MRS. ALISON COCKBURN
From a Photograph
She heard Colonel Reid (afterwards General Reid and the founder of the chair of Music in the University, where the annual Reid concerts perpetuate his name) play on the flute. “It thrills to your very heart, it speaks all languages, it comes from the heart to the heart. I never could have conceived, it had a dying fall. I can think of nothing but that flute.” Mrs. Cockburn saw Sir Walter Scott when he was six, and was astonished at his precocity. He described her as “a virtuoso like myself,” and defined a virtuoso as “one who wishes and will know everything.”
The other and superior set of The Flowers of the Forest was written by Miss Jean Elliot, who lived from 1727 till 1805. The story is that she was the last Edinburgh lady who kept a private sedan chair in her “lobby.” In this she was borne through the town by the last of the caddies. The honour of the last sedan chair is likewise claimed for Lady Don who lived in George Square; probably there were two “lasts.” Those Edinburgh aristocratic lady writers had many points in common; they mainly got fame by one song, they made a dead secret of authorship, half because they were shy, half because they were proud. Caroline Baroness Nairne was more prolific than the others, for The Land of the Leal, Caller Herrin’ (the refrain to which was caught from the chimes of St. Giles’), The Auld Hoose, and John Tod almost reach the high level of masterpieces, but she was as determined as the others to keep it dark. Her very husband did not know she was an authoress; she wrote as Mrs. Bogan of Bogan. In another direction she was rather too daring. She was one of a committee of ladies who proposed to inflict a bowdlerised Burns on the Scots nation. An emasculated Jolly Beggars had made strange reading, but the project fell through.
Lady Anne Barnard, one of the Lindsays of Balcarres, was another Edinburgh poetess. She is known by her one song, indeed only by a fragment of it, for the continuation or second part of Auld Robin Gray is anti-climax, fortunately so bad, that it has well-nigh dropped from memory. The song had its origin at Balcarres. There was an old Scots ditty beginning, “The bridegroom grat when the sun gaed doon.” It was lewd and witty, but the air inspired the words to the gifted authoress. She heard the song from Sophy Johnstone—commonly called “Suff” or “the Suff,” in the words of Mrs. Cockburn—surely the oddest figure among the ladies of old Edinburgh. Part nature, part training, or rather the want of it, exaggerated in her the bluntness and roughness of those old dames. She was daughter of the coarse, drunken Laird of Hilton. One day after dinner he maintained, in his cups, that education was rubbish, and that his daughter should be brought up without any. He stuck to this: she was called in jest the “natural” child of Hilton, and came to pass as such in the less proper sense of the word. She learned to read and write from the butler, and she taught herself to shoe a horse and do an artisan’s work. She played the fiddle, fought the stable boys, swore like a trooper, dressed in a jockey coat, walked like a man, sang in a voice that seemed a man’s, and was believed by half Edinburgh to be a man in disguise. She had strong affections and strong hates, she had great talent for mimicry, which made her many enemies, was inclined to be sceptical though not without misgivings and fears. She came to pay a visit to Balcarres, and stayed there for thirteen years. She had a choice collection of old Scots songs. One lingered in Sir Walter Scott’s memory:
“Eh,” quo’ the Tod, “it’s a braw, bricht nicht,
The wind’s i’ the wast and the mune shines bricht.”
She gave her opinion freely. When ill-pleased her dark wrinkled face looked darker, and the hard lines about her mouth grew harder, as she planted her two big feet well out, and murmured in a deep bass voice, “Surely that’s great nonsense.” One evening at Mrs. Cockburn’s in Crichton Street, the feet of Ann Scott, Sir Walter’s sister, touched by accident the toes of the irascible Suff, who retorted with a good kick. “What is the lassie wabster, wabster, wabstering that gait for?” she growled. When she was an old woman, Dr. Gregory said she must abstain from animal food unless she wished to die. “Dee, Doctor! odd, I’m thinking they’ve forgotten an auld wife like me up yonder.” But all her gaiety vanished near the end. From poverty or avarice she half starved herself. The younger generation of the Balcarres children brought tit-bits to her garret every Sunday. “What hae ye brocht? What hae ye brocht?” she would snap out greedily.
MISS JEAN ELLIOT
From a Sepia Drawing
And so the curtain falls on this strange figure of old Edinburgh.