Good claret best keeps out the cauld,
And drives away the winter sune;
It makes a man baith gash and bauld,
And heaves his saul beyond the mune.”
Among drinking-songs it would be hard to beat these lines for vigour. Did he quaff as heartily as he sang? I think not, probably his comrades shouted “pike yer bane” to no purpose (he would have translated it to an English admirer as “no heel taps”) to this little “black-a-vised” man with his nightcap for head-dress, and his humorous, contented, appreciative smile. The learned Thomas Ruddiman, his fellow-townsman and fellow-Jacobite, used to say “The liquor will not go down” when urged to yet deeper potations; perhaps Allan escaped with some such quip, at least there is no touch of dissipation about his life, nay, a well-founded reputation for honest, continuous, and prosperous industry. In the end he built that famous house on the Castle Hill, called, from its quaint shape, the “Goose Pie.” “Indeed, Allan, now that I see you in it I think the term is very properly applied,” said Lord Elibank. The joke was obvious and inevitable, but for all that rather pointless, unless it be that Ramsay affected a little folly now and then to escape envy or a too pressing hospitality. However, he lived reputably, died a prosperous citizen, and his is one of the statues you see to-day in the Princes Street Gardens.
Although Buchanan was one of the greatest scholars of his time in Europe, he was not the founder of a race in minute points of classical scholarship, especially in correct quantities of Latin syllables. Scotland was long lacking, perhaps the reason was the want of rich endowments, but Dr. Archibald Pitcairne (1652-1713), the physician, the Jacobite, and the scholar, had another reason: “If it had not been for the stupid Presbyterianism we should have been as good as the English at longs and shorts.” Oddly enough, the same complaint was echoed within the national Zion itself. Dalzel, Professor of Greek and Clerk to the General Assembly, was, according to Sydney Smith, heard to declare, “If it had not been for that Solemn League and Covenant we should have made as good longs and shorts as they.” Before I pass from Pitcairne I quote a ludicrous story of which he is the hero. His sceptical proclivities were well known in Edinburgh, and he was rarely seen inside a church. He was driven there, however, on one occasion by a shower of rain. The audience was thin, the sermon commonplace, but the preacher wept copiously and, as it seemed to Pitcairne, irrelevantly. He turned to the only other occupant of the pew, a stolid-visaged countryman, and whispered, “What the deevil gars the man greet?” “You would maybe greet yoursel’,” was the solemn answer, “if ye was up there and had as little to say.”
I pass from one sceptic to another—one might say from one age to another. Edinburgh, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, according to Smollett’s famous phrase, was a “hotbed of genius.” When Amyot, the King’s dentist, was in Edinburgh he said, as he stood at the Cross, that he could any minute take fifty men of genius by the hand. Of this distinguished company David Hume was the chief. To what extent this historian, philosopher, sceptic, is now read, we need not inquire; he profoundly influenced European thought, and gave a system of religious philosophy the deadliest blow it ever received. He was a prominent and interesting figure, and many and various are the legends about him. What were his real religious beliefs, if he had any, remains uncertain. He was hand in glove with “Jupiter” Carlyle, Principal Robertson, Dr. Hugh Blair, and other leading moderates. They thought his scepticism was largely pretence, mere intellectual bounce, so to speak; they girded at his unreasonable departure from the normal, and indeed Carlyle takes every opportunity of thrusting at him on this account. The Edinburgh folk regarded him with solemn horror. The mother of Adam, the architect, who was also aunt to Principal Robertson, had much to say against the ‘atheist,’ whom she had never seen. Her son played her a trick. Hume was asked to the house and set down beside her. She declared “the large jolly man who sat next me was the most agreeable of them all.” “He was the very atheist, mother,” said the son, “that you were so much afraid of.” “Oh,” replied the lady, “bring him here as much as you please, for he is the most innocent, agreeable, facetious man I ever met with.” His scepticism was subject for his friends’ wit and his own. He heard Carlyle preach in Athelstaneford Church. “I did not think that such heathen morality would have passed in East Lothian.” One day when he sat in the Poker Club it was mentioned that a clerk of Sir William Forbes, the banker, had bolted with £900. When he was taken, there was found in one pocket Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature and in the other Boston’s Fourfold State of Man, this latter being a work of evangelical theology. His moderate friends presently suggested that no man’s morality could hold out against the combination. Dr. Jardine of the Tron Kirk vigorously argued with him on various points of theology, suggested by Hume’s Natural History of Religion. His friend, like most folk in Edinburgh, lived in a flat off a steep turnpike stair, down which Hume fell one night in the darkness. Jardine got a candle and helped the panting philosopher to his feet. Your old Edinburgh citizen never could resist the chance of a cutting remark. The divine was no exception. “Davy, I have often tell’t ye that ‘natural licht’ is no’ sufficient.” Like Socrates, he hid his wit under an appearance of simplicity. His own mother’s opinion of him was: “Davy’s a fine, good-natured crater, but uncommon wake-minded.” He had his weaknesses, undoubtedly. Lord Saltoun said to him, referring to his credulity, “David, man, you’ll believe onything except the Bible,” but like other Scotsmen of his time he did not believe overmuch in Shakespeare. In 1757 he thus addresses the author of Douglas: “You possess the true theatrical genius of Shakespeare and Otway, refined from the barbarisms of the one, and the licentiousness of the other.” Put beside this Burns’s famous and fatuous line: “Here Douglas forms wild Shakespeare into plan,” and what can you do but shudder? When young, he had paid his court to a lady of fashion, and had met with scant courtesy. He was told afterwards that she had changed her mind. “So have I,” said the philosopher. On another occasion he was more gallant. Crossing the Firth in a gale he said to Lady Wallace, who was in the boat, that they would soon be food for the fishes. “Will they eat you or me?” said the lady. “Ah,” was the answer, “those that are gluttons will undoubtedly fall foul of me, but the epicure will attack your ladyship.” David, like the fishes he described, was a bit of an epicure of the simplest kind. He would sup with his moderate friends in Johnny Dowie’s tavern in Libberton’s Wynd. On the table lay his huge door-key, wherewith his servant, Peggy, had been careful to provide him that she might not have to rise to let him in. After all, the friends did not sit very late, and the supper was some simple Scots dish—haddock, or tripe, or fluke, or pies, or it might be trout from the Nor’ Loch, for Dowie’s was famous for these little dainties. But the talk! Would you match it in modern Edinburgh with all its pomp and wealth? I trow not—perhaps not even in mightier London.
The story is threadbare of how he was stuck in a bog under the Castle rock, and was only helped out by a passing Edinburgh dame on condition that he would say the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed. More witty and more probable, though perhaps as well known, is the following: In the last years of his life he deserted the Old Town for the New. He had a house at the corner of St. Andrew Square, in a street as yet anonymous. “St. David Street” chalked up a witty young lady, Miss Nancy Ord, daughter of Chief Baron Ord, and St. David Street it is to this day. His servant, in a state of indignation, brought him the news. “Never mind, lassie, many a better man has been made a saint without knowing it,” said the placid philosopher. A female member of a narrow sect called upon him near the end with an alleged message from Heaven. “This is an important matter. Madam, we must take it with deliberation. Perhaps you had better get a little temporal refreshment before you begin.—Lassie, bring this young lady a glass of wine.” As she drank, he in his turn questioned, and found that the husband was a tallow-chandler. How fortunate, for he was out of candles! He gave an order, the woman forgot the message, and rushed off to fulfil it. Hume, you fancy, had a quiet chuckle at his happy release. He was a great friend of Mrs. Mure, wife of Baron Mure, and was a frequent visitor at their house at Abbeyhill, near Holyrood. On his death-bed he sent to bid her good-bye. He gave her his History of England. “O, Dauvid, that’s a book ye may weel be proud o’! but before ye dee ye should burn a’ yer wee bookies,” to which the philosopher, with difficulty raising himself on his arms, was only able to reply with some little show of vehemence, “What for should I burn a’ my wee bookies?” But he was too weak to argue such points; he pressed the hand of his old friend as she rose to depart. When his time came he went quietly, contentedly, even gladly, regretted by saint and sceptic alike. If Carlyle girded at him, his intimate friend, Adam Smith, who might almost dispute his claim to mental eminence, pictured him forth in those days as the perfectly wise man, so far as human imperfections allowed. The piety or caution of his friends made them watch the grave for some eight nights after the burial. The vigil began at eight o’clock, when a pistol was fired, and candles in a lanthorn were placed on the grave and tended from time to time. Some violation was feared, for a wild legend of Satanic agency had flashed on the instant through the town. Hume has no monument in Edinburgh, crowded as she is with statues of lesser folk; but the accident of position and architecture has in this, as in other cases, produced a striking if undesigned result. From one cause or another the valley is deeper than of yore, and the simple round tower that marks Hume’s grave in the Calton burying-ground crowns a half-natural, half-artificial precipice. It is seen with effect from various points: thus you cannot miss it as you cross the North Bridge. Some memory of this great thinker still projects itself into the trivial events of the modern Edinburgh day.
Of Hume’s friend and companion, Adam Smith, there are various anecdotes, more or less pointed, bearing on his oblivious or maybe contemptuous indifference to the ordinary things of life. The best and best known tells how, as he went with shuffling gait and vacant look, a Musselburgh fishwife stared at him in amazement. “Hech, and he is weel put on tae.” It seemed to her a pity that so well-dressed a simpleton was not better looked after. No amount of learning helps you in a crowded street. The wisdom of the ancients reports that Thales, wrapt in contemplation of the stars, walked into a well and thus ended. Adam Smith’s grave is in a dark corner of the Canongate Churchyard; it is by no means so prominent as Hume’s, nay, it takes some searching to discover. When I saw it last I found it neglected and unvisited alike by economic friends and foes.
Among Hume’s intimate cronies was Dr. Carlyle of Inveresk, whose Autobiography preserves for us the best record of the men of his time. “The grandest demigod I ever saw,” says Sir Walter Scott, “commonly called Jupiter Carlyle, from having sat more than once for the King of gods and men to Gavin Hamilton, and a shrewd, clever old carle he was, no doubt, but no more a poet than his precentor.” This last is apropos of some rhyming of Carlyle’s as bad as rhymes can possibly be. In 1758 Carlyle and Principal Robertson and John Home were together in London; they went down to Portsmouth and aboard the Ramilies, the warship in the harbour, where was Lieut. Nelson, a cousin of Robertson’s. The honest sailor expressed his astonishment in deliciously comical terms: “God preserve us! what has brought the Presbytery of Edinburgh here? for damme me if there is not Willy Robertson, Sandie Carlyle, and John Home come on board.” He soon had them down in the cabin, however, and treated them to white wine and salt beef. A jolly meal, you believe, for divines or sceptics, philosophers or men of letters or business, those old Edinburgh folk had a common and keen enjoyment of life. Certainly Carlyle had. Dr. Lindsay Alexander of Augustine Church, Edinburgh, remembered as a child hearing one of the servants say of this divine, “There he gaed, dacent man, as steady as a wa’ after his ain share o’ five bottles o’ port.” Home by this time was no longer a minister of the Church. He had thrown up his living in the previous year on account of the famous row about the once famous tragedy of Douglas. He still had a hankering after the General Assembly, where, if he could no longer sit as teaching elder, he might as ruling elder, because he was Conservator of Scots privileges at Campvere, but he was something else; he was lieutenant in the Duke of Buccleuch’s Fencibles, and as such had a right to attire himself in a gorgeous uniform, and it was so incongruously adorned that he took his seat in that reverend house. The country ministers stared with all their eyes, and one of them exclaimed, “Sure, that is John Home the poet! What is the meaning of that dress?” “Oh,” said Mr. Robert Walker of Edinburgh, “it is only the farce after the play.”