heroines.’ Her career lasted from 1665 to 1746. In that life of
fourscore years and one she wrote one famous song, ‘Were my Heart
licht I wad dee,’ and rendered a million good services to her
fellow-creatures. One of the eighteen children of Sir Patrick Home,
afterwards Earl of Marchmont, she learned the trick of serving her
kindred so early and so well that she could not give it up when she was
a fine old lady. Till her eighty-first year she rose the earliest of
her family, and managed the most difficult of their affairs. When her
father was in hiding from the scaffold, and Grisell was eighteen, she
walked alone every night, over a dark road, and through an ill-reputed
churchyard, to carry food to the fugitive, who was concealed in the
family vault. Sir Patrick is described as lying on a mattress wrapped
in a Kilmarnock cloak, among the mouldering bones of his ancestors,
with nothing to help to spend the time but repeating some of Buchanan’s
Latin psalms. Grisell had to be cautious, for there were hostile
soldiers in her father’s house ever on the watch. One night, when she
was providing the rations for her parent, she contrived to take a
sheep’s head from the table. She was nearly betrayed to the soldiers
by the remark of a sister, who, suddenly missing the head, gave loud
expressions to her wonder at Grisell having so quickly eaten the
whole of it. When in exile in Holland, before the Great Revolution,
Sir Patrick wrote home as to how the young people should be brought
up. He enjoined dancing every day. ‘Lost estates,’ he said, ‘can be
recovered again, but health once lost by a habit of melancholy can
never be recovered.’ After Grisell married young Baillie of Jerviswood,
‘he never went abroad but she went to the window to look after him (so
she did that very day he fell ill, the last time he was abroad), never
taking her eyes from him so long as he was in sight.’ Grisell ranks
among Scottish songstresses. Some of her tuneful sisters are worthy of
notice.
The world does not know much of Alison Rutherford of Fairnalee, but she
is familiar to us under her married name of Mrs. Cockburn, authoress
of one of the versions of ‘Flowers of the Forest.’ Her period was a
long one, within the limits of the last century, 1712-1794. One of the
biographers of this Queen of Edinburgh describes the Scotswomen of
the early part of that century as highly cultivated. ‘The daughters
of the country houses were educated by their fathers’ chaplains and
their brothers’ tutors’ (the Dominie Sampsons of the House), ‘when they
had brothers, as well as by their mothers’ waiting-women; and when
the family happened to be of more than ordinary intelligence, or to
be decidedly of a studious turn, the daughters were fairly well-read
and well-informed women. Not only were Shakespeare, Milton, Pope,
Prior, and Addison on many bookshelves in lairds’ and ladies’ closets,
but, though the women of the nobility and gentry had not a classical
education, they frequently learnt French and Italian, and were very
conversant with the former. This was not so much because of the
obsolete national alliances which have scattered French words broadcast
over the field of the Scottish language, as because of the influence of
the _vieille cour_ of the great Louis on manners, and the effects of
its _beaux esprits_ on literature, which were felt as far as Scotland.
The number of soldiers of fortune belonging to the upper classes who
served campaigns abroad and came home with foreign polish increased
the influence. Corneille, Racine, and Molière, La Fontaine and La
Bruyère were as much the fashion in the Scotch rank that pretended to
fashion when Alison Rutherford was young, as they were in English high
society when Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Mrs. Delany grew up.’ The
above must be taken with some reserve. Scottish governesses of the
period were, for the most part, ill-educated, and they were as much
servants as teachers. When Jean Adam, the reputed author of ‘There’s
nae Luck about the House’ (she was born in 1710), went as governess
into the family of a clergyman, Mr. Turner of Greenock, she had to
live on pease-brose, nettle-kail, and barley-meal scones. She knitted
the minister’s stockings, helped to make the clothes of his wife, his
girls, and his boys, worked at the spinning-wheel, nursed the baby,
and tended the sick. In the manse of Crawfurdsdyke this governess
wore a woollen petticoat and a short gown of striped linen within
the house. Her Indian cotton gown and her _bon grâce_, or straw hat,
were for gala trips to Glasgow. The education of Mrs. Cockburn, as we
will call her, was defective in spelling, at all events. In one of
her notes she complains of the ‘rheumatiz.’ In another she uses the
word ‘unparaleled,’ sees the mistake, can’t correct it, and then gaily
writes in a postscript, ‘cannot spell unparaleled.’ She was a beauty
throughout life--supremely beautiful in her youth. She says prettily
of herself: ‘I was a prude when young, and remarkably grave. It was
owing to a consciousness that I could not pass unobserved, and a fear
of giving offence or incurring censure. I loved dancing extremely,
because I danced well.’ She loved it to the end of her days, and would
dance with men whose grandfathers had been her partners in days of
yore. Mrs. Cockburn also preferred men’s society to that of women. A
company without a clever man in it was to her worse than no company
at all. The sterling stuff that was in her is to be seen in what she
curiously says of the early years of her marriage with young Cockburn,
son of the Lord Justice Clerk: ‘I was married, properly speaking, to
a man of seventy-five, my father-in-law. I lived with him four years,
and as the ambition had seized me to make him fond of me, knowing
also that nothing could please his son so much, I bestowed all my
time and trouble to gain his approbation.’ Of her husband she wrote,
three-and-thirty years after she had become a widow: ‘I was twenty
years united to a lover and a friend.’ Perhaps it was the happiness
of her own married life that gave her a decided partiality for making
matches. ‘She was the _confidante_,’ her biographers remark, ‘of all
lovesick hearts.’ When speaking of a widow ‘being consoled by one who
had been longer in that state,’ Mrs. Cockburn contemptuously asked,
‘What’s a woman to a woman?’ That any woman should prefer a single
to a married life was a fact she could not account for. ‘The girls
are all set agog,’ she writes, ‘in seeking the ideal man, and will
have none of God’s corrupted creatures.... Even as a good housewife
I would choose my lord and master should have many faults, because
there’s so much glory in mending them. One is prouder of darning an old
table-cloth than of sewing a new one.’ The sentiment is happier than
the simile. To the next sentiment universal mankind would say a loud
Amen: ‘It’s a pity woman does not mend with age as wine does.’ There
was a rough side to female Scottish character in those days. Among the
friends of Mrs. Cockburn, when she was queen of Edinburgh society,
was a Miss Suff Johnstone. She is thus sketched in ‘The Songstresses
of Scotland,’ of whom Miss Suff was not one: ‘Miss Suff, before
women’s rights were mooted, took the law into her own hand, and wore a
man’s greatcoat, hat, and square-buckled shoes, practising, with the
habiliments, a man’s habit of striding, spitting, and swearing. She
shod a horse better than a smith, had a private forge in her bedroom,
played on a fiddle, and sang a man’s song in a man’s bass voice.’
Gentle Anne Scott’s foot happening to tread upon the space appropriated
by the Amazon, Anne was punished by a rough kick on the shins, and the
fierce challenge, ‘What are ye wab-wabstering there for?’ The innocent
offender was overwhelmed, and the rest of the party electrified. A
contemporary of Mrs. Cockburn, Miss Jean Elliot, whose life ran between
the limits of 1727 and 1805, and who was also the author of a version
of the song, ‘Flowers of the Forest,’ had a very indifferent opinion of
the Scotswomen of her time. ‘The misses,’ she wrote to a friend, ‘are,
I am afraid, the most rotten part of the society. Envy and jealousy of
their rivals have, I fear, a possession in their minds, especially the
old part of the young ladies, who grow perfect beldames in that small
society.’ At that period, the lady leaders of fashion of the faster
sort frequented the Edinburgh oyster-cellars, exercised the license
of men, and had such promising pupils as Miss Suff Johnstone. In an
indirect way we owe to this last lady the song of ‘Auld Robin Gray.’
She was in the habit of singing words far from choice to the old tune.
Lady Anne Barnard (while she was the yet unmarried daughter of the Earl
of Balcarres) took the tune, and supplied it with the words which tell
the well-known tale of virtuous distress. The author was forty years of
age when she married Mr. Barnard, son of the Bishop of Limerick. She is
almost as celebrated for this one song as the Baroness Nairne (by birth
an Oliphant of Gask) was for the ‘Laird o’ Cockpen,’ ‘Caller Herrin,’
and a dozen of Jacobite and other songs, in some of which there are
indications of great humour, in others of great pathos. In one verse of
‘Caller Herrin,’ she sketches a picture, as George Cruikshank used to
do, with two or three strokes:--
When the creel o’ herrin’ passes
Ladies, clad in silk and laces,
Gather in their braw pelisses,
Cast their heads and screw their faces.
In the last century there was a Scottish home discipline, compared with
which that of school must have appeared amiable. Take the Lanarkshire
home of Joanna Baillie, who passed away just twenty years ago at the
venerable age of ninety. She and the other children of the family had
parents whose hearts were full of affection, which their principles
would not permit them to show. The father never kissed his children.
Joanna, hungering for a caress, once clasped her mother’s knee, and was
gently chided. ‘But,’ Joanna used to say, ‘I know she liked it.’ It is
curious to mark the contrast of Joanna Baillie, who could hardly read
at eleven, running wild by the banks of the Clyde or on the braes of
Calder, and of Joanna Baillie writing songs and plays in the house of
her brother, the physician, in Windmill Street, Haymarket--the site of
the house now occupied by the Argyll Dancing-rooms. Byron’s daughter,
Ada, Countess of Lovelace, had a wonderful knowledge of mathematics,
but she cared nothing for her father’s nor any other person’s poetry.
Joanna Baillie had not a poet for her sire, but the numbers came.
Therewith she acquired the paternal affection for Euclid, and was
great in the demonstration of problems. In her unrestrained Scottish
girlhood she knew as little of fear as Nelson ever did. She was not
only supreme in all girlish sports, but she rushed into audacious deeds
that boys stopped short at. She ran unbonneted and high-kilted, along
the parapets of bridges and the tops of walls as deftly as Mazurier
or Gouffe over theatrical representations of them. She once induced
her brother to mount a horse on which she was seated. The steed,
waxing angry, bolted, and flung the brother, whose arm was broken. Her
equestrianism was the admiration of the countryside. ‘Look at Miss
Jack!’ cried a farmer, who saw her pass, riding at the head of a party
on a country excursion. ‘Look at Miss Jack! she sits her horse as if
it was a bit of herself.’ Not the least singular thing connected with
this Scottish lady is that when, after a long residence in London she
returned to Scotland, her Scottish accent was stronger than ever. Her
Scottish songs, original or adapted, will probably live longer than her
‘Plays of the Passions,’ with all their unquestionable merits.
We may here put readers on their guard against concluding that even a
very Scottish song must necessarily be by a Scottish author. Mrs. John
Hunter, who wrote ‘My Mother bids me,’ and a version of ‘Flowers of the
Forest,’ was a Yorkshirewoman. Mrs. Grant, famous for ‘Roy’s Wife,’
was Irish. Mrs. Ogilvy, who has given so many samples of Highland
minstrelsy, was born in India. Miss Blamire wrote ‘An ye shall walk in
Silk Attire,’ but she was a Cumberland lass; and Mrs. Hamilton, of ‘My
ain Fireside,’ was, like Mrs. Grant, of Carron, an Irish lady. They are
all held to be virtually Scottish by men who deny that Wallace was a
Welshman and that Robert Bruce was a native of Yorkshire.
_THE DIBDINS._
For about a hundred years the name of Dibdin was a pleasant name in
the ears and eyes of the English people. The Dibdin proper, son of
a silversmith, was born at Southampton in the year of the Scotch
Rebellion, 1745. The event belongs almost to ancient history, but there
are men not yet so very old who can remember in their childhood the
once ‘tuneful Charley,’ who became for ever mute in the year 1814.
The name is a local one. There is a place called Dibden (originally
Deep Dene), a place of some importance at the time of the Conquest,
situated in a thickly wooded dell in Southampton Water. Charles Dibdin
was Hampshire born and Hampshire bred. His father, silversmith and
parish clerk, sent him to Winchester School, but he was more especially
of the Winchester Cathedral choir. He was ‘intended for the Church,’
as the phrase goes, but instead of a bishop writing charges, he became
a composer arranging musical scores. In the Church he probably would
have written a few indifferent sermons. On and for the stage, and the
world, he penned and melodised hundreds of popular songs. Some of these
are as good as sermons; others are as unintelligible; there are many
of them that are infinitely better. Dibdin knew as much about a ship
as many curates know about religion; and now and then he got into the
same sort of mess accordingly. On the whole, however, he pulled through
successfully. The backbone of all his songs was ‘loyalty.’ It was like
insisting on ‘faith’ in sermons. He perhaps would have been a popular
preacher, had he not preferred being a popular song-writer--Tyrtæus
instead of Calchas.
Charles Dibdin was neither sailor nor parson, but the family was
destined to contribute both to the wide-apart professions respectively.
Charles had an elder brother who took to sea and became captain of
an East Indiaman. Years after, but in the same year, 1775, a son was
born to each, and each son was named Thomas. The captain’s son was
born at Calcutta. He was put to the law with the object of making a
Lord Chancellor of him, but the young fellow turned to the Church,
and did not become an archbishop. Nevertheless, he is well remembered
as the Rev. Thomas Frognal Dibdin, author of the ‘Bibliomania,’ the
‘Biographical Decameron,’ and many other works of a similar nature. The
Rev. Thomas died, a popular preacher, rector of St. Mary’s, Bryanstone
Square, in 1847.
The Rev. Thomas’s cousin, Tom, was born in Peter Street, Holborn. You
will look for street or house in vain. New Oxford Street has swept
it all down. Peter Street was the third of a street which had three
names. At the Holborn end it was Bow Street; at the Montague House,
or Museum, end, it was Queen Street. The middle portion was Peter
Street, which New Oxford Street has knocked out of existence. But for
this, you might yourself have knocked at the very house door, as Mr.
Garrick did, on the day of Master Tom’s christening, when Roscius was
godfather, and he brought with him a hamper of wine, and Frank Aickin,
as second godfather. This was ‘Tyrant Aickin,’ as Frank was called,
from his having always to play the swaggering, low-mouthed Maximinus
of the drama. The godson of the two actors never had the good luck in
life of either of his godfathers. He never had a _living_ that made him
socially equal with his cousin the rector. The cousins were alike in
one point only. Each wrote his own biography, both of which are worth
the reading. Thomas Frognal Dibdin, D.D., became one of the founders of
the Roxburgh Club. Tom Dibdin of Peter Street was often a guest at the
Sublime Society of Beef Steaks. T. F. D. was a popular lecturer, but no
lecture of his had such vogue as his cousin Tom’s song, ‘When Vulcan
forged the bolts of Jove.’ Tom’s father never wrote a better.
But Tom’s father is waiting, and it is his story that has to be
briefly told. After all, Charles Dibdin the elder began life, or would
have begun it, with the Church--as organist. He was a candidate for
the office at Bishop’s Waltham, in his native county. He was then
only fourteen years of age. He was self-taught, save some elementary
instruction from Mr. Fussel, the organist of Winchester Cathedral. The
village judges, finding him competent, duly rejected him on account of
his youth! He was looking at the ruins of the episcopal palace with
a humble church officer, who told him it was built by King Stephen’s
brother Henry de Blois. ‘And you are a descendant of his,’ said
Charles. ‘That’s more than I ever knew before,’ replied his companion.
‘It’s quite true though,’ rejoined Dibdin; ‘are you not Henry the
_organ-blower_?’
The outlines of Dibdin’s career are soon told. He came up to London as
poor as Whittington, but with little of his luck. He earned a couple
of guineas by composing ballads for music-sellers, by which they made
hundreds; and he tuned pianos, and taught how to play on them. At
length, wearied with this, he made his first appearance on the stage
(he says) at the Richmond Theatre, on the Hill, in 1762, when he was
seventeen years of age. Dibdin, however, also states that he first
appeared at Birmingham, and Jesse records that Dibdin and Bannister
came out originally at Marylebone Gardens. Dibdin speaks of the old
Richmond house as the ‘Academy’ and the ‘Histrionic Academy.’ This
was one of the names given to the theatre by Theophilus Cibber before
a licence had been got to open it. Theophilus called it at first the
Cephalic Snuff Warehouse. Snuff, in minute quantities, was sold at
the various entrances, and admission followed _gratis_. It was on
this stage that Dibdin is said to have made his _début_, as Damætas,
in ‘Midas’; a thing the more difficult to believe, as ‘Midas’ was not
produced in England till 1764, namely, at Covent Garden, and then
Damætas was played by Fawcett.
Victor pronounced Charles Dibdin’s Mungo to be ‘as complete a low
character as was ever exhibited.’ Isaac Bickerstaffe as highly praised
the musical composer as Victor did the actor. ‘The music of this
piece,’ he wrote in the preface to it, ‘being extremely admired by
persons of the first state and distinction, it would be injustice to
the extraordinary talents of the young man who assisted me in it, was I
not to declare that it is, under my direction, the entire composition
of Mr. Dibdin, whose admirable performance in the character of Mungo
does so much credit to himself and me, as well as to the gentleman
whose penetration could distinguish neglected genius, and who has
taken pleasure in producing it to the public.’ Dibdin’s elder son was
named after his father, the character he played, and the author of
‘The Padlock’--Charles Isaac Mungo Dibdin. The author of ‘The Thespian
Dictionary,’ writing of the second son, Thomas Dibdin, adds to the
fact, ‘but not acknowledged by his father!’
Dibdin’s success as an actor was so complete, that we can only wonder
at his leaving it so soon for authorship, musical composition, and
entertainments in which he was the sole performer. He was the original
Ralph, in ‘The Maid of the Mill,’ and straightway London fluttered
with ‘Ralph handkerchiefs.’ Dibdin’s Mungo, in ‘The Padlock,’ another
creation, was so naturally and thoroughly to the purpose, it was said
that the performer had gone to Jamaica and spent weeks there in order
to study the manners and speech of the negroes! The fact is, that he
combined impulse with intelligence, and never lost an opportunity. The
very first sea-song of his which took the national ear and the national
heart, was ‘Blow high, blow low!’ and this, if he did not compose, he
imagined, not in the open stormy ocean, on board a man-of-war, but on
board a Calais packet which took thirteen hours on a stormy passage
across the Straits of Dover.
In nearly all cases of composition, with Dibdin, his method was most
singular. In his musical entertainments, he introduced hundreds of
songs, words and music by himself. But when he seated himself at the
piano, before the public, not a note of the accompaniment was written.
He improvised, and never thought of putting a single note down on paper
till the music-sellers wanted copy for the engravers.
Dibdin went abroad in the early part of his career to study music; but
he merely practised by himself, and noted little but the manners and
morals of the people amongst whom he was thrown. The English society at
Calais, during his sojourn there, he describes as consisting of three
or four fraudulent bankrupts, two or three too successful duellists, a
few rich smugglers under strong suspicion of having committed murder,
which was the most likely thing in the world, and a high official
personage, guilty of forgery, and ‘the father of a nobleman who was
afterwards singularly remarkable for having publicly exhibited the hand
and head of Struensee.’
Dibdin exchanged Calais for ever pleasant, and _then_ especially
pleasant, Nancy. He makes a very curious observation on one incident of
his sojourn there. He saw the Emperor of Germany, Joseph, brother of
Marie Antoinette, pass through the old capital of the province which
had once belonged to the imperial house of Hapsburg Lorraine. There was
an outburst of the old affection of the Lorrainers at the sight of the
descendant of their old dukes; and such expression was given to this
manifestation that Dibdin states his conviction that if the Emperor of
Germany were once resolved to relieve Lorraine from the oppression of
the French yoke, the inhabitants of the old duchy would give him their
enthusiastic support.
We will not follow out Dibdin’s professional career. The biographical
dictionaries and his own works tell of his struggles, his ups and
downs, his reverses and his triumphs. We rather care to look at him in
some of his picturesque moments. We seem to see and to hear him when
we look in at St. Bride’s--a mere lad, playing the congregation out
with such exquisite power, that instead of departing, they remained
to listen. We seem to see the young fellow’s enraptured look when he
first heard the crash of an overture. What emotion there must have
been in the young soul when he discovered that from simply hearing the
combination and working of sounds in that overture, he had grasped the
secret of composition; and later, on returning home from some grand
musical banquet, he could write out the whole score from memory, with
very few errors indeed. It was only natural after Dibdin had composed
a great part of the music to ‘Love in the City,’ and to ‘Lionel and
Clarissa’--as we write the words, Tom Cooke’s manly voice seems to fill
the house with ‘I’ll love thee ever dearly!‘--it is natural, we say,
that ‘Charley’ should find himself growing famous. We find him in
strange company the year after ‘Lionel and Clarissa’ was produced.
Perhaps the last place in which one would expect to find Dibdin is, not
indeed with Dr. Johnson, but in Boswell’s life of the erudite savage.
Boswell had composed a ‘little epigrammatical song’ which, he says, he
was ‘volatile enough’ to repeat to Johnson, adding, ‘that Garrick had,
a few days before, got it set to music by the ingenious Mr. Dibdin.’
This was in 1769, when Charles was four-and-twenty; and this is what he
had to go to work upon:--
A MATRIMONIAL THOUGHT.
In the blithe days of honeymoon,
With Kate’s allurements smitten,
I lov’d her late, I lov’d her soon,
And call’d her, ‘dearest kitten!’
But now my kitten’s grown a cat,
And cross, like other wives;
Oh, by my soul, my honest Mat,
I fear she has nine lives!
Doubtless, Dibdin’s music was better than Boswell’s words--it could not
be worse. Johnson confined himself simply to literary criticism. ‘My
illustrious friend,’ Boswell remarks, said, “It is very well, sir, but
you should not swear.” Upon which, I altered “Oh by my soul” to “Alas,
alas!”’
It was in this year, 1769, that Dibdin lifted Sedaine’s ‘Deserter’
to the English stage, after which all the sweet throats in town were
warbling ‘Somehow, my spindle I mislaid.’ Just ninety-nine years ago
this last month of August, Dibdin produced ‘The Waterman,’ which
has now entered its hundredth year, and which is as fresh as a pure
flood-tide on a bright morning. Many of us may remember having seen
in our childhood the original Tom Tug, for Bannister lived half a
century after he created the part. And what a whole crew of Tom
Tugs have warbled on the boards and concert-room since then! Do you
remember, on Edmund Kean’s benefit, June 3rd, 1822, how touchingly he
sang ‘Farewell, my trim-built wherry’? Can you not see Braham, so like
an amateur waterman? Can you not hear him so like something sweetly
superhuman, trilling forth, ‘And have you not heard of a jolly young
waterman?’ Only a few nights ago we saw the piece and heard the songs,
and were tempted to say as Ophelia says about the things that had been
and the things that be. It is ninety-eight years since Dibdin himself,
as Solomon, sang his own song, ‘The lads of the village shall merrily,
ha!’ in ‘The Quaker,’ and it remains an exquisite song still, but it
demands an exquisite voice and tact in the singer.