aptain Clutterbuck, the amusing personage who introduces “The Monastery” and “Nigel,” and who employed himself so agreeably during the half-pay part of his life in showing off the ruins of St. Mary’s, finds a happy counterpart in Mr., vulgo Captain O——n, a gentleman well known in Melrose as an amateur cicerone of “the Abbey.” His peculiarities and pursuits very nearly resemble those of the fictitious Clutterbuck. He differs from him in this,—that he never was engaged in foreign service, having merely held some rank in a provincial corps of volunteers; but in every other respect he bears a striking resemblance. He is a staid, elderly person, about fifty, dresses like a gentleman,—that is, a Melrose gentleman,—and parades about his native village with a swagger of military gentility in his air, such as the possession of a walking-cane and the title of Captain seems alone capable of inspiring in the legs of mankind.
He possesses as much property in the neighbourhood of Melrose as would entitle him to the honourable appellation, Laird; but in his case that enviable title is merged in the more romantic and splendid one of Captain, of which he is, perhaps, ambitious. He has his property in his own hands, and by its means contrives to keep himself independent. He thus wavers between the species of the half-pay officer and the cock-laird, and has no particular claims upon a distinct classification with either. He is chiefly genteel and idle, and associates a good deal with that regular hanger-on in all country villages, the exciseman. Having by some chance got the title of Captain affixed to his name, (in truth, he was only sergeant of a local militia corps,) he persists in retaining, by abstinence from personal labour, what otherwise he would have forfeited. The dignity which he contrives to maintain in his native town is scarcely wonderful, when we consider how few are ever independent in such a community, and to what a degree the respect of the illiterate is calculated to be excited by the possession of a very little knowledge,—such as Captain O. would easily acquire in the course of his unoccupied life, and which the opportunities of ease did not fail to confer upon even David Ritchie. Besides, to speak in the deferential words of Captain Clutterbuck’s Kennaquhair Club, “The Captain has something in him after a’—few folk ken sae mickle about the Abbey.” O.’s knowledge upon this point is indeed well calculated to excite the astonishment and veneration of the natives. He has not only driven the grave-digger fairly off the field, who, in the reality of Melrose, as well as in the ideality of Kennaquhair, was the former cicerone of the ruins,—but he is even a formidable rival to the ingenious John Bower himself. Old David Kyle, who kept the head inn at Melrose, and who is the David of the Introduction here illustrated, was in the frequent practice of calling upon Captain O. for the purpose there so humorously described, namely, to press his knowledge into the service of his guests. Upon such occasions of importance, the Captain would, and still does, march away, with great pomposity, at the head of his company, like a peripatetic philosopher declaiming to a troop of disciples, and by the way lays off, as he terms it, all he has ever been able to discover respecting the valuable remains of St. Mary’s,—and sometimes more than all! How, then, will his eloquence expand over crypts and chancels, naves and arches! With what an important sound will the point of his walking cane ring against the tomb of Michael Scott! And, above all, how will the surrounding cockneys stare in admiration, when, in the course of his lecture, he chances to emit some such grandly unintelligible word as architrave or transept.
Captain O.’s intelligence chiefly lies among the vulgar traditionary opinions which are entertained regarding the ruins by the country people; and he knows comparatively little of the lore with which written records and authentic treatises instruct the general antiquary. Mr. Bower is a person of better authority than the Captain, and has even published descriptions of the Abbey; but, notwithstanding, the Captain is not without his party in the town, and it is generally remarked that his anecdotes, if not so true, are at least as entertaining. A sort of jealousy sometimes is observable between these rival Ciceroni, a remarkable anecdote of which is recorded. Upon the opening of some ancient grave within the ruins, a noseless bust of St. Peter happened to be found, which it pleased Captain O. to take under his immediate protection. Bower had found some other remarkable idol in another part of the Abbey, to which he endeavoured to collect as many votaries of curiosity as possible; but the rival statue, which the Captain had already christened by the taking name of Michael Scott, drew off a sweeping sect from the more legitimate shrine. Bower then endeavoured to prove that this was no statue of the wizard at all, but merely one of the common herd of saints, who had formerly figured in the niches of the building. Of this he at last succeeded in convincing all concerned, to the discomfiture of his rival. But, nevertheless, the Captain would not give up his point. He continued pertinacious in maintaining the authenticity of his noseless protégé, in spite of all detractions, in spite of all heresies; till at last finding the whole world against him, he gave up his argument, and turned off the whole as a joke, with the facetious observation, that “It was just as good a Michael Scott as could have been found among the whole ruins, if they would only have held with it!”
Sometimes, in the course of exhibition, there occur distresses nearly resembling that which happened to Captain Clutterbuck, in the company of the Benedictine,—that is to say, he “finds himself a scholar when he came to teach,” by the strangers actually knowing more of his favourite study than himself. This happens most frequently in the case of “gentlemen from Edinburgh,”—elderly persons with black coats and low-crowned hats, which may be called the costume of terror to our antiquary. To these habiliments, if we add the circumstance of hair-powder, O——n would as soon face a hyena as any person so clothed. He is said to fly from a wig as from a pestilence.
Yet, even in these predicaments, the Captain is never entirely at a loss. Repulsed from one stone, he can retreat to another; refuted in any part of his intelligence, he can make an honourable stand at another, of which his visitors had not been aware; and, even when found to be wholly fabulous and absurd in his anecdotes, he can, as a dernier resort, turn them off with some pleasantry or other, which is, of course, irrefragable. Besides, even when he catches a complete, resolute, Antiquarian Tartar, he generally contrives to profit by the encounter, by picking up some new intelligence, which he adds to his own former stock.
In describing this part of the character of a local antiquary, with all his ignorance and all his fables, it is forced upon our observation, how little certain information is commonly to be found, concerning the relics of antiquity, among those who dwell in their immediate neighbourhood. They know that there is an “auld abbey” or a “queer sort o’ stane,” near them; but for any more particular notice of their history, you might as well inquire in a different quarter of the globe. We have known instances of people, whose playground in infancy, and whose daily walks in manhood, had been among the ruins of an ancient Collegiate Church, (not the least interesting in the kingdom,) being yet quite ignorant of every circumstance connected with it, except that it was “just the auld Kirk.”
“It not unfrequently happened,” says Captain Clutterbuck, in his amusing account of himself, “that an acquaintance which commenced in the Abbey concluded in the Inn, which served to relieve the solitude as well as the monotony of my landlady’s shoulder of mutton, whether hot, cold, or hashed.” This happened not more frequently in the case of Captain Clutterbuck than it does in that of Captain O——n. The latter personage, indeed, makes a constant practice of living entirely with his eleves during their stay in Melrose; and, as they have been guests at the hospitable board of his learning and entertainment, so he in turn becomes a guest at the parade of their “bottle of sherry, minced collops, and fowl,” or whatever else the order upon David Kyle may be. He is thus always ready at the elbows of their ignorance, to explain and to exhibit the various petty curiosities of the place, of which it is probable they might otherwise be obliged to remain perfectly unknowing, but for the condescending attention of Captain O. He is not destitute of other means of entertainment, besides showing the Abbey. He can tell a good story, after a few glasses, and is an excellent hand at a song. “The Broom of the Cowdenknows” is his favourite and his best; but we are also tenderly attached to “The Flowers of the Forest,” which he gives in the milkmaid style, with much pathos. When his company is agreeable, he can (about the tenth tumbler,) treat them with “Willie brewed a peck o’ Maut,” or “Auld Lang Syne,” or “For a’ that and a’ that.” These infatuating lyrics he gives in such a style of appropriate enthusiasm, that if his companions have at all a spark of Burns’s fire in their composition, they will rise up and join hands round the table, and, at the conclusion of every stanza, drink down immense cups of kindness, till, in the springtide of their glory, they imagine themselves the most jolly, patriotic, and independent Scotsmen upon the face of the earth. Such is the deceiving effect of a national song upon the spirits of men of sober reason when prepared for the excitement by previous intoxication. This trait is also not without its parallel in Clutterbuck. The reader will remember how, in the Introduction to Nigel, he pathetically laments that since Catalani visited the ruins, his “Poortith Cauld” has been received both poorly and coldly, and his “Banks of Doon” been fairly coughed down, at the Club. May the vocal exertions of Captain O——n, however, never meet with such a scurvy reception among the cognoscenti of Melrose!
Such are the characteristics of the prototype of Captain Clutterbuck, as we have gathered them from persons who have been acquainted with him, natives of the same town. We learn that there is another person of the same description in Melrose, named Captain T——t, who was really a Captain, but of a man-of-war, instead of a regiment. May he not have been the Captain Doolittle of “The Monastery”? The grave-digger of Kennaquhair, who has the honour of speaking a few words in that work, must have been John Martin, who was professor of the same trade in Melrose. He is now dead. Mr. David Kyle, a very respectable and worthy man, who kept the Cross Keys Inn at Melrose, is also dead. He was in the custom of keeping an album in his house, for the amusement of his guests; though we cannot say as to the truth of his having had a copy of the “great Dr. Samuel Johnson’s Tower to the Hebrides, in his parlour window, wi’ the twa boards torn aff.” In the album, to which we had access, is the following very curious document, among much nonsense:—
EPITAPH ON MR. LITTLE,
A JOLLY FELLOW.