“Edinburgh, Nov. 19.—I have been four days at Winton with dear old Lady Ruthven. She is now blind as well as deaf, and very helpless, but she is still a loving centre of beautiful and unstinted beneficence. She says, ‘It is a great trial, a very great trial, neither to see nor hear, but it is astonishing the amount of time it gives one for good thoughts. I just know fifty chapters of the Bible by heart, and when I say them to myself in the night, it soothes and quiets me, however great the pain and restlessness. It is often a little trial to me—the unsatisfied longing I have to know just a little more, just something of the beyond. If I could only find out if my husband and my sister knew about me. There is a little poem I often think of—
‘The soul’s dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made.’[234]
Perhaps it will be so with me; but soon I shall know all, and meantime God is very good. Since my last great illness I have not been able for it, but till then I just always went on reading prayers to my servants, that is, I could not really read, you know, but I just said a chapter out of my own remembrance, and then I prayed as I felt we needed.’
“Lady Ruthven can repeat whole cantos of Milton and other poets, and her peculiar voice does not spoil them; rather, when one remembers her great age and goodness, it adds an indescribable pathos. She likes to be read to down her trumpet, which is not easy; and the person she hears best thus is George the under-footman; but, as she says, she ‘has formidable rivals in lamps.’
“One of her occupations is feeding her pheasants with bread and milk at the castle door. ‘Ah! I see you are early accustoming them to bread sauce,’ said Mr. Reeve of the Edinburgh Review, when he saw her thus employed.
“One day we drove to Yester (Lord Tweeddale’s), only remarkable for its pretty wooded approach. In leaving Lady Ruthven, one could not but feel one left her for the last time, and what for her the change—which at ninety must be so near—will be, from blindness, deafness, helplessness, after her entirely noble and holy life—to light, and hearing, and power.”
“Edinburgh, Nov. 20.—A visit to the Robert Shaw Stewarts has given me a pleasant glimpse of Edinburgh society.
“Certainly Edinburgh is gloriously beautiful, but never was there a city so richly endowed by Nature contaminated by such abject and ludicrous public monuments!—the enormous monument of Walter Scott, a ludicrous copy in stone of the Bishop’s throne at Exeter: the sort of lighthouse which closes Princes Street (a monument to Lord Nelson, I was told): the statue of the Duke of Wellington, who has lost his hat in a perfectly futile struggle with his restive horse, which is standing on its tail:—worst of all, the figure of the Prince Consort (in Charlotte Square), being adorned by specimens of each class of society, the most ridiculous of all being a peer and peeress in their robes.
“This morning I drew in the Grassmarket. The crowd was most tiresome till it took the idea that I was Sir Noel Paton, the popular Edinburgh artist. I tacitly encouraged the idea, when I found the result was--‘Dinna ye see it’s Sir Noel Paton hissel drawing the cassel? then let Sir Noel see, mon.’
“In the afternoon I went with Mrs. Stewart to the exhibition of Raeburn’s pictures—nothing but Raeburns, though many vast rooms are filled with them; and deeply interesting it is thus not only to follow one great, too little appreciated, painter through life, but to be introduced to the whole world of his illustrious contemporaries. Raeburn’s pictures may be slight, and may have faults of colouring, and even of drawing, but his men never fail to be gentlemen and his women are always ladies—very pleasant people too generally, and people it is delightful to live with. ‘A great portrait should be liker than the original,’ wrote Coleridge. The noblest portrait here seemed to me to be that of Alexander Adam, Rector of the High School, a serious and holy, but engaging old man. Lady Mackenzie of Coul is a sweet, refined, and beautiful woman. As a rule, the old men’s portraits are the best—their shaggy eyebrows, their vigorous old age, the sharp shadows of their chins, so vividly and carefully drawn, and all the delicacies of expression centred in the eyes. There were numbers of such old men’s portraits, in which the dead grandfather must still often seem to share the inner family life of many a quiet country-house. It shows the extraordinary change in the value popular feeling places upon art when one recollects that the works of Watts and Millais cost from £2000 to £3000, while these pictures—far more pleasing, far more like those they represent, and, though more sketchy, cleverer and more original—used to cost only £10.”