clergy; the stern Seceders also looked askance on this new revival. The
Haldanes, for their part, had soon drifted away from Presbyterianism;
and when the circus-like Tabernacle, still to be seen on the side of the
Calton Hill, was built at Robert Haldane’s expense, it opened as a
Congregational Chapel, with James Haldane as pastor, who continued his
evangelical tours. By and by differences of opinion arose in the new
congregation; and both brothers went over to Baptist views. Robert,
especially, in his zeal for soundness, was all along much given to
controversy--with Zachary Macaulay over a plan for bringing young
Africans to be educated in Britain, as later with his famous son anent
the ballot; with the Bible Society for its backsliding in publishing the
Apocrypha; with the degenerate Socinian Calvinism of Geneva; with the
divers errors of Irvingites and Sandemanians; and with the Presbyterian
“Voluntaries” as to their refusal to pay the “Annuity Tax,” which was
the church rate of Edinburgh. In their old age the Haldanes found more
fellowship in the Presbyterian Church, especially when it had been
warmed by Free Church enthusiasm. They seem both to have been earnest
and sincere in struggling after what they held for purity of saving
truth; and when they died in the middle of last century, they could
congratulate themselves on having stirred the life of their country in a
way that might be better remembered had they not been concerned to leave
“their work and not their name.”
Gleneagles has taken us too far from the Earn, to which we come back at
Kinkell Bridge, below the castle and collegiate church of Innerpeffray,
burial-place of the Drummonds. On the north side lies Madderty, where,
near the railway line from Perth to Crieff, may be visited the remains
of Inchaffray Abbey, whose Abbot so effectually asked a blessing on the
Scottish arms at Bannockburn. On the south side of the river runs the
older branch line from Crieff Junction, with a station for Muthill, a
goodly village that a century ago was as large as Crieff, and a century
before had been burned, with Auchterarder and other neighbours, by the
old Pretender’s forces, the harmless inhabitants being hustled out into
a January night by soldiers whom they had sometimes received as
guests--a needless cruelty to be set against that Whiggish harrying of
Glencoe.
[Illustration: GLENFINLAS]
Muthill has kept some notable ecclesiastical antiquities; and in my
youth it had, what was a rarity for a Scottish village, an English
“chapel,” if I remember right, not in communion with the Scottish
Episcopal Church, but one of several scattered over Scotland that
counted themselves as belonging to the Church of England, and looked to
Carlisle as their diocesan see. I am not sure how far this body still
holds out, its sap having been cut off by the refusal of later Carlisle
bishops to exercise their functions across the Border; then for a time
its congregations had to depend for a precarious supply of sacramental
grace upon colonial and other stray bishops who could be engaged by the
job. This small Church, in fact, represented the old evangelical party
that for the last generation has been waning on both sides of the
Border, while the Scottish Episcopalians of that day lay under a dark
imputation of being “Puseyites.” Through one of its Episcopal ministers,
Muthill had a chance of standing high in song and story, for his
daughter, Mary Erskine, is said to have been loved in vain by Walter
Scott. It was for her consolation, in the loss of a beloved child, that
Carolina Oliphant wrote _The Land o’ the Leal_.
Muthill has another connection, now almost forgotten, with the religious
life of Scotland. About the time of the Original Secession, to an
Earnside farmer in this parish was born a son named John Barclay, who
became a probationer in the Kirk, but soon fell out with its fathers
upon his interpretation of saving doctrine. He founded a sect which took
the name of the Bereans, as searching the Scriptures with peculiar zeal,
where they seem to have found assurance of salvation as a leading
tenet, on the strength of which they cultivated a grace of cheerfulness
not too common among Calvinist believers. “Rejoice evermore” is the
suggestive title of one of their founder’s books. Their communion spread
over several parts of Scotland, even into England and across the
Atlantic. When Mr. Hall was at Abernethy he heard of theirs as one of
the most flourishing congregations at Newburgh, having for its head
Alexander Pirie, who for a time had been professor of divinity at the
Seceders’ rustic college, then from an Anti-burgher softened down into a
Burgher, from which he passed on to the Relief Church, and finally found
rest among the Bereans. The English parson, who goes out of his way for
a sneer at Robert Haldane’s missionary devotion, is rather satirical on
those dissenters, whom he inclines to lump with the Sandemanians, and
hints at accusations of sinning that grace may abound. They are, he
says, “drunk or sober, as merry as grigs.” What struck him most about
their ceremonies was the social love feast in which they copied the
Sandemanians; and he repeats a scandalous story of the Crieff
congregation sending to a public-house to get wine on trust for this
function. At Crieff, which may be called its native soil, the body held
together till the middle of last century, when its property was divided
by lot among the members; and, so far as I know, the Bereans are now
everywhere extinct, unless, perhaps, in America, where so many sects
have taken fresh root on virgin soil.
Muthill lies between the grounds of Culdees Castle and of Drummond
Castle, the latter famous for its gardens, avenues, and nobly wooded
demesne. In passing up Tayside, I have told how it came into Southron
hands, when the power of its old lords split on the rock that wrecked so
many another Jacobite family; while the neighbour house of Murray tacked
and trimmed its fortunes into calm waters. Strathearn has dark memories
of the feuds between those names. When the old church of Monzievaird was
being turned into a mausoleum for the Ochtertyre family, a quantity of
charred wood and calcined bones came to light to bear out the tradition
how a band of Murrays, fleeing before Drummonds, took refuge in this
church with their wives and children, and were there burned to death by
the savage pursuers. For this atrocity, indeed, several Drummonds came
to be executed at Stirling. Only one Murray had escaped the holocaust,
by the help, it is said, of a Drummond who loved his sister; later, this
Drummond having fled for refuge to Ireland, he in turn was helped to
pardon by the man he had saved, and came back with the agname
Drummond-Ernoch, handed down to the victim of another revolting tragedy
told in the introduction to _A Legend of Montrose_.
Drummond Castle is the Versailles of Crieff, itself the capital of
Strathearn, where it stands among lovely surroundings and notable
mansions--Monzie, Abercairney, Cultoquhey, Inchaffray, Ochtertyre, names
that “fill the mouth as the mountains the eyes.” Such sounding names
are, of course, wreckage of the once familiar speech that has ebbed far
back into the Highlands. I never met any one in Perthshire who did not
speak English; and even a knowledge of Gaelic, I fancy, is exceptional
in this southern half of the country, certainly so in the lower half of
Strathearn. But I forget what writer of a century or so back can record
that at Monzie Castle--recently burned--only a mile separated the
English-speaking lodge-keeper from neighbours who could not understand
his tongue. A German traveller, in the early years of Queen Victoria,
noted the east-enders of Loch Tay as speaking English, while Gaelic was
still common about the other end. In our own generation, old inhabitants
of Crieff could remember how troops of shock-headed lads and lasses came
tramping down from the glens--like the _Schwabenkinder_ of Tirol--to
learn English by working a summer on Lowland farms, turning an honest
penny out of this course of education.
Not that Scotland was without schooling long before the days of School
Boards. In out-of-the-way parts of the Highlands, as well as in Lowland
Gandercleughs, Dr. Johnson could hear of day-schools, even
boarding-schools, kept here and there under difficulties, perhaps in
summer by a bookish youth who for his winter studies walked all the way
to Aberdeen or Glasgow. When a society seemed necessary for the
diffusion of Christian knowledge in the Highlands, thanks to John Knox
every English-speaking and Shorter Catechism-conning parish, at least,
had its dominie, who, thanks to those land-grabbing Lords of the
Congregation, was often such a “downtrodden, underfoot martyr” as
Carlyle deplores, eking out his exiguous dues by a medley of
occupations, and by unworthy perquisites that fell to him at the annual
cock-fighting holiday. He was fain not only to perform all the duties of
his school, down to mending pens and sharpening the points of his tawse,
but to act as precentor, session-clerk, and general man of business for
the parish; “even the story ran that he could gauge.” He has been known
to play the cobbler in his hours of ease. Not seldom he was a “stickit
minister,” qualified to wag his head in a pulpit, if he could get one,
hindered perhaps from that eminence by some infirmity, such as a tied
tongue or a too red nose. Often he was a “character,” who has figured in
many a tale told by graceless Roderick Randoms when they grew out of
dread of his skelpings and palmies. The most famous of such presentments
ought to be Jedediah Cleishbotham, who presents himself as quite
superfluously editing the _Tales of My Landlord_; but few impatient
readers of our day spend much time over the mystifying patter with which
that Wizard of the North thought necessary to introduce his feats of
imagination. I should like, by the way, to point out how the
self-important schoolmaster of Gandercleugh seems to have sent a
thriving progeny across the Atlantic. Surely it is one of his family
who, as the Rev. Homer Wilbur, A.M., so long occupied a pulpit at
Jaalam, Mass., where one “talented parishioner,” Hosea Biglow, might
call cousins with the Peter Pattieson who penned a story when he should
have been engrossing rudimentary instruction on the skins of the lower
classes.
Let us drop a tear over the dominie, who in the last generation or two
has been vanishing from the world of fact. His place is now taken by
Normal-school teachers of both sexes, well-trained, well-inspected, and
less ill-paid than their predecessors. Every young Scot gets such
mouthful of learning as can be crammed into him; but, to copy Johnson’s
coarse metaphor, I am not sure that there were not better bellyfuls
going under the old dispensation of scholarship. With all his faults, of
which whisky was apt to be the worst, the snuffy dominie had sometimes
the knack of turning out silk purses among sows’ ears, and with the most
imperfect tools. The general run of his pupils perhaps profited most by
being kept out of mischief, wholesomely hardened to chastisement, and
awed by the mysteries of Effectual Calling, while the choicer natures
had their chance to be brought into touch with an inspiring example that
showed them the way to learning, a more important course of education
than the cleverness of teaching which goes to load the minds of a whole
class with not always fruitful instruction.
And those rude schools of old days had this educational advantage, that
the minister’s bairn, and even the laird’s, might tumble and quarrel
with the cottar’s, picking up the local vernacular and accent, but
little more harm at an age when all sons of Adam are in the savage state
of development, not easily inoculated with the curse of snobbery that
sets classes apart, barred from the kindly intercourse of the older
generations, among whom gentle and simple knew their place too well for
troublesome presumption or uneasy stand-offishness. The parish school at
least was a little republic, tempered sometimes, indeed, by grudges of
favouritism on the part of its president. While English squires and
parsons still looked suspiciously on the three R’s for peasants,
barefooted Scottish laddies, sometimes lassies, would tackle Latin, even
Greek, under the village dominie, who sent forth some of his pupils into
the world equipped at least with a turn of mind and a stirred ambition
that put them at advantage wherever they went. But now they go out into
a new world, in which man may not be so much master of his own fate.
What self-help could do for him is, it seems, to be done rather by the
State, conceived of as a national Trades Union, which need not consider
the chance of national bankruptcy in providing for the general welfare.
The very virtues that winged a prosperous career--thrift, industry,
enterprise, force of character--become suspected for vices in the
interest of the common herd. It is a bad lookout for Scotsmen in that
golden age of mediocrity so glibly promised by certain social reformers,
who might begin by doing away with prizes and punishments in schools, if
they cannot altogether level down Nature’s distinctions.
My own first experience of school life was near Crieff, where I spent a
year in the family of an English clergyman, whom I dimly remember as a
model for the head of the Fairchild family. For all his austerity, my
recollections are of cheerful days spent under his charge, and
especially of a keen relish for meals, which may be connected with the
fact that this was the only period in my life when I might not eat as
much as I pleased. But also I have two painful memories of this place.
The first is breaking my arm on the rocks of the Turret one Saturday
afternoon, and not getting a doctor for it till Monday evening: my
tutor, who had been a soldier before he took orders, and ought to have
known better, judged the hurt no more than a sprain; then on Sunday I
had to walk three miles to church, and back, with my arm hanging
helpless, the torment relieved only by my brother holding it up. The
other woeful experience was my own fault, and such as many sons of Adam
have to confess. Some years later, I was sent on a holiday task, a ride
of seventeen miles with a pointer pup to be handed over at Crieff to a
keeper, whose lodge made a sort of canine academy. I was to dine at the
“Drummond Arms,” after making sure to see my pony fed first--a sound
instruction to heedless youth. Somewhat elated by this independent
charge, as I strolled about the town it occurred to me that my own meal
ought to be crowned by a cigar. It was my first; it cost twopence. “Left
to myself” as I was in that rash undertaking, I had sense enough to seek
out for it a secluded spot on the banks and braes of the Earn, where ere
long my song would be--“How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair!”
At Crieff, with its two railways and everything handsome about it, we
get upon a regular caravan route of tourists, too few of whom stop to
discover the lochs, falls, and shaggy glens that around it are strung
upon the Highland line, among hills making with the Earn valley a choice
epitome of Perth scenery. I have already extolled this neighbourhood in
_Bonnie Scotland_, so now I must pass quickly over the most picturesque
part of Strathearn. Nothing could be prettier in its way than the walk
up the Earn, foaming and rippling through its leafy banks, past wooded
eminences, like Torleum, whose top makes a weather-glass for the
countryside, and Tomachastle, crowned by a monument to Sir David Baird,
the hero of Seringapatam. This local worthy’s widow cherished his renown
regardless of expense, the model village of St. David’s, below Crieff,
being also a memorial of him; but
[Illustration: LOCH LUBNAIG]
the too towering obelisk on Tomachastle challenged a thunderbolt to
rebuke the vanity of mortal fame.
Soon appear on either side mantled crags and bristling ridges, and the
mountain moors begin to close in upon fields and parks. Half-way between
Crieff and Loch Earn, Comrie stands at the head of the rich strath which
now begins to take on the features of a Highland glen, still tamed by
mansions and plantations. On one side the Ruchill Water comes in from
Glenartney, where the stag was startled from his midnight lair by
Fitzjames’s hounds; on the other, by Dunira, the Lednock rushes down a
wilder ravine over which stands out a monument to Dundas, Lord Melville,
head of the Tory oligarchy that to its own satisfaction ruled Scotland
in the days of Pitt. This satrap is not so much admired by later leaders
of Scottish politics. He has another tall column at Edinburgh in a line
with statues of George IV. and Pitt, a trio of monuments denounced as
“Vice standing between Tyranny and Corruption” by the Radical orator,
Bailie Jamieson, who went to prison for such speeches, as his more
widely famous son did for certain doings in South Africa.
As I write, newspapers record the death of a Dundas of Dunira, whose
name takes me back half a century to the morning when two of his
brothers breakfasted at our house on their way from school, wearing
scarlet flannel, then known as “Crimean,” shirts, which, to us
unsophisticated provincials, not yet “in the movement,” seemed below the
dignity of Harrow boys. Dr. Keate would have agreed with us, who, in the
former generation, gave an Eton culprit two extra cuts for the vulgarity
of having a “checked shirt” to turn up in disclosing circumstances.
Times are changed; but it is not so clear about _nos et mutamur_: one
can fancy the schoolmasters and schoolboys of to-day still cocking a
critical eye at changes of custom and costume, which in a few years will
seem matters of course.
The stranger who, to a panorama of celebrated scenes flitting before his
strained eyes, prefers settling down and photographing on memory
characteristically charming landscapes, could not do better than set up
his tent at Comrie, where he may come in for the excitement of one of
its slight earthquakes. Among the many excursions radiating hence, he
must not neglect to follow up the Earn to its parent lake. The last time
I took this lovely walk, it was in company with the late Dr. Andrew
Melville, Clerk of the Free Church, a name well-known in Scotland as
reviving that of his forbears, the Reformation champions. He made his
summer home at Comrie, which, through another sojourner, the widow of
Lord Chancellor Cairns, had come to be a resort of the English sect
called Plymouth Brethren; and I recall his telling me on our walk how a
party of sisters of that ilk, invited together to a house at Comrie,
proved to be hardly on speaking terms after a rent in this exclusive
communion. It is not only in Scotland that Seceders split up into Auld
Lichts and New. And in Scotland, by the way, the Wee Free Church that
lately made such a profitable contention for the faith as once delivered
to Calvinistic saints, begins to generate a fissiparous ferment, having
already mutinied against the lay champion who led it to victory and
booty. At least sects are fewer in Scotland, which seldom welcomes
exotic divinity, its taste being for home-made dissensions. A local
writer has an amusing account of a Plymouth Brother, at Crieff, roaring
down a Mormon missionary who promised mounts and marvels across the
Atlantic; but the contest did not tend to conversion or edification.
Our way up the Earn has led us by several eddies and backwaters of
Scottish Protestantism; but now we pass into the shadow of the hills
where the cross itself was dipped in fire and blood. When I walked up to
Loch Earn with that kindly kinsman of mine, the railway did not go
beyond Comrie, as it does now, under outlying masses of Ben Voirlich,
where wooded knolls huddle below slopes of turf and rock and fern
dappled by patches of brown or purple heather. We are here fairly in the
Highlands; and from St. Fillan’s Hill, shooting up over the river, we
look down upon a true central Perthshire prospect of a long lake
stretching below high mountains; but else, as a disappointed Cockney
complained, one can’t see the view for the hills.
The smart village of St. Fillans, spreading out along the loch foot in
villakins of rusticating townsfolk, is a modern settlement, but it may
have had ancient memories to forget, for here, or hereabouts, stood
Dundurn, capital of the Pictish land called Fortrenn, which seems to
have taken in Angus, along with Strathearn and the lower basin of the
Tay. The island in the foreground was in later times lair of a gang of
robbers named Neish, who in an ill turn for themselves undertook to rob
a servant of the Macnabs, bringing their Christmas fare from Crieff. The
Macnab of that day had a round dozen of Samsonlike sons, to whom, at
their bare board, he significantly spoke--“The night is the night, were
the lads but the lads!” On this hint the twelve set out, dragged a boat
across from Loch Tay to Loch Earn, surprised the revelling Neishes at
dead of night, and slew all but one youth who managed to slip off. Next
morning they greeted their father with the outlaws’ gory heads and the
boast, “The lads _were_ the lads!” Another account makes them exclaim on
this occasion, “Dread nought!” which has remained the Macnabs’ motto.
It is nearly sixty years ago that I spent a summer at St. Fillans, as
yet hardly known to the outside world. At times that sojourn comes back
to me as a dream of childish delight; but I was too young to gather a
faggot of impressions that would serve when--
As less the olden glow abides,
And less the chillier heart aspires,
With drift-wood beached in past spring tides
We light our sullen fires.
Perhaps the most prosaic English urchin stores up as warm memories of
“days in the distance enchanted,” spent on the fattest claylands or the
smoothest fen. Anyhow, one’s heart goes out to the bare-headed and
bare-kneed youngsters, “hardy, bold, and wild,” who from the train are
seen taking all chances of weather with frolic and glee on the banks of
Loch Earn, heedless of the cloud of “Rudiments” and “Delectus” that will
loom back upon them with the shortening autumn days.
Even less to be envied passengers have a good glimpse of this lake, as
upon a shelf above the northern side they are whisked along a fine
panorama, with Ben Voirlich’s rugged head for its background. Farther
on, the shores grow tamer, where fields come down to the water edge;
then, as by the scattering of houses at Lochearnhead the railway winds
round its upper end, it overlooks a fine retrospect of the loch’s whole
reach from St. Fillans. A few minutes more among bare green slopes, and
we are at the Balquhidder Junction of the railway to Oban, standing
lonely as if lost in the heart of the Highlands. The name seems
misleading, for it is rather at the next halting-place southward,
Kingshouse, that one turns off a couple of miles to Loch Voil and the
Braes of Balquhidder, where Rob Roy rests at peace beneath a circle of
chieftainly Bens, through which Glenfinlas would lead us to the
Trossachs region.
Thus, whichever way we take through the heart of Scotland--by Atholl, by
Breadalbane, by Strathearn--we come upon memories of the Macgregors. It
is at Balquhidder that this famous stock was most at home in historic
times; so here seems the place for some account of it, a story that will
carry us back over all those regions, and bring most of the Perthshire
clans on to its stage.
VI
THE MACGREGORS
What perils do environ
The man that meddles with cold iron