had often heard her tell of the time when the family lived at Lochlea,
and Robert, spending his evenings at the Tarbolton merry-makings with
the Bachelors' Club or the Masons, used to come home late in the
night, and she used to sit up to let him in. These doings sorely
displeased the father; and at last he said grimly, one night, that he
would sit up to open the door for Robert. Trembling with fear, the
mother went to bed, and did not close her eyes, listening
apprehensively for the angry meeting between father and son. She heard
the door open, the old man's stern tone, Robert's gay reply; and in a
twinkling more the two were sitting together over the fire, the father
splitting his sides with half-unwilling laughter at the boy's
inimitable descriptions and mimicry of the scenes he had left. Nearly
two hours they sat there in this way, the mother all the while
cramming the bed-clothes into her mouth, lest her own laughter should
remind her husband how poorly he was carrying out his threats. After
that night "Rob" came home at what hour he pleased, and there was
nothing more heard of his father's sitting up to reprove him.
They believed that Burns's intemperate habits had been greatly
exaggerated. Their mother was a woman twenty-five years old, and the
mother of three children when he died, and she had never once seen him
the "waur for liquor." "There were vary mony idle people i' the warld,
an' a great deal o' talk," they said. After his father's death he
assumed the position of the head of the house, and led in family
prayers each morning; and everybody said, even the servants, that
there were never such beautiful prayers heard. He was a generous soul.
After he left home he never came back for a visit, however poor he
might be, without bringing a present for every member of the family;
always a pound of tea for his mother, "and tea was tea then," the old
ladies added. To their mother he gave a copy of Thomson's "Seasons,"
which they still have. They have also some letters of his, two of
which I read with great interest. They were to his brother, and were
full of good advice. In one he says:--
"I intended to have given you a sheetful of counsels, but some
business has prevented me. In a word, learn taciturnity. Let
that be your motto. Though you had the wisdom of Newton or the
wit of Swift, garrulousness would lower you in the eyes of your
fellow-creatures."
In the other, after alluding to some village tragedy, in which great
suffering had fallen on a woman, he says,--
"Women have a kind of steady sufferance which qualifies them to
endure much beyond the common run of men; but perhaps part of
that fortitude is owing to their short-sightedness, as they are
by no means famous for seeing remote consequences in their real
importance."
The old ladies said that their mother had liked "Jean" on the whole,
though "at first not so weel, on account of the connection being what
it was." She was kindly, cheery, "never bonny;" but had a good figure,
danced well and sang well, and worshipped her husband. She was "not
intellectual;" "but there's some say a poet shouldn't have an
intellectual wife," one of the ingenuous old spinsters remarked
interrogatively. "At any rate, she suited him; an' it was ill speering
at her after all that was said and done," the younger niece added,
with real feeling in her tone. Well might she say so. If there be a
touching picture in all the long list of faithful and ill-used women,
it is that of "bonnie Jean,"--the unwedded mother of children, the
forgiving wife of a husband who betrayed others as he had betrayed
her,--when she took into her arms and nursed and cared for her
husband's child, born of an outcast woman, and bravely answered all
curious questioners with, "It's a neebor's bairn I'm bringin' up." She
wrought for herself a place and an esteem of which her honest and
loving humility little dreamed.
There is always something sad in seeking out the spot where a great
man has died. It is like living over the days of his death and burial.
The more sympathetically we have felt the spell of the scenes in which
he lived his life, the more vitalized and vitalizing that life was,
the more are we chilled and depressed in the presence of places on
which his wearied and suffering gaze rested last. As I drove through
the dingy, confused, and ugly streets of Dumfries, my chief thought
was, "How Burns must have hated this place!" Looking back on it now, I
have a half-regret that I ever saw it, that I can recall vividly the
ghastly graveyard of Saint Michael's, with its twenty-six thousand
gravestones and monuments, crowded closer than they would be in a
marble-yard, ranged in rows against the walls without any pretence of
association with the dust they affect to commemorate. What a ballad
Burns might have written about such a show! And what would it not have
been given to him to say of the "Genius of Coila, finding her favorite
son at the plough, and casting her mantle over him,"--that is, the
sculptured monument, or, as the sexton called it, "Máwsolem," under
which he has had the misfortune to be buried. A great Malvern
bathwoman, bringing a bathing-sheet to an unwilling patient, might
have been the model for the thing. It is hideous beyond description,
and in a refinement of ingenuity has been made uglier still by having
the spaces between the pillars filled in with glass. The severe Scotch
weather, it seems, was discoloring the marble. It is a pity that the
zealous guardians of its beauty did not hold it precious enough to be
boarded up altogether.
The house in which Burns spent the first eighteen months of his dreary
life in Dumfries is now a common tenement-house at the lower end of a
poor and narrow street. As I was reading the tablet let into the wall,
bearing his name, a carpenter went by, carrying his box of tools slung
on his shoulder.
"He only had three rooms there," said the man, "those three up there,"
pointing to the windows; "two rooms and a little kitchen at the back."
The house which is usually shown to strangers as his is now the home
of the master of the industrial school, and is a comfortable little
building joining the school. Here Burns lived for three years; and
here, in a small chamber not more than twelve by fifteen feet in size,
he died on the 21st of July, 1796, sadly harassed in his last moments
by anxiety about money matters and about the approaching illness of
his faithful Jean.
Opening from this room is a tiny closet, lighted by one window.
"They say he used to make up his poetry in here," said the
servant-girl; "but I dare say it is only a supposeetion; still, it 'ud
be a quiet place."
"They say there was a great lot o' papers up here when he died," she
added, throwing open the narrow door of a ladder-like stairway that
led up into the garret, "writin's that had been sent to him from all
over the world, but nobody knew what become of them. Now that he's so
much thought aboot, I wonder his widow did not keep them. But, ye
know, the poor thing was just comin' to be ill; that was the last
thing he wrote when he knew he was dyin', for some one to come and
stay with her; and I dare say she was in such a sewither she did not
know about anything."
The old stone stairs were winding and narrow,--painted now, and neatly
carpeted, but worn into depressions here and there by the plodding of
feet. Nothing in the house, above or below, spoke to me of Burns so
much as did they. I stood silent and rapt on the landing, and saw him
coming wearily up, that last time; after which he went no more out
forever, till he was borne in the arms of men, and laid away in Saint
Michael's graveyard to rest.
That night, at my lonely dinner in the King's Arms, I had the
Edinburgh papers. There were in them three editorials headed with
quotations from Burns's poems, and an account of the sale in
Edinburgh, that week, of an autograph letter of his for ninety-four
pounds!
Does he think sadly, even in heaven, how differently he might have
done by himself and by earth, if earth had done for him then a tithe
of what it does now? Does he know it? Does he care? And does he listen
when, in lands he never saw, great poets sing of him in words simple
and melodious as his own?
"For now he haunts his native land
As an immortal youth: his hand
Guides every plough;
He sits beside each ingle-nook,
His voice is in each rushing brook,
Each rustling bough.
"His presence haunts this room to-night,
A form of mingled mist and light
From that far coast.
Welcome beneath this roof of mine!
Welcome! this vacant chair is thine,
Dear guest and ghost!"[8]
GLINTS IN AULD REEKIE.
As soon as one comes to know Edinburgh, he feels a gratitude to that
old gentleman of Fife who is said to have invented the affectionate
phrase "Auld Reekie." Perhaps there never was any such old gentleman;
and perhaps he never did, as the legend narrates, regulate the hours
of his family prayers, on summer evenings, by the thickening smoke
which he could see rising from Edinburgh chimneys, when the cooking of
suppers began.
"It's time now, bairns, to tak the beuks an' gang to our beds; for
yonder's Auld Reekie, I see, putting on her nichtcap," are the words
which the harmless little tradition puts into his mouth. They are
wisely dated back to the reign of Charles II., a time from which none
now speak to contradict; and they serve as well as any others to
introduce and emphasize the epithet which, once heard, is not
forgotten by a lover of Edinburgh, remaining always in his memory,
like a pet name of one familiarly known.
It is not much the fashion of travellers to become attached to
Edinburgh. Rome for antiquity, London for study and stir, Florence for
art, Venice for art and enchantment combined,--all these have pilgrims
who become worshippers, and return again and again to them, as the
devout return to shrines. But few return thus to Edinburgh. It
continually happens that people planning routes of travel are heard to
say, "I have seen Edinburgh," pronouncing the word "seen" with a
stress indicating a finality of completion. Nobody ever uses a phrase
in that way about Rome or Venice. It is always, "We have been in,"
"spent a winter in," "a summer in," or "a month in" Rome, or Venice,
or any of the rest; and the very tone and turn of the phrase tell the
desire or purpose of another winter, or summer, or month in the
remembered and longed-for place.
But Edinburgh has no splendors with which to woo and attract. She is
"a penniless lass;" "wi' a lang pedigree," however,--as long and as
splendid as the best, reaching back to King Arthur at least, and some
say a thousand years farther, and assert that the rock on which her
castle stands was a stronghold when Rome was a village. At any rate,
there was a fortress there long before Edinburgh was a town, and that
takes it back midway between the five hundredth and six hundredth year
of our Lord. From that century down to this it was the centre of as
glorious and terrible fighting and suffering as the world has ever
seen. Kingly besieged and besiegers, prisoners, martyrs, men and women
alike heroic, their presences throng each doorway still; and the very
stones at a touch seem set ringing again with the echoes of their
triumphs and their agonies.
To me, the castle is Edinburgh. Looking from the sunny south windows
of Prince's Street across at its hoary front is like a wizard's
miracle, by which dead centuries are rolled back, compressed into
minutes. At the foot of its north precipices, where lay the lake in
which, in the seventeenth century, royal swans floated and plebeian
courtesans were ducked, now stretches a gay gardened meadow, through
which flash daily railway trains. Their columns of blue smoke scale
the rocks, coil after coil, but never reach the citadel summit, being
tangled, spent, and lost in the tops of trees, which in their turn
seem also to be green-plumed besiegers, ever climbing, climbing. For
five days I looked out on this picture etched against a summer sky: in
black, by night; in the morning, of soft sepia tints, or gray,--tower,
battlement, wall, and roof, all in sky lines; below these the wild
crags and precipices, a mosaic of grays, two hundred feet down, to a
bright greensward dotted with white daisies. Set steadily to the
sunrise, by a west wind which never stopped blowing for the whole five
days, streamed out the flag. To have read on its folds,
"Castelh-Mynyd-Agned," or "Castrum Puellarum," would not have seemed
at any hour a surprise. There is nowhere a relic of antiquity which so
dominates its whole environment as does this rock fortress. Its
actuality is sovereign; its personality majestic. The thousands of
modern people thronging up and down Prince's Street seem perpetrating
an impertinent anachronism. The times are the castle's times still;
all this nineteenth-century haberdashery and chatter is an
inexplicable and insolent freak of interruption. Sitting at one's
Prince's Street windows, one sees it not; overlooks it as meaningless
and of no consequence. Instead, he sees the constable's son, in
Bruce's day, coming down that two hundred feet of precipice, hand over
hand, on a bit of rope ladder, to visit the "wench in town" with whom
he was in love; and anon turning this love-lore of his to patriotic
account, by leading Earl Douglas, with his thirty picked Scots, up the
same precipices, in the same perilous fashion, to surprise the English
garrison, which they did to such good purpose that in a few hours they
retook the castle, the only one then left which Bruce had not
recovered. Or, when morning and evening mists rise slowly up from the
meadow, veil the hill, and float off in hazy wreaths from its summit,
he fancies fagots and tar-barrels ablaze on the esplanade, and the
beauteous Lady Glammis, with her white arms crossed on her breast,
burning to death there, with eyes fixed on the windows of her
husband's prison. Scores of other women with "fayre bodies" were
burned alive there; men, too, their lovers and sons,--all for a crime
of which no human soul ever was or could be guilty. Poor, blinded,
superstitious earth, which heard and saw and permitted such things!
Even to-day, when the ground is dug up on that accursed esplanade,
there are found the ashes of these martyrs to the witchcraft madness.
That grand old master-gunner, too, of Cromwell's first
following,--each sunset gun from the castle seemed to me in honor of
his memory, and recalled his name. "May the devil blaw me into the
air, if I lowse a cannon this day!" said he, when Charles's men bade
him fire a salute in honor of the Restoration. Every other one of
Cromwell's men in the garrison had turned false, and done ready
service to the king's officers; but not so Browne. It was only by main
force that he was dragged to his gun, and forced to fire it. Whether
the gun were old, and its time had come to burst, or whether the
splendid old Puritan slyly overweighed his charge, it is open to each
man's preference to believe; but burst the gun did, and, taking the
hero at his word, "shuites his bellie from him, and blew him quyte
over the castle wall," says the old record. I make no doubt myself
that it was just what the master-gunner intended.
Thirty years later there were many gunners in Edinburgh Castle as
brave as he, or braver,--men who stood by their guns month after
month, starving by inches and freezing; the snow lying knee-deep on
the shattered bastions; every roof shelter blown to fragments; no
fuel; their last well so low that the water was putrid; raw salt
herrings the only food for the men, and for the officers oatmeal,
stirred in the putrid water. This was the Duke of Gordon's doing, when
he vowed to hold Edinburgh Castle for King James, if every other
fortress in Scotland went over to William. When his last hope failed,
and he gave his men permission to abandon the castle and go out to the
enemy, if they chose, not a man would go. "Three cheers for his
grace," they raised, with their poor starved voices, and swore they
would stay as long as he did. From December to June they held out, and
then surrendered, a handful of fifty ghastly, emaciated, tottering
men. Pity they could not have known how much grander than victories
such defeats as theirs would read by and by!
Hard by the castle was the duke's house, in Blair's Close; in this he
was shut up prisoner, under strict guard. The steps up which he walked
that day, for the first time in his life without his sword, are still
there; his coronet, with a deer-hound on either side, in dingy stone
carving, above the low door. It is one of the doorways worth haunting,
in Edinburgh. Generations of Dukes of Gordon have trodden its
threshold, from the swordless hero of 1689 down to the young lover
who, in George the Third's day, went courting his duchess, over in
Hyndford's Close, at the bottom of High Street. She was a famous
beauty, daughter of Lady Maxwell; and thanks to one gossip and
another, we know a good deal about her bringing-up. There was still
living in Edinburgh, sixty years ago, an aged and courtly gentleman,
who recollected well having seen her riding a sow in High Street; her
sister running behind and thumping the beast with a stick. Duchesses
are not made of such stuff in these days. It almost passes belief what
one reads in old records of the ways and manners of Scottish nobility
in the first half of the eighteenth century. These Maxwells' fine
laces were always drying in the narrow passage from their front stair
to their drawing-room; and their undergear hanging out on a pole from
an upper window in full sight of passers-by, as is still the custom
with the poverty-stricken people who live in Hyndford's Close.
On the same stair with the Maxwells lived the Countess Anne of
Balcarres, mother of eleven children, the eldest of whom wrote "Auld
Robin Gray." She was poor and proud, and a fierce Jacobite to the
last. To be asked to drink tea in Countess Anne's bedchamber was great
honor. The room was so small that the man-servant, John, gorgeous in
the Balcarres livery, had to stand snugged up to the bedpost. Here,
with one arm around the post, he stood like a statue, ready to hand
the teakettle as it was needed. When the noble ladies differed about a
date or a point of genealogy, John was appealed to, and often so far
forgot his manners as to swear at the mention of assumers and
pretenders to baronetcies.
There is an endless fascination in going from house to house, in their
old wynds and closes, now. A price has to be paid for it,--bad smells,
filth underfoot, and, very likely, volleys of ribald abuse from
gin-loosened tongues right and left and high up overhead; but all this
only emphasizes the picture, and makes one's mental processions of
earls and countesses all the livelier and more vivid.
Some of these wynds are so narrow and dark that one hesitates about
plunging into them. They seem little more than rifts between dungeons:
seven, eight, and nine stories high, the black walls stretch up. If
there is a tiny courtyard, it is like the bottom of a foul well; and
looking to the hand's-breadth of sky visible above, it seems so far up
and so dark blue, one half expects to see its stars glimmering at
noonday. A single narrow winding stone stair is the only means of
going up and down; and each floor being swarming full of wretched
human beings, each room a tenement house in itself, of course this
common stairway becomes a highway of contentions, the very
battle-ground of the house. Progress up or down can be stopped at a
second's notice; a single pair of elbows is a blockade. How sedan
chairs were managed in these corkscrew crevices is a puzzle; yet we
read that the ladies of quality went always in sedan chairs to balls
and assemblies.
In the Stamp Office Close, now the refuge of soot-venders, old-clothes
dealers, and hucksters of lowest degree, tramps, beggars, and skulkers
of all sorts, still is locked tight every night a big carved door, at
foot of the stair down which used to come stately Lady Eglintoune, the
third, with her seven daughters, in fine array. It was one of the
sights of the town to see the procession of their eight sedan chairs
on the way to a dance. The countess herself was six feet tall, and her
daughters not much below her; all strikingly handsome, and of such
fine bearing that it went into the traditions of the century as the
"Eglintoune air." There also went into the traditions of the century
some details of the earl's wooing, which might better have been kept a
secret between him and his father-in-law. The second Lady Eglintoune
was ailing, and like to die, when Sir Archibald Kennedy arrived in
Edinburgh, with his stalwart but beautiful daughter Susanna. She was
much sought immediately; and Sir Archibald, in his perplexity among
the many suitors, one day consulted his old friend Eglintoune. "Bide a
wee, Sir Archy," replied the earl,--"bide a wee; my wife's very
sickly." And so, by waiting, the fair Susanna became Countess of
Eglintoune. It would seem as if Nature had some intent to punish the
earl's impatient faithlessness to his sickly wife; for, year after
year, seven years running, came a daughter, and no son, to the house
of Eglintoune. At last the earl, with a readiness to ignore marital
obligations at which his third countess need not have been surprised,
bluntly threatened to divorce her if she bore him no heir. Promptly
the spirited Susanna replied that nothing would please her better,
provided he would give her back all she brought him. "Every penny of
it, and welcome!" retorted the earl, supposing she referred to her
fortune. "Na, na, my lord," replied the lady, "that winna do. Return
me my youth, beauty, and virginity, and dismiss me when you please;"
upon which the matter dropped. In the end, the earl fared better than
he deserved, three sons being given him within the next five years.
For half a century Lady Eglintoune was a prominent figure in Scottish
social life. Her comings and goings and doings were all chronicled,
and handed down. It is even told that when Johnson and Boswell visited
her at her country-place, she was so delighted with Johnson's
conversation that she kissed him on parting,--from which we can argue
her ladyship's liking for long words. She lived to be ninety-one, and
amused herself in her last days by taming rats, of which she had a
dozen or more in such subjection that at a tap on the oak wainscoting
of her dining-room they came forth, joined her at her meal, and at a
word of command retired again into the wainscot.
When twenty-first-century travellers go speiring among the dingy ruins
of cities which are gay and fine now, they will not find relics and
traces of such individualities as these. The eighteenth century left a
most entertaining budget, which we of to-day are too busy and too well
educated to equal. No chiel among us all has the time to take gossip
notes of this century; and even if he did, they would be dull enough
in comparison with those of the last.
Groping and rummaging in Hyndford's Close, one day, for recognizable
traces of Lady Maxwell's house, we had the good fortune to encounter a
thrifty housewife, of the better class, living there. She was coming
home, with her market-basket on her arm. Seeing our eager scenting of
the old carvings on lintels and sills, and overhearing our mention of
the name of the Duchess of Gordon, she made bold to address us.