Many amusing books (and many dull ones) come into existence through
the clubs which have been following the fashion of the Bannatyne in
Edinburgh, the Maitland in Glasgow, and the Camden and Grainger in
England. The northern clubs have indulged the most in what the French
call luxurious editions. They have benefited by the notion that each
subscriber will, in addition to his very moderate subscription,
sooner or later print a book for them at his own charge. And when a
duke presents to one of these societies the Chartulary of Melrose at
the cost of a thousand guineas, and an earl having paid as much for
the printing of the Chartulary of Paisley goes on to produce four or
five quartos of the Analecta of Woodrow, the example of liberality is
set upon no trifling scale. As gifts, though not to be refused, are
not always well chosen, volumes that are scarcely worth the pains of
reading do occasionally appear. This by the way. We have been reading
without any sense of pain one of the publications of the Maitland
club--a piece of history relating to a family at present extinct in the
male line, the Stewarts of Coltness, in Lanarkshire. Authorship ran in
their blood. One of their family wrote a domestic narrative in the year
sixteen hundred, which was the main source of a genealogical history
of the race drawn up by a Sir Archibald one hundred and seventy-three
years later. There were cavalier Coltnesses, and there was a Gospel
Coltness; but the Coltness to whom we mean to pay attention in this
place is a lady--a literary Coltness, married unto Mr. Calderwood
of Polton, in Mid-Lothian. This clever dame descended into England,
exactly one hundred years ago, and passed over Holland, on a journey to
her brother, a political exile at Aix-la-Chapelle. She wrote a journal,
and regarding England through a Scotch mist of her own, took notes in
a shrewd way; sometimes canny, and sometimes (as regards the relative
merits of the north and south), of a not wholly unquestionable kind.
This lady had been bred up in the family of a distinguished crown
lawyer; was accustomed to the best society in Scotland; was in her
own family commander-in-chief over an amiable husband; and, if we may
venture to state so much, forty years of age, when she, for the first
time in her life, came south.
Mrs. Calderwood and her husband travelled from Edinburgh to London in
their own post-chaise, attended by a serving-man on horseback with
pistols in his holsters and a broadsword in his belt. There was a case
of pistols in the carriage, more fit, perhaps, for the use of the lady
than of the good-natured laird; who, being a man of accomplishments,
took with him a pocket Horace to beguile the hours of wayfaring. They
set out on the third of June; and, being on the road each day for
twelve or fourteen hours, arrived in London on the evening of the tenth.
On the road of course, one day, the lady dined at Durham, “and I went,”
she adds, “to see the cathedral; it is a prodigious bulky building.”
The day happening to be Sunday, Mrs. Calderwood was much shocked at
the behaviour of little boys, who played at ball in what she termed
the piazzas, and supposed that the woman who was showing her the place
considered her a heathen,--“in particular she stared when I asked
what the things were they kneeled upon, as they appeared to me to be
so many Cheshire cheeses.” Mrs. Calderwood had travelled far into
England before she met with any sensible inhabitant; and then the first
intelligent native is recorded, and proves to have been a chamber-maid.
“At Barnet we stopped; and while we changed horses, I asked some
questions at the maid who stood at the door, which she answered and
went in. In a little time out comes a squinting, smart-like, black
girl, and spoke to me, as I thought, in Irish; upon which I said,
‘Are you a Highlander?’ ‘No,’ said she, ‘I am Welch. Are not you
Welch?’ ‘No,’ said I, ‘but I am Scots, and the Scots and Welch are
near relations, and much better born than the English.’ She took me
by the hand, and looked so kindly, that I suppose she thought me her
relation because I was not English; which makes me think the English
are a people one may perhaps esteem or admire, but they do not draw the
affections of strangers, neither in their country nor out of it.”