“Rise, honest muse, and sing the man of Ross.”--POPE.
[Sidenote: GEORGE ROSS, THE SCOTCH AGENT.]
In the letter in which Junius accuses the Duke of Grafton of having
sold a patent place in the collection of customs to one Mr. Hine, he
informs the reader that the person employed by his Grace in negotiating
the business, was “George Ross, the Scotch Agent and worthy confidant
of Lord Mansfield. And no sale by the candle,” he adds, “was ever
conducted with greater formality.” Now, slight as this notice is, there
is something in it sufficiently tangible for the imagination to lay
hold of. If the reader thinks of the Scotch Agent at all, he probably
thinks of him as one of those convenient creatures so necessary to the
practical statesman, whose merit does not consist more in their being
ingenious in a great degree, than in their being honest in a small
one. So mixed a thing is poor human nature, however, that though the
statement of Junius has never been fairly controverted, no possible
estimate of character could be more unjust. The Scotch Agent, whatever
may have been the nature of his services to the Duke of Grafton, was
in reality a high-minded, and, what is more, a truly patriotic man;
so good a person indeed, that, in a period of political heats and
animosities like the present, his story, fairly told, may teach us a
lesson of charity and moderation. I wish I could transport the reader
to where his portrait hangs, side by side with that of his friend the
Lord Chief-Justice, in the drawing-room of Cromarty House. The air of
dignified benevolence impressed on the features of the handsome old
man, with his grey hair curling round his temples, would secure a fair
hearing for him from even the sturdiest of the class who hate their
neighbours for the good of their country. Besides, the very presence
of the noble-looking lawyer, so much more like the Murray eulogized by
Pope and Lyttelton, than the Mansfield denounced by Junius, would of
itself serve as a sort of guarantee for the honour of his friend.
George Ross was the son of a petty proprietor of Easter-Ross, and
succeeded, on the death of his father, to the few barren acres on
which, for a century or two before, the family had been ingenious
enough to live. But he possessed besides what was more valuable than
twenty such patrimonies--an untiring energy of disposition, based on a
substratum of sound good sense; and, what was scarcely less important
than either, ambition enough to turn his capacity of employment to the
best account. Ross-shire, a century ago, was no place for such a man;
and as the only road to preferment at this period was the road that
led south, George Ross left, when very young, his mother’s cottage
for England, where he spent nearly fifty years amongst statesmen
and courtiers, and in the enjoyment of the friendship of such men
as President Forbes and Lord Mansfield. At length he returned, when
an old greyheaded man, to rank amongst the greatest capitalists and
proprietors of the county; and purchased, with other lesser properties
in the neighbourhood, the whole estate of Cromarty. Perhaps he had
come to rest him ere he died; but there seems to be no such thing
as changing one’s natural bent when confirmed by the habits of half
a lifetime; and the energies of the Scotch Agent, now that they had
gained him fortune and influence, were as little disposed to fall
asleep as they had been forty years before. As it was no longer
necessary, however, that they should be employed on his own account, he
gave them full scope in behalf of his poorer neighbours. The country
around him lay dead. There were no manufactories, no knowledge of
agriculture, no consciousness that matters were ill, and consequently
no desire of making them better; and the herculean task imposed upon
himself by the Scotch Agent, now considerably turned of sixty, was to
animate and revolutionize the whole. And such was his statesmanlike
sagacity in developing the hitherto undiscovered resources of the
country, joined to a high-minded zeal that could sow liberally, in the
hope of a late harvest for others to reap, that he fully succeeded.
He first established in the town an extensive manufactory of hempen
cloth, which has ever since employed about two hundred persons within
its walls, and fully twice that number without. He next built an ale
brewery, which, at the time of its erection, was by far the largest in
the north of Scotland. He then furnished the town at a great expense
with an excellent harbour, and set on foot a trade in pork, which,
for the last thirty years, has been carried on by the people of the
place to an extent of from about fifteen to twenty thousand pounds
annually. He set himself, too, to initiate his tenantry in the art of
rearing wheat; and finding them wofully unwilling to become wiser on
the subject, he tried the force of example, by taking an extensive
farm under his own management, and conducting it on the most approved
principles of modern agriculture. He established a nail and spade
manufactory; brought women from England to instruct the young girls in
the art of working lace; provided houses for the poor; presented the
town with a neat substantial building, the upper part of which still
serves for a council-room and court-house, and the lower as a prison;
and built for the accommodation of the poor Highlanders, who came
thronging into the town to work on his lands and his manufactories, a
handsome Gaelic chapel. He built for his own residence an elegant house
of hewn stone; surrounded it with pleasure-grounds designed in the best
style of the art; planted many hundred acres of the less improvable
parts of his property, and laid open the hitherto scarcely accessible
beauties of the hill of Cromarty, by crossing and recrossing it with
well-nigh as many walks as there are veins in the human body. He was
proud of his exquisite landscapes, and of his own skill in heightening
their beauty, and fully determined, he said, if he but lived long
enough, to make Cromarty worth an Englishman’s while coming all the way
from London to see.
When Oscar fell asleep, says the old Irish bard, it was impossible to
awaken him before his time except by cutting off one of his fingers,
or flinging a rock at his head; and wo to the poor man who disturbed
him! The Agent found it every whit as difficult to awaken a sleeping
country, and in some respects almost as unsafe. I am afraid human
nature is nearly the same thing in the people that it is in their
rulers, and that both are alike disposed to prefer the man who flatters
them to the man who merely does them good. George Ross was by no means
the most popular of proprietors--he disturbed old prejudices, and
unfixed old habits. The farmers thought it hard that they should have
to break up their irregular maplike patches of land, divided from each
other by little strips and corners not yet reclaimed from the waste,
into awkward-looking rectangular fields; and that they durst no longer
fasten their horses to the plough by the tail--a piece of natural
harness evidently formed for the purpose. The town’s-people deemed the
hempen manufactory unwholesome, and found that the English lacewomen,
who to a certainty were tea-drinkers, and even not very hostile, it was
said, to gin, were in a fair way of teaching their pupils something
more than the mere weaving of lace. What could be more heathenish, too,
than the little temple covered with cockle-shells which the laird had
just reared on a solitary corner of the hill; but the temple they soon
sent spinning over the cliff into the sea, a downward journey of a
hundred yards. And then his odious pork trade! There was no prevailing
on the people to rear pigs for him, and so he had to build a range of
offices in an out-of-the-way nook of his lands, which he stocked with
hordes of these animals, that he might rear them for himself. The
herds increased in size and number, and, voracious beyond calculation,
almost occasioned a famine. Even the great wealth of the speculatist
proved insufficient to supply them with the necessary food, and the
very keepers were in danger of being eaten alive. The poor animals
seemed departing from their very nature, for they became long, and
lank, and bony as the griffins of heraldry, until they looked more like
race-horses than pigs; and as they descended with every ebb in huge
droves to browse on the sea-weed, or delve for shell-fish among the
pebbles, there was no lack of music befitting their condition, when the
large rock-crab revenged with his nippers on their lips the injuries
inflicted on him by their teeth. Now, all this formed a fine subject
for joking to people who indulged in a half-Jewish dislike of the pig,
and who could not guess that the pork trade was one day to pay the
rents of half the widows’ cottages in the country. But no one could lie
more open than George Ross to that species of ridicule which the men
who see further than their neighbours, and look more to the advantage
of others than to their own, cannot fail to encounter. He was a worker
in the dark, and that at no slight expense; for though all his many
projects were ultimately found to be benefits conferred on his country,
not one of them proved remunerative to himself. But he seems to have
known mankind too well to have expected a very great deal from their
gratitude; though, on one occasion at least, his patience gave way.
The town in the course of years had so entirely marched to the west,
that, as I have already had occasion to remark, the town’s cross came
at length to be fairly left behind, with a hawthorn hedge on the one
side and a garden fence on the other; and when the Agent had completed
the house which was to serve as council-room and prison to the place,
the cross was taken down from its stand of more than two centuries,
and placed in front of the new building. That people might the better
remember the circumstance, there was a showy procession got up;
healths were drunk beside the cross in the Agent’s best wine, and not
a little of his crystal broken against it; and the evening terminated
in a ball. It so happened, however, through some cross chance, that,
though all the gentility of the place were to be invited, three young
men, who deemed themselves as genteel as the best of their neighbours,
were passed over--the foreman of the hemp manufactory had received no
invitation, nor the clever superintendent of the nail-work, nor yet
the spruce clerk of the brewery; and as they were all men of spirit,
it so happened that, during the very next night, the cross was taken
down from its new pedestal, broken into three pieces, and carried
still further to the west, to an open space where four lanes met; and
there it was found in the morning--the pieces piled over each other,
and surrounded by a profusion of broken ale-bottles. The Agent was
amazingly angry--angrier, indeed, than even those who best knew him had
deemed him capable of becoming; and in the course of the day the town’s
crier went through the streets proclaiming a reward of ten pounds in
hand, and a free room in Mr. Ross’s new buildings for life, to any one
who would give such information as might lead to the conviction of the
offenders.
In one of his walks a few days after, the Agent met with a poor
miserable-looking Highland woman, who had been picking a few withered
sticks out of one of his hedges, and whose hands and clothes seemed
torn by the thorns. “Poor old creature!” he said, as she dropped her
courtesy in passing; “you must go to my manager and tell him I have
ordered you a barrel of coals. And stay--you are hungry; call at my
house in passing, and the servants will find you something to take home
with you.” The poor woman blessed him, and looked up hesitatingly in
his face. She had never betrayed any one, she said; but his honour was
so good a gentleman--so very good a gentleman; and so she thought she
had best tell him all she knew about the breaking of the cross. She
lived in a little garret over the room of Jamie Banks the nailer; and
having slept scarcely any all the night in which the cross was taken
down, for the weather was bitterly cold, and her bedclothes very thin,
she could hear weighty footsteps traversing the streets till near
morning, when the house-door opened and in came Jamie with a tottering
unequal step, and disturbed the whole family by stumbling over a stool
into his wife’s washing tub. Besides, she had next day overheard his
wife rating him for staying out to so _untimeous_ an hour, and his
remark in reply, that she would do well to keep quiet unless she wished
to see him hanged. This was the sort of clue the affair required, and
in following it up, the unlucky nailer was apprehended and examined;
but it was found, that, through a singular lapse of memory, he had
forgotten every circumstance connected with the night in question,
except that he had been in the very best company, and one of the
happiest men in the world.
Jamie Banks was decidedly the most eccentric man of his day in at
least one parish; full of small wit and little conceits, and famous
for a faculty of invention fertile enough to have served a poet. On
one occasion when the gill of whisky had risen to three-halfpence
in Cromarty, and could still be bought for a penny in Avoch, he had
prevailed on a party of his acquaintance to accompany him to the latter
place, that they might drink themselves rich on the strength of the old
proverb; and as they actually effected a saving of two shillings in
spending six, it was clear, he said, that had not their money failed
them, they would have made fortunes apiece. Alas for the littleness
of that great passion, the love of fame! I have observed that the
tradespeople among whom one meets with most instances of eccentricity,
are those whose shops, being places of general resort, furnish them
with space enough on which to achieve a humble notoriety, by rendering
themselves unlike everybody else. To secure to Jamie Banks due leisure
for recollection, he was committed to jail.
He was sitting one evening beside the prison fire with one of his
neighbours and the jailer, and had risen to exclude the chill night air
by drawing a curtain over the open barred window of the apartment, when
a man suddenly started from behind the wall outside, and discharged
a large stone with tremendous force at his head. The missile almost
brushed his ear as it sung past, and, rebounding from the opposite
wall, rolled along the floor. “That maun be Rob Williamson!” exclaimed
Jamie, “wanting to keep _me_ quiet; out, neebour Jonathan, an’ after
him.” Neebour Jonathan, an active young fellow, sprang to the door,
caught the sounds of retreating footsteps as he turned the gate,
and dashing after like a greyhound, succeeded in laying hold of the
coat-skirts of Rob Williamson, as he strained onwards through the gate
of the hemp manufactory. He was immediately secured and lodged in
another apartment of the prison; and in the morning Jamie Banks was
found to have recovered his memory.
He had finished working, he said, on the evening after the ball, and
was just putting on his coat preparatory to leaving the shop, when
the superintendent called him into his writing-room, where he found
three persons sitting at a table half covered with bottles. Rob
Williamson, the weaver, was one of them; the other two were the clerk
of the brewery and the foreman of the hemp manufactory; and they were
all arguing together on some point of divinity. The superintendent
cleared a seat for him beside himself, and filled his glass thrice in
succession, by way of making up for the time he had lost--nothing could
be more untrue than that the superintendent was proud! They then all
began to speak about morals and Mr. Ross; the clerk was certain that,
what with his harbour and his piggery, and his heathen temples and his
lacewomen, he would not leave a rag of morality in the place; and Rob
was quite as sure he was no friend to the gospel. He a builder of
Gaelic kirks, forsooth! had he not, yesterday, put up a Popish Dagon of
a cross, and made the silly mason bodies worship it for the sake o’ a
dram? And then, how common ale-drinking had become in the place since
he had built his brewery--in his young days they drank naething but
gin;--and what would their grandfathers have said to a _whigmaleerie_
of a ball! “I sipped and listened,” continued Jamie, “and thought the
time couldna have been better spent at an elder’s meeting in the kirk;
and as the night wore later, the conversation became more edifying
still, until at length all the bottles were emptied, when we sallied
out in a body, to imitate the old reformers by breaking the cross. ‘We
may suffer, Jamie, for what we have done,’ said Rob to me, as we parted
for the night; ‘but remember it was duty, Jamie--it was duty. We have
been testifying wi’ our hands, an’ when the hour o’ trial comes, we
mauna be slow in testifying wi’ our tongues too.’ He wasna slack, the
deceitfu’ bodie!” concluded Jamie, “in trying to stop mine.” And thus
closed the evidence. The Agent was no vindictive man; he dismissed
his two superintendents and the clerk, to find for themselves a more
indulgent master; but the services of Jamie Banks he still retained,
and the first employment which he found for him after his release, was
the fashioning of four iron bars for the repair of the cross.
The Agent, in the closing scene of his life, was destined to experience
the unhappiness of blighted hope. He had an only son, a weak and very
obstinate young man, who, without intellect enough to appreciate his
well-calculated schemes, and yet conceit enough to sit in judgment
on them, was ever showing his spirit by opposing a sort of selfish
nonsense, that aped the semblance of common sense, to the expansive and
benevolent philosophy of his father. But the old man bore patiently
with his conceit and folly. Like the great bulk of the class who attain
to wealth and influence through their own exertions, he was anxiously
ambitious to live in his posterity, and be the founder of a family; and
he knew it was quite as much according to the nature of things, that a
fool might be the father, as that he should be the son, of a wise man.
He secured, therefore, his lands to his posterity by the law of entail;
did all that education and example could do for the young man; and
succeeded in getting him married to a sweet amiable Englishwoman, the
daughter of a bishop. But, alas! his precautions and the hopes in which
he indulged, proved equally vain. The young man, only a few months
after his marriage, was piqued when at table by some remark of his
father regarding his mode of carving--some slight allusion, it is said,
to the maxim, that little men cannot afford to neglect little matters;
and rising with much apparent coolness from beside his wife, he stepped
into an adjoining room, and there blew out his brains with a pistol.
The stain of his blood may still be seen in two large brownish-coloured
blotches on the floor.
It was impossible that so sad an event should have occurred in this
part of the country fifty years ago, without exciting as marked an
interest in the supernatural world as in our own. For weeks before,
strange unearthly sounds had been heard after nightfall from among
the woods of the hill. The forester, when returning homewards in the
stillness of evening, had felt the blood curdling round his heart,
as low moans, and faint mutterings, and long hollow echoes, came
sounding along the pathways, which then winded through the thick wood
like vaulted passages through an Egyptian cemetery; and boys of the
town who had lingered among the thickets of the lower slopes until
after sunset, engaged in digging sweet-knots or pig-nuts, were set
a-scampering by harsh sudden screams and loud whistlings, continued in
one unvaried note for minutes together. On the evening that preceded
the commission of the rash act, a party of schoolboys had set out for
the hill to select from among the young firs some of the straightest
and most slender, for fishing-rods; and aware that the forester might
have serious objections to any such appropriation of his master’s
property, they lingered among the rocks below till the evening had set
in; when they stole up the hill-side, and applied themselves to the
work of choosing and cutting down, in a beautiful little avenue which
leads from the edge of the precipices into the recesses of the wood.
All at once there arose, as if from the rock-edge, a combination of
the most fearful sounds they had ever heard;--it seemed as if every
bull in the country had congregated in one little spot, and were
bellowing together in horrid concert. The little fellows looked at
one another, and then, as if moved by some general impulse--for they
were too panic-struck to speak--they darted off together like a shoal
of minnows startled from some river-side by a shadow on the bank. The
terrible sounds waxed louder and louder, like the sounds of the dread
horn which appalled Wallace at midnight in the deserted fortress, after
the death of Faudon; and, long ere they had reached the town, the
weaker members of the party began to fall behind. One little fellow,
on finding himself left alone, began to scream in utter terror, scarce
less loudly than the mysterious bellower in the wood; but he was waited
for by a bold, hardy boy--a grandchild and name-son of old Sandy Wright
the boatman--who had not even relinquished his rod, and who afterwards
did his country no dishonour when, in like fashion, he grasped his pike
at the landing in Egypt. To him I owe the story. He used to say, it
was not until he had reached with his companions the old chapel of St.
Regulus, a full mile from the avenue, that the sounds entirely ceased.
They were probably occasioned by some wandering bittern, of that
species whose cry is said by naturalists to resemble the interrupted
bellowings of a bull, but so much louder that it may be distinctly
heard at a mile’s distance.
George Ross survived his son for several years, and he continued,
though a sadder and graver man, to busy himself with all his various
speculations as before. It was observed, however, that he seemed to
care less than formerly for whatever was exclusively his own--for
his fine house and his beautiful lands--and that he chiefly employed
himself in maturing his several projects for the good of his
country-folk. Time at length began to set his seal on his labours, by
discovering their value; though not until death had first affixed _his_
to the character of the wise and benevolent projector. He died full of
years and honour, mourned by the poor, and regretted by every one; and
even those who had opposed his innovations with the warmest zeal, were
content to remember him, with all the others, as “the good laird.”