John Burnet of Barns: A Romance

by John Buchan

The life at the college of Leyden was the most curious that one could well conceive; yet ere I had been there a week, I had begun heartily to like it. The students were drawn from the four corners of Europe: Swedes, great men with shaggy beards and invincible courage; neat-coated Germans, Dutchmen by the score, and not a few Frenchmen, who were the dandies of the place. We all gathered of a morning in the dusky lecture-hall, where hung the portraits of the great scholars of the past, and where in the cobwebbed rafters there abode such a weight of dust that a breeze coming through the high windows would stir it and make the place all but dark. Nor had I fault to find with the worthy professors, for I found soon that Master Sandvoort, though a miserly churl, had vast store of Latin, and would expound the works of Cornelius Tacitus in a fashion which I could not sufficiently admire. His colleague, too, who was the best of good fellows in the seclusion of his house, in his lecture-room was dignified and severe in deportment. You never saw such a change in a man. I went on the first morning expecting to find little but buffoonery; and lo! to my surprise, in walks my gentleman in a stately gown, holding his head like an archduke's; and when he began to speak, it was with the gravest accents of precision. And I roundly affirm that no man ever made more good matter come out of Plato. He would show wherein he erred and wherein he was wiser than those who sought to refute him; he would weigh with the nicest judgment the variae lectiones on each passage; and he would illustrate all things with the choicest citations. In truth, I got a great wealth of good scholarship and sound philosophy from my squire of bottle and pasty.

I was not the only Scot in Leyden, as I soon discovered; for forbye that I had letters to Master Peter Wishart, who taught philosophy in the college, there abode in the town Sir James Dalrymple, afterwards my Lord Stair, the great lawyer, and sometime a professor in my old college, whose nephew I had so cruelly beaten before I bade farewell to Glasgow. He was a man of a grave deportment, somewhat bent with study, and with the look of exceeding weight on his face which comes to one who has shared the counsel of princes. There were also not a few Scots lords of lesser fame and lesser fortune, pensioners, many of them, on a foreign king, exiles from home for good and evil causes. As one went down the Breedestraat of a morning he could hear much broad Scots spoke on the causeway, and find many fellow-countrymen in a state ill-befitting their rank. For poverty was ever the curse of our nation, and I found it bitter to see ignoble Flemings and Dutch burghers flaunting in their finery, while our poor gentlemen were threadbare. And these folk, too, were the noblest in the land, bearing the proudest names, descendants of warriors and statesmen—Halketts of Pitfirran, Prestons of Gorton, Stewarts, Hays, Sinclairs, Douglases, Hamiltons, and Grahams. It was their fathers and grandfathers who had won the day at Rijnemants, under Sir Robert Stuart, when, says Strada, "Nudi pugnant Scoti multi." They had fought to the death on the Kowenstyn dyke when Parma beleaguered Antwerp. And in all the later wars they took their share—Scotts of Buccleuch, Haigs of Bemersyde, Erskines, Grants, and Kilpatricks. In the Scots brigade in Holland had served John Graham of Claverhouse, as some will have it, the greatest soldier of our age. I saw nothing of him, for while I was in the Low Lands he was already riding in the western hills, shooting and hanging and dealing martial law to herds and weavers. But I saw often the gallant figure of that Colonel Hugh Mackay who met Claverhouse in that last and awful fight in the Highland pass when the mountaineers swept on the lowlanders like a winter storm, and who marched to his death long after on the field of Steinkirk, and fell with the words on his lips, "The will of the Lord be done." This valiant soldier had made the Scots brigade into some semblance of that doughty regiment which Lord Reay commanded under the great Gustavus. He had driven out all the foreign admixture, and, by keeping it to Scotsmen of gentle blood, rendered it well-nigh invincible. But the pay was poor, and they who entered it did so for the sake of honour and for no notions of gain.

But though it cheers me yet to tell of such fellows, and though it pleased me vastly to meet them in that distant land, it is not of such that I must write. As I have said, forbye attending the two classes of Greek and Latin, I resorted to the lectures of Master Wishart, who hailed from Fife, and had taught philosophy with much success among the Hollanders for some twenty years. He was well acquainted with my family, so what does he do but bid me to his house at Alphen one Saturday in the front of March. For he did not abide in Leyden, never having loved the ways of a town, but in the little village of Alphen, some seven miles to the northeast.

I accepted his bidding, for I had come there for no other cause than to meet and converse with men of learning and wisdom; so I bade Nicol have ready the two horses, which I had bought, at eleven o'clock in the forenoon. One of the twain was a bay mare, delicately stepping, with white pasterns and a patch of white on her forehead. The other was the heavier, reserved for Nicol and what baggage I might seek to carry, black and deep-chested, and more sedate than his comrade.

It was a clear, mild day when we set out, with no trace of frost, and but little cold. The roads were dry underfoot, and the horses stepped merrily, for they were fresh from long living indoors. The fields on either side were still bleak, but the sowers were abroad, scattering the seeds of the future harvest. The waters that we passed were alive with wild-fowl, which had wintered in the sea-marshes, and were now coming up to breed among the flags and rushes of the inland lakes. The tender green was sprouting on the trees, the early lark sang above the furrows, and the whole earth was full of the earnest of spring.

Alphen is a straggling line of houses by a canal. They are all well sized, and even with some pretension to gentility, with long gardens sloping to the water, and shady coverts of trees. Master Wishart's stood in the extreme end, apart from the rest, low-built, with a doorway with stuccoed pilasters. It was a place very pleasant to look upon, and save for its flatness, I could have found it in my heart to choose it for a habitation. But I am hill-bred, and must have rough, craggy land near me, else I weary of the finest dwelling. Master Wishart dwelt here, since he had ever a passion for the growing of rare flowers, and could indulge it better here than in the town of Leyden. He was used to drive in every second day in his great coach, for he lectured but three times a week.

A serving-man took my horse from me, and, along with Nicol, led them to the stable, having directed me where, in the garden, I should find my host. I opened a gate in a quickset hedge, and entered upon the most beautiful pleasure-ground that I had ever beheld. A wide, well-ordered lawn stretched straitly down to the very brink of the canal, and though, as was natural at that season of the year, the grass had not come to its proper greenness, yet it gave promise of great smoothness and verdure. To the side of this, again, there ran a belt of low wood, between which and the house was a green all laid out into flower beds, bright even at that early time with hyacinths and jonquils. Below this the low wood began again, and continued to the borders of the garden, full of the most delightsome alleys and shady walks. From one of these I heard voices, and going in that direction, I came of a sudden to a handsome arbour, at the side of which flowered the winter-jasmine, and around the door of which, so mild was the day, some half-dozen men were sitting.

My host, Master Wishart, was a short, spare man, with a long face adorned with a well-trimmed beard. He had the most monstrous heavy brows that I have ever seen, greater even than those of our Master Sandeman, of whom the students were wont to say that his eyebrows were heather-besoms. His eyes twinkled merrily when he spoke, and but for his great forehead no one might have guessed that he stood in the presence of one of the most noted of our schoolmen.

He rose and greeted me heartily, bidding me all welcome to Alphen, saying that he loved to see the sight of a Scots face, for was he not an exile here like the Jews by the waters of Babylon? "This is Master John Burnet of Barns," said he, presenting me to a very grave and comely man some ten years my senior, "who has come all the way from Tweedside to drink at our Pierian Spring." The other greeted me, looked kindly at me for a second, and then asked me some question of my family; and finding that a second cousin of his own on his mother's side had once married one of my race, immediately became very gracious, and condescended to tell me his opinions of the land, which were none so good. He was, as I did not know till later, Sir William Crichtoun of Bourhope; that Sir William who in after times was slain in the rout at Cromdale when the forces of Buchan and Cannon were caught unawares on the hillside.

I had leisure now to look around me at the others, and a motley group they were. There was Quentin Markelboch, the famous physician of Leyden, who had been pointed out to me in the street some days before, a little, round-bellied man with an eye of wondrous shrewdness. There was likewise Master Jardinius, who had lectured on philosophy at one time in the college, but had now grown too old for aught save sitting in the sun and drinking Schiedam—which, as some said, was no great pity. But the one I most marked was a little, fiery-eyed, nervous man, Pieter van Mieris by name, own cousin to the painter, and one who lived for nothing else than to fight abstruse metaphysical quarrels in defence of religion, which he believed to be in great peril from men of learning, and, but for his exertions on its behalf, to be unable to exist. It was he who first addressed me.