Some gentlemen's mansions, like Haddon and Chatsworth, were visited with much interest. But Chatsworth, with all its wonders, did not impress him so much as some other castles. What he liked was a grand baronial residence, befitting the time when the owner was really the head of his people, ready for any expedition which the public interest required, and not merely a landlord drawing his rents. Places that had a connection with great men were peculiarly attractive. We have noticed his reverence for Trinity College, Cambridge, as the abode of Isaac Newton. Kingston, near Canterbury, acquired a classic character, because the rector's wife was great-grandniece of Bishop Butler, and showed him a snuff-box, a memorandum-book, and an annotated Greek Testament, which had belonged to the author of the Analogy.[4] In the immediate neighbourhood of Kingston was the church where Richard Hooker ministered. House and church were accordingly visited. And when he came to Sunderland, its great interest was that Dr. Paley had been its rector, and that he saw the study in which he wrote, the room in which he died, and the field around which he took excursions on horseback. Newton, Butler, and Paley were among the very chief of Chalmers's instructors and friends.
Not less characteristic of the man were the free and friendly relations into which he entered with some of the common people who were thrown in his way. Usually he travelled on the stage-coach, but occasionally he hired a carriage, and not unfrequently a gig, with the driver at his side. He had the feeling that he would enjoy his holiday all the more if it were mingled with a little study. Accordingly we find that, when passing slowly in his gig over some monotonous part of the road, he would pull from his pocket a grave book, like Mede's Latin Lectures on Prophecy, and have a spell of theological reading. But his eye seemed always to be open to any object of interest, whether in the scenery or in the places he passed. With his driver he entered into friendly relations, although he sometimes found him a very dolt. At Huddersfield he hired a gig to carry him through some of the remarkable scenes of Derbyshire. The driver was a grave, silent, and simple lad of twenty-two, and he made a practice of taking him with him to the caverns and other places of interest that he visited. At the Peak Cavern he had to change his coat and hat, 'and a worse coat or a worse hat I never saw on the back or head of any carter or scavenger in the land, insomuch that I was a spectacle to the children of the village, who shouted and laughed behind me, and even the driver of the gig could not restrain his merriment. I always take him to the sights along with me; first, because I found a great ignorance of Derbyshire curiosities in Huddersfield, and I want to make him more enlightened and enlarged than his fellow-citizens; secondly, because I always feel a strong reflex or secondary enjoyment in the gratification of other people, so that the sympathy of his enjoyment greatly enhances my own; and thirdly, because I get amusement from the remarks of his simple wonderment and not very sagacious observations; and it has now passed into a standing joke with me, when leaving any of our exhibitions, that "there is no such fine sight to be seen at Huddersfield."' At Chatsworth, the Doctor gave the lad his hat and silver-headed cane to carry; he followed at a respectful distance, while his master went before with a book in his hand, taking notes of whatever was memorable. He found afterwards that his picturesque appearance and unusual employment had excited much speculation among other visitors as to who he was, and that the conclusion to which they all came was that he was a foreign nobleman. At Matlock he parted with his driver, who, he found, could hardly read; he warned him that many perish of lack of knowledge, and that he must learn to study his Bible, which was able to make him wise unto salvation through faith in Jesus Christ.
Chalmers did not always show the same patience and consideration for his fellow-travellers. Once, in Yorkshire, waiting at the door of the coach-office, he found himself beside a herd of swine, whose motions and operations he studied with interest; on the top of the coach he found a company much of the same order—'fat and unintelligent, with only pursy and vesicular projections on each side of their chins, and a superabundance of lard in their gills, whose manners well-nigh overset me, overloading our coach with their enormous carcasses, and squeezing themselves, as they ascended from various parts of the road, between passengers already in a state of compression, to the gross infraction of all law and justice, and the imminent danger of our necks.' It was enough, he said, to make any man a Tory. Naturally, Chalmers had much of the passion which bursts out in this bit of sarcasm; but, before the end of his letter, he feels that he has gone too far, his better nature asserts itself, and he gives utterance to a milder spirit. 'I feel it wrong to nourish contempt for any human being: "Honour all men," is the precept of Scripture. We should not despise any of those for whom Christ died; and the tendency to do so is one of those temptations to which refinement and knowledge are apt to expose us, and which ought to be resisted.' The 'old Adam' was not extinct; but at the bottom of his heart Chalmers wished him destroyed.
Even with a London barber he could have a merry time. To be sure the barber began the fun, for he undertook, by clipping out all the white hairs and leaving only the black, to make his client look forty years younger. This greatly tickled the Doctor, and he proceeded to compliment the barber's profession, inasmuch as, though he heard universal complaints of a bad hay-crop, his haymaking in the metropolis went on pleasantly and prosperously all the year round. On the completion of the job, the man assured the Doctor that he looked at least thirty years younger. 'I told him how delighted my wife would be with the news of this wonderful transformation, and gave him half a crown, observing that it was little enough for having turned me into a youthful Adonis. We parted in a roar of laughter, and great mutual satisfaction with each other.'
His tour in France was undertaken in 1838, on occasion of his reading his paper to the French Institute, and lasted about a month. He was struck with the airiness and brightness of Paris, and the apparent leisureliness of the people as compared with London; he remarked, too, how inferior the equipages were to those of England. Among other persons of mark whom he met with were Guizot, who told him that the combination of the moral and economical was wholly unknown in France; Mignet, Madame de Staël, and the Duc and Duchesse de Broglie, with all of whom, and many of their friends, he had most agreeable intercourse. The duke had borne a distinguished part in political history; he was a sort of head of the Liberal party, but with the utmost aversion to noise and violence. The duchess, a daughter of Madame de Staël, was a lady of many gifts and of eminent piety. The company of such persons, aristocratic yet simple, cultured yet humble, and deeply interested in the welfare of the people, was a great enjoyment to Dr. Chalmers. But, vanity of vanities! a few months after his visit, the duchess was cut off by sudden illness, and the bright and happy home of the family made desolate. Dr. Chalmers expressed his sympathy in a very tender letter to the afflicted duke.
Along with Mr. Erskine of Linlathen, whom he found at Paris, he made a short provincial tour, embracing Evreux, Broglie, Alençon, Lemans, Tours, Orleans, Malesherbes, and Fontainebleau. The scenery pleased him much; it was the kind he liked best, for he did not so much care for the sublimely picturesque as for fertile valleys and well-wooded uplands. While in France, he was much interested in the law of succession, especially to landed property, and its effects on the condition of the people. He had supposed that, by giving rise to endless subdivision of the land, the law must bring down the people to a very low standard of living. In point of fact, he found it less disadvantageous than he had thought. On one point he was more convinced than ever, that to elevate a country, moral and economical forces must go together.
We must now glance at Chalmers in his family and inner life during this busy and trying period of his life. A man who is forming new acquaintances by the hundred, and is constantly receiving the enthusiastic applause of thousands, is in no small danger of two things—of letting his home-affections become somewhat languid, and of neglecting his inner life. But in the case of Chalmers, we can find no evidence of either of these results. Shortly before his departure from St. Andrews, his domestic affections had been profoundly stirred by the death of his mother; and hardly had his first session in Edinburgh closed, when he was called to follow to the tomb the remains of Alexander, his youngest and favourite brother. His journal for 25th April 1829 has the following entry: 'It was a large funeral. The sun shone sweetly on the burying-place. I was like to give way, when, after leaving the grave, I passed Mr. Fergus; neither of us could speak. Oh that God would interpose to perpetuate the impressions of this day! This is the fifth time within these few years that I have been chief mourner, and carried the head of a relative to the grave. But this has been far the heaviest of them all.'
Dr. Chalmers himself had an alarming illness in 1834, though, happily, it passed without serious results. He had been at a meeting of the Presbytery of Edinburgh, at which he had vehemently opposed the proposal of the Town Council to curtail the number of the city ministers; and he had been greatly excited by the thought that the real welfare of the people should be obstructed and hindered by the very men who professed to be their friends. It was on this occasion that he proclaimed himself a Radical, the only consistent Radical among them. 'The dearest object of my earthly existence,' he then said, 'is the elevation of the common people—humanised by Christianity, and raised by the strength of their moral habits to a higher platform of human nature, and by which they may attain and enjoy the rank and consideration due to enlightened and companionable men. I trust the day is coming when the people will find out who are their best friends, and when the mock patriotism of the present day shall be unmasked by an act of robbery and spoliation on the part of those who would deprive the poor of their best and highest patrimony. The imperishable soul of the poor man is of as much value as the soul of the rich; and I will resist, even to the death, that alienation which goes but to swell the luxury of the higher ranks at the expense of the Christianity of the lower.'
Dr. Chalmers was moved in the very depths of his soul—for the proposal of the Town Council was a blow at the ruling idea of his heart—and he delivered himself of these sentiments with such overwhelming energy that his friends at the moment trembled for the consequences. As he was walking homeward after the meeting, on hailing a friend and taking his arm, he suddenly stopped short, and said he felt very strangely. His sensations were giddiness, and a numbness on the right side, as if he were going to fall. It was but too evident that he had sustained a slight attack of paralysis. When medical aid was obtained, it was seen that the muscles on the right side of his face were slightly paralysed, and his speech somewhat affected. Sensation over the right side was very much impaired, but the mind was wholly untouched. Rest and the ordinary treatment soon restored him, and in a short time he was able to resume all his ordinary studies and avocations.
But the event in his personal history that touched him more than anything else during this period was the completion of his sixtieth year, on 17th March 1840. It was a favourite thought that the seventh decade of life ought to be turned into a kind of Sabbath, and spent sabbatically, as if on the shore of the next world, or in the outer courts of the heavenly tabernacle. In the case of his mother the last years of her life had had something of this character, and Dr. Chalmers longed for a like experience. Deep in his soul lay the desire for direct and deliberate communion with God, for he not only believed in such communion as the greatest privilege of the human spirit, but he knew that it brought to the worshipper an actual communication of divine influence, so far as the creature was capable of receiving the divine. 'Oh that my heart were a fountain of gracious things,' he wrote in his diary on his sixtieth birthday, 'which might flow out with gracious influence on the heads of my acquaintances, and more particularly of the members of my family!'