Oliver Ellis

by James Grant

This leader was that unfortunate Robert Watt, who, on the 15th of the succeeding October (for the very same opinions which he there expressed so freely) was drawn on a low hurdle, heavily chained, to the Castle Hill of Edinburgh, and had his head struck from his body by three blows of an axe, pursuant to a sentence passed on him by the Lord Justice General of Scotland.

I drew a long breath when they separated, deeming that I had narrowly escaped a sudden death. Still I was afraid to leave my retreat altogether; so descending from the beech, I sought a place where the grass was soft and dry at the root of an old oak tree, and lay down to think over my situation, and the truths I had heard—for much that was solemn, and stern truth had fallen from the lips of Robert Watt. I had ample food for reflection, but amid it I fell into a sound and heavy sleep.

In the year of which I write—to wit, 1792—the Scottish capital had made but little progress (as we now understand that great and comprehensive word) since the commencement of the century, save in noisy professions of religion, and an external air of sanctity to cloak hypocrisy and vice.

Though a new town on the north, and another on the south, were rising into existence, the mass of the citizens dwelt yet within the steep, narrow closes and wynds of the ancient city, from which many made vows they would never remove. The streets were without sewerage, and dimly lighted by a few oil-lamps, which were placed on wooden posts at long intervals. People dined at two o'clock, and were all a-bed by eleven. The High Street alone was well watched. There, the city guard, a body of three hundred old soldiers, who wore the square-skirted red coats and cocked hats of Queen Anne's time, and were armed with the long muskets and bayonets, and the Lochaber axes used by Scottish regiments in her wars, were the custodiers of the public safety. Being all Highlanders, they spoke no language save the Celtic, and were alternately the jest and the terror of the people. Women were still flogged at a cart's-tail, or drummed through the streets for petty offences, and poor debtors begged for alms at the door of St. Giles', as they had done in the days of the Jameses.

Though the capital was little changed in its external aspect, the hearty old Scottish spirit was dead, or dying fast; and so narrow-minded were the people, that a few years before, a clergyman had to strip off his gown and turn soldier, for having penned a tragedy, which now ranks as one of the British Classics. I allude to Home, the author of "Douglas." Any one who entered a theatre, especially on a Saturday; or read a novel, especially on a Sunday; or who, on that grim Scottish day of silence or psalmsinging, ventured to whistle or hum an air, received public censure; for now it seemed as if fasting and preaching, hypocrisy and craft, were all to flourish together, each bearing a due proportion to the progress of the other. Thus choked amid such evil weeds, nothing truly good, or great, or pure, can thrive or be attempted, without exciting the envy of some, or the contumely of others; for many men are there, who would oppose even the redemption of mankind, if to do so suited the advancement of their vulgarly-sectarian, selfishly-political, or personal interests—and so, as Macfarisee would say, "the wicked flourished like the green bay tree." So still the tide rolls on—religion becoming a surly burlesque—society a system of miserable cliques, and the nation itself a provincial tradition.

In 1792 the ideas of the people were so contracted and thoroughly local, that the appearance of a strange carriage in the streets put all Edinburgh a-tiptoe for three days to discover its owner—and so low had the old military spirit sunk, that the appearance of the pirate Paul Jones in the river, in 1779, threw eighty thousand citizens into a paroxysm of terror.

Few persons left, and fewer still visited, Edinburgh in those days. Any one departing thence for London—perhaps the great and only event of a long stupid and monotonous life—cautiously settled his worldly affairs by will, was duly prayed for in "the kirk"—took solemn leave of his weeping relations, and was escorted by all his friends to the eastern gate of the town; and all were there again to receive and conduct him with acclamations to his home in some dingy close of the middle ages, when he returned three months after, by the well-armed stage-coach, "General Wolfe" or the letter-of-marque smack, "The Lovely Jenny," carrying four 6-pounders—and brimful of hair-breadth escapes from footpads and masked highwaymen, to be related, amid due libations of reeking whiskey toddy, to a gaping circle of provincials.

By the spread of education among the lower, and the almost general flight of the upper classes, the old order of society became inverted. Dukes and earls no longer lived in the Canongate; nor lords, nor lairds, nor aristocratic grandmothers, who remembered "the bonnie prince" dancing in Holyrood, or the cannon that boomed for his downfall at Culloden; nothing now remained to Scotland, but the dregs and lees of her once warlike and kingly post—the sour kirk and the subtle law.

So matters had been going on for years, and all had been quiet in the Scottish capital since the terrible Porteous mob of 1735, and the irruption of the Clans ten years later, until this year, 1792, when the political convulsions in France began to affect their well-wishers in Scotland, a country so long neglected by a foreign race of kings and an alien peerage, as to have lost all sympathy for either; thus the sentiments of republicanism spread like a contagion among certain classes, who began to arm them in secret—to form clubs, on the principle of those over which Marat and others presided in Paris, and to designate themselves, "The Friends of the People."