My Schools and Schoolmasters; Or, The Story of My Education

by Hugh Miller

CHAPTER XVII.

"Beware, Lorenzo, a slow, sudden death."—Young.

There was one special subject which my friend, in our quiet evening walks, used to urge seriously upon my attention. He had thrown up, under strong religious impressions, what promised to be so good a business, that in two years he had already saved money enough to meet the expenses of a college course of education. And assuredly, never did man determine on entering the ministry with views more thoroughly disinterested than his. Patronage ruled supreme in the Scottish Establishment at the time; and my friend had no influence and no patron; but he could not see his way clear to join with the Evangelical Dissenters or the Secession; and believing that the most important work on earth is the work of saving souls, he had entered on his new course in the full conviction that, if God had work for him of this high character to do, He would find him an opportunity of doing it. And now, thoroughly in earnest, and as part of the special employment to which he had devoted himself, he set himself to press upon my attention the importance, in their personal bearing, of religious concerns.

I was not unacquainted with the standard theology of the Scottish Church. In the parish school I had, indeed, acquired no ideas on the subject; and though I now hear a good deal said, chiefly with a controversial bearing, about the excellent religious influence of our parochial seminaries, I never knew any one who owed other than the merest smattering of theological knowledge to these institutions, and not a single individual who had ever derived from them any tincture, even the slightest, of religious feeling. In truth, during almost the whole of the last century, and for at least the first forty years of the present, the people of Scotland were, with all their faults, considerably more Christian than the larger part of their schoolmasters. So far as I can remember, I carried in my memory from school only a single remark at all theological in its character, and it was of a kind suited rather to do harm than good. In reading in the class one Saturday morning a portion of the Hundred and Nineteenth Psalm, I was told by the master that that ethical poem was a sort of alphabetical acrostic—a circumstance, he added, that accounted for its broken and inconsecutive character as a composition. Chiefly, however, from the Sabbath-day catechizings to which I had been subjected during boyhood by my uncles, and latterly from the old divines, my Uncle Sandy's favourites, and from the teachings of the pulpit, I had acquired a considerable amount of religious knowledge. I had thought, too, a good deal about some of the peculiar doctrines of Calvinism, in their character as abstruse positions—such as the doctrine of the Divine decrees, and of man's inability to assume the initiative in the work of his own conversion. I had, besides, a great admiration of the Bible, especially of its narrative and poetical parts; and could scarce give strong enough expression to the contempt which I entertained for the vulgar and tasteless sceptics who, with Paine at their head, could speak of it as a weak or foolish book. Further, reared in a family circle, some of whose members were habitually devout, and all of whom respected and stood up for religion, and were imbued with the stirring ecclesiastical traditions of their country, I felt that the religious side in any quarrel had a sort of hereditary claim upon me. I believe I may venture to say, that previous to this time I had never seen a religious man badgered for his religion, and much in a minority, without openly taking part with him; nor is it impossible that, in a time of trouble, I might have almost deserved the character given by old John Howie to a rather notable "gentleman sometimes called Burly," who, "although he was by some reckoned none of the most religious," joined himself to the suffering party, and was "always zealous and honest-hearted." And yet my religion was a strangely incongruous thing. It took the form, in my mind, of a mass of indigested theology, with here and there a prominent point developed out of due proportion, from the circumstance that I had thought upon it for myself; and while entangled, if I may so speak, amid the recesses and under cover of the general chaotic mass, there harboured no inconsiderable amount of superstition, there rested over it the clouds of a dreary scepticism. I have sometimes, in looking back on the doubts and questionings of this period, thought, and perhaps even spoken of myself as an infidel. But an infidel I assuredly was not: my belief was at least as real as my incredulity, and had, I am inclined to think, a much deeper seat in my mind. But wavering between the two extremes—now a believer, and anon a sceptic—the belief usually exhibiting itself as a strongly-based instinct,—the scepticism as the result of some intellectual process—I lived on for years in a sort of uneasy see-saw condition, without any middle ground between the two extremes, on which I could at once reason and believe.

That middle ground I now succeeded in finding. It is at once delicate and dangerous to speak of one's own spiritual condition, or of the emotional sentiments on which one's conclusions regarding it are often so doubtfully founded. Egotism in the religious form is perhaps more tolerated than in any other; but it is not on that account less perilous to the egotist himself. There need be, however, less delicacy in speaking of one's beliefs than of one's feelings; and I trust I need not hesitate to say, that I was led to see at this time, through the instrumentality of my friend, that my theologic system had previously wanted a central object, to which the heart, as certainly as the intellect, could attach itself; and that the true centre of an efficient Christianity is, as the name ought of itself to indicate, "the Word made Flesh." Around this central sun of the Christian system—appreciated, however, not as a doctrine which is a mere abstraction, but as a Divine Person—so truly Man, that the affections of the human heart can lay hold upon Him, and so truly God, that the mind, through faith, can at all times and in all places be brought into direct contact with Him—all that is really religious takes its place in a subsidiary and subordinate relation. I say subsidiary and subordinate. The Divine Man is the great attractive centre, the sole gravitating point of a system which owes to Him all its coherency, and which would be but a chaos were He away. It seems to be the existence of the human nature in this central and paramount object that imparts to Christianity, in its subjective character, its peculiar power of influencing and controlling the human mind. There may be men who, through a peculiar idiosyncrasy of constitution, are capable of loving, after a sort, a mere abstract God, unseen and inconceivable; though, as shown by the air of sickly sentimentality borne by almost all that has been said and written on the subject, the feeling in its true form must be a very rare and exceptional one. In all my experience of men, I never knew a genuine instance of it The love of an abstract God seems to be as little natural to the ordinary human constitution as the love of an abstract sun or planet. And so it will be found, that in all the religions that have taken strong hold of the mind of man, the element of a vigorous humanity has mingled, in the character of its gods, with the theistic element. The gods of classic mythology were simply powerful men set loose from the tyranny of the physical laws; and, in their purely human character, as warm friends and deadly enemies, they were both feared and loved. And so the belief which bowed at their shrines ruled the old civilized world for many centuries. In the great ancient mythologies of the East—Buddhism and Brahmanism—both very influential forms of belief—we have the same elements, genuine humanity added to god-like power. In the faith of the Moslem, the human character of the man Mahommed, elevated to an all-potential viceregency in things sacred, gives great strength to what without it would be but a weak theism. Literally it is Allah's supreme prophet that maintains for Allah himself a place in the Mahommedan mind. Again, in Popery we find an excess of humanity scarce leas great than in the classical mythology itself, and with nearly corresponding results. Though the Virgin Mother takes, as queen of heaven, a first place in the scheme, and forms in that character a greatly more interesting goddess than any of the old ones who counselled Ulysses, or responded to the love of Anchises or of Endymion, she has to share her empire with the minor saints, and to recognise in them a host of rivals. But undoubtedly to this popular element Popery owes not a little of its indomitable strength. In, however, all these forms of religion, whether inherently false from the beginning, or so overlaid in some after stage by the fictitious and the untrue as to have their original substratum of truth covered up by error and fable, there is such a want of coherency between the theistic and human elements, that we always find them undergoing a process of separation. We see the human element ever laying hold on the popular mind, and there manifesting itself in the form of a vigorous superstition; and the theistic element, on the other hand, recognised by the cultivated intellect as the exclusive and only element, and elaborated into a sort of natural theology, usually rational enough in its propositions, but for any practical purpose always feeble and inefficient. Such a separation of the two elements took place of old in the ages of the classical mythology; and hence the very opposite characters of the wild but genial and popular fables so exquisitely adorned by the poets, and the rational but uninfluential doctrines received by a select few from the philosophers. Such a separation took place, too, in France in the latter half of the last century; and still on the European Continent generally do we find this separation represented by the assertors of a weak theism on the one hand, and of a superstitious saint-worship on the other. In the false or corrupted religions, the two indispensable elements of Divinity and Humanity appear as if blended together by a mere mechanical process; and it is their natural tendency to separate, through a sort of subsidence on the part of the human element from the theistic one, as if from some lack of the necessary affinities. In Christianity, on the other hand, when existing in its integrity as the religion of the New Testament, the union of the two elements is complete: it partakes of the nature, not of a mechanical, but of a chemical mixture; and its great central doctrine—the true Humanity and true Divinity of the Adorable Saviour—is a truth equally receivable by at once the humblest and the loftiest intellects. Poor dying children possessed of but a few simple ideas, and men of the most robust intellects, such as the Chalmerses, Fosters, and Halls of the Christian Church, find themselves equally able to rest their salvation on the man "Christ, who is over all, God blessed for ever." Of this fundamental truth of the two natures, that condensed enunciation of the gospel which forms the watchword of our faith, "Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved," is a direct and palpable embodiment; and Christianity is but a mere name without it.

I was impressed at this time by another very remarkable feature in the religion of Christ in its subjective character. Kames, in his "Art of Thinking," illustrates, by a curious story, one of his observations on the "nature of man." "Nothing is more common," he says, "than love converted into hatred; and we have seen instances of hatred converted into love." And in exemplifying the remark, he relates his anecdote of "Unnion and Valentine." Two English soldiers, who fought in the wars of Queen Anne—the one a petty officer, the other a private sentinel—had been friends and comrades for years; but, quarrelling in some love affair, they became bitter enemies. The officer made an ungenerous use of his authority, and so annoyed and persecuted the sentinel as almost to fret him into madness; and he was frequently heard to say that he would die to be avenged of him. Whole months were spent in the infliction of injuries on the one side, and in the venting of complaints on the other; when, in the midst of their mutual rage, they were both selected, as men of tried courage, to share in some desperate attack, which was, however, unsuccessful; and the officer, in the retreat, was disabled, and struck down by a shot in the thigh. "Oh, Valentine! and will you leave me here to perish?" he exclaimed, as his old comrade rushed past him. The poor injured man immediately returned; and, in the midst of a thick fire, bore off his wounded enemy to what seemed a place of safety, when he was struck by a chance ball, and fell dead under his burden. The officer, immediately forgetting his wound, rose up, tearing his hair; and, throwing himself on the bleeding body, he cried, "Ah, Valentine! and was it for me, who have so barbarously used thee, that thou hast died? I will not live after thee." He was not by any means to be forced from the corpse; but was removed with it bleeding in his arms, and attended with tears by all his comrades, who knew of his harshness to the deceased. When brought to a tent, his wounds were dressed by force; but the next day, still calling on Valentine, and lamenting his cruelties to him, he died in the pangs of remorse and despair.

This surely is a striking story; but the commonplace remark based upon it by the philosopher is greatly less so. Men who have loved do often learn to hate the object of their affections; and men who have hated sometimes learn to love: but the portion of the anecdote specially worthy of remark appears to be that which, dwelling on the o'ermastering remorse and sorrow of the rescued soldier, shows how effectually his poor dead comrade had, by dying for him "while he was yet his enemy," "heaped coals of fire upon his head." And such seems to be one of the leading principles on which, with a Divine adaptation to the heart of man, the scheme of Redemption has been framed. The Saviour approved his love, "in that while we were yet sinners, He died for us." There is an inexpressibly great power in this principle; and many a deeply-stirred heart has felt it to its core. The theologians have perhaps too frequently dwelt on the Saviour's vicarious satisfaction for human sin in its relation to the offended justice of the Father. How, or on what principle, the Father was satisfied, I know not, and may never know. The enunciation regarding vicarious satisfaction may be properly received in faith as a fact, but, I suspect, not properly reasoned upon until we shall be able to bring the moral sense of Deity, with its requirements, within the limits of a small and trivial logic. But the thorough adaptation of the scheme to man's nature is greatly more appreciable, and lies fully within the reach of observation and experience. And how thorough that adaptation is, all who have really looked at the matter ought to be competent to say. Does an earthly priesthood, vested with alleged powers to interpose between God and man, always originate an ecclesiastical tyranny, which has the effect, in the end, of shutting up the mass of men from their Maker?—here is there a High Priest passed into the heavens—the only Priest whom the evangelistic Protestant recognises as really such—to whom, in his character of Mediator between God and man, all may apply, and before whom there need be felt none of that abject prostration of the spirit and understanding which man always experiences when he bends before the merely human priest. Is self-righteousness the besetting infirmity of the religious man?—in the scheme of vicarious righteousness it finds no footing. The self-approving Pharisee must be content to renounce his own merits, ere he can have part or lot in the fund of merit which alone avails; and yet without personal righteousness he can have no evidence whatever that he has an interest in the all-prevailing imputed righteousness. But it is in the closing scene of life, when man's boasted virtues become so intangible in his estimation that they elude his grasp, and sins and shortcomings, little noted before, start up around him like spectres, that the scheme of Redemption appears worthy of the infinite wisdom and goodness of God, and when what the Saviour did and suffered seems of efficacy enough to blot out the guilt of every offence. It is when the minor lights of comfort are extinguished that the Sun of Righteousness shines forth, and more than compensates for them all.

The opinions which I formed at this time on this matter of prime importance I found no after occasion to alter or modify. On the contrary, in passing from the subjective to the objective view, I have seen the doctrine of the union of the two natures greatly confirmed. The truths of geology appear destined to exercise in the future no inconsiderable influence on natural theology; and with this especial doctrine they seem very much in accordance. Of that long and stately march of creation with which the records of the stony science bring us acquainted, the distinguishing characteristic is progress. There appears to have been a time when there existed on our planet only dead matter unconnected with vitality; and then a time in which plants and animals of a low order began to be, but in which even fishes, the humblest of the vertebrata, were so rare and exceptionable, that they occupied a scarce appreciable place in Nature. Then came an age of fishes huge of size, and that to the peculiar ichthyic organization added certain well-marked characteristics of the reptilian class immediately above them. And then, after a time, during which the reptile had occupied a place as inconspicuous as that occupied by the fish in the earlier periods of animal life, an age of reptiles of vast bulk and high standing was ushered in. And when, in the lapse of untold ages, it also had passed away, there succeeded an age of great mammals. Molluscs, fishes, reptiles, mammals, had each in succession their periods of vast extent; and then there came a period that differed even more, in the character of its master-existence, from any of these creations, than they, with their many vitalities, had differed from the previous inorganic period in which life had not yet begun to be. The human period began—the period of a fellow-worker with God, created in God's own image. The animal existences of the previous ages formed, if I may so express myself, mere figures in the landscapes of the great garden which they inhabited. Man, on the other hand, was placed in it to "keep and to dress it;" and such has been the effect of his labours, that they have altered and improved the face of whole continents. Our globe, even as it might be seen from the moon, testifies, over its surface, to that unique nature of man, unshared in by any of the inferior animals, which renders him, in things physical and natural, a fellow-worker with the Creator who first produced it. And of the identity of at least his intellect with that of his Maker, and, of consequence, of the integrity of the revelation which declares that he was created in God's own image, we have direct evidence in his ability of not only conceiving of God's contrivances, but even of reproducing them; and this, not as a mere imitator, but as an original thinker. He may occasionally borrow the principles of his contrivances from the works of the Original Designer, but much more frequently, in studying the works of the Original Designer does he discover in them the principles of his own contrivances. He has not been an imitator: he has merely been exercising, with resembling results, the resembling mind, i.e., the mind made in the Divine image. But the existing scene of things is not destined to be the last. High as it is, it is too low and too imperfect to be regarded as God's finished work: it is merely one of the progressive dynasties; and Revelation and the implanted instincts of our nature alike teach us to anticipate a glorious terminal dynasty. In the first dawn of being, simple vitality was united to matter: the vitality thus united became, in each succeeding period, of a higher and yet higher order;—it was in succession the vitality of the mollusc, of the fish, of the reptile, of the sagacious mammal, and, finally, of responsible, immortal man, created in the image of God. What is to be the next advance? Is there to be merely a repetition of the past—an introduction a second time of "man made in the image of God?" No! The geologist, in the tables of stone which form his records, finds no example of dynasties once passed away again returning. There has been no repetition of the dynasty of the fish—of the reptile—of the mammal. The dynasty of the future is to have glorified man for its inhabitant; but it is to be the dynasty—the "kingdom"—not of glorified man made in the image of God, but of God himself in the form of man. In the doctrine of the two natures, and in the further doctrine that the terminal dynasty is to be peculiarly the dynasty of Him in whom the natures are united, we find that required progression beyond which progress cannot go. Creation and the Creator meet at one point, and in one person. The long ascending line from dead matter to man has been, a progress Godwards—not an asymptotical progress, but destined from the beginning to furnish a point of union; and, occupying that point as true God and true man, as Creator and created, we recognise the adorable Monarch of all the Future. It is, as urged by the Apostle, the especial glory of our race, that it should have furnished that point of contact at which Godhead has united Himself, not to man only, but also, through man, to His own Universe—to the Universe of Matter and of Mind.

I remained for several months in delicate and somewhat precarious health. My lungs had received more serious injury than I had at first supposed; and it seemed at one time rather doubtful whether the severe mechanical irritation which had so fretted them that the air-passages seemed overcharged with matter and stone-dust, might not pass into the complaint which it stimulated, and become confirmed consumption. Curiously enough, my comrades had told me in sober earnest—among the rest, Cha, a man of sense and observation—that I would pay the forfeit of my sobriety by being sooner affected than they by the stone-cutter's malady: "a good bouse" gave, they said, a wholesome fillip to the constitution, and "cleared the sulphur off the lungs;" and mine would suffer for want of the medicine which kept theirs clean. I know not whether there was virtue in their remedy: it seems just possible that the shock given to the constitution by an overdose of strong drink may in certain cases be medicinal in its effects; but they were certainly not in error in their prediction. Among the hewers of the party I was the first affected by the malady. I still remember the rather pensive than sad feeling with which I used to contemplate, at this time, an early death, and the intense love of nature that drew me, day after day, to the beautiful scenery which surrounds my native town, and which I loved all the more from the consciousness that my eyes might so soon close upon it for ever. "It is a pleasant thing to behold the sun." Among my manuscripts—useless scraps of paper, to which, however, in their character as fossils of the past epochs of my life, I cannot help attaching an interest not at all in themselves—I find the mood represented by only a few almost infantile verses, addressed to a docile little girl of five years, my eldest sister by my mother's second marriage, and my frequent companion, during my illness, in my short walks.

TO JEANIE.

Sister Jeanie, haste, we'll go

To whare the white-starred gowans grow,

Wi' the puddock flower o' gowden hue.

The snaw-drap white and the bonny vi'let blue.

Sister Jeanie, haste, we'll go

To whare the blossomed lilacs grow—

To whare the pine-tree, dark an' high,

Is pointing its tap at the cloudless sky.

Jeanie, mony a merry lay

Is sung in the young-leaved woods to-day;

Flits on light wing the dragon-flee,

An' bums on the flowrie the big red-bee.

Down the burnie wirks its way

Aneath the bending birken spray,

An' wimples roun' the green moss-stane,

An' mourns. I kenna why, wi' a ceaseless mane.

Jeanie, come; thy days o' play

Wi' autumn-tide shall pass away;

Sune shall these scenes, in darkness cast,

Be ravaged wild by the wild winter blast.

Though to thee a spring shall rise,

An' scenes as fair salute thine eyes;

An' though, through many a cludless day,

My winsome Jean shall be heartsome and gay;

He wha grasps thy little hand

Nae langer at thy side shall stand,

Nor o'er the flower-besprinkled brae

Lead thee the low'nest and the bonniest way.

Dost thou see yon yard sae green,

Spreckled wi' mony a mossy stane?

A few short weeks o' pain shall fly,

An' asleep in that bed shall thy puir brither lie.

Then thy mither's tears awhile

May chide thy joy an' damp thy smile;

But sune ilk grief shall wear awa',

And I'll be forgotten by ane an' by a'.

Dinna think the thought is sad;

Life vexed me aft, but this mak's glad:

When cauld my heart and closed my e'e,

Bonny shall the dreams o' my slumbers be.

At length, however, my constitution threw off the malady; though—as I still occasionally feel—the organ affected never quite regained its former vigour; and I began to experience the quiet but exquisite enjoyment of the convalescent. After long and depressing illness, youth itself appears to return with returning health; and it seems to be one of the compensating provisions, that while men of robust constitution and rigid organization get gradually old in their spirits and obtuse in their feelings, the class that have to endure being many times sick have the solace of being also many times young. The reduced and weakened frame becomes as susceptible of the emotional as in tender and delicate youth. I know not that I ever spent three happier months than the autumnal months of this year, when gradually picking up flesh and strength amid my old haunts, the woods and caves. My friend had left me early in July for Aberdeen, where he had gone to prosecute his studies under the eye of a tutor, one Mr. Duncan, whom he described to me in his letters as perhaps the most deeply learned man he had ever seen. "You may ask him a common question," said my friend, "without getting an answer—for he has considerably more than the average absentness of the great scholar about him; but if you inquire of him the state of any one controversy ever agitated in the Church or the world, he will give it you at once, with, if you please, all the arguments on both sides." The trait struck me at the time as one of some mark; and I thought of it many years after, when fame had blown the name of my friend's tutor pretty widely as Dr. Duncan, Hebrew Professor in our Free Church College, and one of the most profoundly learned of Orientalists. Though separated, however, from my friend, I found a quiet pleasure in following up, in my solitary walks, the views which his conversations had suggested; and in a copy of verses, the production of this time, which, with all their poverty and stiffness, please me as true, and as representative of the convalescent feeling, I find direct reference to the beliefs which he had laboured to instil. My verses are written in a sort of metre which, in the hands of Collins, became flexible and exquisitely poetic, and which in those of Kirke White is at least pleasing, but of which we find poor enough specimens in the "Anthologies" of Southey, and which perhaps no one so limited in his metrical vocabulary, and so defective in his musical ear, as the writer of these chapters, should ever have attempted.

SOLACE.

No star of golden influence hailed the birth

Of him who, all unknown and lonely, pours,

As fails the light of eve,

His pensive, artless song;

Yea, those who mark out honour, ease, wealth, fame,

As man's sole joys, shall find no joy in him;

Yet of far nobler kind

His silent pleasures prove.

For not unmarked by him the ways of men;

Nor yet to him the ample page unknown,

Where, traced by Nature's hand,

Is many a pleasing line.

Oh! when the world's dull children bend the knee,

Meanly obsequious, to some mortal god,

It yields no vulgar joy

Alone to stand aloof;

Or when they jostle on wealth's crowded road,

And swells the tumult on the breeze, 'tis sweet,

Thoughtful, at length reclined,

To list the wrathful hum.

What though the weakly gay affect to scorn

The loitering dreamer of life's darkest shade,

Stingless the jeer, whose voice

Comes from the erroneous path.

Scorner, of all thy toils the end declare!

If pleasure, pleasure comes uncalled, to cheer

The haunts of him who spends

His hours in quiet thought.

And happier he who can repress desire,

Than they who seldom mourn a thwarted wish;

The vassals they of fate—

The unbending conqueror he,

And thou, blest Muse, though rudely strung thy lyre,

Its tones can guile the dark and lonesome day—

Can smooth the wrinkled brow,

And dry the sorrowing tear.

Thine many a bliss—oh, many a solace thine!

By thee up-held, the soul asserts her throne,

The chastened passions sleep,

And dove-eyed Peace prevails.

And thou, fair Hope! when other comforts fail—

When night's thick mists descend—thy beacon flames,

Till glow the dark clouds round

With beams of promised bliss.

Thou failest not, when, mute the soothing lyre,

Lives thy unfading solace: sweet to raise

Thy eye, O quiet Hope,

And greet a friend in heaven!—

A friend, a brother, one whose awful throne

In holy fear heaven's mightiest sons approach:

Man's heart to feel for man—

To save him God's great power!

Conqueror of death, joy of the accepted soul,

Oh, wonders raise no doubt when told of thee!

Thy way past finding out,

Thy love, can tongue declare?

Cheered by thy smile, Peace dwells amid the storm;

Held by thy hand, the floods assail in vain;

With grief is blent a joy,

And beams the vault of death.

Passing, in one of my walks this autumn, the cave in which I used to spend in boyhood so many happy hours with Finlay, I found it smoking, as of old, with a huge fire, and occupied by a wilder and more careless party than even my truant schoolfellows. It had been discovered and appropriated by a band of gipsies, who, attracted by the soot-stains on its roof and sides, and concluding that it had been inhabited by the gipsies of other days, had without consulting factor or landlord, at once entered upon possession, as the proper successors of its former occupants. They were a savage party, with a good deal of the true gipsy blood in them, but not without mixture of a broken-down class of apparently British descent; and one of their women was purely Irish. From what I had previously heard about gipsies, I was not prepared for a mixture of this kind; but I found it pretty general, and ascertained that at least one of the ways in which it had taken place was exemplified by the case of the one Irish woman. Her gipsy husband had served as a soldier, and had married her when in the army. I have been always exceedingly curious to see man in his rude elements—to study him as the savage, whether among the degraded classes of our own country, or, as exhibited in the writings of travellers and voyagers, in his aboriginal state; and I now did not hesitate to visit the gipsies, and to spend not unfrequently an hour or two in their company. They at first seemed jealous of me as a spy; but finding me inoffensive, and that I did not bewray counsel, they came at length to recognise me as the "quiet, sickly lad," and to chatter as freely in my presence as in that of the other pitchers with ears, which they used to fabricate out of tin by the dozen and the score, and the manufacture of which, with the making of horn spoons, formed the main branch of business carried on in the cave. I saw in these visits curious glimpses of gipsy life. I could trust only to what I actually witnessed: what was told me could on no occasion be believed; for never were there lies more gross and monstrous than those of the gipsies; but even the lying formed of itself a peculiar trait. I have never heard lying elsewhere that set all probability so utterly at defiance—a consequence, in part, of their recklessly venturing, like unskilful authors, to expatiate in walks of invention over which their experience did not extend. On one occasion an old gipsy woman, after pronouncing my malady consumption, prescribed for me as an infallible remedy, raw parsley minced small and made up into balls with fresh butter; but seeing, I suppose, from my manner, that I lacked the necessary belief in her specific, she went on to say, that she had derived her knowledge of such matters from her mother, one of the most "skeely women that ever lived." Her mother, she said, had once healed a lord's son of a grievous hurt in half a minute, after all the English doctors had shown they could do nothing for him. His eye had been struck out of its socket by a blow, and hung half-way down his cheek; and though the doctors could of course return it to its place, it refused to stick, always falling out again. Her mother, however, at once understood the case; and, making a little slit at the back of the young man's neck, she got hold of the end of a sinew, and pulling in the dislodged orb at a tug, she made all tight by running a knot on the controlling ligament, and so kept the eye in its place. And, save that the young lord continued to squint a little, he was well at once. The peculiar anatomy on which this invention was framed must have, of course, resembled that of a wax-doll with winking eyes; but it did well enough for the woman; and, having no character for truth to maintain, she did not hesitate to build on it. On asking her whether she ever attended church, she at once replied, "O yes, at one time very often. I am the daughter of a minister—a natural daughter, you know: my father was the most powerful preacher in all the south, and I always went to hear him." In about an hour after, however, forgetting her extemporary sally, and the reverend character with which she had insisted her sire, she spoke of him, in another equally palpable invention, as the greatest "king of the gipsies" that the gipsies ever had. Even the children had caught this habit of monstrous mendacity. There was one of the boys of the band, considerably under twelve, who could extemporize lying narratives by the hour, and seemed always delighted to get a listener; and a little girl, younger still, who "lisped in fiction, for the fiction came." There were two things that used to strike me as peculiar among these gipsies—a Hindu type of head, small of size, but with a considerable fulness of forehead, especially along the medial line, in the region, as the phrenologist would perhaps say, of individuality and comparison; and a singular posture assumed by the elderly females of the tribe in squatting before their fires, in which the elbow rested on the knees brought close together, the chin on the palms, and the entire figure (somewhat resembling in attitude a Mexican mummy) assumed an outlandish appearance, that reminded me of some of the more grotesque sculptures of Egypt and Hindustan. The peculiar type of head was derived, I doubt not, from an ancestry originally different from that of the settled races of the country; nor is it impossible that the peculiar position—unlike any I have ever seen Scottish females assume—was also of foreign origin.

I have witnessed scenes among these gipsies, of which the author of the "Jolly Beggars" might have made rare use, but which formed a sort of materials that I lacked the special ability rightly to employ. It was reported on one occasion that a marriage ceremony and wedding were to take place in the cave, and I sauntered the way, in the hope of ascertaining how its inmates contrived to do for themselves what of course no clergyman could venture to do for them—seeing that, of the parties to be united, the bridegroom might have already as many wives living as "Peter Bell," and the bride as many husbands. A gipsy marriage had taken place a few years previous in a cave near Rosemarkie. An old male gipsy, possessed of the rare accomplishment of reading, had half-read, half-spelled the English marriage-service to the young couple, and the ceremony was deemed complete at its close. And I now expected to witness something similar. In an opening in the wood above, I encountered two very drunk gipsies, and saw the first-fruits of the coming merriment. One of the two was an uncouth-looking monster, sallow-skinned, flat-faced, round-shouldered, long and thinly limbed, at least six feet two inches in height, and, from his strange misproportions, he might have passed for seven feet any day, were it not that his trousers, made for a much shorter man, and rising to the middle of his calfless leg, gave him much the appearance of a big boy walking on stilts. The boys of the place called him "Giant Grimbo;" while his companion, a tight dapper little fellow, who always showed off a compact, well-rounded leg in corduroy inexpressibles, they had learned to distinguish as "Billy Breeches." The giant, who carried a bagpipe, had broken down ere I came up with them; and now, sitting on the grass, he was droning out in fitful blasts a diabolical music, to which Billy Breeches was dancing; but, just as I passed, Billy also gave way, after wasting an infinity of exertion in keeping erect; and, falling over the prostrate musician, I could hear the bag groaning out its soul as he pressed against it, in a lengthened melancholious squeal. I found the cave bearing an aspect of more than ordinary picturesqueness. It had its two fires, and its double portion of smoke, that went rolling out in the calm like an inverted river; for it clung close to the roof, as if by a reversed gravitation, and turned its foaming surface downwards. At the one fire an old gipsy woman was engaged in baking oaten cakes; and a great pot, that dispensed through the cave the savoury odour of unlucky poultry out short in the middle of their days, and of hapless hares destroyed without the game licence, depended over the other. An ass, the common property of the tribe, stood meditating in the foreground; two urchins, of about from ten to twelve years a-piece—wretchedly supplied in the article of clothing—for the one, provided with only a pair of tattered trousers, was naked from the waist upwards, and the other, furnished with only a dilapidated jacket, was naked from the waist downwards—were engaged in picking up fuel for the fire, still further in front; a few of the ordinary inmates of the place lounged under cover of the smoke, apparently in a mood not in the least busy; and on a couch of dried fern sat evidently the central figure of the group, a young, sparkling-eyed brunette, more than ordinarily marked by the Hindu peculiarities of head and feature, and attended by a savage-looking fellow of about twenty, dark as a mulatto, and with a profusion of long flexible hair, black as jet, hanging down to his eyes, and clustering about his cheeks and neck. These were, I ascertained, the bride and bridegroom. The bride was engaged in sewing a cap—the bridegroom in watching the progress of the work. I observed that the party, who were less communicative than usual, seemed to regard me in the light of an intruder. An elderly tinker, the father of the bride, grey as a leafless thorn in winter, but still stalwart and strong, sat admiring a bit of spelter of about a pound weight. It was gold, he said, or, as he pronounced the word, "guild," which had been found in an old cairn, and was of immense value, "for it was peer guild and that was the best o' guild;" but if I pleased, he would sell it to me, a very great bargain. I was engaged with some difficulty in declining the offer, when we were interrupted by the sounds of the bagpipe. Giant Grimbo and Billy Breeches had succeeded in regaining their feet, and were seen staggering towards the cave. "Where's the whisky, Billy!" inquired the proprietor of the gold, addressing himself to the man of the small clothes. "Whisky!" said Billy, "ask Grimbo." "Where's the whisky, Grimbo?" reiterated the tinker. "Whisky!" replied Grimbo, "Whisky!" and yet again, after a pause and a hiccup, "Whisky!" "Ye confounded blacks!" said the tinker, springing to his feet with an agility wonderful for an age so advanced as his, "Have you drunk it all? But take that, Grimbo," he added, planting a blow full on the side of the giant's head, which prostrated his vast length along the floor of the cave. "And take that, Billy," he iterated, dealing such another blow to the shorter man, which sent him right athwart his prostrate comrade. And then, turning to me, he remarked with perfect coolness, "That, master, I call smart hitting." "Honest lad," whispered one of the women immediately after, "it will be a reugh time wi' us here the nicht: you had just better be stepping your ways." I had already begun to think so without prompting; and so, taking my leave of the gipsies, I failed being, as I had proposed, one of the witnesses of the wedding.

There is a sort of grotesque humour in scenes of the kind described, that has charms for artists and authors of a particular class—some of them men of broad sympathies and great genius; and hence, through their representations, literary and pictorial, the ludicrous point of view has come to be the conventional and ordinary one. And yet it is a sad enough merriment, after all, that has for its subject a degradation so extreme. I never knew a gipsy that seemed to possess a moral sense—a degree of Pariahism which has been reached by only one other class in the country, and that a small one—the descendants of degraded females in our large towns. An education in Scotland, however secular in its character, always casts a certain amount of enlightenment on the conscience; a home, however humble, whose inmates win their bread by honest industry, has a similar effect; but in the peculiar walks in which for generations there has been no education of any kind, or in which bread has been the wages of infamy, the moral sense seems so wholly obliterated, that there appears to survive nothing in the mind to which the missionary or the moralist can appeal. It seems scarce possible for a man to know even a very little of these classes, without learning, in consequence, to respect honest labour, and even secular knowledge, as at least the second-best things, in their moral bearing and influence, that can exist among a people.

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