But political and professional ambitions carried Mackenzie away from pure literature into dark and tortuous paths. His work on the Criminal Law of Scotland has considerable literary as well as great legal merit; his observations on the persecution of witches are of great interest; and the worst of his "Memoirs of the Affairs of Scotland" is the fragmentary condition of the manuscript. Mackenzie was the cause of the foundation of the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh: after the Revolution of 1688 he retired to Oxford, where he was hospitably welcomed.
The Rev. Robert Wodrow (1679-1734) a country clergyman, would gladly have taken all knowledge for his province; his was a most inquiring mind, and perhaps no man so assiduous in his parochial duties ever left behind him so huge a mass of unpublished manuscript. His great work is "The History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland from the Restoration to the Revolution". He was, of course, a partisan, but an honest partisan; he consulted all accessible documents, and often printed them at full length; he occasionally makes errors in the direction of his bias, but never makes them consciously. He neglects not one of the humblest of the sufferers, and, as he did not belong to the extreme left of the Covenanting party, he was savagely criticized by its members. He is a most serviceable writer, and his "Analecta, or Materials for a History of Remarkable Providences" (published long after his death), is a delightful collection of ghost-stories, and tales of witches. The evidence for the ghosts is extremely frail. Wodrow was in frequent correspondence with an American divine, as simple, learned, and credulous as himself, the Rev. Cotton Mather. Wodrow, after 1714, saw the beginnings of "Latitudinarianism," or "Moderatism," in the Kirk: young ministers began to study the "Characteristics" of that polite philosopher, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713); to doubt whether virtuous heathens and Catholics must inevitably be excluded from salvation; to wander from the Calvinism of John Knox; to aim at rhetorical airs and graces; and to regard the chief end of religion as the promotion of virtue. These Moderates despised "enthusiasm," and while the fiercer Presbyterian leaders separated themselves from the Kirk, the abler Moderates attempted, sometimes with much success, to distinguish themselves in secular studies, and took part in secular amusements, being patrons of the stage.
To understand the new Georgian revival of polite letters among the clergy and laity of Scotland, we should study the writings and life of Professor Francis Hutcheson of Glasgow University (1694-1746) a follower of Shaftesbury, and a writer on æsthetics and on moral philosophy. But for a true, lively, and Humorous picture of ministers who loved society, the stage, and the company of the wits, in London and in Edinburgh, we should read the autobiography, posthumously published, of the Rev. Dr. Alexander Carlyle, minister of Inveresk (1722-1805). In youth he had revelled and drunk deep with the wicked Lord Lovat, and that stern Presbyterian, dear to Wodrow, Lord Grange, well remembered for his energy in packing off his termagant wife to seclusion on the Isle of St. Kilda. Carlyle had seen the rout of Sir John Cope at Prestonpans; he had amazed Garrick, at his villa on the Thames, by the accuracy of his driving at golf; he had championed his brother minister, John Home, when Home offended the Kirk by writing the once famous play of "Douglas"; and he lived to be the acquaintance of Sir Walter Scott. Carlyle, called "Jupiter Carlyle" from his noble presence, knew every one worth knowing in Scotland; and if we think him a kind of good-humoured pagan, he is nevertheless reported to have been an excellent parish minister. "For human pleasure" in the reading, the memoirs of this most unspiritual of divines are the best thing that the literary revival in Scotland has bequeathed to us. Very few Scottish writers had paid attention to the graces of composition, except in the period of the tenure by James I of the English Crown, and in the cases of Sir George Mackenzie and Archbishop Leighton during the Restoration. But the papers of Addison and Steele, "The Tatler" and "The Spectator," went everywhere, were eagerly read in Scotland, and provoked imitation in the matter of style. Literary clubs met in Edinburgh taverns: and men corresponded with Berkeley on philosophical subjects, as Mackenzie had corresponded on literature with John Evelyn. In addition to the literary clubs a centre of interest in poetry and prose was the shop of Allan Ramsay (1686-1758) who passed from the trade of a wigmaker to that of a bookseller. In 1724 he published "The Evergreen," a collection of old Scots verses from the manuscript made by George Bannatyne (1545-1608) during a visitation of the plague (1568).[1] Ramsay's "Tea-table Miscellany" (1724-1727) was a medley of old Scots and new songs and lyrics: the new made by Ramsay and his disciples to be sung to the old Scots tunes. The old verses were the basis of the new, which are a mixture of the simple ancient matter with that of the eighteenth century. Hamilton of Gilbertfield, who, by modernizing Blind Harry's "Wallace," produced a book very inspiring to Burns, was a contemporary of Ramsay: they wrote to each other "epistles" in verse, in the manner continued by Burns. Ramsay's "Gentle Shepherd" (1725) contains matter more true to Scottish shepherd life than is common in pastoral poetry: and Ramsay's elegies, in Burns's favourite metre, on such personages as Maggy Johnstoun, an ale-wife, were models for Fergusson and Burns. Allan was no friend of the more rigid Presbyterian party, and once, at least, in the pretty song of "The Blackbird," he showed the colours of the Jacobite. Another poet, Hamilton of Bangour (1704-1754) was actually out with Prince Charles in 1745; his slim volume of 1744, "Poems on Several Occasions," contains little that dwells in the memory except the beautiful and melancholy song of Yarrow,
Busk ye, busk ye, my bonny, bonny Bride.
In this little renaissance, whose poets always had their eyes on the romantic past, Lady Wardlaw (1677-1727) produced what was taken for an old ballad, "Hardyknute," the first, Scott said, that he ever learned, the last that he would ever forget. But it needed "a poetic child" to find so much merit in "Hardyknute". Ladies like Lady Grizel Baillie (1665-1746) with "Were na my heart licht I wad dee," and Miss Jean Elliot of Minto, with "The Flowers of the Forest," a lament for Flodden, were surpassed in the number, and equalled in the merit of their songs by Lady Nairne (an Oliphant of Gask, and a hereditary Jacobite) (1766-1845). She was the best of the known and named poets of the Cause which has had so many singers; and her strains were continued by the last of these lady minstrels and musicians, Lady John Scott, a Spottiswoode (1810-1900). The new day was dawning in Scotland, thus early in the eighteenth century, and the birds were singing prelusive to Burns, Scott, and Hogg. Indeed, Lady Nairne's "Will ye no come back again?" and "The Auld House," and "Wi' a Hundred Pipers and a,'" and "The Land o' the Leal," are far better remembered than the poems of Robert Fergusson (1750-1774) who died so young, the harmless, hapless Villon of St. Andrews and Edinburgh, and, in certain poems, the model of Burns.
These poets were not more determined to be Scots (though Ramsay and Fergusson also wrote in English) than the wits who attempted prose were set on speaking English with the English accent, and on avoiding Scotticisms. The Select Society (1754) was a debating society whose members were taught to speak English by an Irishman, the father of the famous author of "The School for Scandal". The results were matter of admiration. They produced an "Edinburgh Review" which survived into two numbers: it had intended to appear every six months, but expired, though Edinburgh was full of literati, including the Rev. Hugh Blair, a once celebrated preacher, and Hume's friend, the Rev. John Home (1722-1808) whose tragedy, "Douglas," "gave the clergy cause for speculation". Hume declared that Home possessed "the true theatric genius of Shakespeare and Otway, refined from the unhappy barbarism of the one, and licentiousness of the other". Posterity has not confirmed Hume's verdict, but Home is the one "mellow glory" of the Scottish stage.
The Rev. Adam Ferguson (1723-1816), as chaplain of the Black Watch, went in at Fontenoy with the claymore. "Remember your commission, Sir," shouted his colonel. "D— my commission, Sir!" shouted the chaplain. His "History of Margaret, otherwise called Sister Peg" (1760), is a humorous and valuable sketch of the antipathy between England and Scotland in 1760-1770. These men, and many others,—Lord Kames, Lord Monboddo, Lord Hailes, a serviceable critical historian, Beattie, the poet of "The Minstrel," and the satirist of the dead Churchill,—kept alive the interest in all forms of literature. The great men of the time, to be treated in a later chapter, alas! fall under the censure of Charles Lamb, that their "books are no books," but Charles's sympathy with Scotland was confessedly imperfect.
Out of this medley of new and old, of the vernacular Scots with the affected English of Edinburgh, out of the ancient ballads and old frolicsome rural ditties, arose the style of Burns.
Robert Burns.