“Ten thousand tapers shone; ten thousand lords,
And squires, and yeomen, hungry clerks, and churchmen,
Bended the supple knee; ten thousand ladies,
With eyes of love, lit up the nether skies.”
Although each of these, no doubt, seemed to the parties themselves of sufficient importance to add to the shelves of literature a new volume, instead of being confined to a single chapter or section, yet I am induced to bring the three into juxtaposition, because I shall thereby preserve the unities,—have a beginning in light, a middle in somewhat of gruffness, if not of gloom, and an end as glorious as the congregated beauty of a whole nation, together with divers importations, could make it.
It may be thought that the burning of a certain number of candles, the hanging up of a certain number of coloured lamps, and the displaying of a few ill-daubed transparencies, could contain no trait of national character; and that therefore it ought to find no place in these pages. But there was, perhaps, no one scene during the whole solemnity which brought out the character of the Scotch more decidedly than the illumination of Edinburgh upon the evening after that on which the King landed. The town of Leith had indeed been both very generally and very finely illuminated on the evening before; but that haughty spirit of the Athens which makes her bear herself somewhat saucily toward all her compatriot (or if you will, com-provosted) cities and towns in general, and towards poor Leith in particular,—that spirit which made them taunt Leith with the translated side of the inscription, in the morning, made them reckon it high treason against the majesty of the Athens to look at, or talk of, her illumination in the evening; and thus, although the thing was no doubt very fine, there were few to wonder, and still fewer to put that wonder upon record. When the Athens, however, hung out her physical lamps, the emblems of her metaphysical light, all came, all saw, and all admired. It was a novelty to me: the illumination was so general, the streets were so thronged, and the people were so orderly. No doubt, there were wanting that profusion of daubed transparencies, and dangling festoons, tagged with classic mottoes and allusions, ill-quoted and worse applied, which are found in other places; but here, again, his Majesty would have had cause to exclaim, that the nation by which he was surrounded were all ladies and gentlemen. Excepting at the public buildings, the houses of official persons, the apartments of clubs and societies, and the houses of a few private individuals, the abode of peer and burgher were illuminated in the same style, and with the same brilliance. I waive the details as to who hung up a crown in white lamps, or a thistle in green and red, or who took up their motto in Latin, in English, or in Gaelic. I do not even dwell upon the general effect; for though, on account of the situations in Edinburgh, the state of the weather, and the zeal of all classes of the people, that was as fine as possible,—it was the people themselves that were the sight. Natives and visiters, three hundred thousand of every rank, age, and sex, thronged the streets to such a degree, that it was difficult in many of them to get a sight either of the pavement or the carriage-way. This immense mass put one very much in mind of bees; their noise at any point was scarcely louder than the hum of those insects, and in their varied motions they clashed as little with each other. Instead of brawling and wrangling, which almost invariably take place on such occasions, the most elegant escaped without a stain, and the most feeble without a jostle. The accommodation which they afforded each other in their progress was truly remarkable: When one came to any of the elevations so frequent in the streets of Edinburgh, one saw nothing but human beings, thick and reeling as the leaves in an autumnal whirlwind; and yet, if one chose, one’s progress could be as rapid and almost as free of interruption as if the street had been deserted. I did not remark a face in the whole assemblage that did not express the feeling of being pleased itself, and the desire of communicating pleasure to all around it. Just as was the case on the day of his Majesty’s entry, the conduct of the people was the same as if they had been engaged in a solemn and felicitous act of religious worship.
While the inhabitants of the Athens and their visiters were thus rejoicing in the light which themselves had kindled, (a species of joy which, by the way, is peculiarly congenial to the said Athenians,) they whispered, as any unknown personage of sufficient size for a monarch moved through the crowd, that that personage could be none other than the king himself in disguise. Indeed, I am not sure but a considerable portion of that decorum which marked Edinburgh upon this occasion was owing to the apprehension which every body had that the royal eye might be upon them, without their knowing any thing about it; but whatever might be the operating principle, whether a sense of decorum, or national or personal pride, the effect was equally striking, and the merit perhaps equally great. But still, though the illumination, especially when the spirit of the people is taken into the account, was a fine show, still it was only a show, and a show in which the king, or even the Athens, in her peculiar capacity, took no part, and in which official men cut no more figure than the common herd.
With the levee it was otherwise: that was one of the grand acts for which the king had been invited to Scotland; and it is utterly impossible to form even an idea of the hopes that were built upon it. From the very first blush of the business, the regular, thorough-going tories, (which, in Scotland, mean those who will take any public employment, and pocket any public money, however improperly or dirtily got,) fancied that the whole consequence of the land was to be entwined around their capacious heads, and the whole wealth of it crammed into their more capacious pockets; and thus, they had given themselves airs, at which an Englishman would have been perfectly thunderstruck. A very respectable and very independent proprietor of the county of Fife told me that, a personage who had acted as tell-tale of their village during the war, and who, for a long time after the peace, continued to sell plots (perhaps at a handsome discount) to the crown lawyers of Scotland, until the ministry put an end to the unavailing traffic, would occasionally be found pacing over his estate, tasting the soil of the fields, and noting down what he was to have sown in each of them, after the king should have put him in possession.
The people were quite full of stories of this kind; and I have no doubt that the desire of seeing how these men of high loyalty and higher hopes would act, was one of the chief causes that brought so many provincial people to the Athens; and that the humiliation that these persons met with was, next to the joy at seeing each other happy, one of the greatest boasts that the whole affair yielded. Without a previous knowledge of the political system of Scotland,—the way in which the few vicegerents in the Athens gobble up the loaves and the fishes, how lesser men over the country snap at the crumbs; and how they all growl, and worry, and snarl at other folks, it is quite impossible to form an idea of the insolence by which the little men of office were actuated. As, however, I shall have to discuss this matter when I come to treat of the politics of the Athens, (for it is there that the centre and focus of the system exists,) it would be both premature and unintelligible to notice them here. Wherefore, I shall confine myself to what I saw and heard as touching the levee.
The night which preceded that eventful day was an anxious and unclosing one to the men of hope and of office, from all parts of Caledonia; and baron and bailie, parson, provost, and professor, great judge and small attorney, eloquent advocate and uneloquent scribe,—all that the land of heath, of herrings, and of black cattle, could produce, was, with proud but palpitating heart, bedecking and bedizening itself, in all sorts of dresses, official, courtly, and nondescript, in order that they might, in seemly array, kiss that Kaaba of all loyal men’s worship, (and who would not be a loyal man upon such an occasion,) the hand of a king. Three dukes, the same tale of marquesses, sixteen earls, a brace of viscounts, twenty-nine barons, a pair of right honourables, four great officers of state, sixteen judges of the land, twenty-two who were honourable, and eleven who lengthened the fag end of the Scottish household, were there. Besides seventy-seven baronets, twelve members of parliament, thirty-eight lords lieutenant, a hundred head of provosts, bailies, counsellors, and deacons, “after their kinds,” with as many parsons, professors, physicians, and pleaders, as were sufficient to convert, and cultivate, and cure, from plethora both of person and of purse, the whole British empire, together with military men, who had fought and who had not fought, proprietors or kinsmen of the soil, and burgesses, “simple persons,” swelled the amount to not fewer than two thousand persons, who had to pass in wonderful procession before the wondering king. When it was considered, that the whole of this mighty and motley squad, charged with addresses to the number of nearly a hundred, each more loyal and laboured than another, had to pass muster, and read, and retire, in the space of one brief hour, it was apparent that the official men of Scotland would have to dance about and deliver themselves with somewhat more of alacrity, and somewhat less of that slow profundity of bowing than is usually the case. Dreading that the addresses, from the importance of their contents, and the orthoëpal powers of the readers, would of themselves have consumed more than a day, it was wisely resolved, that the persons who were charged with them should continue enceinte of them till the Monday, upon which day they should be allowed to deliver themselves before the throne, or behind it in the closet, according to their several conditions and importance; and thus the mighty tide of the levee was undisturbed by any prosing from parchment, and undisconcerted by any uncouthness of provincial speech. The muster of beast-drawn vehicles was tremendous; and, though the magisterial equipages were reduced in their number of cattle, those which they contained never looked so big in their lives as when they were in progress to the levee, or so little as when they were fairly there. A grievous mishap befel their worships the under-magistrates of Glasgow: The ruler of that city, who never bought or sold any thing less than a bale of cotton or a basket of figs, could not be expected to ride in the same carriage with the bailies, many of whom were fain to vend a sixpenny handkerchief, or an ounce of caraway seeds; so two carriages were prepared, the foremost for his lordship, and the hindermost for their not-lordships. The provost entered his state-coach, and both carriages simultaneously sought their places in the line of procession; the line threaded its way to the Holyrood; the provost alighted with true magisterial dignity, and the door was opened to let the bailie train come forth of their wagon. They had vanished! “Whare are my bailie bodies?” exclaimed the provost; “I knew they were taking a bit bowl to keep their hearts aboon; but I didna reckon on their gettin’ fou upon sic an occasion as this!” His lordship, however, was instantly relieved by a dozen of chairmen, hurrying across the area, while a well-known voice was bawling from each chair, “Whare’s the right and honourable lord provost o’ the wast?” It would be endless to recount all the little accidents of this nature that rippled the swelling waves of official joy; but it would be unjust not to mention the wig and staff of Dundee’s principal and vice. The wig of the principal which, ungainly as it was, was the most wise-looking thing about him, had been put under the curling irons before day-break, and thus was burned and cauterized to the lining in sundry places. These had been skilfully repaired with court plaster of the most glossy black; and thus, in reply to sundry pityings of the lacerated head of the burgh, the official man was forced to make it known, that he was of peace-seeking disposition, and, instead of a broken head, had only got a burned wig. The staff of the vice was a matter yet more serious. It had a diamond head, and the wearer, when at home, contrived to poke it under his left arm so skilfully, that it shone by all the world like the star of the order of the golden calf, at the button-hole of some foreign knight. The worshipful gentleman never dreamt that he would be prevented from bearing this splendid and symbolic staff into the presence of the King, and thus, in as far as stars were concerned, vying in magnitude with the Monarch himself; but he was sadly disappointed, had to leave the sacred cudgel in charge of the cook at Mackay’s Hotel, and thus grope his way to the royal presence as grim as a dark lantern.
Nothing could exceed in breadth of humour, the countenances of many of Scotland’s important sons, as they came, with eyes and mouth set wide to worship and to wonder, into the presence-chamber. Not a few of them, when they raised their “leaden eyes that loved the ground,” in lack-lustre astonishment, from the drab-coloured drugget which had been nailed down by Mr. Trotter as fit carpeting for their feet, beheld more kings than were exhibited to Banquo in the wizard glass. As is not unfrequent with men whose wits are neither great, nor altogether at home, not a few of them mistook the right one; and the portly Sir William Curtis, who was “dressed in tartan sheen,” with a kilt marvellously scant in its longitude, and dangling a bonnet, in which was displayed a grey goose feather of the largest size, took the edge off the loyalty of a full third; while his great grace of Montrose, who was drudging at the honours of the day, monopolized another, leaving only thirty-three and one-third per cent. of the loyalty of Scotland to be inflicted directly upon the King. It is needless to tell how brief were the salutations: there were two thousand persons who had to make their entrée, their bow, and their exit, in about a hundred minutes, which was, as nearly as possible, one second to each act of each person; and thus, however discordant might be the bearing of the different bodies, the unity of time was admirably preserved. The ceremony came upon them like an electric shock, or rather they came upon it as moths come upon the flame of a candle,—a buz, a singe of the wings, and down they dropt into insignificance. “Hech, Sirs!” said a brawny yeoman from the kingdom of Fife, as he attempted in vain to squeeze his minimum of opera hat upon his maximum of skull,—“Hech, Sirs! but its quick wark this! We might hae gotten a snuff wi’ him at ony rate;” and, as he strode across the court, and found himself fairly without the great gate, he fumbled over his head-piece with his paws, saying, “I’m thankfu’ that it’s upo’ my shouthers after a’!” Those who attended the civic authorities, who stuck to each other as closely as if they had been in their council-chambers at home, wore faces of the most broad and boundless delight; for, of the men of more ample calibre, the tories looked blank, because they were elbowed and perhaps outnumbered by the whigs in the presence of the King. Some of the clods of the valley lost themselves in the long galleries and cold corridors of the Holyrood; and, after all was over, and the fatigued Monarch had retired to Dalkeith, a few of them were heard at the windows bawling, like Sterne’s Starling, “I can’t get out.” So ended the levee; and the King and the people rested for the sabbath without any thing of remarkable occurrence.
On Monday the hearts of the address men were lifted higher than ever; and, as the rapid and dumb show in which they passed before the King on Saturday, had taken off the first and deepest blush of their bashfulness, they went to the court in very masterly style: foremost, were a hundred ministers of the Scotch kirk, supported by about fifty ruling elders of the same; who, having met in solemn conclave in the Canon-gate church, said to be the most composing and soporific in all Edinburgh, they moved “dark as locusts o’er the land of Nile” across the sanctuary, not of churchmen but of insolvent debtors, approached the presence, bowed themselves with more than priestly reverence, and, by the mouth of David Lamont, D.D., their moderator, poured the honey and the oil of their adulation into the royal ear. Spirit of John Knox, wert thou then on the watch! and didst thou mark the silken cords in which thy degenerate sons were drawn to bend the knee before an earthly Monarch! Yes, how wouldst thou have exclaimed that the gold of the zeal of thy church had become dim, and the fine gold of its independence had changed, if thou hadst heard thy backsliding children tempering their temporizing address with the miry clay of earthly politics, calling the King “the bulwark of the church,” and promising to labour, not for the conversion of sinners, or for the glory of Him whom thou didst account the only Head of the church, but “to impress upon the people committed to their care, a high sense of the invaluable blessings of the glorious and happy constitution?” But, boldest spirit of the reformation, be not offended,—Think on the difference of the times. The times in which your earthly lot was cast, were times of wrestling and of reformation,—they required the heart of steel, the eye that turns not aside, and the hand which is never slackened; but the lines of thy followers have fallen in pleasant places, they have become full of the fatness of the earth, and therefore they recline at their ease under the refreshing shadow of temporal power.