Both before and after the time of his studies under Dr Melvin he had experience of schoolmasters of a different type. The tales of flogging under these pedagogues were so absolutely sickening, that Dr Burton's family used to beg him to stop his narrations to spare their feelings. He had beheld, though he had never undergone, the old-fashioned process of flogging by heezing up the culprit on the back of the school-porter, so as to bring his bare back close to the master's lash. The trembling victim, anticipating such punishment, used to be sent to summon the porter. He frequently returned with a half-sobbing message, "Please, sir, he says he's not in." The fiction did not lead to escape. Cromar was the name of the chief executioner in these scenes. Detested by his pupils, he was a victim to every sort of petty persecution from them, so that cruelty acted and reacted between him and them. On one memorable occasion he flogged John Burton with such violence as to cause to himself an internal rupture.
The offence which led to this unmeasured punishment was "looking impudent!"—and the look of supposed impudence was produced by a temporarily swollen lip; but the swollen lip was the effect of a single combat with a schoolfellow; and fighting was so rife, and so severely repressed, that it appeared less dangerous to meet the consequences of the supposed impertinent face than those of the battle. The unfortunate pupil of course continued to grimace, and the wretched schoolmaster to flog, till the pupil streamed with blood, and the master sat down from sheer exhaustion and an injury from which he never recovered.
Before John Hill Burton had completed his course at the grammar school he gained a bursary by competition, and began his studies at Marischal College. The open competition for bursaries at Aberdeen was a subject on which he delighted to talk, often with tears of enthusiasm in his eyes. The entire impartiality, the complete openness of these competitions to the whole world, the spectacle of high learning freely offered to whoever could by merit earn it, seemed to Dr Burton, to his life's end, as fine a subject of contemplation as any the world could offer. During his last illness, a friend, who knew his strong interest in his Alma Mater, presented him with Mr M'Lean's 'Life at a Northern University.' He read it with the utmost delight, often reading passages aloud with great emotion, on account of the vivid picture they presented of the scenes of his youth. It was a rough hard life that of an Aberdeen College student fifty or sixty years ago.
Mr M'Lean says of his fellow-students: "As the most of them came from the country—generally from the Highlands and Western Islands of Scotland—they brought with them all their native roughness and coarseness of manners. The great majority of those who had spent their lives in town frequented the neighbouring university,[1] where the entrance and other examinations were not nearly so severe. In general, the great bulk of the students were far behind in good manners, and that polish which a large town always gives. Their secluded habits when at college, and their intercourse only with their own number, prevented any improvement in this matter. On the whole, their conduct in the class, and their behaviour towards some of the professors, were anything but gentlemanly."[2]
Another quotation from Mr M'Lean may be allowed, as embodying the descriptions often given by Dr Burton of the motley crew of competitors for the scholarships and bursaries dispensed by the university: "Gazing round the room, I noted that my competitors consisted of raw-boned red-haired Highlandmen, fresh from their native hills, with all their rusticity about them. All the northern counties had sent their quota to swell the number, and even the Orkney and Shetland Islands were represented. Many rosy-faced young fellows were also to be seen, who had left their country occupations for a little, and who, if unsuccessful"—i.e., in gaining a bursary—"would return to them, and work in their leisure hours at their favourite classics until another competition came round. Here and there were to be seen a few rather better dressed than the rest; whilst amongst the crowd the eye rested on many a studious, thin, cadaverous, hard-worked face, which made you look again, and feel in your heart that there sat a bursar. A more motley crowd, as respects age, dress, and features, could scarcely be found anywhere; and yet over all there was an intellectual, manly look, a look of innocence and unacquaintance with the low ways of the world."[3]
Among this motley crowd John Hill Burton was no model student. He took his full share of the rough sport so well described in the 'Northern University'—wrenched off door-knockers and house-bells, transplanted sign-boards, &c. He was but a schoolboy in years when he left school for college, and his mother was frequently obliged to provide him with a private tutor, not so much to assist him in his studies as to keep him from idleness during his hours at home. Home was, during these years, for a time sad, and was always quiet. During his father's lifetime it was diversified by frequent changes of abode within a very narrow circuit.
The writer has seen some half-dozen small houses, in a rather unlovely suburb of Aberdeen, all within sight of each other, which had successively been inhabited by Lieutenant Burton and his family; the poor invalid craving for the real change which might have benefited his health, and seeking relief, instead, in constant change of house. Mrs Burton was entitled to an abode at Grandholm as well as her sisters, and the little family went there occasionally, at least after Lieutenant Burton's death. The place, which is a rather interesting one, filled a considerable space in the affections of the children. Its inmates did not. Clearly sister Eliza never was forgiven for her unfortunate marriage. Affection for her husband and for his memory prevented her apologising for it, and her children were not of the sort to apologise for their existence. A series of petty slights, small unkindnesses, imbittered the mind of the poverty-stricken widow against her unmarried sisters, and her feeling was strongly inherited by her children.
A house in Old Aberdeen has been already mentioned as the abode of Mrs Margaret Brown, Dr Burton's last surviving aunt. This quaint old house had been purchased by Mrs Brown's grandmother, mother of the laird of Grandholm, and at the beginning of the century was inhabited by her maiden daughter Margaret, or, as she was oftener called, Peggy Paton. This lady lived to the age of ninety, and at her death left her house and fortune to her niece and name-daughter, Margaret Paton (Mrs Brown), who in her turn adopted a grand-niece, the daughter already mentioned of Dr Burton's eldest brother, William,—the same who, having nursed her aged aunt till her death, in the last year of his life so tenderly ministered to her uncle, the subject of this notice.
The second in the line of female owners of the old house, Peggy Paton, was, for the outer world, what George Eliot calls "a charicter"—one of those distinguishing features of country-town life which the march of improvement has swept away: a lady by birth, but owing little to schools or teachers, books or travel: a woman of strong natural understanding and some wit, who loved her nightly rubber at whist, could rap out an oath or a strong pleasantry, and whose quick estimates of men and things became proverbs with the younger generation.
For her inner circle Peggy Paton was a most motherly old maid. She it was who, when she found her niece Eliza would marry Lieutenant Burton, mediated between father and daughter, and arranged matters as well as might be in an affair in which her good sense found much to disapprove, and her heart much to excuse. Not only to her niece Margaret, her adopted daughter, but also to her other nieces at Grandholm, motherless by death, and fatherless by desertion, did she fill a mother's part as far as these robust virgins would permit her. Sister Eliza's rough little children, or rougher great boys, always found kindness in the house in the Old Town, first in their grand-aunt's[4] time, and afterwards in that of her successor, Mrs Brown. David, Dr Burton's younger brother, was lovingly tended by them during part of the lingering illness of which he died, and the youngest of Eliza Paton's sons remained an inmate of Mrs Brown's house that he might continue his education in Aberdeen, when his mother removed to Edinburgh.