Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland

by Hugh Miller

I have said that the proprietor of the lands of Cromarty, in the early part of the reign of Charles II., was a Sir John Urquhart of Craigfintrie, celebrated by Wodrow, though the celebrity be of no enviable character, as the person whose advice, strengthened by that of Sir George Mackenzie of Tarbat, led Commissioner Middleton to introduce the unhappy Act which overturned Presbyterianism in Scotland. He was a shrewd, strong-minded man, thoroughly acquainted with all the worse and some of the better springs of human action—cool, and cautious, and skilful, in steering himself through the difficulties of so unsettled a period by the shifts and evasions of a well-balanced expediency. The current of the age had set in towards religion, and Sir John was by much too prudent to oppose the current. There were few men who excelled him in that most difficult art of computation, the art of estimating the strength of parties; perhaps he was all the more successful in his calculations from his never suffering himself to be disturbed in them by an over-active zeal; and believing, with Tamerlane and Sir Thomas, that the Deity usually declares for the stronger party, Sir John was always religious enough to be of the stronger party too.

About twelve years before his death, which took place in 1673, there resided in his family a young licentiate of the Scottish Church, a nephew of his own, who officiated as chaplain. Dallas Urquhart was naturally a soft-tempered, amiable man, of considerable attainments, and of no inferior powers of mind, but his character lacked the severer virtues; and it was his fate to live in an age in which a good-natured facility of disposition was of all qualities the worst fitted to supply their place. He was deemed a person of more than ordinary promise in an age when the qualifications of the Presbyterian minister were fixed at least as high as in any after period;—there was a charm, too, in his pliant and docile disposition, which peculiarly recommended him to his older friends and advisers; for even the wise are apt to overvalue whatever flatters themselves, and to decide regarding that modest facility which so often proves in after life the curse of its possessor, according to an estimate very different from that by which they rate the wilful, because partially developed strength which thwarts and opposes them. Dallas therefore had many friends; but the person to whom he was chiefly attached was the young minister of Cromarty—the “good Maister Hugh Anderson,” whose tombstone, a dark-coloured slab, roughened with uncouth sculpture, and a neat Latin inscription, may still be seen in the eastern gable of the parish church, and to whom I have already referred as one of the few faithful in this part of the country in a time of fiery trial. The two friends had passed through college together, associates in study and recreation, and, what is better still, for they were both devout young men, companions in all those acts of religious fellowship which renders Christianity so true a nurse of the nobler affections. And yet no two persons could be less similar in the original structure of their minds. Dallas was gentle-tempered and imaginative, and imbued, through a nature decidedly intellectual, with a love of study for its own sake. His friend, on the contrary, was of a bold energetic temperament, and a plain, practical understanding, which he had cultivated rather from a sense of duty than under the influence of any direct pleasure derived in the process. But it is probable that had they resembled one another more closely, they would have loved one another less. Friendship, if I may venture the metaphor, is a sort of ball-and-socket connexion. It seems to be a first principle in its economy that its agreements should be founded in dissimilarity—the stronger with the weaker—the softer with the more rugged. And perhaps, in looking round to convince ourselves of the fact, we have but to note how the sexes—formed for each other by God himself—have been created, not after a similar, but after a diverse pattern—and that their natures piece together, not because they were made to resemble, but to correspond with each other.

The friends were often together; the huge old castle, grey with the lichens of a thousand years, towered on its wooded eminence immediately over the town; and the little antique manse, with its narrow serrated gables, and with the triangular tablets of its upper windows, rising high in the roof, occupied, nest-like, an umbrageous recess so directly below, that the chaplain in his turret was scarcely a hundred yards distant from the minister in his study. There hardly passed a day in which Dallas did not spend an hour or two in the manse; at times speculating on some abstruse scholastic question with his friend the clergyman, whom he generally found somewhat less than his match on such occasions; at times still more pleasingly engaged in conversing, though on somewhat humbler terms, with his friend’s only sister. Mary Anderson was a sylph-looking young creature, rather below the middle size, and slightly though finely formed. Her complexion, which was pale and singularly transparent, indicated no great strength of constitution; but there was an easy grace in all her motions, that no one could associate with the weakness of positive indisposition, and an expression in her bright speaking eyes and beautiful forehead, that impressed all who knew her rather with the idea of an active and powerful spirit than of a delicate or feeble frame. There was an unpretending quietness in her manners, and a simple good sense in all she said and did on ordinary occasions, that seemed to be as much the result of correct feeling as of a discriminating intellect; but there were depths in the character beyond the reach of the ordinary observer—powers of abstract thought which only a superior mind could fully appreciate, and a vigorous but well-regulated imagination that could bedeck the perfections of the moral world with all that is exquisite among the forms and colours of the natural. No one ever seemed less influenced by the tender feelings than Mary Anderson; she loved her brother’s friend—loved to study, to read, to converse with him, but in no respect did her regard for him seem to differ from her regard for her brother himself. She was his friend—a tender and attached one, it is true—but his friend only. But the young chaplain, whose nature it was to cleave to everything nobler and more powerful than himself, was of a different temper, and he had formed a deep though silent attachment to the highly-gifted maiden of the manse.

Troublesome times came on; the politic and strong-minded proprietor was no longer known as the friend of the Presbyterian Church, and the comparatively weak and facile chaplain wavered in all the agonies of irresolution, under the fascinating influences of the massier and wilier character. All the persuasive powers of Sir John were concentrated on the conversion of his nephew. Acts of kindness, expressions of endearment and good-will, and a well-counterfeited zeal for the interests of true religion formed with him merely a sort of groundwork for arguments of real cogency so far as they went, and facts which, though of partial selection, could not be well disputed. He had passed, he said, over the ground which Dallas now occupied, and was thus enabled to anticipate some of his opinions on the subject; he, too, had once regarded Christianity and the Presbyterian form of it as identical, and associated the excellencies of the one with the peculiarities of the other. He now saw clearly, however; and his nephew, he was assured, would soon see it too, that they were things as essentially different as soul and body, and that the Presbyterian form—the Presbyterian body, he might say—was by no means the best which the true religion could inhabit! He pointed out what he deemed the peculiar defects of Presbyterianism; and summed up with consummate skill the various indications of the subdued and unresisting mood which at this period formed that of the entire country.

“Men of all classes,” he said, “have been wearied in the long struggle of twenty years, from which they have but just escaped, and stand in need of rest. They see, too, that they have been contending, not for themselves, but for others—striving to render kings less powerful, that Churchmen might become more so. They see that they have thus injured the character of a body of men, valuable in their own sphere, but dangerous when invested with the power of the magistrate; and that they have so weakened the hands of Government, that to escape from anarchy they have to fling themselves into the arms of comparative despotism. But there are better times coming; and the wiser sort of men are beginning to perceive that religion must work more effectually under the peaceable protection of a paternal Government, than when united to a form which cannot exist without provoking political heats and animosities. Not a few of our best men are more than prepared for the movement. You already know something of Leighton; I need not say what sort of a man he is;—and young Burnet and Scougall are persons of resembling character. But there are many such among the belied and persecuted Episcopalians; and does it not augur well, that since the one Church must fall, we should have materials of such value for building up the other? I cannot anticipate much opposition to the change. A few good men of narrow capacity, such as your friend Anderson, will not acquiesce in it till they are made to distinguish between form and spirit, which may take some time; and leaders in the Church, who have become influential at the expense of their country’s welfare, must necessarily be hostile to it for another cause; for no man willingly parts with power. But certain I am it can meet with no effectual opposition.”

Dallas had little to urge in reply. Sir John had ever been kind to him, nor was his disposition a cold or ungrateful one; and, naturally facile and diffident besides, he had been invariably in the habit of yielding up his own judgment, in matters of a practical tendency, to the more mature and powerful judgment of his uncle. He could feel, however, that on this occasion there was something criminal in his acquiescence; but his weakness overcame him. He passed sleepless nights, and days of restless inquietude; at times half resolved to seek out Sir John and say that, having cast in his lot with the sinking Church, he could not quit her in the day of trouble—at times groaning under a despairing sense of his thorough inability to oppose him—yielding to what seemed to be the force of destiny, and summing up the various arguments so often pressed upon him, less with the view of ascertaining their real value, than of employing them in his own defence. Meanwhile whole weeks elapsed ere he could muster up resolution enough to visit his friend the clergyman; and the report had gone far and wide that he had declared with his uncle for the court religion. He at length stole down one evening to the manse with a sinking heart, and limbs that trembled under him.

Mary was absent on a visit; her brother he found sitting moodily in his study. The minister had but just returned from a Presbytery, at which he had to contend single-handed against the arguments of Sir John, and the votes of all the others; and, under the influence of the angry feelings awakened in a conflict so hopeless and unequal, and irritated by the gibes and taunts of his renegade brethren, he at once denounced Dallas as a time-server and an apostate. The temper of the chaplain gave way, and he retorted with a degree of spirit which might have given a different colour to his after life, had it been exerted during his earlier interviews with Sir John. The anger of the friends, heightened by mutual reproaches, triumphed over the affection of years; and, after a scene of bitter contention, they parted with the determination of never meeting again. Dallas felt not the ground, as, with throbbing pulses and a flushed brow, he hastily scaled the ascent which led to the castle; and when, turning round from beside the wall to look at the manse, he thought of Mary, and thought, too, that he could now no longer visit her as before, his heart swelled almost to bursting. “But I am like a straw on the current,” he said, “and must drift wherever the force of events carries me. Coward that I am! Why do I live in a world for which I am so wretchedly unfitted?”

He had now passed the Rubicon. His first impressions he had resisted; and the feebler suggestions which afterwards arose in his mind, only led him to entrench himself the more strongly in the arguments of Sir John. Besides, he had declared himself a friend to Episcopacy, and thus barred up his retreat by that shrinking dread of being deemed wavering and inconsistent, which has so often merely the effect of rendering such as lie openest to the imputation firm in the wrong place. There was a secret bitterness in his spirit, that vented itself in caustic remarks on all whom he had once admired and respected—all save Mary and her brother, and of them he never spoke. His former habits of application were broken up; yet, though no longer engrossed by the studies which it had once seemed the bent of his nature to pursue, he remained as indifferent as ever to the various pursuits of interest and ambition which engaged his uncle. After passing a day of restless inactivity among his books, he walked out a little before sunset in the direction of the old chapel of St. Regulus, and, ere he took note of where his wanderings led him, found himself among the graves.

It was a lovely evening of October. The ancient elms and wild cherry-trees which surrounded the burying-ground still retained their foliage entire, and the elms were hung in gold, and the wild cherry-trees in crimson, and the pale yellow tint of the straggling and irregular fields on the hill-side contrasted strongly with the deepening russet of the surrounding moor. The tombs and the ruins were bathed in the yellow light of the setting sun; but to the melancholy and aimless wanderer the quiet and gorgeous beauty of the scene was associated with the coming night and the coming winter, with the sadness of inevitable decay and the gloom of the insatiable grave. He passed moodily onward, and, on turning an angle of the chapel, found Mary Anderson seated among the ruins, on the tombstone of her mother, whom she had lost when a child. There was a slight flush on her countenance as she rose to meet him, but she held out her hand as usual, though the young man thought, but it might not be so, that the grasp was less kindly.

“You have been a great stranger of late, Dallas,” she said; “how have we been so unhappy as to offend you?”