Edinburgh sketches & memories

by David Masson

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.

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“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]]