Take the following specimen of ludicrous pomposity, which must suffer a

little by being quoted from memory: it describes a Highland

procession:--

"Come the Grants o' Tullochgorum,

Wi' their pipers on afore 'em;

Proud the mithers are that bore 'em,

Fee fuddle, fau fum.

Come the Grants o' Rothiemurchus,

Ilka ane his sword an' durk has,

Ilka ane as proud's a Turk is,

Fee fuddle, fau fum."

To comprehend the spirit of this, one must endow himself with the

feelings of a Lowland Scot before Waverley and Rob Roy imparted a glow

of romantic interest to the Highlanders. The pompous and the ludicrous

were surely never more happily interwoven. One would require to go

further back still to appreciate the spirit of "Skeldon Haughs, or the

Sow is Flitted." It is a picture of old Ayrshire feudal rivalry and

hatred. The Laird of Bargainy resolved to humiliate his neighbour and

enemy, the Laird of Kerse, by a forcible occupation of part of his

territory. For the purpose of making this aggression flagrantly

insulting, it was done by tethering or staking a female pig on the

domain of Kerse. The animal was, of course, attended by a sufficient

body of armed men for her protection. It was necessary for his honour

that the Laird of Kerse should drive the animal and her attendants away,

and hence came a bloody battle about "the flitting of the sow." In the

contest, Kerse's eldest son and hope, Jock, is killed, and the point or

moral of the narrative is, the contempt with which the old laird looks

on that event, as compared with the grave affair of flitting the sow. A

retainer who comes to tell him the result of the battle stammers in his

narrative on account of his grief for Jock, and is thus pulled up by the

laird--

"'Is the sow flitted?' cries the carle;

'Gie me an answer, short and plain--

Is the sow flitted, yammerin' wean?'"

To which the answer is--

"'The sow, deil tak her, 's ower the water,

And at her back the Crawfords clatter;

The Carrick couts are cowed and bitted.'"

Hereupon the laird's exultation breaks forth,--

"'My thumb for Jock--the sow's flitted!'"

Another man of genius and learning, whose name is a household one among

the book clubs, is Robert Surtees, the historian of Durham. You may

hunt for it in vain among the biographical dictionaries. Let us hope

that this deficiency will be well supplied in the Biographia Britannica,

projected by Mr Murray. Surtees was not certainly among those who flare

their qualities before the world--he was to a peculiar degree addicted,

as we shall shortly see, to hiding his light under a bushel; and so any

little notice of him in actual flesh and blood, such as this left by his

friend, the Rev. James Tate, master of Richmond School, interests one:--

"One evening I was sitting alone--it was about nine o'clock in the

middle of summer--there came a gentle tap at the door. I opened the door

myself, and a gentleman said with great modesty, 'Mr Tate, I am Mr

Surtees of Mainsforth. James Raine begged I would call upon you.' 'The

master of Richmond School is delighted to see you,' said I; 'pray walk

in.' 'No, thank you, sir; I have ordered a bit of supper; perhaps you

will walk up with me?' 'To be sure I will;' and away we went. As we went

along, I quoted a line from the Odyssey. What was my astonishment to

hear from Mr Surtees, not the next only, but line after line of the

passage I had touched upon. Said I to myself, 'Good Master Tate, take

heed; it is not often you catch such a fellow as this at Richmond.' I

never spent such an evening in my life." What a pity, then, that he did

not give us more of the evening, which seems to have left joyful

memories to both: for Surtees himself thus commemorated it in

macaronics, in which he was an adept:--

"Doctus Tatius hic residet,

Ad Coronam prandet ridet,

Spargit sales cum cachinno,

Lepido ore et concinno,

Ubique carus inter bonos

Rubei montis præsens honos."

In the same majestic folio in which this anecdote may be found--the

Memoir prefixed to the History of Durham--we are likewise told how, when

at college, he was waiting on a Don on business; and, feeling coldish,

stirred the fire. "Pray, Mr Surtees," said the great man, "do you think

that any other undergraduate in the college would have taken that

liberty?" "Yes, Mr Dean," was the reply--"any one as cool as I am!" This

would have been not unworthy of Brummell. The next is not in Brummell's

line. Arguing with a neighbour about his not going to church, the man

said, "Why, sir, the parson and I have quarrelled about the tithes."

"You fool," was the reply, "is that any reason why you should go to

hell?" Yet another. A poor man, with a numerous family, lost his only

cow. Surtees was collecting a subscription to replace the loss, and

called on the Bishop of Lichfield, who was Dean of Durham, and owner of

the great tithes in the parish, to ascertain what he would give. "Give!"

said the bishop; "why, a cow, to be sure. Go, Mr Surtees, to my

steward, and tell him to give you as much money as will buy the best cow

you can find." Surtees, astonished at this unexpected generosity,

said--"My Lord, I hope you will ride to heaven upon the back of that

cow." A while afterwards he was saluted in the college by the late Lord

Barrington, with--"Surtees, what is the absurd speech that I hear you

have been making to the dean?" "I see nothing absurd in it," was the

reply; "when the dean rides to heaven on the back of that cow, many of

you prebendaries will be glad to lay hold of her tail!"

I have noted these innocent trifles concerning one who is chiefly known

as a deep and dry investigator, for the purpose of propitiating the

reader in his favour, since the sacred cause of truth renders it

necessary to refer to another affair in which his conduct, however

trifling it might be, was not innocent. He was addicted to literary

practical jokes of an audacious kind, and carried his presumption so far

as to impose on Sir Walter Scott a spurious ballad which has a place in

the Border Minstrelsy. Nor is it by any means a servile imitation, which

might pass unnoticed in a crowd of genuine and better ballads; but it is

one of the most spirited and one of the most thoroughly endowed with

individual character in the whole collection. This guilty composition is

known as "The Death of Featherstonhaugh," and begins thus:--

"Hoot awa', lads, hoot awa';

Ha' ye heard how the Ridleys, and Thirlwalls, and a',

Ha' set upon Albany Featherstonhaugh,

And taken his life at the Dead Man's Haugh?

There was Williemoteswick

And Hardriding Dick,

And Hughie of Hawdon, and Will of the Wa',

I canna tell a', I canna tell a',

And many a mair that the deil may knaw.

The auld man went down, but Nicol his son

Ran awa' afore the fight was begun;

And he run, and he run,

And afore they were done

There was many a Featherston gat sic a stun,

As never was seen since the world begun.

I canna tell a', I canna tell a',

Some got a skelp and some got a claw,

But they gar't the Featherstons haud their jaw.

Some got a hurt, and some got nane,

Some had harness, and some got staen."

This imposture, professing to be taken down from the recitation of a

woman eighty years old, was accompanied with some explanatory notes,

characteristic of the dry antiquary, thus: "Hardriding Dick is not an

epithet referring to horsemanship, but means Richard Ridley of

Hardriding, the seat of another family of that name, which, in the time

of Charles I., was sold on account of expenses incurred by the loyalty

of the proprietor, the immediate ancestor of Sir Matthew Ridley. Will o'

the Wa' seems to be William Ridley of Walltown, so called from its

situation on the great Roman wall. Thirlwall Castle, whence the clan of

Thirlwalls derived their name, is situated on the small river of

Tippell, near the western boundary of Northumberland. It is near the

wall, and takes its name from the rampart having been _thirled_--that

is, pierced or breached--in its vicinity."

In the Life of Surtees, the evidence of the crime is thus dryly set

forth, in following up a statement of the transmission of the

manuscript, and of its publication: "Yet all this was a mere figment of

Surtees's imagination, originating probably in some whim of ascertaining

how far he could identify himself with the stirring times, scenes, and

poetical compositions which his fancy delighted to dwell on. This is

proved by more than one copy among his papers of this ballad, corrected

and interlined, in order to mould it to the language, the manners, and

the feelings of the period and of the district to which it refers. Mr

Surtees no doubt had wished to have the success of his attempt tested by

the unbiassed opinion of the very first authority on the subject; and

the result must have been gratifying to him."

In Scott's acknowledgment of the contribution, printed also in the Life

of Surtees, there are some words that must have brought misgivings and

fear of detection to the heart of the culprit, since Scott, without

apparently allowing doubts to enter his mind, yet marked some

peculiarities in the piece, in which it differed from others. "Your

notes upon the parties concerned give it all the interest of authority,

and it must rank, I suppose, among those half-serious, half-ludicrous

songs, in which the poets of the Border delighted to describe what they

considered as the _sport of swords_. It is perhaps remarkable, though it

may be difficult to guess a reason, that these Cumbrian ditties are of a

different stanza and character, and obviously sung to a different kind

of music, from those on the northern Border. The gentleman who collected

the words may perhaps be able to describe the tune."

There is perhaps no system of ethics which lays down with perfect

precision the moral code on literary forgeries, or enables us to judge

of the exact enormity of such offences. The world looks leniently on

them, and sometimes sympathises with them as good jokes. Allan

Cunningham, who, like Ramsay, was called "honest Allan," did not lose

that character by the tremendous "rises" which he took out of Cromek

about those remains of Nithsdale and Galloway song--a case in point so

far as principle goes, but differing somewhat in the intellectual rank

of the victim to the hoax. The temptation to commit such offences is

often extremely strong, and the injury seems slight, while the offender

probably consoles himself with the reflection that he can immediately

counteract it by confession. Vanity, indeed, often joins

conscientiousness in hastening on a revelation. Surtees, however,

remained in obdurate silence, and I am not aware that any edition of

the Minstrelsy draws attention to his handiwork. Lockhart seems not only

to have been ignorant of it, but to have been totally unconscious of the

risk of such a thing, since he always speaks of its author as a

respectable local antiquary, useful to Scott as a harmless drudge.

Perhaps Surtees was afraid of what he had done, like that teller in the

House of Commons who is said by tradition to have attempted to make a

bad joke in the division on the Habeas Corpus Act by counting a fat man

as ten, and, seeing that the trick passed unnoticed, and also passed the

measure, became afraid to confess it.

The literary history of "The Death of Featherstonhaugh" naturally

excited uneasiness about the touching ballad of "Barthram's Dirge," also

contributed to the Minstrelsy as the fruit of the industrious

investigations of Surtees. Most readers will remember this:--

"They shot him dead at the Nine-Stone Rig,

Beside the headless cross,

And they left him lying in his blood,

Upon the moor and moss."

After this stanza, often admired for its clearness as a picture, there

is a judicious break, and then come stanzas originally deficient of

certain words, which, as hypothetically supplied by Surtees, were

good-naturedly allowed to remain within brackets, as ingenious

suggestions:--

"They made a bier of the broken bough,

The sauch and the aspine grey,

And they bore him to the Lady Chapel,

And waked him there all day.

A lady came to that lonely bower,

And threw her robes aside;

She tore her ling [long] yellow hair,

And knelt at Barthram's side.

She bathed him in the Lady Well,

His wounds sae deep and sair,

And she plaited a garland for his breast,

And a garland for his hair."

A glance at the reprint of the Life of Surtees for the book club called

after his name, confirms the suspicions raised by the exposure of the

other ballad--this also is an imposition.[75]

[Footnote 75: The editor of the Life prints the following note by Mr

Raine, the coadjutor of Surtees in his investigations into the history

of the North of England: "I one evening in looking through Scott's

Minstrelsy wrote opposite to this dirge, _Aut Robertus aut Diabolus_.

Surtees called shortly after, and, pouncing upon the remark, justified

me by his conversation on the subject, in adding to my note, _Ita, teste

seipso_."--P. 87.]

Altogether, such affairs create an unpleasant uncertainty about the

paternity of that delightful department of literature, our ballad

poetry. Where next are we to be disenchanted? Of the way in which

ancient ballads have come into existence, there is one sad example

within my own knowledge. Some mad young wags, wishing to test the

critical powers of an experienced collector, sent him a new-made

ballad, which they had been enabled to secure only in a fragmentary

form. To the surprise of its fabricator, it was duly printed; but what

naturally raised his surprise to astonishment, and revealed to him a

secret, was, that it was no longer a fragment, but a complete

ballad,--the collector, in the course of his industrious inquiries among

the peasantry, having been so fortunate as to recover the missing

fragments! It was a case where neither could say anything to the other,

though Cato might wonder _quod non rideret haruspex, haruspicem cum

vidisset_. This ballad has been printed in more than one collection, and

admired as an instance of the inimitable simplicity of the genuine old

versions!

It may perhaps do something to mitigate Surtees's offence in the eye of

the world, that it was he who first suggested to Scott the idea of

improving the Jacobite insurrections, and, in fact, writing Waverley. In

the very same letter, quoted above, where Scott acknowledges the

treacherous gift, he also acknowledges the hints he has received; and,

mentioning the Highland stories he had imbibed from old Stewart of

Invernahyle, says: "I believe there never was a man who united the

ardour of a soldier and tale-teller--or man of talk, as they call it in

Gaelic--in such an excellent degree; and as he was as fond of telling as

I was of hearing, I became a violent Jacobite at the age of ten years

old; and even since reason and reading came to my assistance, I have

never got rid of the impression which the gallantry of Prince Charles

made on my imagination. Certainly I will not renounce the idea of doing

something to preserve these stories, and the memory of times and manners

which, though existing as it were yesterday, have so strangely vanished

from our eyes."

So much for certain men of mark whose pursuits or hobbies induced them

to cluster round the cradle of this new literary organisation. When it

was full grown it gathered about it a large body of systematic workers,

who had their own special departments in the great republic of letters.

To offer a just and discriminating account of these men's services would

draw me through an extensive tract of literary biography.

There is a shallow prejudice very acceptable to all blockheads, that men

who are both learned and laborious must necessarily be stupid. It is

best to meet the approach of such a prejudice at once, by saying that

the editors of club books are not mere dreary drudges, seeing the works

of others accurately through the press, and attending only to dates and

headings. Around and throughout the large library of volumes issued by

these institutions, there run prolific veins of fresh literature

pregnant with learning and ability. The style of work thus set agoing

has indeed just the other day been incorporated into a sort of

department of state literature since the great collection called The

Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle

Ages, of which the Master of the Rolls accepts the responsibility, is

carried out in the very spirit of the book clubs, in which indeed most

of the editors of the Chronicles have been trained.

Without prejudice to others, let me just name a few of those to whom the

world is under obligation for services in this field of learned labour.

For England, there are James Orchard Halliwell, Sir Frederic Madden,

Beriah Botfield, Sir Henry Ellis, Alexander Dyce, Thomas Stapleton,

William J. Thoms, Crofton Croker, Albert Way, Joseph Hunter, John Bruce,

Thomas Wright, John Gough Nichols, Payne Collier, Joseph Stevenson, and

George Watson Taylor, who edited that curious and melancholy book of

poems, composed by the Duke of Orleans while he was a prisoner in

England after the battle of Agincourt--poems composed, singularly

enough, in the English language, and at a period extremely deficient in

native vernacular literature.

In Scotland, it was in the earlier issues of the Bannatyne that Thomas

Thomson, too indolent or fastidious to commit himself to the writing of

a book, left the most accessible vestiges of that power of practically

grasping historical facts and conditions, which Scott admired so

greatly, and acknowledged so much benefit from. He was followed by

Professor Innes, who found and taught the secret of extracting from

ecclesiastical chartularies, and other early records, the light they

throw upon the social condition of their times, and thus collected

matter for the two pleasant volumes which have become so popular. The

Bannatyne Club, lately finding no more to do, wound up with a graceful

compliment to David Laing--the man to whom, after Scott, it has been

most indebted. And, lastly, it is in the Scotch book clubs that Joseph

Robertson has had the opportunity of exercising those subtle powers of

investigation and critical acumen, peculiarly his own, which have had a

perceptible and substantial effect in raising archæology out of that

quackish repute which it had long to endure under the name of

antiquarianism. For Ireland, of which I have something farther to say at

length, let it suffice in the mean time to name Dean Butler, Dr Reeves,

Mr O'Donovan, Mr Eugene Curry, and Dr Henthorn Todd.

There is another and distinct class of services which have been

performed through the medium of the club books. The Roxburghe having

been founded on the principle that each member should print a volume, to

be distributed among his colleagues, an example was thus set to men of

easy fortune and scholarly tastes, which has been followed with a large

liberality, of which the public have probably but a faint idea. Not only

in those clubs founded on the reciprocity system of each member

distributing and receiving, but in those to be presently noticed, where

the ordinary members pay an annual sum, to be expended in the printing

of their books, have individual gentlemen come forward and borne the

expense of printing and distributing costly volumes. In some instances

valuable works have thus been presented to the members at the cost of

those who have also undergone the literary labour of editing them.

There is something extremely refined and gentlemanlike in this form of

liberality. The recipient of the bounty becomes the possessor of a

handsome costly book without being subjected in any way to the

obligation of receiving a direct gift at the hands of the munificent

donor; for the recipient is a sort of corporation--a thing which the

lawyers say has no personal responsibility and no conscience, and which

all the world knows to have no gratitude.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

_PART IV.--BOOK-CLUB LITERATURE._

Generalities.

Nearly a quarter of a century after the birth of the first book club, a

new era was ushered in by its brother, the Camden, established for the

printing of books and documents connected with the early civil,

ecclesiastical, and literary history of the British Empire. It discarded

the rule which threw on each member the duty of printing and

distributing a book, and tried the more equitable adjustment of an

annual subscription to create a fund for defraying the expense of

printing volumes to be distributed among the members. These, at first

limited to 1000, expanded to 1200. Clubs with various objects now

thickly followed. Any attempt to classify them as a whole, is apt to

resemble Whately's illustration of illogical division--"_e.g._, if you

were to divide 'book' into 'poetical, historical, folio, quarto, French,

Latin,'" &c. One of the systems of arrangement is topographical, as the

Chetham, "for the purpose of publishing biographical and historical

books connected with the counties palatine of Lancaster and

Chester."[76] The Surtees, again, named after our friend the

ballad-monger, affects "those parts of England and Scotland included in

the east between the Humber and the Firth of Forth, and in the west

between the Mersey and the Clyde--a region which constituted the ancient

kingdom of Northumberland." The Maitland, with its headquarters in

Glasgow, gives a preference to the west of Scotland, but has not been

exclusive. The Spalding Club, established in Aberdeen, the granite

capital of the far north, is the luminary of its own district, and has

produced fully as much valuable historical matter as any other club in

Britain. Then there is the Irish Archæological--perhaps the most learned

of all--with its casual assistants, the Ossianic, the Celtic, and the

Iona. The Ælfric may be counted their ethnical rival, as dealing with

the productions of the Anglo-Saxon enemies of the Celt. The Camden

professes, as we have seen, to be general to the British Empire. The

name of the club called "The Oriental Translation Fund," tells its own

story.

[Footnote 76: Among other volumes of interest, the Chetham has issued a

very valuable and amusing collection of documents about the siege of

Preston, and other incidents of the insurrection of 1715 in Lancashire.]

There are others, too, with no topographical connection, which express

pretty well their purpose in their names--as the Shakespeare, for the

old drama--the Percy, for old ballads and lyrical pieces. The Hakluyt

has a delightful field--old voyages and travels. The Rae Society sticks

to zoology and botany; and the Wernerian, the Cavendish, and the

Sydenham, take the other departments in science, which the names given

to them readily indicate.

In divinity and ecclesiastical history we have the Parker Society, named

after the archbishop. Its tendencies are "Low," or, at all events,

"Broad;" and as it counted some seven thousand members, it could not be

allowed the run of the public mind without an antidote being accessible.

Hence "The Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology," the tendency of which

was not only shown in its name, but in its possessing among its earliest

adherents the Rev. E.B. Pusey and the Rev. John Keble. The same party

strengthened themselves by a series of volumes called the "Library of

the Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church anterior to the Division of the

East and West, translated by Members of the English Church." In

Scotland, the two branches which deny the supremacy of Rome (it would

give offence to call them both Protestant) are well represented by the

Spottiswoode, already referred to as the organ of Episcopacy; and the

more prolific Wodrow, which, named after the zealous historian of the

Troubles, was devoted to the history of Presbyterianism, and the works

of the Presbyterian fathers.

Thus are the book clubs eminently the republic of letters, in which no

party or class has an absolute predominance, but each enjoys a fair

hearing. And whereas if we saw people for other purposes than literature

combining together according to ecclesiastical divisions, as High Church

or Low, Episcopalian or Presbyterian, we should probably find that each

excluded from its circle all that do not spiritually belong to it, we

are assured it is quite otherwise in the book clubs--that High Churchmen

or Romanists have not been excluded from the Parker, or Evangelical

divines prohibited from investing in the Library of Anglo-Catholic

Theology. Nay, the most zealous would incline to encourage the

communication of their own peculiar literary treasures to their avowed

theological opponents, as being likely to soften their hearts, and turn

them towards the truth. Some adherents of these theological clubs there

also are of slightly latitudinarian propensities, to whom the

aspirations of honest religious zeal, and the records of endurance and

martyrdom for conscience' sake, can never be void of interest, or fail

in summoning up feelings of respectful sympathy, whatever be the

denominational banner under which they have been exhibited. Some of

these clubs now rest from their labours, the literary strata in which

they were employed having been in fact worked out. Whether dead or

living, however, their books are now a considerable and varied

intellectual garden, in which the literary busy bee may gather honey all

the day and many a day.

It will be readily supposed from the different and utterly separate

grooves in which they run, and is very well known to the prowler among

club books, that although these volumes profess to be printed from old

manuscripts, or to be mere reprints of rare books, they take a

considerable portion of their tone and tendency from the editor. In

fact, the editor of a club book is, in the general case, a sort of

literary sportsman, who professes to follow entirely his own humour or

caprice, or, say, his own taste and enjoyment, in the matter which he

selects, and the manner in which he lays it before his friends. Hence,

many of these volumes, heavy and unimpressible as they look, yet are

stamped strongly with the marks of the individuality, or of the peculiar

intellectual cast, of living men. Take down, for instance, the volume of

the Camden called "De Antiquis Legibus Liber," otherwise, "Cronica

Majorum et Vicecomitum Londoniarum," printed from "a small folio, nine

inches and a half in length and seven inches in breadth, the binding of

white leather covering wooden backs, and containing 159 leaves of

parchment, paged continuously with Arabic cyphers." It is partly a

record of the old municipal laws of the city of London, partly a

chronicle of events. Had it fallen to be edited by a philosophical

inquirer into the origin and principles of jurisprudence, or an

investigator of the rise and progress of cities, or a social philosopher

of any kind, it is hard to say what might have been made of it--easy to

say that it would have been made something very different from what it

is. The editor was an illustrious genealogist. Accordingly, early in his

career as expositor of the character of the volume, he alights upon a

proper name, not entirely isolated, but capable of being associated with

other names. Thus, he is placed on a groove, and off he goes travelling

in the fashion following over 220 pages of printed quarto: "Henry de

Cornhill, husband of Alice de Courcy, the heiress of the Barony of Stoke

Courcy Com. Somerset, and who, after his decease, re-married Warine

Fitz-Gerald the king's chamberlain, leaving by each an only daughter,

co-heirs of this Barony, of whom Joan de Cornhill was the wife of Hugh

de Neville, Proto Forester of England, wife first of Baldwine de

Riviers, eldest son and heir-apparent of William de Vernon, Earl of

Devon, deceased in his father's lifetime; and, secondly, of the

well-known favourite of King John, Fulk de Breauté, who had name from a

commune of the Canton of Goderville, arrondissement of Le Havre,

department of La Seine Inférieure, rendered accompt of this his debt in

the same roll;" and so on over the remainder of the 220 pages. If you

turn over a few of them you will find the same sort of thing: "Agnes,

the first daughter, was married to William de Vesey, of whom John de

Vesey, issueless, and William de Vesey, who had issue, John de Vesey,

who died before his father; and afterwards the said William de Vesey,

the father, without heir of his body;" and so on.

The reader whose fortune it has been to pass a portion of his early days

among venerable Scottish gentlewomen of the old school, will perhaps

experience an uneasy consciousness of having encountered matter of this

description before. It may recall to him misty recollections of

communications which followed a course something like this: "And so ye

see, auld Pittoddles, when his third wife deed, he got married upon the

laird o' Blaithershin's aughteenth daughter, that was sister to Jemima,

that was married intil Tam Flumexer, that was first and second cousin to

the Pittoddleses, whase brither became laird afterwards, and married

Blaithershin's Baubie--and that way Jemima became in a kind o' way her

ain niece and her ain aunty, an' as we used to say, her gude-brither was

married to his ain grannie."

But there is the deep and the shallow in genealogy, as in other arts and

sciences, and, incoherent as it may sound to the uninitiated, the

introduction to the Liber de Antiquis Legibus is no old woman's work,

but full of science and strange matter.[77] It all grows, however, in

genealogical trees, these being the predominant intellectual growth in

the editor's mind. In fact, your thorough genealogist is quite a

peculiar intellectual phenomenon. He is led on by a special and

irresistible internal influence or genius. If he should for some time

endeavour to strive after a more cosmopolite intellectual vitality, the

ruling spirit conquers all other pursuits. The organism of the tree

resumes its predominance, and if he have healthy sturdy brains, whatever

other matter they may have collected is betimes dragged into the growth,

and absorbed in the vitality of the majestic bole and huge branches.

There is perhaps no pursuit more thoroughly absorbing. The reason is

this: No man having yet made out for himself an articulate pedigree from

Adam--Sir Thomas Urquhart, the translator of Rabelais, to be sure, made

one for himself, but he had his tongue in his cheek all the while--no

clear pedigree going back to the first of men, every one, whether short

or long, Celtic or Saxon, comes into the clouds at last. It is when a

pedigree approaches extinction that the occasion opens for the

genealogist to exercise his subtlety and skill, and his exertions become

all the more zealous and exciting that he knows he must be baffled

somewhere. The pursuit is described as possessing something like the

same absorbing influence which is exercised over certain minds by the

higher mathematics. The devotees get to think that all human knowledge

centres in their peculiar science and the cognate mysteries and

exquisite scientific manipulations of heraldry, and they may be heard

talking with compassionate contempt of some one so grossly ignorant as

not to know a bar-dexter from a bend-sinister, or who asks what is meant

by a cross potent quadrate party per pale.

[Footnote 77: I remember hearing of an instance at a jury trial in

Scotland, where counsel had an extremely subtle point of genealogy to

make out, and no one but a ploughman witness, totally destitute of the

genealogical faculty, to assist him to it. His plan--and probably a very

judicious one in the general case--was to get the witness on a

table-land of broad unmistakable principle, and then by degrees lure him

farther on. Thus he got the witness readily to admit that his own mother

was older than himself, but no exertion of ingenuity could get his

intellect a step beyond that broad admission.]

These are generally great readers--reading is absolutely necessary for

their pursuit; but they have a faculty of going over literary ground,

picking up the proper names, and carrying them away, unconscious of

anything else, as pointers go over stubble fields and raise the

partridges, without taking any heed of the valuable examples of

cryptogamic botany or palæozoic entomology they may have trodden over. A

certain writer on logic and metaphysics was once as much astonished as

gratified by an eminent genealogical antiquary's expression of interest

in a discovery which his last book contained. The philosopher thought

his views on the subjectivity of the nominalists and the objectivity of

the realists had at last been appreciated; but the discovery was merely

this, that the name of a person who, according to the previously

imperfect science of the genealogist, ought not to have existed then and

there, was referred to in a letter from Spinoza, cited in defence of

certain views upon the absolute.

The votaries of this pursuit become powers in the world of rank and

birth, from the influence they are able to bring upon questions of

succession and inheritance. Hence they are, like all great influences,

courted and feared. Their ministry is often desired and sometimes

necessary; but it is received with misgiving and awe, since, like the

demons of old summoned by incantation, they may destroy the audacious

mortal who demands their services. The most sagacious and sceptical men

are apt to be mildly susceptible to conviction in the matter of their

own pedigrees, and, a little conscious of their weakness, they shrink

from letting the sacred tree be handled by relentless and unsympathising

adepts. One of these intellectual tyrants, a man of great ability, when

he quarrelled with any one, used to threaten to "bastardise" him, or to

find the bend-sinister somewhere in his ancestry; and his experience in

long genealogies made him feel assured, in the general case, of finding

what he sought if he went far enough back for it.

The next volume you lay hand on is manifestly edited by an

Ecclesiologist, or a votary of that recent addition to the constituted

"ologies," which has come into existence as the joint offspring of the

revival of Gothic architecture and the study of primitive-church

theology. Through this dim religious light he views all the things in

heaven and earth that are dealt with in his philosophy. His notes are

profusely decorated with a rich array of rood screens, finial crockets,

lavatories, aumbries, lecterns, lych sheds, albs, stoups, sedilia,

credence tables, pixes, hagioscopes, baudekyns, and squenches. It is

evident that he keeps a Bestiary, or record of his experiences in

bestiology, otherwise called bestial eikonography; and if he be

requested to give a more explicit definition of the article, he will

perhaps inform you that it is a record of the types of the

ecclesiological symbolisation of beasts. If you prevail on him to

exhibit to you this solemn record, which he will open with befitting

reverence, the faintest suspicion of a smile curling on your lip will

suffuse him with a lively sorrow for your lost condition, mixed with

righteous indignation towards the irreverent folly whereof you have been

guilty. He finds a great deal beyond sermons in stones, and can point

out to you a certain piece of rather confused-looking architecture,

which he terms a symbolical epitome of all knowledge, human and

divine--an eikonographic encyclopædia.

If you desire an antidote to all this, you may find it in the editor in

true blue who so largely refers to the Book of the Universal Kirk, The

Hynd Let Loose, The Cloud of Witnesses, Naphtali, and Faithful

Witness-Bearing Exemplified, and is great in his observations on the

Auchinshauch Testimony, the Sanquhar Declaration, and that fine

amalgamation of humility and dogmatism, the Informatory Vindication.[78]

[Footnote 78: "An Informatory Vindication of a poor, wasted,

misrepresented remnant of the suffering anti-popish, anti-prelatic,

anti-erastian, anti-sectarian, _only true_ church of Christ in

Scotland."]

There is no occasion for quarrelling with these specialties. They are

typical of a zeal often prolific both in amusement and instruction; and

when a man has gone through the labour of rendering many hundreds of

pages from a crabbed old manuscript, or of translating as much from a

nearly unknown tongue, it would be hard to deny him the recreation of a

few capers on his own hobby. Keep in mind that everything of this kind

is outside the substance of the book. The editor has his swing in the

introduction and appendix, and the notes; perhaps also in the title and

index, if he can make anything of them. But it is a principle of honour

throughout the clubs that the purity of the text shall not be tampered

with; and so, whether dark or light, faint or strong, it is a true

impression of the times, as the reader will perhaps find in the few

specimens I propose to show him. As touching the literary value of what

is thus restored, there are some who will say, and get applause for

doing so, that there are too many bad or second-rate books in existence

already; that every work of great genius finds its way to the world at

once; and that the very fact of its long obscurity proves a piece of

literature to be of little value. For all this, and all that can be

added to it, there are those who love these recovered relics of

ancestral literature, and are prepared to give reasons for their

attachment. In the first place, and apart from their purely literary

merits, they are records of the intellect and manners of their age.

Whoever desires to be really acquainted with the condition of a nation

at any particular time--say with that of England during Elizabeth's

reign, or the Commonwealth--will not attain his object by merely reading

the most approved histories of the period. He must endeavour as far as

he can to live back into the times, and to do this most effectually he

had better saturate himself to the utmost with its fugitive literature,

reading every scrap he may lay hand on until he can find no more.

Looking at these relics, on the other hand, as pure literature, no doubt

what is recalled out of the past loses the freshness and the fitness to

surrounding conditions which gave it pungency and emphasis in its own

day, while it has not that hold on our sympathies and attachment

possessed by the household literature which generation after generation

has been educated to admire, and which, indeed, has made itself a part

of our method of thought and our form of language. But precisely because

it wants this qualification has resuscitated literature a peculiar value

of its own. It breaks in with a new light upon the intellect of the day,

and its conventional forms and colours. There is not in the intellectual

history of mankind any so effective and brilliant an awakening as the

resuscitation of classical literature. It was not one solitary star

arising after another at long intervals and far apart in space, but a

sudden blazing forth of a whole firmament of light. But that is a

phenomenon to all appearance not to be repeated, or, more correctly

speaking, not to be completed, since it broke up unfinished, leaving the

world in partial darkness. Literature has been ever since wailing the

loss of the seventy per cent of Livy's History, of the eighty per cent

of Tacitus and of Euripides, of the still larger proportion of Æschylus

and Sophocles, of the mysterious triumphs of Menander, and of the whole

apparatus of the literary renown of Varro and of Atticus.[79] What would

the learned world give for the restoration of these things? It may

safely offer an indefinite reward, for so well has its surface been

ransacked for them that their existence is hardly possible, though some

sanguine people enjoy the expectation of finding them in some obscure

back-shelves in the Sultan's library. The literary results of the costly

and skilful scientific process for restoring the baked books found in

Herculaneum were so appallingly paltry, as to discourage the pursuit of

the lost classics. The best thing brought to light during the present

century, indeed, is that Institute of Gaius which cost Angelo Maï such a

world of trouble, and was the glory and boast of his life; but it is not

a very popular or extensively read book after all. The manuscripts that

have been extracted from the dirty greedy fingers of the Armenian and

Abyssinian monks, are the most valuable pieces of literature that have

been rescued from the far past. Important light on the early history of

Eastern Christianity will no doubt be extracted from them; but they are

written in those Oriental tongues which are available only to the

privileged few.

[Footnote 79: The applicability of this to Varro has been questioned. It

is a matter in which every one is entitled to hold his own opinion. To

say nothing of the other extant shreds of his writings--and I never

found any one who had anything to say for them--I cannot account even

the De Re Rustica as much higher in literary rank than a Farmers' and

Gardeners' Calendar. No doubt it is valuable, as any such means of

insight into the practical life of the Egyptians or the Phoenicians

would be, even were it less methodical than what we have from Varro. But

this, or other writing like it, will hardly account for his great fame

among contemporaries. Look, for instance, to Cicero at the outset of the

Academics: "Tu ætatem patriæ, tu descriptiones temporum, tu sacrorum

jura, tu sacerdotum munera, tu domesticam, tu bellicam disciplinam, tu

sedem regionum et locorum, tu omnium divinarum humanarumque rerum

nomina, genera officia, causas aperuiste: plurimumque poetis nostris

omninoque latinis, et literis luminis attulisti, et verbis: atque ipse

varium et elegans omni fere numero poema fecisti: philosophiamque multis

locis inchoasti--ad impellendum satis, ad edocendum parum." Laudation

could scarcely be pitched in higher tone towards the works of the great

Youatt, or Mr Huxtable's contributions to the department of literature

devoted to manure and pigs. The De Re Rustica, written when its author

was eighty years old, seems to have been about the last of what he calls

his seven times seventy works, and it is natural to suppose that

somewhere in the remaining four hundred and eighty-nine lay the merits

which excited such encomiums. The story about Gregory the Great

suppressing the best of Varro's works to hide St Augustine's pilferings

from them, would be a valuable curiosity of literature if it could be

established.]

Unlikely as the treasures opened by the revival of classic literature

are to be to any extent increased, let us not despise the harvest of our

own home gleaners. They do not find now and then a buried Hamlet, or

Paradise Lost, or Hudibras--though, by the way, the Poetical Remains of

Butler, which in wit and sarcasm are second only to his great work, were

rescued from oblivion by the drudging antiquary Thyer, who was so

conceited of the performance that he had the portrait of his own

respectable and stupid face engraved beside that of Butler, in order

perhaps that all men might see how incapable he was of fabricating the

pieces to which it is prefixed. There is a good deal of the poetry of

the club books of which it may at least be said, that worse is printed

and praised as the produce of our contemporaries.

It is not so much, however, in Poetry or the Drama as in Historical

literature that the clubs develop their strength. It is difficult to

estimate the greatness of the obligations of British history to these

institutions. They have dug up, cleansed, and put in order for immediate

inspection and use, a multitude of written monuments bearing on the

greatest events and the most critical epochs in the progress of the

empire. The time thus saved to investigators is great and priceless. In

no other department of knowledge can the intellectual labourer more

forcibly apply the Latin proverb which warns him that his work is

indefinite, but his life brief. In the ordinary sciences the philosopher

may and often does content himself with the well-rounded and professedly

completed system of the day. But no one can grapple with history without

feeling its inexhaustibleness. Its final boundaries seem only to retreat

to a farther distance the more ground we master, as Mr Buckle found,

when he betook himself, like another Atlas, to grapple with the history

of the whole world.

The more an investigator finds his materials printed for him, the

farther he can go. No doubt it is sometimes desirable, even necessary,

to look to some manuscript authority for the clearing-up of a special

point; but too often the profession of having perused a great mass of

manuscript authorities is an affectation and a pedantry. He who

searches for and finds the truth in any considerable portion of history,

performs too great an achievement to care for the praise of deciphering

a few specimens of difficult handwriting, and revealing the sense hidden

in certain words couched in obsolete spelling. If casual discoveries of

this kind do really help him to great truths, it is well; but it too

often happens that he exaggerates their value, because they are his own

game, shot on his own manor. Until he has exhausted all that is in

print, the student of history wastes his time in struggling with

manuscripts. Hence the value of the services of the book clubs in

immensely widening the arena of his immediate materials. To him their

volumes are as new tools to the mechanic, or new machinery to the

manufacturer. They economise, as it is termed, his labour: more

correctly speaking, they increase its productiveness.

These books are fortunately rich in memorials of the great internal

contest of the seventeenth century. The notes, for instance, of the

proceedings of the Long Parliament, by Sir Ralph Verney, edited for the

Camden by Mr Bruce, come upon us fresh from that scene of high debate,

carrying with them the very marks of strife. The editor informs us that

the manuscript is written almost entirely in pencil on slips of foolscap

paper, which seem to have been so folded as to be conveniently placed on

the knee, and transferred to the pocket as each was completed. "They

are," he says, "full of abrupt terminations, as if the writer

occasionally gave up the task of following a rapid speaker who had got

beyond him, and began his note afresh. When they relate to resolutions

of the House, they often contain erasures, alterations, or other marks

of the haste with which the notes were jotted down, and of the changes

which took place in the subject-matter during the progress towards

completion. On several important occasions, and especially in the

instance of the debate on the Protestation [as to the impeachment of

Strafford], the confusion and irregularity of the notes give evidence to

the excitement of the House; and when the public discord rose higher,

the notes become more brief and less personal, and speeches are less

frequently assigned to their speakers, either from greater difficulty in

reporting, or from an increased feeling of the danger of the time, and

the possible use that might be made of notes of violent remarks. On

several of the sheets there are marks evidently made by the writer's

pencil having been forced upwards suddenly, as if by some one, in a full

House, pressing hastily against his elbow while he was in the act of

taking his note."

John Spalding.

Looking from the opposite end of the island, and from a totally

different social position, another watchful observer recorded the events

of the great contest. This was John Spalding, commonly supposed to have

been Commissary-Clerk of Aberdeen, but positively known in no other

capacity than as author of the book aptly entitled The Troubles, or,

more fully, "Memorials of the Troubles in Scotland and in England," from

1624 to 1645. Little, probably, did the Commissary-Clerk imagine, when

he entered on his snug quiet office, where he recorded probates of wills

and the proceedings in questions of marriage law, that he was to witness

and record one of the most momentous conflicts that the world ever

beheld--that contest which has been the prototype of all later European

convulsions. Less still could he have imagined that fame would arise for

him after two hundred years--that vehement though vain efforts should be

made to endow the simple name of John Spalding with the antecedents and

subsequents of a biographical existence, and that the far-off

descendants of many of those lairds and barons, whose warlike deeds he

noticed at humble distance, should raise a monument to his memory in an

institution called by his name. He was evidently a thoroughly retiring

man, for he has left no vestige whatever of his individuality. Some

specimens of his formal official work might have been found in the

archives of his office--these would have been especially valuable for

the identification of his handwriting and the settlement of disputed

questions about the originality of manuscripts; but these documents, as

it happens, were all burnt early in last century with the building

containing them. So ardent and hot has been the chase after vestiges of

this man, that the fact was once discovered that with his own hand he

had written a certain deed concerning a feu-duty or rent-charge of £25,

7s. 4d., bearing date 31st January 1663; but in spite of the most

resolute efforts, this interesting document has not been found.

It is probably to this same unobtrusive reserve, which has shrouded his

very identity, that we owe the valuable peculiarities of the

Commissary-Clerk's chronicle. He sought no public distinctions, took no

ostensible side, and must have kept his own thoughts to himself,

otherwise he would have had to bear record of his own share of troubles.

In this calm serenity--folding the arms of resignation on the bosom of

patience, as the Persians say--he took his notes of the wild contest

that raged around him, setting down each event, great or small, with

systematic deliberation, as if he were an experimental philosopher

watching the phenomena of an eclipse or an eruption. Hence nowhere,

perhaps, has it been permitted to a mere reader to have so good a peep

behind the scenes of the mighty drama of war. We have plenty of

chroniclers of that epoch--marching us with swinging historic stride on

from battle unto battle--great in describing in long sentences the

musterings, the conflicts, and the retreats. In Spalding, however, we

shall find the numbers and character of the combatants, their arms,

their dresses, the persons who paid for these, and the prices paid--the

amount they obtained in pay, and the amount they were cheated out

of--their banners, distinguishing badges, watchwords, and all other like

particulars, set down with the minuteness of a bailiff making an

inventory of goods on which he has taken execution. He is very specific

in what one may term the negative side of the characteristics of

war--the misery and desolation it spreads around. The losses of this

"gudeman" and that lone widow are stated as if he were their law agent,

making up an account to go to a jury for damages for the "spulzie of

outside and inside plenishing, nolt, horse, sheep, cocks and hens, hay,

corn, peats, and fodder." He specifies all the items of mansions and

farm-houses attacked and looted, or "harried," as he calls it--the doors

staved in, the wainscoting pulled down--the windows smashed--the

furniture made firewood of--the pleasant plantations cut down to build

sleeping-huts--the linen, plate, and other valuables carried off: he

will even, perchance, tell how they were distributed--who it was that

managed to feather his nest with the plunder, and who it was that was

disappointed and cheated.

He had opportunities of bestowing his descriptive powers to good

purpose. Besides its ordinary share in the vicissitudes and calamities

of the war, his town of Aberdeen was twice pillaged by Montrose, with

laudable impartiality--once for the Covenanters and once for the

Royalists. Here is his first triumphant entry:--

"Upon the morne, being Saturday, they came in order of battle, being

well armed both on horse and foot, ilk horseman having five shot at the

least, whereof he had ane carbine in his hand, two pistols by his sides,

and other two at his saddle-torr; the pikemen in their ranks with pike

and sword; the musketeers in their ranks with musket, musket-staff,

bandelier, sword, powder, ball, and match. Ilk company, both horse and

foot, had their captains, lieutenants, ensigns, sergeants, and other

officers and commanders, all for the most part in buff coats and goodly

order. They had five colours or ensigns, whereof the Earl of Montrose

had one having his motto drawn in letters, 'For Religion, the Covenant,

and the Countrie.' The Earl Marechal had one, the Earl of Kinghorn had

one, and the town of Dundee had two. They had trumpeters to ilk company

of horsemen, and drummers to ilk company of footmen. They had their

meat, drink, and other provisions, bag and baggage, carried with them,

done all by advice of his Excellency Field-Marshal Leslie, whose counsel

General Montrose followed in this business. Then, in seemly order and

good array, this army came forward and entered the burgh of Aberdeen

about ten hours in the morning, at the Over Kirk gateport, syne came

down through the Broadgate, through the Castlegate, over at the Justice

Port to the Queen's Links directly. Here it is to be noted that few or

none of this haill army wanted are blue ribbon hung about his craig

[viz., neck] under his left arm, whilk they called 'the Covenanters'

ribbon,' because the Lord Gordon and some other of the Marquis's bairns

had ane ribbon, when he was dwelling in the toun, of ane red flesh

colour, which they wore in their hats, and called it 'the royal ribbon,'

as a sign of their love and loyalty to the King. In dispite or dirision

whereof this blue ribbon was worn and called 'the Covenanters' ribbon'

by the haill soldiers of this army."

The well-ordered army passed through, levying a fine on the Malignants,

and all seemed well; but because the citizens had not resisted Montrose,

the loyal barons in the neighbourhood fell on them and plundered them;

and because they had submitted to be so plundered, the Covenanting army

came back and plundered them also. "Many of this company went and brack

up the Bishop's yetts, set on good fires of his peats standing within

the close: they masterfully broke up the haill doors and windows of this

stately house; they brake down beds, boards, aumries, glassen windows,

took out the iron stauncheons, brake in the locks, and such as they

could carry had with them, and sold for little or nothing; but they got

none of the Bishop's plenishing to speak of, because it was all conveyed

away before their coming." On Sunday, Montrose and the other leaders

duly attended the devotional services of the eminent Covenanting divines

they had brought with them. "But," says Spalding, "the renegate

soldiers, in time of both preachings, is abusing and plundering New

Aberdeen pitifully, without regard to God or man;" and he goes on in his

specific way, describing the plundering until he reaches this climax:

"No foul--cock or hen--left unkilled. The haill house-dogs, messens, and

whelps within Aberdeen felled and slain upon the gate, so that neither

hound nor messen or other dog was left that they could see." But there

was a special reason for this. The ladies of Aberdeen, on the retiring

of Montrose's army, had decorated all the vagabond street-dogs with the

blue ribbon of the Covenant.

This was in 1639. Five years afterwards Montrose came back on them in

more terrible guise still, to punish the town for having yielded to the

Covenant. In Aberdeen, Cavalier principles generally predominated; but

after being overrun and plundered successively by either party, the

Covenanters, having the acting government of the country at their back,

succeeded in establishing a predominance in the councils of the

exhausted community. Spalding had no respect for the civic and rural

forces they attempted to embody, and speaks of a petty bailie "who

brought in ane drill-master to learn our poor bodies to handle their

arms, who had more need to handle the plough and win their livings."

Montrose had now with him his celebrated army of Highlanders--or Irish,

as Spalding calls them--who broke at a rush through the feeble force

sent out of the town to meet them. Montrose "follows the chase to

Aberdeen, his men hewing and cutting down all manner of men they could

overtake within the town, upon the streets, or in their houses, and

round about the town, as our men were fleeing, with broadswords, but

mercy or remeid. These cruel Irish, seeing a man well clad, would first

tyr [_i.e._, strip] him and save the clothes unspoiled, then kill the

man; ... nothing heard but pitiful howling, crying, weeping, mourning,

through all the streets.... It is lamentable to hear how thir Irishes,

who had gotten the spoil of the town, did abuse the samin. The men that

they killed they would not suffer to be buried, but tirled them of

their clothes, syne left their naked bodies lying above the ground. The

wife durst not cry nor weep at her husband's slaughter before her eyes,

nor the mother for her son--which if they were heard, then they were

presently slain also; ... and none durst bury the dead. Yea, and I saw

two corpses carried to the burial through the old town with women only,

and not are man amongst them, so that the naked corpses lay unburied so

long as these limmers were ungone to the camp."

The Commissary-Clerk was on Montrose's side, but he had the hatred of a

Lowlander of that day for the Highlanders. He has a great many amusing

episodes describing the light-fingered lads from the hills coming down,

and in the general confusion of the times plundering Cavalier and

Covenanter alike; and on these occasions he drops his usual placidity

and becomes rabid and abusive, as the best-tempered Americans are said

to become when they speak of niggers, and deals out to them the terms

limmers, thieves, robbers, cut-throats, masterful vagrants, and so

forth, with great volubility. Of some of their chiefs, renowned in

history, he speaks as mere robber-leaders, and when they are known by

one name in their own country and another in the Lowlands, he puts an

_alias_ between the two. The very initial words of his chronicle are,

"Efter the death and burial of Angus Macintosh of Auldterlie, _alias_

Angus Williamson."

Montrose having departed, Argyle's troops commenced to plunder the

district for having submitted to his enemy, and these, being doubly

offensive as Covenanters and Highlanders, are treated accordingly. But

it is necessary to be impartial; and having bestowed so much on the

Cavalier annalist, let us take a glimpse at the other side.

Robert Wodrow.

From the collections of the Reverend Robert Wodrow, the historian of The

Sufferings of the Church of Scotland, a rich harvest has been reaped by

the northern clubs, one of which appropriately adopted his name. He was

a voluminous writer and an inexhaustible collector. It is generally

classed among the failings of the book-hunter that he looks only to the

far past, and disregards the contemporary and the recent. Wodrow was a

valuable exception to this propensity. Reversing the spirit of the

selfish bull which asks what posterity has done for us, he stored up

contemporary literature for subsequent generations; and he thus left, at

the commencement of the eighteenth century, such a library as a

collector of the nineteenth, could he have sent a caterer before him,

would have prepared to await his arrival in the world. The inestimable

value of the great collection of the civil-war pamphlets made by George

Thomason, and fortunately preserved in the British Museum, is very well

known. Just such another of its kind is Wodrow's, made up of the

pamphlets, broadsides, pasquinades, and other fugitive pieces of his own

day, and of the generation immediately preceding. These are things

easily obtained in their freshness, but the term fugitive is too

expressive of their nature, and after a generation or two they have all

flown away, save those which the book-hunter has exorcised into the

vaults of some public collection. There is perhaps too little done in

our own day in preserving for posterity these mute witnesses of our

sayings and doings. They are too light and volatile to be caught by the

Copyright Act, which so carefully deposits our quartos and octavos in

the privileged libraries. It is pleasant, by the way, at this moment, to

observe that the eminent scholar who has charge of the chief portion of

Wodrow's gatherings, as keeper of the Advocates' Library, is following

his example, by preserving a collection of the pamphlets of the present

century which will keep our posterity in employment, if they desire to

unwind the intricacies of all our civil and ecclesiastical sayings and

doings.

Wodrow carried on an active correspondence about matters of contemporary

policy, and the special inquiries connected with his History: selections

from this mass have furnished three sturdy volumes. Besides pamphlets,

he scraped together quantities of other people's manuscripts--some of

them rising high enough in importance to be counted State papers. How

the minister of the quiet rural parish of Eastwood could have got his

hands on them is a marvel, but it is fortunate that they were saved from

destruction; and it is nearly equally fortunate that they have been well

ransacked by zealous club-book makers, who have by this time probably

exhausted the better part of their material. In the next place, Wodrow

left behind several biographies of eminent members of his own Church,

its saints and martyrs; and goodly masses out of this storehouse have

also been printed.

But by far the most luxurious morsel in the worthy man's intellectual

larder was not intended to reach the profane vulgar, but destined for

his own special rumination. It consists in the veritable contents of his

private note-books, containing his communings with his own heart and his

imagination. They were written on small slips of paper, in a hand direly

cramped and minute; and lest this should not be a sufficient protection

to their privacy, a portion was committed to certain ciphers, which

their ingenious inventor deemed, no doubt, to be utterly impregnable. In

stenography, however, the art of lock-picking always keeps ahead of the

art of locking, as that of inventing destructive missiles seems to

outstrip that of forging impenetrable plates. Wodrow's trick was the

same as that of Samuel Pepys, and productive of the same

consequences--the excitement of a rabid curiosity, which at last found

its way into the recesses of his secret communings. They are now

printed, in the fine type of the Maitland Club, in four portly quartos,

under the title, Wodrow's Analecta. Few books would hold out so much

temptation to a commentator, but their editor is dumb, faithfully

reprinting the whole, page by page, and abstaining both from

introduction and explanatory foot-note.

Perhaps in the circumstances this was a prudent measure. Those who enjoy

the weaknesses of the enthusiastic historian have them at full length.

As to others partially like-minded with him, but more worldly, who would

rather that such a tissue of absurdities had not been revealed, they are

bound over to silence, seeing that a word said against the book is a

word of reproach against its idolised author--for as to the editor, he

may repeat after Macbeth, "Thou canst not say I did it."

Mr Buckle's ravenous researches into the most distant recesses of

literature revealed to him this pose. He has taken some curious

specimens out of it, but he might have made his anthology still richer

had he been in search of the picturesque and ludicrous, instead of

seeking solid support for his great theory of positivism. What he

chiefly amuses one with in this part of the world, however, is the

solemn manner in which he treats the responsibility of giving increased

publicity to such things, and invokes the Deity to witness that his

objects are sincere, and he is influenced by no irreverence. This

feeling may arise from a very creditable source, but a native of

Scotland has difficulty in understanding it. In this country, being, as

many of us have been, within the very skirts of the great contests that

have shaken the realm--Jacobitism on the one hand and Covenantism on the

other--we are roughened and hardened, and what shocks our sensitive

neighbours is very good fun to ourselves.

It appears that Wodrow had intended to publish a book on remarkable

special providences--something of a scientific character it was to be,

containing a classification of their phenomena, perhaps a theory of

their connection with revealed religion. The natural laws by which they

are ruled, he could not, of course, have sought to discover, since the

principle on which he set out predicated the non-existence of such laws.

The advantage of the peep enjoyed into his private note-book is, that we

have his incompleted inquiries containing the stories as to which even

he--a very poor adept at scepticism--required some confirmation. It is

quite evident that we thus have something more valuable to philosophy,

and infinitely more amusing, than his completed labours would have been.

Here, for instance, is one of his break-downs--an interesting

phenomenon, but not irrefragably proved.

"This day I have an accompt from Marion Stevenson, who says she had it

from one who was witness to it, that near Dunglass there was a child

found upon the highway by some shearers, to their uptaking lately born;

and they brought it to the next house, where the woman putting on the

pan to make some meat for it, the pan filled full of corn; and when she

turned it out and put it on the second time, it filled full of bear; and

when put on the third time, it filled full of blood; and upon this the

child began to alter its shapes some way, and to speak, and told them

this year should have great plenty, and the next year also, but the

third the land should be filled with blood and fire and sword! and the

child desired it might be taken to the place where it was found, and

left there. I hear not yet what was done with it. This is so incredible,

that I set it down only for after trial and inquiry about it--no

confirmation."

His wife tells him a story which in her youth she had heard narrated by

Mr Andrew Reid, minister of Kirkbean. It is a case of true love crossed

by the interference of cruel relations. The swain leaves the country

for several years--gets on--remembers the old love, and returns to

fulfil his vows. It happens that on the day of his return the loved one

dies. He is on his way to her house in the dusk of eve when he meets an

old man, who tells him that he is going on a bootless errand--he will

find a dead corpse for the warm living heart he expected. The stranger,

however, pitying his distress, tells him there is a remedy--hands to the

lover certain pills, and says, "If you will give her these, she will

recover." So it turned out, and they were happily married. A certain

visitor at the house, however, "a very eminent Christian," refused to

salute the lady with the usual courtesies. He takes the husband aside,

"and tells him that he was very much persuaded his wife was a devil, and

indeed he could not salute her; and after some discourse prevailed so

far with him as to follow his advice, which was to go with her and take

her to that room where he found her, and lay her down upon the bed where

he found her, and quit her of a devil. Which he did, and immediately she

became a dead corpse half consumed." "This had need," says cautious

Wodrow, "to be weel attested, and I have writ to Mr Reid anent it."

Curiosity urged me to look for and find among Wodrow's manuscripts Mr

Reid's answer. He says he often heard the story from his father as a

truth, but had been unaccountably negligent in noting the particulars of

it; and then he favours his correspondent with some special providences

anent himself, which appear not to have been sufficiently pungent for

Wodrow's taste.

A philosophical investigator of the established national superstitions

would find excellent types of all of them in the Analecta. In the

department of second-sight, for instance, restricted, with due

observance to geographical propriety, within the Highland line, a guest

disturbs a convivial meeting at Blair-Athol by exclaiming that he

beholds a dirk sticking in the breast of their entertainer. That night

he is stabbed to the heart; and even while the seer beheld the visionary

dagger, a bare-legged gilly was watching outside to execute a

long-cherished Highland vengeance. The Marquess of Argyle, who was

afterwards beheaded, was playing with some of his clan at bowls, or

bullets, as Wodrow calls them, for he was not learned in the

nomenclature of vain recreations. "One of the players, when the Marquess

stooped down to lift the bullet, fell pale, and said to them about him,

'Bless me! what is that I see?--my Lord with the head off, and all his

shoulders full of blood.'"

In the department of fairy tricks, the infant of Thomas Paton, "a very

eminent Christian," in its first use of speech, rattles out a volley of

terrific oaths, then eats two cheeses, and attempts to cut its brother's

throat. This was surely sufficient evidence to satisfy the most

sceptical that it was a changeling, even had it not, as the result of

certain well-applied prayers, "left the house with an extraordinary

howling and crying."

Ghost and witch stories abound. The following is selected on account of

the eminence of its hero, Gilbert Rule, the founder and first Principal

of the University of Edinburgh: He was travelling on the dreary road

across the Grampians, called the Cairn o' Mont, on which stood a lone

desolate inn. It has now disappeared, but I remember it in its dreary

old age, standing alone on the moor, with its grim gables and its

loupin'-on stane,--just the sort of place where, in the romances, the

horrified traveller used to observe a trap-door in his bedroom floor,

and at supper picked the finger of a murdered man out of a mutton-pie.

There Rule arrived late at night seeking accommodation, but he could get

none--the house was crammed. The only alternative was to make a bed for

him in an empty house close by; it had been unoccupied for thirty years,

and had a bad repute. He had to sleep there alone, for his servant would

not go with him. Let Wodrow himself tell what came to pass.

"He walked some time in the room, and committed himself to God's

protection, and went to bed. There were two candles left on the table,

and these he put out. There was a large bright fire remaining. He had

not been long in bed till the room door is opened, and an apparition, in

shape of a country tradesman, came in and opened the curtains without

speaking a word. Mr Rule was resolved to do nothing till it should speak

or attack him, but lay still with full composure, committing himself to

the Divine protection and conduct. The apparition went to the table,

lighted the two candles, brought them to the bedside, and made some

steps toward the door, looking still to the bed, as if he would have Mr

Rule rising and following. Mr Rule still lay still, till he should see

his way further cleared. Then the apparition, who the whole time spoke

none, took an effectual way to raise the doctor. He carried back the

candles to the table, and went to the fire, and with the tongs took down

the kindled coals, and laid them on the deal chamber floor. The doctor

then thought it time to rise and put on his clothes, in the time of

which the spectre laid up the coals again in the chimney, and, going to

the table, lifted the candles and went to the door, opened it, still

looking to the Principal as he would have him following the candles,

which he now, thinking there was something extraordinary in the case,

after looking to God for direction, inclined to do. The apparition went

down some steps with the candles, and carried them into a long trance,

at the end of which there was a stair which carried down to a low room.

This the spectre went down, and stooped, and set down the lights on the

lowest step of the stair, and straight disappears."

The learned Principal, whose courage and coolness deserve the highest

commendation, lighted himself back to bed with the candles, and took the

remainder of his rest undisturbed. Being a man of great sagacity, on

ruminating over his adventure, he informed the sheriff of the county

"that he was much of the mind there was murder in the case." The stone

whereon the candles were placed was raised, and there "the plain remains

of a human body were found, and bones, to the conviction of all." It was

supposed to be an old affair, however, and no traces could be got of the

murderer. Rule undertook the functions of the detective, and pressed

into the service the influence of his own profession. He preached a

great sermon on the occasion, to which all the neighbouring people were

summoned; and behold, "in the time of his sermon, an old man near eighty

years was awakened, and fell a-weeping, and before all the whole company

acknowledged that, at the building of that house, he was the murderer."

In Wodrow's note-book the devil often cuts a humiliating figure, and is

treated with a deal of rude and boisterous jeering. A certain "exercised

Christian," probably during a fit of indigestion, was subjected to a

heavy wrestling with doubts and irreconcilable difficulties, which

raised in his mind horrible suggestions. The devil took occasion to put

in a word or two for the purpose of increasing the confusion, but it

had the directly opposite effect, and called forth the remark that, "on

the whole the devil is a great fool, and outshoots himself oft when he

thinks he has poor believers on the haunch." On another occasion the

devil performed a function of a very unusual kind, one would think. He

is known to quote Scripture for his purposes, but who ever before heard

of his writing a sermon--and, as it seems, a sound and orthodox one?

There was, it appears, a youth in the University of St Andrews,

preparing to undergo his trials as a licentiate, who had good reason to

fear that he would be plucked. He found he could make nothing whatever

of the trial sermon, and was wandering about by lonely ways, seeking in

vain for inspiration. At last "there came up to him a stranger, in habit

like a minister, in black coat and band, and who addressed the youth

very courteously." He was mighty inquisitive, and at length wormed out

the secret grief. "I have got a text from the Presbytery. I cannot for

my life compose a discourse on it, so I shall be affronted." The

stranger replied--"Sir, I am a minister; let me hear the text?" He told

him. "Oh, then, I have an excellent sermon on that text in my pocket,

which you may peruse and commit to your memory. I engage, after you have

delivered it before the Presbytery, you will be greatly approven and

applauded." The youth received it thankfully; but one good turn

deserves another. The stranger had an eccentric fancy that he should

have a written promise from the youth to do him afterwards any favour in

his power; and there being no other liquid conveniently at hand for the

signature of the document, a drop of the young man's blood was drawn for

the purpose. Note now what followed. "Upon the Presbytery day the youth

delivered an excellent sermon upon the text appointed him, which pleased

and amazed the Presbytery to a degree; only Mr Blair smelt out something

in it which made him call the youth aside to the corner of the church,

and thus he began with him: 'Sir, you have delivered a nate sermon,

every way well pointed. The matter was profound, or rather sublime; your

style was fine and your method clear; and, no doubt, young men at the

beginning must make use of helps, which I doubt not you have done.' So

beginning, Blair, who was a man of mighty gifts and repute, pressed on

so close with repeated questions that the awful truth at last came out."

There was nothing for it but that the Presbytery must engage in special

exercise for the penitent youth. They prayed each in succession to no

purpose, till it came to Blair's turn. "In time of his prayer there came

a violent rushing of wind upon the church--so great that they thought

the church should have fallen down about their ears--and with that the

youth's paper and covenant drops down from the roof of the church among

the ministers."

A large proportion of Wodrow's special providences are performed for the

benefit of the clergy, either to provide them with certain worldly

necessaries of which they may happen to be in want, or to give effect to

their pious indignation, or, as some might be tempted to call it, their

vindictive spite, again those who revile them. Perhaps an interdicted

pastor, wandering over the desolate moors where he and his hunted flock

seek refuge, is sorely impeded by some small want of the flesh, and

gives expression to his wishes concerning it; when forthwith he is

miraculously supplied with a shoulder of mutton or a pair of trousers,

according to the nature of his necessities. He encounters ridicule or

personal insult, and instantly the blasphemer is struck dead, or

idiotic, or dumb, after the example of those who mocked Elisha's bald

head; and Wodrow generally winds up these judgments with an appropriate

admonitory text, as, for instance, "Touch not His anointed, and do His

prophets no harm." As the persons for whom these special miracles are

performed generally happen to be sorely beset by worldly privations and

dangers, which are at their climax at the very time when they are able

to call in supernatural intervention, a logician might be inclined to

ask why, if the operations, and, as it were, the very motives, of the

Deity are examined in respect of those events which are propitious to

His favourite, they should not also be examined with the same critical

pertinacity as to the greatly predominating collection of events which

are decidedly unpropitious to him, so as to bring out the reason why the

simpler course of saving him from all hardships and persecution had not

been followed, instead of the circuitous plan of launching heavy

calamities against him, and then issuing special miraculous powers to

save him from a small portion of these calamities. But such logic would

probably be unprofitably bestowed, and it is wiser to take the

narratives as they stand and make the best use of them. Whoever looks at

them with a cold scientific eye, will at once be struck by the close

analogy of Wodrow's vaticinations and miracles to those of other times

and places, and especially to those credited to the saints of the early

Catholic Church, to which many of them, indeed, bear a wonderfully exact

resemblance.

The Early Northern Saints.

Carried on by the power of association, we are thus brought to the door

of an exceedingly interesting department of book-club literature,--the

restoration of the true text of the early lives of the saints--a

species of literature now recognised and separated from others by the

title of Hagiology. Everybody knows, or ought to know, that the great

library of this kind of literature, published by the Bollandists, begins

with the beginning of the year, and gives the life of each saint

successively according to his day in the calendar. Ignorance is more

excusable on the question what constitutes saintship, and, supposing you

to have found your saint, on the criterion by which the day of his

festival should be adjusted in the calendar. Technically, to make a

saint, there should be an act of pontifical jurisdiction, all the more

solemn than any secular judicial act as the interests affected are more

momentous; but only a small number of the saints stand on record in the

proceedings of the Vatican. In fact, the great body of them were in the

enjoyment of their honours hundreds of years before the certifying

process was adopted, and to investigate all their credentials was far

too weighty a task to be attempted. It is taken for granted that they

have been canonised, and if it be difficult to prove that they have gone

through this ceremony, they hold their ground through the still greater

difficulty of proving that they have not. Some of those whose sanctity

is established by this kind of acclamation are so illustrious, that it

would be ludicrous to suppose even the Vatican capable of adding to

their eminence--more so, to imagine any process by which they could be

unsanctified; such are St Patrick, St George, and St Kentigern. But

there is a vast crowd of village or parochial saints firmly established

within their own narrow circles, but as unknown at the court of Rome as

any obscure curate working in some distant valley, or among the poor of

some great city. In such a crowd there will naturally be questionable

personages. St Valentine, St Fiacre, St Boniface, St Lupus, St Maccesso,

St Bobbio, St Fursy, and St Jingo, have names not endowed with a very

sanctimonious sound, but they are well-established respectable saints.

Even Alban Butler, however, has hard work in giving credit to St

Longinus, St Quirinus, St Mercurius, St Hermes, St Virgil, St Plutarch,

and St Bacchus. It is the occurrence of such names that makes Moreri

speak of the Bollandist selection as rather loose, since it contains

"vies des saintes bonnes, médiocres, mauvaises, vrayes, douteuses, et

fausses."

The saint's festival-day is generally the anniversary of his death, or

"deposition," as it is technically termed; but this is by no means an

absolute rule. Few compilers deserve more sympathy than those who try to

adjust saints' days by rule and chronology, since not only does one

saint differ from another in the way in which his feast is established,

but for the same saint there are different days in different countries,

and even in different ecclesiastical districts--the diocese of Paris

having, for instance, some special saints' days of its own, which differ

from the practice throughout the rest of Catholic Christendom. Some

saints, too, have been shifted about from day to day by authority. Queen

Margaret of Scotland, the wife of Malcolm, whose real source of

influence was that she represented the old Saxon line of England, had

two great days,--that of her deposition on July the 8th, and that of her

translation on July the 19th; but, by a papal ordinance immediately

after the Revolution, her festival was established upon the 10th of

June. This was rather a remarkable day in Britain, being that on which

the poor infant son of the last of the Jameses, afterwards known in

Parliamentary language as the Pretender, was born. The adjustment of

Queen Margaret's day to that event was a stroke of policy for the

purpose of rendering the poor child respectable, and removing all doubts

about warming-pans and other disagreeables; but it is not known that the

measure exercised the slightest influence on the British Parliament.

Bollandus, who was the first seriously to lay his hand to the great work

called after him, was a Belgian Jesuit. He had got through January and

February in five folio volumes, when he died in 1658. Under the auspices

of his successor, Daniel Papebroch, March appeared in 1668 and April in

1675, each in three volumes. So the great work crept on day by day and

year by year, absorbing the whole lives of many devoted labourers,

conspicuous among whom are the unmelodious names of Peter Bosch, John

Stilting, Constantine Suyskhen, Urban Sticken, Cornelius Bye, James Bue,

and Ignacius Hubens. In 1762, a hundred and four years after January,

September was completed. It filled eight volumes, for the work

accumulated like a snow-ball as it rolled, each month being larger than

its predecessor. Here the ordinary copies stop in forty-seven volumes,

for the evil days of the Jesuits were coming on, and the new literary

oligarchy, where Voltaire, Montesquieu, and D'Alembert held sway, had

not been propitious to hagiology. A part of October was accomplished

under the auspices of Maria Theresa, the Empress Queen, but for some

reason or other it came within the category of rare books, and was not

to be easily obtained until it was lately reprinted.

Whatever effect such a phenomenon may have on some denominations of the

religious world, it can afford nothing but pure satisfaction to all

historical investigators to know that this great work has been resumed

in this middle of the nineteenth century. I have before me the ninth

volume for October, embracing the twentieth and twenty-first days of

that month, and containing about as much matter as the five volumes of

Macaulay's History. On the 21st of October there is, to be sure, a very

heavy job to be got through in St Ursula and her eleven thousand

virgins, whose bones may be seen in musty presses in the Church of the

Ursulines in Cologne; but still as it moves forward, it is evident that

the mighty work continues to enlarge its proportions. The winter is

coming on too, a period crowded with the memorials of departed saints,

as being unpropitious to men of highly ascetic habits, so that those who

have undertaken the completion of the Bollandist enterprise have their

work before them.

There is a marvellous uniformity in all the arrangements of this array

of volumes which have thus appeared at intervals throughout two

centuries. They dealt with matter too sublimely separated from the

temporal doings of men to be affected by political events, yet could

they not entirely escape some slight touches from the convulsions that

had recast the whole order and conditions of society. When October was

begun, Belgium, where the work is published, was attached to the

Austrian Empire, and the French Revolution had not yet come. The

Jesuits, though not favourites among monarchs, profess a decorous

loyalty, and the earlier volumes of the month have portraits of the

Empress Queen, and others of the Imperial family, in the most elaborate

court costume of the days before the Revolution; while the later

volumes, still loyal, are illustrated by the family circle of the

Protestant King of constitutional Belgium, whose good-natured face and

plain broad-cloth coat are those doubtless of the right man, though one

cannot help imagining that he feels himself somehow in the wrong place.

The crowds of saints who come sometimes swarming in on a single day to

these teeming volumes, give one an almost oppressive notion of the

quantity of goodness that must have, after all, existed in this wicked

world. The labours of the Bollandists, not only in searching through all

available literature, but in a special correspondence established with

their Jesuit brethren throughout the world, are absolutely astounding.

Their conscientious minuteness is wonderful; and many a one who thinks

he is master of the ecclesiastical lore of his own parish, which he has

made his specialty, has been petrified to find what he thought his

discoveries all laid down with careful precision as matters of ordinary

knowledge in some corner of these mighty volumes. The Bollandists

obtained their information from the spot, and it is on the spot that

this kind of literature must be worked out. A thoroughly accomplished

antiquary, working within a limited district, will thus bring forth more

full and satisfactory results, so far as they go, than even the

Bollandists have achieved, and hence the great value of the services of

the book clubs to hagiology.

The writer of the letters bearing the signature "Veritas," in all the

newspapers, would, of course, specially object to the resuscitation of

this class of literature, "because it is full of fabulous accounts of

miracles and other supernatural events which can only minister to

credulity and superstition." But even in the extent and character of

this very element there is a great significance. The size of a current

falsehood is the measure of the size of the human belief that has

swallowed it, and is a component part of the history of man.

The best critical writers on ancient history have agreed not to throw

away the cosmogony and the hierology of Greece. It is part of Grecian

history that the creed of the people was filled with a love of embodied

fancies, so graceful and luxuriant. No less are the revel rout of

Valhalla part of the virtual history of the Scandinavian tribes. But the

lives of our saints, independently altogether of the momentous change in

human affairs and prospects which they ushered in, have a substantial

hold on history, of which neither the classical nor the northern

hierology can boast. Poseidon and Aphrodite, Odin and Freya, vanish into

the indefinite and undiscoverable at the approach of historical

criticism. But separately altogether from their miracles, Cuthbert and

Ninian, Columba and Kentigern, had actual existences. We know when they

lived and when they died. The closer that historical criticism dogs

their steps, the clearer it sees them, and the more it knows about their

actual lives and ways. Even if they were not the missionaries who

introduced Christianity among us,--as men who, in the old days before

Britain became populous and affluent in the fruits of advanced

civilisation, trod the soil that we tread, it would be interesting to

know about them--about the habitations they lodged in, the garments they

wore, the food they ate, the language they spoke, their method of social

intercourse among each other, and the sort of government under which

they lived.

That by investigation and critical inquiry we can know more of these

things than our ancestors of centuries past could know, is still a

notion comparatively new which has not been popularly realised. The

classic literature in which our early training lies has nothing in it to

show us the power of historical inquiry, and much to make us slight it.

The Romans, instead of improving on the Greeks, fell in this respect

behind them. Father Herodotus, credulous as he was, was a better

antiquary than any who wrote in Latin before the revival of letters.

Occupied entirely with the glory of their conquests, and blind to the

future which their selfish tyranny was preparing for them, the Romans

were equally thoughtless of the past, unless it were exaggerated and

falsified into a narrative to aggrandise their own glory. Their authors

abdicated the duty of leaving to the world the true narrative of the

early struggles and achievements out of which the Republic and the

Empire arose. It is easy to be sceptical at any time. We can cut away

Romulus and Remus from accepted history now, hundreds of years after the

Empire has ceased to govern or exist. But the golden opportunity for

sifting the genuine out of the fabulous has long passed away. It is

seldom possible to construct the infant histories of departed

nationalities. The difference between the facilities which a nation has

for finding out its own early history, and those which strangers have

for constructing it when the nationality has allowed its deathbed to

pass over without the performance of that patriotic task, is nearly as

great as a man's own facilities for writing the history of his youth,

and those of the biographer who makes inquiries about him after he is

buried.

We are becoming wiser than the Romans in this as in other matters, and

are constructing the infant histories of the various European nations

out of the materials which each possesses. The biographies of those

saints or missionaries who first diffused the light of the Gospel among

the various communities of the Christian north, form a very large

element in these materials; and no wonder, when we remember that the

Church possessed all the literature, such as it was, of the age. In

applying, however, to the British Empire, this new source of historical

information, there arose the difficulty that it was chiefly supplied

from Ireland. If all hagiology were under a general suspicion of the

fabulous, Irish history was known to be a luxuriant preserve of fables,

and these causes of dubiety being multiplied by each other in the mind,

it seemed almost impossible to obtain a hearing for the new voice. In

fact, during a long period the three nations were engaged in a

competition which should carry its history through the longest track of

fictitious glory, and this was a kind of work in which Ireland beat her

neighbours entirely. Hence, when all were pressing pretty close upon the

Deluge, Ireland took the leap at once and cleared that gulf. As a

fairish record of these successful efforts, I would recommend to the

reader's notice a very well-conditioned and truly learned-looking folio

volume, called "The General History of Ireland, collected by the learned

Jeffrey Keating, D.D., faithfully translated from the original Irish

Language, with many curious Amendments taken from the Psalters of Tara

and Cashel, with other authentic Records, by Dermod O'Connor, Antiquary

to the Kingdom of Ireland." Opposite to the title-page is a full-length

portrait of Brian Boroomh, whose fame has been increased of late years

by the achievements of his descendant in the cabbage-garden. The monarch

is in full burnished plate armour, with scarf and surcoat--all three

centuries at least later in fashion than the era attributed to him. But

that is a trifle. It would involve much hard and useless work to make

war on the anachronisms of historical portraits, and we are not to judge

of historical works by their engraved decorations. Here, however, the

picture is sober truth itself to what the inquiring reader finds in the

typography. After the descriptive geographical introduction common in

old histories, the real commencement comes upon us in this form:--

"Of the first invasion of Ireland before the Flood!" "Various," the

author tells us, "are the opinions concerning the first mortal that set

a foot upon this island. We are told by some that three of the daughters

of Cain arrived here, several hundred years before the Deluge. The white

book, which in the Irish is called Leabhar Dhroma Sneachta, informs us

that the oldest of these daughters was called Banba, and gave a name to

the whole kingdom. After these, we are told that three men and fifty

women arrived in the island; one of them was called Ladhra, from whom

was derived the name of Ardladhan. These people lived forty years in the

country, and at last they all died of a certain distemper in a week's

time. From their death, it is said that the island was uninhabited for

the space of an hundred years, till the world was drowned. We are told

that the first who set foot upon the island were three fishermen that

were driven thither by a storm from the coast of Spain. They were

pleased with the discovery they had made, and resolved to settle in the

country; but they agreed first to go back for their wives, and in their

return were unfortunately drowned by the waters of the Deluge at a place

called Tuath Inbhir. The names of these three fishermen were Capa,

Laighne, and Luasat. Others, again, are of opinion that Ceasar, the

daughter of Bith, was the first that came into the island before the

Deluge.... When Noah was building the ark to preserve himself and his

family from the Deluge, Bith, the father of Ceasar, sent to desire an

apartment for him and his daughter, to save them from the approaching

danger. Noah, having no authority from Heaven to receive them into the

ark, denied his request. Upon this repulse, Bith Fiontan, the husband of

Ceasar, and Ladhra her brother, consulted among themselves what measures

they should take in this extremity."

The result was, that, like the Laird of Macnab, they "built a boat o'

their ain," but on a much larger scale, being a fair match with the ark

itself. But justice should be done to every one. The learned Dr Keating

does not give us all this as veritable history; on the contrary, being

of a sceptical turn of mind, he has courage enough to stem the national

prejudice, and throw doubt on the narrative. He even rises up into

something like eloquent scorn when he discusses the manner in which some

antediluvian annals were said to be preserved. Thus:--

"As for such of them who say that Fiontan was drowned in the Flood, and

afterwards came to life, and lived to publish the antediluvian history

of the island--what can they propose by such chimerical relations, but

to amuse the ignorant with strange and romantic tales, to corrupt and

perplex the original annals, and to raise a jealousy that no manner of

credit is to be given to the true and authentic chronicles of that

kingdom?"

I shall quote no more until after the doctor, having exhausted his

sceptical ingenuity about the antediluvian stories, finds himself again

on firm ground, prepared to afford his readers, without any critical

misgivings, "an account of the first inhabitants of Ireland after the

Flood." He now tells us with simple and dignified brevity that "the

kingdom of Ireland lay waste and uninhabited for the space of three

hundred years after the Deluge, till Partholanus, son of Seara, son of

Sru, son of Easru, son of Framant, son of Fathochda, son of Magog, son

of Japhet, son of Noah, arrived there with his people." From such a

patriarchal nomenclature the reader of Keating is suddenly introduced to

a story of domestic scandal, in which a "footman" and a "favourite

greyhound" make their frequent appearance. Then follow many great

epochs--the arrival of the Firbolgs, the dynasty of the Tuatha de

Danans, with revolutions and battles countless, before we come to the

commencement of a settled dynasty of kings, of whom more than ninety

reigned before the Christian era. It is, after all, more sad than

ridiculous to remember that within the present generation many

historians believed not only what Keating thus tells as truth, but also

what he ventured to doubt; and if the English antiquaries, according to

their wont, called for records,--did these not exist abundantly, if they

could be got at, in those authentic genealogies, which were from time to

time adjusted and collated with so much skill and scrupulous accuracy by

the official antiquaries who met in the Hall of Tara? The reader

unacquainted with such an out-of-the-way and rather weedy corner of

literature, may think this vague exaggeration; and I shall finish it by

quoting the latest printed, so far as I know, of the numerous solemn and

methodical statements about the manner in which the records of these

very distant matters were authenticated.

"When the said princes got the kingdom into their hands, they assigned

large territories to their antiquaries and their posterity to preserve

their pedigree, exploits, actions, &c.; and so very strict they were on

this point, that they established a triennial convention at Tara, where

the chief kings of Ireland dwelt, where all the antiquaries of the

nation met every third year to have their chronicles and antiquities

examined before the king of Ireland, the four provincial kings, the

king's antiquary-royal, &c.; the least forgery in the antiquary was

punished with death, and loss of estate to his posterity for ever--so

very exact they were in preserving their venerable monuments, and

leaving them to posterity truly and candidly; so that even at this day

(though our nation lost estate and all almost) there is not an ancient

name of Ireland, of the blood-royal thereof descended, but we can bring,

from father to father, from the present man in being to Adam--and I,

Thaddy O'Roddy, who wrote this, have written all the families of the

Milesian race from this present age to Adam."[80]

[Footnote 80: Miscel. of Irish Arch. Soc., i. 120.]

To all this preposterous, and now scarcely credible extravagance of

fiction, there attaches a melancholy political moral. Poor Ireland,

trodden by a dominant party whose hand was strengthened by her potent

neighbour, sought relief from the gloom of the present, by looking far

back into the fabulous glories of the past--and it seemed the last drop

in her cup of bitterness when this pleasant vista was also to be closed

by the hard utilitarian hand of the unsympathising Saxon.

After "this sort of thing" it was naturally difficult to get sensible

men to listen to proposals for opening valuable new sources of early

history in Ireland. In fact, down to the time when Moore wrote his

History in 1835, no one could venture to look another in the face when

speaking of the early Irish annals, and the consequence was that that

accomplished author wilfully shut his eyes to the rich supply of

historical materials in which he might have worked to brilliant effect.

Yet, upon the general face of history, it must on examination have been

fairly seen that Ireland is the natural place where a great proportion

of whatever is to be known about the primitive Church in the British

Islands was to be found. Indeed, in the history of Christianity, not the

least wonderful chapter contains the episode of the repose in the West,

where a portion of the Church, having settled down, grew up in calm

obscurity, protected by distance from the desolating contest which was

breaking up the empire of the world, and raged more or less wherever the

Roman sway had penetrated. Of the southern Britons it could no longer be

said, as in the days of Augustus, that they were cut off from all the

world. England was an integral part of the empire, where, if the

proconsul or legionary commander had not the hot sun and blue sky of

Italy, there were partial compensations in the bracing air which renewed

his wasted strength, the new and peculiar luxuries in the shape of

shellfish and wildfowl that enriched his table, and the facilities

which his insular authority afforded him for strengthening his political

position, and plotting for a fragment of the disintegrating empire. An

admiral of the Roman fleet had at one time established his power in

Britain, where he set up as Cæsar, and sought to create a new imperial

centre. Thus the southern part of Britain was a province of the true

Roman empire awaiting the coming of the wild hordes who were gathering

for the general overthrow, and was not the place where either the

Christian Church or Italian civilisation could find permanent refuge.

The destined destroyer was indeed close at hand. Though the Romans had

their walls, their roads, their forts, and even a few villas in

Scotland, yet one going northward at that time through the territories

of the Gadeni and the Otadeni, would observe the Romanised character of

the country gradually decreasing, until he found himself among those

rough independent northern tribes, who, under the name of Picts and

Scots, drove the Romanised Britons into the sea, and did for the insular

portion of the empire what the hordes who were called Goths, Franks, and

Alemanni, were doing in the Roman provinces of the Continent.

Behind the scene of this destructive contest, Christianity, having been

planted, flourished in peaceful poverty. It grew here and there over

Ireland, and in a small portion of the remote part of Scotland; and the

distance from the scene of warfare necessary for its safety is shown by

the fate of St Ninian's little church in the Mull of Galloway. It was

too near the field of strife to live. The isolation in which the western

Christians thus arose, was productive of ecclesiastical conditions very

remarkable in themselves, but perfectly natural as the effects of their

peculiar causes. The admirable organisation for carrying out the civil

government of the Roman empire, was a ready-made hierarchy for carrying

out the ecclesiastical supremacy of the Bishop of Rome. It was far from

the object of those who seized on the power of the Cæsars to abolish

that power. On the contrary, they desired to work it on their own

account, and thus the machinery of the empire lived, exercising more or

less vitality and power, down to the first French Revolution.

No part of its civil organisation, however, retained the comprehensive

vitality which the learning and subtlety of the priesthood enabled them

to preserve, or rather restore, to its spiritual branch. Hence, wherever

the conquerors of Rome held sway, there the priests of Rome obtained a

sway also. But the one little fragment of the primitive Church, which

had been so curiously cut off during the great contest, was beyond the

sway of the conquerors of Rome, as it had been beyond the sway of the

Emperors themselves. Hence, while the Church, as united to Rome, grew up

in one great uniform hierarchy, the small, isolated Church in the West

grew up with different usages and characteristics; and when afterwards

those who followed them were charged with schism, they asserted that

they had their canons and usages directly from the apostles, from whom

they had obtained the Gospel and the regulations of the Church pure and

undefiled. Thus arose the renowned contest between the early Scottish

Church and the rest of Christendom about the proper period of observing

Easter, and about the form of the tonsure. Hence, too, arose the debates

about the peculiar discipline of the communities called Culdees, who,

having to frame their own system of church government for themselves,

humble, poor, and isolated as they were, constructed it after a

different fashion from the potent hierarchy of Rome. The history of

these corporations possesses extreme interest, even to those who follow

it without a predetermined design to identify every feature of their

arrangements with a modern English diocese, or with a modern Scottish

presbytery; and not the least interesting portion of this history is its

conclusion, in the final absorption, not without a struggle, of these

isolated communities within the expanding hierarchy of the Popes.

In a few humble architectural remains, these primitive bodies have left

vestiges of their peculiar character to the present day. Neither

deriving the form of their buildings nor their other observances from

Rome, they failed to enter with the rest of the Church on that course of

construction which led towards Gothic architecture. The earliest

Christian churches on the Continent were constructed on the plan of the

Roman basilica, or court of justice, and wherever the Church of Rome

spread, this method of construction went with her. The oldest style of

church-building--that which used to be called Saxon, and is now

sometimes termed Norman, and sometimes Romanesque--degenerated directly

from the architecture of Rome. There are ecclesiastical buildings in

France and Italy, of which it might fairly be debated, from their style,

whether they were built by the latest of the classical, or the earliest

of the Gothic architects. The little Church in the West had not the

benefit of such models. Places of worship, and cells, or oratories, were

built of timber, turf, or osiers. The biographer of Columba describes

his followers as collecting wattles for the construction of their first

edifice. But they had also a few humble dwellings of stone, which,

naturally enough, had no more resemblance to the proud fanes of the

Romish hierarchy, than the primitive edifices of Mexico and New Zealand

had to those of modern Europe. They were first found in Ireland; more

lately, they have been traced in the Western Isles. They are small rude

domes of rough stone; and if it may seem strange that the form adapted

to the grandest of all architectural achievements should be

accomplished by those rude masons who could not make a Roman arch, it

must be remembered, that while the arch cannot be constructed without

artificial support or scaffolding, a dome on a small scale may, and is

indeed the form to which rude artists, with rude stones, and no other

materials, would naturally be driven. It is that in which boys build

their snow-houses. I shall not easily forget how, once, accompanying a

piscatorial friend on the Loch of Curran, near Ballyskelligs, in Kerry,

I stepped on a small island to visit a Norman ruin there, and saw,

besides the ruin and a stone cross, one of these small rough domes,

testifying, by its venerable simplicity, that it had stood there

centuries before the Norman church beside it. But the peculiar

characteristics of the architecture of the West did not stop short with

these simple types. It advanced, carrying in its advance its own

significant character, until it became mingled with the architecture

propagated from Rome, as the Christian community which worshipped within

the buildings became absorbed in the hierarchy. The Oratory of Galerus,

in Kerry, is a piece of solid, well-conditioned masonry, built after a

plan of no mean symmetry and proportion, yet with scarcely a feature in

common with the early Christian churches of the rest of Europe. Like the

ruder specimens, it struggles for as much solidity and spaciousness as

it can obtain in stonework without the help of the arch, and it makes a

good deal out of the old Egyptian plan of gradually narrowing the

courses of stones inwards, until they come so near that large slabs of

stone can be thrown across the opening. Some buildings of the same sort

have been lately revealed in the island of Lewis: one is named Teampul

Rona, and another, which is dedicated to St Flannan, Teampul

Beannachadh.[81] The specialty of both these, as well as of the Irish

buildings, is that they are edifices beyond all question raised for

Christian worship, that they have been built with pains and skill, and

yet that they have no vestige of that earlier type of Christian

architecture which Europe in general obtained from Rome.

[Footnote 81: See Mr Muir's very curious volume on "Characteristics of

Old Church Architecture in the Mainland and Western Islands of

Scotland."]

In offering a few stray remarks on the lives of the saints, or, more

properly speaking, the missionaries, whose labours lay in the British

Isles, it would be pedantic to cite the precise document, printed

generally for one or other of the book clubs, which supplies the

authority for each sentence. I must, however, mention one authority

which stands supreme among its brethren--the edition of Adamnan's Life

of St Columba, edited by Dr Reeves, under the joint patronage of the

Irish Archæological and the Bannatyne Clubs. The original work has long

been accepted as throwing a light on the Christianising of the North,

second only to that shed by the invaluable morsels in Bede. With

wonderful industry and learning, the editor has incorporated the small

book of Adamnan in a mass of new matter, every word of which is equally

instructive and interesting to the student.

There is no doubt that the saints of Irish origin supply by far the more

important portion of our hagiology. They are countless. Taking merely a

topographical estimate of them--looking, that is, to the names of places

which have been dedicated to them, or otherwise bear their names--we

find them crowding Ireland, and swarming over the Highlands of Scotland

and the north of England into London itself, where St Bride's Well has

given a gloomy perpetuity to the name of the first and greatest of Irish

female saints. Some people would be content to attribute the

frequentness of saintship among the Irish and the Highlanders to the

opportunities enjoyed by them in consequence of the early Church having

found a refuge in Ireland. Others would attribute the phenomenon to the

extreme susceptibility of the Celtic race to religious enthusiasm, and

would illustrate their views by referring to the present Celtic

population in Ireland under the dominion of the priests, and their

brethren of the West of Scotland equally under the dominion of the

doctrinal antipodes of the priests; while the parallel might be

illustrated by a reference to those Highland Franciscans called "The

Men," whose belcher neckcloths represent the cord, and their Kilmarnock

bonnets the cowl.

At the commencement of Christianity the difference between the religious

Celt and the religious Saxon was naturally far more conspicuous than it

is now. Bede's description of the thoughtful calmness with which

Ethelbert studied the preaching of Augustin, with all the consequences

which the adoption of the new creed must bring upon his kingdom, is

still eminently characteristic of the Saxon nature. In the life of St

Wilbrord a scene is described which is not easily alluded to with due

reverence. The saint had prevailed on a Frisian Prince to acknowledge

Christianity, and be baptised. Standing by the font, with one foot in

the water, a misgiving seized on him, and he inquired touching his

ancestors, whether the greater number of them were in the regions of the

blessed, or in those of the spirits doomed to everlasting perdition. On

being abruptly told by the honest saint that they were all, without

exception, in the latter region, he withdrew his foot--he would not

desert his race--he would go to the place where he would find his dead

ancestors.

The conversion of the Picts by Columba seems to have proceeded

deliberately. We find him, in the narrative of his life, exercising much

influence on Brud their king, and occasionally enjoying a visit to the

royal lodge on the pleasant banks of Lochness. There he is seen

commending his friend and fellow-labourer St Cormac to the good offices

of the Regulus of the Orkney Islands, who is also at the court of Brud,

to whom he owes something akin to allegiance; for Columba looks to Brud

as well as to the Orcadian guest for the proper attention being paid to

Cormac. Still, honoured and respected as he is in the court of the

Pictish monarch, Columba is not that omnipotent person which he finds

himself to be in Dalriada and in Ireland. There still sits an unpleasant

personage at the king's gate. A Magus, as he is called--a priest of the

old heathen religion--is in fact well received at court, where, although

doomed to be superseded by the Christian missionary, he yet seems to

have been retained by the king, as a sort of protest that he had not put

himself entirely under the control of the priests of the new doctrine.