half a century he saw it growing around him, increasing in
population, wealth, and political importance, as during the same
period no other British city had increased; and as he knew everything
concerning that growth, he not unnaturally took in it the deepest
pride. He could remember the old times, the old families, the old
buildings, the old domestic habits; and when well-stricken in years,
it pleased him to recall the matters which he remembered, and to
contrast them with what he saw on every side. I think that on the
whole he preferred the old Glasgow of his boyhood to the new Glasgow
of his age. All his life he had a turn for literature; in his
earlier day he had written stories and sketches, in which he mirrored
as vividly as he could the older aspects of the city; and as, along
with this turn for writing, he had that antiquarian taste which has
been a characteristic of almost every distinguished Scotsman since
Sir Walter, while his years and his official position gave him
opportunities of gratifying it, he knew Glasgow almost as well as the
oldest inhabitant, who has been a bailie and cognisant of all
secrets, knows his native village. He was an admirable _cicerone_;
his mind was continually pacing up and down the local last century,
knowing every person he met as he knew his contemporary
acquaintances; and when he spoke of the progress of Glasgow, he spoke
proudly, as if he were recounting the progress of his own son.
[Sidenote: Glasgow clubs.] During the last years of his life, it
struck him that he might turn his local knowledge to account. The
Doctor was a humorist; he was fond of anecdote, had a very proper
regard for good eating and drinking; he remembered regretfully the
rum-punch of his youth, and he was deeply versed in the histories of
the Glasgow Clubs. In a happy hour, it occurred to him that if he
told the story of those clubs--described the professors, the
merchants, the magistrates, the local bigwigs, the clergymen, the
rakes, who composed their memberships--he would go to the very core
and essence of old Glasgow Society; while in the course of his work
he would find opportunities of using what antiquarian knowledge he
had amassed concerning old houses, old social habits, the state of
trade at different periods, and the like. The idea was a happy one;
the Doctor set to work valiantly, and in course of time in a spacious
volume, with suitable index and appendix, the "Clubs of Glasgow" was
before the world. Never, perhaps, has so good a book been so badly
written. The book is interesting, but interesting in virtue of the
excellence of the material, not of the literary execution. Yet, on
the whole, it may fairly be considered sufficient. You open its
pages, and step from the Present into the Past. You are in the
Trongate, through which Prince Charles has just ridden. You see
Virginian merchants pacing to and fro with scarlet cloaks and
gold-headed sticks; you see belle and beau walk a minuet in the Old
Assembly-Room; you see flushed Tom and Jerry lock an asthmatic
"Charlie" in his sentry-box, and roll him down a declivity into the
river--all gone long ago, like the rum-punch which they brewed, like
the limes with which they flavoured it!
[Sidenote: Hugh Macdonald.]
Mr Macdonald is Dr Strang's antithesis, and yet his complement. The
one worked in antiquarianism and statistics; the other in
antiquarianism and poetry. The one loved the old houses, the old
hedges, the old churchyards within the city; the other loved these
things without the city and miles away from it--and so between them
both we have the district very fairly represented. Mr Macdonald was
a man of genius, a song-writer, an antiquary, a devout lover of beast
and bird, of snowdrop and lucken-gowan, of the sun setting on
Bothwell Bank, of the moon shining down on Clydesdale barley fields.
He was in his degree one of those poets who have, since Burns's time,
made nearly every portion of Scotland vocal. Just as Tannahill has
made Gleniffer hills greener by his songs, as Thorn of Inverury has
lent a new interest to the banks of the Dee, as Scott Riddell has
added a note to the Border Minstrelsy, has Mr Macdonald taken poetic
possession of the country around Glasgow. Neither for him nor for
any of his compeers can the title of great poet be claimed. These
men are local poets; but if you know and love the locality, you
thankfully accept the songs with which they have associated them. If
the scenery of a shire is gentle, it is fitting that the poet of the
shire should possess a genius to match. Great scenes demand great
poems; simple scenes, simple ones. Coleridge's hymn in the Vale of
Chamouni is a noble performance, but out of place if uttered in a
Lanarkshire glen where sheep are feeding, and where you may search
the horizon in vain for an elevation of five hundred feet. Mr
Macdonald could not have approached Coleridge's hymn had he been
placed in Chamouni; but he has done justice to the scenery that
surrounded him--made the ivies of Crookston more sombre with his
verse, and yet more splendid the westward-running Clyde in which the
sun is setting.
He was one of those, too--of whom Scotchmen are specially proud--who,
born in humble circumstances, and with no aid from college, and often
but little from school, do achieve some positive literary result, and
recognition more or less for the same. He was born in one of the
eastern districts
of Glasgow, lived for some time in the Island of Mull, in the house
of a relative--for, as his name imports, he was a pure Celt--and from
his sires he drew song, melancholy, and superstition. The
superstition he never could completely shake off. He could laugh at
a ghost story, could deck it out with grotesque or humorous
exaggeration; but the central terror glared upon him through all
disguises, and, hearing or relating, his blood was running chill the
while. Returning to his native city, he was entered an apprentice in
a public manufactory, and here it was--fresh from ruined castle, mist
folding on the Morven Hills, tales told by mountain shepherd or
weather-beaten fisherman of corpse lights glimmering on the sea; with
English literature in which to range and take delight in golden
shreds of leisure; and with everything, past Highland experience and
present dim environment, beginning to be overspread by the "purple
light of love"--that Mr Macdonald became a poet. Considering the
matter now, it may be said that his circumstances were not
unfavourable to the development of the poetic spirit. [Sidenote:
Glasgow poets.] Glasgow at the period spoken of could boast of her
poets. Dugald Moore was writing odes to "Earthquake" and "Eclipse,"
and getting quizzed by his companions. Motherwell, the author of
"Jeanie Morrison," was editor of the _Courier_, and in its columns
fighting manfully against Reform. Alexander Rodger, who disgusted
Sir Walter by the publication of a wicked and witty welcome--singular
in likeness and contrast to the Magician's own--on the occasion of
the visit of his gracious Majesty George IV. to Edinburgh, was
filling the newspapers of the west with satirical verses, and getting
himself into trouble thereby. Nay, more, this same Alexander Rodger,
either then or at a later period, held a post in the manufactory in
which Mr Macdonald was apprentice. Nor was the eye without
education, or memory without associations to feed upon. Before the
door of this manufactory stood Glasgow Green, the tree yet putting
forth its leaves under which Prince Charles stood when he reviewed
his shoeless Highland host before marching to Falkirk. Near the
window, and to be seen by the boy every time he lifted his head from
work, flowed the Clyde, bringing recollections of the red ruins of
Bothwell Castle, where the Douglases dwelt, and the ivy-muffled walls
of Blantyre Priory where the monks prayed; carrying imagination with
it as it flowed seaward to Dumbarton Castle, with its Ossianic
associations, and recalling, as it sank into ocean, the night when
Bruce from his lair in Arran watched the beacon broadening on the
Carrick shore. And from the same windows, looking across the stream,
he could see the long straggling burgh of Rutherglen, with the church
tower which saw the bargain struck with Menteith for the betrayal of
Wallace, standing eminent above the trees. And when we know that the
girl who was afterwards to become his wife was growing up there,
known and loved at the time, one can fancy how often his eyes dwelt
on the little town, with church tower and chimney, fretting the
sky-line. And when he rambled--and he always _did_
ramble--inevitably deeper impulses would come to him. Northward from
Glasgow a few miles, at Rob Royston, where Wallace was betrayed,
lived Walter Watson, whose songs have been sung by many who never
heard his name. Seven miles southward from the city lay Paisley in
its smoke, and beyond that, Gleniffer Braes--scarcely changed since
Tannahill walked over them on summer evenings. [Sidenote: A poetic
education.] South-east stretched the sterile district of the Mearns,
with plovers, and heather, and shallow, glittering lakes; and beyond,
in a green crescent embracing the sea, lay a whole Ayrshire, fiery
and full of Burns, every stock and stone passionate with him, his
daisy blooming in every furrow, every stream as it ran seaward
mourning for Highland Mary--and when night fell, in every tavern in
the county the blithest lads in Christendie sitting over their cups,
and flouting the horned moon hanging in the window pane. And then,
to complete a poetic education, there was Glasgow herself--black
river flowing between two glooms of masts--the Trongate's all-day
roar of traffic, and at night the faces of the hurrying crowds
brought out keenly for a moment in the light of the shop windows--the
miles of stony streets, with statues in the squares and open
spaces--the grand Cathedral, filled once with Popish shrines and
rolling incense, on one side of the ravine, and on the other, John
Knox on his pillar, impeaching it with outstretched arm that clasps a
Bible. And ever as the darkness came, the district north-east and
south of the city was filled with shifting glare and gloom of furnace
fires; instead of night and its privacy, the splendour of towering
flame brought to the inhabitants of the eastern and southern streets
a fluctuating scarlet day, piercing nook and cranny as searchingly as
any sunlight--making a candle needless to the housewife as she darned
stockings for the children, and turning to a perfect waste of charm,
the blush on a sweetheart's cheek. With all these things around him,
Mr Macdonald set himself sedulously to work, and whatever may be the
value of his poetic wares, plenty of excellent material lay around
him on every side.
[Sidenote: Hugh Macdonald.]
To him all these things had their uses. He had an excellent literary
digestion, capable of extracting nutriment from the toughest
materials. He assiduously made acquaintance with English literature
in the evenings, gradually taking possession of the British
essayists, poets, and historians. During this period, too, he
cherished republican feelings, and had his own speculations
concerning the regeneration of the human race. At this time the
splendid promise of Chartism made glorious the horizon, and
Macdonald, like so many of his class, conceived that the "five pints"
were the _avant-couriers_ of the millennium. For him, in a very
little while, Chartism went out like a theatrical sun. He no longer
entertained the idea that he could to any perceptible extent aid in
the regeneration of the race. Indeed, it is doubtful whether, in his
latter days, he cared much whether the race would ever be
regenerated. Man was a rascal, had ever been a rascal, and a rascal
he would remain till the end of the chapter. He was willing to let
the world wag, certified that the needful thing was to give regard to
his own private footsteps. His own personal hurt made him forget the
pained world. He was now fairly embarked on the poetic tide. His
name, appended to copies of verses, frequently appeared in the local
prints, and gained no small amount of local notice. At intervals
some song-bird of his brain of stronger pinion or gayer plumage than
usual would flit from newspaper to newspaper across the country; nay,
several actually appeared beyond the Atlantic, and, not unnoticed by
admiring eyes, perched on a broadsheet here and there, as they made
their way from the great cities towards the Western clearings. All
this time, too, he was an enthusiastic botanist in book and field, a
lover of the open country and the blowing wind, a scorner of fatigue,
ready any Saturday afternoon when work was over for a walk of twenty
miles, if so be he might look on a rare flower or an ivied ruin. And
the girl living over in Rutherglen was growing up to womanhood, each
charm of mind and feature celebrated for many a year in glowing
verse; and her he, poet-like, married--the household plenishing of
the pair, love and hope, and a disregard of inconveniences arising
from straitened means. The happiest man in the world--but a widower
before the year was out! With his wife died many things, all buried
in one grave. Republican dreamings and schemes for the regeneration
of the world faded after that. Here is a short poem, full of the
rain cloud and the yellow leaf, which has reference to his feelings
at the time--
Gorgeous are thy woods, October!
Clad in glowing mantles sear;
Brightest tints of beauty blending
Like the west, when day's descending,
Thou'rt the sunset of the year.
"Fading flowers are thine, October!
Droopeth sad the sweet blue-bell;
Gone the blossoms April cherish'd--
Violet, lily, rose, all perish'd--
Fragrance fled from field and dell.
"Songless are thy woods, October!
Save when redbreast's mournful lay
Through the calm gray morn is swelling,
To the list'ning echoes telling
Tales of darkness and decay.
"Saddest sounds are thine, October!
Music of the falling leaf
O'er the pensive spirit stealing,
To its inmost depths revealing:
'Thus all gladness sinks in grief.'
"I do love thee, drear October!
More than budding, blooming Spring--
Hers is hope, delusive smiling,
Trusting hearts to grief beguiling;
Mem'ry loves thy dusky wing.
"Joyous hearts may love the summer,
Bright with sunshine, song, and flower;
But the heart whose hopes are blighted,
In the gloom of woe benighted,
Better loves thy kindred bower.
"'Twas in thee, thou sad October!
Death laid low my bosom flower.
Life hath been a wintry river,
O'er whose ripple gladness never
Gleameth brightly since that hour.
"Hearts would fain be with their treasure,
Mine is slumb'ring in the clay;
Wandering here alone, uncheery,
Deem 't not strange this heart should weary
For its own October day."
The greater proportion of Mr Macdonald's poems first saw the light in
the columns of the _Glasgow Citizen_, then, as now, conducted by Mr
James Heddenvick, an accomplished journalist, and a poet of no mean
order. The casual connexion of contributor and editor ripened into
friendship, and in 1849, Mr Macdonald was permanently engaged as Mr
Hedderwick's sub-editor. He was now occupied in congenial tasks, and
a gush of song followed this accession of leisure and opportunity.
Sunshine and the scent of flowers seemed to have stolen into the
weekly columns. You "smelt the meadow" in casual paragraph and in
leading article. The _Citizen_ not only kept its eye on Louis
Napoleon and the Czar, it paid attention to the building of the
hedge-sparrow's nest, and the blowing of the wild flower as well.
Still more to prose than to verse did Mr Macdonald at this time
direct his energies; and he was happy enough to encounter a subject
exactly suited to his powers and mental peculiarities. He was the
most uncosmopolitan of mortals. He had the strongest local
attachments. In his eyes, Scotland was the fairest portion of the
planet; Glasgow, the fairest portion of Scotland; and Bridgeton--the
district of the city in which he dwelt--the fairest portion of
Glasgow. He would have shrieked like a mandrake at uprootal. He
never would pass a night away from home. But he loved nature--and
the snowdrop called him out of the smoke to Castle Milk, the
lucken-gowan to Kenmure, the craw-flower to Gleniffer. His heart
clung to every ruin in the neighbourhood like the ivy. He was
learned in epitaphs, and spent many an hour in village churchyards in
extracting sweet and bitter thoughts from the half-obliterated
inscriptions. Jaques, Isaak Walton, and Old Mortality, in one, he
knew Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire, and Ayrshire by heart. Keenly
sensible to natural beauty, full of antiquarian knowledge, and in
possession of a prose style singularly quaint, picturesque, and
humorous, he began week, by week, in the columns of the _Citizen_,
the publication of his "Rambles Round Glasgow." City people were
astonished to learn that the country beyond the smoke was far from
prosaic--that it had its traditions, its antiquities, its historical
associations, its glens and waterfalls worthy of special excursions.
These sketches were afterwards collected, and ran, in their separate
and more convenient form, through two editions. No sooner were the
"Rambles" completed than he projected a new series of sketches,
entitled, "Days at the Coast"--sketches which also appeared in the
columns of a weekly newspaper. Mr Macdonald's best writing is to be
found in this book--several of the descriptive passages being really
notable in their way. As we read, the Firth of Clyde glitters before
us, with white villages sitting on the green shores: Bute and the
twin Cumbraes are asleep in sunshine; while beyond, a stream of
lustrous vapour is melting on the grisly Arran peaks. The
publication of these sketches raised the reputation of their author,
and, like the others, they received the honour of collection, and a
separate issue. But little more has to be said concerning his
literary activity. The early afternoon was setting in. During the
last eighteen months of his life he was engaged on one of the Glasgow
morning journals; and when in its columns he rambled as of yore, it
was with a comparatively infirm step, and an eye that had lost its
interest and lustre. "Nature never did betray the heart that loved
her;" and when the spring-time came, Macdonald, remembering all her
former sweetness, journeyed to Castle Milk to see the snowdrops--for
there, of all their haunts in the west, they come earliest and linger
latest. It was a dying visit, an eternal farewell. Why have I
written of this man so? Because he had the knack of making friends
of all with whom he came into contact, and it was my fortune to come
into more frequent and more intimate contact with him than most. He
was neither a great man nor a great poet--in the ordinary senses of
these terms--but since his removal there are perhaps some half-dozen
persons in the world who feel that the "strange superfluous glory of
the air" lacks something, and that because an eye and an ear are
gone, the colour of the flower is duller, the song of the bird less
sweet, than in a time they can remember.
Both Dr Strang and Mr Macdonald have written about Glasgow, and by
their aid we shall be able to see something of the city and its
surroundings.
[Sidenote: Early history of Glasgow.]
The history of the city, from the period of St Mungo to the
commercial crisis in 1857 and the fall of the Western Bank, presents
many points of interest. Looking back some thirteen centuries into
the gray morning-light of time, we see St Mungo led by an angel,
establishing himself on the banks of the Molendinar, and erecting a
rude chapel or oratory. There for many summers and winters he prayed
his prayers, sung his aves, and wrought his miracles. The fame of
his sanctity spread far and wide, and many pilgrims came to converse
with, and be counselled by, the holy man. In process of time--the
prayers of the saint proving wondrously efficacious, and the Clyde
flowing through the lower grounds at a little distance being populous
with salmon--people began to gather, and a score or so of wooden
huts, built on the river bank, was the beginning of the present city.
In 1197 the cathedral was consecrated by a certain Bishop Jocelyn,
and from thence, on to the Reformation, its affairs continued in a
prosperous condition; its revenues, taking into consideration the
poverty of the country and the thinness of the population, were
considerable; and its bishops were frequently men of ambition and of
splendid tastes. Its interior was enriched by many precious relics.
On days of high festival, the Lord Bishop and his officials, clad in
costly vestments, entered by the great western door, and as the
procession swept onward to the altar, incense fumed from swinging
censers, the voices of the choir rose in rich and solemn chanting,
the great organ burst on the ear with its multitudinous thunders, and
rude human hearts were bowed to the ground with contrition, or rose
in surges of sound to heaven in ecstasy. Glasgow, too, is closely
connected with Wallace. The Bell o' the Brae saw the flash of his
sword as the Southrons fled before him. At the kirk of Rutherglen,
Sir John Menteith and Sir Aymer de Vallance met to plan the capture
of the hero: and at Rob Royston the deed of shame was consummated.
Menteith, with sixty followers, surrounded the house in which Wallace
slept. Traitors were already within. His weapons were stolen.
Kierly, his servant, was slain. According to Blind Harry, at the
touch of a hand Wallace sprung up--a lion at bay. He seized an oaken
stool--the only weapon of offence within reach--and at a blow broke
one rascal's back, in a second splashed the wall with the blood and
brains of another, when the whole pack threw themselves upon him,
bore him down by sheer weight, and secured him. He was conveyed to
Dumbarton, then held by the English, and from thence was delivered
into the hands of Edward. The battle of Langside was fought in the
vicinity of the city. Moray, lying in Glasgow, intercepted Mary on
her march from Hamilton to Dumbarton, and gave battle. Every one
knows the issue. For sixty miles without drawing rein the queen fled
towards England and a scaffold. Moray returned to Glasgow through
the village of Gorbals, his troopers, it is said, wiping their bloody
swords on the manes of their horses as they rode, and went thence to
meet his assassin in Linlithgow town. During the heat and frenzy of
the Reformation, nearly all our ecclesiastical edifices went to the
ground, or came out of the fierce trial with interiors pillaged,
altars desecrated, and the statues of apostles and saints broken or
defaced. Glasgow Cathedral was assailed like the rest; already the
work of destruction had begun, when the craftsmen of the city came to
the rescue. Their exertions on that occasion preserved the noble
building for us. They were proud of it then; they are proud of it
to-day. During the persecution, the country to the west of Glasgow
was overrun by dragoons, and many a simple Covenanter had but short
shrift--seized, tried, condemned, shot, in heaven, within the hour.
The rambler is certain to encounter, not only in village churchyards,
but by the wayside, or in the hearts of solitary moors, familiar but
with the sunbeam and the cry of the curlew, rude martyr stones, their
sculptures and letters covered with lichen, and telling with
difficulty the names of the sufferers and the manner of their deaths,
and intimating that--
"This stone shall witness be
'Twixt Presbyterie and Prelacie."
[Sidenote: Prince Charles.]