The influences of early training are traceable throughout the whole of Mr. Thomas Nelson’s career, and have left their impress on the business which owed its origin to his patient assiduity. He remained to the last faithful to the Covenanting Presbyterian Church, which maintained a stern adherence to the principles for which the martyrs of the Covenant had witnessed a good confession alike on the battlefield and the scaffold. His career in business had been an arduous struggle under many disabilities. As I remember him in my own boyhood, he was a grave, silent, yet not ungenial man; but one who seemed preoccupied with thoughts and cares in which a younger generation could claim no share. He had married, somewhat late in life, a bright young wife, by whom he had a family of four sons and three daughters; of whom the eldest son, the subject of this memoir, was born on the 13th of December, 1816.
On Mrs. Nelson the care and training of the young family devolved, as the successful prosecution of the business necessarily required the frequent and prolonged absence of their father. Yet his interest in them was not less fervent. An incident illustrative of this has also its bearings in relation to a characteristic feature of the devout faith of the old Covenanting fathers. He dreamt that a terrible accident had befallen his younger son John, then a youth of ten years of age, who was absent at Pettycur in Fife. He set off on the following morning, and crossed the Forth, burdened with foreboding visions of death. On his arrival, he learned that his boy had fallen into the sea, and been brought back apparently lifeless; but he had been revived, and then lay asleep after the exhaustion of this vital struggle. It fully accorded with the devout piety of the old Covenanter to recognize in his dream a divine message and proof of providential interposition.
Of Mrs. Nelson, Dr. John Cairns, who knew her intimately, refers, in his “In Memoriam” address on the death of this younger son, to her look of bright intelligence and winning affection, as indelibly impressed on the memory of all who were familiar with her. She possessed the happy mixture of tender, motherly guidance with an unusual amount of firmness and decision of character; and exercised great influence in the training of her son, who was passionately devoted to her. She was in perfect sympathy with her husband in his religious opinions, and venerated the memories of the confessors and martyrs of the Covenant; so that their sons and daughters were reared in strict conformity to the devout faith of Cameron, Peden, Cargill, and other fathers and confessors of that old Scottish type. Few men were more liberal-minded in later years than William Nelson; but the influence of early training survived through life, begetting some familiar traits of the best type of Scottish character evolved from that elder generation which so impressed the mind of the poet Wordsworth:—
“Pure livers were they all, austere and grave,
And fearing God; the very children taught
Stern self-respect, a reverence for God’s Word,
And a habitual piety, maintained
With strictness scarcely known on English ground.”
Some characteristic manifestations of the results of such early training will come under review in the narrative of later years.
CHAPTER II.
HAUNTS OF BOYHOOD.
THE curious ancient thoroughfare, the scene of early bookselling and publishing operations, has been described in the previous chapter: for many youthful recollections of William Nelson are associated with the West Bow. In those years Edinburgh was still the romantic town described by Scott in his “Marmion,” piled steep and massy, close and high, along the ridge between the Cowgate and the Nor’ Loch. Since then nearly all the antique historical mansions of the Castle Hill and the adjoining Bowhead have disappeared. An extensive range was swept away about 1835 in clearing the area for Johnston Terrace and the Assembly Hall of the Scottish Church. The famous old palace of Mary of Guise has given place to the rival Assembly Hall and the New College of the Free Church; and a broad highway now sweeps round the Castle rock where in early years antique lands, closes, and wynds, once the abodes of the Scottish gentry, were crowded together on the slope reaching to the Grassmarket.
The fine timber-fronted tenement at the corner of the Bowhead, constructed mainly of oak, was a choice example of the burghers’ dwellings in Old Edinburgh, with their trading booths opening on the street. Similar front lands in the High Street were the abodes of the merchants and traders. The “Gladstone Land” still stands near by in the Lawnmarket, bearing the initials of Thomas Gladstone, a merchant of Edinburgh in the days of Charles I. and Cromwell, to whose gifted descendant the restoration of the City Cross is due. The old nobles and landed gentry, judges and advocates, preferred the retirement of the closes and wynds, some of which still retain the names of patrician occupants. In one of those antique dwellings, in Trotter’s Close, near the Bowhead, with its wainscotted chambers, painted panels, and other traces of older generations, the Nelson family resided in William’s youth. The narrow approach to it admitted of no other carriage than the old-fashioned sedan chair; but the house itself was commodious, though with curious complexities of internal adaptation to its confined neighbourhood. One large chamber was shelved round, and stored with the surplus productions of publishing enterprise for which the Bowhead establishment had no room; and its miscellaneous contents furnished a tempting resort for explorations into some strange fields of literature not ordinarily lying within the range of youthful studies. When at length the West Bow was invaded by civic reformers, the Nelsons removed to a more commodious house, the dwelling in an elder century of Lady Elizabeth, Duchess of Gordon, while the duke held the Castle for James II. The Gordon House on the Castle Hill was a fine example of the town mansions of the sixteenth century; and, owing to its elevated site, commanded a beautiful view from its southern windows, looking across the Grassmarket to Heriot’s Hospital, the Greyfriars’ Churchyard, and the distant range of the Pentland Hills. On its demolition, in 1887, William Nelson secured sundry interesting relics, including a landscape by James Norie, which filled a panel over the mantlepiece in the duchess’s drawing-room. He also carried off the stone gargoils, fashioned in the shape of cannons, which projected from under the south parapet; and they now adorn the river wall of the garden at St. Bernard’s Well, the restoration of which, as will be seen hereafter, constituted one of the public-spirited works on which he was engaged when his life drew to a close.
The stirring scene that the Grassmarket presented on certain days, as a regular horse-fair, may be seen in a fine engraving after Calcott in “The Provincial Antiquities of Scotland;” and is still more graphically depicted in one of Geikie’s humorous etchings. Here accordingly was a favourite resort of the boys from the neighbouring Bow. The Castle Esplanade at certain hours afforded a freer playground. At other times it offered the tempting attractions of military parade and drill. But Edinburgh has also within its civic bounds the royal park of Arthur’s Seat, the Salisbury Crags, and Duddingston Loch, looking as though a choice fragment of the Highlands had been transported thither to form an adequate pleasure-ground for the Scottish capital. Hither flocked the city boys alike from the closes and wynds of the old town and from the new town crescents and squares. There was room for all, and a choice of sport for every age. Here is a reminiscence of a very youthful pastime, recalled in 1883, in a letter to Mr. James Campbell, one of William Nelson’s old West Bow playmates:—“You will, I have no doubt, recollect a long, smooth stone near Jeanie Deans’ House, in the Queen’s Park. This stone was associated with my earliest recollections, as it was a great enjoyment for boys and girls to slide down it; and many a time, when I was a little boy, have I had this enjoyment. Well, the stone was in existence till only a few weeks ago, when some rascally fellows blew it to pieces with dynamite. The act is much to be regretted, as the stone, in addition to its being a source of enjoyment for little folks in the way I have stated, was extremely interesting to geologists as one of the finest illustrations near Edinburgh of the polish produced by glacial action.”
While the boys were disporting themselves on the Castle Hill and Arthur’s Seat, without a care for the future, their father was grappling with the first difficulties inevitable to the innovator on the prescriptive usages of the book-trade. But whatever may have been the obstacles encountered by him, there was no grudging expenditure in the educational advantages provided for his sons. At the school of Mr. William Lennie, and subsequently at that of Mr. George Knight, then second to none in Edinburgh, and afterwards at the High School, William Nelson pursued his earlier studies; and there, too, some of the friendships were formed which he cherished with all the warmth of his sympathetic nature to the close of life. It was in those early days, at Mr. Knight’s school, that the friendship was formed with his present biographer, along with George Wilson, subsequently Professor of Technology in the University of Edinburgh, with Dr. Philip Maclagan, and with William and James Sprunt, two young West Indians, the former of whom will reappear as British Consul in North Carolina. Of the more romantic career of the latter an account is happily preserved in the notes of an address by William Nelson at one of the gatherings of old schoolmates in later years, which were so congenial to his tastes. After telling of James Sprunt’s first settlement in the island of St. Vincent among a dissolute set of West Indians, his quitting it for New Orleans, and being lost sight of for years, he thus proceeds:—“He had landed penniless; but when his old father and mother got their first letter from him, it was an invitation for them to join him there and share his good fortune. He next appears as rector of a classical academy at Wilmington, North Carolina, where he became a clergyman and pastor of the Presbyterian Church; and when the war broke out between the North and South, he cast in his lot with the latter, marched with the Wilmington brigade into action, and as an army chaplain, under General Stonewall Jackson, went through the terrible scenes of strife and carnage in that bloody civil war, utterly regardless of danger, and even ready to face death at the call of duty. His popularity with his Wilmington congregation was not lessened, it may be believed, when he returned to resume his pastoral charge at the close of the war.” Of other boys of those first school-days may be noted Dr. J. A. Smith, in later years an active member of the Royal Society, and Secretary of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland; Dr. John Knight, the son of our old teacher; the Rev. James Huie of Wooler, Northumberland, and others, who formed themselves into “The Juvenile Society for the Advancement of Knowledge,” of which an account is given in the Memoir of George Wilson by his sister.