——“Argosies with portly sail,
Like signiors and rich burghers of the flood,”
what could be expected of the man who retailed pig-tail tobacco by the yard, or played the leach to the breechless urchins of the mountains? “Nothing,” will be the answer of any uninterested spectator or hearer; but to put any corporation man, more especially if he be Scotch, in possession of this part of his utter insignificance without his own burgh, or indeed, to any rational purpose, within it, would be as hard and hopeless a task as ever was undertaken by man.
Thus the chances are, that though these poor innocents (and to have beheld their rueful looks on their neglect and disappointment, would have created bowels in a Turk, or made Burdett pity, if not love, borough-mongers,) felt all the bitterness of the infliction, they would profit nothing by the wholesome hint of the lesson,—just as in a school, the blockheads get all the whipping, and none of the Latin.
Even as early as the levee day, those persons had found that they were not in their proper element, and the discovery had become more plain and palpable every day. Their first and fondest hopes were that each would be made a peer; then they came down to baronets; next to simple knights; and again each would have been pleased if the King had given him a snuff-box,—or even, latterly, a pinch of snuff. But all that the King gave was an Irish giving—he gave himself no trouble about them; and the whole court, or, as tails were the fashion, the whole royal tail, from the Right Honourable Robert Peel, Secretary of State for the Home Department, to Sir Patrick Walker, Knight, Usher (not, as some say, of the white feather,) but of the White Rod, followed at the hinder parts of its royal master. Even with regard to the counties, there were few of the men in office who met with much regard. A Scotch lord-lieutenant has commonly a very capacious swallow himself; thus whatever the minor officers happen to pick up is only at second hand through him; and upon the occasion alluded to, a few wary wights who gave themselves airs haughty and tyranic enough, while in their own localities, might be seen twittering after the great man who made them, just as Irish beggars twitter after a mail-coach. But hope is like the sun, it ever rises the soonest, and sets the latest, upon the most elevated point; and so, ere the last and lingering ray had gone down upon the pinnacle of royalty, the middle men of Scotland and of the Athens were dark as Erebus. Long before that feast of which they were forbidden to eat, and that solitary honour to Provost Arbuthnot which they were forbidden to witness, the greater part of the “bodies” had taken their knapsacks and their departure.
For a day or two previous, they who one little week before had looked down not only upon great merchants and little squires, but absolutely upon the nobles of the land, might be found at the corners and crossings of streets, begging a bow from the poorest of their townsmen.
On the morning preceding the pilgrimage, I took an early walk round the Calton-Hill; and I cannot say that I ever met with a spectacle more ludicrously pathetic than the chief magistrate of a royal burgh, who sat in brown and stony meditation there. A large stone formed his seat; and, but for his resemblance to human nature, and the chain of office that was about his neck, I might have supposed that the seat and the sitter were of the same senseless material. The north-east wind swept coldly upon him, but he appeared to heed it not; as little did he notice me, as I went close up to scan his singular appearance. In shape, in size, and in colour, his face more resembled a brick than any other similitude that I could find. One hand hung upon his knee and held a snuff-box, by the inscription upon which I could perceive that he had been a colonel of volunteers; while the other hand, arrested in middle course, as it bore its load from the silver to the brazen repository, was relaxed in its hold, and dropping upon the cravat that with which he meant to powder the intellect. His speculationless eye was directed across the blue Firth, and to the brown mountains, among which I should presume he had his residence; and, heedless of any passer by, he was taking up his Ecclesiastes like another Solomon: “Deil’s i’ that King! could not he hae staid at hame, and let us continue to tell him a’ abaut the countrie? We hae put ourselves to nae sma’ fash an’ expense, and it has a’ come to a bonnie upshot. Our business negleckit, half the siller cuinzied out a’ our ain pooches, naething but lookit doon upon here; an’ a’ for the sake o’ bein’ taunted and worried by the folk at hame, for sax months at the least.” Thus saying, he bounced up, buttoned his coat, trotted away to the coach-office, and, instead of returning at the tails of four greys as he had come, was fain to ride outside the stage-coach, and smuggle himself into his burgh under cloud of night.
The rout soon became general: Glasgow, in great wrath, took her coach, and her lamentation, and drove so furiously, that the cries of “make way for the duke,” and “stop thief!” resounded alternately at the hamlets and turnpike-gates; while the echo of the western city, emptied as it still was of a great part of its inhabitants, was the most dismal that can be imagined. Aberdeen tarried not the wheels of her chariot, until she had reached her own Castle Street; where the answer that she made to the many inquiries as to what she had gotten was, “It wad nae mak ony body vera fat.” Nor was disappointment the only misery against which they had to bear up. Perth got her head broken by thrusting herself in the way at the peer’s ball. Poor Dundee got her pocket picked at some place she did not mention. Inverness was put on quarantine when she went home. Inverbernie found that during her absence, a radical barber and breeches-maker had established himself next door, and monopolized the whole custom; and, in short, every one had a tale of woe, which, while it pleaded for pity, found only derision.
Towards the close of the exhibition, a number even of the people seemed to get heartily tired of the business; and notwithstanding all the scramble that was made by those whose interest it was to preserve appearances as much as possible, every succeeding act fell off in interest, and, had George the Fourth remained in the Athens for but one brief month, it is probable that the people of Scotland would have returned to their own homes, and the Athenians to the worship of their own idols.
THE PARTING.
“Adieu, Adieu, Adieu! remember me.—Shakspeare.”