CHAPTER XXXII.

BLACKWOOD’S

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

NO. CCCCLXIII. MAY, 1854. VOL. LXXV.

CONTENTS.

THE OXFORD REFORM BILL, 507

ANCIENT AND MODERN FORTRESSES, 522

FIRMILIAN: A TRAGEDY, 533

THE QUIET HEART.—PART THE LAST, 552

MARATHON, 568

LONDON TO WEST PRUSSIA, 572

THE NATIONAL LIFE OF CHINA, 593

RELEASE, 609

TOO LATE, 610

THE PROGRESS AND POLICY OF RUSSIA IN CENTRAL ASIA, 611

DEATH OF PROFESSOR WILSON, 629

EDINBURGH:

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, 45 GEORGE STREET,

AND 37 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON;

_To whom all communications (post paid) must be addressed_.

SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.

PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.

BLACKWOOD’S

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

NO. CCCCLXIII. MAY, 1854. VOL. LXXV.

THE OXFORD REFORM BILL.

On Friday night, April 2, 1854—or rather at half-past one on the

Saturday morning—there passed to its second reading in the House of

Commons, represented at that time by twenty-four members, a Bill “to

make further provision for the good government and extension of the

University of Oxford.” A measure, declared by her Majesty’s Government

so important as to demand their careful deliberation—heralded by its

promoters as a new charter of intellectual liberty for England—denounced

by its opponents as unconstitutional and illegal—appears to have

commanded, at this crisis of its parliamentary existence, as little of

the attention of the House as if it had been a Welsh highway act or an

Irish grievance. True, the debate occupied its fair share of the time of

the Commons, and filled its due number of columns in the morning papers.

If the reporters as well as the speakers found themselves occasionally

upon rather difficult ground—making some trifling confusion between

“Students” and “Tutors,” and leaving out here and there a negative which

must have rather confused their non-academical readers—such little

inaccuracies are neither surprising nor important in a debate in which

almost every speaker seems to have been anxious to assure his hearers,

such as he had, that he meant nothing—at all events, that he did not

mean what he said, still less what he might have said on some previous

occasion; where the reputed parents of the bill, Lord John Russell and

the Chancellor of the Exchequer, were rather its apologists than its

advocates, promising amendments even before they were proposed; while Mr

Blackett, as the organ of the “root-and-branch” men, puzzling himself

how to deal with the sop thrown to him and his party—sweet to the taste

but far from satisfying—tendered his best thanks for a measure which he

concluded by saying “the Liberal members of that House could never

adopt.”

The truth is, that there is an apathy in the public mind upon this great

question which has reacted upon its representatives. The University

Commission, as a political speculation, has been a failure, and the game

of Academical Reform has lost much of its piquancy by a change in the

players. Setting aside the question of the legality of parliamentary

interference, it was found, somewhat to the surprise of a large section

of those who had swelled the cry for a commission—well-meaning, but

ill-informed on such subjects—that the most active, as they were the

most able university reformers, were to be found within the walls of the

University itself. That there was also a section to whom such a

discovery was a disappointment, we have little doubt. At all events,

from that time the public interest in the subject appears to have

gradually died away. Visible excitement of men’s minds, since the

issuing of the Commission, there has been none. And since the

presentation of the Report, when even the warmest imagination could no

longer picture the goodly revenues of Oxford transferred to the London

University, or handed over to a Whig minister of education, the extremes

of both parties, obstructive and destructive, must have felt their

occupation gone;—moderate non-academical politicians began to vote the

whole thing rather a bore—and the _Oxford Blue Book_, of which more

copies were sold we believe than of any similar publication, went the

way of all blue books, and was seen no more except on Tutors’ tables. In

no circles, political or social, in town or country, did University

Reform become the topic of the day. If you heard three people together

in conversation on the subject, two at least were Oxford men. They,

indeed, with that propensity charged against them, with some truth, of

“talking shop,” as it is called—and which, with deference be it said in

this large-minded and Catholic generation, is better at all events than

talking nonsense—they “ventilated” the subject sufficiently, each having

usually some pet scheme of his own for the regeneration of Alma Mater,

under which, if you were to believe the author, she was to come forth in

the renewed beauty of her youth, without losing aught of the reverend

features of age.

But while the country at large has been taking things so quietly, Oxford

herself has been neither unmoved nor silent. Her bitterest enemies

cannot have charged her, during the last few months, with inactivity.

Schemes of reform and extension, which a few years ago would have

startled the most zealous of the _progressistas_, have been poured into

the Home Office, since this year began, at a rate which would seem to

have disconcerted even the impassable Palmerston. There is not wanting

both external and internal evidence of Lord John’s present bill having

been ushered into the world somewhat in a hurry; in fact, there was some

risk of his being outbid in the improvement market. Even our old friends

of the Hebdomadal Board had made wonderful progress since we last wrote

of them, and, as an undutiful boating undergraduate of our acquaintance

phrased it to us, “put on an awful spurt at the end.” College Visitors

have been called on to discharge unwonted duties; Heads and Fellows have

been closeted in their respective common-rooms for days together;

statutes that were before as the Eleusinian mysteries are recklessly

published, with their owners’ new interpretations thereof, “by command

of her Majesty,” and may be bought, together with the select epistles of

Palmerston to his new _familiares_ in Oxford, for the small charge of

one shilling and threepence; and Mr Parker’s well-known counter teems

with pamphlets. Many a College dignitary appears to have had Job’s wish

realised; his enemy has written a book, and he, as in duty bound, has

been down upon him, in another, immediately. The brother Professors of

Modern History and Hebrew, besides a stout pamphlet each, have had a

little private (published) correspondence, in the latter part of which

the professorial tone predominates over the brotherly. The Professor of

Poetry has a letter—more poetical than anything else—to the Warden of

Wadham, who has not replied; not having, possibly, a poetical taste. Of

minor and anonymous _brochures_ there are more than we care to number.

From this category we must carefully exempt the clever argument in

defence of the private tenure of College property by Mr Neate of

Oriel—himself a staunch university reformer, and a supporter of the

Commission; and the unanswerable appeal of Mr Woodgate of St John’s to

the “National Faith,” as pledged to founders by the acceptance of their

endowments.

The introducers of the bill congratulate themselves, with some

complacency, on the satisfaction with which it has been received in

Oxford. True, when Mr Blackett expressed his disgust at the fact as an

evident proof of its utter inefficiency, the Chancellor of the Exchequer

hastened to contradict himself, and to assure his friends of _that_

party, that the remonstrances against it had been many and vehement, and

that it was by no means such an innocent measure as they feared. The

truth is, the feeling of the University on this great question has been

much misunderstood, and, we believe not intentionally, misrepresented.

This is in itself unfortunate, and adds to the difficulties which the

world without suddenly finds besetting what seemed at one time an easy

and a popular question: but more unfortunate than all will it be, if the

comparative apathy of the public mind arises from a delusive notion that

the bill now before Parliament is the advance of a government of

progress against an antiquated corporation, fortified with prejudices,

and tenacious of vested interests; that the two great parties in the

struggle are, a growing nation, clamorous for intellectual food, and a

rich and covetous university, like an unnatural stepmother, proffering

them stones for bread, and keeping her rich gifts for some few favoured

children. For such is the view carefully set before men’s minds by those

whose designs against the universities of England would accept Lord John

Russell’s bill, or even the bolder scheme of the Commissioners, as a

very small instalment of what they deem justice. Unless the people of

England can be disabused of this false notion,—and by the people, we beg

here to be understood to mean especially those classes to whom some

political authorities restrict the term, “the masses”—unless they can

learn somewhat more truly what their rightful claims upon their national

universities are, and who are perilling, and who defending them, and how

far they are likely to be secured or lost by the measures now in

contemplation,—they may only find out too late that they were led to

confound friends with foes, and to cast recklessly from them the solid

advantages which wise and good men in days gone by had bequeathed them,

for the sake of a glittering dream.

Even in Oxford itself, it seems to have been too much assumed that a

broad line of distinction could be drawn, placing on the one side the

advocates of progress, who were desirous of remodelling the constitution

of the University, and re-distributing its revenues, at whatever cost;

and, on the other, those who thought they saw in every change a

dangerous innovation. Whereas, in fact, both these extreme sections

would at any time have made but a very poor show in the

Convocation-house, the former especially having been always

inconsiderable in numbers, and more noisy than influential; while the

ranks of the latter, more open to argument and conviction, were thinning

day by day. That the first were represented in Her Majesty’s Commission

was a mistake in its composition, of which the present Government at all

events have begun to feel the consequences embarrassing; it has

furnished weapons against them to the hands of both supporters and

opponents: either too much was intended, or too little has been done.

The two great points on which a vast majority of members of Convocation,

resident and non-resident, found themselves united in a hostile attitude

against the government of the day, were, first, the constitutional right

of Parliament to interfere at all; and, secondly, the _animus_ of the

Commission. As to the necessity for practical reforms, for rearranging

some of the machinery of university education, and extending its

basis,—this had for years impressed itself upon most thinking minds,—had

at least received a formal acknowledgment at the hands of a committee of

the Hebdomadal Board so long ago as 1846, and had been elaborately, if

not wisely, dealt with in the new Examination Statute of 1850; a measure

which, whatever may have been its tendencies, could not be charged with

narrowness or prejudice, and showed, at least, much zeal and

pains-taking in its compilers, and an honest wish to meet the

educational wants of the age. The real difficulties—not the faults—of

Oxford were, that she was fettered by a code of Caroline Statutes which

checked her attempts to take a freer attitude, and a form of local

government which was the very reverse of representative. Had some

friendly ministry given her the power, as she had the will, to rid

herself of these incumbrances, we should have had a measure of reform

and extension—we are not afraid of the words—not perhaps so showy and

sweeping as the present, but much better considered, and therefore more

really effectual. No one can have read the evidence laid before the

Hebdomadal Committee, and the Tutors’ Association, and considered the

various suggestions there embodied, from men of very different minds,

sometimes widely at variance with each other, but almost always

thoughtful and fairly argued, without feeling that we have there the

only materials out of which any wholesome scheme for the “good

government” of Oxford is to be built, and can there trace the hands best

fitted to combine them. And the strongest argument in favour of the bill

now before Parliament is, that its authors have borrowed from this

legitimate source their best enactments.

To the Tutors’ Association indeed, especially, Oxford will hereafter in

any event confess herself much indebted. Numbering some fifty or sixty

of the most able and active college and private tutors—men of all shades

of party—practically acquainted with the real wants and difficulties

both of College authorities and undergraduates, and conscientiously

desirous of remedying them—they took upon themselves, not without some

obloquy, an anomalous and quite unrecognised position in the

University,—that of a voluntary and independent legislative body, and

supplied for a time, in this irregular manner, the defects of the

academical constitution. By this gentle pressure from without, the

Hebdomadal Board were made aware of the state of public feeling, and

were brought to act somewhat more in harmony with it. To them we owe the

changes of 1850—changes which, we say again, in many important features

we cannot think improvements, and which we quote only in evidence of a

progressive tendency. To them we shall owe almost all that is valuable

in the Government measure of 1854.

For let no one suppose that the bill now introduced by Government is the

scheme of her Majesty’s Commissioners. The spirit which dictated their

Report peeps out, indeed, here and there, in some of its most

objectionable enactments; but, on the whole, their ponderous blue folio

has contributed much less than the four modest pamphlets issued by the

Tutors’ Association; and when those important modifications shall have

been made in it, either in committee or in the Upper House—without which

this measure can never become the law of England—it will be difficult

for the late commissioners to recognise, in its altered features, the

rickety and unpleasant-looking offspring of their own incubations. Their

sole representative in the newly-proposed Commission, if he ever takes

his seat in the altered company in which he must be rather surprised to

find himself, will be called upon to administer an act of a character

widely different from the recommendations which received his signature

in April 1852. And before we briefly discuss the objections, both of

principle and detail, against the bill as it stands, we would first of

all draw our readers’ attention to these points of difference.

The leading idea of the Commissioners’ scheme was, as every one knows,

the Professoriate. The multiplication of professors was to be the remedy

for all shortcomings in the way of education; a government by professors

was to close all mouths which were complaining of the powers that be,

and demanding representation; college revenues, applied to the liberal

support of professors, could no longer excite the envy, or awake the

rapacity of reformers, but must be held to have been at last applied to

their rightful uses; examiners, appointed by professors, were at last to

achieve the difficult task of satisfying every candidate; to be a

professor was to be all that man ought to be—a guarantee amply

sufficient for religion, learning, and energy—an office which could

teach independently of vulgar details of actual instruction, diffusing

scholarship through the University by its mere presence—

“_Dives_, et sutor bonus, et solus formosus, et est rex.”

Where this new race of more than mortal teachers was to spring from, was

a point for which, it will be remembered, the Commissioners made no

provision; but as to their mode of appointment there was no difficulty

whatever. All newly-created chairs (pretty comfortable berths too) were

to be filled with nominees of the Crown—in plainer words, of a future

minister of public education,—for we should have soon found that office

even more necessary than a secretary at war,—and these, with such as

were already subject to the same appointment, would have had an absolute

majority in the remodelled House of Congregation. But this is by no

means the only mode in which, if the Commissioners should have had their

will, Oxford would have been gradually converted into a national

gymnasium under Government superintendence, and at the same time a

gigantic field of patronage. They did not, indeed, go so far as to

recommend, because in their delicate consideration for the feelings of

others they thought it might be “distasteful” to the societies

themselves, but they evidently entertained with favour Mr Senior’s cool

proposition,[1] that “the power of selection of Heads of Houses should

be given to the Crown, under the advice of the prime-minister.” And in

Recommendation 44 we have the first step made towards it—that the

election to these offices should, _if possible_, be left to the Fellows

of Colleges; but that in case abuses in these elections should continue,

provision to abate them should be made by an alteration in the mode of

election. To what this subtle proviso might have led, and was intended

to lead, it requires no peculiar spirit of divination to foresee. Again,

the staff of professors and the “Crown,” indirectly through these its

nominees, was, by the Commissioners’ scheme, to have the control of the

studies, and the sole appointment of the public examiners, although on

this latter head not a tittle of evidence went to show that the present

mode of nomination (by the vice-chancellor, as representing the

governing body, and by the two proctors, as representing the Masters of

Arts collectively) had in any instance been abused; it being a truth so

notorious, both in and out of the University, that we have rather taken

it for granted than given it its due weight as the highest of all

testimonies in favour of the existing system, that whatever

disappointment there may have often been amongst the candidates for

honours, the honesty and integrity of the award has never been

questioned for a moment.

These features, then, at all events, are not reproduced in the bill of

1854. Another pet idea of the Commissioners, which they may claim

exclusively as their own—for very few of their own chosen witnesses in

Oxford approved it, and those somewhat hesitatingly, and with awkward

apologies—was that of unattached students, who were to be the great

means of increasing the numbers, and new-leavening the morality of

Oxford. Whether this wild project fell before the grave and loving

Christian arguments of Dr Pusey,[2] the quiet irony of Mr Gordon,[3] or

the bitter but amusing sarcasms of the _Quarterly Review_, it is certain

that it has found no favour in the eyes of our present university

reformers. The “independent monads” have vanished.

So it has fared again, with that sweeping clause in the Commissioners’

Recommendations (32), that “all persons elected to Fellowships should be

released from all restrictions on the tenure of their Fellowships

arising from the obligation to enter into holy orders,” which, when

viewed in connection with the abolition of all religious tests in the

appointment of teachers, and the last-named provision for a large class

of students who would have been as far as possible removed from

religious influences, with their confessed longing to tread the

forbidden ground of the admission of Dissenters, clearly showed their

object to be the severance of the University as much as possible from

the Church; the gradual withdrawal of the whole education of the place

out of the Church’s hands—for the theological as well as other studies

were to be “supervised” by the professors;[4]—and the future admission,

not only to degrees, be it remembered, which is the only right openly

claimed at present, but to the emoluments and the dignities of our old

religious foundations, of men of any religion, or of no religion at all.

It is true that even the small amount of change proposed in this

direction by clause xxxiv. of the present measure, forces upon us

unpleasant suspicions, and seems founded upon no better reason than that

some Fellows of colleges in Oxford are impatient of the restrictions, or

forgetful of the professed objects, under which and for which they were

elected; still, practically, it is admitted it would not tend materially

to secularise the tone of the colleges, or weaken the clerical element

in the University generally.

These disagreeably prominent features of the report of 1852 will not be

found in the bill of 1854. Other minor points there are, in which the

views of the Commissioners have been set aside, in deference, as we may

hope, to the deliberately-expressed opinions of the University. The

abolition of the distinctive ranks of nobleman and gentleman-commoner,

odious in the eyes of the popular reformer, but proved to be at least

harmless, and probably beneficial in practice, has not been insisted on;

a light straw, perhaps, yet serving as some indication of the setting of

the reform current just at present. The general matriculation

examination, from which such benefit was hoped to the general standard

of scholarship at entrance—often it must be confessed very low—a point

in which we are not sure but that the Commissioners were in the right by

accident, this too we hear no more of, it would seem in deference to the

opinion of the University.[5] And even in the great question of the

throwing open the foundations, the clauses of the proposed act, though,

as we shall be prepared to show presently, utterly indefensible, whether

on the ground of justice or expediency, are yet not so sweepingly

destructive as Recommendation 40 of the Commissioners’ Report.

There is another point too, the great difficulty and the great evil, as

we think, not of the Oxford system, for the system itself does not

recognise it, but of Oxford practice, which, as the bill would surely

have been powerless to deal with effectually, its promoters have perhaps

done wisely in not dealing with at all. Of private tuition, with the

expenses which it involves, the idleness which it encourages, the

specious pretexts under which it has gradually wormed its way into a

sort of quasi-official existence, and is fast sapping all university and

collegiate education as such, and substituting the flimsy trickery of

“cram” for the sound and wholesome scholarship of other days,—we have

expressed our opinion elsewhere in no measured terms.[6] And we are

thankful to my Lord John, or Palmerston, or our own clever and, as he

assures us, affectionate representative,—whichever we are to thank for

such benefits, for none of these gentlemen seem over anxious to take the

credit of their good deeds,—that they have left this question, at all

events, for the University to deal with it at its own discretion. The

private Tutors, we rejoice to say, are not recognised as yet, even in

name, by act of Parliament. If we have no “enabling powers” to get rid

of them, they are at least not forced upon us by “extraneous authority.”

The Commissioners themselves found them a ticklish subject to handle;

they took them up unwillingly, apologised for them in a deprecating

manner, as being ugly but useful, and were glad to let them go. It was

not the only point upon which, for excellent reasons, they were

compelled to differ from their own witnesses. Clause xxxvi. 1, is, we

hope, specially intended to ignore them as lawfully “engaged in the

tuition or discipline of the said University.” And assuredly a “heavy

blow and a great discouragement” is dealt out to their present

occupation in the wide powers given to open private halls; whilst, at

the same time, we are glad to think it opens a legitimate field of

usefulness, and, we hope, emolument, to the many talented and excellent

men so employed; for it is against the whole system of private tuition

that our strictures are directed, and not the individuals who are forced

to take a false position by its general prevalence. It is the more

necessary to draw public attention to this prudent omission in the bill,

because already voices are raised in complaint against it. This body is

too numerous and too influential not to have its organs both in and out

of the House. The fluent Mr Byng, representing one phase of young

Oxford, takes the earliest opportunity of claiming for them their share

in the new representation;[7] and it would be very hard if they had not

their champion among the pamphleteers. We only trust that no

parliamentary friend, by some ingenious insertion of words, will be

allowed to establish a new reading of the aforesaid clause in their

favour. So much for the evil which this bill might have proposed to do,

and which it has happily left undone. These are its virtues of omission;

it has also its sins. If it has sometimes firmly resisted the

mischievous proposals of the Commissioners, it has in no case had the

courage to take a bold line of its own. One measure of practical reform

which would have trenched upon no rights, and violated no principle, and

therefore, perhaps, was not sufficiently telling to recommend itself to

the Commissioners—but which the public would have thankfully

acknowledged, and which the University could hardly have objected to—was

the removal of the inconvenient fiction, which demands four years for

the first degree, whilst, in the thirteenth term, the beginning of the

fourth year, the final examination may be, and often is, passed, not

only with success, but with honour. We are not arguing, it must be

remembered, for an actual shortening (unless it were by the odd

thirteenth term) the academical course, which we agree with Mr Justice

Coleridge in regarding as an evil; but merely for insisting, in the case

of all pass-men, that the period which is now the minimum should also be

the maximum of their university course, and that the absurd and

expensive anomaly of “grace terms” should be altogether done away with.

We will not trouble our readers again with the arguments on this subject

which we have used before;[8] but we must confess the disappointment

with which we have looked in vain through the Reports, both of the

Hebdomadal and of the Tutors’ Committee, and find this most simple and

convenient re-arrangement,—change it can hardly be called—either wholly

overlooked, or only noticed to be dismissed without consideration. It is

totally distinct in principle from the 12th Recommendation of the

Commissioners, “that, during the latter part of their course, students

should be left free to devote themselves to some special branch or

branches of study”—which of course is neither more nor less than a

postponement of classical literature, to what is popularly called

“Useful Knowledge,” against which we should assuredly protest as

strongly as any of the Oxford witnesses; three clear years of four terms

each, all strictly kept, would save undergraduates some expense, much

indecision and confusion as to when they shall go up, would be easier

understood by the public generally, and would not involve the sacrifice

of a single hour of classical training,—nay, in connection with one

little improvement to be mentioned presently, might allow more time to

be really devoted to it than at present. We are glad to recognise the

“consent, though with great doubts of its expediency,”[9] to this view

of one of the most real, because one of the most cautious and moderate

reformers in the University. And we still entertain some confidence that

it is a principle which must find its way into a well-digested scheme of

collegiate reform, whenever we have one.

Another measure which we had hoped to have seen suggested by the bill,

important as it certainly is to the “good government” of Oxford—but on

which we are sorry to find both the Oxford committees rigidly silent—is

the shortening of the long vacation. On this subject, necessarily a

distasteful one to college Tutors, we have already, in a previous

article, spoken at some length, and nothing has been written or said to

shake in the slightest degree our strong opinion of its desirability. In

all the evidence which has been sought or volunteered by the Tutors,

this point has been studiously, as it seems, avoided. Only Sir F.

Rogers, (who is not a Tutor) follows us in pressing this, as he also

confesses, “unpalatable suggestion.”[10] He sees in it, as we do, the

simplest means of shortening the time of a general university education,

without in the least impairing its efficiency. Exeter College also, in

the abstract of proposed changes in its statutes, forwarded to the Home

Office, Feb. 1, 1854, has set a solitary example of endeavouring to

reclaim to collegiate study some portion of that pleasant but not very

profitable four months during which Alma Mater usually turns her

children out of doors: “It is proposed that a Tutor or Fellow reside

during the greater part of the long vacation, to enable undergraduates

to reside there for the purpose of study.” In these few lines we gladly

hail one of those just and sensible reforms in which Exeter does not now

for the first time take the lead,—which are overlooked because they are

so simple in themselves, and so plainly within the reach of every

college, but which, when once seen in action, cannot fail to be

generally adopted.

Such are the negative tendencies of the Government measure, both for

good and evil: it remains to consider its positive enactments. And to

begin with the beginning,—that is to say, the heads, who here for the

last time take the initiative. The Hebdomadal Board, it seems, is

doomed. They are not to await, like other subjects of reform, the action

of the University itself; on the 10th day of October next, if this act

becomes law, their corporate existence ceases. Of all the sufferers by

Government legislation, they, we fear, will find the fewest champions,

and meet with the least commiseration. The Tutors, whom they unwisely

neglected to conciliate, have been their bitter enemies from the first.

They fall a sacrifice not to any cry from without, but to domestic

unpopularity. The Commissioners would have mercifully retained them as

an upper house of legislature, only placing by their side another body,

with equal powers and greater influence—the “remodelled Congregation.”

But the Tutors’ Committee would not hear of it. “Half shares” was the

formal demand of the majority of this body, just beginning to feel their

own power. And as this consciousness of strength increased, the

hopelessness of the struggle on the side of the existing authorities

became more and more apparent. A third party, however—but weakly

represented, and jealously looked upon in the Tutors’ Association, made

their claim for a share in the directory; and the Professorial interest,

addressing themselves directly to the ear of the Government, succeeded

in making the proposed Hebdomadal Council what it is in the bill as at

present—one-third Heads of Houses, one-third Professors, and one-third

Masters of Arts. We have no particular objection to the proposed

partition—we believe that any tolerably fair form of representation

would work sufficiently well—nor have we ever been the apologists of the

Hebdomadal dignitaries. We have admitted their policy to have been at

once weak and obstinate; slow to move at all, and undecided in action.

With a hostile commission hanging over their heads, they at first

affected to ignore the danger, and then wasted, in the most

unaccountable manner, the time which might, wisely used, have in great

measure averted it. They appointed a committee “to consider and report

upon” the recommendations of the Commissioners on 16th June 1852; that

report was presented on 1st December 1853. The Tutors’ Committee,

appointed five months later, presented its first report in January 1853,

its second in April, its third in November, and its fourth and last in

March 1854. The Tutors had large demands upon their time besides

legislation—the Heads should have made it their first and most earnest

duty. Yet it was not until the 24th February, after the terms of the

proposed bill must have been known in the University, that a new statute

was proposed in Convocation, which must have been felt at the time to be

mere waste paper. Nor do we think it was wise to summon Convocation

again, at four days’ notice, to divide upon a petition which the

previous voting must have told them could only be carried by a narrow

majority, and would therefore lose the only weight which could have

attached to it as a collective protest. Nor do they seem to us to have

well consulted their own dignity in the terms of that petition, after

having questioned the authority of Parliament to interfere at all. Yet,

in spite of all this, we confess we think the Heads have been harshly

treated in this measure. There seemed to be no valid objection to a more

numerous Board, in which, while the Heads retained their seats, a fair

proportion of the popular element might have been infused by election.

The scheme of the Commissioners was less offensive, and would have been

quite as effectual. We could never see the force of the objections

raised to their separate existence as an honoured estate, whose years

and experience, together with the large stake which they would always

hold in the prosperity of the University, would perhaps often have

tempered the rash enthusiasm of younger, more energetic, but not always

abler men, and whose deliberate opinion would perhaps have carried more

weight, when it had ceased to be the only source of academical

legislation. The very antagonistic position of two chambers, constituted

on different principles, to which the Tutors object, has ere this been

found conducive to good government. At all events, we can never

cordially agree with any act which disfranchises—except for proved

abuse, which in this case cannot be urged—any individual, or any body of

individuals; and we think the present Heads might have retained their

seats at the Board for life, even had it been thought expedient to

diminish those seats in number for the future. We shall part from our

old governors, if we must part from them, with regret; not the less

because we have not implicit confidence in those who may succeed them.

It is indeed very possible, as Mr Burgon says,[11] “to conceive

something worse than even the inactivity of the Hebdomadal Board.” As

things stand now, at least we know our rulers—they represent twenty-four

separate and independent interests, and are, from their very isolation,

at least above all suspicion of clique or party. Will it as surely be so

in the dynasty to come? Are the smaller societies as sure to be

represented? We shrewdly suspect that hereafter many a small college

Tutor may rue the day when, in the associated committee, he took up the

pleasant trade of tinkering a constitution. He may find out, when too

late, that when his hand helped to close the door of the delegates’ room

against the legitimate representative of his own college, he shut out

the voice of that college for ever from the great council of the

University. We may live to see an “initiative,” composed of eight Heads

of powerful colleges, plus eight Professors of the same colleges—plus

eight Tutors or M.A.’s of the same colleges again; for their influence

in the new Congregation, if exerted, will entirely neutralise the votes

of the smaller colleges and halls. And if it be said that this is an

illiberal view, and that such influence will not be put in motion, the

answer is, that there is every reason to believe that the leading

colleges have foreseen this advantage, and are prepared to use it. A

far-sighted tutor of the most powerful society in Oxford objects to the

constitution of the Commissioners’ congregation, on the significant

ground that “it gives exactly the same influence to the largest college

and the smallest hall;”[12] and unless these smaller societies unite in

protesting against this part of the scheme, their share in the

government of the University, unless in rare exceptional instances, is

forfeited for ever. An amendment to clause v., by way of proviso, that

not more than two members of the council shall be of the same college,

might tend to secure something like a fair distribution of power.[13]

From the Hebdomadal Council we descend to Congregation—the

Commissioners’ idea, clumsily expanded. The framers of the fourteen not

very clear provisions of clause xvi., which provides for the composition

of the said council, have found themselves in the position not unknown

to those who, with a somewhat miscellaneous visiting list, have to give

a very large party: anxious to issue as many invitations as possible,

they have contrived to make exclusion very invidious, whilst no one

considers his invitation a compliment. “We must draw the line somewhere,

you know,” says Mr Dickens’ friend of the cheap and fashionable

shaving-shop—“we don’t go below journeyman bakers.” And the coal-heaver

turns away, an aggrieved and angry man. The bill is here quite as

arbitrary, but hardly so distinct. Journeyman professors are included;

journeyman tutors we believe not. Masters of private halls—which might

contain two students—have a seat there; senior bursars, transacting the

business of large colleges, have not. But of all unintelligible

qualifications—“all who shall have a certificate of being habitually

engaged in the study of some branch of learning or science” are to be

members of this privileged body. (“Earnest” study, Lord Palmerston would

have had it,[14] but the others would not bite.) And the authority which

is to grant these “certificates of study” is, by clause xxxviii. 5, left

to “any college” to “declare.” This, we think, must have been a mere

successful joke of Palmerston’s inserting. Plainly the triumvirate were

wise in not declaring it themselves. A certificate of study in some

branch of learning or science!—how many hours a day? how are the results

to be ascertained? is the candidate to be examined? If not, how is the

“authority” to know? and what is to be the definition of learning and

science? Would an accurate knowledge of “Bradshaw” reckon? It is a

science which has never yet, we believe, been fully investigated. Would

a man be allowed to “take up” the Times, including the foreign

intelligence, with dates?—just at present, what with the Turkish names,

and contradictory correspondence, it is much the hardest reading we

know. Or the new and fashionable science of “common things,” hitherto

much neglected in Oxford? It is idle to argue seriously upon such an

enactment as this; it is legislation carried into its dotage. That such

a crotchet could have been calmly entertained by any three sensible

English statesmen, is one of those unaccountable instances in which fact

is more improbable than fiction. If there is to be a remodelled

Congregation, we suppose some such simple qualification as all M.A.’s

_bonâ fide_ resident, or all engaged in collegiate tuition, discipline,

or administration, would fully suffice, and be at least intelligible. On

the question of allowing such a large and heterogeneous body, however

composed, to debate in English, we think the Tutors’ objections entitled

to every consideration; they have had full opportunity of practically

judging of its tendencies; and it is quite clear that it would thus

become a perpetual field for loud and unprofitable discussion,

subversive of the dignity and quiet of the University, and wasteful of

its time.

Of the numerous petty and vexatious restrictions on the tenure of

Fellowships, it is not necessary for us to dwell at length; because this

portion of the bill, by an ingenious complication of difficulties, has

secured the opposition of all parties, and cannot by any possibility

pass as it stands. If its object was to make residence compulsory, it

would have been better to have done it by a few plain words. This would

have had at least the merit of being in accordance with the original

intention of the founders, although few would have been found to

advocate such an enactment on the ground of utility. But clause xxxvi.

assumes to treat a body of men who are to be, if the other bold

aspirations of this measure are carried out, the intellectual flower of

England, as a set of schoolboys; establishing an inquisition into their

private pursuits, which we will venture to say was never yet proposed,

and which no government will be allowed to exercise, over any society of

Englishmen. In this inquisitorial process, their pet invention of the

“certificate of study” is again to do them yeoman’s service. This is to

make sure that the intellectual genius, which their whole system is

invented to foster, shall not be turned—as we are glad to find them

recognise that even intellect may be—to purposes of mischief. The

difficulty here, as in the other case, is in the providing the

“authority” from which these certificates are to issue; for here the

bill gives us no help whatever. If Fellows of colleges, chosen solely

for their “superior fitness in character and attainments,” cannot be

trusted to take care of themselves, who is to take care of them? “Quis

custodiet ipsos custodes”? Who is this unknown “authority,” thus

mysteriously veiled, whom all are to worship? Can it be Lord John?

The term of five years, the maximum allowed by the previous clause to a

non-resident Fellow to prepare for a profession, is justly felt to be an

arbitrary limitation; as is also the three-mile boundary, outside which

no Fellow, under the provisions of the Act, is to hold a cure of souls,

retaining his fellowship; and it will scarcely be believed that the

Bursars, who have the entire administration of college business and

estates, and who are usually some of their most valuable resident

members, are, under the famous clause xxxvi., classed implicitly with

the idlers, and would not be allowed to retain their fellowships at all.

We beg our readers also to remark the miserable economy, which holds

out, in the shape of a boon to the Fellow who shall have spent

twenty-one years in the faithful discharge of college duties, permission

to retain his fellowship, exempt from such active employment, “subject

to the payment of one-third of the profits thereof.” So that the Tutor

who, for a third of a human life, has by his energy and ability

sustained or made the reputation of his college, may find himself with

failing health, or failing powers, pensioned off upon a stipend of some

£100 or £150 per annum; for the case, indeed, of ill health

incapacitating for an active share of college duties, or even for

“earnest study”—not uncommon, alas! in men overstrained in the race for

honours—has never entered into the calculations of our modern university

reformers. “Work, work!” is their cry—“what else are you paid for?”

One ground of complaint, too, which we think the University has, as a

body, against the general tone of this bill, independently of any

injustice in its enactments, is the distrust which is implied in these

and other instances where free agency is curtailed, as well as in the

attempt to guard jealously all exercise of power which is necessarily,

but grudgingly, preserved. Perhaps this strict surveillance is held

necessary in the present corrupt state of Oxford, but is to be removed

when a regenerated University has grown to the full stature, and becomes

entitled to the rights, of intellectual manhood. From Lord John Russell

and Lord Palmerston such treatment might have been expected; in them it

might have been the expression of an honest prejudice, and a pardonable

misappreciation. To have assumed, as is done in clauses xxxiii. and

xxxviii., 8, that Examiners and Electors would be found wanting in

common honesty, and must be bound to the “strict performance of their

duties” by declaration _or otherwise_—(convenient vagueness!)—might have

been understood as a little ebullition of feeling, natural if not

dignified; though we conclude no one would have attached much real

weight to such futile precautions. The Examiner or Elector who betrays

his trust by an unjust decision will not think much of supporting it by

a lying declaration. An Act of Parliament, we have heard, can make a

gentleman; we never yet heard that it could make an honest man. But Mr

Gladstone, at least for his own credit, if not for theirs who trusted

him, should have eliminated these gratuitous and unworthy passages

before he allowed his name to appear on the back of this bill. He had

more experience of such things, and knew the Oxford spirit better. He,

for very shame, should not have put this moral bribery oath to those

constituents who have thrice elected him—he knows on no selfish

grounds—amidst much obloquy, and, in many instances, at much sacrifice

of private interest and personal feeling.

There flashes upon us also, here and there throughout the several

clauses—though made to assume as unobtrusive a form as possible—the

shadow of a giant influence, as yet rather felt than seen. Any vacancy

in the number of Commissioners to be appointed by Parliament for the

purposes of this Act,—and with the selection of whose names, as at

present understood, we are fully satisfied,—is to be filled up by the

Minister of the day. A report of the “state, receipts, and expenditure,

and other particulars,” of every college, is by clause liii. to be

forwarded, if required, to “one of Her Majesty’s principal Secretaries

of State.” There is a remarkable and mysterious article in clause xliv.,

forbidding the Commissioners to “appoint any person extraneous to a

college to exercise any authority therein,” without the consent of a

majority of the Fellows of the said college. There are no scholia on

this obscure passage, but we suspect it is pregnant with possibilities,

and, like some other dark sayings of old, the interpretation may come

too late. It is no use, in short, to try to shut our eyes to the fact,

that Government has got a hold upon the colleges, and intends, as far as

possible, to keep it.

Against the diversion of college revenues to the general purposes of the

University,—the founding of new professorships, &c.,—the feeling at

Oxford is so nearly unanimous, and so reasonable,—while those colleges

upon whom alone the University had any claims of this nature, have for

some time been so fully prepared to recognise them—Magdalen proposing to

devote £750 per annum “at least” to the founding of prælectorships,

Corpus appropriating £600 to the endowment of a professorship of Latin,

and Merton promising assistance; and when these are excepted, there

remain so few colleges containing the number of fellowships (20)

required, in order to justify such an appropriation,—that we may hope

the justice and discretion of the Commissioners may safely be trusted

not to make such a diversion in the case of any college whose

authorities may be conscientiously unwilling to sanction it.

The means here proposed for the extension of the University, by the

unrestricted establishment of private halls, are those which we have

already advocated in a previous article. Established under due

regulations, they cannot prejudice the discipline of the University. It

would be ridiculous to suppose that they could interfere with the

colleges, whose wealthy foundations must always enable them, if they

will, to educate more cheaply and with greater advantages; whilst we

still believe that they will succeed in drawing to Oxford a class of

students which it does not now possess, in developing the demand of

which the existence is so disputed, and in proving, in spite of Mr

Gordon’s clever irony[15] on so tempting a subject, that a more kindly

and domestic discipline is both possible, and in some cases very

desirable, without treating men as children. At any rate, if they fail,

they will involve no interest but their own.

There is yet one principle boldly laid down in this bill—for one

principle it is under several forms—so cruel and so unwise, involving

such a deep wrong to the memory of the dead, and such contempt for the

claims of the living, that it forms alone one of the most solemn

questions ever submitted to the decision of the legislature. Beneath

this great injustice—if once it pass into law—all the minor evils of

this measure may take shelter and be forgotten. If Parliament, more

faithful to Oxford than her own sons and representatives, shall deliver

her from this, we know of no surrender of her liberties which would be

too great a price to pay. It is proposed by this bill to take away the

heritage of the poor; Oxford is to be no more what she has been for

above five hundred years—“the almshouse of noble poverty.” It is by the

merest rule of consequence that the same hands sweep away the rights of

families, of counties, and of schools. “No preference shall, after the

passing of this Act, be accorded to any candidate by reason of

birthplace, kinship, education at any school, or INDIGENCE, over any

other person of superior fitness in character and attainments,” (clause

xxviii). These are the words. Then follow some grudging exceptions in

favour of kinship, of districts, and of schools; _none_ in behalf of

poverty. For this wholesale confiscation the Commissioners had striven

hard to prepare the public mind; voices within the walls of Oxford

itself had shamefully avowed it as their object; the doctrine of “open

competition” and “abolition of preferences” has been preached as an

intellectual gospel; and still good and wise men have been slow to

realise its growth: whilst those against whose rights it is aimed are

lured into a blind belief in it.

Let the people of England look to it. If their old adage be true, that

“learning is better than house and land,” a heritage is passing from

them. “The nation has a claim to the national universities,” it is said.

If it means anything, it means this—that rank, and wealth, and worldly

position are not to hold them, to the exclusion of the poor seeker after

knowledge. Will they believe us, if we tell them, that the great and

good men who in other days built and endowed these colleges, said more

than this; they said the poor _alone_ should hold the seats of honour

there, if they could prove that they were led by the love of learning to

enter in and take possession. The sons of the rich and noble might

resort there for education; but their fellowships and their

scholarships, endowed by their bounty, were for the poor for ever. Is

this truth disputed? Is there any moral doubt that the poor scholars of

England are the true heirs of the “city of palaces,” any more than of

the true purpose of the Hospital of St Cross, which has just engaged so

much of the public attention? Is there one whit more iniquity in Lord

Guildford’s acts, than there will be in this act, if it passes? We

believe that in this case, as well as in that, the public is not awake

to the fact, and needs to have the wrong set very plainly before them in

order to appreciate it. Ancient statutes—even were the handwriting

legible, and the Latin easy—are not popular reading. Yet there are some

things in them which would open, to many a shrewd reader amongst our

middle classes, a new chapter of the rights of man. It might form a

novel, and not wholly unprofitable, theme for a popular lecturer to

teach his hearers that the Scholars or Fellows of Oriel were, by the

founder’s will, to be not only “casti et humiles” but “indigentes;” not

necessarily first- or second-class men, who had spent large sums of

money upon private tutors, but merely “ad studium habiles,” “proficere

volentes;” that the same qualifications, nearly word for word, repeated

as a sacred formula, are those for the Scholars or Fellows of the rich

and noble foundations of St John’s, of Merton, of Balliol; that at

Magdalen—perhaps now the most luxurious of all our colleges—they were,

and _are_ commanded by the same statutes, by which they claim to hold

their rich endowments, to elect “_pauperes_ et _indigentes_,” guarding

the rights of the poor by a double title. And it might not be

uninstructive to trace the different interpretations put, in different

ages, upon those strange old Latin words—especially the last new

interpretation of them; and, by the help of grammar and dictionary,

impressing upon an audience, by this time somewhat interested, the rapid

advance made, in this age of progress, and under a government of

progress, both in the philosophy of language and the recognition of

popular rights. There is many an honest Radical, hating a parson or a

lord, who no doubt chuckles over reform in any shape, but especially

reform of the universities—they being, as it were, hot-beds for raising

parsons, and lords, and such-like. He regards this bill as a little step

in the way in which we are to go,—not much, but something,—“the

beginning of the end,” as our clever friend of the _Examiner_ has it. He

thinks it is to “throw open” the good things to his children which the

higher classes have hitherto been giving away quietly among each other.

Such men look upon Oxford as aristocrat, and the Commission as the

popular champion. Never was a more complete delusion. Who will be the

fortunate claimants for these “open” scholarships, which are to be

wrested, as Mr Woodgate ably and eloquently shows, from country

grammar-schools to which the middle classes resort, from districts which

some benevolent founder, risen himself to wealth from a humble origin,

wished in his grateful affection to connect with his name for ever—in

some cases from orphans—who are to inherit them? They are to be rewards

of “merit;” we have so much unrewarded merit going about in this

generation; and merit is nothing now without reward. It will be, in nine

cases out of ten, boys from the head forms of Eton, Harrow, Rugby,

Westminster—

“Magnis centurionibus orti.”

The sons of parents who can afford to spend one or two hundred per annum

upon their education,—who have had advantages of every kind, which the

poor curate’s or the country tradesman’s son can never hope for,—who

should need no such incentives to study, as they need no such help in

its pursuit. Are these the classes for which founders bequeathed their

wealth? Hear the good William of Wykeham, one of the most magnificent of

Oxford benefactors—whose too princely foundations are, as it would

appear, never to be allowed to do the noble and pious work for which he

intended them—“I will have,” says he, “not those already learned,

skilled in letters, wealthy, accomplished in arts.” His gifts were

wisdom to those who sought after wisdom, and help to those who needed

help to seek it.

It is curious to mark the poverty of argument amongst the champions—of

all parties—who advocate this nefarious spoliation. “Fellowships and

scholarships,” says the Edinburgh Reviewer, “have now become situations

of influence and honour; it would be wrong to appoint men to these

simply because they are poor.”[16] Let the words go down to posterity as

the expression of the sentiments of our self-styled friends of the

people: because the poor man’s heritage has increased, it may be his no

longer—what has he to do in situations of “honour and influence?”

“Because he is poor?” No; but because, being poor, with the many

disadvantages which poverty entails, he has proved himself “ad studendum

habilis et idoneus”—“proficere volens”—these must be his claims besides

poverty; and they may involve at least as high an order of “merit” as

any mere examination-test of acquirements. Hear again, in the same

strain, Professor Garbett. University emoluments, according to him, are

“the intellectual property of the nation.”[17] Now, if this be a mere

flower of diction—a _vox artis_—if, being Professor of Poetry, he

thought he was nothing if not poetical, we have nothing more to say—it

may pass for what it is worth. But if it be put forth as a serious

prosaic assertion—if he means to say that the wealth of Oxford is the

property of mere intellect, then is Professor Garbett the strongest of

all living arguments against professorial teaching. We are then to deify

intellect; to this idol we are to sacrifice the rights of the poor, the

claims of kindred and of neighbourhood. Does he know who is the

impersonation of intellect unsanctified?

And, as the claim of poverty is to be extinguished within Oxford itself,

so are those institutions which were to supply claimants to be robbed in

their turn. Here is the sentence of disfranchisement for a multitude of

provincial grammar-schools throughout England. No preference to any

scholarship shall be accorded to any school except such school shall

contain one hundred scholars. Is this wisdom and justice? Will the towns

of Appleby, Abingdon, Ashburton, Bromsgrove, Coventry, Hereford,

Marlborough, Reading, Tiverton, Worcester, call this a liberal scheme?

Will you withdraw from these places the fruits of the munificence,

often, of some grateful townsman, and deprive them of the only hope of a

good classical education for their sons? For be it remembered, it is not

merely the two or three boys here and there, who are the fortunate

holders of these helps to study, who are benefited thereby—it is the

many that, thus encouraged to exertion, and the still greater number who

have the advantage of first-rate masters, whom these very scholarships

have attracted to these schools. And is there no injustice to such men

themselves?—who have given up perhaps fair prospects at Oxford, resigned

fellowships, married wives, and carried their talents into remote

districts of England to take charge of country schools, which two lines

of this bill are to empty for ever? Then the absurd estimate of the

efficiency of a school by its actual numbers—giving it a scholarship, we

suppose, when it had the even hundred, and next year destroying it for

lack of five. A school may be in a high state of efficiency, and yet

never reach near a hundred boys. Bridgnorth, Oakham, Uppingham, when in

the last generation they ranked almost as public schools, did not;

Bromsgrove has not ninety, Repton just sixty, at the present time. Are

these inefficient places of education?

We are estranging the middle classes from us day by day. With all our

large professions, we are a narrow-minded age. It has been well

remarked, how, in olden times, many of our great divines were sons of

tradesmen.[18] This enactment would close in great measure the avenues

by which the Church was meant to draw into its ranks those who now,

partly in ignorance, shrink from her teaching.

Here then, or never, the Universities must take their stand. This is no

struggle for privileges. It cannot be said that colleges have any

interest in keeping up a preference for the poor. Rather, most

unhappily, their tendency has been to pass over these claims, not being

fonder of poor connections than the world in general is—preferring the

scholar and the gentleman, and merging the preference into a poor

“_cæteris paribus_.” Perhaps—not unnaturally—corporations, like

individuals, require to be often recalled to homely duties. In this, as

in other points, Oxford has not been immaculate. Let her make amends.

Let us hear no more of “poor halls,” when almost every one of her

proudest buildings should be an “Hospitium Pauperum Scholarium.” Much of

what she holds to be her legal rights may be given up for the sake of

peace—obedience to lawful, though arbitrary authority; some things

indifferent may even be sacrificed as popular concessions; but in this

there must be no compromise—in this she is a steward for GOD.

ANCIENT AND MODERN FORTRESSES.

Having been moved to put together some ideas on ancient fortresses, with

a slight unprofessional glance at modern fortifications, we feel at a

loss to say whether the subject was suggested by the prospect of a

European war, or by finding, on turning up page 52 of the second volume

of Edward King’s _Munimenta Antiqua_, the curious statement about famous

Conisborough Castle, “that, if a person chances to stand in the least

degree nearly opposite to any one of the buttresses, the whole building

appears, notwithstanding its perfect rotundity, to be a square tower

instead of a round one.”

If we led the reader to suppose, that anything he finds in this article

will indicate the probable result of the coming European Struggle, we

should grossly deceive him; and it is but fair to say, that if the

opening sentences have induced him to expect a succinct digest of the

history of fortified places from the era of the Flood, he will have to

complain that his anticipations are by no means fulfilled. We intend to

take advantage of that happy vagrant eclecticism, which nothing in this

world but a magazine admits of, and which, in truth, is a blessing too

often forgotten and betrayed by its proper guardian, when he consents to

be nothing but the expounder of opinion for a polemical or a civic

conclave, or the recorder of the pother of local antiquaries. Our

remarks on fortresses will follow no specific line, logical, or

otherwise—will supply no desideratum—prove no problem, and exhaust no

subject of inquiry; and, with these preliminary indications, we now

offer them.

Be it a question which, among ancient nations, was most illustrious in

deed and thought—the Jewish, the Assyrian, the Persian, the Egyptian,

the Hellenic, or the Roman—there can be no doubt that the most

illustrious race acting within the sphere of modern history is the

Norman. And when we give them this local name, we do not mean to confine

its comprehension to the descendants of the Rollo who bullied the King

of France out of a province, or to those of the band of adventurous men

who “came over” with the Conqueror. The real Norman who founded the

institutions which still live to attest his greatness, was a mixed

being, possessed of the hardy, enduring energy of the North, and the

fire and versatility of the South. Most European countries have enjoyed

his presence. France has largely partaken of it, so has Spain—though the

spirit of the old greatness it produced has died, and the faded lustre

of its memory only remains. Italy, Sicily, and portions of Germany, have

had their share of these high-spirited wanderers; and indeed often, in

the history of European states, might it be traced that, as if by an

injection of fresh blood, the Norman element has saved them from

immediate dissolution, if it has failed to confer on them a prolonged

and invigorated existence.

Greatest, however, of all the obligations to this race are those which

we of the British empire owe; for the illustrious adventurers—whose

spirit and energy sometimes seemed to consume and destroy the feebler

qualities of the people on whom they were ingrafted—found among their

Saxon brethren only a reinforcement of those steady and enduring powers,

which had not yet acquired a sufficient preponderance in the composition

of the Norman. To the character and tendencies of this race we owe the

centralising influence which has given power to our democratic

institutions. We owe to them the principle of honour, courtesy to women,

social disinterestedness, and the many virtues which have grown out of

the system of chivalry. In art, we owe to them the great system of

ecclesiastical architecture, which, after slumbering for a couple of

centuries, is now flourishing in so remarkable a revival, that every

genuine vestige of it is preserved with pious care; and even a

worshipful municipality, if it design to destroy a remnant of the art,

as it would have almost been thanked for doing fifty years ago, is

restrained from the act by a feeling of public indignation.

The magnificent system which goes commonly by the name of Gothic

architecture, is essentially the work of the Norman race, taking both

the character of the architecture and the name of the race in a

comprehensive sense.

If it be an inferior achievement, yet it is something to say that to the

same race we owe the fortalice of the middle ages—the parent of the

modern fortress. The castle, as we know it in romance and history, is

essentially a Norman creation. The symmetrical external strength, and

the gloomy mysteries of the interior, necessary to make a castle be a

castle in poetry or romance, are features entirely belonging to the

Norman edifice. The vaulted form of internal roofing, with all its

grandeur and gloom—the dungeons beneath—the battlements above—the secret

passages—and other mysteries which are necessarily connected with these

in architectural arrangement, are all peculiarities of the Norman

fortalice. To find what there is in this, inquire how _The Old English

Baron_—_The Castle of Otranto_—Mrs Radcliffe’s or Victor Hugo’s novels

could have been written without this element of poetic romance. Go

higher up, and see how much of the glorious interest of Scott’s novels

has been created out of this element; and whether it is presented at

Torquelstone or Tillytudlem, all comes of Norman origin. But go still

higher, and see how such a tragedy as Macbeth could have existed, if

Shakespeare had been a contemporary of the Scottish monarch, and had

been bound to describe him living in an extensive craal of wicker or

turf huts, instead of placing the whole tragic history in one of those

mysterious Norman castles which did not exist until centuries after

Macbeth’s day, and were beginning to add to their other interest that of

a mellow age in Shakespeare’s.

Besides these elements of associative interest, there is the external

beauty involved in a marvellous development of strength and symmetry.

Take the Norman castle in its most perfect development—the stern square

mass in the centre—the flanking round towers at the angles, widening

with a graceful sweep towards the earth, after the manner in which the

oak stem widens to its root—the varied crest of battlements, turrets,

and machicolations which crown all, adjusting their outline to the

graceful variations of the square and circular works below,—all make a

combination, the grandeur and beauty of which has been attested by its

eternal repetition in landscape-painting, since landscape-painting

began.

Nor were the beauty and grandeur all that the Norman fortalice could

boast of. It was a great achievement in science. Of all the steps taken

onwards in fortification, from the primitive earthwork on the steppes of

Tartary down to the fortification of Paris, the greatest was taken by

that one which combined together the dwelling-house and the fortress,

and made that organisation of main edifice and flanking protections of

which the great works of Vauban were but a further development, as we

shall have occasion more fully to show.

But we must stop here.—External beauty and grandeur, engineering skill,

we attribute to the Norman castle; but we cannot award the same praise

to its moral objects, which were ever those of subjugation and regal or

lordly despotism. In fact, the castle was the embodiment of the feudal

system, and ripened into the Parisian Bastille, the largest and most

perfect Norman fortress ever built. As one of our kings said of a border

keep, the man who built that was a thief in his heart; and they who

reared the stately dwellings of the Norman kings and nobles had

subjugation and tyranny in their hearts, and indeed embodied these

qualities in mason-work; for, after all, these gloomy edifices owe a

mighty portion of their influence to that overawing quality which Burke

made out to be the source of sublimity. If all admiration of artistic

achievement in architecture must depend on the honourableness, the

faithfulness, the humaneness of those who were the designers, we fear we

would need to abandon our favourite edifices as structural lies, and

architectural shams, only fit to be cast into oblivion, and there obtain

Christian burial. But so callous are we in the matter of the faith and

morality of designers, that we can even confess that the exterior

structure so well fitted for defence against an oppressed peasantry, and

the dreary dungeons so well fitted for feudal vengeance, when these were

driven desperate, only raise our interest by a contemplation of their

objects; while the assurance that some murder has been committed within

the gloomy recesses—the baser and more brutal the better—simply affords

additional zest to the tragic interest of the whole.

Let us cast a glance back to the condition of the art of fortification,

at the time when it was taken up by these Normans. The most truly

primitive forts are naturally decided by antiquaries to be those which

are found constructed solely out of the native materials which the site

may have afforded. In this matter time has been by no means impartial to

the handiwork of man; since, in some places it remains, and is likely to

remain, so long as the crust of the earth keeps together: while in

others, the stronghold of the dwellers in vast watery wastes and swamps

has melted away with the mud of which it may have been originally

formed. So, in the swamps of Friesland, defended in the dawn of history

as they were in the seventeenth century, and in the flats of Lincoln,

defended against the Normans, many a place of strength has departed; but

on the tops of barren hills the rude stone circles remain, the relics of

some utterly unknown antiquity.

There is scarcely to be named that part of the world where there are

hills, and no hill-forts. They occur in the Holy Land; and Jeremiah

speaks of the people being hunted “from every mountain, and from every

hill.” On the approach of the Assyrians, we hear that the Israelites

possessed themselves of all the tops of the high mountains. They are

found all over the East—on the steppes of the Russian provinces—on the

German and Scandinavian hills—in all parts of the British empire: while

those which have been discovered in the valley of the Mississippi, and

other parts of America, are said to have a precise resemblance to the

specimens in the county of Angus. Often, of course, efforts have been

made to connect them with early historical events—as when the fortified

camp of Caractacus has been found in England, and that of Galgacus, in

fifty different places of Scotland: while the Germans are naturally

anxious to find the circle within which their national hero, Arminius,

or Hermann, assembled the tribes who punished the presumption of Varus.

But these are all vain speculations; and when or how these forts were

made, we shall probably find out when we get the working plans and the

engineers’ contract for Stonehenge.

Among the English hill-forts, there is the Herefordshire beacon, on the

highest point of the Malvern hills, commanding the main pass through the

chain. It is an irregular oblong, one hundred and seventy-five feet by

one hundred and ten; and the inner wall is a strong work of stones and

turf. Three exterior walls encompass it, and an eccentric work lops out

at either side, on some engineering principle, which, doubtless, was

highly approved of in its day, but is sunk in as deep oblivion as the

name of the people who awaited anxiously within the inner ring to see

the heads of the enemy, as they strove to mount the steep acclivity, in

the year of the world in which the defence was completed. Wales claims

the chief specimens in England, for the reason we have already

stated—that Wales has hills. Hence we have Moel y Gaer in Flintshire,

and a great work close to the Castle of Montgomery, where, King says, it

was certainly needless, “unless it had been long prior to the erection

of that castle.” There are, besides these, Carn Madryn, Trer Caeri in

Carnarvonshire, and Caer Caradoc, which tradition associates with

Caractacus. One of the oddest of these forts is Penman Mawr, of which

Pennant says, “After climbing for some space among the loose stones, the

fronts of three, if not four walls presented themselves very distinctly,

one above the other. In most places the facings appeared very perfect,

but all dry work. I measured the height of one wall, which was at the

time nine feet; the thickness seven feet and a half. Between these

walls, in all parts, were innumerable small buildings, mostly circular,

and regularly faced within and without, but not disposed in any certain

order. These had been much higher, as is evident from the fall of stones

which lie scattered at their bottoms. Their diameter, in general, is

from twelve to eighteen feet; but some were far less, not exceeding five

feet. On the small area of the top had been a group of towers or cells,

like the former—one in the centre, and five others surrounding it.”[19]

Some of our northern forts have been, however, on a greater scale. Of

the White Caterthun in Strathmore, General Roy says, “The most

extraordinary thing that occurs in this British fort is the astonishing

dimensions of the rampart, composed entirely of large loose stones,

being at least twenty-five feet thick at top, and upwards of one hundred

at bottom, reckoning quite to the ditch, which seems, indeed, to be

greatly filled up by the tumbling down of the stones. The vast labour

that it must have cost to amass so incredible a quantity, and carry them

to such a height, surpasses all description. A simple earthen breastwork

surrounds the ditch; and beyond this, at the distance of about fifty

yards on the two sides, but seventy on each end, there is another double

intrenchment, of the same sort, running round the slope of the hill. The

intermediate space probably served as a camp for the troops, which the

interior post, from its smallness, could only contain a part of. The

entrance into this is by a single gate on the east end; but opposite to

it there are two leading through the outward intrenchment, between which

a work projects, no doubt for containing some men posted there, as an

additional security to that quarter.”[20]

The author who is found thus to speak of the rude hill-fort was an

experienced officer of engineers, on service in Scotland. The tone of

professional respect with which he treats the effort of the primitive

engineer is remarkable; one might suppose him discussing the merits of

Sebastopol or Cronstadt. In the unprofessional, such works create

perhaps all the more astonishment from their unexpected magnitude; for

when you are desired to ascend a desolate, uninteresting-looking

secondary hill, in a remote district of Scotland, apart from any of the

tourist circuits, you do not expect to find its brows covered with some

triumph of industrial development. The height necessarily ascended

before these works can be seen—a matter which must have made the raising

of them all the more formidable—keeps them away from observation. Were

they on flat ground, and near watering-places, they would be among the

wonders of the world. In the vastness of the mass of collected stones,

they are more like the great breakwaters of harbours of refuge than any

other works we can name. Even more remarkable than General Roy’s

Caterthun, appears to us to be the Barmkyn of Echt, a few miles farther

north. The etymologist may call Barmkyn a corruption of Barbican if he

likes. The lonely hill is so steep and circular that it seems as if it

must have been artificially scarped. Scarcely from below can any curve

be seen to interrupt the straight line of the ascent, and one is utterly

unprepared for the mighty ramparts of stone—five of them—of which the

innermost encloses a space of about an acre, quite flat, and seeming to

be levelled, as the sides of the hill seem to be scarped, by art.

It may be a question if these stone masses were ever built, either so as

to represent external courses, like the Roman wall in Northumberland, or

even in the fashion called cyclopean. They bear, in their heaped

character, and the regularity of their course, more resemblance to the

moraines on the edge of the glacier, than to any other object, natural

or artificial, with which we happen to be acquainted. So ancient,

indeed, must they be supposed to be, that in the war with the elements

all minuter structural characteristics seem to have been lost, and the

stones lie, not as they were placed, but virtually in a heap of ruins.

In these stormy hills, indeed, it is difficult to suppose that anything

less imperishable than the gneiss, or granite, of which the blocks

forming the circular forts are composed, would have preserved the

original plan. In flatter and more turfy districts of Scotland, as well

as in England, there are mounds seeming to be artificial, and cast in

circular terraces, as if they had been put on a turning lathe and

bevelled down. There is one of these—perhaps the most remarkable in

Britain—at Old Sarum, and it was generally supposed to have some

connection with the franchise of that scheduled corporation. How these

could have been very available for forts it is difficult to imagine; and

to devise any other purpose to which they can have been applicable would

be still more difficult. But when it was reported in England, as it was

about seventy years ago, that there were some ancient hill-forts in

Scotland made of glass, the antiquaries, not having a prescience of the

Crystal Palace before their eyes, turned from puzzling themselves about

the earthen mounds in England, to burst forth in scornful laughter about

the glass fortresses of Scotland. But people who have had much

experience in the ways of this world, learn how the same word may,

without the slightest misapplication, be used for very different things.

The dingy slag-like lumps, with a vitreous fraction, found in the

heather of some Scottish fortified hills, has undoubtedly a claim to the

vitreous character, perhaps as strong as the glittering diaphanous

squares which are to let in all the sun, and exclude the wind and rain,

at Sydenham. That they were the creation of fire is certain; and though

the geologists sought at first to make out a case of volcano, yet it

became evident that it was administered by the hand of man; for the

materials, which had been calcined and vitrified so as to resemble in a

considerable degree the scoriæ of a glass-house, were built into walls

round the summits of steep circular hills;—those with which we are

acquainted have much the appearance, from their extreme steepness and

regularity, of having been scarped. And then come the questions—were the

vitrified masses produced by some accident, such as the burning of a

stronghold? or were they a deliberate method of cementing stones

together by fusion? or, perchance, were they the wide circuits within

which might be consumed some whole forest of trees, cut down and piled

together within a ring of stone, whether as a vast beacon, reddening the

sky from the Tweed to Cape Wrath, or a sacrifice to the ancient God of

fire?—Questions these which we respectfully decline taking the

responsibility of answering.

The step from such rude Titanic works as these to the Norman fortress is

great—and perhaps a word or two on other forms of places of strength may

be suitable, as showing distinctly that the feudal castles were the

combination of the rude strength of the primitive fortress with

domiciliary comfort—that they brought the defensive strength, supposed

to reside only in inaccessible mountain regions or swamps, into the

midst of rich agriculture and smiling abundance—that they no longer

rendered necessary a retreat to the place of strength, as one may

suppose the whole community of a district to have retreated to a

hill-fort, but were themselves alike the abode of luxurious ease in time

of peace, and of resistance and fierce contest in time of war. Perhaps

we may best comprehend how original was the idea of the union of

fortress and house or palace in one, by observing how few are the

vestiges of such a combination having existed elsewhere before the

establishment of the feudal system. Towns undoubtedly seem to have been

fortified from the beginning of town life; and of the extent to which

the system was carried, let us take once for all the account which

honest old Herodotus gives of Babylon, with its walls two hundred cubits

high, on which a chariot could be driven with four horses abreast, and

its hundred gates of brass. But, of anything of the nature of a domestic

fortress in which people lived in their ordinary manner during peace,

and defended themselves in war, we remember but few vestiges.

Separate buildings like towers there probably have been in many times

and places, and they may have been used as fortresses. Along the Roman

Wall were the square towers called mile-castles, which are interesting,

not only as the best remains of the arrangements made by the great

aggressors for the protection of their frontier, but as the models on

which the ancient inhabitants would probably build their castles—if they

built any. It is singular enough that the Border peel towers—built a

thousand years after the Romans had abandoned Britain to her fate—have,

in their compact squareness, more resemblance to these castella, than

any type of earlier British castellated architecture possesses. Since

the publication of Mr Bruce’s book on the Roman Wall, to which we lately

had occasion to refer, no one need remain ignorant of any feature,

however minute, which, now existing, attests what these mile-castles

originally were. Mr Bruce tells us, in a summary description, that “they

derive their modern name from the circumstance of their being usually

placed at the distance of a Roman mile from each other. They were

quadrangular buildings, differing somewhat in size, but usually

measuring from sixty to seventy feet in each direction. With two

exceptions, they have been placed against the southern face of the wall:

the castle of Portgate, every trace of which is now obliterated, and

another near Æsica, the foundations of which may with some difficulty

still be traced, seem to have projected equally to the north and south

of the wall. Though generally placed about seven furlongs from each

other, the nature of the ground, independently of distance, has

frequently determined the spot of their location. Whenever the wall has

had occasion to traverse a river or a mountain pass, a mile-castle has

uniformly been placed on the one side or other to guard the defile. The

mile-towers have generally had but one gate of entrance, which was of

very substantial masonry, and was uniformly placed in the centre of the

south wall: the most perfect specimen now remaining, however, has a

northern as well as a southern gateway. It is not easy to conjecture

what were the internal arrangements of these buildings—probably they

afforded little accommodation, beyond what their four strong walls and

well-barred gates gave.”[21]

They were evidently mere barracks or stations, nor can much more be said

for any of the Roman works in the lands of their conquests. Roman troops

were taught, in the conflict with the barbarian, to look solely to

discipline; and the places called forts, apart from these square towers

along the wall, were merely intrenched camps.

Investigation is, in this country, ever apt to strip our stone edifices

of their hoar antiquity. Mr Petrie has “taken the shine,” as the

Cockneys say, out of the round towers of Ireland, by showing that they

have the ordinary details of the Romanesque ecclesiastical work, and has

rendered it unnecessary to decide whether they are anchorite hermitages

for a multitude of rivals to St Simeon Stylites, or temples for Photic

or for Phalic worship. Criticism has gone in the same way back upon our

castles, proving, in truth, that very few of them are so old as they

were supposed to be. Yet there is a particular class of buildings of a

systematically castellated type, which the scythe of the archæological

iconoclast has not yet swept—on the age of which no particle of

authentic light has been cast, and which we are thus entitled to count

as old as we like.

These are the circular towers called sometimes Dunes, Burghs, Danish

forts, Pictish forts, &c., scattered hither and thither in the far

northwest of Scotland. They are supposed to be of Scandinavian origin—to

have been the fortresses built by the Seakings, but nothing in the least

degree resembling them has been found elsewhere within Scandinavian

land. Their mysterious builders have carefully avoided every particle of

incidental evidence that might lead to a betrayal of their origin.

Graceful and symmetrical as they are in their outline—perfectly

circular, and rising without a bulge in a decreasing sweep from the

broad base—there is not a single ornament or moulding to let the

antiquary detect them, as the Romanesque work proved the betrayal of the

Irish round towers. Nay, there is not the mark of chiselling on the

stones to show that human hands have touched them. That can be inferred

from the structure alone; and the unhewn lumps of mica schist or gneiss

are laid in distinct courses perfectly parallel and round, by the

selection of rough stones of equal size, and the insertion of minute

splinters to make up deficiencies—for, as there is no stone hewing,

there is also no cement.

It is the most puzzling of the peculiarity of these perplexing

buildings, that they have tiers of galleries running round them within

the thickness of the wall. To form the roofs of these tiny serpentine

chambers, large slabs have been necessary, but, in some marvellous

manner, they have been obtained without being wrought; for, on the

largest, it is vain to look for the mark of a chisel, or even artificial

squaring or smoothing. It would seem, at least in such of them as we

have seen, that the thinnest large slabs of schist had been collected in

the mountains, and brought probably from great distances to fulfil the

object of the builder.

It seems to have been ever taken for granted that these round towers

must have been fortresses, and the only remaining question seemed to

be—by what people, nation, or language were they so used? Was it by the

Phœnicians? A great antiquary showed that in Tyre and Sidon there must

have been edifices precisely of the same character, though no vestige of

them now remains. Did they belong to the Caledonians of the days of

Tacitus, or to the Atacotti, or to the Dalriads, or to the Albanich, or

to the Siol Torquil, or the Fion Gall, or the Dubh Gall? Or, were they

erected especially by some individual Aulaf or Maccus, or Sigurd, or

Thorfin, or Godred M‘Sitric, or Diarmid M‘Maelnambo—all gentlemen having

their own peculiar claims on the architectural merit? It occurred to us

one day to ask internally the question, whether they were fortresses or

strongholds at all? It arose as we looked down from the broken edge of

the galleried wall of one of those towers in solitary Glen-Elg Beg. It

stands, a hoar ruin on the edge of a precipice, where a torrent takes a

sudden turn; and nothing could be better conceived for the landscape

ideal of the remains of some robber stronghold of the middle ages, than

the remnant of circular masonry rising flush from the edge of the

precipice. But it was precisely the force with which these apparent

conditions of a fortified character were conveyed, that showed the utter

want of them in the others scattered throughout the valley. What could

they have defended? Whom could they have resisted?

Primitive fortresses are places where considerable armies or large

numbers of people go for protection from besieging enemies. Now, though

the outside circle of these burghs is considerable, yet, from the

thickness of the galleried wall, they only contain an inner area of from

twenty to thirty feet—the size of a moderate dining-room. And, while the

numbers they could have held were thus few, they possessed no means like

the medieval castles for assault, and could have been easily pulled to

pieces by an enemy. Nor, if they were places of strength, can it be

easily conceived why there should be a whole cluster of them in a place

like Glen Beg, and no others in the neighbouring districts.

The notion, indeed, of their being strongholds, seems to have been

grasped at once by their striking resemblance in structure and

dimensions to the Norman flanking round towers. But the Norman towers

were only outworks, to aid in defence of the central keep, and could

have been of small service as detached forts. There are many things

which have a warlike resemblance to this part of a feudal castle;—a

windmill, as Don Quixote’s chivalrous eye at once told him, possesses

the character very decidedly—so does a modern blast-furnace. The

columbarium lingering on the grounds of some old mansion is often

mistaken for a tower; and the prototype of the columbarium, the Roman

tomb, eminently anticipated the form of the Norman tower. Of one of

these Byron says,—

“There is a stern old tower of other days,

Firm as a fortress with its fence of stone;

Such as an army’s baffled strength delays,

Standing with half its battlements alone.”

One of these tombs is the nucleus of the castle of St Angelo, others

were incrusted into the fortified mansions of the quarrelsome Colonna—so

like were they, though built as the quiet mansions of the dead, to the

towers of feudal fortresses.

Shall we venture a theory about these Highland round towers? We have not

yet found one to our own satisfaction; but the reader, if he likes, may

take the following, which we guarantee to be of the average quality of

such theories. It is well known that, when the Scots under Kenneth

M‘Alpine conquered the Picts, they saved from death just two inhabitants

of that devoted race, a father and son; their disinterested object in

this clemency was, to find out how the Picts got their beer. It seems

that they possessed a precious and much-coveted secret, in the means of

brewing heather-ale. The Scots offered to spare the lives of the

captives, if they would reveal the secret. The father promised to do so

if they would, in the first place, comply with his request,—a very odd

one for a father to make in such circumstances—to put to death his son.

They did so; and then the father uttered a loud yell of triumph—the

secret of the beer would be for ever hidden in his bloody grave. He

could not trust to the firmness of his son; he could entirely rely on

his own, and he was ready to bear all tortures rather than make the

revelation. Now, why not suppose that these mysterious buildings were

just breweries of heather-ale, and that, in the various galleries,

decreasing as they ascend until they become mere pigeon-holes, the

brewsts of the different years were binned for the use of hospitable

dinner-giving Picts? No one can disprove the theory, and this is more

than can be said for many another.

The more they are examined, the more are the actual fortresses of

Britain stripped of any pretensions to extreme antiquity, and brought

within the Norman period. There are two leading objects of

fortification—the protective and the aggressive; and, according to the

view we have been supporting, it has been the function of the Norman, in

the development of European history, to have been the inventor and

propagator of the kind of works adapted to the latter object. Fortresses

of mere refuge are on the tops of hills, or in other inaccessible

places. It does not suit the aggressor to go to the wilds—he must have

his elements of strength in the very middle of the people whom he is to

rule over. If a rock happens to be found bulging out of a fine alluvial

district—as the plutonic upheavings of trap have supplied in Edinburgh,

Stirling, and Dumbarton—it is well; but, where there are no natural

strengths, they must be artificially constructed—and art has in this

department far outstripped nature, or has rather found in her own

resources better means of defence against her instruments of destruction

than nature provides.

The Saxons did not raise strongholds of this kind, nor did the northern

races, in their native districts; and, indeed, it is rather curious to

observe that there is scarcely a feudal castle to be found in the

Scandinavian territories, whence issued the race who strewed all Europe

with fortresses. Scott speaks of Bamborough as “Ida’s castle, huge and

square;” but there can now be little doubt that it is a Norman edifice.

If the tall gaunt tower of Conisborough retain its Saxon antiquity, yet

it is evident that it must have been a rude and feeble strength,

standing alone without the outworks, which were the great achievement of

Norman engineering. Some other bare towers of this character are

supposed to be of ante-Norman origin, as the round tower of Trematon, in

Cornwall, and that of Launceston, on the apex of a conical rock, round

the base of which Norman works have been raised.

Scott is historically correct, as he almost ever is, when he thus

describes the abode of Cedric the Saxon:—“A low irregular building,

containing several courtyards or enclosures, extending over a

considerable space of ground; and which, though its size argued the

inhabitant to be a person of wealth, differed entirely from the tall,

turreted, and castellated buildings in which the Norman nobility

resided, and which had become the universal style of architecture

throughout England.”

William the Norman found no castles to resist him. He resolved that any

one who came after him should complain of no such omission. England

proper immediately bristled with strongholds. They were afterwards

extended to Wales and Ireland; and it is perhaps the most remarkable

episode in the history of Norman fortification, as indicative of the

systematic zeal with which the system was conducted, that during the

brief tenure of Scotland, the opportunity was taken for dispersing

throughout the country Edwardian castles.

The earliest Norman form was the vast square keep, such as Bamborough

New Castle, or the Tower of London. The value of projecting angles seems

soon to have been felt, but it does not appear that the noble flanking

round towers, which make a perfect Norman fortress, were devised until

the days of the Edwards. The central strength then consisted of a square

work, with a round tower at each angle. When the work was very large,

demi-towers might project here and there from its face. This was the

leading principle of modern fortification—the protection of the face. It

is understood that no plain wall-plate, however strong, can be defended

from an enemy ready to sacrifice a sufficient number of men to batter it

open and rush in by the breach. The object, then, is by outworks to keep

the assailants at a distance. The flanking towers accomplished this for

the Norman fortress, and the work of a siege was not in those days

utterly unlike what it now is in general character, though the less

destructive character of the weapons on either side made it a much

closer affair.

There is room for considerable classification, and even for abundant

technical nomenclature, among the besieging engines used before the

invention of gunpowder. The term mangona, or mangonel, was generally

applicable to ballistic engines, moved by springs, or quick descending

weights. The trebuchet, the matafunda, the ribaudequin, and the petrary,

were special machines for discharging what the Americans call rocks.

There were the robinet, the espringal, and the bricole, which discharged

huge iron bolts and other miscellaneous mischievous articles. The oddest

of all names to find among these wicked and destructive agents is

conveyed in a sentence by Grose, who says that “Beugles, or bibles, were

also engines for throwing large stones, as we learn from an ancient

poem;” and he quotes as his authority the Romance of Claris, in the

Royal library of Paris (No. 7534).

“Et pierres grans, et les perrieres,

Fit les bibles qui sont trop fieres,

Gétent trop manuement.”

Besides the ram and the testudo, with which every boy becomes acquainted

in the plates to his _Roman Antiquities_, there were the instruments

bearing the quadrupedal names of the war-wolf, the cat, and the sow.

“The cattus or cat-house, gattus or cat,” says the instructive Grose,

“was a covered shed, occasionally fixed on wheels, and used for covering

of soldiers employed in filling up the ditch, preparing the way for the

movable tower, or mining the wall. It was called a cat because under it

soldiers lay in watch like a cat for its prey. Some of these cats had

crenelles and chinks, from whence the archers could discharge their

arrows. These were called castellated cats. Sometimes under this machine

the besiegers worked a small kind of ram.”[22] The sow reminds all true

Scotsmen of Black Agnes of Dunbar jeering Salisbury with the farrowing

of his sow, when she toppled on its wooden roof a mass of rock, and

beheld the mutilated sappers crawling from beneath their shattered

protector, like so many pigs. But the chief of all besieging works was

the movable tower, brought up face to face with the defenders, and

containing battering-rams below, with the various instruments already

mentioned, employed in its several upper storeys. To oppose such a

formidable engine, which could only be applied by some commander of vast

resources, the flanking round towers were of invaluable service, as the

bastions and outworks are at the present day. The main difference in the

projectile direction of the operations in the two is, that while the

fire of a fort is chiefly horizontal, the assaults made by the Norman

keep were vertical, and hence came the crest of machicolations and

turrets which has given so picturesque a character to the whole school

of baronial architecture.

The instances of the Norman castle in its more perfect shape, still

existing, are very interesting in a historical view. It may be observed,

that in the settled districts of England there are specimens of the

older and ruder style of Norman work; but that, in the Edwardian

conquests, the fully developed form is the oldest of which vestiges are

to be found.

Aberconway, or Snowdon Castle in Carnarvonshire, must have been one of

the most formidable specimens, from the great extent of its curtain

walls, and its numerous round towers. It was built, say authorities on

which we place no reliance, except in so far as they correspond with the

character of the edifice, in 1284; it served the purpose for which the

strongest fortresses are required—that of a frontier defence. In

Flintshire there are Hawarden and Rhudland. Beaumaris, in Anglesea, has

some fine diminishing towers. Carew, in Pembrokeshire, has a sort of

angular buttresses, instead of the graceful increment towards the base,

in the round towers; but it is a luxuriant and noble specimen; and

though Welsh tradition says it belonged to the princes of South Wales—no

man can tell how many hundreds of years before William or Rollo

either—and was given by Rhys ap Theodore, with his daughter, Nest, as a

marriage portion to Gerrald de Carrio, yet we take the liberty of

holding that it as clearly bears the mark of the invader of Wales, as

any government-house in Canada or New Zealand bears evidence that it is

not the work of the natives. We take Cilgarron, Haverford-west, and

Mannorbeer castles, in the same county, to belong to the same category.

The same characteristics do not so frequently occur in the southern

English counties, though there is Pevensey in Sussex, Goodrich in

Herefordshire, and Cowling in Kent, and there may be several other

instances. They reappear on the Border, where they were connected with

the Scottish wars; the forms may be seen in Prudho, Twizel, the outworks

of Bamborough, and in a modernised shape at Alnwick.

Ireland is rich in these quadrilateral flanked edifices. There is

Enniscorthy guarding the bridge of the Slaney in Wexford, and Dunmore in

Meath, one of the most entire and regular specimens, if we may judge by

the representation of Grose, who, to do him justice, never idealises. It

is one of the many castles attributed to De Lacey, the governor of

Meath. Another of them, Kilkea, continued long to raise its flanking

round towers after it had laughed at the ferocious raids of the O’Moors

and O’Dempsies in the English pale. Two of the best specimens, Lea, in

Queen’s county, and Ferns in Wexford, were attacked and taken in the

romantic inroad of Edward Bruce, who thought that, as his brother had,

by one gallant achievement, wrested a crown in Scotland from the

encroaching Norman, he might as well endeavour to take one in Ireland.

Grandison Castle, with two beautiful specimens of the bell-shaped round

tower, is attributed to the reign of James I.; but, though it is not the

peculiar defect of Irish antiquities to be post-dated, this portion

must, we think, belong to the Norman period. There are fine specimens of

the round tower at Ballylachan and Ballynafad, whence the M‘Donoughs

were driven forth, and the utterly un-Norman names of these buildings do

not exclude them from identification as the work of the courtly

invaders. In Ireland, however, this sort of work never ceased. There

were ever O’Shauchnessies, O’Donahues, O’Rourkes, or O’Dempsies, keeping

the Norman or the Saxon at work in making fortresses; and perhaps the

latest specimen of it is a relic of the ’48, which we saw the other day

in an antiquarian rummage in ancient and ruiniferous Cashel, being a

large iron box with loopholes projecting out from the barrack where it

was placed, to rake the street into which it projected with musketry

from the loopholes.

In Scotland, the Anglo-Norman origin of the earliest true baronial

fortresses is attested with remarkable precision. In the first place,

there is not a vestige in Scotland of the earlier kind of square keep,

such as might have been raised in the days of the Conqueror, or of

William Rufus, with its semicircular arches and dog-toothed decorations.

The pointed architecture and the Edwardian baronial had come into use

ere any of the fortresses of which we possess remains were erected.

Hence, the oldest of the Scottish castles were evidently built by Edward

to secure his conquest. They may be enumerated as those of Caerlaverock,

Bothwell, Dirleton, Kildrummie, and Lochindorb. These names at once

excite recollections of the war of independence, when these castles were

taken and retaken, and were surrounded by the most interesting and

enduring associations of that majestic conflict.

The architectural progeny which this style of building left in Scotland,

is very different from its growth into the bastioned fortifications of

other countries. The Scottish laird, or chief, when he made his house a

fortress, as he had imminent necessity for doing, could not afford to

erect the great flanking towers of the Normans; but he stuck little

turrets on the corners of his block-house, which served his purpose

admirably; and there are no better flanked fortresses, considered with a

view to the form of attack to which they were subjected, than our

peel-houses.

On the other hand, in the Continental castles of the fifteenth and

sixteenth centuries, as Heidelberg, Perronne, and Plessis la Tour, as

the old representations give it, we see the flanking system extending

itself laterally, until it forms something between the Norman keep and

the modern fortress. It was on Plessis that Philip de Comines moralises,

as a large prison into which the great King Louis had virtually immured

himself, becoming, by his own exertions for the enlargement of his

power, and his protection from secret enemies, nothing better than the

hapless immured prisoner, whose lot he forced upon so many others.

The one great leading step which modern fortification took beyond the

mere flanking system, is the discovery of the glacis for covering the

stone-work, and protecting it from the attacks of cannon. The whole

system, it appears, is now on trial. The charge against it is, that

every addition made to it in the way of protecting works, only renders a

fort the more certain of ultimate capture, since these protecting works

are themselves easily taken. It is said that they save the main work

from a general escalade which is never likely to be attempted, but

facilitate a deliberate siege, which is the proper method of taking

fortified places. It is said that in fortification we must, as in other

matters of war, recur to the first principle, that the best way to

protect ourselves is to kill our enemy. Of old, the main defences of a

vessel were to protect the deck by castles stem and stern from a

boarding enemy; now the arrangement is directed to the destruction of

the enemy before he can board. Our old knights in armour were a sort of

moving fortresses made more for protection than destruction. In Italy,

the steel encasement was brought to such perfection, that at the battle

of Tornoue, under Charles VIII., we are told by Father Daniel that a

number of Italian knights were overthrown, but could not be killed until

the country people brought huge stones and sledge-hammers and broke

their shells, like those of so many lobsters. It sounds like an odd

accompaniment of civilisation that she should make the external form of

warfare more destructive and less defensive—but so it is; and a reform

in fortification is proposed, which, by the abandonment of the flanking

system, and something like a restoration of the primitive form, is to

make the fort more terrible to the invader, as a means of making it a

more effective defence.

We profess not to enter on so great a question. Mere theories we have

herein offered to our reader; and as they are given in all innocence and

good-humour, all we pray is, that he will not, if they differ from his

own, condemn us to some dire mysterious fate. Let him, if we displease

him, simply content himself with the old established remedy, and mutter

to himself, “Pooh! humbug!” And we on our part engage that we shall live

in all charity with all men who accept not our theory; and will by no

means endeavour to prove that they are sensual, lewd, dishonourable

people, deserving of some dire punishment.

FIRMILIAN: A TRAGEDY.[23]

We have great pleasure in announcing to our readers the fact, that we

have at last discovered that long-expected phenomenon, the coming Poet,

and we trust that his light will very soon become visible in the

literary horizon. We cannot, however, arrogate to ourselves any large

share of merit in this discovery—indeed, we must confess, with a feeling

akin to shame, that we ought to have made it at a much earlier date.

_Firmilian_ is not altogether new to us. We have an indistinct

recollection of having seen the tragedy in manuscript well-nigh two

years ago; and, if we remember aright, a rather animated correspondence

took place on the subject of the return of the papers. We had, by some

untoward accident, allowed them to find their way into the Balaam-box,

which girnel of genius was at that particular time full up to the very

hinges. We felt confident that _Firmilian_ lay under the weight of some

twenty solid layers of miscellaneous literature; and we should as soon

have thought of attempting to disinter an ichthyosaurus from a

slate-quarry, as of ransacking the bowels of the chest for that treasury

of rare delights. However, we took care, on the occasion of the next

incremation, to make search for the missing article, and had the

pleasure of returning it to Mr Percy Jones, from whom we heard nothing

further until we received his tragedy in print. Our first perusal having

been rather of a cursory nature, we are not able to state with certainty

whether the author has applied himself during the intervening period to

the work of emendation; but we think it exceedingly probable that he has

done so, as we now remark a degree of vivacity and force of expression,

however extravagant many of the ideas may be, which had escaped our

previous notice. We hope that, by a tardy act of justice, we shall offer

no violence to that amiable modesty which has, in the mean time,

restrained him from asking the verdict of the general public.

As to the actual amount of poetic genius and accomplishment which Mr

Percy Jones possesses, there may, even among the circle of his friends,

be considerable difference of opinion. Those who admire spasmodic throes

and writhings may possibly be inclined to exalt him to a very high

pinnacle of fame; for certainly, in no modern work of poetry—and there

have been several recently published which might have borne the

_imprimatur_ of Bedlam—have we found so many symptoms of unmistakable

lunacy. Still there is a method in his madness—a rapidity of perception

and originality of thought, which contrasts very favourably with the

tedious drivellings of some other writers of the same school. His taste

is not one whit better than theirs, but he brings a finer fancy and a

more vivid imagination to the task; nor is he deficient in a certain

rude exaggerated dramatic power, which has more than once reminded us of

the early style of Marlowe and the other predecessors of Shakespeare.

It is not very easy to comprehend the exact creed and method of the new

school of poets, who have set themselves to work upon a principle

hitherto unknown, or at all events unproclaimed. This much we know from

themselves, that they regard poetry not only as a sacred calling, but as

the most sacred of any—that, in their opinion, every social relation,

every mundane tie, which can interfere with the bard’s development, must

be either disregarded or snapped asunder—and that they are, to the

fainting race of Adam, the sole accredited bearers of the Amreeta cup of

immortality. Such is the kind of nonsense regarding the nature of his

mission which each fresh poetaster considers it his duty to enunciate;

and as there is nothing, however absurd, which will not become credited

by dint of constant repetition, we need not be surprised that some very

extraordinary views regarding the “rights of genius” should of late

years have been countenanced by men who ought to have known better.

Poets are, like all other authors or artisans, valuable according to the

quality of the article which they produce. If their handiwork be good,

genuine, and true, it will pass at once into circulation and be

prized—if the reverse, what title can they prefer to the name which they

so proudly arrogate to themselves?

We do not, however, quarrel with a poet for having an exalted idea of

his art—always supposing that he has taken any pains to acquire its

rudiments. Without a high feeling of this kind, it would be difficult to

maintain the struggle which must precede eminent success; nor would we

have alluded to the subject but for the affectation and offensive

swaggering of some who may indeed be rhymsters, but who never could be

poets even if their days were to be prolonged to the extent of those of

Methusaleh. When the painter of the tavern sign-post, whereon is

depicted a beer-bottle voiding its cork, and spontaneously ejecting its

contents right and left into a couple of convenient tumblers, talks to

us of high art, Raphael, and the effects of _chiaroscuro_, it is utterly

impossible to control the action of the risible muscles. And, in like

manner, when one of our young poetical aspirants, on the strength of a

trashy duodecimo filled with unintelligible ravings, asserts his claim

to be considered as a prophet and a teacher, it is beyond the power of

humanity to check the intolerable tickling of the midriff.

But, apart from their exaggerated notions of their calling, let us see

what is the practice of the poets of the Spasmodic School. In the first

place, they rarely, if ever, attempt anything like a plot. After you

have finished the perusal of their verses, you find yourself just as

wise as when you began. You cannot tell what they would be at. You have

a confused recollection of stars, and sunbeams, and moonbeams, as if you

had been staring at an orrery; but sun, moon, and stars, were intended

to give light to something—and what that something is, in the poet’s

page, you cannot, for the life of you, discover. In the second place, we

regret to say that they are often exceedingly profane, not, we suppose,

intentionally, but because they have not sense enough to see the limits

which decency, as well as duty, prescribes. In the third place, they are

occasionally very prurient. And, in the fourth place, they are almost

always unintelligible.

Now, although we cannot by any means aver that Mr Percy Jones is

entirely free from the faults which we have just enumerated, we look

upon him as a decidedly favourable specimen of his tribe. There is, in

_Firmilian_, if not a plot, at least some kind of comprehensible action;

and in it he has portrayed the leading features of the poetical school

to which he belongs with so much fidelity and effect, that we feel

called upon to give an outline of his tragedy, with a few specimens from

the more remarkable scenes.

The hero of the piece, Firmilian, is a student in the university of

Badajoz, a poet, and entirely devoted to his art. He has been engaged

for some time in the composition of a tragedy upon the subject of Cain,

which is “to win the world by storm;” but he unfortunately discovers,

after he has proceeded a certain length in his task, that he has not yet

thoroughly informed himself, by experience, of the real nature of the

agonies of remorse. He finds that he cannot do justice to his subject

without steeping his own soul in guilt, so as to experience the pangs of

the murderer; and as, according to the doctrines of the spasmodic school

of poetry, such investigations are not only permitted, but highly

laudable, he sets himself seriously to ponder with what victim he should

begin. All our spasmodic poets introduce us to their heroes in their

studies, and Mr Percy Jones follows the tradition. He does not, however,

like some of them, carry his imitative admiration of Goethe’s _Faust_ so

far, as personally to evoke Lucifer or Mephistopheles—an omission for

which we are really thankful. Firmilian begins by a soliloquy upon his

frame of mind and feelings; and states himself to be grievously

perplexed and hindered in his work by his comparative state of

innocence. He then meditates whether he should commence his course of

practical remorse by putting to death Mariana, a young lady to whom he

is attached, or three friends and fellow-students of his, with whom he

is to dine next day. After much hesitation, he decides on the latter

view, and, after looking up “Raymond Lullius” for the composition of a

certain powder, retires to rest after a beautiful but somewhat lengthy

apostrophe to the moon. There is nothing in this scene which peculiarly

challenges quotation. The next is occupied by love-making; and

certainly, if Mr Percy Jones had intended to exhibit his hero throughout

in the most amiable and romantic light, nothing could be better than his

appearance in the bower of Mariana. If, here and there, we encounter an

occasional floridness, or even warmth of expression, we attribute that

in a great measure to the sunny nature of the clime; just as we feel

that the raptures of Romeo and Juliet are in accordance with the

temperament of the land that gave them birth. But we presently find that

Firmilian, though a poet, is a hypocrite and traitor in love. The next

scene is laid in a tavern, where he and his friends, Garcia Perez,

Alphonzo D’Aguilar, and Alonzo Olivarez are assembled, and there is a

discussion, over the winecup, on the inexhaustible subject of knightly

love. Alphonzo, claiming to be descended from the purest blood of

Castile, asserts the superiority of European beauty over the rest of the

universe; to which Firmilian, though known to be betrothed to Mariana,

makes the following reply—

FIRMILIAN.

I knew a poet once; and he was young,

And intermingled with such fierce desires

As made pale Eros veil his face with grief,

And caused his lustier brother to rejoice.

He was as amorous as a crocodile

In the spring season, when the Memphian bank,

Receiving substance from the glaring sun,

Resolves itself from mud into a shore.

And—as the scaly creature wallowing there,

In its hot fits of passion, belches forth

The steam from out its nostrils, half in love,

And half in grim defiance of its kind;

Trusting that either, from the reedy fen,

Some reptile-virgin coyly may appear,

Or that the hoary Sultan of the Nile

May make tremendous challenge with his jaws,

And, like Mark Anthony, assert his right

To all the Cleopatras of the ooze—

So fared it with the poet that I knew.

He had a soul beyond the vulgar reach,

Sun-ripened, swarthy. He was not the fool

To pluck the feeble lily from its shade

When the black hyacinth stood in fragrance by.

The lady of his love was dusk as Ind,

Her lips as plenteous as the Sphinx’s are,

And her short hair crisp with Numidian curl.

She was a negress. You have heard the strains

That Dante, Petrarch, and such puling fools

As loved the daughters of cold Japhet’s race,

Have lavished idly on their icicles.

As snow melts snow, so their unhasty fall

Fell chill and barren on a pulseless heart.

But, would you know what noontide ardour is,

Or in what mood the lion, in the waste,

All fever-maddened, and intent on cubs,

At the oasis waits the lioness—

That shall you gather from the fiery song

Which that young poet framed, before he dared

Invade the vastness of his lady’s lips.

Judging from the implied character of the ditty in question, we are not

sorry that we cannot lay it before our readers—indeed it does not appear

in the volume, for D’Aguilar was so disgusted with the introduction that

he openly reviled Firmilian as a pupil of Mahound, and bestowed a buffet

on him, whereupon there was a flashing of swords. These, however, were

sheathed, and the students again sate down amicably to drink. Firmilian,

being suddenly called away, entreats his friends to amuse themselves,

during his absence, with a special bottle of “Ildefronso”—a vintage

which we do not remember having seen in any modern list of wines. They

comply—feel rather uncomfortable—and the scene concludes by the chaunt

of a funeral procession beneath the window; an idea which we strongly

suspect has been borrowed from Victor Hugo’s tragedy of _Lucrèce

Borgia_.

The next scene exhibits Firmilian pacing the cloisters. His three

friends have died by poison, but he is not able by any means to conjure

up a feeling of adequate remorse. He does not see that he is at all

responsible in the matter. If he had poured out the wine into their

glasses, and looked upon their dying agonies, then, indeed, he might

have experienced the desired sensation of guilt. But he did nothing of

the kind. They helped themselves, of their own free will and accord, and

died when he was out of the way. On the whole, then, his first

experiment was a blunder. During his reverie, an old preceptor of his,

the Priest of St Nicholas, passes; and certain reminiscences of stripes

suggest him as the next victim. The reader will presently see by what

means this scheme is carried into execution. Suffice it to say, that the

mere anticipation of it sheds a balm upon Firmilian’s disappointed

spirit, who, being now fully convinced that in a few days he will be

able to realise the tortures of Cain, departs for an interview with

Lilian, a young lady for whom he entertains a clandestine attachment.

The next scene speaks for itself.

EXTERIOR OF THE CATHEDRAL OF ST NICHOLAS.

_Choir heard chaunting within._

_Enter_ FIRMILIAN.

How darkly hangs yon cloud above the spire!

There’s thunder in the air—

What if the flash

Should rend the solid walls, and reach the vault

Where my terrestrial thunder lies prepared,

And so, without the action of my hand,

Whirl up those thousand bigots in its blaze,

And leave me guiltless, save in the intent?

That were a vile defraudment of my aim,

A petty larceny o’ the element,

An interjection of exceeding wrong!

Let the hoarse thunder rend the vault of heaven,

Yea, shake the stars by myriads from their boughs,

As autumn tempests shake the fruitage down;—

Let the red lightning shoot athwart the sky,

Entangling comets by their spooming hair,

Piercing the zodiac belt, and carrying dread

To old Orion, and his whimpering hound;—

But let the glory of this deed be mine!

ORGAN _and_ CHOIR.

Sublimatus ad honorem

Nicholai presulis:

Pietatis ante rorem

Cunctis pluit populis:

Ut vix parem aut majorem

Habeat in seculis.

FIRMILIAN.

Yet I could weep to hear the wretches sing!

There rolls the organ anthem down the aisle,

And thousand voices join in its acclaim.

All they are happy—they are on their knees;

Round and above them stare the images

Of antique saints and martyrs. Censers steam

With their Arabian charge of frankincense,

And every heart, with inward fingers, counts

A blissful rosary of pious prayer!

Why should they perish then? Is’t yet too late?

O shame, Firmilian, on thy coward soul!

What! thou, the poet!—thou, whose mission ’tis

To send vibration down the chord of time,

Until its junction with eternity—

Thou, who hast dared and pondered and endured,

Gathering by piecemeal all the noble thoughts

And fierce sensations of the mind—as one

Who in a garden culls the wholesome rose,

And binds it with the deadly nightshade up;

Flowers not akin, and yet, by contrast kind—

Thou, for a touch of what these mundane fools

Whine of as pity, to forego thine aim,

And never feel the gnawing of remorse,

Like the Promethean vulture on the spleen,

That shall instruct thee to give future voice

To the unuttered agonies of Cain!

Thou, to compare, with that high consequence

The breath of some poor thousand knights and knaves,

Who soaring, in the welkin, shall expire!

Shame, shame, Firmilian! on thy weakness, shame!

ORGAN _and_ CHOIR.

Auro dato violari

Virgines prohibuit:

Far in fame, vas in mari

Servat et distribuit:

Qui timebant naufragari

Nautis opem tribuit.

FIRMILIAN.

A right good saint he seems, this Nicholas!

And over-worked too, if the praise be just,

Which these, his votaries, quaver as his claim.

Yet it is odd he should o’erlook the fact

That underneath this church of his are stored

Some twenty barrels of the dusky grain,

The secret of whose framing, in an hour

Of diabolic jollity and mirth,

Old Roger Bacon wormed from Belzebub!

He might keep better wardship for his friends;

But that to me is nothing. Now’s the time!

Ha! as I take the matchbox in my hand,

A spasm pervades me, and a natural thrill

As though my better genius were at hand,

And strove to pluck me backwards by the hair.

I must be resolute. Lose this one chance,

Which bears me to th’ Acropolis of guilt,

And this, our age, foregoes its noblest song.

I must be speedy—

ORGAN _and_ CHOIR.

A defunctis suscitatur

Furtum qui commiserat:

Et Judæus baptizatur

Furtum qui recuperat:

Illi vita restauratur,

Hic ad fidem properat.

FIRMILIAN.

No more was needed to confirm my mind!

That stanza blows all thoughts of pity off,

As empty straws are scattered by the wind!

For I have been the victim of the Jews,

Who, by vile barter, have absorbed my means.

Did I not pawn—for that same flagrant stuff,

Which only waits a spark to be dissolved,

And, having done its mission, must disperse

As a thin smoke into the ambient air—

My diamond cross, my goblet, and my books?

What! would they venture to baptise the Jew?

The cause assumes a holier aspect, then;

And, as a faithful son of Rome, I dare

To merge my darling passion in the wrong

That is projected against Christendom!

Pity, avaunt! I may not longer stay.

[_Exit into the vaults. A short pause, after which he reappears._

’Tis done! I vanish like the lightning bolt!

ORGAN _and_ CHOIR.

Nicholai sacerdotum

Decus, honor, gloria:

Plebem omnem, clerum totum—

[_The Cathedral is blown up_].

We back that scene, for intensity, against anything which has been

written for the last dozen of years. Nay, we can even see in it traces

of profound psychological observation. Firmilian, like Hamlet, is

liable, especially on the eve of action, to fits of constitutional

irresolution; and he requires, in order to nerve him to the deed, a more

direct and plausible motive than that which originally prompted him.

Hence we find him wavering, and almost inclined to abandon his purpose,

until a casual passage in the choral hymn jars upon an excitable nerve,

and urges him irresistibly forward. We shall presently find the same

trait of character even more remarkably developed in another scene.

We then come to the obsequies of the students, which, being episodical,

we may as well pass over. There are two ways of depicting grief—one

quiet and impressive, the other stormy and clamorous. Mr Percy Jones, as

might have been expected, adopts the latter method; and we are bound to

say that we have never perused anything in print so fearful as the

ravings of the bereaved Countess D’Aguilar, mother of the unfortunate

Alphonzo. She even forgets herself so far as to box the ears of the

confessor who is officiously whispering consolation.

Meanwhile, where is the hero of the piece—the successful Guy Fawkes of

the cathedral? Perched on a locality which never would have occurred to

any but the most exalted imagination.

SUMMIT OF THE PILLAR OF ST SIMEON STYLITES.

FIRMILIAN.

’Twas a grand spectacle! The solid earth

Seemed from its quaking entrails to eruct

The gathered lava of a thousand years,

Like an imposthume bursting up from hell!

In a red robe of flame, the riven towers,

Pillars and altar, organ-loft and screen,

With a singed swarm of mortals intermixed,

Were whirled in anguish to the shuddering stars,

And all creation trembled at the din.

It was my doing—mine alone! and I

Stand greater by this deed than the vain fool

That thrust his torch beneath Diana’s shrine.

For what was it inspired Erostratus

But a weak vanity to have his name

Blaze out for arson in the catalogue?

I have been wiser. No man knows the name

Of me, the pyrotechnist who have given

A new apotheosis to the saint

With lightning blast, and stunning thunder knell!

And yet—and yet—what boots the sacrifice?

I thought to take remorse unto my heart,

As the young Spartan hid the savage fox

Beneath the foldings of his boyish gown,

And let it rive his flesh. Mine is not riven—

My heart is yet unscarred. I’ve been too coarse

And general in this business. Had there been

Amongst that multitude a single man

Who loved me, cherished me—to whom I owed

Sweet reciprocity for holy alms

And gifts of gentle import—had there been

Friend,—father,—brother, mingled in that crowd,

And I had slain him—then indeed my soul

Might have acquired fruition of its wish,

And shrieked delirious at the taste of sin!

But these—what were the victims unto me?

Nothing! Mere human atoms, breathing clods,

Uninspired dullards, unpoetic slaves,

The rag, and tag, and bobtail of mankind;

Whom, having scorched to cinders, I no more

Feel ruth for what I did, than if my hand

Had thrust a stick of sulphur in the nest

Of some poor hive of droning humble-bees,

And smoked them into silence!

I must have

A more potential draught of guilt than this,

With more of wormwood in it!

Here I sit,

Perched like a raven on old Simeon’s shaft,

With barely needful footing for my limbs—

And one is climbing up the inward coil,

Who was my friend and brother. We have gazed

Together on the midnight map of heaven,

And marked the gems in Cassiopea’s hair—

Together have we heard the nightingale

Waste the exuberant music of her throat,

And lull the flustering breezes into calm—

Together have we emulously sung

Of Hyacinthus, Daphne, and the rest,

Whose mortal weeds Apollo changed to flowers.

Also from him I have derived much aid

In golden ducats, which I fain would pay

Back with extremest usury, were but

Mine own convenience equal to my wish.

Moreover, of his poems he hath sold

Two full editions of a thousand each,

While mine remain neglected on the shelves!

Courage, Firmilian! for the hour has come

When thou canst know atrocity indeed,

By smiting him that was thy dearest friend.

And think not that he dies a vulgar death—

’Tis poetry demands the sacrifice!

Yet not to him be that revealment made.

He must not know with what a loving hand—

With what fraternal charity of heart

I do devote him to the infernal gods!

I dare not spare him one particular pang,

Nor make the struggle briefer! Hush—he comes.

HAVERILLO, _emerging from the staircase_.

How now, Firmilian!—I am scant of breath;

These steps have pumped the ether from my lungs,

And made the bead-drops cluster on my brow.

A strange, unusual rendezvous is this—

An old saint’s pillar, which no human foot

Hath scaled this hundred years!

FIRMILIAN.

Aye—it is strange!

HAVERILLO.

’Faith, sir, the bats considered it as such:

They seem to flourish in the column here,

And are not over courteous. Ha! I’m weary:

I shall sleep sound to-night.

FIRMILIAN.

You _shall_ sleep sound!

HAVERILLO.

Either there is an echo in the place,

Or your voice is sepulchral.

FIRMILIAN.

Seems it so?

HAVERILLO.

Come, come, Firmilian—Be once more a man!

Leave off these childish tricks, and vapours bred

Out of a too much pampered fantasy.

What are we, after all, but mortal men,

Who eat, drink, sleep, need raiment and the like,

As well as any jolterhead alive?

Trust me, my friend, we cannot feed on dreams,

Or stay the hungry cravings of the maw

By mere poetic banquets.

FIRMILIAN.

Say you so?

Yet have I heard that by some alchemy

(To me unknown as yet) you have transmuted

Your verses to fine gold.

HAVERILLO.

And all that gold

Was lent to you, Firmilian.

FIRMILIAN.

You expect,

Doubtless, I will repay you?

HAVERILLO.

So I do.

You told me yesterday to meet you here,

And you would pay me back with interest.

Here is the note.

FIRMILIAN.

A moment.—Do you see

Yon melon-vender’s stall down i’ the square?

Methinks the fruit that, close beside the eye,

Would show as largely as a giant’s head,

Is dwindled to a heap of gooseberries!

If Justice held no bigger scales than those

Yon pigmy seems to balance in his hands,

Her utmost fiat scarce would weigh a drachm!

How say you?

HAVERILLO.

Nothing—’tis a fearful height!

My brain turns dizzy as I gaze below,

And there’s a strange sensation in my soles.

FIRMILIAN.

Ay—feel you that? Ixion felt the same

Ere he was whirled from heaven!

HAVERILLO.

Firmilian!

You carry this too far. Farewell. We’ll meet

When you’re in better humour.

FIRMILIAN.

Tarry, sir!

I have you here, and thus we shall not part.

I know your meaning well. For that same dross,

That paltry ore of Mammon’s mean device

Which I, to honour you, stooped to receive,

You’d set the Alguazils on my heels!

What! have I read your thought? Nay, never shrink,

Nor edge towards the doorway! You’re a scholar!

How was’t with Phaeton?

HAVERILLO.

Alas! he’s mad.

Hear me, Firmilian! Here is the receipt—

Take it—I grudge it not! If ten times more,

It were at your sweet service.

FIRMILIAN.

Would you do

This kindness unto me?

HAVERILLO.

Most willingly.

FIRMILIAN.

Liar and slave! There’s falsehood in thine eye!

I read as clearly there, as in a book,

That, if I did allow you to escape,

In fifteen minutes you would seek the judge.

Therefore, prepare thee, for thou needs must die!

HAVERILLO.

Madman—stand off!

FIRMILIAN.

There’s but four feet of space

To spare between us. I’m not hasty, I!

Swans sing before their death, and it may be

That dying poets feel that impulse too:

Then, prythee, be canorous. You may sing

One of those ditties which have won you gold,

And my meek audience of the vapid strain

Shall count with Phœbus as a full discharge

For all your ducats. Will you not begin?

HAVERILLO.

Leave off this horrid jest, Firmilian!

FIRMILIAN.

Jest! ’Tis no jest! This pillar’s very high—

Shout, and no one can hear you from the square—

Wilt sing, I say?

HAVERILLO.

Listen, Firmilian!

I have a third edition in the press,

Whereof the proceeds shall be wholly thine—

Spare me!

FIRMILIAN.

A third edition! Atropos—

Forgive me that I tarried!

HAVERILLO.

Mercy!—Ah!—

[FIRMILIAN _hurls him from the column_.

There is a grand recklessness and savage energy displayed in this scene,

which greatly increases our admiration of the author’s abilities. He

seems, indeed, in the fair way of making the spasmodic school famous in

modern literature. With the death of Haverillo an ordinary writer would

have paused—not so Percy Jones, who, with a fine aptitude for

destruction, makes his hero, Firmilian, kill two birds with one stone.

The manner in which he accomplishes this feat is most ingenious. He

maintains the unity of the design by a very slight alteration of the

locality. Whilst the two poets are ominously conversing on the summit of

the pillar, a critic, affected by an intolerable itch for notoriety, is

prowling in the square beneath—

SQUARE BELOW THE PILLAR.

_Enter_ APOLLODORUS, _a Critic_.

Why do men call me a presumptuous cur,

A vapouring blockhead, and a turgid fool,

A common nuisance, and a charlatan?

I’ve dashed into the sea of metaphor

With as strong paddles as the sturdiest ship

That churns Medusæ into liquid light,

And hashed at every object in my way.

My ends are public. I have talked of men

As my familiars, whom I never saw.

Nay—more to raise my credit—I have penned

Epistles to the great ones of the land,

When some attack might make them slightly sore,

Assuring them, in faith, it was not I.

What was their answer? Marry—shortly this:

“Who, in the name of Zernebock, are you?”

I have reviewed myself incessantly—

Yea, made a contract with a kindred soul

For mutual interchange of puffery.

Gods—how we blew each other! But, ’tis past—

Those halcyon days are gone; and, I suspect,

That, in some fit of loathing or disgust,

Mine ancient playmate hath deserted me.

And yet I am Apollodorus still!

I search for genius, having it myself,

With keen and earnest longings. I survive

To disentangle, from the imping wings

Of our young poets, their crustaceous slough.

I watch them, as the watcher on the brook

Sees the young salmon wrestling from its egg,

And revels in its future bright career.

Ha! what seraphic melody is this?

_Enter_ SANCHO, _a Costermonger, singing_.

Down in the garden behind the wall,

Merrily grows the bright-green leek;

The old sow grunts as the acorns fall,

The winds blow heavy, the little pigs squeak.

One for the litter, and three for the teat—

Hark to their music, Juanna my sweet!

APOLLODORUS.

Now, heaven be thanked! here is a genuine bard,

A creature of high impulse, one unsoiled

By coarse conventionalities of rule.

He labours not to sing, for his bright thoughts

Resolve themselves at once into a strain

Without the aid of balanced artifice.

All hail, great poet!

SANCHO.

Save you, my merry master! Need you any leeks or onions? Here’s the

primest cauliflower, though I say it, in all Badajoz. Set it up at a

distance of some ten yards, and I’ll forfeit my ass if it does not look

bigger than the Alcayde’s wig. Or would these radishes suit your turn?

There’s nothing like your radish for cooling the blood and purging

distempered humours.

APOLLODORUS.

I do admire thy vegetables much,

But will not buy them. Pray you, pardon me

For one short word of friendly obloquy.

Is’t possible a being so endowed

With music, song, and sun-aspiring thoughts,

Can stoop to chaffer idly in the streets,

And, for a huckster’s miserable gain,

Renounce the urgings of his destiny?

Why, man, thine ass should be a Pegasus,

A sun-reared charger snorting at the stars,

And scattering all the Pleiads at his heels—

Thy cart should be an orient-tinted car,

Such as Aurora drives into the day,

What time the rosy-fingered Hours awake—

Thy reins—

SANCHO.

Lookye, master, I’ve dusted a better jacket than yours before now, so

you had best keep a civil tongue in your head. Once for all, will you

buy my radishes?

APOLLODORUS.

No!

SANCHO.

Then go to the devil and shake yourself!

[_Exit._

APOLLODORUS.

The foul fiend seize thee and thy cauliflowers!

I was indeed a most egregious ass

To take this lubber clodpole for a bard,

And worship that dull fool. Pythian Apollo!

Hear me—O hear! Towards the firmament

I gaze with longing eyes; and, in the name

Of millions thirsting for poetic draughts,

I do beseech thee, send a poet down!

Let him descend, e’en as a meteor falls,

Rushing at noonday——

[_He is crushed by the fall of the body of_ HAVERILLO.

We then find Firmilian wandering among the mountains, and lavishing a

superfluity of apostrophe upon the rocks, forests, and cataracts around

him. Whatever may be his moral deficiencies, we are constrained to admit

that he must have studied the phenomena of nature to considerable

purpose at the University of Badajoz, since he explains, in no fewer

than twelve pages of blank verse, the glacier theory, entreating his own

attention—for no one is with him—to the striated surface of rocks and

the forcible displacement of boulders. He then, by way of amusement,

works out a question in conic sections. But, notwithstanding these

exercitations, he is obviously not happy. He is still as far as ever

from his grand object, the thorough appreciation of remorse—for he can

assign a distinct moral motive for each atrocity which he has committed.

He at last reluctantly arrives at the conclusion that he is not the

party destined—

To shrine that page of history in song,

And utter such tremendous cadences,

That the mere babe who hears them at the breast,

_Sans_ comprehension, or the power of thought,

Shall be an idiot to its dying hour!

I deemed my verse would make pale Hecate’s orb

Grow wan and dark; and into ashes change

The radiant star-dust of the milky-way.

I deemed that pestilence, disease, and death

Would follow every strophe—for the power

Of a true poet, prophet as he is,

Should rack creation!

If this view of the powers of poets and poetry be correct, commend us to

the continuance of a lengthened period of prose!

Firmilian then begins to look about him for a new subject, and a new

course of initiative discipline. Magic first occurs to him—but he very

speedily abandons that idea, from a natural terror of facing the fiend,

and a wholesome dread of the Inquisition. He admits having made already

one or two experiments in that line, and narrates, with evident horror,

how he drew a chalk circle in his apartments, kindled a brazier, and

began an incantation, when suddenly a lurid light appeared in the

sockets of a skull upon the shelf, and so nearly threw him into

convulsions that he could barely mutter the exorcism. (It appears, from

another part of the poem, that this exploit had been detected by his

servant, a spy of the Inquisition, in consequence of his having

neglected to erase the cabalistic markings in chalk, and was of course

immediately reported.) At last he determines to fall back upon

sensuality, and to devote his unexampled talents to a grand poem upon

the amours of the Heathen deities. He states, with much show of truth,

that the tone of morals which an exclusively classical education is apt

to give, cannot but be favourable to an extensive and sublime erotic

undertaking—and that the youthful appetite, early stimulated by the

perusal of the Pantheon, and the works of Ovid, Juvenal, and Catullus,

will eagerly turn to anything in the vernacular which promises still

stronger excitement. We shall not venture, at the present, to apply

ourselves seriously to that question.

That Firmilian—for we shall not say Mr Percy Jones—was well qualified

for such an undertaking as he finally resolved to prosecute, must be

evident to every one who has perused the earliest extract we have given;

and we shall certainly hold ourselves excused from quoting the terms of

the course of study which he now proposes to himself. Seriously, it is

full time that the prurient and indecent tone which has liberally

manifested itself in the writings of the young spasmodic poets should be

checked. It is so far from occasional, that it has become a main feature

of their school; and in one production of the kind, most shamefully

bepuffed, the hero was represented as carrying on an intrigue with the

kept-mistress of Lucifer! If we do not comment upon more recent

instances of marked impurity, it is because we hope the offence will not

be repeated. Meantime, let us back to Firmilian.

As he approaches the catastrophe, we remark, with infinite

gratification, that Mr Percy Jones takes pains to show that he is not

personally identified with the opinions of his hero. Up to the point

which we have now reached, there has been nothing to convince us that

Jones did not intend Firmilian to be admired—but we are thankful to say

that before the conclusion we are undeceived. Jones, though quite as

spasmodic as the best of them, _has_ a sense of morals; and we do not

know that we ever read anything better, in its way, than the following

scene:—

A GARDEN.

FIRMILIAN. MARIANA.

FIRMILIAN.

My Mariana!

MARIANA.

O my beautiful!

My seraph love—my panther of the wild—

My moon-eyed leopard—my voluptuous lord!

O, I am sunk within a sea of bliss,

And find no soundings!

FIRMILIAN.

Shall I answer back?

As the great Earth lies silent all the night,

And looks with hungry longing on the stars,

Whilst its huge heart beats on its granite ribs

With measured pulsings of delirious joy—

So look I, Mariana, on thine eyes!

MARIANA.

Ah, dearest! wherefore are we fashioned thus?

I cannot always hang around thy neck

And plant vermilion kisses on thy brow;

I cannot clasp thee, as yon ivy bush—

Too happy ivy!—holds, from year to year,

The stalwart oak within her firm embrace,

Mixing her tresses fondly up with his,

Like some young Jewish maid with Absalom’s.

Nay, hold, Firmilian! do not pluck that rose!

FIRMILIAN.

Why not? it is a fair one.

MARIANA.

Are fair things

Made only to be plucked? O fie on thee!

I did not think my lord a libertine!

FIRMILIAN.

Yet, sweetest, with your leave I’ll take the rose,

For there’s a moral in it.—Look you here.

’Tis fair, and sweet, and in its clustered leaves

It carries balmy dew: a precious flower,

And vermeil-tinctured, as are Hebe’s lips.

Yet say, my Mariana, could you bear

To gaze for ever only upon this,

And fling the rest of Flora’s casket by?

MARIANA.

No, truly—I would bind it up with more,

And make a fitting posy for my breast.

If I were stinted in my general choice,

I’d crop the lily, tender, fresh, and white,—

The shrinking pretty lily—and would give

Its modest contrast to the gaudier rose.

What next? some flower that does not love the day—

The dark, full-scented night-stock well might serve

To join the other two.

FIRMILIAN.

A sweet selection!

Think’st thou they’d bloom together on one breast

With a united fragrance?

MARIANA.

Wherefore not?

It is by union that all things are sweet.

FIRMILIAN.

Thou speakest well! I joy, my Mariana,

To find thy spirit overleaps the pale

Of this mean world’s injurious narrowness!

Never did Socrates proclaim a truth

More beautiful than welled from out thy lips—

“It is by union that all things are sweet.”

Thou, darling, art my rose—my dewy rose—

The which I’ll proudly wear, but not alone.

Dost comprehend me?

MARIANA.

Ha! Firmilian—

How my eyes dazzle!

FIRMILIAN.

Let me show you now

The lily I have ta’en to bind with thee.

[_He brings_ LILIAN _from the summer-house_.

MARIANA.

Is this a jest, Firmilian?

FIRMILIAN.

Could I jest

With aught so fair and delicate as this?

Nay, come—no coyness! Both of you embrace.

Then to my heart of hearts—

MARIANA.

Soft you a moment!

Methinks the posy is not yet complete.

Say, for the sake of argument, I share

My rights with this pale beauty—(for she’s pretty;

Although so fragile and so frail a thing,

That a mere puff of April wind would mar her)—

Where is the night-stock?

FIRMILIAN _brings_ INDIANA _from the tool-house_.

Here!

MARIANA.

A filthy negress!

Abominable!

LILIAN.

Mercy on me! what blubber lips she has!

MARIANA, _furiously to_ FIRMILIAN.

You nasty thing! Is this your poetry—

Your high soul-scheming and philosophy?

I hate and loathe you! (_To Indiana_).—Rival of my shoe,

Go, get thee gone, and hide thee from the day

That loathes thine ebon skin! Firmilian—

You’ll hear of this! My brother serves the king.

LILIAN.

My uncle is the chief Inquisitor,

And he shall know of this ere curfew tolls!

What! Shall I share a husband with a coal?

MARIANA.

Right, girl! I love thee even for that word—

The Inquisition makes most rapid work,

And, in its books, that caitiff’s name is down!

FIRMILIAN.

Listen one moment! When I was a babe,

And in my cradle puling for my nurse,

There fell a gleam of glory on the floor,

And in it, darkly standing, was a form—

MARIANA.

A negress, probably! Farewell awhile—

When next we meet—the faggot and the pile!

Come, Lilian!

[_Exeunt._

INDIANA.

I shake from head to foot with sore affright—

What will become of me?

FIRMILIAN.

Who cares? Good night!

[_Scene closes._

Bravo, Percy! The first part of that scene is managed with a dexterity

which old Dekker might have applauded, and the conclusion shows a

perfect knowledge of womanly character and feeling. Firmilian is now

cast beyond the pale of society, and in imminent danger, if apprehended,

of taking a conspicuous part in an _auto-da-fé_. An author of inferior

genius would probably have consigned him to the custody of the

Familiars, in which case we should have had a dungeon and rack scene, if

not absolute incremation as the catastrophe. But Jones knew better. He

felt that such a cruel fate might, by the effect of contrast, revive

some kind of sympathy in the mind of the reader for Firmilian, and he

has accordingly adopted the wiser plan of depicting him as the victim of

his own haunted imagination. The closing scene is so eminently graphic,

and so perfectly original, that we give it entire.

A BARREN MOOR.

_Night—Mist and fog._

_Enter_ FIRMILIAN.

They’re hot upon my traces! Through the mist

I heard their call and answer—and but now,

As I was crouching ’neath a hawthorn bush,

A dark Familiar swiftly glided by,

His keen eyes glittering with the lust of death.

If I am ta’en, the faggot and the pile

Await me! Horror! Rather would I dare,

Like rash Empedocles, the Etna gulf,

Than writhe before the slaves of bigotry.

Where am I? If my mind deceives me not,

Upon that common where, two years ago,

An old blind beggar came and craved an alms,

Thereby destroying a stupendous thought

Just bursting in my mind—a glorious bud

Of poesy, but blasted ere its bloom!

I bade the old fool take the leftward path,

Which leads to the deep quarry, where he fell—

At least I deem so, for I heard a splash—

But I was gazing on the gibbous moon,

And durst not lower my celestial flight

To care for such an insect-worm as he!

How cold it is! The mist comes thicker on.

Ha!—what is that? I see around me lights

Dancing and flitting, yet they do not seem

Like torches either—and there’s music too!

I’ll pause and listen.

_Chorus of_ IGNES FATUI.

Follow, follow, follow!

Over hill and over hollow;

It is ours to lead the way,

When a sinner’s footsteps stray—

Cheering him with light and song,

On his doubtful path along.

Hark, hark! The watch-dogs bark.

There’s a crash, and a splash, and a blind man’s cry,

But the Poet looks tranquilly up at the sky!

FIRMILIAN.

Is it the echo of an inward voice,

Or spirit-words that make my flesh to creep,

And send the cold blood choking to my heart?

I’ll shift my ground a little—

_Chorus of_ IGNES FATUI.

Flicker, flicker, flicker!

Quicker still, and quicker.

Four young men sate down to dine,

And still they passed the rosy wine;

Pure was the cask, but in the flask

There lay a certain deadly powder—

Ha! his heart is beating louder!

Ere the day had passed away,

Garcia Perez lifeless lay!

Hark! his mother wails Alphonzo,

Never more shall strong Alonzo

Drink the wine of Ildefronso!

FIRMILIAN.

O horror! horror! ’twas by me they died!

I’ll move yet farther on—

_Chorus of_ IGNES FATUI.

In the vaults under

Bursts the red thunder;

Up goes the cathedral,

Priest, people, and bedral!

Ho! ho! ho! ho!

FIRMILIAN.

My brain is whirling like a potter’s wheel!

O Nemesis!

_Chorus of_ IGNES FATUI.

The Muses sing in their charmed ring,

And Apollo weeps for him who sleeps,

Alas! on a hard and a stony pillow—

Haverillo! Haverillo!

FIRMILIAN.

I shall go mad!

_Chorus of_ IGNES FATUI.

Give him some respite—give him some praise—

One good deed he has done in his days;

Chaunt it, and sing it, and tell it in chorus—

He has flattened the cockscomb of Apollodorus!

FIRMILIAN.

Small comfort that! The death of a shard-beetle,

Albeit the poorest and the paltriest thing

That crawls round refuse, cannot weigh a grain

Against the ponderous avalanche of guilt

That hangs above me! O me miserable!

I’ll grope my way yet further.

_Chorus of_ IGNES FATUI.

Firmilian! Firmilian!

What have you done to Lilian?

There a cry from the grotto, a sob by the stream,

A woman’s loud wailing, a little babe’s scream!

How fared it with Lilian,

In the pavilion,

Firmilian, Firmilian?

FIRMILIAN.

Horror! I’m lost!—

_Chorus of_ IGNES FATUI.

Ho! ho! ho!

Deep in the snow

Lies a black maiden from Africa’s shore!

Hasten, and shake her—

You never shall wake her—

She’ll roam through the glens of the Atlas no more!

Stay, stay, stay!

This way—this way—

There’s a pit before, and a pit behind,

And the seeing man walks in the path of the blind!

[FIRMILIAN _falls into the quarry. The_ IGNES FATUI _dance as the

curtain descends_.

And so ends the tragedy of Firmilian.

It is rather difficult to give a serious opinion upon the merits of such

a production as this. It is, of course, utterly extravagant; but so are

the whole of the writings of the poets of the Spasmodic school; and, in

the eyes of a considerable body of modern critics, extravagance is

regarded as a proof of extraordinary genius. It is, here and there,

highly coloured; but that also is looked upon as a symptom of the divine

afflatus, and rather prized than otherwise. In one point of proclaimed

spasmodic excellence, perhaps it fails. You can always tell what Percy

Jones is after, even when he is dealing with “shuddering stars,”

“gibbous moons,” “imposthumes of hell,” and the like; whereas you may

read through twenty pages of the more ordinary stuff without being able

to discern what the writers mean—and no wonder, for they really mean

nothing. They are simply writing nonsense-verses; but they contrive, by

blazing away whole rounds of metaphor, to mask their absolute poverty of

thought, and to convey the impression that there must be something

stupendous under so heavy a canopy of smoke. If, therefore,

intelligibility, which is the highest degree of obscurity, is to be

considered a poetic excellence, we are afraid that Jones must yield the

palm to several of his contemporaries; if, on the contrary, perspicuity

is to be regarded as a virtue, we do not hesitate in assigning the

spasmodic prize to the author of _Firmilian_. To him the old lines on

Marlowe, with the alteration of the name, might be applied—

“Next Percy Jones, bathed in the Thespian Springs,

Had in him those brave sublunary Things

That your first Poets had; his Raptures were

All Air and Fire, which made his Verses clear;

For that fierce Madness still he did retain,

Which rightly should possess a Poet’s Brain.”

THE QUIET HEART.

PART THE LAST.—CHAPTER XXXI.

Courage, Menie Laurie! Heaven does not send this breeze upon your cheek

for nought—does not raise about you these glorious limits of hill and

cloud in vain. Look through the distance—look steadily. Yes, it is the

white gable of Crofthill looking down upon the countryside. Well, never

veil your eyes—are you not at peace with them as with all the world?

Little Jessie here wearies where you have left her waiting, and trembles

to move a finger lest she spoil the mysterious picture at which she

glances furtively with awe and wonder. “The lady just looks at me,” says

little Jessie; “no a thing mair. Just looks, and puts it a’ doun like

writing on a sclate.” And Jessie cannot understand the magic which

by-and-by brings out her own little bright sun-burnt face, from that

dull canvass which had not a line upon it when Jessie saw it first.

Come to your work, Menie Laurie; they make your heart faint these

wistful looks and sighs. No one doubts it is very heavy—very heavy—this

poor heart; no one doubts it is full of yearnings—full of anxious

thought and fears, and solitude. What then!—must we leave it to brood

upon its trouble? Come to little Jessie here, and her picture—find out

the very soul in these surprised sweet eyes—paint the loveliest little

heart upon your canvass, fresh and fair out of the hands of God—such a

face as will warm cold hearts, and teach them histories of joyous

sacrifice—of love that knows no evil—of life that remembers self last

and least of all. You said it first in bitterness and sore distress;

but, nevertheless, it is true. You can do it, Menie. It is “the trade”

to which you were born.

And with a long sigh of weariness Menie comes back. No, it is not a very

fine picture; the execution is a woman’s execution, very likely no great

thing in the way your critics judge; but one can see how very like it

is, looking at these little simple features—one could see it was still

more like, looking in to the child’s sweet generous heart.

“What were you crying for this morning, Jessie?”

A cloud came over the little face—a mighty inclination to cry again; but

Jessie glanced at the picture once more, and swallowed down her grief,

feeling herself a very guilty Jessie, as one great blob of a tear fell

upon her arm.

“It wasna little Davie’s blame—it was a’ me.” Poor little culprit, she

dares not hang her head for terror of that picture. “He was paidling in

the burn—and his new peeny ga’e a great screed, catching on the auld

saughtree; but it wasna his blame—he’s owre wee—it was a’ mine for no

looking after him. Just, I was awfu’ busy; but that’s nae excuse—and my

mother ga’e Davie his licks, for a’ I could say.”

Another great tear; no one knows so well what an imp this said little

Davie is—but Jessie sighs again. “It was a’ me.”

But it is not this little cloud of childish trouble that throws a

something of pensive sadness into Jessie’s pictured face. The face is

the face before you; but the atmosphere, Menie Laurie, is in your own

heart. Something sad—touched with that sweet pathos which lies on the

surface of all great depths—and this true picture grows under Menie’s

hand to a heroic child.

It is a strange place for an artist to be. From this dark raftered

threatening roof which catches your first glance, you look down to the

mother by the fire with her unpretending look of gentlewoman—to the

daughter’s graceful head bending over her work—to pretty little Jessie

here with her flutter of extreme stillness, looking at the grey walls

and sober thatch without. You would never think to surprise such a group

within; and yet, when you look at them again, there is something of

nobleness in the primitive cottage where these women have come to live

independent and unpitied—come down in the world—very true; but it would

be hard to presume upon the tenants of this wayside house.

You need not fear to enter, little July. Half-weeping, blushing,

trembling, and with all these beseeching deprecations of yours, you may

come in boldly at this narrow entrance. “It is no blame of hers, poor

bairn,” Mrs Laurie says, with a little sigh. No blame of hers nor of

Randall’s either, for Menie has kept her secret religiously, and will

never tell to mortal ear what broke her engagement. Nelly Panton knows

it, it is true; but Nelly, with the obtuse comprehension of a mercenary

mind, thinks Randall broke off the match in consequence of Mrs Laurie’s

poverty, and knows of no more delicate difficulties behind. Come in

boldly, July Home—for no manner of interpretation could disclose to you

the sudden pang which seizes Menie as she bends her head down for an

instant, when she discovers you at the door. Now she says nothing, as

she holds out her hand; but Menie is busy; it is only her left hand she

extends to her friend; that is why she does not speak.

“I’m not to come out again,” whispers July, sitting back into Mrs

Laurie’s shadow, and speaking under her breath. “I came here the very

last place—and oh, Menie, will you come?”

The colour mounts high to Menie’s temples; this means, will she come to

July’s marriage, which is to happen a week hence. Will she be there?

Some one else will be there, the thought of whose coming makes Menie’s

heart beat strong and loud against her breast. But Menie only shakes her

head in reply—shakes her head and says steadily, “No.”

“You might come, for me. I never had a friend but you, and you’ve aye

been good to me. Mrs Laurie, she might come?”

But Mrs Laurie too, after quite a different fashion, shakes her head

with a look of regret—of only partial comprehension, but unmistakable

solicitude. “No,” she says, doubtfully; “I do not see how Menie could

go;” but, as she speaks, she looks at Menie, with an eager wish that she

would.

Courage, Menie Laurie! If your hand falters, they will see it; if a

single tear of all this unshed agony bursts forth, your mother’s heart

will be overwhelmed with pain and wonder—your little friend’s with

dismay. This is best—to look at the child and go on—though little Jessie

has much ado to keep from weeping when she meets, with her startled

face, the great gloom and darkness of Menie’s eye.

“This is from Menie and me,” said Mrs Laurie, taking out a pretty ring.

“You are to wear it for our sake, July. Menie, can you put it on?”

Yes—Menie takes the little trembling hand within her own, and fits her

mother’s present to a slender finger—and no one knows how Menie presses

her own delicate ankle under her chair, to keep herself steady by the

pain. “You must try to be very happy, July,” says Menie, with a faint

smile, holding the hand a moment in her own; then she lets it drop, and

turns to her work once more.

What can July do but cry? She does cry, poor little trembling heart,

very abundantly, and would fain whisper a hundred hesitations and

terrors into Menie’s ear. But there is nothing of encouragement in

Menie’s face—so steady and grave, and calm as it looks. The little bride

does not dare to pour forth her innocent confidences—but only whispers

again, “I never had another friend but you, and you were aye so good to

me;” and weeps a flood of half-joyful, half-despairing tears, out of her

very heart.

CHAPTER XXXII.

“No one can doubt that Randall is unhappy; but Randall is not a humble

man, Mrs Laurie; he will not woo and plead and supplicate, I am afraid;

he will honour only those who honour him, and never obtrude his love

where he thinks there is no response. You know them both—could anything

be done?”

Alas! good Johnnie Lithgow, we are all proud. This is not the wisest

line of attack, in the circumstances. Mrs Laurie sits gravely by the

fireside to listen. Mrs Laurie was Mrs Laurie before Randall Home was

born. It is wonderful how she recollects this; and, recollecting, it is

not difficult to see which of the two, in the opinion of Menie’s mother,

has the best right to stand on their dignity.

“I cannot advise,” said Mrs Laurie somewhat coldly. “Menie has made no

explanation to me. Mr Home has not addressed me at all on the subject. I

am sorry I cannot suggest anything—especially when I have to take into

consideration the lofty ideas of your friend.”

It was a little bitter this. Lithgow felt himself chilled by it, and she

saw it herself immediately; but Mrs Laurie said no word of atonement,

till a sudden recollection of Menie’s strangely altered and sobered fate

broke upon her. Her countenance changed—her voice softened.

“I would be glad to do anything,” she said, with a slight faltering. “To

make Menie happy, I could accept any sacrifice. I will see—I will try.

No,” she continued, after a considerable pause, “I was right after

all—your friend is what you call him. My Menie has a very high spirit,

and in this matter is not to be controlled by me. They must be left to

themselves—it is the wisest way.”

Lithgow made no answer. Mrs Laurie sank into silence and thought. As

they sat opposite to each other by the little fireplace, the young man’s

eye wandered over the room. His own birthplace and home was such another

cottage as this; and Lithgow’s mother, with her homely gown and check

apron—her constant occupation about the house—her peasant tastes and

looks and habits, was suitable and homogeneous to the earthen floor and

rude hearth of the cottars’ only room. But very strangely out of place

was Menie’s easel—Menie’s desk—Mrs Laurie’s delicate basket of work—her

easy-chair and covered table; strangely out of place, but not

ungracefully—bearing, wherever they might be, a natural seemliness and

fitness of their own. And if a rapid cloud of offence—a vapour of pride

and resentment, might glide over Mrs Laurie’s brow, it was never shaded

by so much as a momentary shame. As undisturbed in her household dignity

as at her most prosperous time, she received her visitor in the

cot-house, nor ever dreamt she had cause to be ashamed of such an

evidence of her diminished fortunes.

But Lithgow’s thoughts were full of Randall; he was not willing to give

up his attempt to reconcile them. “Randall is working very hard,” said

his generous fellow-craftsman. “I think his second success will lift him

above all thought of hazard. He does his genius wrong by such

unnecessary caution; he could not produce a commonplace thing if he

would.”

“And you, Mr Lithgow”—Mrs Laurie’s heart warmed to him, plebeian though

he was.

“I do my day’s work,” said the young man, happily, “thanking God that it

is very sufficient for the needs of the day; but between Randall and

myself there is no comparison. I deal with common topics, common

manners, common events, like any other labouring man. But Randall is an

artist of the loftiest class. What he does is for generations to come,

no less than for to-day.”

This enthusiasm threw a flush upon his face. As it receded, gradually

fading from his forehead, a quick footstep went away from the cottage

threshold. Menie Laurie had paused to listen whose the voice was before

she entered, and, pausing, had heard all he had to say.

The happy golden purple of the sunset has melted from Criffel and his

brother hills; but there is a pale light about all the east, whither

Menie Laurie’s face is turned as she leaves the cottage door. From her

rapid step, you would fancy she was going somewhere. Where will she go?

Nowhither, poor heart—only into the night a little—into the silence. It

would not be possible to sit still in that noiseless house, by that

lonely fireside, with such a tumult and commotion in this loud throbbing

heart—forcing up its rapid cadence into the ears that thrill with

sympathetic pulses—leaping to the very lips that grow so parched and

faint. Oh! for the din of streets, of storms, the violence of crowds and

noise of life—anything to drown this greater violence, these strong

perpetual throbs that beat upon the brain like hailstones—anything to

deaden this.

But all the air remains so still—so still; not a sound upon the silent

road, but the heart and the footsteps, so rapid and irregular, which

keep each other time. But by-and-by, as Menie goes upon her aimless way,

another sound does break the silence—voices in the air—the sound of

wheels and of a horse’s feet. Listen, Menie—voices in the air!

But Menie will not listen—does not believe there are voices in the world

which could wake her interest now—and so, unconsciously, looks up as

this vehicle dashes past—looks up, to receive—what? The haughty

salutation—uncovered brow and bending head, of Randall Home.

She would fain have caught at the hedge for a support; but he might look

back and see her, and Menie hurried on. She had seen him; they had

looked again into each other’s eyes. “I never said I was indifferent,”

sobbed Menie to herself, and, in spite of herself, her voice took a

shriller tone of passion—her tears came upon her in an agony. “I never

said I was indifferent; it would have been a lie.”

Hush!—be calm. It is safe to sit down by the roadside on this turf,

which is unsullied by the dust of these passing wheels;—safe to sit

down, and let the flood have vent, once and never more. And the soft

whispering air comes stealing about Menie, with all its balmy gentle

touches, like a troop of fairy comforters; and the darkness comes down

with gracious speed, to hide her as she crouches, with her head upon her

hands, overcome and mastered;—once, and never more.

Now it is night. Yonder the lights are glimmering faintly in the cottage

windows of the Brigend. Far away above the rest, shines a little speck

of light from the high window of Burnside, where once was Menie Laurie’s

chamber—her land of meditation, her sanctuary of dreams. The wind

rustles among the firs—the ash-trees hold up their bare white arms

towards the heavens, waiting till this sweet star, lingering at the

entrance of their arch, shall lead her followers through, like children

in their dance. And—hush!—suddenly, like a bird new awaked, the burn

throws out its voice upon the air, something sad. The passion is

overpast. Look up, Menie Laurie; you are not among strangers. The hills

and the heavens stretch out arms to embrace you; the calm of this great

night, God’s minister, comes to your heart. Other thoughts—and noble

ones—stretch out helping hands to you like angels. Rise up; many a hope

remains in the world, though this one be gone for ever.

And Menie, rising, returns upon her way—away from Burnside, her old

beloved home, and, going, questions with herself if aught is changed

since she made the bitter and painful decision which in her heart she

thought it right to make. Nothing is changed—the severance has been

made—the shock is over. At first we knew it would be very hard; at first

we thought of nothing but despair. We never took into our calculation

the oft-returning memories—the stubborn love, that will not be slain at

a blow; and this it is that has mastered mind and heart and resolution

now.

There is no one else upon the road. The night, and the hills, and Menie

Laurie, look up through the silence to heaven—and no one knows the

conflict that is waging—none is here with human voice or hand to help

the struggle. Fought and won—lie still in her religious breast, oh

heart! Fittest way to win your quiet back again, Menie Laurie has laid

you down—come good or evil, come peace or contest—laid you down once for

all at the feet of God.