberdeen,
where he was born in 1809, and where he mainly resided till 1830. We see
him in his boyhood and early youth, growing up hardily among the quaint
and old-fashioned domesticities of his maternal relatives, the Patons of
Grandholm, or moving about between the two almost contiguous towns, the
main Aberdeen and the smaller Old Aberdeen, that share the mouths of the
Dee and the Don. By-the-bye, why does Mrs. Burton lavish all her
affection on Old Aberdeen, calling it “a sweet, still, little place,”
and dilating on the charms of its college and cathedral and antique
streets, while she has nothing more to say for New Aberdeen than that it
is “a highly prosperous commercial city, as utterly devoid of beauty or
interest as any city under the sun”? About Old Aberdeen all will agree
with her; but who that really knows the Granite City will agree with her
about the New? Is it nothing to be able to walk along the whole length
of her noble Union Street, whether on fair summer mornings, when the sun
is shining, or again in the frosty winter nights, when the eye is held
by the undulating perspective of the lamps, and the very houses glitter
keenly in the starlight, and the aurora borealis is seen dancing at its
best in the northward sky over the chasm from Union Bridge? Is it
nothing to saunter down by the bustling quays and ship-yards, and thence
to the extreme of the harbour, where the great out-jutting pier of
stonework commands the miles of breakers and of sandy beach to the left,
and spikes the wrath of the German Ocean?
To young Burton, at all events, these and other sights and experiences
of his native city were by no means nothing. Familiar, like all other
Aberdonians, with the quiet little old town of the Don, he was a
nursling more peculiarly of the new town of the Dee,—historically the
older town, after all. It was at the Grammar School of New Aberdeen that
he received his first instruction in Latin; and, when he passed to the
University, it was not to King’s College in Old Aberdeen, but to the
amorphous hulk of a building, off the Broadgate, in the New Town, then
famous as Marischal College and University, where Dugald Dalgetty had
been educated long before him. For a while, indeed, it seemed as if
Burton was to be a denizen of New Aberdeen all his days. Hardly had he
left the University when he was apprenticed to an Aberdeen writer, and
began the drudgery of officework, with a view to being an Aberdeen
writer himself. Two passions, however, had already been developed in
him, which made the prospect of such a life unendurably irksome. One was
a passion for rambling about the country. To the last Dr. Burton was an
indefatigable pedestrian, thinking nothing of a walk of fifty or even
sixty miles in a day, over any tract of country and in any kind of
weather; and the habit, Mrs. Burton tells us, and proves by letters, had
been formed in his boyhood. Nothing more common with him then than to
set off, in the holiday season, with a pound in his pocket, accomplish
some incredible distance on that sum in the Aberdeenshire, Banffshire,
or Morayshire Highlands, and reappear, draggled and footworn, when the
sum was spent. His other passion was for literature. Letter-writing he
disliked, and avoided as much as he could; but for every other purpose
he had always a pen in his hand. Heaps of early manuscript of his, Mrs.
Burton informs us, are yet extant, conspicuously weak in the spelling,
but showing an extraordinary versatility of taste in the matter. He
wrote verse as well as prose, drama as well as narrative, but had a
special propensity to terrific prose-stories of the blood and murder
sort. There were newspapers in Aberdeen, and even a magazine, at that
date; and, where editors were so good-natured and not over-burdened, it
was not difficult for a clever young scribbler to get a percentage of
his writings into print. The Memoir does not give us particulars; but
Aberdonian legend still preserves the memory of those old days when
young Burton, young Joseph Robertson, young Spalding, and others, began
their literary lives together, and had no higher ambition as yet than
astonishing the Devanha and being read in the Gallowgate.
Released, by happy chance, from his detested Aberdeen writership, Burton
came to Edinburgh in November 1830, at the age of one-and-twenty, and
was able, by passing some forms of examination, which seem to have been
easier and more rapid than the corresponding forms now, to qualify
himself at once for the Scottish Bar. He was called in 1831; and from
that date he was a citizen of Edinburgh, never leaving it save for one
of his country rambles, or for an occasional visit to London or the
Continent. From that date, too, his membership of the Bar leading to
little or no practice, but only to more and more distinct recognition of
him as one of the Whig politicians of the Parliament House, literature
was his avowed profession.
The fifty years of Burton’s Edinburgh life are sketched for us in Mrs.
Burton’s Memoir with chronological and topographical precision. The
substance is as follows:—
The thirteen years of his continued bachelorship, from 1831 to 1844,
when he was domiciled with his mother and sister, first in Warriston
Crescent, and then in Howard Place, with a little summer cottage at
Brunstane, were a period of extraordinary and most varied literary
industry, chiefly anonymous. He wrote for newspapers and reviews; he
wrote schoolbooks and other compilations; he wrote no one knows what or
how much. “Dr. Burton’s whole resources at this time,” we are informed,
“were derived from his pen.”
It was the same during the five years of his first married life, from
1844 to 1849, when he and his wife resided in Scotland Street, and then
in Royal Crescent, his mother and sister having taken up house by
themselves,—not at Brunstane, which was given up about this time,—but at
Liberton Bank. It was during those five years, however, that, while
still engaged in a great amount of miscellaneous hackwork, he emerged
into independent authorship in his _Life and Correspondence of David
Hume_, his _Lives of Lord Lovat and Duncan Forbes of Culloden_, his
_Benthamiana_, and his _Political and Social Economy_,—the last written
for the Messrs. Chambers. This was the time, too, of his fullest relish
for general companionship, his most frequent appearances at Edinburgh
dinner tables, and perhaps his highest reputation for humorous
sociability and powers of table talk.
The sad death of his wife in 1849, leaving him a widower in his fortieth
year, with three young daughters, produced a change in that respect from
which he never quite recovered. He was all but shattered by the blow,
and went about for a time broken-hearted, shunning all ordinary society,
and finding relief only in aimless walks by night and day, and in
strenuous and solitary work. Through the whole of his widowerhood, in
fact, he remained very much of a recluse, living laboriously with his
children and his books, first in Castle Street and then in Ann Street,
and having intercourse only with a few intimates: such as Joseph
Robertson, John Ritchie, Alexander Russel and other _Scotsman_ friends,
and Professor Cosmo Innes. With the last of these, especially, he was in
the habit of taking long Saturday and Sunday walks; which ended
generally in his dining with the Innes family, the one guest at their
table in Inverleith Row, of a Saturday or Sunday evening. This, we
believe, was the time of the beginning of his important connection with
_Blackwood’s Magazine_, as it was certainly of the publication of his
_Narratives from Criminal Trials in Scotland_, his _Treatise of the Law
of Bankruptcy in Scotland_, and his _History of Scotland from the
Revolution to the Extinction of the last Jacobite Rebellion_. His
appointment in 1854 to the Secretaryship of the Scottish Prisons Board,
with a salary of £700 a year, made his circumstances easier, and at the
same time provided him with that regular occupation in official business
for so many hours every day which he thought desirable for any man of
letters. The appointment caused him to remove to a largish, semi-rural
house in Lauriston Place, backing on the Meadows, the site of which is
now occupied by the Simpson Memorial Hospital.
In August 1855 he married his second wife,—the daughter of his friend
Cosmo Innes, and writer of the present Memoir. As is natural, she
devotes a considerable proportion of the Memoir to recollections of the
subsequent six-and-twenty years of her husband’s life. Till March 1861
they remained in Lauriston Place,—where three more children were born to
Dr. Burton, a son and two daughters; but in that month they entered on
the tenancy of Craighouse, a quaint old-sixteenth century fortalice,
near the Braid Hills, and two miles out of Edinburgh, on which they had
set their hearts, partly for the charm of its own ruinous
picturesqueness, partly for its historical associations with the reigns
of Queen Mary and James VI., and partly on account of the singular
beauty of the views in its vicinity. Here, having reduced the ruin into
habitable and pleasant order, they lived till 1878, on the verge of the
Edinburgh world, and sufficiently close to it for the daily business
purposes of such an inveterate pedestrian as Burton, but still so much
out of it that the recluse evening habits into which he had settled
could be interrupted only when he chose, whether by the reception of a
friend or two now and then under his own roof, or by the still rarer
accident of a visit to some friend’s house in town.
Incidents of those seventeen years at Craighouse, besides the birth of
his seventh child and youngest son, were his honorary graduation as
LL.D. by the University of Edinburgh, his election to the membership of
the Athenæum Club in London, his appointment to the dignity of the
Historiographership-Royal for Scotland, and his honorary graduation as
D.C.L. by the University of Oxford. These honours were successive
acknowledgments of that growth of his literary reputation which had
attended the appearance of such results of his continued industry for
Blackwood as his _Book-Hunter_ and his _Scot Abroad_, but, above all,
the publication of his completed _History of Scotland_ in eight volumes.
Hardly had this last, his largest, work been finished when he projected
his _History of the Reign of Queen Anne_.
That work, however, prosecuted slowly and intermittently, and requiring
visits to London and to the Continent for its preparation, was not
concluded in Craighouse, but in another country house, called Morton
House, at the foot of the Pentland Hills, to which he was reluctantly
obliged to remove in 1878, when a new speculation affecting the future
property of Craighouse and its neighbourhood dispossessed him from that
much-loved home. The last three years of his life, marked by the
publication of his _History of the Reign of Queen Anne_, in three
volumes, and then, as if in final farewell to authorship of any kind, by
the sale of his library, were spent in this Morton House; and here he
died in 1881. As he had by that time retired from his official duties in
connection with the Prisons Board, and had few business occasions for
being in Edinburgh, he was even more of a recluse at Morton than he had
been before. Many of the younger Edinburgh generation, however, that
knew nothing of him personally in his prime, must have a vivid
recollection of casual glimpses of him in those still recent years, when
his stooping, eccentric figure, very untidily dressed, and with the most
battered and back-hanging of hats, would be seen pushing rapidly along
Princes Street, or some other thoroughfare, with a look that seemed to
convey the decided intimation: “Don’t stop me; I care for none of you.”
But, if you did have a meeting with Burton in circumstances that made
colloquy possible, he was the most kindly of men in his rough and
unsophisticated way, with a quantity of the queerest and most
entertaining old lore, and no end of good Scottish stories.
For the filling-out of this mere chronological scheme with the
particulars that make it lively and interesting, the reader must go to
Mrs. Burton’s own pages. She has judiciously interwoven her own
narrative with a selection from the simple and chatty letters which,
with all his dislike of letter-writing, he did punctually send to his
family whenever he chanced to be absent from them. Of her account of his
domestic habits, and of the singular honesty which tempers, as we have
said, her affectionate estimate of his character all-in-all, the
following sentences, strung together from different parts of the Memoir,
will be a sufficient specimen here:—
“His defect in conversation was that he was a bad listener. His own
part was well sustained. His enormous store of varied information
poured forth naturally and easily, and was interspersed with a
wonderful stock of lively anecdotes and jokes. But he always lacked
that greatest power of the conversationalist, the subtle ready
sympathy which draws forth the best powers of others. He was
invaluable at a dull dinner-table, furnishing the whole _frais de la
conversation_ himself.... His mode of life at that time [during his
residence at Lauriston Place and at Craighouse] was to repair to the
office of the Prison Board, in George Street, about eleven. He
remained there till four, and made it a matter of conscience neither
to do any extra-official writing nor to receive visits during those
hours.... Returning from his office to dinner at five, he would, after
dinner, retire to the library for twenty minutes or half-an-hour’s
perusal of a novel as mental rest. His taste in novels has been
already described. Although he would read only those called exciting,
they did not, apparently, excite him, for he read them as slowly as if
he was learning them by heart. He would return to the drawing-room to
drink a large cup of extremely strong tea, then retire again to the
library to commence his day of literary work about eight in the
evening. He would read or write without cessation, and without the
least appearance of fatigue or excitement, till one or two in the
morning.... Constitutionally irritable, energetic, and utterly
persistent, Dr. Burton did not know what dulness or depression of
spirits was. With grief he was indeed acquainted, and while such a
feeling lasted it engrossed him; but his spirits were naturally
elastic, and both by nature and on principle he discouraged in himself
and others any dwelling on the sad or pathetic aspects of life. He has
said that the nearest approach he had ever felt to low spirits was
when he had finished some great work and had not yet begun another....
John Hill Burton can never have been handsome, and he so determinedly
neglected his person as to increase its natural defects. His greatest
mental defect was an almost entire want of imagination. From this
cause the characters of those nearest and dearest to him remained to
his life’s end a sealed book.... Dr. Burton was excessively
kind-hearted within the limits placed by this great want. To any
sorrow or suffering which he could understand he craved with
characteristic impatience to carry immediate relief; and the greatest
enjoyment of his life, especially of its later years, was to give
pleasure to children, poor people, or the lower animals. Many humble
folks will remember the bunches of flowers he thrust silently into
their hands, and the refreshment he never failed to press on their
acceptance in his own peculiar manner. He was liberal of money to a
fault. He never refused any application even from a street beggar....
No printer’s devil or other chance messenger failed to receive his
sixpence or shilling, besides a comfortable meal.... Many of the
‘motley crew’ along with whom Dr. Burton received his education fell
into difficulties in the course of their lives. Application from one
of them always met with a prompt response. To send double the amount
asked on such occasions was his rule, if money was the object desired.
In his earlier life he would also spare no trouble in endeavouring to
help these unfortunates to help themselves. As he grew older he was
less zealous, probably from being less sanguine of success, in this
service.”
The illustrations that accompany the Memoir deserve a word. The portrait
of Dr. Burton, etched by Mr. W. B. Hole, A.R.S.A., after a photograph,
and representing him walking away, with a book in his hand, from an old
book-stall near Candlemaker Row, is done to the life, slightly tidied
perhaps in the look of the costume, but catching his gait and the keen
expression of his eyes and face with wonderful fidelity. Very faithful
and pleasing, also, are the vignettes of Craighouse Avenue and
Craighouse itself, the view of a nook in the library of Craighouse, and
the vignette of Dalmeny Churchyard, where Dr. Burton lies buried, all
drawn by his daughter Miss Rose Burton, and engraved by her sister Miss
E. P. Burton.
DR. JOHN BROWN OF EDINBURGH[50]
Since the last session of our University, Edinburgh has lost two of her
citizens of literary mark. Dr. John Brown died, in his house in Rutland
Street, on the 11th of May, in the seventy-second year of his age; and
his friend, Dr. William Hanna, died in London on the 24th of the same
month, aged seventy-three. They were both buried in Edinburgh. As I had
the honour of knowing them both well, I cannot let the present occasion
pass without asking you to join with me in remembering them
affectionately. I could say much to you of Dr. Hanna, the son-in-law and
biographer of Dr. Chalmers. I could dwell on the merits of his _Life_ of
that great man and of his other well-known works, and on his fine
liberality of intellect and the keen and warm geniality of his
Scoto-Irish heart. In this place, however, it is naturally of Dr. John
Brown that I feel myself entitled to speak at some length. He was, in a
sense, during the latter part of his life, peculiarly our Edinburgh man
of letters, the man most fondly thought of in that character by many
people at a distance. They had begun, long before his death, to call him
“The Scottish Charles Lamb”; and the name is applied to him still by
English critics.
Born at Biggar in Lanarkshire, in 1810, the son of the Secession
minister of that town, and of a family already in the third generation
of its remarkable distinction in the Scottish religious world as “The
Browns of Haddington,” our friend came to Edinburgh in 1822, when he was
twelve years old. His father had then removed from Biggar, to assume
that pastorate of the Rose Street Secession Church in this city in
which, and subsequently in his ministry in the Broughton Place Church,
and in his Theological Professorship in connection with the Associate
Synod, he attained his celebrity. When I first knew Edinburgh there was
no more venerable-looking man in it than this Dr. John Brown of
Broughton Place Church. People would turn in the streets to observe his
dignified figure as he passed; and strangers who went to hear him preach
were struck no less by the beauty of his appearance in the pulpit, the
graceful fall of the silver locks round his fine head and sensitive
face, than by the Pauline earnestness of his doctrine. At that time, the
phrase “Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh,” if used in any part of Scotland
away from the metropolis, would have been taken as designating this
venerable Calvinistic clergyman, and not his son.
The son, meanwhile, it is true, was becoming well enough known within
Edinburgh on his own account. Having been educated at the High School
and the University, and having chosen the medical profession, and been
apprenticed for some time to the famous surgeon, Syme, he had taken his
degree of M.D. in 1833, and had then,—with no other previous medical
experience out of Edinburgh than a short probation among the sailors at
Chatham,—settled down permanently in Edinburgh for medical practice.
From that date, therefore, on to the time when I can draw upon my own
first recollections of him,—say about 1846,—there had been two Dr. John
Browns in Edinburgh, the father and the son, the theological doctor and
the medical doctor. It was the senior or theological doctor, as I have
said, that was then still the “Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh” _par
excellence_, and the name had not transferred itself to the younger with
its new signification. He was then about thirty-six years of age, with
some little practice as a physician; and my remembrance of him at that
time is of a darkish-haired man, of shorter stature than his father,
with fine soft eyes, spirited movement, and very benignant manner, the
husband of a singularly beautiful young wife, and greatly liked and
sought after in the Edinburgh social circles in which he and she
appeared. This was partly from the charm of his vivid temperament and
conversation, and partly because of a reputation for literary ability
that had been recently gathering round him on account of occasional
semi-anonymous articles of his in newspapers and periodicals, chiefly
art-criticisms. For the hereditary genius of “The Browns of Haddington”
had, in this fourth generation of them, turned itself out of the
strictly theological direction, to work in new ways. While Dr. Samuel
Brown, a younger cousin of our Dr. John, had been astonishing Edinburgh
by his brilliant speculations in Chemistry, Dr. John himself, in the
midst of what medical practice came in his way, had been toying with
Literature. Toying only it had been at first, and continued to be for a
while; but, by degrees,—and especially after 1847, when the editorship
of the _North British Review_, which had been founded in 1844, passed
into the hands of his friend Dr. Hanna,—his contributions to periodical
literature became more various and frequent. At length, in 1858, when he
was forty-eight years of age, and had contributed pretty largely to the
periodical named and to others, he came forth openly as an author, by
publishing a volume of what he called his _Horæ Subsecivæ_, consisting
mainly of medical biographies and other medico-literary papers collected
from the said periodicals, but including also his immortal little
Scottish idyll called “Rab and His Friends.” His father had died in that
year, so that thenceforward, if people chose, the designation “Dr. John
Brown of Edinburgh” could descend to the son without ambiguity.
And it did so descend. For eleven years before that appearance of the
first collection of his _Horæ Subsecivæ_, with “Rab and His Friends”
included in it, I had been resident in London, and I remained there for
seven years more. During all those eighteen years, therefore, my direct
opportunities of cultivating his acquaintance had ceased; and, while I
could take note through the press of the growth of his literary
reputation, it was only by hearsay at a distance, or by a letter or two
that passed between us, or by a glimpse of him now and then when I came
north on a visit, that I was kept aware of his Edinburgh doings and
circumstances. Not till the end of 1865, when I resumed residence in
Edinburgh, were we brought again into close neighbourhood and
intercourse. Then, certainly, I found him, at the age of five-and-fifty,
as completely and popularly our “Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh” in the new
sense as ever his father had been in the old one. His pen had been still
busy in newspapers and periodicals, the subjects ranging away more and
more from the medical; another volume of his _Horæ Subsecivæ_, or
collected articles, had been published; and some of his papers, selected
from that volume or its predecessor, or taken more directly from the
manuscript, had been brought out separately, in various forms, under the
discerning care of his friend and publisher, Mr. David Douglas, and had
been in circulation almost with the rapidity of one of the serial parts
of a novel by Dickens. Of both his _Minchmoor_ and his _Jeems the
Doorkeeper_ more than 10,000 copies had been sold; his _Pet Marjorie_
had passed the sale of 15,000 copies; and _Rab and His Friends_ was
already in its 50th thousand.
With all this applause beating in upon him from the reading public, in
Scotland, in England, and in America, there he still was in his old
Edinburgh surroundings: a widower now for some years, domesticated with
his two children, and more solitary in his habits than he had been; but
to be seen walking along Princes Street of a forenoon, or sometimes at
some hospitable dinner-table of an evening, always the same simple,
wise, benevolent, lovable, and much-loved Dr. John. And so for sixteen
years more, and to the very end. The sixties crept upon him after the
fifties, and the white touch of the first seventies followed, and the
vivid darkish-haired Dr. John of my first memory had changed into the
bald-headed and spectacled veteran you may see in the later
photographs,—the spectacles before his fine eyes if he were looking to
the front, but raised over the placid forehead if he were looking
downwards at a print or a book. But these changes had come softly, and
with a mellowing rather than withering effect; and, as late as last
winter, what veteran was there in our community whose face and presence
in any company was more desired or gave greater pleasure? If a stranger
of literary tastes visited Edinburgh, about whom did he inquire more
curiously, or whom was he more anxious to see, if possible, than Dr.
John Brown? We knew, most of us, that his calm face concealed sorrows;
we remembered his long widowerhood; we were aware too of the occasional
glooms and depressions that withdrew him from common society; but, when
he did appear among us, whether in any public gathering or in more
private fashion, how uniformly cheerful he was, how bright and sunny! It
has been stated, in one obituary notice of him, that his medical
practice declined as his literary reputation increased. I doubt the
truth of the statement, and imagine that the reverse might be nearer the
truth. To the end he loved his profession; to the end he practised it;
to the end there were not a few families, in and about Edinburgh, who
would have no other medical attendant, if they could help it, than their
dear and trusted Dr. John. My impression rather is that he was wrapt up
in his profession more and more in his later days, using his pen only
for a new trifle now and then as the whim struck him, and content in the
main with the continued circulation of his former writings or their
reissue in new shapes. It was on the 12th of April in the present year,
or only a month before his death, that he put the last prefatory touch
to the first volume of that new edition of his _Horæ Subsecivæ_ in three
volumes in which his complete literary remains are now accessible.
The title _Horæ Subsecivæ_, borrowed by Dr. John from the title-pages of
some old volumes of the minor English literature of the seventeenth
century, indicates, and was intended to indicate, the nature of his
writings. They are all “Leisure Hours,” little things done at times
snatched from business. There are between forty and fifty of them in
all, none of them long, and most of them very short. It is vain in his
case to repeat the regret, so common in similar cases, that the author
did not throw his whole strength into some one or two suitable subjects,
and produce one or two important works. By constitution, I believe, no
less than by circumstances, Dr. John Brown was unfitted for large and
continuous works, and was at home only in short occasional papers. One
compensation is the spontaneity of his writings, the sense of immediate
throb and impulse in each. Every paper he wrote was, as it were, a
moment of himself, and we can read his own character in the collected
series.
A considerable proportion of his papers, represented most directly by
his _Plain Lectures on Health addressed to Working People_, his little
essay entitled _Art and Science_, and his other little essays called
_Excursus Ethicus_ and _Education through the Senses_, but also by his
_Locke and Sydenham_ and others of his sketches of eminent physicians,
are in a didactic vein. Moreover, they are all mainly didactic on one
string. When these papers are read, it is found that they all propound
and illustrate one idea, which had taken such strong hold of the author
that it may be called one of his characteristics. It is the idea of the
distinction or contrast between the speculative, theoretical, or
scientific habit of mind, and the practical or active habit. In medical
practice and medical education, more particularly, Dr. John Brown
thought there had come to be too much attention to mere science, too
much faith in mere increase of knowledge and in exquisiteness of
research and apparatus, and too little regard for that solid breadth of
mind, that soundness of practical observation and power of decision in
emergencies, that instinctive or acquired sagacity, which had been
conspicuous among the best of the older physicians. As usual, he has put
this idea into the form of humorous apologue:—
A DIALOGUE.
SCENE.—Clinical wards of Royal Infirmary. The Physician and his Clerk
_loquuntur_.
John Murdoch, in the clinical ward with thoracic aneurism of the
aorta, had at his bedside a liniment of aconite, etc. Under the stress
of a paroxysm of pain, he drank it off, and was soon dead.
_Physician._—Well, Sir, what about Murdoch? Did you see him alive?
_Clerk._—Yes, Sir.
_Physician._—Did you feel his pulse?
_Clerk._—No, Sir.
_Physician._—Did you examine his eyes?
_Clerk._—No, Sir.
_Physician._—Did you observe any frothing at the mouth and nose?
_Clerk._—No, Sir.
_Physician._—Did you count his respirations?
_Clerk._—No, Sir.
_Physician._—Then, Sir, what the d——l _did_ you do?
_Clerk._—_I ran for the stomach-pump._
Dr. John was never tired of inculcating this distinction; it is the
backbone of almost all those papers of his that have been just
mentioned, and it reappears in others. In his special little essay
called _Art and Science_ he formulates it thus:—
IN MEDICINE
SCIENCE
Looks to essence and cause.
Is diagnostic.
Has a system.
Is _post-mortem_.
Looks to structure more than function.
Studies the phenomena of poisoning.
Submits to be ignorant of nothing.
Speaks.
ART
Looks to symptoms and occasions.
Is therapeutic and prognostic.
Has a method.
Is _ante-mortem_.
Looks to function more than structure.
Runs for the stomach-pump.
Submits to be ignorant of much.
Acts.
Now, in the particular matter in question, so far as it is here
represented, we should, doubtless, all agree with our friend. We should
all, for ourselves, in serious illness, infinitely prefer the attendance
of any tolerable physician of the therapeutic and prognostic type to
that of the ablest of the merely diagnostic type, especially if we
thought that the genius of the latter inclined him to a _post-mortem_
examination. Hence we may be disposed to think that Dr. John did good
service in protesting against the run upon science, ever new science, in
the medicine of his day, and trying to hark back the profession to the
good old virtues of vigorous rule of thumb. What I detect, however,
underneath all his expositions of this possibly salutary idea, and
prompting to his reiterations of it, is something deeper. It is a
dislike in his own nature to the abstract or theoretical in all matters
whatsoever. Dr. John Brown’s mind, I should say, was essentially
anti-speculative. His writings abound, of course, with tributes of
respect to science and philosophy, and expressions of astonishment and
gratitude for their achievements; but it may be observed that the
thinkers and philosophers to whom he refers most fondly are chiefly
those older magnates, including Bacon, Newton, Locke, and Bishop Butler
among the English, whose struggle was over long ago, whose results are
an accepted inheritance, and who are now standards of orthodoxy. All
later drifts of speculative thought, and especially the latest drifts of
his own day, seem to have made him uncomfortable. He actually warns
against them as products of what he calls “the lust of innovation.” This
is a matter of so much consequence in the study of Dr. John Brown’s
character that it ought not to be passed over lightly.
There can be no doubt that his dislike of the purely speculative spirit,
and especially of recent speculation of certain kinds, was rooted in
some degree in the fine devoutness of his nature, his unswerving
fidelity to his inherited religion. The system of beliefs which had been
consecrated for him so dearly and powerfully by the lives and example of
his immediate progenitors was still substantially that with which he
went through the world himself, though it had been softened in the
course of transmission, stripped of its more angular and sectarian
features, and converted into a contemplative _Religio Medici_, not
unlike that of his old English namesake, the philosopher and physician
of Norwich. Like that philosopher, for whom he had all the regard of a
felt affinity, he delighted in an _O altitudo!_, craved the refuge of an
_O altitudo!_ in all the difficulties of mere reason, and held that in
that craving itself there is the sure gleam for the human spirit of the
one golden key that unlocks those difficulties. A difference, however,
between him and old Browne of Norwich is that he had much less of clear
and definite thought, of logical grasp of prior propositions and
reasonings, with which to prepare for an _altitudo_, justify it, and
prop it up. Take as a specimen a passage relating to that very
distinction between Art and Science which he valued so much:—
“It may be thought that I have shown myself, in this parallel and
contrast, too much of a partisan of Art as against Science, and the
same may be not unfairly said of much of the rest of this volume. It
was in a measure on purpose,—the general tendency being counteractive
of the purely scientific and positive, or merely informative, current
of our day. We need to remind ourselves constantly that this kind of
knowledge puffeth up, and that it is something quite else that
buildeth up. It has been finely said that Nature is the Art of God,
and we may as truly say that all Art,—in the widest sense, as
practical and productive,—is His Science. He knows all that goes to
the making of everything; for He is Himself, in the strictest sense,
the only maker. He knows what made Shakespeare and Newton, Julius
Cæsar and Plato, what we know them to have been; and they are His by
the same right as the sea is His, and the strength of the hills, for
He made them and His hands formed them, as well as the dry land. This
making the circle for ever meet, this bringing Omega eternally round
to Alpha, is, I think, more and more revealing itself as a great
central, personal, regulative truth, and is being carried down more
than ever into the recesses of physical research, where Nature is fast
telling her long-kept secrets: all her tribes speaking, each in their
own tongue, the wonderful works of God,—the sea saying ‘It is not in
me,’ everything giving up any title to anything like substance, beyond
being the result of one Supreme Will. The more chemistry, and
electrology, and life, are searched into by the keenest and most
remorseless experiment, the more do we find ourselves admitting that
motive power and force, as manifested to us, is derived, is in its
essence immaterial, is direct from Him in whom we live and move, and
to whom, in a sense quite peculiar, belongeth power.”
This is fine, it is eloquent, it is likeable; but one cannot call it
lucid. Indeed, if interpreted literally, it is incoherent, for the end
contradicts the beginning. “Abstain from excess of theory or
speculation,” it substantially says, “for theory and speculation, when
prosecuted to the very utmost, lead to a profound religiousness.” This
is the only verbal construction of the passage; but it is the very
opposite of what was meant.
It is much the same with Dr. John Brown in smaller matters. If he wants
a definition or a distinction on any subject, he generally protests
first against the desire for definitions and distinctions, maintaining
the superiority of healthy practical sense and feeling over mere theory;
then he produces, in his own words, some “middle axiom,” or passable
first-hand notion on the subject, as sufficient for the purpose if
anything theoretical is wanted; and then he proceeds to back this up by
interesting quotations from favourite and accredited authors. In short,
Dr. John Brown lived in an element of the “middle propositions,” the
accredited axioms, on all subjects, and was impatient of reasoning,
novelty of theory, or search for ultimate principles. It is but the same
thing in another form,—though it deserves separate statement,—to say
that he disliked controversy. He shrank from controversy in all matters,
social as well as intellectual; was irritated when it came near him; and
kept rather on the conservative side in any new “cause” or “movement”
that was exciting his neighbourhood. Perhaps the most marked exception
in his writings to this disposition to rest in existing social
arrangements, and also to his prevailing dislike of speculation, was his
assertion of his unhesitating assent to that extreme development of Adam
Smith’s doctrines which would abolish the system of state-licensing for
particular professions, or at all events for the profession of Medicine.
He advocates this principle more than once in his papers, and he
signifies his adherence to it in almost the last words he wrote. “I am
more convinced than ever,” he says in the prefatory note to the
collected edition of his _Horæ Subsecivæ_, “of the futility and worse of
the Licensing System, and think, with Adam Smith, that a mediciner
should be as free to exercise his gifts as an architect or a
mole-catcher. The public has its own shrewd way of knowing who should
build its house or catch its moles, and it may quite safely be left to
take the same line in choosing its doctor.” This is bold enough, and
speculative enough; but the fact is that this acceptance of the
principle of absolute _laissez-faire_, or non-interference of the state,
or any other authority, in Medicine, or in any analogous art or craft,
was facilitated for him by his hereditary Voluntaryism in Church
matters, and indeed came to him ready-made in that form. What is
surprising, and what corroborates our view of the essentially
non-theoretical character of his intellect, is the unsystematic manner
in which he was content to hold his principle, his failure to carry it
out consistently, his apparent inability to perceive the full sweep of
its logical consequences. Thus, to the words just quoted he appends
these,—“Lawyers, of course, are different, as they have to do with the
state, with the law of the land.” Was there ever a more innocent _non
sequitur_? If any one may set up as a curer of diseases and make a
living in that craft by charging fees from those who choose to employ
him, why may not any one set up as a lawyer, and why may not I select
and employ any one I please to plead my cause in court, instead of being
bound to employ one of a limited number of wigged and gowned gentlemen?
If, then, it was not in theory or speculation that Dr. John Brown
excelled,—and that there was no deficiency of hereditary speculative
faculty in his family, but much the reverse, is proved not only by the
theological distinction of his predecessors in the family, and by the
brilliant career of his cousin, Dr. Samuel Brown, but also by the
reputation among us at this moment of his still nearer relative, the
eminent Philosophical Chemist of Edinburgh University,—in what was it
that he did excel? It was in what I may call an unusual
_appreciativeness_ of all that did recommend itself to him as good and
admirable. In few men has there been such a fulfilment of the memorable
apostolic injunction: “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are
honourable, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure,
whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report,—if
there be any virtue, and if there be any praise,—think on these things.”
The context of that passage shows that what was enjoined on the
Philippians was a habit of meditative and ruminative appreciation of all
that was noteworthy, of every variety, within accredited and prescribed
limits. Dr. John Brown was a model in this respect. Within the limits of
his preference for the concrete and practical over the abstract and
theoretical, he was a man of peculiarly keen relish for anything
excellent, and of peculiar assiduity in imparting his likings to others.
His habit of appreciativeness is seen, on the small scale, even in such
a matter as his appropriation and use of pithy phrases and anecdotes
picked up miscellaneously. “‘Pray, Mr. Opie, may I ask what you mix your
colours with?’ said a brisk dilettante student to the great painter.
‘With brains, sir,’ was the gruff reply.” Having met this story in some
Life of the painter Opie, Dr. John Brown had fastened on it, or it had
adhered to him; and not only did he hang one whole paper on it, entitled
_With Brains, Sir_, but he made it do duty again and again in other
papers. At times when Dr. Chalmers happened to be talked to about some
person not already known to him, and was told that the person was a man
of ability, “Yes, but has he _wecht_, Sir, has he _wecht_?” was his
common question in reply; and, as Dr. John Brown had also perceived that
it is not mere cleverness that is effective in the world, and that
_weight_ is the main thing, he was never tired of bringing in Dr.
Chalmers’s phrase to enforce that meaning. When Dr. John wanted to
praise anything of the literary kind as being of the most robust
intellectual quality, not food for babes but very “strong meat” indeed,
he would say “This is lions’ marrow.” As he was not a man to conceal his
obligations, even for a phrase, we learn from him incidentally that he
had taken the metaphor originally from this passage in one of the pieces
of the English poet Prior:—
“That great Achilles might employ
The strength designed to ruin Troy,
He dined on lions’ marrow, spread
On toasts of ammunition bread.”
Dr. John had a repertory of such individual phrases and aphorisms,
picked up from books or conversation, which he liked to use as
flavouring particles for his own text. He dealt largely also in extracts
and quotations of greater length. Any bit that struck him as fine in a
new book of verses, any scrap of old Scottish ballad not generally
known, any interesting little poem by a friend of his own that he had
seen in manuscript, or any similar thing communicated to him as not
having seen the light before, was apt to be pounced upon, stamped with
his _imprimatur_, and turned into service in his own papers, as motto,
relevant illustration, or pleasant addition. His fondness for quotation
from his favourite prose authors has already been mentioned. In fact,
some of his papers are little more than patches of quotations connected
by admiring comments. In such cases it is as if he said to his readers,
“How nice this is, how capital! don’t you agree with me?” Sometimes you
may not quite agree with him, or you may wish that he had thrown fewer
quotations at you, and had said more on the subject out of his own head;
but you always recognise his appreciativeness.
On the larger scale of the papers themselves the same appreciativeness
is discernible. Take first the papers which are most in the nature of
criticisms. Such are those entitled _Henry Vaughan_, _Arthur H. Hallam_,
_Thackeray’s Death_, _Notes on Art_, _John Leech_, _Halle’s Recital_,
and _Sir Henry Raeburn_. Whether in the literary papers of this group,
or in the art papers, you can see how readily and strongly Dr. John
Brown could admire, and what a propagandist he was of his admirations.
If Henry Vaughan the Silurist, the quaint and thoughtful English poet of
the seventeenth century, is now a better known figure in English
literary history than he was a generation ago, it is owing, I believe,
in some measure, to Dr. John Brown’s resuscitation of him. So, when
Tennyson’s _In Memoriam_ appeared in 1850, and all the world was moved
by that extraordinary poem, who but Dr. John Brown could not rest till
he had ascertained all that was possible about young Arthur Hallam, by
obtaining a copy of his “Remains in Verse and Prose,” privately printed
in 1834, with a memoir by the author’s father, Hallam the historian, and
till he had been permitted to give to the public, in liberal extracts
from the memoir, and by quotation from the pieces themselves, such an
authentic account of Tennyson’s dead friend as all were desiring? The
paper called _Thackeray’s Death_, though the only paper on Thackeray now
to be found among Dr. John Brown’s collected writings, is by no means, I
believe, the only paper he wrote on Thackeray. If there was a
Thackeray-worshipper within the British Islands, it was Dr. John Brown
of Edinburgh. Thackeray was his greatest man by far, after Scott, or
hardly after Scott, among our British novelists,—his idol, almost his
demigod; he had signified this, if I mistake not, in an article on
Thackeray while Thackeray’s fame was still only in the making; and the
particular paper now left us is but a re-expression of this high regard
for Thackeray as an author, blended with reminiscences of his own
meetings with Thackeray in Edinburgh, and testimonies of his warm
affection for the man. Another of his chief admirations was Ruskin. I
can remember how, when the first volume of the _Modern Painters_
appeared, the rumour of it ran at once through Edinburgh, causing a most
unusual stir of interest in the new book, and in the extraordinary
“Oxford Graduate” who was its author; and I am pretty sure now that it
was Dr. John Brown that had first imported the book among us, and had
enlightened Dr. Chalmers and others as to its merits. There is no
article on Ruskin among the collected papers; but there are frequent
references to him, and his influence can be discerned in all the
Art-criticisms. These Art-criticisms of Dr. John Brown, however, are
hardly criticisms in the ordinary sense. No canons of Art are expounded
or applied in them. All that the critic does is to stand, as it were,
before the particular picture he is criticising,—a Wilkie, a Raeburn, a
Turner, a Landseer, a Delaroche, a Holman Hunt, or, as it might happen,
some new performance by one of his Edinburgh artist-friends, Duncan, Sir
George Harvey, or Sir Noel Paton,—exclaiming “How good this is, how
true, how powerful, how pathetic!” while he attends to the direct human
interest of the subject, interprets the story of the picture in his own
way, and throws in kindly anecdotes about the painter. It is the same,
_mutatis mutandis_, for music, in his notices of pieces by Beethoven and
others, as heard at Halle’s concerts. His most elaborate paper of
Art-criticism is that entitled _John Leech_. It is throughout a glowing
eulogium on the celebrated caricaturist, with notices of some of his
best cartoons, but passing into an affectionate memoir of the man, on
his own account and as the friend of Thackeray, and indeed incorporating
reminiscences of Leech and Thackeray that had been supplied him by a
friend of both as material for a projected Memoir of Leech on a larger
scale. If not in this particular paper, at least here and there in some
of the others, the query may suggest itself whether the laudation is not
excessive. One asks sometimes whether the good Dr. John was not carried
away by the amiable fault of supposing that what happens to be present
before one of a decidedly likeable kind at any moment, especially if it
be recommended by private friendship, must be the very nonsuch of its
kind in the whole world. Another query forced on one is whether there
did not sometimes lurk under Dr. John’s superlative admiration of a
chief favourite in any walk an antipathy to some other in the same walk.
It is told of Sir Philip Francis, the reputed author of _Junius_, that,
when he was an old man, he gave this counsel to a promising young member
of the House of Commons whom he had heard deliver a speech distinguished
by the generosity of its praises of some of his fellow-members,—“Young
man, take my advice; never praise anybody unless it be _in odium
tertii_,” _i.e._ “unless it be to the discredit of some third party.” No
man ever acted less in the spirit of this detestable, this truly
diabolic, advice than Dr. John Brown; and one’s question rather is
whether he did not actually reverse it by never attacking or finding
fault with any one unless it were _in laudem tertii_, to the increased
credit of some third party. Whether he was so actuated, consciously or
unconsciously, in his declaration of irreconcilable dislike to Maclise,
and his exceptionally severe treatment of that artist, I will not
venture to say; but I can find no other sufficient explanation of his
habitual depreciation of Dickens. His antipathy to Dickens, his
resentment of any attempted comparison between Dickens and Thackeray,
was proverbial among his friends, and amounted almost to a monomania.
While, as will have been seen, Dr. John was by no means insensible to
impressions from anything excellent coming from besouth the Tweed, it
was naturally in his own Scotland, and among the things and persons
immediately round about him there, that his faculty of appreciation
revelled most constantly. With the majority of his literary
fellow-countrymen that have attained popularity in Scotland during the
last fifty years, he derived many of his literary instincts from the
immense influence of “Scotticism” which had been infused into the
preceding generation, and is seen, in his choice of themes, following
reverently in the wake of the great Sir Walter. He reminds one somewhat
of Aytoun in this respect, though with a marked Presbyterian difference.
Most of his papers are on Scottish subjects; and in some of them, such
as his _Queen Mary’s Child-Garden_, his _Minchmoor_, the paper called
_The Enterkin_, that entitled _A Jacobite Family_, and that entitled
_Biggar and the House of Fleming_, we have descriptions of Scottish
scenes and places very much in the spirit of Sir Walter, though by no
means slavishly so, with notes of their historical associations, and
recovery of local legends, romances, and humours. In a more original
vein, though also principally Scottish, are those papers which may be
described as memoirs and character-sketches in a more express sense than
the three or four already referred to as combining memoir with
criticism. By far the most important of these is his Memoir of his own
Father, in supplement to the Life of his Father by the Rev. Dr. John
Cairns, and published under the too vague title of _Letter to John
Cairns, D.D._ It is a really beautiful piece of writing, not only full
of filial affection, and painting for us his father’s life and character
with vivid fidelity, but also interesting for its reminiscences of the
author’s own early years, and its sketches of several eminent ministers
of the Scottish Secession communion whom he had known as friends of his
father. The paper entitled _Dr. Chalmers_, though not particularly good,
attests the strength of the impression made by that great man on Dr.
John Brown, as on every one else that knew Dr. Chalmers. Better, and
indeed fine, though slight, are _Edward Forbes_, _Dr. George Wilson_,
_The Duke of Athole_, _Struan_, and _Miss Stirling Graham of Duntrune_.
On the whole, however, the most characteristic papers of the Memoir
class are those of Medical Biography, including _Locke and Sydenham_,
_Dr. Andrew Combe_, _Dr. Henry Marshall and Military Hygiene_, _Our
Gideon Grays_, _Dr. Andrew Brown and Sydenham_, _Dr. Adams of Banchory_,
_Dr. John Scott and His Son_, _Mr. Syme, and Sir Robert Christison_.
Sydenham was Dr. John Brown’s ideal of a physician, and his account of
that English physician and of his place in the history of medicine is of
much value. The medical profession is indebted to him also for his
warm-hearted vindication of those whom he calls, after Scott, “Our
Gideon Grays,”—the hard-working and often poorly paid medical
practitioners of our Scottish country villages and parishes,—and for the
justice he has done to such a scholarly representative of that class as
the late Dr. Adams of Banchory, and to such recent medical reformers as
Dr. Andrew Combe and Dr. Henry Marshall. Especially interesting to us
here ought to be the obituary sketches of Syme and Christison, so
recently the ornaments of the Medical School of Edinburgh University. He
threw his whole heart into his sketch of Syme, his admiration of whom,
dating from the days when he had been Syme’s pupil and apprentice in
surgery, had been increased by life-long intimacy. I may therefore dwell
a little on this sketch, the rather because it reminds me of perhaps the
only occasion on which I was for some hours in the society of Syme and
Dr. John Brown together.
In the autumn of 1868, Carlyle, then Lord Rector of our University, and
in the seventy-third year of his age, was persuaded, on account of some
little ailment of his, to come to Edinburgh and put himself under the
care of Professor Syme for surgical treatment. Syme, proud of such a
patient, and resolved that he should have his best skill, would hear of
no other arrangement than that Carlyle should be his guest for the
necessary time. For a fortnight or more, accordingly, Carlyle resided
with Syme in his beautiful house of Millbank in the southern suburb of
our city. Pains were taken to prevent the fact from becoming known, that
Carlyle might not be troubled by visitors. But one day, when Carlyle was
convalescent, there was a quiet little dinner party at Millbank to meet
him. Besides Syme and Carlyle, and one or two of the members of Syme’s
family, there were present only Dr. John Carlyle, Dr. John Brown, and
myself. It was very pleasant, at the dinner table, to observe the
attention paid by the manly, energetic, and generally peremptory and
pugnacious, little surgeon to his important guest, his satisfaction in
having him there, and his half-amused, half-wondering glances at him as
a being of another _genus_ than his own, but whom he had found as
lovable in private as he was publicly tremendous. There was no “tossing
and goring of several persons” by Carlyle, in that dining-room at all
events, but only genial and cheerful talk about this and that. After
dinner, we five went upstairs to a smaller room, where the talk was
continued, still more miscellaneously, Syme and Carlyle having most of
it. That very day there had been sent to Carlyle, by his old friend
David Laing, a copy of the new edition which Laing had just privately
printed of the rare _Gude and Godly Ballates_ by the brothers
Wedderburn, originally published in 1578; and Carlyle, taking up the
volume from the table, would dip into it here and there, and read some
passages aloud for his own amusement and ours. One piece of fourteen
stanzas he read entire, with much gusto, and with excellent chaunt and
pronunciation of the old Scotch. Here are three of the stanzas:—
“Thocht thow be Paip or Cardinall,
Sa heich in thy Pontificall,
Resist thow God that creat all,
Than downe thou sall cum, downe.
“Thocht thow be Archebischop or Deane,
Chantour, Chanslar, or Chaplane,
Resist thow God, thy gloir is gane,
And downe thow sall cum, downe.
“Thocht thow flow in Philosophie,
Or graduate in Theologie,
Yit, and thow fyle the veritie,
Than downe thow sall cum, downe.”
Most pleasant of all it was when, later in the evening, we moved to the
low trellised verandah on the south side of the house, opening on the
beautiful garden of flowers and evergreens in which Syme took such
delight. It was a fine, still evening; and, as the talk went on in the
open air, with the garden stretching in front of us and the views of the
hills beyond, only with the accompaniment now of wreaths of
tobacco-smoke, Syme, who disliked tobacco, was smilingly tolerant even
of that accompaniment, in honour of the chief smoker.
For more than twelve years after that evening, which I remember now like
a dream, Carlyle was still in the land of the living, advancing from his
seventy-third year to his eighty-sixth; but hardly a year of the twelve
had elapsed when the great surgeon who had entertained him, and who was
so much his junior, was struck by the paralysis which carried him off.
It is from Dr. John Brown that we have this touching record of Syme’s
last days:—
“I was the first to see him when struck down by _hemiplegia_. It was
in Shandwick Place, where he had his chambers,—sleeping and enjoying
his evenings in his beautiful Millbank, with its flowers, its
matchless orchids and heaths and azaleas, its bananas and grapes and
peaches: with Blackford Hill,—where Marmion saw the Scottish host
mustering for Flodden,—in front, and the Pentlands, with Cairketton
Hill, their advanced guard, cutting the sky, its ruddy porphyry
_scaur_ holding the slanting shadows in its bosom. He was, as before
said, in his room in Shandwick Place, sitting in his chair, having
been set up by his faithful Blackbell. His face was distorted. He
said—‘John, this is the conclusion’; and so it was, to his, and our,
and the world’s sad cost. He submitted to his fate with manly
fortitude, but he felt it to the uttermost,—struck down in his prime,
full of rich power, abler than ever to do good to men, his soul
surviving his brain, and looking on at its steady ruin during many sad
months. He became softer, gentler,—more easily moved, even to tears;
but the judging power, the perspicacity, the piercing to the core,
remained untouched. Henceforward, of course, life was maimed. How he
bore up against this, resigning his delights of teaching, of doing
good to men, of seeing and cherishing his students, of living in the
front of the world,—how he accepted all this only those nearest him
can know. I have never seen anything more pathetic than when, near his
death, he lay speechless, but full of feeling and mind, and made known
in some inscrutable way to his old gardener and friend that he wished
to see a certain orchid which he knew should be then in bloom. The
big, clumsy, knowing Paterson, glum and victorious (he was for ever
getting prizes at the Horticultural), brought it,—the _Stanhopea
Tigrina_,—in without a word. It was the very one,—radiant in beauty,
white, with a brown freckle, like Imogen’s mole, and, like it, ‘right
proud of that most delicate lodging.’ He gazed at it, and, bursting
into a passion of tears, motioned it away as insufferable.”
To have been such a chronicler of the excellent as Dr. John Brown was
required more than endowment, however extraordinary, in any mere passive
quality of appreciativeness. It required the poetic eye, the imaginative
faculty in its active form, the power of infusing himself into his
subject, the discernment and subtlety of a real artist. Visible to some
extent in his criticisms of books and pictures, and also in his memoirs
and character-sketches, and in a still higher degree in those papers of
local Scottish description, legend, and reminiscence to which I have
already referred,—_Queen Mary’s Child Garden_, _Minchmoor_, _The
Enterkin_, _A Jacobite Family_, and _Biggar and the House of
Fleming_,—this rising of sympathetic appreciation into poetic art and
phantasy appears most conspicuously of all in those papers or parts of
papers in which the matter is whimsical or out of the common track.
Perhaps it is his affection for out-of-the-way subjects, evident even in
the titles of some of his papers, that has led to the comparison of Dr.
John Brown with Charles Lamb. Like that English humourist, he did go
into odd corners for his themes,—still, however, keeping within Scottish
ground, and finding his oddities, whether of humour or of pathos, in
native Scottish life and tradition. Or rather, by his very
appreciativeness, he was a kind of magnet to which stray and hitherto
unpublished curiosities, whether humorous or pathetic, floating in
Scottish society, attached themselves naturally, as if seeking an
editor. In addition to the illustrations of this furnished by the
already-mentioned papers of Scottish legend, or by parts of them, one
may mention now his paper entitled _The Black Dwarf’s Bones_, that
entitled _Mystifications_, his _Marjorie Fleming_ or _Pet Marjorie_, his
_Jeems the Doorkeeper_, and the quaint little trifle entitled _Oh! I’m
wat, wat_. In the first three of these Dr. John Brown is seen distinctly
as the editor of previously unpublished curiosities. There were relics
of information respecting that strange being, David Ritchie, the
deformed misanthropist of Peeblesshire, who had been the original of one
of Scott’s shorter novels. These came to Dr. John Brown, and he strung
them together, extracts and quotations, on a thread of connecting
narrative. Again, having had the privilege of knowing intimately that
venerable Miss Stirling Graham of Duntrune who is the subject of one of
his memorial sketches, and who used to reside in Edinburgh every winter
till within a few years of her death in 1877 at the age of ninety-five,
who but Dr. John Brown first persuaded the venerable lady to give to the
world her recollections of her marvellous dramatic feats in her earlier
days, when she used to mystify Scott, and Jeffrey, and Lord Gillies, and
John Clerk of Eldin, and Count Flahault, and whole companies of their
contemporaries in Edinburgh drawing-rooms, by her disguised appearances
in the dress and character of an eccentric old Scottish gentlewoman; and
who but Dr. John immortalised the tradition by telling her story over
again, and re-imagining for us the whole of that Edinburgh society of
1820–21 in which Miss Stirling Graham had moved so bewitchingly? Ten
years before that, or in December 1811, there had died in Edinburgh a
little girl of a family with whom Scott was particularly intimate, and
who lived near him. She was but in her ninth year; but for several years
she had been the pet and wonder of her friends, for her childish humours
and abilities, her knowledge of books and poetry, the signs of a quaint
genius in her behaviour, and in her own little exercises in prose and in
verse. Many a heart was sore, Scott’s for one, we are told, when poor
little “Pet Marjorie” died; and no one that knew her ever forgot her.
One sister of hers, who survived her for seventy years, cherished her
memory to the last like a religion, and had preserved all her childish
and queerly spelt letters and journals, with other scraps of writing,
tied up with a lock of her light-brown hair. To these faded letters and
papers Dr. John Brown had access; and the result was his exquisitely
tender _Pet Marjorie_ or _Marjorie Fleming_,—the gem in its kind among
all his papers, and perhaps the most touching illustration in our
language of Shakespeare’s text, “How quick bright things come to
confusion!” Here, as in some other cases, it may be said that Dr. John
Brown only edited material that came ready to his hand. Even in that
view of the matter, one could at least wish that there were more such
editing; but it is an insufficient view. He had recovered the long-dead
little Marjorie Fleming for himself; and the paper, though consisting
largely of quotations and extracts, is as properly his own as any of the
rest. But, should there be a disposition still with some to distinguish
between editing and invention, and to regard _Mystifications_ and
_Marjorie Fleming_ as merely well-edited curiosities of a fascinating
kind, no such distinction will trouble one who passes to _Jeems the
Doorkeeper_. A real person, as the writer tells us, sat for that sketch
too, and we have a portrait of the actual Jeems who officiated as his
father’s beadle in Broughton Place Church; but with what originality and
friskiness of humour is the portrait drawn, and how fantastically the
paper breaks in the end into streaks of a skyward sermon! There is the
same quaint originality, or Lamb-like oddity of conglomerate, in the
little fragment called “_Oh, I’m wat, wat_,” and in one or two other
trifles, with similarly fantastic titles, which I have not named.
There is no better test of imaginative or poetic faculty in a man than
susceptibility to anything verging on the preternaturally solemn or
ghastly. Of the strength of this susceptibility in Dr. John Brown’s
nature there are evidences, here and there, in not a few of his
writings. Take for example the following reminiscence, in his paper
entitled _Thackeray’s Death_, of a walk with Thackeray in one of the
suburbs of Edinburgh:—
“We cannot resist here recalling one Sunday evening in December when
he was walking with two friends along the Dean Road, to the west of
Edinburgh,—one of the noblest outlets to any city. It was a lovely
evening,—such a sunset as one never forgets: a rich dark bar of cloud
hovered over the sun, going down behind the Highland hills, lying
bathed in amethystine bloom; between this cloud and the hills there
was a narrow slip of the pure ether, of a tender cowslip colour,
lucid, and as it were the very body of heaven in its clearness; every
object standing out as if etched upon the sky. The north-west end of
Corstorphine Hill, with its trees and rocks, lay in the heart of this
pure radiance; and there a wooden crane, used in the quarry below, was
so placed as to assume the figure of a cross: there it was,
unmistakable, lifted up against the crystalline sky. All three gazed
at it silently. As they gazed, he gave utterance, in a tremulous,
gentle, and rapid voice, to what we all were feeling, in the word
‘CALVARY!’ The friends walked on in silence, and then turned to other
things.”
Even a more remarkable example is that furnished by the paper entitled
“_In Clear Dream and Solemn Vision_.” The paper purports to be the
record of a singular dream, dreamt by a man whom Dr. John Brown counted
among his friends, and of whose great abilities, powers of jest and
whimsical humour, and powers of a still higher kind, there are yet
recollections in the lawyer-world of Edinburgh,—the late A. S. Logan,
Sheriff of Forfarshire. I prefer here to tell the dream in my own words,
as it has remained in my memory since I first heard it described many
years ago. This I do because, while the version of it I have so retained
came to me originally from Dr. John Brown himself, it seems to me better
than the version subsequently given by him in his own paper, attenuated
as it is there by explanations and comments, and by the insertion of a
weak metrical expansion of it by Logan himself.
The Dream may be entitled _The Death of Judas_, and was as follows:—The
dreamer seemed to be in a lonely, dreary landscape somewhere, the nearer
vicinity of which consisted of a low piece of marshy ground, with dull,
stagnant pools, overgrown with reeds. The air was heavy and thick: not a
sound of life, or sight of anything indicating human presence or
habitation, save that on the other side of the marshy ground from the
dreamer, and near the margin of the pools and reeds, was what seemed to
be a deserted wooden hut, the door half-broken, and the side-timbers and
rafters also ragged, so that through the rifts there was a dim
perception of the dark interior. But lo! as the dreamer gazed, it
appeared as if there were a motion of something or other within the hut,
signs of some living thing in it moving uneasily and haggardly to and
fro. Hardly has one taken notice of this when one is aware of a new
sight outside the hut,—a beautiful dove, or dove-like bird, of spotless
white, that has somehow stationed itself close to the door, and is
brooding there, intent and motionless, in a guardian-like attitude. For
a while the ugly, ragged hut, with the mysterious signs of motion inside
of it, and this white dove-like creature outside at its door, are the
only things in the marshy tract of ground that hold the eye. But,
suddenly, what is this third thing? Round from the gable of the hut it
emerges slowly towards the marshy front, another bird-like figure, but
dark and horrible-looking, with long and lean legs and neck, like a
crane. Past the hut it stalks and still forward, slowly and with
loathsome gait, its long neck undulating as it moves, till it has
reached the pools and their beds of reeds. There, standing for a moment,
it dips down its head among the reeds into the ooze of one of the pools;
and, when it raises its head again, there is seen wriggling in its mouth
something like a small, black, slimy snake, or worm. With this in its
mouth, it stalks slowly back, making straight for the white dove that is
still brooding at the door of the hut. When it has reached the door,
there seems to be a struggle of life and death between the two
creatures,—the obscene, hideous, crane-like bird, and the pure, white
innocent,—till, at last, by force, the dove is compelled to open its
throat, into which its enemy drops the worm or snake. Immediately the
dove drops dead; and at that same instant the mysterious motion within
the hut increases and becomes more violent,—no mere motion now, but a
fierce strife and commotion, with nothing distinctly visible or
decipherable even yet, but a vague sense of some agony transacting
itself in the dark interior within the loop-holed timbers and rafters,
and of two human arms swung round and round like flails. Then, all at
once, it flashed upon the dreamer what he had been beholding. It was
Judas that was within the hut, and that was the suicide of the Betrayer.
Every author is to be estimated by specimens of him at his very best.
Dr. John Brown had a favourite phrase for such specimens of what he
thought the very best in the authors he liked. Of a passage, or of a
whole paper, that seemed to him perfect in its kind, perfect in
workmanship as well as in conception, he would say that it was “done to
the quick.” The phrase indicates, in the first place, Dr. John Brown’s
notions of what constitutes true literature of any kind, or at least
true literature of a popular kind, as distinct from miscellaneous
printed matter. It must be something that will reach the feelings. This
being presupposed, then that is best in any author which reaches the
feelings most swiftly and directly,—cuts at once, as it were, with
knife-like acuteness, to the most sensitive depths. That there are not a
few individual passages scattered through Dr. John’s own writings, and
also some entire papers of his, that answer this description, will have
appeared by our review of his writings so far as they have been yet
enumerated. In such papers and passages, as every reader will observe,
even the workmanship is at its best. The author gathers himself up, as
it were; his artistic craft becomes more decisive and subtle with the
heightened glow of his feelings; and his style, apt to be a little
diffuse and slipshod at other times, becomes nervous and firm.
Of whatever other productions of Dr. John Brown’s pen this may be
asserted, of whatever other things of his it may be said that they are
thus masterly at all points and “done to the quick,” that supreme praise
must be accorded, at all events, to the two papers I have reserved to
the last,—_Rab and his Friends_ and _Our Dogs_. Among the many fine and
humane qualities of our late fellow-citizen it so happened that love of
the lower animals, and especially of the most faithful and most
companionable of them, was one of the chief. Since Sir Walter Scott
limped along Princes Street, and the passing dogs used to fawn upon him,
recognising him as the friend of their kind, there has been no such
lover of dogs, no such expert in dog-nature, in this city at least, as
was Dr. John Brown. It was impossible that he should leave this part of
himself, one of the ruling affections of his life, unrepresented in his
literary effusions. Hence, while there are dogs incidentally elsewhere
in his writings, these two papers are all but dedicated to dogs. What
need to quote from them? What need to describe them? They have been
read, one of them at least, by perhaps two millions of the
English-reading population of the earth: the very children of our Board
Schools know the story of _Rab and his Friends_. How laughingly it
opens; with what fun and rollick we follow the two boys in their scamper
through the Edinburgh streets sixty years ago after the hullabaloo of
the dog-fight near the Tron Kirk! What a sensation on our first
introduction, in the Cowgate, under the South Bridge, to the great Rab,
the carrier’s dog, rambling about idly “as if with his hands in his
pockets,” till the little bull-terrier that has been baulked of his
victory in the former fight insanely attacks him and finds the
consequence! And then what a mournful sequel, as we come, six years
afterwards, to know the Howgate carrier himself and his wife, and the
wife is brought to the hospital at Minto House, and the carrier and Rab
remain there till the operation is over, and the dead body of poor Ailie
is carried home by her husband in his cart over the miles of snowy
country road, and the curtain falls black at last over the death of the
carrier too and the end of poor Rab himself! Though the story, as the
author vouches, “is in all essentials strictly matter of fact,” who
could have told it as Dr. John Brown did? Little wonder that it has
taken rank as his masterpiece, and that he was so commonly spoken of
while he was alive as “The author of _Rab and His Friends_.” It is by
that story, and by those other papers that may be associated with it as
also masterly in their different varieties, as all equally “done to the
quick,” that his name will live. Yes, many long years hence, when all of
us are gone, I can imagine that a little volume will be in circulation,
containing _Rab and his Friends_ and _Our Dogs_, and also let us say the
_Letter to Dr. Cairns_, and _Queen Mary’s Child-Garden_, and _Jeems the
Doorkeeper_, and the paper called _Mystifications_, and that called _Pet
Marjorie_ or _Marjorie Fleming_, and that then readers now unborn,
thrilled by that peculiar touch which only things of heart and genius
can give, will confess to the charm that now fascinates us, and will
think with interest of Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh.
LITERARY HISTORY OF EDINBURGH
A GENERAL REVIEW[51]
I
The Literary History of Edinburgh, in any special sense, may be said to
have begun in the reigns of the Scottish Kings James IV. (1488–1513) and
James V. (1513–1542.) There had been a good deal of scattered literary
activity in Scotland before,—all, of course, in manuscript only,—in
which Edinburgh had shared; but it was not till those two reigns,—when
Edinburgh had become distinctly the capital of the Scottish Kingdom, and
was in possession of a printing-press or two,—it was not till then that
Edinburgh could claim to be the central seat of the Scottish Muses. What
was there anywhere over the rest of Scotland in the shape of new
literary product that could then compete with the novelties that came
from that cluster of “makars” and men of genius,—Dunbar, Gavin Douglas,
and Sir David Lindsay the three best remembered of them,—whose habitual
residence was in Edinburgh, and whose figures were to be seen daily in
the picturesque long slope of the High Street and the Canongate which
connects the ancient Castle with the venerable Holyrood?
From the Edinburgh of the two reigns mentioned we pass to the Edinburgh
of the Regencies for the infant and absent Queen Mary, of Queen Mary’s
own short resident reign, and of the beginnings of the reign of James
VI. Through this period, carrying us from 1542 to about 1580, Edinburgh
still maintained her metropolitan distinction in literature, as in other
things; though with the enormous difference imported into literature, as
into other things, by the Reformation struggle and its consequences.
Lindsay, the last of the bright poetic triad of the two bygone reigns,
survived far into the Reformation struggle,—in which indeed he was a
champion of the first mark and importance on the Protestant side; and,
though he died before the conclusive Reformation enactment of the
Scottish Estates in 1560, he had lived long enough to know personally,
and as it were to put his hands on, those who were to be the foremost
intellects of Scotland in her new and Protestantised condition. When
John Knox and George Buchanan returned from their Continental exile and
wanderings to spend their veteran days in their native land,—Knox with
his already acquired reputation by English theological writings and
pamphlets, and Buchanan with the rarer European fame of superb Latinist
and scholar, _poetarum sui sæculi facile princeps_, as his foreign
admirers already universally applauded him,—where could they settle but
in Edinburgh? For thirteen years, accordingly, Knox was minister of
Edinburgh and her most powerful citizen, writing industriously still,
while he preached and directed Scottish politics; and it was in
Edinburgh, in 1572, that he died and was buried. Of Buchanan’s life
after his return to Scotland, portions were spent at St. Andrews or in
Stirling; but Edinburgh had most of _him_ too. It was in Edinburgh that
he published his _Baptistes_, his _De Jure Regni apud Scotos_, and
others of his writings in verse or in prose; and it was in an Edinburgh
lodging that he died in 1582, after having sent to the press the last
proof-sheets of his _Rerum Scoticarum Historia_, or Latin History of
Scotland. Recollect such minor Edinburgh contemporaries of those two, of
literary repute of one kind or another, as Sir Richard Maitland, Robert
Pont, Thomas Craig, and the collector George Bannatyne,—not forgetting
that before 1580 Edinburgh had glimpses of the new force that was at
hand for all Scotland, literary as well as ecclesiastical, in Andrew
Melville,—and it will be seen that, though the Reformation had changed
notably the character of the intellectual pursuits and interests of the
Scottish capital, as of Scotland generally, yet there had been no real
interruption so far of that literary lustre of the town which had begun
with Dunbar at the Court of James IV. In fact, the first eighty years of
the sixteenth century may be regarded (the pre-Reformation authorship
and the post-Reformation authorship taken together) as one definitely
marked age, and the earliest, in the literary history of Edinburgh. It
was an age of high credit in Scottish literary history all in all.
Scotland was then no whit inferior to contemporary England in literary
power and productiveness. On the contrary, as it is admitted now by the
historians of English Literature that in the long tract of time between
the death of Chaucer and the appearance of Spenser it was in Scotland
rather than in England that the real succession to Chaucer was kept up
in the British Islands, so it must be admitted that it was in the last
eighty years of that long period of comparative gloom in England that
the torch that had been kindled in Scotland was passed there most nimbly
and brilliantly from hand to hand.
From 1580 onwards there was a woeful change. “Let not your Majesty
doubt,” Napier of Merchiston ventured to say to James VI., while that
King was still Sovereign of Scotland only, but after he had shown his
own literary ambition in his _Essayes of a Prentise in the Divine Art of
Poesie_ and other Edinburgh publications, “let not your Majesty doubt
that there are within your realm, as well as in other countries, godly
and good ingines, versed and exercised in all manner of honest science
and godly discipline, who by your Majesty’s instigation might yield
forth works and fruits worthy of memory, which otherwise, lacking some
mighty Mæcenas to encourage them, may perchance be buried with eternal
silence.” The augury, so far as it was one of hope, was not fulfilled.
Through the last forty-five years of the reign of James, and then
through all the rest of the seventeenth century, including the reign of
Charles I., the interregnum of the English Commonwealth and the
Oliverian Protectorate, the Restoration reigns of Charles II., and James
II., and the reign of William and Mary,—through all that long period,
the greatest and richest in the literary annals of England, the time
when she made herself the astonishment of the nations by her Elizabethan
splendour in Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare, and their many contemporaries,
and then by the succession to these in the great series of which Hobbes,
Milton, Jeremy Taylor, Bunyan, Dryden, and Locke were the chiefs,—what
had Scotland to show in comparison? In the first section of the period
Napier of Merchiston himself and Drummond of Hawthornden,—a pair well
worthy of attention, and both of them specially Edinburgh men; but after
these only or mainly a straggle of mediocrities, or of lower than
mediocrities. A tradition, it is true, in Arthur Johnston and others, of
an excellent Scottish Latinity in discipleship to Buchanan,—the more the
pity in so far as this prevented a free and brave exercise of the
vernacular; the apparition here and there, too, of a spirit of finer
quality among the ecclesiastics, such as Rutherford and Leighton, or of
an individual book of mark, such as Baillie’s _Letters_ or Stair’s
_Institutes_; but, for the rest, within Scotland, and without tracking
any continuation of the old race of the _Scoti extra Scotiam agentes_,
only such small mercies as a Mure of Rowallan, a Semple of Beltrees, or
a Cleland, among the versifiers, or, in prose, a Hume of Godscroft, a
Spotswood, a Sir Thomas Urquhart, or a Sir George Mackenzie!
What was the cause of this poverty? The loss of the benefits of a
resident Scottish kingship, consequent on the removal of the Court to
England in 1603, may have had some effect. No chance after that of
Napier’s desired agency of a mighty royal Mæcenas in Holyrood for
stirring the Scottish “ingines.” A more certain cause, however, is to be
found in the agonising intensity with which, through the whole of the
century and a quarter from 1580 onwards, the soul and heart of Scotland,
in all classes of the community alike, were occupied with the successive
phases of the one vexed question of Presbytery-versus-Episcopacy in
Church government, and its theological and political concomitants. It
was in the nature of this controversy, agitated as it was with such
persevering, such life-or-death vehemence, in Scotland, to strangle all
the ordinary muses. Here, however, lies the historical compensation.
There are other interests in a nation, other duties, than those of art
and literature; and he would be but a wretched Scotsman who, while
hovering over the history of his country in the seventeenth century and
noting her deficiencies then in literary respects in comparison with
England, should forget that this very century was the time of the most
powerful action ever exerted by Scotland in the general history of the
British Islands, and that, when the great British Revolution of that
century was over, its accounts balanced, and the residuum of indubitably
successful and useful result summed up, no little of that residuum was
traceable to Scotland’s obstinate perseverance so long in her own
peculiar politico-ecclesiastical controversy, and to what had been
argued or done in the course of it, on one side or the other, by such
men as Andrew Melville, Alexander Henderson, Argyle, Montrose,
Claverhouse, and Carstares. But it is on Scottish Literature that we are
now reporting, and for that the report must remain as has been stated.
From Dan to Beersheba, from Hawick to Thurso, all through the Scottish
century and a quarter under view, very few roses or other flowers, and
not much even of happy thistle-bloom!
A revival came at last. It came in the beginning of the eighteenth
century, just after the union of Scotland with England in the reign of
Queen Anne, when the literary succession to Dryden in England was
represented by such of the Queen Anne wits and their Georgian recruits
as Defoe, Matthew Prior, Swift, Congreve, Steele, Addison, Gay, and
Pope. It was then that, from a group of lingering Scottish literary
stagers of the antique type, such as Bishop Sage, Dr. Pitcairn,
Pennicuik, Fletcher of Saltoun, Wodrow, and Ruddiman, there stepped
forth the shrewd Edinburgh periwig-maker who was to be for so many years
the popular little Horace of Auld Reekie, not only supplying the lieges
with such songs and poems as they had not had the like of for many a
day, but actually shaking them again into some sense of the importance
of popular books and of a taste for lightsome reading. Yes, it was Allan
Ramsay,—the placid little man of the night-cap that one sees in the
white statue of him in Princes Street,—it was he that was the real
reviver of literature and of literary enthusiasm in Scotland after their
long abeyance. He was conscious of his mission:—
“The chiels of London, Cam., and Ox.
Hae reared up great poetic stocks
Of _Rapes_, of _Buckets_, _Sarks_, and _Locks_,
While we neglect
To shaw their betters. This provokes
Me to reflect
On the learn’d days of Gawn Dunkell:
Our country then a tale could tell:
Europe had nane mair snack and snell
In verse or prose:
Our kings were poets too themsell,
Bauld and jocose.”
He combined, as we see here, the two passions of a patriotic and
antiquarian fondness for the native old literature of Scotland, the all
but forgotten old Scottish poetry of the sixteenth century, and an eager
interest in what his English contemporaries in the south, the “chiels of
London,”—to wit, Prior, Addison, Pope, Gay, and the rest,—had recently
done, or were still doing, for the maintenance of the great literary
traditions of England. How strong was his interest in those “chiels of
London,” how much he admired them, appears not only from their influence
upon him in his own special art of a resuscitated Scottish poetry in an
eclectic modification of the old vernacular, but also in the dedication
of so much of his later life to the commercial enterprise of an
Edinburgh circulating library for the supply of his fellow-citizens with
all recent or current English books, and in his less successful
enterprise for the introduction of the English drama by the
establishment of a regular Edinburgh theatre. In short, before Allan
Ramsay’s death in 1758, what with his own example and exertions, what
from the stimulus upon his countrymen independently of the new sense,
more and more consciously felt since the Union, of an acquired
partnership with England in all that great inheritance in the English
speech which had till then belonged especially to England, and in the
common responsibilities of such partnership thenceforward, Scotland was
visibly holding up her head again. Before that date there had appeared,
in Ramsay’s wake, some of the other forerunners of that famous race of
eighteenth-century Scottish writers who, so far from giving cause for
any continuance of the imputation of the literary inferiority of
Scotland to England, were to command the respect of Europe by the vigour
of their co-operation and rivalry with their English coevals.
Without taking into account Lady Elizabeth Wardlaw, whose noble poetic
fragment of _Hardyknute_ was made public by Ramsay, and whose influence
on the subsequent course of specially Scottish literature by that
fragment, and possibly by other unacknowledged things of the same kind,
remains yet to be adequately estimated, one notes that among those
juniors of Ramsay who had entered on the career of literature after him
and under his observation, but who had died before him, were Robert
Blair, James Thomson, and William Hamilton of Bangour. David Malloch,
once an Edinburgh _protégé_ of Ramsay’s, but a naturalised Londoner
since 1723, and Anglicised into Mallet, was about the oldest of Ramsay’s
Scottish literary survivors, and does not count for much. But, when
Ramsay died, there were already in existence, at ages varying from full
maturity to mere infancy, more than fifty other Scots who are memorable
now, on one ground or another, in the British Literary History of the
eighteenth century. Some of these, such as Armstrong, Smollett, Mickle,
and Macpherson, migrated to England, as Arbuthnot, Thomson, and Mallet
had done; others, such as Reid, Campbell, and Beattie, are associated
locally with Aberdeen, Glasgow, or some rural part of Scotland; but by
far the largest proportion, like Allan Ramsay himself, had their homes
in Edinburgh, or were essentially of Edinburgh celebrity by all their
belongings. Kames, David Hume, Monboddo, Dr. Robert Henry, Dr. Hugh
Blair, Dr. Thomas Blacklock, Principal Robertson, John Home, Adam Smith,
Dr. Adam Ferguson, Lord Hailes, Hutton, Black, Falconer, Professor
Robison, James Boswell, George Chalmers, Henry Mackenzie, Professor
Playfair, Robert Fergusson, Dugald Stewart, and John Pinkerton: these,
with others whom their names will suggest, were the northern lights of
the Scottish capital through the half-century or more in which Dr.
Johnson wielded the literary dictatorship of London, and he and
Goldsmith, and, after they were gone, Burke and Gibbon, were seen in the
London streets. Greater and smaller together, were they not a sufficient
northern constellation? Do not we of modern Edinburgh still remember
them now with a peculiar pride, and visit, out of curiosity, the houses
in the Old Town squares or closes where some of them had their
dwellings? Do not traditions of them, and of their physiognomies and
habits, linger yet about the Lawnmarket, the High Street, the Canongate,
the Parliament House, and the site of our University? Was it not the
fact that in their days there were two recognised and distinct centres
or foci of literary production in Great Britain: the great London on the
banks of the Thames being one; but the other 400 miles farther north, in
the smaller city of heights and hollows that stood ridged beside Arthur
Seat on the banks of the Forth? And so, not without a track of enduring
radiance yet, vanishes from our gaze what we may reckon as the third age
of the Literary History of Edinburgh.
A fourth was to follow, and in some respects a still greater. It was in
July 1786 that there was published the first, or Kilmarnock, edition of
the Poems of Robert Burns; and it was in the winter of that same year
that the ploughman-poet paid his memorable first visit to Edinburgh. On
one particular day in the course of that visit, as all know, Burns
encountered, in the house of Dr. Adam Ferguson, a lame fair-haired
youth, of fifteen years of age, upon whom, in the midst of other
company, his eyes were led, by a happy accident, to fix themselves for a
moment or two with some special interest. This was young Walter Scott.
In the same week, or thereabouts, it was that another Edinburgh boy, two
years younger than Scott, standing somewhere in the High Street, and
staring at a man whose unusual appearance had struck him, was told by a
bystander that he might well look, for that man was Robert Burns. This
was young Francis Jeffrey. What a futurity for Edinburgh in the coming
lives of those two young natives of hers, both of whom had just seen the
wondrous man from Ayrshire! In 1802, when Burns had been dead for six
years, Scott, already the author of this or that, was collecting the
“Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border”; and in the end of the same year
appeared the first number of the _Edinburgh Review_, projected in
Jeffrey’s house in Buccleuch Place, and of which, after its third
number, Jeffrey was to be the sole editor. Pass thence to 1832, the year
of Scott’s death. How enormous the accession in those thirty years to
all that had been previously illustrious in the literary history of
Edinburgh! On the one hand, all the marvellous offspring of Scott’s
creative genius, the novels as well as the poems; on the other, all
Jeffrey’s brilliant and far-darting criticisms, with those of his
associate reviewers, from Horner, Brougham, and Sydney Smith, to the
juniors who succeeded them. In any retrospect of this kind, however,
criticism pales by the side of creation; and it is in the blaze of the
completed life of the greater of the two rising stars of 1802 that the
present Edinburgh now necessarily recollects and reimagines the
Edinburgh of those thirty following years.
II.
It is not for nothing that the very central and supreme object in the
architecture of our present Edinburgh is the monument to Sir Walter
Scott,—the finest monument, I think, that has yet been raised anywhere
on the earth to the memory of a man of letters. The Edinburgh of the
thirty years from 1802 to 1832 was, is, and will ever be, the Edinburgh
of Sir Walter Scott. All persons and things else that were contained in
the Edinburgh of those thirty years are thought of now as having had
their being and shelter under the presidency of that one overarching
personality. When these are counted up, however, the array should be
sufficiently impressive, even were the covering arch removed. The later
lives of Henry Mackenzie, Dugald Stewart, and Playfair, and of the
Alison of the _Essays on Taste_; the lyric genius of the Baroness
Nairne, and her long unavowed songs; the rougher and more prolific muse
of James Hogg; Dr. M’Crie and his historical writings; all the early
promise of the scholarly and poetical Leyden; some of the earlier
strains of Campbell; Dr. Thomas Brown and his metaphysical teachings in
aberration from Dugald Stewart; Mrs. Brunton and her novels; Mrs.
Johnstone and her novels; Miss Ferrier and her novels; the too brief
career of the philologist Dr. Alexander Murray; much of the most active
career, scientific and literary, of Sir David Brewster; the Scottish
Record researches of Thomas Thomson, and the contributions of
Kirkpatrick Sharpe, and many of those of David Laing, to Scottish
history and Scottish literary antiquities; the starting of _Blackwood’s
Magazine_ in 1817, and the outflashing in that periodical of Wilson as
its “Christopher North,” with his coadjutor Lockhart; all the rush of
fame that attended the “Noctes Ambrosianæ” in that periodical, with the
more quiet popularity of such particular contributions to its pages as
those of David Macbeth Moir; the first intimations of the extraordinary
erudition and the philosophic power of Sir William Hamilton; the first
years of the Edinburgh section of the life of Dr. Chalmers; the first
tentative residences in Edinburgh, and ultimate settlement there, in
connection with _Blackwood_ and other periodicals, of the strange
English De Quincey, driven thither by stress of livelihood after trial
of London and the Lakes; the somewhat belated outset, in obscure
Edinburgh lodgings, and then in a house in Comely Bank, of what was to
be the great career of Thomas Carlyle; the more precocious literary
assiduity of young Robert Chambers, with results of various kinds
already in print; such are some of the phenomena discernible in the
history of Edinburgh during those thirty years of Scott’s continuous
ascendency through which there ran the equally continuous shaft of
Jeffrey’s critical leadership.
Nor when Scott died was his influence at an end. Edinburgh moved on,
indeed, after his familiar figure had been lost to her, into another
tract of years, full of continued and still interesting literary
activity, in which, of all Scott’s survivors, _who_ so fit to succeed
him in the presidency, _who_ called to it with such acclamation, as the
long-known, long-admired, and still magnificent Christopher North? In
many respects, however, this period of Edinburgh’s continued literary
activity, from 1832 onwards, under the presidency of Wilson, was really
but a prolongation, a kind of afterglow, of the era of the great Sir
Walter.
Not absolutely so. In the Edinburgh from which Sir Walter had vanished
there were various intellectual developments, various manifestations of
literary power and tendency, as well as of social energy, which Sir
Walter could not have foreseen, which were even alien to his genius, and
which owed little or nothing to his example. There were fifteen years
more of the thunders and lightnings of the great Chalmers; of real
importance after a different fashion was the cool rationality of George
Combe, with his physiological and other teachings; the little English De
Quincey, hidden away in no one knows how many Edinburgh domiciles in
succession, and appearing in the Edinburgh streets and suburbs only
furtively and timorously when he appeared at all, was sending forth more
and more of his wonderful essays and prose-phantasies; less of a
recluse, but somewhat of a recluse too, and a late burner of the lamp,
Sir William Hamilton was still pursuing those studies and speculations
which were to constitute him in the end the most momentous force since
Hume in the profounder philosophy of Great Britain; and, not to multiply
other cases, had there not come into Edinburgh the massive Hugh Miller
from Cromarty, his self-acquired English classicism superinduced upon
native Scandinavian strength, and powdered with the dust of the Old Red
Sandstone?
Not the less, parallel with all this, ran the transmitted influence of
Sir Walter Scott. What we may call the _Scotticism of Scott_,—that
special passion for all that appertained to the land of brown heath and
shaggy wood, that affection for Scottish themes and legends in
preference to all others, which he had impressed upon Scottish
Literature so strongly that its perpetuation threatens to become a
restriction and a narrowness, was the chief inspiration of many of those
Scottish writers who came after him, in Edinburgh or elsewhere. One sees
a good deal of this in Christopher North himself, and also in Hugh
Miller. It appears in more pronounced form in the long-protracted
devotion of the good David Laing to those labours of Scottish
antiquarianism which he had begun while Scott was alive and under
Scott’s auspices, and in the accession to the same field of labour of
such later scholars as Cosmo Innes. It appears in the character of many
of those writings which marked the advance of Robert Chambers, after the
days of his youthful attachment to Scott personally, to his more mature
and more independent celebrity. It appears, moreover, in the nature of
much of that publishing enterprise of the two Chamberses jointly the
commencement of which by the starting of _Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal_
in the very year of Scott’s death is itself a memorable thing in the
annals of Edinburgh; and it is discernible in a good deal of the
contemporary publishing activity of other Edinburgh firms. Finally, to
keep still to individuals, do we not see it, though in contrasted
guises, in the literary lives, so closely in contact, of John Hill
Burton and William Edmonstoune Aytoun? If we should seek for a
convenient stopping-point at which to round off our recollections of the
whole of that age of the literary history of Edinburgh which includes
both the era of the living Scott and the described prolongation of that
era, then, unless we stop at the death of Wilson in 1854, may not the
death of Aytoun in 1865 be the point chosen? No more remarkable
representative than Aytoun to the last of what we have called the
afterglow from the spirit of Scott. Various as were his abilities, rich
as was his vein of humour, what was the dominant sentiment of all his
serious verse? What but that to which he has given expression in his
imagined soliloquy of the exiled and aging Prince Charlie?—
“Let me feel the breezes blowing
Fresh along the mountain side!
Let me see the purple heather,
Let me hear the thundering tide,
Be it hoarse as Corrievreckan
Spouting when the storm is high!
Give me back one hour of Scotland;
Let me see it ere I die.”
In our chronological review of the literary history of Edinburgh to the
point to which it has thus been brought, there has been, it will have
been observed, the intervention of at least one age of poverty in what
would else be a pretty continuous show of plenty. There are among us
some who tell us that we are now in an age of poverty again, a season of
the lean kine of Pharaoh’s dream. _Ichabod_, they tell us, may be now
written on the front of the Register House; and Edinburgh is living on
her past glories! As this complaint was raised again and again in
previous times to which its application is now a matter of surprise, may
we not hope that its recurrence in the present is only a passing wave of
that feeling, common to all times, and not unbecoming or unuseful, which
underestimates, or even neglects, what is near and round about, in
comparison with what is old or far off? The question whether Edinburgh
is now despicable intellectually in comparison with her former self,
like the larger question, usually opened out from this smaller one, and
pressed along with it, whether Scotland at large is not intellectually
poor in comparison with her former self, is really a question of
statistics. As a certain range of time is requisite to form a sufficient
basis for a fair inventory, perhaps we ought to wait a little. When one
remembers, however, that among those who would have to be included in
the inventory, inasmuch as they dropped out from the society of
Edinburgh considerably after that year 1865 which has been suggested as
a separating point between the defunct past and the still current, are
not only such of the older and already-named ornaments of Edinburgh as
David Laing, Cosmo Innes, William and Robert Chambers, and Hill Burton,
but also such individualities of later conspicuous mark as Alexander
Smith, Alexander Russel, and Dr. John Brown, then, perhaps, there might
be some confidence that, if one were to proceed to the more delicate
business of comprising in the list all that suit among the living,
together with those of whom there is any gleam “upon the forehead of the
town to come,” the total would exhibit an average not quite shameful.
Perhaps, however, as has been said, it is too soon yet to begin to
count.
Those who believe in the literary decadence of Edinburgh naturally find
the cause to some extent in the increasing centralisation of the
commerce of British Literature universally in London. They point to such
facts as that the _Edinburgh Review_ has long ceased to be an Edinburgh
periodical, that some Edinburgh publishing firms have transferred their
head-quarters to London, and that other Edinburgh publishing firms are
understood to be meditating a similar removal. Now, in the first place,
is there not here some exaggeration of the facts? London, with its
population of four or five millions, is so vast a nation in itself that
the fair comparison in this matter should not be between London and
Edinburgh, but between London and the whole of Scotland; and, if it were
found that the amount of book-production in Edinburgh were even
one-twentieth of that of London, the scores between the two places would
then, in proportion to their bulks, be about exactly equal. I cannot
pretend to have used all the available means for the computation; but,
in view of some facts before me, I should be surprised if it turned out
that Edinburgh did not come up to her proportional mark. Edinburgh
possesses, at all events, a most flourishing printing industry. The
printing of Edinburgh is celebrated all the world over; a very large
proportion of the books published in London are printed in Edinburgh.
That is something; but what of _publishing_ business? From the Edinburgh
Directory of this year, I find that among the booksellers of the city
there are 62 who are also publishers. As against these 62 publishing
houses in Edinburgh there ought, in the proportion of the bulks, to be
about 1260 in London; but from the London Directory of last year I find
that the number of London publishing houses was but 373,—_i.e._ that
London, in proportion to its size, has only about one-third of the
publishing machinery of Edinburgh. The mere relative numbers, however,
do not suffice for the comparison; for may not the proportionally fewer
London houses have been doing a much larger amount of business, and may
not the publishing machinery of Edinburgh have been lying comparatively
idle? Well, I do not know; but the recent publishing lists of our
Edinburgh houses show no signs of declining activity. The completed
Ninth Edition of the great _Encyclopædia Britannica_, for example, has
been wholly an Edinburgh enterprise, and a new edition of another
Edinburgh Cyclopædia is now running its course. Where Edinburgh falls
most obviously behind London at present is perhaps in the dimensions of
her journalism and her apparatus of periodical literature. _Blackwood’s
Magazine_ and _Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal_ exist still; but other
literary periodicals, once known in Edinburgh, are extinct, and one can
recollect the time when there were more newspapers in Edinburgh than
there are now. Those, however, were the days of twice-a-week newspapers
or once-a-week newspapers; and in the present daily journalism of
Edinburgh one has to observe not only the unprecedented amount of energy
and writing ability at work for all the ordinary requirements of
newspapers, but also (a very noteworthy feature of Edinburgh journalism
in particular) the increasing extent to which, by frequent non-political
articles and continual accounts of current books, it is annexing to
itself the functions hitherto performed by magazines, reviews, and other
literary miscellanies. But, suppose that, all these appearances
notwithstanding, it should be made out that the publishing machinery of
Edinburgh _is_ scantier and slacker than it was, there is another
consideration yet in reserve. The real measure of the present or the
future literary capabilities of Edinburgh, or of Scotland generally, is
not the extent of the publishing machinery which either Edinburgh, or
Scotland generally, still retains within herself, but the amount and
worth of the actual or potential authorship, the literary brain and
ability of all kinds, that may be still resident within the bounds of
Edinburgh or of Scotland, wheresoever the products are published. Those
who are so fond of upbraiding the present Edinburgh more especially with
the former literary distinction of Edinburgh in the latter half of the
eighteenth century,—the days of Hume, Adam Smith, Robertson, and
others,—seem to be ignorant of a most important fact. The publishing
machinery of Edinburgh in those days was very poor; and the chief books
of those Edinburgh celebrities were published in London. That there came
a change in this respect was owing mainly, or wholly, to one man. His
name was Archibald Constable. Of this man, the Napoleon of the British
publishing trade of his time, and of such particular facts in his
publishing career as his bold association of himself with the _Edinburgh
Review_ from its very outset, and his life-long connection with Scott,
all have some knowledge from tradition. But hear Lord Cockburn’s
succinct account of him in general. “Constable,” says Lord Cockburn,
“began as a lad in Hill’s shop, and had hardly set up for himself when
he reached the summit of his business. He rushed out, and took
possession of the open field, as if he had been aware from the first of
the existence of the latent spirits which a skilful conjurer might call
from the depths of the population to the service of literature.
Abandoning the old timid and grudging system, he stood out as the
general patron and payer of all promising publications, and confounded
not merely his rivals in trade, but his very authors, by his unheard-of
prices. Ten, even twenty, guineas a sheet for a review, £2000 or £3000
for a single poem, and £1000 each for two philosophical dissertations,
drew authors from dens where they would otherwise have starved, and made
Edinburgh a literary mart, famous with strangers, and the pride of its
own citizens.” These words of Lord Cockburn’s are too high-flown, in so
far as they might beget wrong conceptions of what was or is possible.
But, recollecting what Constable did,—recollecting that it was mainly
his example and success that called into being those other Edinburgh
publishing firms, contemporary with his own or subsequent, which have
maintained till now the place won by him for Edinburgh in the commerce
of British literature,—recollecting also how largely he led the way in
that enormous change in the whole system of the British book trade, now
almost consummated, which has liberated publishers from the good old
necessity of waiting for the authors that might come to them, one by
one, with already-prepared manuscripts under their arm, the fruit of
their careful private labours on self-chosen subjects, and has
constituted publishers themselves, to a great extent, the real
generators and regulators of literature, projecting serials, manuals,
sets of schoolbooks, and whatever else they see to be in demand, and
employing literary labour preferably in the service of these enterprises
of their own,—recollecting all this, may we not speculate on what might
be the consequences in the present Edinburgh of the appearance of
another Archibald Constable? The appurtenances are all ready. One has
heard complaints lately of the dearth in Edinburgh of those materials in
the shape of collections of books which would be requisite for the
future sufficiency of the city as a manufactory of such kinds of
literature as admit of being manufactured. That is a sheer
hallucination. Next to London, and perhaps to Oxford, Edinburgh has the
largest provision of books of any city in the British Empire. There are
at this moment 800,000 volumes,—say close on a million,—on the shelves
of the various public or corporate libraries. Much remains to be done
towards making all this wealth of books in Edinburgh as available as it
might be; and there ought to be no rest among us till that particular
advance is made towards an ideal state of things which shall consist in
the conversion of the present noble library of the Faculty of Advocates
into the nucleus of a great National Library for all Scotland. But, even
as things are, why be indolent, why not utilise our implements? Doubt
not that in the present Edinburgh and in the present Scotland, as in
other parts of Her Majesty’s dominions, there are, as Napier of
Merchiston phrased it, “good ingines, versed and exercised in all manner
of honest science,” who, if they were to bestir themselves, and
especially if there were another Archibald Constable in the midst of
them, would find plenty of excellent employment without needing, unless
they chose, to change the territory of their abode!
THE END
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, _Edinburgh_.
-----
Footnote 1:
From _The Scotsman_ of 18th, 19th, and 21st August 1886.
Footnote 2:
Written, and in part delivered, as an Introductory Lecture to the
Class of English Literature in the University of Edinburgh in the
Session 1867–8.
Footnote 3:
A scrap from unpublished MSS.
Footnote 4:
From _The Scotsman_ of 29th December 1890.
Footnote 5:
Written in 1883, in the form of a Lecture.
Footnote 6:
Written in 1883, as a lecture for the Class of English Literature in
the Edinburgh Association for the University Education of Women.
Footnote 7:
Reprinted, with some modifications, from the _Westminster Review_ for
Oct.–Dec. 1856; where it appeared, with the title “Edinburgh Fifty
Years Ago,” in the form of an article on Lord Cockburn’s “Memorials of
Edinburgh,” then just published.
Footnote 8:
Opening Address to Session 1890–1 of The Philosophical Institution of
Edinburgh.
Footnote 9:
From _Macmillan’s Magazine_ for November and December 1881 and January
1882.
Footnote 10:
Another incident which he told me of his first boyish saunterings
about Edinburgh is more trivial in itself, but of some interest as
showing his observant habits and sense of humour at that early
age:—For some purpose or other, he was going down Leith Walk, the long
street of houses, stone-yards, and gaps of vacant space, which leads
from Edinburgh to its sea-port of Leith. In front of him, and also
walking towards Leith, was a solid, quiet-looking countryman. They had
not gone far from Edinburgh when there advanced to them from the
opposite direction a sailor, so drunk that he needed the whole breadth
of the footpath to himself. Taking some umbrage at the countryman, the
sailor came to a stop, and addressed him suddenly, “Go to H——,”
looking him full in the face. “’Od, man, I’m gaun to Leith,” said the
countryman, as if merely pleading a previous engagement, and walked
on, Carlyle following him and evading the sailor.
Footnote 11:
Quoted by Mr. Froude in his article, “The Early Life of Thomas
Carlyle,” in the _Nineteenth Century_ for July 1881.
Footnote 12:
Quoted by Mr. Froude, _ut supra_.
Footnote 13:
Printed in an appendix to Mr. Moncure D. Conway’s Memoir of Carlyle
(1881), with other fragments of letters which had been copied from the
originals by Mr. Alexander Ireland of Manchester, and which Mr.
Ireland put at Mr. Conway’s disposal. The date of this fragment is
“August 1814”; and, as it is evidently a reply to Murray’s letter of
“July 27,” I have ventured to dissent from Mr. Froude’s conjectural
addition of “1816?” to the dating of that letter.
Footnote 14:
The first secession from the National Presbyterian Church of Scotland,
as established at the Revolution, was in 1733, when differences on
account of matters of administration, rather than any difference of
theological doctrine, led to the foundation by Ebenezer Erskine of the
dissenting communion called _The Associate Presbytery_ or _Secession
Church_. In 1747 this communion split itself, on the question of the
obligation of the members to take a certain civil oath, called The
Burgher’s Oath, into two portions, calling themselves respectively the
_Associate_ or _Burgher Synod_ and the _General Associate_ or
_Anti-Burgher Synod_. The former in 1799 sent off a detachment from
itself called the _Original Burgher Synod_ or _Old Light Burghers_,
the main body remaining as the _Associate Burgher Synod_; and it was
to the second that Carlyle’s parents belonged, their pastor in
Ecclefechan being that Rev. Mr. Johnston to whose memory Carlyle has
paid such a tribute of respect, and whose grave is now to be seen in
Ecclefechan churchyard, near Carlyle’s own.
Footnote 15:
This is not the first passage at arms on record between a Carlyle and
an Irving. As far back as the sixteenth century, when Irvings and
Carlyles were even more numerous in the West Border than they are at
present, and are heard of, with Maxwells, Bells, Johnstons, and other
clans, as keeping those parts in continual turmoil with their feuds,
raids, and depredations, it would happen sometimes that a Carlyle
jostled with an Irving. Thus, in the Register of the Privy Council of
Scotland, under date Aug. 28, 1578, we have the statement from an
Alexander Carlyle that there had been a controversy “betwix him and
Johnne Irvin, callit the Windie Duke.” What the controversy was does
not appear; but both parties had been apprehended by Lord Maxwell,
then Warden of the West Marches, and lodged in the “pledge-chalmer,”
or prison, of Dumfries; and Carlyle’s complaint is that, while the
said John Irving had been released on bail, no such favour has been
shown to _him_, but he has been kept in irons for twenty-two weeks.
This Alexander Carlyle seems to be the same person as a “Red Alexander
Carlyle of Eglisfechan” heard of afterwards in the same Record, under
date Feb. 22, 1581–2, as concerned in “some attemptatis and slauchter”
committed in the West March, and of which the Privy Council were
taking cognisance. On this occasion he is not in controversy with an
Irving, but has “Edward Irving of Boneschaw,” and his son “Christie
Irving of the Coif,” among his fellow-culprits. Notices of the
Dumfriesshire Carlyles and Irvings, separately or in company, are
frequent in the Register through the reign of James VI.
Footnote 16:
I have been informed, however, that Leslie must have misconceived
Carlyle when he took the solution as absolutely Carlyle’s own. It is
to be found, I am told, in an old Scottish book of geometry.
Footnote 17:
A letter of Carlyle’s among those contributed by Mr. Alexander Ireland
to Mr. Conway’s _Memoir_ proves that the momentous reading of Gibbon
was before Feb. 20, 1818; and in a subsequent letter in the same
collection, of date “July 1818,” he informs his correspondent, “I have
quitted all thoughts of the Church, for many reasons, which it would
be tedious, perhaps [word not legible], to enumerate.” This piece of
information is bedded, however, in some curious remarks on the
difficulties of those “chosen souls” who take up opinions different
from those of the age they live in, or of the persons with whom they
associate. See the letter in Mr. Conway’s volume, pp. 168–170.
Footnote 18:
Quoted in Mr. Froude’s article, “The Early Life of Carlyle,” in the
_Nineteenth Century_ for July 1881.
Footnote 19:
Mrs. Oliphant’s _Life of Irving_ (1862), i. 90, 91.
Footnote 20:
My impression now is that it was this autumn of 1819 in his father’s
house that Carlyle had in his mind when he talked to me once of the
remembered pleasures of certain early mornings in the Dumfriesshire
hill-country. The chief was when, after a saunter out of doors among
the sights and sounds of newly awakened nature, he would return to the
fragrant tea that was ready for him at home. No cups of tea he had
ever tasted in his life seemed so fragrant and so delicious as those
his mother had ready for him after his walks in those old
Dumfriesshire mornings.
Footnote 21:
But for the phrase “Hume’s Lectures once done with, I flung the thing
away for ever,” quoted by Mr. Froude as from “a note somewhere,” I
should, on the evidence of handwriting, etc., have decided
unhesitatingly for the second and more extensive of the two
hypotheses.—The attendance on the Chemistry Class, which would become
a fact if that hypothesis were correct, would be of some independent
interest. With Carlyle’s turn for science at that time, it was not
unlikely. I may add that, from talks with him, I have an impression
that, some time or other, he must have attended Professor Jameson’s
class of Natural History. He had certainly heard Jameson lecture
pretty frequently; for he described Jameson’s lecturing humorously and
to the life, the favourite topic of his recollection being Jameson’s
discourse on the order _Glires_ in the Linnæan Zoology. Though I have
looked over the Matriculation Lists and also the preserved class-lists
pretty carefully from 1809 to 1824, it is just possible that Carlyle’s
name in one of Jameson’s class-lists within that range of time may
have escaped me. The only other Professor, not already mentioned in
the text, that I remember to have heard him talk of was Dr. Andrew
Brown, Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres; but _him_ he knew, I
think, only by occasional dropping in at his lectures.
Footnote 22:
Carlyle to a correspondent, in one of Mr. Ireland’s copies of letters:
_Conway_, p. 178.
Footnote 23:
Ditto, _ibid._ p. 180.
Footnote 24:
Ditto, _ibid._ pp. 201, 202.
Footnote 25:
Carlyle to his brother John, quoted in Mr. Froude’s Article.
Footnote 26:
_Reminiscences_, ii. 16, 11.
Footnote 27:
Quoted at p. 57 of Mr. William Howie Wylie’s excellent volume entitled
_Carlyle: The Man and His Books_.
Footnote 28:
Mr. Ireland’s copies of Letters, in _Conway_, p. 171.
Footnote 29:
_Ibid._ p. 180.
Footnote 30:
Quoted in Mr. Froude’s Article.
Footnote 31:
Quoted _ibid._
Footnote 32:
The best account I ever had of Carlyle’s father was from an
intelligent elderly gentleman who, having retired from business,
amused himself one session, somewhere about or after 1857, by
attending my class of English Literature in University College,
London. He was from Dumfriesshire originally, and had known all the
Carlyle family. He spoke more of Carlyle’s father than of Carlyle
himself; and his first words to me about him were these:—“He was a
most extraordinary man, Carlyle’s father: he said a thing, and it
ran through the country.”——Carlyle often talked to me of his father,
and always in the tone of the memoir in his _Reminiscences_, though
I did not then know that he had any such memoir in writing. “He was
a far cleverer man, my father, than I am or ever shall be,” was one
of his phrases. He dwelt on what he thought a peculiar use by his
father of the Scottish word _gar_, meaning “to compel,” as when he
was reluctant to do a thing that must be done, and ended by saying
he must “just _gar_ himsel’ do it.” The expression was not new to
me, for it is to be heard farther north than Annandale; but it
seemed characteristic.—Of the strong and picturesque rhetoric of
Carlyle’s father I remember two examples, told me, I think, by Mrs.
Carlyle. Once, when he was going somewhere in a cart with his
daughters on a rainy day, he was annoyed by the drip-dripping into
his neck from the whalebone point of one of the umbrellas. “I would
rather sit a’ nicht in my sark,” he said, “under a waterspout on the
tap of ——” [some mountain in the neighbourhood, the name of which I
forget]. Once, when his son, of whom he had become proud, was at
home in a vacation, and a pious old neighbour-woman who had come in
was exciting herself in a theological controversy with the Divinity
student on some point or other, he broke out, “Thou auld
crack-brained enthusiastic, dost thou think to argue wi’ our Tom?”
Footnote 33:
The substance of the paper must have been retained in Carlyle’s
memory, for he described to me once with extraordinary vividness
his first sight of the Vale of Yarrow as he struck it in one
of his walks to Annandale. It was a beautiful day, and he had
come upon a height looking down upon the stony stream and its
classic valley. As he stood and gazed, with something in his mind
of Wordsworth’s salutation, “And this is Yarrow!”, up from the
valley there came a peculiar, repeated, rhythmical sound, as of
_clink_—_clink_—_clink_, for which he could not
account. All was solitary and quiet otherwise, but still the
_clink_—_clink_—_clink_ rose to his ear. At last, some
way off, he saw a man with a cart standing in the bed of the stream,
and lifting stone after stone from it, which he threw into the cart.
He could then watch the gesture of each cast of a stone in among the
rest, and note the interval before the _clink_ reached him.—The
Yarrow songs were familiar to Carlyle; and among the many scraps of
old verse which he was fond of quoting or humming to himself in his
later years I observed this in particular:—
“But Minstrel Burn cannot assuage
His grief while life endureth,
To see the changes of this age,
Which fleeting time procureth;
For mony a place stands in hard case
Where joy was wont beforrow,
With Humes that dwelt on Leader braes,
And Scotts that dwelt on Yarrow.”
Footnote 34:
See the article _Some Fifty Years Ago_ in Fraser’s
Magazine for June 1879, by Mr. Allingham, then Editor of the Magazine.
Footnote 35:
Dr. Hill Burton’s Reminiscences of Professor Wilson, published in
_Wilson’s Life_ by Mrs. Gordon, ii. 25.
Footnote 36:
_Peter Nimmo: A Rhapsody_ is duly registered among
Carlyle’s anonymous contributions to Fraser’s Magazine in Mr. Richard
Herne Shepherd’s _Bibliography of Carlyle_ (1881). Should
any one entertain doubts, even after such excellent authority, a
glance at the prose preface to the thing, signed O. Y. (“Oliver
Yorke”), in _Fraser_ for February 1831, will remove them.
After specifying Edinburgh University as Peter’s local habitat, and
estimating the enormously diffused celebrity he has attained by his
long persistence there, the preface proceeds: “The world itself is
interested in these matters: singular men are at all times worthy of
being described and sung; nay, strictly considered, there is nothing
else worthy.... The Napoleon, the Nimmo, are mystic windows through
which we glance deeper into the hidden ways of Nature, and discern
under a clearer figure the working of that inscrutable Spirit of the
Time, and Spirit of Time itself, who is by some thought to be the
Devil.” There may remain some little question as to the date of the
_Rhapsody_. That it was written by Carlyle in Annandale
seems proved by the phrase “in heaths and splashy weather” in the
prologue. The date _may_ have been any time before 1831; but
before 1821 seems the most likely.
Footnote 37:
Quoted by Mr. Froude in his _Nineteenth Century_ article.
Footnote 38:
Mr. Ireland’s copies of early Carlyle Letters, in Mr. Conway’s
_Memoir_, p. 185.
Footnote 39:
_Ibid._
Footnote 40:
Mr. Ireland’s copies of Carlyle’s Letters, in _Conway_,
pp. 192, 193.
Footnote 41:
_Reminiscences_, i. 208, 209.
Footnote 42:
Carlyle’s habit of smoking had begun in his boyhood, probably at
Ecclefechan before he came to Edinburgh University. His father, he
told me, was a moderate smoker, confining himself to about an ounce
of tobacco a week, and so thoughtfully as always to have a pipe ready
for a friend out of that allowance. Carlyle’s allowance, in his
mature life, though he was very regular in his times and seasons,
must have been at least six times as much. Once, when the canister
of “free-smoking York River” on his mantelpiece was nearly empty,
he told me not to mind that, as he had “about _half-a-stone_
more of the same upstairs.”——Another tobacco anecdote of Carlyle,
which I had from the late G. H. Lewes, may be worth a place here.
One afternoon, when his own stock of “free-smoking York River” had
come to an end, and when he had set out to walk with a friend (Lewes
himself, if I recollect rightly), he stopped at a small tobacco-shop
in Chelsea, facing the Thames, and went in to procure some temporary
supply. The friend went in with him, and heard his dialogue with the
shopkeeper. York River, having been asked for, was duly produced;
but, as it was not of the right sort, Carlyle, while making a small
purchase, informed the shopkeeper most particularly what the right
sort was, what was its name, and at what wholesale place in the city
it might be ordered. “O, we find that this suits our customers very
well,” said the man. “That may be, Sir,” said Carlyle; “but you will
find it best in the long run always to deal in the veracities.” The
man’s impression must have been that _the veracities_ were some
peculiar curly species of tobacco, hitherto unknown to him.
Footnote 43:
There does not seem to have been much direct intercourse between
Wilson and Carlyle after the meeting mentioned, though there were
cordial exchanges of regards between them, and some incidental
compliments to Carlyle in _Blackwood_.
Footnote 44:
As the dates in this sentence will suggest, the last few paragraphs,
narrating the story of Goethe’s frustrated attempt to bring Scott
and Carlyle together, did not appear in the paper as originally
published in _Macmillan_, but are an insertion into the
present reprint made possible by the information furnished by the
two recent publications named. I did, indeed, give an outline sketch
of some such affair as it had hung in my memory from talk either
with Carlyle himself or with his brother Dr. John Carlyle. But the
sketch was hazy, and I now find that it was inaccurate in some
points.—Scott and Carlyle, I may here add, _were_ once together
in the same room in Edinburgh in a semi-private way. The fact has
been communicated to me by Mr. David Douglas, the editor of Scott’s
Journal, who had it from Dr. David Aitken, already mentioned in this
paper as an intimate friend of Carlyle’s in the Comely Bank days.
The scene of the meeting was the shop of Mr. Tait, the publisher,
then in an upper floor in Hanover Street. Carlyle and Mr. Aitken,
who had been walking in Princes Street, turned aside for a call at
Mr. Tait’s. While they were there and talking with Mr. Tait, Scott
came in,—well known to both by sight. “Mr. Tait, have you got a copy
of Horace at hand? I want to make a quotation,” were Scott’s words
on entering. The book having been brought,—a handsome quarto, Dr.
Aitken remembered,—Scott sat down with it in his lap, and began to
turn over the leaves, Carlyle and Mr. Aitken standing a little way
off meanwhile, and Carlyle continuing his talk with Mr. Tait. Soon,
as if attracted by the voice or by something said, Scott began to
look up, the volume still resting in his lap. Several times he raised
his eyes in the same fashion from the book to the two strangers, or
to the one who was talking. The expression, as Dr. Aitken interpreted
it in recollection, was as if he were saying to himself: “He is a
kenspeckle-looking chiel that; I wonder who he is.”—The date of this
encounter I do not know. If it was _after_ the affair of the
Goethe medals and the unanswered letters (and that is not impossible
if we suppose some occasion for a brief visit from Craigenputtock
to Edinburgh in 1829 or 1830), one can imagine with what studious
_aloofness_ from his great senior Carlyle would comport himself
in the accidental interview.
Footnote 45:
From the _Correspondence between Goethe and Carlyle_,
edited by Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, we learn that Carlyle had, on the
same day on which he wrote this letter to Procter, written to Goethe
soliciting a testimonial from _him_ for the same occasion. The
testimonial was sent from Weimar, but not till the 14th of March; and
it came too late to be of use. A copy of the original German, with
an English translation, is printed in Mr. Norton’s volume. It is a
document of five pages, and perhaps the most unbusiness-like thing
ever sent in the shape of a testimonial on behalf of a candidate for
a Scottish Professorship. It begins thus:—“True conviction springs
from the heart; the Soul, the real seat of the Conscience, judges
concerning what may be permitted and what may not be permitted far
more surely than the Understanding, which will see into and determine
many things without hitting the right mark. A well-disposed and
self-observant man, wishing to respect himself and to live at peace
with himself, and yet conscious of many an imperfection perplexing
his inner life, and grieved by many a fault compromising him in the
eyes of others, whereby he finds himself disturbed and opposed from
within and from without, will seek by all methods to free himself
from such impediments.” Then follow two paragraphs of continued
remarks on the intellectual or literary life in general; after which
the testimonial becomes more specific, thus:—“It may now without
arrogance be asserted that German Literature has effected much
for humanity in this respect,—that a moral-psychological tendency
pervades it, introducing not ascetic timidity, but free culture
in accordance with nature, and a cheerful obedience to law; and
therefore I have observed with pleasure Mr. Carlyle’s admirably
profound study of this Literature, and I have noticed with sympathy
how he has not only been able to discover the beautiful and human,
the good and great, in us, but has also contributed what was his
own, and has endowed us with the treasures of his genius. It must be
granted that he has a clear judgment as to our Æsthetic and Ethic
writers, and, at the same time, his own way of looking at them, which
proves that he rests on an original foundation and has the power to
develop in himself the essentials of what is good and beautiful. In
this sense, I may well regard him as a man who would fill a Chair
of Moral Philosophy with single-heartedness, with purity, effect,
and influence, enlightening the youth entrusted to him as to their
real duties, in accordance with his disciplined thought, his natural
gifts, and his acquired knowledge, aiming at leading and urging their
minds to moral activity, and thereby steadily guiding them towards
a religious completeness.”—When one imagines the probable effects
on the minds of the St. Andrews Principal and Professors of 1828 of
such a testimonial from the German sage, known to them so dimly, and
perhaps in ways that made them suspicious of him, one’s impression
is that, if they had been thinking of appointing Carlyle, the
presentation of this testimonial would have been likely to stop them.
Never having been presented, it can have done no harm.
Footnote 46:
Review, in _The Scots Observer_ (now _The National Observer_), 15th
December 1888, of “_Letters from and to Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe,
Esq._ Edited by Alexander Allardyce. With a Memoir by the Rev. W. K.
R. Bedford. In two volumes. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons.”
Footnote 47:
Lockhart, in his quotation from the Diary as here given, omitted a
line or two. The complete text may be now read in Mr. Douglas’s
edition of the entire Diary in 1890.
Footnote 48:
This is the “General Sharpe” from whom Carlyle’s father had a lease of
his farm of Mainhill from 1815 onwards, and from whom Carlyle himself
rented the house and grounds of Hoddam Hill for his one year’s
experiment of farming-life in 1825–26. See the _Reminiscences_ for the
story of Carlyle’s quarrel, and then his father’s also, with their
landlord, caused mainly by his “arbitrary high-handed temper, used to
a rather prostrate style of obedience, and not finding it here.” Both
father and son gave up their leases in 1826, the father protesting “We
can live without Sharpe and the whole Sharpe creation,” and saying he
would “rather go to Jerusalem seeking farms, and die without finding
one,” than remain under such a landlord.
Footnote 49:
From _The Scotsman_ of 18th November 1882; where it appeared as a
review of “_The Book-Hunter_, etc. By John Hill Burton, D.C.L., LL.D.,
Author of _A History of Scotland_, _The Scot Abroad_, _The Reign of
Queen Anne_, etc. A New Edition: with a Memoir of the Author. William
Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh and London.”
Footnote 50:
From _Macmillan’s Magazine_ for February 1883. The main portion of the
paper was delivered as a lecture in the University of Edinburgh on
Tuesday, October 24, 1882; and there are reasons for retaining the
familiarity of the lecture form in the reprint.
Footnote 51:
From _The Scotsman_ of 8th and 9th November 1889. This paper is
purposely placed last in the volume, as containing necessarily a
recapitulation of portions of the matter of some of the preceding.
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