“Alack-a-day! it was the school-house indeed; but, to be sure, sir,
the squire has pulled it down, because it stood in the way of his
prospects.”--MACKENZIE.
[Sidenote: THE OLD SCHOOL AND WHAT IT PRODUCED.]
The old school of Cromarty was situated in a retired little corner,
behind the houses where the parish burying-ground bordered on the
woods of the old castle. It was a low, mean-looking building, with
its narrow latticed windows, which were half buried in the thatch,
opening on the one side to the uncouth monuments of the churchyard,
and on the other, through a straggling line of willows which fringed
the little stream in front, to the ancient timeworn fortalice perched
on the top of the hill. Mean, however, as it seemed--and certainly
no public edifice could owe less to the architect--it formed one of
Knox’s strongholds of the Reformation, and was erected by the united
labours of the parishioners, agreeably to the scheme laid down in the
First Book of Discipline, long previous to the Education Act of 1646.
It had become an old building ere the Restoration, and fell into such
disrepair during the reign of Episcopacy, that for a time it no longer
sheltered the scholars. I find it enacted in the summer of 1682, by
the Kirk-Session--for, curious as it may seem, even the curates in
the north of Scotland had their kirk-sessions and their staffs of
elders--that “the hail inhabitants of the burgh, especially masons and
such as have horse, do repayre and bigg the samin in the wonted place,
and that the folk upland do provide them with feal and diffiot.” And,
in the true spirit of the reign of Charles II., a penalty of four
pounds Scots enforced the enactment.
The scheme of education drawn up by our first Reformers was stamped
by the liberality of men who had learned from experience that tyranny
and superstition derive their chief support from ignorance. Almost all
the knowledge which books could supply at the time was locked up in
the learned languages; and so it was necessary that these languages
even the common people should acquire. It was appointed, therefore,
“that young men who purposed to travail in some handicraft for the
good of the commonwealth, should first devote ane certaine time to
Grammar and the Latin tongue, and ane certaine time to the other
tongues and the study of philosophy.” Even long after the enactment,
when we had got authors of our own in every department of literature,
and a man could have become learned, if knowledge be learning,
simply as an English reader, an acquaintance with Latin formed no
unimportant part of a common Scotch education. Our fathers pursued
the course which circumstances had rendered imperative in the days of
their great-grandfathers, merely because their great-grandfathers had
pursued it, and because people find it easier to persist in hereditary
practices than to think for themselves. And so the few years which
were spent in school by the poorer pupils of ordinary capacity, were
absurdly frittered away in acquiring a little bad Latin and a very
little worse Greek. So strange did the half-learning of our common
people (derived in this way) appear to our southern neighbours, that
there are writers of the last century who, in describing a Scotch
footman or mechanic, rarely omit making his knowledge of the classics
an essential part of his character. The barber in Roderick Random
quotes Horace in the original; and Foote, in one of his farces,
introduces a Scotch valet, who, when some one inquires of him whether
he be a Latinist, indignantly exclaims, “Hoot awa, man! a Scotchman and
no understand Latin!”
The school of Cromarty produced, like most of the other schools of the
kingdom, its Latinists who caught fish and made shoes; and it is not
much more than thirty years since the race became finally extinct. I
have heard stories of an old house-painter of the place, who, having
survived most of his schoolfellows and contemporaries, used to regret,
among his other vanished pleasures, the pleasure he could once derive
from an inexhaustible fund of Latin quotation, which the ignorance of
a younger generation had rendered of little more value to him than the
paper-money of an insolvent bank; and I have already referred to an
old cabinetmaker whom I remember, who was in the practice, when his
sight began to fail him, of carrying his Latin New Testament with him
to church, as it chanced to be printed in a clearer type than any of
his English ones. It is said, too, of a learned fisherman of the reign
of Queen Anne, that when employed one day among his tackle, he was
accosted in Latin by the proprietor of Cromarty, who, accompanied by
two gentlemen from England, was sauntering along the shore, and that,
to the surprise of the strangers, he replied with no little fluency in
the same language.
The old castle rose, I have said, direct in front of the old school,
about three hundred yards away; and, tall itself, and elevated by the
green hill on which it stood, it formed, with all its timeworn turrets,
and all its mouldering bartisans, a formidable spectre of the past.
Little thought the proud hereditary sheriffs of the stern old tower,
that the humble building at the foot of the hill was a masked battery
raised against their authority, which was to burst open their dungeon
door and to beat down their gallows. But a very formidable battery it
proved. There is a class of nature’s aristocracy that has but to arise
from among the people, in order that the people may become influential
and free; and the lowly old school did its part in separating from
the general mass its due proportion of these, as mercury separates
gold from the pulverized rock in which it is contained. If, in passing
along the streets, we see a handsomer domicile than the low tenements
around it, we may safely conclude that the builder spent his boyhood
in the old school; that if he went out to some of the colonies, he
carried with him as his stock in trade a knowledge of figures and the
pen, and returned with both that and a few thousands on which to employ
it; or if his inclination led him to sea, that he became, through his
superior intelligence, the commander of a vessel; if to London, that
he rose into wealth as a merchant; or if he remained at home, that
he gained a competency as a shopkeeper, general trader, or master
mechanic. I am not making too much of my subject when I affirm, that
the little thatched hovel at the foot of the Castle-hill gave merchants
to the Exchange, ministers to the Church, physicians to the Faculty,
professors to Colleges, and members to Parliament.
[Sidenote: DR. HOSSACK.]
One of the pupils reared within its walls--the son of old Clerk
Davidson, a humble subordinate of the hereditary sheriff--became
a wealthy London merchant, and, after establishing in the city a
respectable firm, which still exists, represented his native county in
Parliament. Another of its boys, the late Mr. William Forsyth, to whom
I have already had occasion to refer, revived the sinking trade of the
town; and, though the son of a man who had once worked as a mechanic,
he took his well-merited place among the aristocracy of the district,
not less from the high tone of his character, and the liberality of
his views and sentiments, than from the extent of his resources. Yet
another of its boys, a Mr. James Ross, entered life as a common sailor,
and, after rising by his professional skill to a command in the navy,
published a work on the management of nautical affairs, which attracted
a good deal of notice at the time among the class to which it was
specially addressed. The late Dr. James Robertson, librarian of the
University of Edinburgh, and its Professor of the Oriental Tongues, was
a native of Cromarty, of humble parentage, and experienced his first
stirrings of scholastic ambition in the old school. He was the author
of a Hebrew grammar, to which the self-taught linguist, Dr. Alexander
Murray, owed, as he tells us in his interesting Autobiography, his
first introduction to Hebrew; and we learn from Boswell, in his Journal
of a Tour to the Hebrides, that Dr. Johnson, when in Edinburgh, “was
much pleased with the College library, and with the conversation of Dr.
James Robertson, the librarian.” Provost Hossack of Inverness, whom
the author of the “Jacobite Memoirs” terms, in relating his spirited
remonstrance with the Duke of Cumberland in behalf of the conquered
rebels, “a man of humanity, and the Sir Robert Walpole of Inverness,
under the direction of President Forbes,” was also a Cromarty man, the
child of seafaring parents, and received the education through which
he rose, in its school. And his namesake and contemporary, Dr. Hossack
of Greenwich, one of the first physicians of his time, was likewise
a native of Cromarty--not of the town, however, but of the landward
part of the parish; and owed his first knowledge of letters to the
charity of the schoolmaster. There is, unfortunately, not much of the
Doctor’s story known; but to the little which survives there attaches a
considerable amount of interest.
He had lost both his parents when an infant; all his other nearer
kindred were also dead: and so he was dependent in his earlier years
for a precarious subsistence on the charity of a few distant relatives,
not a great deal richer than himself. Among the rest there was a poor
widow, a namesake of his own, who earned a scanty subsistence by her
wheel, but who had heart enough to impart a portion of her little
to the destitute scholar. The boy was studious and thoughtful, and
surpassed in his tasks most of his schoolfellows; and after passing
with singular rapidity through the course pursued at school, he
succeeded in putting himself to college. The struggle was arduous and
protracted; sometimes he wrought as a common labourer, sometimes he
taught an adventure school; he deemed no honest employment too mean or
too laborious that forwarded his scheme; and thus he at length passed
through the University course. His town’s-people then lost sight of
him for nearly twenty years. It was understood, meanwhile, that some
nameless friend in the south had settled a small annuity on poor old
Widow Hossack; and that a Cromarty sailor, who had been attacked by a
dangerous illness when at London, had owed his life to the gratuitous
attentions of a famous physician of the place, who had recognised him
as a town’s-man. No one, however, thought of the poor scholar; and it
was not until his carriage drove up one day through the main street of
the town, and stopped at the door of his schoolfellow, William Forsyth,
that he was identified with “the great Doctor” who had attended the
seaman, and the benefactor of the poor widow. On entering the cottage
of the latter, he found her preparing gruel for supper, and was asked,
with the anxiety of a gratitude that would fain have rendered him some
return, “O Sir! will ye no tak’ _brochan_?” He is said to have been a
truly excellent and benevolent man--the Abercromby of a former age;
and the ingenious and pious Moses Browne (a clergyman who, to the
disgrace of the English Church, was suffered to languish through life
in a curacy of fifty pounds per annum) thus addresses him in one of his
larger poems, written immediately after the recovery of the author from
a long and dangerous illness:--
“The God I trust with timeliest kind relief
Sent the beloved physician to my aid,
(Generous, humanest, affable of soul,
Thee, dearest Hossack;--Oh! long known, long loved,
Long proved; in oft found tenderest watching cares,
The Christian friend, the man of feeling heart;)
And in his skilful, heaven-directed hand,
Put his best pleasing, _only_ fee, my cure.”
SUNDAY THOUGHTS, Part iv.
[Sidenote: THE HARD DOMINIE.]
The reputation of the old school necessarily varied with the character
and acquirements of its several teachers. About a century ago, it
was one of the most celebrated in this part of the kingdom, and was
attended by the children of country gentlemen for sixty miles round.
The teacher, a Mr. David Macculloch, was a native of the parish; and
so highly were his services appreciated by the people, especially by
such among them as kept lodgers, that they used to allege he was the
means of circulating more money among them than all their shopkeepers
and tradesfolk put together. He was a licentiate of the Church, and was
lost to the place by receiving an appointment to a semi-Highland parish
somewhere in Perthshire; when his fame as a teacher was transferred for
half an age to the parish schoolmaster of Fortrose, a Mr. Smith. It was
under this man, who is said to have done for the burghers of Chanonry
and Rosemarkie all that Mr. Macculloch had done for the householders of
Cromarty, that Sir James Mackintosh, so well known in after years as
a statesman and philosopher, received the rudiments of his education.
Next in course the burgh of Nairn became famous for the skill of its
parish teacher, a Mr. Strath; and there still survive a few of his
pupils to testify to his merits and to express their gratitude. Since
his death, however, the fame of educational ability has failed to
be associated in any very marked degree with our northern parochial
schools--in part a consequence, it is probable, of that change in the
tactics of tuition which, by demanding a division of labour in the
educational as in other departments, at once lessens the difficulty and
increases the efficiency of teaching. It is at least obvious that few
succeed well in what is very difficult; and that every improvement in
any art must add either to the value of what the art produces, or, what
seems to have happened in this case, to the facility of production.
The successor of Mr. Macculloch in the old school--a Mr. Russel--though
not equally celebrated as a teacher, was in other respects a more
remarkable man. About twelve years after his appointment, he
relinquished his pedagogical charge for a chapel in Kilmarnock, and
there he came in contact and quarrelled with our great national poet,
who, bold and unyielding as he was, seems to have regarded the stern
pedagogue of the north as no weak or puny antagonist; at least, against
none of his other clerical opponents did he open so powerful a battery.
We find him figuring in the “Holy Fair,” in the “Ordination,” in the
“Kirk’s Alarm,” and in the “Twa Herds,” one of whom was the “wordy
Russel.” Some degree of interest must necessarily attach to the memory
of a man who seems destined never to be wholly forgotten; and as I have
known and often conversed with several of his pupils, and remember even
some of his mature contemporaries, I must communicate to the reader a
few of their more characteristic recollections of the man of whom they
were accustomed to speak and think as Russel the “hard schoolmaster.”
It is now somewhat more than eighty years since John Russel, a native
of Moray, and one of the Church’s probationers, was appointed to the
parish school of Cromarty. He was a large, robust, dark-complexioned
man, imperturbably grave, and with a singularly stern expression
stamped on his dusky forehead, that boded the urchins of the place
little good. And in a few months he had acquired for himself the
character of being by far the most rigid disciplinarian in the country.
He was, I believe, a good, conscientious man, but unfortunate in a
temper at once violent and harsh, and in sometimes mistaking its
dictates for those of duty. At any rate, whatever the nature of the
mistake, never was there a schoolmaster more thoroughly feared and
detested by his pupils; and with dread and hatred did many of them
continue to regard him long after they had become men and women. His
memory was a dark morning cloud resting on their saddened boyhood,
that cast its shadows into after life. I have heard of a lady who was
so overcome by sudden terror on unexpectedly seeing him, many years
after she had quitted school, in one of the pulpits of the south, that
she fainted away in the pew; and of another of his scholars named
M’Glashan--a robust, daring young man of six feet--who, when returning
to Cromarty from some of the colonies, solaced himself by the way with
thoughts of the hearty drubbing with which he was to clear off all his
old scores with the dominie. Ere his return, however, Mr. Russel had
quitted the parish; nor, even if it had chanced otherwise, might the
young fellow have gained much in an encounter with one of the boldest
and most powerful men in the country.
But Polyphemus himself, giant as he was, and a demigod to boot, could
not always be cruel with impunity. The schoolmaster had his vulnerable
point; he was a believer in ghosts; at all events he feared them very
heartily, whether he believed in them or no; and some of his boys, much
as they dreaded him, contrived on one occasion to avenge themselves
upon him through his fears. In the long summer evenings he was in the
habit of prosecuting his studies to a late hour in the schoolroom;
from which, in returning to his lodgings, he had to pass through the
churchyard. And when striding homewards one night, laden with books
and papers, so affrighted was he by a horrible apparition, all over
white, which started up beside him from beneath one of the tombstones,
that, casting his burden to the winds, and starting off like wildfire,
he never once looked behind him until he had gained his landlady’s
fireside. It is said that he never after prosecuted his evening studies
in the school. The late minister of Knockbain, Mr. Roderick M’Kenzie,
for many years father of the Presbytery of Chanonry, used to tell with
much glee that he knew a very great deal about the urchin who, in
behalf of the outraged youthhood of the place, wore the white sheet
on this interesting occasion. “I was quite as much afraid of ghosts,”
he used to say, “as Mr. Russel himself; but three of my companions
lay fast ensconced, to keep me in heart and countenance, under a
neighbouring gravestone.”
There was among Russel’s pupils a poor boy named Skinner, who, as
was customary in Scottish schools of the period, blew the horn for
gathering the scholars, and kept the catalogue and the key, and who, in
return for his services, was educated by the master, and received some
little gratuity from the boys besides. To the south of the Grampians he
would have been termed the Janitor of the school; whereas in the north,
in those days, the name attached to him, in virtue of his office, was
the humbler one of “The Pauper.” Unluckily, on one occasion, the key
dropped out of his pocket; and, when school time came, the irascible
dominie had to burst open the door with his foot. He raged at the boy
with a fury so insane, and beat him with such relentless severity, that
in the extremity of the case, the other boys rose up shrieking around
him as if they were witnessing the perpetration of a murder; and the
tyrant, brought suddenly to himself by so strange an exhibition, flung
away the rod and sat down. And such, it is said, was the impression
made on the mind of poor “Pauper Skinner,” that though he quitted the
school shortly after, and plied the profession of a fisherman until
he died an old man, he was never from that day seen disengaged for a
moment, without mechanically thrusting his hand into the key-pocket. If
excited too by any unexpected occurrence, whatever its nature, he was
sure to grope hastily, in his agitation, for the missing key. One other
anecdote illustrative of Mr. Russel’s temper. He was passing along the
main street of the town, in a day of wind and rain from the sea, with
his head half-buried in his breast, when he came violently in contact
with a thatcher’s ladder, which had been left sloping from the roof of
one of the houses. A much less matter would have sufficed to awaken the
wrath of Mr. Russel: he laid hold of the ladder, and, dashing it on the
pavement, broke with his powerful foot, ere he quitted it, every one of
the “rounds.”
[Sidenote: MR. RUSSEL THE MINISTER.]
For at least the last six years of his residence in Cromarty he
was not a little popular as a preacher. His manner was strong and
energetic, and the natural severity of his temper seems to have been
more than genius to him when expatiating, which he did often, on the
miseries of the wicked in a future state. The reader will scarce fail
to remember the picture of the preacher dashed off by Burns in the Holy
Fair; or to see that the poet’s arrows, however wickedly shot, came
from no bow drawn at venture:--
“Black Russel is nae spairin’;
His piercing words, like Highland swords,
Divide the joints an’ marrow
His talk o’ hell, where devils dwell,
Our verra sauls does harrow
Wi’ fright that day.
“A vast unbottom’d, boundless pit,
Fill’d fou o’ lowin’ brunstane,
Whase ragin’ flame and scorchin’ heat
Wad melt the hardest whunstane.
The half-asleep start up wi’ fear,
And think they hear it roarin’,
When presently it does appear
’Twas but some neebor snorin’
Asleep that day.”
I have seen one of Russel’s sermons in print; it is a controversial
one, written in a bold rough style, and by no means inferior as a piece
of argument; but he was evidently a person rather to be listened to
than read. He was quite as stern in Church matters, it is said, as in
those of the school; but men are less tractable than boys; and his
severity proved more effectual in making his pupils diligent than in
reforming the town’s-people. He converted a few rather careless boys
into not very inferior scholars; but though he set himself so much
against the practice of Sabbath-evening walking, that he used to take
his stand every Sunday, after the church had dismissed, full in the
middle of the road which leads from the town to the woods and rocks
of the Southern Sutor, and sometimes turned back the walkers by the
shoulders after he had first shaken them by the breast, the practice of
Sabbath-evening walking became even more common than before. Instead
of addressing himself to the moral sense of the people, he succeeded in
but arousing their combative propensities; and these, once awakened,
took part against a good cause, simply because it had been unwisely and
unjustifiably defended.
I have an uncle in Cromarty, now an elderly man, who, when residing in
Glasgow in the year 1792, walked about ten miles into the country to
attend a sacramental _occasion_, at which he was told Mr. Russel was
to officiate, and which proved to be such a one as Burns has described
in his “Holy Fair.” There were excellent sermons to be heard from the
_tent_, and very tempting drink to be had in an ale-house scarcely a
hundred yards away; and between the tent and the ale-house were the
people divided, according to their tastes and characters. A young man
preached in the early part of the day--his discourse was a long one;
and, ere it had come to a close, the mirth of the neighbouring topers,
which became louder the more deeply they drank, had begun to annoy the
congregation. Mr. Russel was standing beside the tent. At every fresh
burst of sound he would raise himself on tiptoe, look first, with a
portentous expression of countenance, towards the ale-house, and then
at the clergyman; who at length, concluding his part of the service,
yielded to him his place. He laid aside the book, and, without psalm
or prayer, or any of the usual preliminaries, launched at once into a
powerful extempore address, directed, over the heads of the people,
at the ale-house. I have been assured by my relative that he never
before or since heard any thing half so energetic. His ears absolutely
tingled, as the preacher thundered out, in a voice almost superhuman,
his solemn and terrible denunciations. Every sound of revelry ceased
in a moment; and the Bacchanals, half-drunk, as most of them had ere
now become, were so thoroughly frightened as to be fain to steal out
through a back window, and slink away along bypaths through the fields.
Mr. Russel was ultimately appointed one of the ministers of Stirling.
A Cromarty man, a soldier in a Highland regiment, when stationed in
Stirling Castle, had got involved one day in some street quarrel,
and was swearing furiously, when a tall old man in black came and
pulled him out of the crowd. “Wretched creature that ye are!” said
the old man; “come along with me.” He drew him into a quiet corner,
and began to expostulate with him on his profanity, in a style to
which the soldier, an intelligent though by no means steady man, and
the child of religious parents, could not but listen. Mr. Russel--for
it was no other than he--seemed pleased with the attention he paid
him; and on learning whence he had come, and the name of his parents,
exclaimed with much feeling, “Wae’s me! that your father’s son should
be a blackguard soldier on the streets of Stirling! But come awa.”
He brought him home with him, and added to the serious advice he had
given him an excellent dinner. The temper of the preacher softened a
good deal as he became old; and he was much a favourite with the more
serious part of his congregation. He was, with all his defects, an
honest, pious man; and had he lived in the days of Renwick or Cargill,
or, a century earlier, in the days of Knox or Wishart, he might have
been a useful one. But he was unlucky in the age in which he lived,
in his temper, and in coming in contact with as hard-headed people as
himself.
[Sidenote: THE COCK-FIGHT.]
The parish schools of Scotland had their annual saturnalian feast, of
what may be well deemed an extraordinary character, if we consider
their close connexion with the National Church, and that their teachers
were in so many instances licensed clergymen waiting for preferment.
On Fasten’s-eve, just when all Rome was rejoicing in the license of
the Carnival, the schoolmaster, after closing the service of the day
with prayer, would call on the boys to divide and choose for themselves
“_Head-stocks_,” _i.e._, leaders, for the yearly cock-fight of the
ensuing Shrove-Tuesday. A sudden rush would immediately take place
among the pigmy population of the school to two opposing desks, which,
piled up with urchin a-top of urchin half-way to the rafters, would
straightway assume the appearance of two treacled staves, covered with
black-bottle flies in a shopkeeper’s yard, on a day of midsummer. The
grave question of leadership soon settled, in consequence of previous
out-of-door arrangement, the master, producing the catalogue, would
next proceed to call the boys in alphabetical order; and each boy
to intimate, in reply, under what “head-stock” he purposed fighting
his cocks, and how many cocks he intended bringing into the pit. The
master, meanwhile, went on recording both items in a book--in especial
the number of the cocks--as, according to the registered figure, which
always exceeded the array actually brought into the fight, he received,
as a fixed perquisite of his office, a fee of twopence per head. The
school then broke up; and for the two ensuing days, which were given
as holidays for the purpose of preparation, the parish used to be
darkened by wandering scholars going about from farmhouse to farmhouse
in quest of cocks. Most boys brought at least one cock to the pit; and
“head-stocks”--selected usually for the wealth of their parents, and
with an eye to the entertainment with which the festival was expected
to close--would sometimes bring up as many as ten or twelve. The
cock-fight ball, given by the victorious “head-stock” on the eve of his
victory, was always regarded as the crowning item in the festival.
On the morning of Shrove Tuesday, the floor of the school, previously
cleared of all the forms, and laid out into a chalked circle,
representative of the cockpit, became a scene of desperate battle.
The master always presided on these occasions as umpire; while his
boys clustered in a ring, immediately under his eye, a little beyond
the chalked line. The cocks of the lads who ranged under the one
“head-stock” were laid down one after one on the left, those of the
other, as a bird dropped exhausted or ran away, upon the right; and
thus the fight went on from morning till far in the evening; when
the “head-stock” whose last bird remained in possession of the field,
and whose cocks had routed the greatest number in the aggregate, was
declared victor, and formally invested with a tinsel cap, in a ceremony
termed the “crowning.” The birds, however, were permitted to share in
the honour of their masters--and in many schools there was a small
silver bell, the property of the institution, attached to the neck of
the poor cock who had beaten the largest number of opponents; but very
rarely did he long survive the honour. I remember seeing one gallant
bird, who had vanquished six cocks in succession, stand in the middle
of the pit, one of his eyes picked out, and his comb and bells all
in a clot of blood, and then, in about half a minute after his last
antagonist had fled, fall dead upon the floor. It is really wonderful
how ingenious boys can be made, in even the more occult mysteries of
the cockpit, when their training has been good. Some hopeful scholars
had learned to provide themselves with medicated grains for drugging,
as the opportunity offered, the birds of an opponent; and it was no
unusual thing for a lad who carried his cock under his arm in the
crowd, to find the creature rendered unfit for the combat by the
skilful application of the pin of an antagonist, who, having stolen
stealthily upon him from behind, succeeded in serving the poor animal
as the minions of Mortimer served the hapless Edward II. Game-birds
who, in inconsistency with their previous character, refused to fight,
were often found, on examination, to have pins thrust up more than two
inches into their bowels. The birds who, without any such apology,
preferred running away to fighting, were converted into _droits_,
under the ill-omened name of _fugies_, and forfeited to the master of
the school. And these were rendered by him the subject of yet another
licensed amusement of the period. The _fugies_ were fastened to a
stake in the playground, and destroyed, one after one, in the noble
game of cock-throwing, by such of the pupils or of the town’s-people
as could indulge in the amusement at the rate of a halfpenny the
throw. The master not only pocketed all the halfpennies, but he also
carried home with him all the carcases. It is perhaps not very strange
that good men, of naturally severe temper, like Mr. Russel, should
have said grace over their _cock-a-leekie_ thus procured, without once
suspecting that there was anything wrong in the practice; but that
schoolmasters like M’Culloch, who was a person of humanity, should
have done so, serves strikingly to show how blinding and tyrannical
must be that influence which custom exercises over even the best of
men; and that not only does religion exert a beneficial effect on
civilisation, but that civilisation may, in turn, react with humanizing
influence on the religious. The very origin of the festival is said
to have been ecclesiastical. It was instituted, we find it intimated
in the _Clavis Calendaria_, “in allusion to the indignities offered
to our Saviour by the Jews before the crucifixion;” but how it should
have survived the Reformation, and been permitted not only to shelter,
like the Gibeonites of old, in the house of the enemy, but have also
become an object of the direct patronage of many of our best men of the
evangelical school, seems a problem of somewhat difficult solution.
It is just possible, however, that the Reformers, who were well
enough acquainted with human nature to be aware of the necessity of
relaxation, might have seen nothing very barbarous in the practice;
seeing that the tone of men’s feelings in such matters depends more
on the degree of refinement which has been attained to by the age or
country in which they live, than on the severity of their general
morals or the purity of their creed. I may add, that the practice
of cock-throwing was abolished in the old school of Cromarty by Mr.
Russel’s immediate successor--the late Rev. Mr. Macadam of Nigg; but
the annual cock-fight survived until put down, a few years ago,[10] by
the present incumbent of the parish.
[Sidenote: M’CULLOCH THE MECHANICIAN.]
There was one other Cromarty man of the last century who became eminent
in his own walk and day, and to whom I must therefore refer; but I know
not that he owed much, if anything, to the old school of the burgh.
In the _Scots Magazine_ for May 1789, there is a report by Captain
Philip d’Auvergne, of the Narcissus frigate, on the practical utility
of Kenneth M’Culloch’s sea compasses. The captain, after an eighteen
months’ trial of their merits, compared with those of all the other
kinds in use at the time, describes them as immensely superior, and
earnestly recommends to the Admiralty their general introduction into
the navy. In passing, on one occasion, through the race of Alderney in
the winter of 1787, there broke out a frightful storm, and so violent
was the opposition of the wind and tide, that while his vessel was
sailing at the rate of eleven miles on the surface, she was making
scarce any headway by the land. The sea rose tremendously--at once
short, high, and irregular; and the motions of the vessel were so
fearfully abrupt and violent, that scarce a seaman aboard could stand
on deck. At a time so critical, when none of the compasses supplied
from his Majesty’s stores _would stand_, but vacillated more than
three points on each side, “it commanded,” says the captain, “the
admiration of the whole crew, winning the confidence of even the most
timorous--to see how quickly and readily M’Culloch’s steering compass
recovered the vacillations communicated to it by the motion of the
ship and the shocks of the sea, and how truly in every brief interval
of rest the needle pointed to the Pole.” It is further added, that on
the Captain’s recommendation these compasses were tried on board the
Andromeda, commanded at the time by Prince William Henry, our present
king, and so satisfied was the Prince of the utility of the invention,
that he too became a strenuous advocate for their general introduction,
and testified his regard for the ingenious inventor, by appointing
him his compass-maker. M’Culloch, however, did not long survive the
honour, dying a few years after, and I have been unable to trace with
any degree of certainty the further history of his improved compasses.
But though only imperfectly informed regarding his various inventions,
and they are said to have been many, and singularly practical, I am
tolerably well acquainted with the story of his early life; and as it
furnishes a striking illustration of that instinct of genius, if I may
so express myself, which leads the possessor to exactly the place in
which his services may be of most value to the community, by rendering
him useless and unhappy in every other, I think I cannot do better than
communicate it to the reader.
There stood, about forty years ago, on the northern side of the parish
of Cromarty, an old farmhouse--one of those low, long, dark-looking
erections of turf and stone which still survive in the remoter
districts of Scotland, as if to show how little man may sometimes
improve, in even a civilized country, on the first rude shelter which
his necessities owed to his ingenuity. A worn-out barrel, fixed
slantwise in the ridge, served as a chimney for the better apartment
(the spare room of the domicile), which was also furnished with a
glazed window; but in the others the smoke was suffered to escape, and
the light to enter, as chance or accident might direct. The eaves,
overhung by stonecrop and studded by bunches of the houseleek, drooped
heavily above the small blind openings and low door; and a row of
ancient elms, which rose from out the fence of a neglected garden,
spread their gnarled and ponderous arms over the roof. Such was the
farmhouse of Woodside, in which Kenneth M’Culloch, the son of the
farmer, was born some time in the early half of the last century. The
family from which he sprang--a race of honest, plodding tacksmen--had
held the place from the proprietor of Cromarty for considerably more
than a hundred years before, and it was deemed quite a matter of
course that Kenneth, the eldest son, should succeed his father in the
farm. Never was there a time, in at least this part of the country,
in which agriculture stood more in need of the services of original
and inventive minds. There was not a wheeled cart in the parish, nor
a plough constructed on the modern principle. There was no changing
of seed to suit the varieties of soil, no green cropping, no rotatory
system of production; it almost seemed as if the main object of the
farmer was to raise the least possible amount of grain at the greatest
possible expense of labour. The farm of Woodside was primitive enough
in its usages and modes of tillage to have formed a study to the
antiquary. Towards autumn, when the fields vary most in colour, it
resembled a rudely executed chart of some large island, so irregular
were the patches which composed it, and so broken on every side by
a surrounding sea of brown sterile moor, that went here and there
winding into the interior in long river-like strips, or expanded within
into firths and lakes. In one corner there stood a heap of stones,
in another a thicket of furze--here a piece of bog--there a broken
bank of clay. The implements, too, with which the fields were tilled,
were quite as uncouth in their appearance as the fields themselves.
There was the single-stilted plough, that did little more than scratch
the surface; the wooden-toothed harrow, that did hardly so much; the
cumbrous sledge--no inconsiderable load of itself, for carrying home
the corn in harvest; and the basket-woven conical cart, with its
rollers of wood, for bearing out the manure in spring. With these, too,
there was the usual misproportion to the extent and produce of the
farm, of lean inefficient cattle--four half-starved animals performing,
with incredible labour, the work of one. And yet, now that a singularly
inventive mind had come into existence on this very farm, and though
its attentions had been directed, as far as external influences could
direct them, on the various employments of the farmer, the interests
of husbandry were to be in no degree improved by the circumstance.
Nature, in the midst of her wisdom, seems to cherish a dash of the
eccentric. The ingenuity of the farmer’s son was to be employed, not
in facilitating the labours of the farmer, but in inventing binnacle
lamps, which would yield an undiminished light amid the agitations of
a tempest, and in constructing mariners’ compasses on a new principle.
There are instances of similar character furnished by the experience of
almost every one. In passing, some years since, over a dreary moor in
the interior of the country, my curiosity was excited by a miniature
mast, furnished, like that of a ship, with shrouds and yards, and
bearing a-top a gaudy pinnet, which rose beside a little Highland
cottage. And on inquiring regarding it at the door, I was informed
that it was the work of the cottager’s son, a lad who, though he had
scarcely ever seen the sea, had taken a strange fancy to the life of
a sailor, and had left his father only a few weeks before, to serve
aboard a man-of-war.
Kenneth’s first employment was the tending of a flock of sheep, the
property of his father; and wretchedly did he acquit himself of the
charge. The farm was bounded on the eastern side by a deep bosky
ravine, through the bottom of which a scanty runnel rather trickled
than flowed; and when it was discovered on any occasion that Kenneth’s
flock had been left to take care of themselves, and of his father’s
corn to boot--and such occasions were wofully frequent--Kenneth
himself was almost invariably to be found in the ravine. There would
he sit for hours among the bushes, engaged with his knife in carving
uncouth faces on the heads of walking-sticks, or in constructing little
water-mills, or in making Liliputian pumps of the dried stalks of the
larger hemlock, and in raising the waters of the runnel to basins dug
in the sides of the hollow. Sometimes he quitted his charge altogether,
and set out for a meal-mill about a quarter of a mile from the farm,
where he would linger for half a day at a time watching the motion
of the wheels. His father complained that he could make nothing of
him--“The boy,” he said, “seemed to have nearly as much sense as other
boys of his years, and yet for any one useful purpose he was nothing
better than an idiot.” His mother, as is common with mothers, and who
was naturally an easy kind-hearted sort of woman, had better hopes of
him. Kenneth, she affirmed, was only a little peculiar, and would turn
out well after all. He was growing up, however, without improving in
the slightest, and when he became tall enough for the plough, he made
a dead stand. He would go and be a tradesman, he said--a mason, or
smith, or house-carpenter--anything his friends chose to make him; but
a farmer he would not be. His father, after a fruitless struggle to
overcome his obstinacy, carried him with him to a friend in Cromarty,
our old acquaintance, Donald Sandison, and after candidly confessing
that he was of no manner of use at home, and would, he was afraid, be
of little use anywhere, bound him by indenture to the mechanic for four
years.
Kenneth’s new master, as I have already had occasion to state, was one
of the best workmen in his profession in the north of Scotland. His
scrutoires and wardrobes were in repute up to the close of the last
century, and in the ancient art of wainscot-carving he had no equal
in the country. He was an intelligent man too, as well as a superior
mechanic; but with all his general intelligence, and all his skill,
he failed to discover the latent capabilities of his apprentice.
Kenneth was dull and absent, and had no heart to his work; and though
he seemed to understand the principles on which his master’s various
tools were used and the articles of his trade constructed, as well as
any workman in the shop, there were none among them who used the tools
so awkwardly, or constructed the articles so ill. An old botching
carpenter who wrought in a little shop at the other end of the town,
was known to the boys of the place by the humorous appellation of
“Spull (_i.e._ spoil)-the-wood,” and a lean-sided, ill-conditioned,
dangerous boat which he had built, as “the Wilful Murder.” Kenneth came
to be regarded as a sort of second “Spull-the-Wood,” as a fashioner of
rickety tables, ill-fitted drawers, and chairs that, when sat upon,
creaked like badly-tuned organs; and the boys, who were beginning to
regard him as fair game, sometimes took the liberty of asking him
whether he, too, was not going to build a Wilful Murder? Such, in
short, were his deficiencies as a mechanic, that in the third year of
his apprenticeship his master advised his father to take him home with
him and set him to the plough--an advice, however, on which the farmer,
warned by his previous experience, sturdily refused to act.
It was remarked that Kenneth acquired more of his profession in the
last year of his apprenticeship than in all the others. His skill
as a workman came to rank but little below the average ability of
his shopmates; and he seemed to enjoy more, and had become less
bashful and awkward. His master on one occasion brought him aboard a
vessel in the harbour, to repair some injury which her bulwarks had
sustained in a storm; and Kenneth, for the first time in his life, was
introduced to the mariner’s compass. The master in after days, when
his apprentice had become a great man, used to relate the circumstance
with much complacency, and compare him, as he bent over the instrument
in wonder and admiration, to a negro of the Kanga tribe worshipping
the elephant’s tooth. On the close of his apprenticeship he left this
part of the country for London, accompanied by his master’s eldest
son, a lad of a rather careless disposition, but, like his father, a
first-rate workman.
Kenneth soon began to experience the straits and hardships of the
inferior mechanic. His companion found little difficulty in procuring
employment, and none at all in retaining it when once procured.
Kenneth, on the contrary, was tossed about from shop to shop, and from
one establishment to another; and for a full twelvemonth, during the
half of which he was wholly unemployed, he did not work for more than a
fortnight together with any one master. It would have fared worse with
him than it did, had it not been for his companion, Willie Sandison,
who generously shared his earnings with him every time he stood in
need of his assistance. In about a year after they had gone to London,
however, Willie, an honest and warm-hearted but thoughtless lad, was
inveigled into a disreputable marriage, and lost in consequence his
wonted ability to assist his companion. I have seen one of Kenneth’s
letters to his old master, written about this time, in which he bewails
Willie’s mishap, and dwells gloomily on his own prospects. How these
first began to brighten I am unable to say, for there occurs about this
period a wide gap in his story, which all my inquiries regarding him
have not enabled me to fill; but in a second letter to his master, now
before me, which bears date 1772, just ten years after the other, there
are the evidences of a surprising improvement in his circumstances and
condition.
He writes in high spirits. Just before sitting down to his desk he
had heard from his old friend Willie, who had gone out to one of the
colonies, where he was thriving in spite of his wife. He had heard,
too, by the same post from his mother, who had been so kind to him
during his luckless boyhood; and the old woman was well. He had,
besides, been enabled to remove from his former lodgings to a fine
airy house in Duke’s Court, opposite St. Martin’s Church, for which
he had engaged, he said, to pay a rent of forty-two pounds per annum,
a very considerable sum nearly sixty years ago. Further, he had
entered into an advantageous contract with Catherine of Russia, for
furnishing all the philosophical instruments of a new college then
erecting in Petersburgh--a contract which promised to secure about two
years’ profitable employment to himself and seven workmen. In the ten
years which intervened between the dates of his two letters, Kenneth
M’Culloch had become one of the most skilful and inventive mechanicians
of London. He rose gradually into affluence and celebrity, and for
a considerable period before his death his gains were estimated at
about a thousand a year. His story, however, illustrates rather the
wisdom of nature than that of Kenneth M’Culloch. We think all the more
highly of Franklin for being so excellent a printer, and of Burns for
excelling all his companions in the labours of the fields; nor did the
skill or vigour with which they pursued their ordinary employments
hinder the one from taking his place among the first philosophers and
first statesmen of the age, nor prevent the other from achieving his
widespread celebrity as the most original and popular of modern poets.
Be it remembered, however, that there is a narrow and limited cast
of genius, unlike that of either Burns or Franklin, which, though of
incalculable value in its own sphere, is of no use whatever in any
other; and to precipitate it on its proper object by the pressure of
external circumstances, and the general inaptitude of its possessor for
other pursuits, seems to be part of the wise economy of Providence. Had
Kenneth M’Culloch betaken himself to the plough, like his father and
grandfather, he would have been, like them, the tacksman of Woodside,
and nothing more; had he found his proper vocation in cabinet-making,
he would have made tables and chairs for life, like his ingenious
master, Donald Sandison.