“Hey, the haggis o’ Dunbar,
Fatharalinkum feedle;
Mony better, few waur,
Fatharalinkum feedle.”
Above all, we must remember how many attached friends Kirkpatrick Sharpe had drawn around him in the course of his life, and how all that survived of the earliest of these kept up their liking for him, and an affectionate intercourse with him, to the last. In September 1831, when the dying Scott was departing on his final journey to the Mediterranean in quest of health, almost the last friend he wrote to was his “Dear Charles”: and the letter contained these words—“I should like to have shaken hands with you, as there are few I regret so much to part with. But it will not be. I will keep my eyes dry if possible, and therefore content myself with bidding you a long, perhaps an eternal, farewell.” That, surely, is a testimony by itself. All in all, then, need we wonder at the rumour that there are some persons in Edinburgh now so peculiarly tempered, or so ill-satisfied with their present mercies, that they would be willing to exchange any three or four of those whom they are pleased to characterise as the more insipid present celebrities of the town for the re-apparition among us of that crabbed old gentleman who was to be seen forty years ago in the Edinburgh streets, with his light-brown wig, faded blue surtout, ribbon-tied pumps, and green silk umbrella?
JOHN HILL BURTON[[49]]
Dr. Hill Burton used to be a little annoyed by the praises bestowed on him for his Book-Hunter. He had written books far more laborious and important, he thought; and why should the public, why should his own friends even, be always paying him such special compliments on account of a mere piece of literary bye-play?
The feeling was natural on Dr. Burton’s part; and it is certainly not to this casual production of his, published originally in 1862, that one would now point as the most solid exhibition of his powers. Yet the public were not wrong in their extraordinary fondness for The Book-Hunter. Not only was it a book of deliciously amusing matter, such as one prays for on a dull evening or a rainy day; but it was pervaded, in an unusual degree, by the flavour of the author’s own peculiar character. If not the most valuable of Dr. Burton’s writings, it is the most thoroughly Burtonian. Hence a real propriety in the form of the present republication. If any one of Dr. Burton’s books was to be converted, by the care of his publishers, into a memorial of himself, and set forth, therefore, in all the beauties of quarto size, thick ribbed paper, wide margins, and gilt binding, and with the accompaniments of a portrait, illustrative vignettes, and a prefixed biography, which could it be but The Book-Hunter? Messrs. Blackwood have done well in perceiving this, and in making reaccessible such a famous book about books, unfortunately so long out of print, in a new edition devised so expressly, in the first place, for book-lovers of very æsthetic tastes and correspondingly superior purses.
No need at this time of day to revert to the book itself for description of the richly humorous variety of its contents, or for specification of the parts that are most fascinating and memorable. No need either to point out the errors into which the author sometimes fell in his hurry, and some of which remain in the present text,—as, for example, the extraordinary blunder of making Gilbert Rule “the founder and first Principal of the University of Edinburgh.” We prefer attending to what is really the most important, as well as the most charming, feature of distinction between this new edition of The Book-Hunter and the older and smaller editions. Biographic sketches of Dr. Burton, some of them in the shape of obituary notices, have already made the public acquainted with the main facts of his life; but there has been no such full, intimate, or interesting account of him as that furnished in the “Memoir of the Author” which opens the present volume, and bears the signature of his widow, “Katharine Burton.” Consisting of no fewer than 104 pages, and sketching the whole life with sufficient continuity, and with a pleasant abundance of personal detail, it is exactly the kind of biographical introduction that one would desire to see prefixed to the most characteristic work, or to the collected works, of any deceased author. We should have been grateful for so much information about Dr. Burton and his habits in whatever form it had been communicated; but the form itself deserves praise. Although there has been evidence of Mrs. Burton’s literary ability and skill in former writings of hers, in none of them has she been more successful than in this. The style is easy; and the narrative is managed throughout with an admirable combination of fidelity to fact, dutiful affection for the subject, and artistic perception of what is historically significant, or racy, or picturesque. One is struck, also, by the frank candour of the writer, her abstinence from exaggeration, her resolution that Dr. Burton should be seen in her pages exactly as he was. In two or three passages this honesty of the writer, so rare in biographies by relatives, comes upon the reader with the effect of a surprise.
In the first portion of the Memoir we are with young Burton in Aberdeen, where he was born in 1809, and where he mainly resided till 1830. We see him in his boyhood and early youth, growing up hardily among the quaint and old-fashioned domesticities of his maternal relatives, the Patons of Grandholm, or moving about between the two almost contiguous towns, the main Aberdeen and the smaller Old Aberdeen, that share the mouths of the Dee and the Don. By-the-bye, why does Mrs. Burton lavish all her affection on Old Aberdeen, calling it “a sweet, still, little place,” and dilating on the charms of its college and cathedral and antique streets, while she has nothing more to say for New Aberdeen than that it is “a highly prosperous commercial city, as utterly devoid of beauty or interest as any city under the sun”? About Old Aberdeen all will agree with her; but who that really knows the Granite City will agree with her about the New? Is it nothing to be able to walk along the whole length of her noble Union Street, whether on fair summer mornings, when the sun is shining, or again in the frosty winter nights, when the eye is held by the undulating perspective of the lamps, and the very houses glitter keenly in the starlight, and the aurora borealis is seen dancing at its best in the northward sky over the chasm from Union Bridge? Is it nothing to saunter down by the bustling quays and ship-yards, and thence to the extreme of the harbour, where the great out-jutting pier of stonework commands the miles of breakers and of sandy beach to the left, and spikes the wrath of the German Ocean?