Scattering the gloom. Then cease my feeble strain:
When darkness reign'd, thy whisperings soothed my pain—
The pain by weariness and languor bred.
But now my eyes shall greet a lovelier scene
Than fancy pictured: from his dark green bed
Soon shall the orb of day exalt his glorious head.
I found my two uncles, Cousin George, and several other friends and relations, waiting for me on the Cromarty beach; and was soon as happy among them as a man suffering a good deal from debility, but not much from positive pain, could well be. When again, about ten years after this time, I visited the south of Scotland, it was to receive the instructions necessary to qualify me for a bank accountant; and when I revisited it at a still later period, it was to undertake the management of a metropolitan newspaper. In both these instances I mingled with a different sort of persons from those with whom I had come in contact in the years 1824-25. And, in now taking leave of the lower class, I may be permitted to make a few general remarks regarding them.
It is a curious change which has taken place in this country during the last hundred years. Up till the times of the Rebellion of 1745, and a little later, it was its remoter provinces that formed its dangerous portions; and the effective strongholds from which its advance-guards of civilisation and good order gradually gained upon old anarchy and barbarism, were its great towns. We are told by ecclesiastical historians, that in Rome, after the age of Constantine, the term villager (Pagus) came to be regarded as synonymous with heathen, from the circumstance that the worshippers of the gods were then chiefly to be found in remote country places; and we know that in Scotland the Reformation pursued a course exactly resembling that of Christianity itself in the old Roman world: it began in the larger and more influential towns; and it was in the remoter country districts that the displaced religion lingered longest, and found its most efficient champions and allies. Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, St. Andrews, Dundee, were all Protestant, and sent out their well-taught burghers to serve in the army of the Lords of the Congregation, when Huntly and Hamilton were arming their vassals to contend for the obsolete faith. In a later age the accessible Lowlands were imbued with an evangelistic Presbyterianism, when the more mountainous and inaccessible provinces of the country were still in a condition to furnish, in what was known as the Highland Host, a dire instrument of persecution. Even as late as the middle of the last century, "Sabbath," according to a popular writer, "never got aboon the Pass of Killicrankie;" and the Stuarts, exiled for their adherence to Popery, continued to found almost their sole hopes of restoration on the swords of their co-religionists the Highlanders. During the last hundred years, however, this old condition of matters has been strangely reversed; and it is in the great towns that Paganism now chiefly prevails. In at least their lapsed classes—a rapidly increasing proportion of their population—it is those cities of our country which first caught the light of religion and learning, that have become preeminently its dark parts; just, if I may employ the comparison, as it is those portions of the moon which earliest receive the light when she is in her increscent state, and shine like a thread of silver in the deep blue of the heavens, that first become dark when she falls into the wane.
It is mainly during the elapsed half of the present century that this change for the worse has taken place in the large towns of Scotland. In the year 1824 it was greatly less than half accomplished; but it was fast going on; and I saw, partially at least, the processes in operation through which it has been effected. The cities of the country have increased their population during the past fifty years greatly beyond the proportion of its rural districts—a result in part of the revolutions which have taken place in the agricultural system of the Lowlands, and of the clearances of the Highlands; and in part also of that extraordinary development of the manufactures and trade of the kingdom which the last two generations have witnessed. Of the wilder Edinburgh mechanics with whom I formed at this time any acquaintance, less than one-fourth were natives of the place. The others were mere settlers in it, who had removed mostly from country districts and small towns, in which they had been known, each by his own circle of neighbourhood, and had lived, in consequence, under the wholesome influence of public opinion. In Edinburgh—grown too large at the time to permit men to know aught of their neighbours—they were set free from this wholesome influence, and, unless when under the guidance of higher principle, found themselves at liberty to do very much as they pleased. And—with no general opinion to control—cliques and parties of their wilder spirits soon formed in their sheds and workshops a standard of opinion of their own, and found only too effectual means of compelling their weaker comrades to conform to it. And hence a great deal of wild dissipation and profligacy, united, of course, to the inevitable improvidence. And though dissipation and improvidence are quite compatible with intelligence in the first generation, they are sure always to part company from it in the second. The family of the unsteady spendthrift workman is never a well-taught family. It is reared up in ignorance; and, with evil example set before and around it, it almost necessarily takes its place among the lapsed classes. In the third generation the descent is of course still greater and more hopeless than in the second. There is a type of even physical degradation already manifesting itself in some of our large towns, especially among degraded females, which is scarce less marked than that exhibited by the negro, and which both my Edinburgh and Glasgow readers must have often remarked on the respective High Streets of these cities. The features are generally bloated and overcharged, the profile lines usually concave, the complexion coarse and high, and the expression that of a dissipation and sensuality become chronic and inherent. And how this class—constitutionally degraded, and with the moral sense, in most instances, utterly undeveloped and blind—are ever to be reclaimed, it is difficult to see. The immigrant Irish form also a very appreciable element in the degradation of our large towns. They are, however, pagans, not of the new, but of the old type: and are chiefly formidable from the squalid wretchedness of a physical character which they have transferred from their mud cabins into our streets and lanes, and from the course of ruinous competition into which they have entered with the unskilled labourers of the country, and which has had the effect of reducing our lowlier countrymen to a humbler level than they perhaps ever occupied before. Meanwhile, this course of degradation is going on, in all our larger towns, in an ever-increasing ratio; and all that philanthropy and the Churches are doing to counteract it is but as the discharge of a few squirts on a conflagration. It is, I fear, preparing terrible convulsions for the future. When the dangerous classes of a country were located in its remote districts, as in Scotland in the early half of the last century, it was comparatively easy to deal with them: but the sans culottes of Paris in its First Revolution, placed side by side with its executive Government, proved very formidable indeed; nor is it, alas! very improbable that the ever-growing masses of our large towns, broken loose from the sanction of religion and morals, may yet terribly avenge on the upper classes and the Churches of the country the indifferency with which they have been suffered to sink.
I was informed by Cousin George, shortly after my arrival, that my old friend of the Doocot Cave, after keeping shop as a grocer for two years, had given up business, and gone to college to prepare himself for the Church. He had just returned home, added George, after completing his first session, and had expressed a strong desire to meet with me. His mother, too, had joined in the invitation—would I not take tea with them that evening?—and Cousin George had been asked to accompany me. I demurred; but at length set out with George, and, after an interruption in our intercourse of about five years, spent the evening with my old friend. And for years after we were inseparable companions, who, when living in the same neighbourhood, spent together almost every hour not given to private study or inevitable occupation, and who, when separated by distance, exchanged letters enough to fill volumes. We had parted boys, and had now grown men; and for the first few weeks we took stock of each other's acquirements and experiences, and the measure of each other's calibre, with some little curiosity. The mind of my friend had developed rather in a scientific than literary direction. He afterwards carried away the first mathematical prize of his year at college, and the second in natural philosophy; and he had, I now found, great acuteness as a metaphysician, and no inconsiderable acquaintance with the antagonistic positions of the schools of Hume and Reid. On the other hand, my opportunities of observation had been perhaps greater than his, and my acquaintance with men, and even with books, more extensive; and in the interchange of idea which we carried on, both were gainers: he occasionally picked up in our conversations a fact of which he had been previously ignorant; and I, mayhap, learned to look more closely than before at an argument. I introduced him to the Eathie Lias, and assisted him in forming a small collection, which, ere he ultimately dissipated it, contained some curious fossils—among the others, the second specimen of Pterichthys ever found; and he, in turn, was able to give me a few geological notions, which, though quite crude enough—for natural science was not taught at the university which he attended—I found of use in the arrangement of my facts—now become considerable enough to stand in need of those threads of theory without which large accumulations of fact refuse to hang together in the memory. There was one special hypothesis which he had heard broached, and the utter improbability of which I was not yet geologist enough to detect, which for a time filled my whole imagination. It had been said, he told me, that the ancient world, in which my fossils, animal and vegetable, had flourished and decayed—a world greatly older than that before the Flood—had been tenanted by rational, responsible beings, for whom, as for the race to which we ourselves belong, a resurrection and a day of final judgment had awaited. But many thousands of years had elapsed since that day—emphatically the last to the Pre-Adamite race—had come and gone. Of all the accountable creatures that had been summoned to its bar, bone had been gathered to its bone, so that not a vestige of the framework of their bodies occurred in the rocks or soils in which they had been originally inhumed; and, in consequence, only the remains of their irresponsible contemporaries, the inferior animals, and of the vegetable productions of their fields and forests, were now to be found. The dream filled for a time my whole imagination; but though poetry might find ample footing on a hypothesis so suggestive and bold, I need scarce say that it has itself no foundation in science. Man had no responsible predecessor on earth. At the determined time, when his appointed habitation was completely fitted for him, he came and took possession of it; but the old geologic ages had been ages of immaturity—days whose work as a work of promise was "good," but not yet "very good," nor yet ripened for the appearance of a moral agent, whose nature it is to be a fellow-worker with the Creator in relation to even the physical and the material. The planet which we inhabit seems to have been prepared for man, and for man only.