The school of Cromarty produced, like most of the other schools of the kingdom, its Latinists who caught fish and made shoes; and it is not much more than thirty years since the race became finally extinct. I have heard stories of an old house-painter of the place, who, having survived most of his schoolfellows and contemporaries, used to regret, among his other vanished pleasures, the pleasure he could once derive from an inexhaustible fund of Latin quotation, which the ignorance of a younger generation had rendered of little more value to him than the paper-money of an insolvent bank; and I have already referred to an old cabinetmaker whom I remember, who was in the practice, when his sight began to fail him, of carrying his Latin New Testament with him to church, as it chanced to be printed in a clearer type than any of his English ones. It is said, too, of a learned fisherman of the reign of Queen Anne, that when employed one day among his tackle, he was accosted in Latin by the proprietor of Cromarty, who, accompanied by two gentlemen from England, was sauntering along the shore, and that, to the surprise of the strangers, he replied with no little fluency in the same language.
The old castle rose, I have said, direct in front of the old school, about three hundred yards away; and, tall itself, and elevated by the green hill on which it stood, it formed, with all its timeworn turrets, and all its mouldering bartisans, a formidable spectre of the past. Little thought the proud hereditary sheriffs of the stern old tower, that the humble building at the foot of the hill was a masked battery raised against their authority, which was to burst open their dungeon door and to beat down their gallows. But a very formidable battery it proved. There is a class of nature’s aristocracy that has but to arise from among the people, in order that the people may become influential and free; and the lowly old school did its part in separating from the general mass its due proportion of these, as mercury separates gold from the pulverized rock in which it is contained. If, in passing along the streets, we see a handsomer domicile than the low tenements around it, we may safely conclude that the builder spent his boyhood in the old school; that if he went out to some of the colonies, he carried with him as his stock in trade a knowledge of figures and the pen, and returned with both that and a few thousands on which to employ it; or if his inclination led him to sea, that he became, through his superior intelligence, the commander of a vessel; if to London, that he rose into wealth as a merchant; or if he remained at home, that he gained a competency as a shopkeeper, general trader, or master mechanic. I am not making too much of my subject when I affirm, that the little thatched hovel at the foot of the Castle-hill gave merchants to the Exchange, ministers to the Church, physicians to the Faculty, professors to Colleges, and members to Parliament.
DR. HOSSACK.
One of the pupils reared within its walls—the son of old Clerk Davidson, a humble subordinate of the hereditary sheriff—became a wealthy London merchant, and, after establishing in the city a respectable firm, which still exists, represented his native county in Parliament. Another of its boys, the late Mr. William Forsyth, to whom I have already had occasion to refer, revived the sinking trade of the town; and, though the son of a man who had once worked as a mechanic, he took his well-merited place among the aristocracy of the district, not less from the high tone of his character, and the liberality of his views and sentiments, than from the extent of his resources. Yet another of its boys, a Mr. James Ross, entered life as a common sailor, and, after rising by his professional skill to a command in the navy, published a work on the management of nautical affairs, which attracted a good deal of notice at the time among the class to which it was specially addressed. The late Dr. James Robertson, librarian of the University of Edinburgh, and its Professor of the Oriental Tongues, was a native of Cromarty, of humble parentage, and experienced his first stirrings of scholastic ambition in the old school. He was the author of a Hebrew grammar, to which the self-taught linguist, Dr. Alexander Murray, owed, as he tells us in his interesting Autobiography, his first introduction to Hebrew; and we learn from Boswell, in his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, that Dr. Johnson, when in Edinburgh, “was much pleased with the College library, and with the conversation of Dr. James Robertson, the librarian.” Provost Hossack of Inverness, whom the author of the “Jacobite Memoirs” terms, in relating his spirited remonstrance with the Duke of Cumberland in behalf of the conquered rebels, “a man of humanity, and the Sir Robert Walpole of Inverness, under the direction of President Forbes,” was also a Cromarty man, the child of seafaring parents, and received the education through which he rose, in its school. And his namesake and contemporary, Dr. Hossack of Greenwich, one of the first physicians of his time, was likewise a native of Cromarty—not of the town, however, but of the landward part of the parish; and owed his first knowledge of letters to the charity of the schoolmaster. There is, unfortunately, not much of the Doctor’s story known; but to the little which survives there attaches a considerable amount of interest.
He had lost both his parents when an infant; all his other nearer kindred were also dead: and so he was dependent in his earlier years for a precarious subsistence on the charity of a few distant relatives, not a great deal richer than himself. Among the rest there was a poor widow, a namesake of his own, who earned a scanty subsistence by her wheel, but who had heart enough to impart a portion of her little to the destitute scholar. The boy was studious and thoughtful, and surpassed in his tasks most of his schoolfellows; and after passing with singular rapidity through the course pursued at school, he succeeded in putting himself to college. The struggle was arduous and protracted; sometimes he wrought as a common labourer, sometimes he taught an adventure school; he deemed no honest employment too mean or too laborious that forwarded his scheme; and thus he at length passed through the University course. His town’s-people then lost sight of him for nearly twenty years. It was understood, meanwhile, that some nameless friend in the south had settled a small annuity on poor old Widow Hossack; and that a Cromarty sailor, who had been attacked by a dangerous illness when at London, had owed his life to the gratuitous attentions of a famous physician of the place, who had recognised him as a town’s-man. No one, however, thought of the poor scholar; and it was not until his carriage drove up one day through the main street of the town, and stopped at the door of his schoolfellow, William Forsyth, that he was identified with “the great Doctor” who had attended the seaman, and the benefactor of the poor widow. On entering the cottage of the latter, he found her preparing gruel for supper, and was asked, with the anxiety of a gratitude that would fain have rendered him some return, “O Sir! will ye no tak’ brochan?” He is said to have been a truly excellent and benevolent man—the Abercromby of a former age; and the ingenious and pious Moses Browne (a clergyman who, to the disgrace of the English Church, was suffered to languish through life in a curacy of fifty pounds per annum) thus addresses him in one of his larger poems, written immediately after the recovery of the author from a long and dangerous illness:—
“The God I trust with timeliest kind relief
Sent the beloved physician to my aid,
(Generous, humanest, affable of soul,
Thee, dearest Hossack;—Oh! long known, long loved,
Long proved; in oft found tenderest watching cares,