"Edina! Scotia's darling seat!
All hail thy palaces and towers!"--BURNS.
There had occurred a sad accident among the Cromarty rocks this season,
when I was labouring in Gairloch, which, from the circumstance that it
had nearly taken place in my own person about five years before, a good
deal impressed me on my return. A few hundred yards from the very bad
road which I had assisted old Johnstone of the Forty-Second in
constructing, there is a tall inaccessible precipice of ferruginous
gneiss, that from time immemorial down to this period had furnished a
secure nestling-place to a pair of ravens--the only birds of their
species that frequented the rocks of the Hill. Year after year,
regularly as the breeding season came round, the ravens used to make
their appearance, and enter on possession of their hereditary home: they
had done so for a hundred years, to a certainty--some said, for a much
longer time; and as there existed a tradition in the place that the nest
had once been robbed of its young birds by a bold climber, I paid it a
visit one morning, in order to determine whether I could not rob it too.
There was no getting up to it from below: the precipice, more
inaccessible for about a hundred feet from its base than a castle wall,
overhung the shore; but it seemed not impracticable from above; and,
coming gradually down upon it, availing myself, as I crept along, of
every little protuberance and hollow, I at length stood within six or
eight feet of the young birds. From that point, however, a smooth shelf,
without projection or cavity, descended at an angle of about forty to
the nest, and terminated abruptly, without ledge or margin, in the
overhanging precipice. Have I not, I asked, crept along a roof of even a
steeper slope than that of the shelf? Why not, in like manner, creep
along it to the nest, where there is firm footing? I had actually
stretched out my naked foot to take the first step, when I observed, as
the sun suddenly broke out from behind a cloud, that the light glistened
on the smooth surface. It was incrusted over by a thin layer of
chlorite, slippery as the mixture of soap and grease that the
ship-carpenter spreads over his slips on the morning of a launch. I at
once saw there was an element of danger in the way, on which I had at
first failed to calculate; and so, relinquishing the attempt as
hopeless, I returned by the path I had come, and thought no more of
robbing the raven's nest. It was, however, again attempted this season,
but with tragic results, by a young lad from Sutherland, named Mackay,
who had previously approved his skill as a cragsman in his native
county, and several times secured the reward given by an Agricultural
Society for the destruction of young birds of prey. As the incident was
related to me, he had approached the nest by the path which I had
selected; he had paused where I had paused, and even for a longer time;
and then, venturing forward, he no sooner committed himself to the
treacherous chlorite, than, losing footing as if on a steep sheet of
ice, he shot right over the precipice. Falling sheer for the first fifty
feet or so without touching the rock, he was then turned full round by a
protuberance against which he had glanced, and, descending for the lower
half of the way head foremost, and dashing with tremendous force among
the smooth sea-stones below, his brains were scattered over an area of
from ten to twelve square yards in extent. His only companion--an
ignorant Irish lad--had to gather up the fragments of his head in a
napkin.
I now felt that, save for the gleam of the sun on the glistening
chlorite--seen not a moment too soon--I should probably have been
substituted as the victim for poor Mackay, and that he, warned by my
fate, would in all likelihood have escaped. And though I knew it might
be asked, Why the interposition of a Providence to save _you_, when he
was left to perish? I _did_ feel that I did not owe my escape merely to
my acquaintance with chlorite and its properties. For the full
development of the moral instincts of our nature, one may lead a life by
much too quiet and too secure: a sprinkling in one's lot of sudden
perils and hair-breadth escapes is, I am convinced, more wholesome, if
positive superstition be avoided, than a total absence of danger. For my
own part, though I have, I trust, ever believed in the doctrine of a
particular Providence, it has been always some narrow escape that has
given me my best evidences of the vitality and strength of the belief
within. It has ever been the touch of danger that has rendered it
emotional. A few years after this time, when stooping forward to examine
an opening fissure in a rock front, at which I was engaged in quarrying,
a stone, detached from above by a sudden gust of wind, brushed so
closely past my head as to beat down the projecting front of my bonnet,
and then dented into a deep hollow the sward at my feet. There was
nothing that was not perfectly natural in the occurrence; but the gush
of acknowledgment that burst spontaneously from my heart would have set
at nought the scepticism which should have held that there was no
Providence in it. On another occasion, I paused for some time, when
examining a cave of the old-coast line, directly under its low-browed
roof of Old Red conglomerate, as little aware of the presence of danger
as if I had been standing under the dome of St. Paul's; but when I next
passed the way, the roof had fallen, and a mass, huge enough to have
given me at once death and burial, cumbered the spot which I had
occupied. On yet another occasion, I clambered a few yards down a
precipice, to examine some crab-apple trees, which, springing from a
turret-like projection of the rock, far from gardens and nurseries, had
every mark of being indigenous; and then, climbing up among the
branches, I shook them in a manner that must have exerted no small
leverage power on the outjet beneath, to possess myself of some of the
fruit, as the native apples of Scotland. On my descent, I marked,
without much thinking of the matter, an apparently recent crack running
between the outjet and the body of the precipice. I found, however,
cause enough to think of it on my return, scarce a month after; for then
both outjet and trees lay broken and fractured on the beach more than a
hundred feet below. With such momentum had even the slimmer twigs been
dashed against the sea-pebbles, that they stuck out from under more than
a hundred tons of fallen rock, divested of the bark on their under
sides, as if peeled by the hand. And what I felt on all these occasions
was, I believe, not more in accordance with the nature of man as an
instinct of the moral faculty, than in agreement with that provision of
the Divine Government under which a sparrow falleth not without
permission. There perhaps never was a time in which the doctrine of a
particular Providence was more questioned and doubted than in the
present; and yet the scepticism which obtains regarding it seems to be
very much a scepticism of effort, conjured up by toiling intellects, in
a quiet age, and among the easy classes; while the belief which,
partially and for the time, it overshadows, lies safely entrenched all
the while amid the fastnesses of the unalterable nature of man. When
danger comes to touch it, it will spring up in its old proportions; nay,
so indigenous is it to the human heart, that if it will not take its
_cultivated_ form as a belief in Providence, it will to a certainty take
to it its _wild_ form as a belief in Fate or Destiny. Of a doctrine so
fundamentally important that there can be no religion without it, God
himself seems to have taken care when he moulded the human heart.
The raven no longer builds among the rocks of the Hill of Cromarty; and
I saw many years ago its last pair of eagles. This last noble bird was a
not unfrequent visitor of the Sutors early in the present century. I
still remember scaring it from its perch on the southern side of the
hill, as day was drawing to a close, when the tall precipices amid which
it had lodged lay deep in the shade; and vividly recollect how
picturesquely it used to catch the red gleam of evening on its plumage
of warm brown, as, sailing outwards over the calm sea many hundred feet
below, it emerged from under the shadow of the cliffs into the sunshine.
Uncle James once shot a very large eagle beneath one of the loftiest
precipices of the southern Sutor; and, swimming out through the surf to
recover its body--for it had dropped dead into the sea--he kept its skin
for many years as a trophy.[6] But eagles are now no longer to lie seen
or shot on the Sutors or their neighbourhood. The badger, too--one of
perhaps the oldest inhabitants of the country, for it seems to have been
contemporary with the extinct elephants and hyaenas of the Pleistocene
periods--has become greatly less common on their steep sides than in the
days of my boyhood; and both the fox and otter are less frequently seen.
It is not uninteresting to mark with the eye of the geologist, how
palpably in the course of a single lifetime--still nearly twenty years
short of the term fixed by the Psalmist--these wild animals have been
posting on in Scotland to that extinction which overtook, within its
precincts, during the human period, the bear, the beaver, and the wolf,
and of which the past history of the globe, as inscribed on its rocks,
furnishes so strong a record.
Winter passed in the usual pursuits; and I commenced the working season
of a new year by assisting my old master to inclose with a stone wall a
little bit of ground, which he had bought on speculation, but had failed
in getting feued out for buildings. My services, however, were
gratuitous--given merely to eke out the rather indifferent bargain that
the old man had been able to drive in his own behalf for my labours as
an apprentice; and when our job was finished, it became necessary that I
should look out for employment of a more profitable character. There was
not much doing in the north; but work promised to be abundant in the
great towns of the south: the disastrous building mania of 1824-25 had
just begun, and, after some little hesitation, I resolved on trying
whether I could not make my way as a mechanic among the stone-cutters of
Edinburgh perhaps the most skilful in their profession in the world. I
was, besides, desirous to get rid of a little property in Leith, which
had cost the family great annoyance, and not a little money, but from
which, so long as the nominal proprietor was a minor, we could not shake
ourselves loose. It was a house on the Coal-hill, or rather the
self-contained ground-floor of a house, which had fallen to my father
through the death of a relative, so immediately before his own death
that he had not entered upon possession. It was burdened with legacies
to the amount of nearly two hundred pounds; but then the yearly rent
amounted to twenty-four pounds; and my mother, acting on the advice of
friends, and deeming the investment a good one, had no sooner recovered
the insurance-money of my father's vessel from the underwriter, than she
handed the greater part of it to the legatees, and took possession of
the property in my behalf. Alas! never was there a more unfortunate
inheritance or worse investment. It had been let as a public-house and
tap-room, and had been the scene of a somewhat rough, and, I daresay,
not very respectable, but yet profitable trade; but no sooner had it
become mine than, in consequence of some alterations in the harbour, the
greater part of the shipping that used to lie at the Coal-hill removed
to a lower reach; the tap-room business suddenly fell off; and the rent
sank, during the course of one twelvemonth, from twenty-four to twelve
pounds. And then in its sear and wintry state, the unhappy house came to
be inhabited by a series of miserable tenants, who, though they
sanguinely engaged to pay the twelve pounds, never paid them. I still
remember the brief, curt letters from our agent, the late Mr. Veitch,
town-clerk of Leith, that never failed to fill my mother with terror and
dismay, and very much resembled, in at least the narrative parts,
jottings by the poet Crabbe, for some projected poem on the profligate
poor. Two of our tenants made moonlight flittings just on the eve of the
term; and though the little furniture which they left behind them was
duly rouped at the cross, such was the inevitable expense of the
transaction, that none of the proceeds of the sale reached Cromarty. The
house was next inhabited by a stout female, who kept a certain
description of lady-lodgers; and for the first half-year she paid the
rent most conscientiously; but the authorities interfering, there was
another house found for her and her ladies in the neighbourhood of the
Calton, and the rent of the second half-year remained unpaid. And as the
house lost, in consequence of her occupation, the modicum of character
which it had previously retained, it lay for five years wholly
untenanted, save by a mischievous spirit--the ghost, it was said, of a
murdered gentleman, whose throat had been cut in an inner apartment by
the ladies, and his body flung by night into the deep mud of the
harbour. The ghost was, however, at length detected by the police,
couching in the form of one of the ladies themselves, on a lair of straw
in the corner of one of the rooms, and exorcised into Bridewell; and
then the house came to be inhabited by a tenant who had both the will
and the ability to pay. One year's rent, however, had to be expended in
repairs; and ere the next year passed, the heritors of the parish were
rated for the erection of the magnificent parish church of North Leith,
then in course of building, with its tall and graceful spire and classic
portico; and as we had no one to state our case, our house was rated,
not according to its reduced, but according to its original value. And
so the entire rental of the second year, with several pounds additional
which I had to subtract from my hard-earned savings as a mason, were
appropriated in behalf of the ecclesiastical Establishment of the
country, by the builders of the church and spire. I had attained my
majority when lodging in the fragment of a salt storehouse in Gairloch;
and, competent in the eye of the law to dispose of the house on the
Coal-hill, I now hoped to find, if not a purchaser, at least some one
foolish enough to take it off my hands for nothing. I have since heard
and read a good deal about the atrocious landlords of the poorer and
less reputable sort of houses in our large towns, and have seen it
asserted that, being a bad and selfish kind of people, they ought to be
rigorously dealt with. And so, I daresay, they ought; but at the same
time I cannot forget, that I myself was one of these atrocious landlords
from my fifth till nearly my twenty-second year, and that I could not
possibly help it, and was very sorry for it.
On the fourth day after losing sight of the Hill of Cromarty, the Leith
smack in which I sailed was slowly threading her way, in a morning of
light airs and huge broken fog-wreaths, through the lower tracts of the
Firth of Forth. The islands and distant land looked dim and grey through
the haze, like objects in an unfinished drawing; and at times some vast
low-browed cloud from the sea applied the sponge as it rolled past, and
blotted out half a county at a time; but the sun occasionally broke
forth in partial glimpses of great beauty, and brought out into bold
relief little bits of the landscape--now a town, and now an islet, and
anon the blue summit of a hill. A sunlit wreath rose from around the
abrupt and rugged Bass as we passed; and my heart leaped within me as I
saw, for the first time, that stern Patmos of the devout and brave of
another age looming dark and high through the diluted mist, and
enveloped for a moment, as the cloud parted, in an amber-tinted glory.
There had been a little Presbyterian oasis of old in the neighbourhood
of Cromarty, which, in the midst of the Highland and _Moderate_
indifferency that characterized the greater part of the north of
Scotland during the seventeenth century, had furnished the Bass with not
a few of its most devoted victims. Mackilligen of Alness, Hogg of
Kiltearn, and the Rosses of Tain and Kincardine, had been incarcerated
in its dungeons; and, when labouring in the Cromarty quarries in early
spring, I used to know that it was time to gather up my tools for the
evening, when I saw the sun resting over the high-lying farm which
formed the patrimony of another of its better-known victims--young
Fraser of Brea. And so I looked with a double interest on the bold
sea-girt rock, and the sun-gilt cloud that rose over its scared
forehead, like that still brighter halo which glorifies it in the
memories of the Scottish people. Many a long-cherished association drew
my thoughts to Edinburgh. I was acquainted with Ramsay, and Fergusson,
and the "Humphrey Clinker" of Smollett, and had read a description of
the place in the "Marmion" and the earlier novels of Scott; and I was
not yet too old to feel as if I were approaching a great magical
city--like some of those in the "Arabian Nights"--that was even more
intensely poetical than Nature itself. I did somewhat chide the
tantalizing mist, that, like a capricious showman, now raised one corner
of its curtain, and anon another, and showed me the place at once very
indistinctly, and only by bits at a time; and yet I know not that I
could in reality have seen it to greater advantage, or after a mode
more in harmony with my previous conceptions. The water in the harbour
was too low, during the first hour or two after our arrival, to float
our vessel, and we remained tacking in the roadstead, watching for the
signal from the pier-head which was to intimate to us when the tide had
risen high enough for our admission; and so I had sufficient time given
me to con over the features of the scene, as presented in detail. At one
time a flat reach of the New Town came full into view, along which, in
the general dimness, the multitudinous chimneys stood up like stacks of
corn in a field newly reaped; at another, the Castle loomed out dark in
the cloud; then, as if suspended over the earth, the rugged summit of
Arthur's Seat came strongly out, while its base still remained invisible
in the wreath; and anon I caught a glimpse of the distant Pentlands,
enveloped by a clear blue sky, and lighted up by the sun. Leith, with
its thicket of masts, and its tall round Tower, lay deep in shade in the
foreground--a cold, dingy, ragged town, but so strongly relieved against
the pale smoky grey of the background, that it seemed another little
city of Zoar, entire in front of the burning. And such was the strangely
picturesque countenance with which I was favoured by the Scottish
capital, when forming my earliest acquaintance with it, twenty-nine
years ago.
It was evening ere I reached it. The fog of the early part of the day
had rolled off, and every object stood out in clear light and shade
under a bright sunshiny sky. The workmen of the place--their labours
just closed for the day--were passing in groups along the streets to
their respective homes; but I was too much engaged in looking at the
buildings and shops to look very discriminately at them; and it was not
without some surprise that I found myself suddenly laid hold of by one
of their number, a slim lad, in pale moleskin a good deal bespattered
with paint. My friend William Ross stood before me; and his welcome on
the occasion was a very hearty one. I had previously taken a hasty
survey of my unlucky house in Leith, accompanied by a sharp,
keen-looking, one-handed man of middle age, who kept the key, and acted,
under the town-clerk, as general manager; and who, as I afterwards
ascertained, was the immortal Peter M'Craw. But I had seen nothing
suited to put me greatly in conceit with my patrimony. It formed the
lowermost floor of an old black building, four stories in height,
flanked by a damp narrow court along one of its sides, and that turned
to the street its sharp-peaked, many-windowed gable. The lower windows
were covered up by dilapidated, weather-bleached shutters; in the upper,
the comparatively fresh appearance of the rags that stuffed up holes
where panes ought to have been, and a few very pale-coloured petticoats
and very dark-coloured shirts fluttering in the wind, gave evident signs
of habitation. It cost my conductor's one hand an arduous wrench to lay
open the lock of the outer door, in front of which he had first to
dislodge a very dingy female, attired in an earth-coloured gown, that
seemed as if starched with ashes; and as the rusty hinges creaked, and
the door fell against the wall, we became sensible of a damp,
unwholesome smell, like the breath of a charnel-house, which issued from
the interior. The place had been shut up for nearly two years; and so
foul had the stagnant atmosphere become, that the candle which we
brought with us to explore burned dim and yellow like a miner's lamp.
The floors, broken up in fifty different places, were littered with
rotten straw; and in one of the corners there lay a damp heap, gathered
up like the lair of some wild beast, on which some one seemed to have
slept, mayhap months before. The partitions were crazed and tottering;
the walls blackened with smoke; broad patches of plaster had fallen from
the ceilings, or still dangled from them, suspended by single hairs; and
the bars of the grates, crusted with rust, had become red as foxtails.
Mr. M'Craw nodded his head over the gathered heap of straw. "Ah," he
said--"got in again, I see! The shutters must be looked to." "I
daresay," I remarked, looking disconsolately around me, "you don't find
it very easy to get tenants for houses of this kind." "_Very_ easy!"
said Mr. M'Craw, with somewhat of a Highland twang, and, as I thought,
with also a good deal of Highland _hauteur_--as was of course quite
natural in so shrewd and extensive a house-agent, when dealing with the
owner of a domicile that would not let, and who made foolish
remarks--"No, nor easy at all, or it would not be locked up in this way:
but if we took off the shutters you would soon get tenants enough." "Oh,
I suppose so; and I daresay it is as difficult to sell as to let such
houses." "Ay, and more," said Mr. M'Craw: "it's all sellers, and no
buyers, when we get this low." "But do you not think," I perseveringly
asked, "that some kind, charitable person might be found in the
neighbourhood disposed to take it off my hands as a free gift! It's
terrible to be married for life to a baggage of a house like this, and
made liable, like other husbands, for all its debts. Is there no way of
getting a divorce?" "Don't know," he emphatically replied, with somewhat
of a nasal snort; and so we parted; and I saw or heard no more of Peter
M'Craw until many years after, when I found him celebrated in the
well-known song by poor Gilfillan.[7] And in the society of my friend I
soon forgot my miserable house, and all the liabilities which it
entailed.
I was as entirely unacquainted with great towns at this time as the
shepherd in Virgil; and, excited by what I saw, I sadly tasked my
friend's peripatetic abilities, and, I fear, his patience also, in
taking an admiring survey of all the more characteristic streets, and
then in setting out for the top of Arthur's Seat--from which, this
evening, I watched the sun set behind the distant Lomonds--that I might
acquaint myself with the features of the surrounding country, and the
effect of the city as a whole. And amid much confused and imperfect
recollection of picturesque groups of ancient buildings, and magnificent
assemblages of elegant modern ones, I carried away with me two vividly
distinct ideas--first results, as a painter might perhaps say, of a
"fresh eye," which no after survey has served to freshen or intensify. I
felt that I had seen, not one, but two cities--a city of the past and a
city of the present--set down side by side, as if for purposes of
comparison, with a picturesque valley drawn like a deep score between
them, to mark off the line of division. And such in reality seems to be
the grand peculiarity of the Scottish capital--its distinguishing trait
among the cities of the empire; though, of course, during the
twenty-nine years that have elapsed since I first saw it, the more
ancient of its two cities--greatly modernized in many parts--has become
less uniformly and consistently antique in its aspect. Regarded simply
as matters of taste, I have found little to admire in the improvements
that have so materially changed its aspect. Of its older portions I used
never to tire: I found I could walk among them as purely for the
pleasure which accrued, as among the wild and picturesque of nature
itself; whereas one visit to the elegant streets and ample squares of
the new city always proved sufficient to satisfy; and I certainly never
felt the desire to return to any of them to saunter in quest of pleasure
along the smooth, well-kept pavements. I of course except Princes
Street. There the two cities stand ranged side by side, as if for
comparison; and the eye falls on the features of a natural scenery that
would of itself be singularly pleasing even were both the cities away.
Next day I waited on the town-clerk, Mr. Veitch, to see whether he could
not suggest to me some way in which I might shake myself loose from my
unfortunate property on the Coal-hill. He received me civilly--told me
that the property was not quite so desperate an investment as I seemed
to think it, as at least the site, in which I had an interest with the
other proprietors, was worth something, and as the little courtyard was
exclusively my own; and that he thought he could get the whole disposed
of for me, if I was prepared to accept of a small price. And I was of
course, as I told him, prepared to accept of a very small one. Further,
on learning that I was a stone-cutter, and unemployed, he kindly
introduced me to one of his friends, a master-builder, by whom I was
engaged to work at a manor-house a few miles to the south of Edinburgh.
And procuring "lodgings" in a small cottage of but a single apartment,
near the village of Niddry Mill, I commenced my labours as a hewer under
the shade of the Niddry woods.
There was a party of sixteen masons employed at Niddry, besides
apprentices and labourers. They were accomplished
stone-cutters--skilful, especially in the cutting of mouldings, far
above the average of the masons of the north country; and it was with
some little solicitude that I set myself to labour beside them on
mullions, and transoms, and labels--for our work was in the old English
style--a style in which I had no previous practice. I was diligent,
however, and kept old John Fraser's principle in view (though, as Nature
had been less liberal in imparting the necessary faculties, I could not
cut so directly as he used to do on the required planes and curves
inclosed in the stones); and I had the satisfaction of finding, when
pay-night came round, that the foreman, who had frequently stood beside
me during the week to observe my modes of working, and the progress
which I made, estimated my services at the same rate as he did those of
the others. I was by and by intrusted, too, like the best of them, with
all the more difficult kinds of work required in the erection, and was
at one time engaged for six weeks together in fashioning long, slim,
deeply-moulded mullions, not one of which broke in my hands, though the
stone on which I wrought was brittle and gritty, and but indifferently
suited for the nicer purposes of the architect. I soon found, however,
that most of my brother workmen regarded me with undisguised hostility
and dislike, and would have been better pleased had I, as they seemed to
expect, from the northern locality in which I had been reared, broken
down in the trial. I was, they said, "a Highlander newly come to
Scotland," and, if not chased northwards again, would carry home with me
half the money of the country. Some of the builders used to criticize
very unfairly the workmanship of the stones which I hewed: they could
not lay them, they said; and the hewers sometimes refused to assist me
in carrying in or in turning the weightier blocks on which I wrought.
The foreman, however, a worthy, pious man, a member of a Secession
congregation, stood my friend and encouraged me to persevere. "Do not,"
he has said, "suffer yourself to be driven from the work, and they will
soon tire out, and leave you to pursue your own course. I know exactly
the nature of your offence: you do not drink with them or treat them;
but they will soon cease to expect that you should; and when once they
find that you are not to be coerced or driven off, they will let you
alone." As, however, from the abundance of employment--a consequence of
the Building mania--the men were masters and more at the time, the
foreman could not take my part openly in opposition to them; but I was
grateful for his kindness, and felt too thoroughly indignant at the mean
fellows who could take such odds against an inoffensive stranger, to be
much in danger of yielding to the combination. It is only a weak man
whom the wind deprives of his cloak: a man of the average strength is
more in danger of losing it when assailed by the genial beams of a too
kindly sun.
I threw myself, as usual, for the compensatory pleasures, on my evening
walks, but found the enclosed state of the district, and the fence of a
rigorously-administered trespass-law, serious drawbacks; and ceased to
wonder that a thoroughly cultivated country is, in most instances, so
much less beloved by its people than a wild and open one. Rights of
proprietorship may exist equally in both; but there is an important
sense in which the open country belongs to the proprietors and to the
people too. All that the heart and the intellect can derive from it may
be alike free to peasant and aristocrat; whereas the cultivated and
strictly fenced country belongs usually, in every sense, to only the
proprietor; and as it is a much simpler and more obvious matter to love
one's country as a scene of hills, and streams, and green fields, amid
which Nature has often been enjoyed, than as a definite locality, in
which certain laws and constitutional privileges exist, it is rather to
be regretted than wondered at that there should be often less true
patriotism in a country of just institutions and equal laws, whose soil
has been so exclusively appropriated as to leave only the dusty
high-roads to its people, than in wild open countries, in which the
popular mind and affections are left free to embrace the soil, but whose
institutions are partial and defective. Were our beloved Monarch to
regard such of the gentlemen of her court as taboo their Glen Tilts, and
shut up the passes of the Grampians, as a sort of disloyal Destructives
of a peculiar type, who make it their vocation to divest her people of
their patriotism, and who virtually teach them that a country no longer
theirs is not worth the fighting for, it might be very safely concluded
that she was but manifesting, in one other direction, the strong good
sense which has ever distinguished her. Though shut out, however, from
the neighbouring fields and policies, the Niddry woods were open to me;
and I have enjoyed many an agreeable saunter along a broad planted belt,
with a grassy path in the midst, that forms their southern boundary, and
through whose long vista I could see the sun sink over the picturesque
ruins of Craigmillar Castle. A few peculiarities in the natural history
of the district showed me, that the two degrees of latitude which lay
between me and the former scenes of my studies were not without their
influence on both the animal and vegetable kingdoms. The group of
land-shells was different, in at least its proportions; and one
well-marked mollusc--the large tortoise-shell helix (_helix aspersa_),
very abundant in this neighbourhood--I had never seen in the north at
all. I formed, too, my first acquaintance in this woody, bush-skirted
walk, with the hedgehog in its wild state--an animal which does not
occur to the north of the Moray Firth. I saw, besides, though the summer
was of but the average warmth, the oak ripening its acorns--a rare
occurrence among the Cromarty woods, where, in at least nine out of
every ten seasons, the fruit merely forms and then drops off. But my
researches this season lay rather among fossils than among recent plants
and animals. I was now for the first time located on the Carboniferous
System: the stone at which I wrought was intercalated among the working
coal-seams, and abounded in well-marked impressions of the more robust
vegetables of the period--stigmaria, sigillaria, calamites, and
lepidodendra; and as they greatly excited my curiosity I spent many an
evening hour in the quarry in which they occurred, in tracing their
forms in the rock; or, extending my walks to the neighbouring coal pits,
I laid open with my hammer, in quest of organisms, the blocks of shale
or stratified clay raised from beneath by the miner. There existed at
the time none of those popular digests of geological science which are
now so common; and so I had to grope my way without guide or assistant,
and wholly unfurnished with a vocabulary. At length, however, by dint of
patient labour, I came to form not very erroneous, though of course
inadequate, conceptions of the ancient Coal Measure Flora: it was
impossible to doubt that its numerous ferns were really such; and though
I at first failed to trace the supposed analogies of its lepidodendra
and calamites, it was at least evident that they were the bole-like
stems of great plants, that had stood erect like trees. A certain amount
of fact, too, once acquired, enabled me to assimilate to the mass little
snatches of information, derived from chance paragraphs and occasional
articles in magazines and reviews, that, save for my previous
acquaintance with the organisms to which they referred, would have told
me nothing. And so the vegetation of the Coal Measures began gradually
to form within my mind's eye, where all had been blank before, as I had
seen the spires and columns of Edinburgh forming amid the fog, on the
morning of my arrival.
I found, however, one of the earliest dreams of my youth curiously
mingling with my restorations, or rather forming their groundwork. I had
read Gulliver at the proper age; and my imagination had become filled
with the little men and women, and retained strong hold of at least one
scene laid in the country of the very tall men--that in which the
traveller, after wandering amid grass that rose twenty feet over his
head, lost himself in a vast thicket of barley forty feet high. I became
the owner, in fancy, of a colony of Liliputians, that manned my
eighteen-inch canoe, or tilled my apron-breadth of a garden; and,
coupling with the men of Liliput the scene in Brobdignag, I had often
set myself to imagine, when playing truant on the green slopes of the
Hill, or among the swamps of the "Willows," how some of the
vignette-like scenes by which I was surrounded would have appeared to
creatures so minute. I have imagined them threading their way through
dark forests of bracken forty feet high--or admiring on the hill-side
some enormous club-moss that stretched out its green hairy arms for
whole roods--or arrested at the edge of some dangerous morass, by hedges
of gigantic horse-tail, that bore a-top, high over the bog, their
many-windowed, club-like cones, and at every point shot forth their
green verticillate leaves, huge as coach-wheels divested of the rim. And
while I thus dreamed for my Liliputian companions, I became for the time
a Liliputian myself, examined the minute in Nature as if through a
magnifying-glass, roamed in fancy under ferns that had shot up into
trees, and saw the dark club-like heads of the equisetaceae stand up
over the spiky branches, some six yards or so above head. And now,
strange to tell, I found I had just to fall back on my old juvenile
imaginings, and to form my first approximate conceptions of the forests
of the Coal Measures, by learning to look at our ferns, club-mosses, and
equisetaceae, with the eye of some wandering traveller of Liliput lost
amid their entanglements. When sauntering at sunset along the edge of a
wood-embosomed stream that ran through the grounds, and beside which the
horse-tail rose thick and rank in the danker hollows, and the bracken
shot out its fronds from the drier banks, I had to sink in fancy as of
old into a manikin of a few inches, and to see intertropical jungles in
the tangled grasses and thickly-interlaced equisetaceae, and tall trees
in the brake and the lady-fern. But many a wanting feature had to be
supplied, and many an existing one altered. Amid forests of arboraceous
ferns, and of horse-tails tall as the masts of pinnaces, there stood up
gigantic club-mosses, thicker than the body of a man, and from sixty to
eighty feet in height, that mingled their foliage with strange monsters
of the vegetable world, of types no longer recognisable among the
existing forms--sculptured ullodendra, bearing rectilinear stripes of
sessile cones along their sides--and ornately tatooed sigillaria, fluted
like columns, and with vertical rows of leaves bristling over their
stems and larger branches. Such were some of the dreams in which I began
at this period for the first time to indulge; nor have they, like the
other dreams of youth, passed away. The aged poet has not unfrequently
to complain, that as he rises in years, his "visions float less palpably
before him." Those, on the contrary, which science conjures up, grow in
distinctness, as, in the process of slow acquirement, form after form is
evoked from out the obscurity of the past, and one restoration added to
another.
There were at this time several collier villages in the neighbourhood of
Edinburgh, which have since disappeared. They were situated on what were
called the "edge-coals"--those steep seams of the Mid-Lothian Coal
Basin which, lying low in the system, have got a more vertical tilt
against the trap eminences of the south and west than the upper seams in
the middle of the field, and which, as they could not be followed in
their abrupt descent beyond a certain depth, are now regarded, for at
least the practical purposes of the miner, and until the value of coal
shall have risen considerably, as wrought out. One of these villages,
whose foundations can no longer be traced, occurred in the immediate
vicinity of Niddry Mill. It was a wretched assemblage of dingy,
low-roofed, tile-covered hovels, each of which perfectly resembled all
the others, and was inhabited by a rude and ignorant race of men, that
still bore about them the soil and stain of recent slavery. Curious as
the fact may seem, all the older men of that village, though situated
little more than four miles from Edinburgh, had been born slaves. Nay,
eighteen years later (in 1842), when Parliament issued a commission to
inquire into the nature and results of female labour in the coal-pits of
Scotland, there was a collier still living that had never been twenty
miles from the Scottish capital, who could state to the Commissioners
that both his father and grandfather had been slaves--that he himself
had been born a slave--and that he had wrought for years in a pit in the
neighbourhood of Musselburgh ere the colliers got their freedom. Father
and grandfather had been parishioners of the late Dr. Carlyle of
Inveresk. They were cotemporary with Chatham and Cowper, and Burke and
Fox; and at a time when Granville Sharpe could have stepped forward and
effectually protected the runaway negro who had taken refuge from the
tyranny of his master in a British port, no man could have protected
_them_ from the Inveresk laird, their proprietor, had they dared to
exercise the right, common to all Britons besides, of removing to some
other locality, or of making choice of some other employment. Strange
enough, surely, that so entire a fragment of the barbarous past should
have been thus dovetailed into the age not yet wholly passed away! I
regard it as one of the more singular circumstances of my life, that I
should have conversed with Scotchmen who had been born slaves. The
collier women of this village--poor over-toiled creatures, who carried
up all the coal from underground on their backs, by a long turnpike
stair inserted in one of the shafts--continued to bear more of the marks
of serfdom still about them than even the men. How these poor women did
labour, and how thoroughly, even at this time, were they characterized
by the slave nature! It has been estimated by a man who knew them
well--Mr. Robert Bald--that one of their ordinary day's work was equal
to the carrying of a hundredweight from the level of the sea to the top
of Ben Lomond. They were marked by a peculiar type of mouth, by which I
learned to distinguish them from all the other females of the country.
It was wide, open, thick-lipped, projecting equally above and below, and
exactly resembled that which we find in the prints given of savages in
their lowest and most degraded state, in such narratives of our modern
voyagers as, for instance, the "Narrative of Captain Fitzroy's Second
Voyage of the Beagle." During, however, the lapse of the last twenty
years this type of mouth seems to have disappeared in Scotland. It was
accompanied by traits of almost infantile weakness. I have seen these
collier women crying like children, when toiling under their load along
the upper rounds of the wooden stair that traversed the shaft; and then
returning, scarce a minute after, with the empty creel, singing with
glee. The collier houses were chiefly remarkable for being all alike,
outside and in; all were equally dingy, dirty, naked, and uncomfortable.
I first learned to suspect, in this rude village, that the democratic
watchword, "Liberty and Equality," is somewhat faulty in its philosophy.
Slavery and Equality would be nearer the mark. Wherever there is
liberty, the original differences between man and man begin to manifest
themselves in their external circumstances, and the equality
straightway ceases. It is through slavery that equality, among at least
the masses, is to be fully attained.[8]
I found but little intelligence in the neighbourhood, among even the
villagers and country people, that stood on a higher platform than the
colliers. The fact may be variously accounted for; but so it is, that
though there is almost always more than the average amount of knowledge
and acquirement amongst the mechanics of large towns, the little hamlets
and villages by which they are surrounded are usually inhabited by a
class considerably below the average. In M. Quetelet's interesting
"Treatise on Man," we find a series of maps given, which, based on
extensive statistical tables, exhibit by darker and lighter shadings the
moral and intellectual character of the people in the various districts
of the countries which they represent. In one map, for instance,
representative of the state of education in France, while certain
well-taught provinces are represented by a bright tint, as if enjoying
the light, there are others, in which great ignorance obtains, that
exhibit a deep shade of blackness, as if a cloud rested over them; and
the general aspect of the whole is that of a landscape seen from a
hill-top in a day of dappled light and shadow. There are certain minuter
shadings, however, by which certain curious facts might be strikingly
represented to the eye in this manner, for which statistical tables
furnish no adequate basis, but which men who have seen a good deal of
the people of a country might be able to give in a manner at least
approximately correct. In a shaded map representative of the
intelligence of Scotland, I would be disposed--sinking the lapsed
classes, or representing them merely by a few such dark spots as mottle
the sun--to represent the large towns as centres of focal brightness;
but each of these focal centres I would encircle with a halo of darkness
considerably deeper in shade than the medium spaces beyond. I found that
in the tenebrious halo of the Scottish capital there existed,
independently of the ignorance of the poor colliers, three distinct
elements. A considerable proportion of the villagers were farm-servants
in the decline of life, who, unable any longer to procure, as in their
days of unbroken strength, regular engagements from the farmers of the
district, supported themselves as occasional labourers. And they, of
course, were characterized by the ignorance of their class. Another
portion of the people were carters--employed mainly, in these times, ere
the railways began, in supplying the Edinburgh coal-market, and in
driving building materials into the city from the various quarries. And
carters as a class, like all who live much in the society of horses, are
invariably ignorant and unintellectual. A third, but greatly smaller
portion than either of the other two, consisted of mechanics; but it was
only mechanics of an inferior order, that remained outside the city to
work for carters and labourers: the better skilled, and, as to a certain
extent the terms are convertible, the more intelligent mechanics found
employment and a home in Edinburgh. The cottage in which I lodged was
inhabited by an old farm-servant--a tall, large-bodied, small-headed
man, who, in his journey through life, seemed to have picked up scarce
an idea; and his wife, a woman turned of sixty, though a fine enough
_body_ in the main, and a careful manager, was not more intellectual.
They had but a single apartment in their humble dwelling, fenced off by
a little bit of partition from the outer door--and I could fain have
wished that they had two--but there was no choice of lodgings in the
village, and I had just to content myself, as the working man always
must in such circumstances, with the shelter I could get. My bed was
situated in the one end of the room, and my landlady's and her husband's
in the other, with the passage by which we entered between; but decent
old Peggy Russel had been accustomed to such arrangements all her life
long, and seemed never once to think of the matter; and--as she had
reached that period of life at which women of the humbler class assume
the characteristics of the other sex, somewhat, I suppose, on the
principle on which very ancient female birds put on male plumage--I in a
short time ceased to think of it also. It is not the less true, however,
that the purposes of decency demand that much should be done, especially
in the southern and midland districts of Scotland, for the dwellings of
the poor.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] Uncle James would scarce have sanctioned, had he been consulted in
the matter, the use to which the carcase of his dead eagle was applied.
There lived in the place an eccentric, half-witted old woman, who, for
the small sum of one halfpenny, used to fall a-dancing on the street to
amuse children, and rejoiced in the euphonious though somewhat obscure
appellation of "Dribble Drone." Some young fellows, on seeing the eagle
divested of its skin, and looking remarkably clean and well-conditioned,
suggested that it should be sent to "Dribble;" and, accordingly, in the
character of a "great goose, the gift of a gentleman," it was landed at
her door. The gift was thankfully accepted. Dribble's cottage proved
odoriferous at dinner-time for the several following days; and when
asked, after a week had gone by, how she had relished the great goose
which the gentleman had seat, she replied, that it was "Unco sweet, but
oh! teuch, teuch!" For years after, the reply continued to be proverbial
in the place: and many a piece of over-hard stock-fish, and over-fresh
steak, used to be characterized as, "Like Dribble Drone's eagle, unco
sweet, but oh! teuch, teuch!"
[7] Well known as Gilfillan's song is among ourselves, it is much less
so to the south of the Border, and I present it to my English readers,
as a worthy representative, in these latter days, of those ludicrous
songs of our country in the olden time which are so admirably suited to
show, notwithstanding the gibe of Goldsmith,
"That a Scot may have humour, I almost said wit."
THE TAX-GATHERER.
Oh! do you ken Peter, the taxman an' writer?
Ye're well aff wha ken naething 'bout him ava;
They ca' him Inspector, or Poor's Rate Collector--
My faith! he's weel kent in Leith, Peter M'Craw!
He ca's and he comes again--haws, and he hums again--
He's only ae hand, but it's as good as twa;
He pu's't out and raxes, an' draws in the taxes,
An' pouches the siller--shame! Peter M'Craw!
He'll be at your door by daylight on a Monday,
On Tyesday ye're favoured again wi' a ca';
E'en a slee look he gied me at kirk the last Sunday,
Whilk meant--"_Mind the preachin' an' Peter M'Craw._"
He glowrs at my auld door as if he had made it;
He keeks through the keyhole when I am awa';
He'll syne read the auld stane, that tells a' wha read it,
To "_Blisse God for a' giftes_,"[*]--but Peter M'Craw!
His sma' papers neatly are 'ranged a' completely,
That yours, for a wonder, 's the first on the raw!
There's nae jinkin' Peter, nae antelope's fleeter;
Nae _cuttin_' acquaintance wi' Peter M'Craw!
'Twas just Friday e'enin', Auld Reekie I'd been in,
I'd gatten a shillin'--I maybe gat twa;
I thought to be happy wi' friends ower a drappie,
When wha suld come papin--but Peter M'Craw?
There's houp o' a ship though she's sair pressed wi' dangere,
An' roun' her frail timmers the angry winds blaw;
I've aften gat kindness unlocked for frae strangers,
But wha need houp kindness frae Peter M'Craw?
I've kent a man pardoned when just at the gallows--
I've kent a chiel honest whase trade was the law!
I've kent fortune's smile even fa' on gude fallows;
But I ne'er kent exception wi' Peter M'Craw!
Our toun, yince sae cheerie, is dowie an' eerie;
Our shippies hae left us, our trade is awa';
There's nae fair maids strayin', nae wee bairnies playin;
Ye've muckle to answer for, Peter M'Craw!
But what gude o' greevin' as lang's we are leevin'?
My banes I'll soon lay within yon kirk-yard wa';
There nae care shall press me, nae taxes distress me,
For there I'll be free frae thee--Peter M'Craw!
[*]A devout legend, common in the seventeenth century above the
entrance of houses.
[8] The act for manumitting our Scotch colliers was passed in the year
1775, forty-nine years prior to the date of my acquaintance with the
class at Niddry. But though it was only such colliers of the village as
were in their fiftieth year when I knew them (with, of course, all the
older ones), who had been born slaves, even its men of thirty had
actually, though not nominally, come into the world in a state of
bondage, in consequence of certain penalties attached to the
emancipating act, of which the poor ignorant workers under ground were
both too improvident and too little ingenious to keep clear. They were
set free, however, by a second act passed in 1799. The language of both
these acts, regarded as British ones of the latter half of the last
century, and as bearing reference to British subjects living within the
limits of the island, strikes with startling effect. "Whereas," says the
preamble of the older act--that of 1775--"by the statute law of
Scotland, as explained by the judges of the courts of law there, many
colliers, and coal-bearers, and salters, are in a state of _slavery or
bondage_, bound to the collieries or salt-works where they work _for
life, transferable with the collieries and salt-works_; and whereas the
emancipating," &c. &c. A passage in the preamble of the act of 1799 is
scarce less striking: it declares that, notwithstanding the former act,
"many colliers and coal-bearers _still continue in a state of bondage_"
in Scotland. The history of our Scotch colliers will be found a curious
and instructive one. Their slavery seems not to have been derived from
the ancient tunes of general serfship, but to have originated in
comparatively modern acts of the Scottish Parliament, and in decisions
of the Court of Session--in acts of a Parliament in which the poor
ignorant subterranean men of the country were, of course, wholly
unrepresented, and in decisions of a Court in which no agent of theirs
ever made appearance in their behalf.