"Let not this weak, unknowing hand,
Presume thy bolts to throw."--POPE.
The great fires of the Parliament Close and the High Street were events
of this winter. A countryman, who had left town when the old spire of
the Tron Church was blazing like a torch, and the large group of
buildings nearly opposite the Cross still enveloped in flame from
ground-floor to roof-tree, passed our work-shed, a little after two
o'clock, and, telling us what he had seen, remarked that, if the
conflagration went on as it was doing, we would have, as our next
season's employment, the Old Town of Edinburgh to rebuild. And as the
evening closed over our labours, we went in to town in a body, to see
the fires that promised to do so much for us. The spire had burnt out,
and we could but catch between us and the darkened sky, the square
abrupt outline of the masonry a-top that had supported the wooden
broach, whence, only a few hours before, Fergusson's bell had descended
in a molten shower. The flames, too, in the upper group of buildings,
were restricted to the lower stories, and flared fitfully on the tall
forms and bright swords of the dragoons, drawn from the neighbouring
barracks, as they rode up and down the middle space, or gleamed athwart
the street on groups of wretched-looking women and ruffian men, who
seemed scanning with greedy eyes the still unremoved heaps of household
goods rescued from the burning tenements. The first figure that caught
my eye was a singularly ludicrous one. Removed from the burning mass but
by the thickness of a wall, there was a barber's shop brilliantly
lighted with gas, the uncurtained window of which permitted the
spectators outside to see whatever was going on in the interior. The
barber was as busily at work as if he were a hundred miles from the
scene of danger, though the engines at the time were playing against the
outside of his gable wall; and the immediate subject under his hands, as
my eye rested upon him, was an immensely fat old fellow, on whose round
bald forehead and ruddy cheeks the perspiration, occasioned by the
oven-like heat of the place, was standing out in huge drops, and whose
vast mouth, widely opened to accommodate the man of the razor, gave to
his countenance such an expression as I have sometimes seen in grotesque
Gothic heads of that age of art in which the ecclesiastical architect
began to make sport of his religion. The next object that presented
itself was, however, of a more sobering description. A poor working man,
laden with his favourite piece of furniture, a glass-fronted press or
cupboard, which he had succeeded in rescuing from his burning dwelling,
was emerging from one of the lanes, followed by his wife, when, striking
his foot against some obstacle in the way, or staggering from the too
great weight of his load, he tottered against a projecting corner, and
the glazed door was driven in with a crash. There was hopeless misery in
the wailing cry of his wife--"Oh, ruin, ruin!--_it's_ lost too!" Nor was
his own despairing response less sad:--"Ay, ay, puir lassie, its a' at
an end noo." Curious as it may seem, the wild excitement of the scene
had at first rather exhilarated than depressed my spirits; but the
incident of the glass cupboard served to awaken the proper feeling; and
as I came more into contact with the misery of the catastrophe, and
marked the groups of shivering houseless creatures that watched beside
the broken fragments of their stuff, I saw what a dire calamity a great
fire really is. Nearly two hundred families were already at this time
cast homeless into the streets. Shortly before quitting the scene of
the conflagration for the country, I passed along a common stair, which
led from the Parliament Close towards the Cowgate, through a tall old
domicile, eleven stories in height, and I afterwards remembered that the
passage was occupied by a smouldering oppressive vapour, which, from the
direction of the wind, could scarce have been derived from the adjacent
conflagration, though at the time, without thinking much of the
circumstance, I concluded it might have come creeping westwards on some
low cross current along the narrow lanes. In less than an hour after
that lofty tenement was wrapt in flames, from the ground story to more
than a hundred feet over its tallest chimneys, and about sixty
additional families, its tenants, were cast into the streets with the
others. My friend William Ross afterwards assured me, that never had he
witnessed anything equal in grandeur to this last of the conflagrations.
Directly over the sea of fire below, the low-browed clouds above seemed
as if charged with a sea of blood, that lightened and darkened by fits
as the flames rose and fell; and far and wide, tower and spire, and tall
house-top, glared out against a background of darkness, as if they had
been brought to a red heat by some great subterranean, earth-born fire,
that was fast rising to wrap the entire city in destruction. The old
church of St. Giles, he said, with the fantastic masonry of its pale
grey tower, bathed in crimson, and that of its dark rude walls suffused
in a bronzed umber, and with the red light gleaming inwards through its
huge mullioned windows, and flickering on its stone roof, formed one of
the most picturesque objects he had ever seen.[10]
I sometimes heard old Dr. Colquhoun of Leith preach. There were fewer
authors among the clergy in those days than now; and I felt a special
interest in a living divine who had written so good a book, that my
uncle Sandy--no mean judge in such matters--had assigned to it a place
in his little theological library, among the writings of the great
divines of other ages. The old man's preaching days, ere the winter of
1824, were well-nigh done: he could scarce make himself heard over half
the area of his large, hulking chapel, which was, however, always less
than half filled; but, though the feeble tones teasingly strained the
ear, I liked to listen to his quaintly attired but usually very solid
theology, and found, as I thought, more matter in his discourses than in
those of men who spoke louder and in a flashier style. The worthy man,
however, did me a mischief at this time. There had been a great Musical
Festival held in Edinburgh about three weeks previous to the
conflagration, at which oratorios were performed in the ordinary pagan
style, in which amateurs play at devotion, without even professing to
feel it; and the Doctor, in his first sermon after the great fires, gave
serious expression to the conviction, that they were judgments sent upon
Edinburgh, to avenge the profanity of its Musical Festival. Edinburgh
had sinned, he said, and Edinburgh was now punished; and it was
according to the Divine economy, he added, that judgments administered
exactly after the manner of the infliction which we had just witnessed
should fall upon cities and kingdoms. I liked the reasoning very ill. I
knew only two ways in which God's judgments could be determined to be
really such--either through direct revelation from God himself, or in
those cases in which they take place so much in accordance with His
fixed laws, and in such relation to the offence or crime visited in them
by punishment, that man, simply by the exercise of his rational
faculties, and reasoning from cause to effect, as is his nature, can
determine them for himself. And the great Edinburgh fires had come under
neither category. God did not reveal that He had punished the tradesmen
and mechanics of the High Street for the musical sins of the lawyers and
landowners of Abercromby Place and Charlotte Square; nor could any
natural relation be established between the oratorios in the Parliament
House or the concerts in the Theatre Royal, and the conflagrations
opposite the Cross or at the top of the Tron Church steeple. All that
could be proven in the case were the facts of the festival and of the
fires; and the further fact, that, so far as could be ascertained, there
was no visible connexion between them, and that it was not the people
who had joined in the one that had suffered from the others. And the
Doctor's argument seemed to be the perilous loose one, that as God had
sometimes of old visited cities and nations with judgments which had no
apparent connexion with the sins punished, and which could not be
recognised as judgments had not He himself told that such they were, the
Edinburgh fires, of which He had told nothing, might be properly
regarded--seeing that they had in the same way no connexion with the
oratorios, and had wrought no mischief to the people who had patronized
the oratorios--as special judgments on the oratorios. The good old
Papist had said, "I believe because it is impossible." What the Doctor
in this instance seemed to say was, "I believe because it is not in the
least likely." If, I argued, Dr. Colquhoun's own house and library had
been burnt, he would no doubt very properly have deemed the infliction a
great trial to himself; but on what principle could he have further held
that it was not only a trial to himself, but also a judgment on his
neighbour? If we must not believe that the falling of the tower of
Siloam was a special visitation on the sins of the poor men whom it
crushed, how, or on what grounds, are we to believe that it was a
special visitation on the sins of the men whom it did not in the least
injure? I fear I remembered Dr. Colquhoun's remarks on the fire better
than aught else I ever heard from him; nay, I must add, that nothing had
I ever found in the writings of the sceptics that had a worse effect on
my mind; and I now mention the circumstance to show how sober in
applications of the kind, in an age like the present, a theologian
should be. It was some time ere I forgot the ill savour of that dead
fly; and it was to beliefs of a serious and very important class that it
served for a time to impart its own doubtful character.
But from the minister whose chapel I oftenest attended, I was little in
danger of having my beliefs unsettled by reasonings of this stumbling
cast. "Be sure," said both my uncles, as I was quitting Cromarty for the
south, "be sure you go and hear Dr. M'Crie." And so Dr. M'Crie I did go
and hear; and not once or twice, but often. The biographer of Knox--to
employ the language in which Wordsworth describes the humble hero of the
"Excursion"--
"was a man
Whom no one could have passed without remark."
And on first attending his church, I found that I had unwittingly seen
him before, and that without remark I had _not_ passed him. I had
extended one of my usual evening walks, shortly after commencing work at
Niddry, in the direction of the southern suburb of Edinburgh, and was
sauntering through one of the green lanes of Liberton, when I met a
gentleman whose appearance at once struck me. He was a singularly erect,
spare, tall man, and bore about him an air which, neither wholly
clerical nor wholly military, seemed to be a curious compound of both.
The countenance was pale, and the expression, as I thought, somewhat
melancholy; but an air of sedate power sat so palpably on every feature,
that I stood arrested as he passed, and for half a minute or so remained
looking after him. He wore, over a suit of black, a brown great-coat,
with the neck a good deal whitened by powder, and the rim of the hat
behind, which was slightly turned up, bore a similar stain. "There is
mark about that old-fashioned man," I said to myself: "who or what can
he be?" Curiously enough, the apparent combination of the military and
the clerical in his gait and air suggested to me Sir Richard Steele's
story, in the "Tattler," of the old officer who, acting in the double
capacity of major and chaplain to his regiment, challenged a young man
for blasphemy, and after disarming, would not take him to mercy until he
had first begged pardon of God upon his knees on the duelling ground,
for the irreverence with which he had treated His name. My curiosity
regarding the stranger gentleman was soon gratified. Next Sabbath I
attended the Doctor's chapel, and saw the tall, spare, clerico-military
looking man in the pulpit. I have a good deal of faith in the military
air, when, in the character of a natural trait, I find it strongly
marking men who never served in the army. I have not yet seen it borne
by a civilian who had not in him at least the elements of the soldier;
nor can I doubt that, had Dr. M'Crie been a Scotch covenanter of the
times of Charles II, the insurgents at Bothwell would have had what they
sadly wanted--a general. The shrewd sense of his discourses had great
charms for me; and, though not a flashy, nor, in the ordinary sense of
the term, even an eloquent preacher, there were none of the other
Edinburgh clergy his contemporaries to whom I found I could listen with
greater profit or satisfaction. A simple incident which occurred during
my first morning attendance at his chapel, strongly impressed me with a
sense of his sagacity. There was a great deal of coughing in the place,
the effect of a recent change of weather; and the Doctor, whose voice
was not a strong one, and who seemed somewhat annoyed by the ruthless
interruptions, stopping suddenly short in the middle of his argument,
made a dead pause. When people are taken greatly by surprise, they cease
to cough--a circumstance on which he had evidently calculated. Every
eye was now turned towards him, and for a full minute so dead was the
silence, that one might have heard a pin drop. "I see, my friends," said
the Doctor, resuming speech, with a suppressed smile--"I see you can be
all quiet enough when I am quiet." There was not a little genuine
strategy in the rebuke; and as cough lies a good deal more under the
influence of the will than most coughers suppose, such was its effect,
that during the rest of the day there was not a tithe of the previous
coughing.
The one-roomed cottage which I shared with its three other inmates, did
not present all the possible conveniences for study; but it had a little
table in a corner, at which I contrived to write a good deal; and my
book-shelf already exhibited from twenty to thirty volumes, picked up on
Saturday evenings at the book-stalls of the city, and which were all
accessions to my little library. I, besides, got a few volumes to read
from my friend William Ross, and a few more through my work-fellow Cha;
and so my rate of acquirement in book-knowledge, if not equal to that of
some former years, at least considerably exceeded what it had been in
the previous season, which I had spent in the Highlands, and during
which I had perused only three volumes--one of the three a slim volume
of slim poems, by a lady, and the other, that rather curious than
edifying work, "Presbyterian Eloquence Displayed." The cheap literature
had not yet been called into existence; and, without in the least
undervaluing its advantages, it was, I daresay, better on the whole as a
mental exercise, and greatly better in the provision which it made for
the future, that I should have to urge my way through the works of our
best writers in prose and verse--works which always made an impression
on the memory--than that I should have been engaged instead in picking
up odds and ends of information from loose essays, the hasty productions
of men too little vigorous, or too little at leisure, to impress upon
their writings the stamp of their own individuality. In quiet moonlight
nights I found it exceedingly pleasant to saunter all alone through the
Niddry woods. Moonlight gives to even leafless groves the charms of full
foliage, and conceals tameness of outline in a landscape. I found it
singularly agreeable, too, to listen, from a solitude so profound as
that which a short walk secured to me, to the distant bells of the city
ringing out, as the clock struck eight, the old curfew peal; and to
mark, from under the interlacing boughs of a long-arched vista, the
intermittent gleam of the Inchkeith light now brightening and now
fading, as the lanthorn revolved. In short, the winter passed not
unpleasantly away: I had now nothing to annoy me in the work-shed; and
my only serious care arose from my unlucky house in Leith, for which I
found myself summoned one morning, by an officer-looking man, to pay
nearly three pounds--the last instalment which I owed, I was told, as
one of the heritors of the place, for its fine new church. I must
confess I was wicked enough to wish on this occasion that the property
on the Coal-hill had been included in the judgment on the Musical
Festival. But shortly after, not less to my astonishment than delight, I
was informed by Mr. Veitch that he had at length found a purchaser for
my house; and, after getting myself served heir to my father before the
Court of the Canongate, and paying a large arrear of feu-duty to that
venerable corporation, in which I had to recognise my feudal superior, I
got myself as surely dissevered from the Coal-hill as paper and
parchment could do it, and pocketed, in virtue of the transaction, a
balance of about fifty pounds. As nearly as I could calculate on what
the property had cost us, from first to last, the _composition_ which it
paid was one of about five shillings in the pound. And such was the
concluding passage in the history of a legacy which threatened for a
time to be the ruin of the family. When I last passed along the
Coal-hill, I saw my umquhile house existing as a bit of dingy wall, a
single storey in height, and perforated by three narrow old-fashioned
doors, jealously boarded up, and apparently, as in the days when it was
mine, of no manner of use in the world. I trust, however, it is no
longer the positive mischief to its proprietor that it was to me.
The busy season had now fairly commenced: wages were fast mounting up to
the level of the former year, which they ultimately overtopped; and
employment had become very abundant. I found, however, that it might be
well for me to return home for a few months. The dust of the stone which
I had been hewing for the last two years had begun to affect my lungs,
as they had been affected in the last autumn of my apprenticeship, but
much more severely; and I was too palpably sinking in flesh and strength
to render it safe for me to encounter the consequences of another season
of hard work as a stone-cutter. From the stage of the malady at which I
had already arrived, poor workmen, unable to do what I did, throw
themselves loose from their employment, and sink in six or eight months
into the grave--some at an earlier, some at a later period of life; but
so general is the affection, that few of our Edinburgh stone-cutters
pass their fortieth year unscathed, and not one out of every fifty of
their number ever reaches his forty-fifth year. I accordingly engaged my
passage for the north in an Inverness sloop, and took leave of my few
friends--of the excellent foreman of the Niddry squad, and of Cha and
John Wilson, with both of whom, notwithstanding their opposite
characters, I had become very intimate. Among the rest, too, I took
leave of a paternal cousin settled in Leith, the wife of a
genial-hearted sailor, master of a now wholly obsolete type of vessel,
one of the old Leith and London smacks, with a huge single mast, massive
and tall as that of a frigate, and a mainsail of a quarter of an acre. I
had received much kindness from my cousin, who, besides her relationship
to my father, had been a contemporary and early friend of my mother's;
and my welcome from the master her husband--one of the best-natured men
I ever knew--used always to be one of the heartiest. And after parting
from Cousin Marshall, I mustered up resolution enough to call on yet
another cousin.
Cousin William, the eldest son of my Sutherlandshire aunt, had been for
some years settled in Edinburgh, first as an upper clerk and
manager--for, after his failure as a merchant he had to begin the world
anew; and now, in the speculation year, he had succeeded in establishing
a business for himself, which bore about it a hopeful and promising air
so long as the over-genial season lasted, but fell, with many a more
deeply-rooted establishment, in the tempest which followed. On quitting
the north, I had been charged with a letter for him by his father, which
I knew, however, to be wholly recommendatory of myself, and so I had
failed to deliver it. Cousin William, like Uncle James, had fully
expected that I was to make my way in life in some one of the learned
professions; and as his position--though, as the result unfortunately
showed, a not very secure one--was considerably in advance of mine, I
kept aloof from him, in the character of a poor relation, who was quite
as proud as he was poor, and in the belief that his new friends, of
whom, I understood, he had now well-nigh as many as before, would hold
that the cousinship of a mere working man did him little credit. He had
learned from home, however, that I was in Edinburgh, and had made not a
few ineffectual attempts to find me out, of which I had heard; and now,
on forming my resolution to return to the north, I waited upon him at
his rooms in Ambrose's Lodgings--at that time possessed of a sort of
classical interest, as the famous Blackwood Club, with Christopher North
at its head, used to meet in the hotel immediately below. Cousin William
had a warm heart, and received me with great kindness, though I had, of
course, to submit to the scold which I deserved; and as some young
friends were to look in upon him in the evening, he said, I had to do
what I would fain have avoided, perform penance, by waiting, on his
express invitation, to meet with them. They were, I ascertained, chiefly
students of medicine and divinity, in attendance at the classes of the
University, and not at all the formidable sort of persons I had feared
to meet; and finding nothing very unattainable in their conversation,
and as Cousin William made a dead set on me "to bring me out," I at
length ventured to mingle in it, and found my reading stand me in some
stead. There was a meeting, we were told, that evening, in the apartment
below, of the Blackwood Club. The night I spent with my cousin was, if
our information was correct, and the _Noctes_ not a mere myth, one of
the famous _Noctes Ambrosiance_; and fain would I have seen, for but a
moment, from some quiet corner, the men whose names fame had blown so
widely; but I have ever been unlucky in the curiosity--though I have
always strongly entertained it--which has the personal appearance of
celebrated men for its object. I had ere now several times lingered in
Castle Street of a Saturday evening, opposite the house of Sir Walter
Scott, in the hope of catching a glimpse of that great writer and genial
man, but had never been successful I could fain, too, have seen Hogg
(who at the time occasionally visited Edinburgh); with Jeffrey; old
Dugald Stewart, who still lived; _Delta_, and Professor Wilson: but I
quitted the place without seeing any of them; and ere I again returned
to the capital, ten years after, death had been busy in the high places,
and the greatest of their number was no longer to be seen. In short, Dr.
M'Crie was the only man whose name promises to live, of whose personal
appearance I was able to carry away with me at this time a distinct
image. Addison makes his _Spectator_ remark, rather in joke than
earnest, that "a reader seldom peruses a book with pleasure till he
knows whether the writer of it be a black or a fair man, of a mild or
choleric disposition, married or a bachelor, with other particulars of
the like nature, that conduce very much to the right understanding of an
author." I am inclined to say nearly as much, without being the least
in joke. I think I understand an author all the better for knowing
exactly how he looked. I would have to regard the massive vehemence of
the style of Chalmers as considerably less characteristic of the man,
had it been dissociated from the broad chest and mighty structure of
bone; and the warlike spirit which breathes, in a subdued but still very
palpable form, in the historical writings of the elder M'Crie, strikes
me as singularly in harmony with the military air of this Presbyterian
minister of the type of Knox and Melville. However theologians may
settle the meaning of the text, it is one of the grand lessons of his
writings, that such of the Churches of the Reformation as did _not_
"take the sword, perished by the sword."
I was accompanied to the vessel by my friend William Ross, from whom I,
alas! parted for the last time; and, when stepping aboard, Cousin
William, whom I had scarce expected to see, but who had snatched an hour
from business, and walked down all the way to Leith to bid me farewell,
came forward to grasp me by the hand. I am not much disposed to quarrel
with the pride of the working man, when according to Johnson and
Chalmers, it is a defensive, not an aggressive pride; but it does at
times lead him to be somewhat less than just to the better feelings of
the men who occupy places in the scale a little higher than his own.
Cousin William, from whom I had kept so jealously aloof, had a heart of
the finest water. His after course was rough and unprosperous. After the
general crash of 1825-26, he struggled on in London for some six or
eight years, in circumstances of great difficulty; and then, receiving
some surbodinate appointment in connexion with the Stipendiary
Magistracy of the West Indies, he sailed for Jamaica--where,
considerably turned of fifty at the time--he soon fell a victim to the
climate.
In my voyage north, I spent about half as many days on sea, between
Leith Roads and the Sutors of Cromarty, as the Cunard steamers now
spend in crossing the Atlantic. I had taken a cabin passage, not caring
to subject my weakened lungs to the exposure of a steerage one; but
during the seven days of thick, foggy mornings, clear moonlight nights,
and almost unbroken calms, both night and morning, in which we tided our
slow way north, I was much in the forecastle with the men, seeing how
sailors lived, and ascertaining what they were thinking about, and how.
We had rare narratives at nights--
"Wonderful stories of battle and wreck,
That were told by the men of the watch."
Some of the crew had been voyagers in their time to distant parts of the
world; and though no existence can be more monotonous than the every-day
life of the seaman, the profession has always its bits of striking
incident, that, when strung together, impart to it an air of interest
which its ordinary details sadly want, and which lures but to disappoint
the young lads of a romantic cast, who are led to make choice of it in
its presumed character as a continued series of stirring events and
exciting adventures. What, however, struck me as curious in the
narratives of my companions, was the large mixture of the supernatural
which they almost always exhibited. The story of Jack Grant the mate,
given in an early chapter, may be regarded as not inadequately
representative of the sailor stories which were told on deck and
forecastle, along at least the northern coasts of Scotland, nearly
thirty years later. That life of peril which casts the seaman much at
the mercy of every rough gale and lee-shore, and in which his
calculations regarding ultimate results must be always very doubtful,
has a strong tendency to render him superstitious. He is more removed,
too, than the landsman of his education and standing, from the influence
of general opinion, and the mayhap over-sceptical teaching of the Press;
and, as a consequence of their position and circumstances, I found, at
this period, seamen of the generation to which I myself belonged as firm
believers in wraiths, ghosts, and death-warnings, as the landward
contemporaries of my grandfather had been sixty years before. A series
of well-written nautical tales had appeared shortly previous to this
time in one of the metropolitan monthlies--the _London Magazine_, if I
rightly remember; and I was now interested to find in one of the
sailors' stories, the original of decidedly the best of their
number--"The Doomed Man." The author of the series--a Mr. Hamilton, it
was said, who afterwards became an Irvingite teacher, and grew too
scrupulous to exercise in fiction a very pleasing pen, though he
continued to employ, as a portrait-painter, a rather indifferent
pencil--had evidently sought such opportunities of listening to sailor's
stories as those on which I had at this time thrust myself. Very curious
materials for fiction may be found in this way by the _litterateur_. It
must be held that Sir Walter Scott was no incompetent judge of the
capabilities, for the purposes of the novelist, of a piece of narrative;
and yet we find him saying of the story told by a common sailor to his
friend William Clerk, which he records in the "Letters on Demonology and
Witchcraft," that "the tale, properly managed, might have made the
fortune of a romancer."
At times by day--for the sailors' stories were stories of the night--I
found interesting companionship in the society of a young student of
divinity, one of the passengers, who, though a lad of parts and
acquirements, did not deem it beneath him to converse on literary
subjects with a working man in pale moleskin, and with whom I did not
again meet until many years after, when we were both actively engaged in
prosecuting the same quarrel--he as one of the majority of the
Presbytery of Auchterarder, and I as editor of the leading newspaper of
the Non-Intrusion party. Perhaps the respected Free Church minister of
North Leith may be still able to call to memory--not, of course, the
subjects, but the _fact_, of our discussions on literature and the
belles-lettres at this time; and that, on asking me one morning whether
I had not been, according to Burns, "crooning to mysel'," when on deck
during the previous evening, what seemed from the cadence to be verse, I
ventured to submit to him, as my night's work, a few descriptive
stanzas. And, as forming in some sort a memorial of our voyage, and in
order that my friendly critic may be enabled, after the lapse of
considerably more than a quarter of a century, to review his judgment
respecting them, I now submit them to the reader:--
STANZAS WRITTEN AT SEA.
Joy of the poet's soul, I court thy aid;
* * * * *
Around our vessel heaves the midnight wave;
The cheerless moon sinks in the western sky;
Reigns breezeless silence!--in her ocean cave
The mermaid rests, while her fond lover nigh,
Marks the pale star-beams as they fall from high.
Gilding with tremulous light her couch of sleep.
Why smile incred'lous? the rapt Muse's eye
Through earth's dark caves, o'er heaven's fair plains, can sweep,
Can range its hidden cell, where toils the unfathom'd deep.
On ocean's craggy floor, beneath the shade
Of bushy rock-weed tangled, dusk, and brown,
She sees the wreck of founder'd vessel laid,
In slimy silence, many a fathom down
From where the star-beam trembles; o'er it thrown
Are heap'd the treasures men have died to gain.
And in sad mockery of the parting groan,
That bubbled 'mid the wild unpitying main,
Quick gushing o'er the bones, the restless tides complain.
Gloomy and wide rolls the sepulchral sea,
Grave of my kindred, of my sire the grave!
Perchance, where now he sleeps, a space for me
Is mark'd by Fate beneath the deep green wave.
It well may he! Poor bosom, why dost heave
Thus wild? Oh, many a care, troublous and dark.
On earth attends thee still; the mermaid's cave
Grief haunts not; sure 'twere pleasant there to mark,
Serene, at noontide hour, the sailor's passing barque.
Sure it were pleasant through the vasty deep,
When on its bosom plays the golden beam.
With headlong speed by bower and cave to sweep;
When flame the waters round with emerald gleam--
When, borne from high by tides and gales, the scream
Of sea-mew softened falls--when bright and gay
The crimson weeds, proud ocean's pendants, stream
From trophied wrecks and rock-towers darkly grey--
Through scenes so strangely fair 'twere pleasant, sure, to stray.
Why this strange thought? If, in that ocean laid.
The ear would cease to hear, the eye to see,
Though sights and sounds like these circled my bed,
Wakeless and heavy would my slumbers be:
Though the mild soften'd sun-light beam'd on me
(If a dull heap of bones retained my name,
That bleach'd or blacken'd 'mid the wasteful sea),
Its radiance all unseen, its golden beam
In vain through coral groves or emerald roofs might stream.
Yet dwells a spirit in this earthy frame
Which Oceans cannot quench nor Time destroy;--
A deathless, fadeless ray, a heavenly flame,
That pure shall rise when fails each base alloy
That earth instils, dark grief, or baseless joy:
Then shall the ocean's secrets meet its sight;--
For I do hold that happy souls enjoy
A vast all-reaching range of angel-flight,
From the fair source of day, even to the gates of night.
Now night's dark veil is rent; on yonder land,
That blue and distant rises o'er the main,
I see the purple sky of morn expand,
Scattering the gloom. Then cease my feeble strain:
When darkness reign'd, thy whisperings soothed my pain--
The pain by weariness and languor bred.
But now my eyes shall greet a lovelier scene
Than fancy pictured: from his dark green bed
Soon shall the orb of day exalt his glorious head.
I found my two uncles, Cousin George, and several other friends and
relations, waiting for me on the Cromarty beach; and was soon as happy
among them as a man suffering a good deal from debility, but not much
from positive pain, could well be. When again, about ten years after
this time, I visited the south of Scotland, it was to receive the
instructions necessary to qualify me for a bank accountant; and when I
revisited it at a still later period, it was to undertake the management
of a metropolitan newspaper. In both these instances I mingled with a
different sort of persons from those with whom I had come in contact in
the years 1824-25. And, in now taking leave of the lower class, I may be
permitted to make a few general remarks regarding them.
It is a curious change which has taken place in this country during the
last hundred years. Up till the times of the Rebellion of 1745, and a
little later, it was its remoter provinces that formed its dangerous
portions; and the effective strongholds from which its advance-guards of
civilisation and good order gradually gained upon old anarchy and
barbarism, were its great towns. We are told by ecclesiastical
historians, that in Rome, after the age of Constantine, the term
villager (_Pagus_) came to be regarded as synonymous with heathen, from
the circumstance that the worshippers of the gods were then chiefly to
be found in remote country places; and we know that in Scotland the
Reformation pursued a course exactly resembling that of Christianity
itself in the old Roman world: it began in the larger and more
influential towns; and it was in the remoter country districts that the
displaced religion lingered longest, and found its most efficient
champions and allies. Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, St. Andrews, Dundee,
were all Protestant, and sent out their well-taught burghers to serve in
the army of the Lords of the Congregation, when Huntly and Hamilton were
arming their vassals to contend for the obsolete faith. In a later age
the accessible Lowlands were imbued with an evangelistic
Presbyterianism, when the more mountainous and inaccessible provinces of
the country were still in a condition to furnish, in what was known as
the Highland Host, a dire instrument of persecution. Even as late as the
middle of the last century, "Sabbath," according to a popular writer,
"never got aboon the Pass of Killicrankie;" and the Stuarts, exiled for
their adherence to Popery, continued to found almost their sole hopes of
restoration on the swords of their co-religionists the Highlanders.
During the last hundred years, however, this old condition of matters
has been strangely reversed; and it is in the great towns that
_Paganism_ now chiefly prevails. In at least their lapsed classes--a
rapidly increasing proportion of their population--it is those cities of
our country which first caught the light of religion and learning, that
have become preeminently its dark parts; just, if I may employ the
comparison, as it is those portions of the moon which earliest receive
the light when she is in her increscent state, and shine like a thread
of silver in the deep blue of the heavens, that first become dark when
she falls into the wane.
It is mainly during the elapsed half of the present century that this
change for the worse has taken place in the large towns of Scotland. In
the year 1824 it was greatly less than half accomplished; but it was
fast going on; and I saw, partially at least, the processes in operation
through which it has been effected. The cities of the country have
increased their population during the past fifty years greatly beyond
the proportion of its rural districts--a result in part of the
revolutions which have taken place in the agricultural system of the
Lowlands, and of the clearances of the Highlands; and in part also of
that extraordinary development of the manufactures and trade of the
kingdom which the last two generations have witnessed. Of the wilder
Edinburgh mechanics with whom I formed at this time any acquaintance,
less than one-fourth were natives of the place. The others were mere
settlers in it, who had removed mostly from country districts and small
towns, in which they had been known, each by his own circle of
neighbourhood, and had lived, in consequence, under the wholesome
influence of public opinion. In Edinburgh--grown too large at the time
to permit men to know aught of their neighbours--they were set free from
this wholesome influence, and, unless when under the guidance of higher
principle, found themselves at liberty to do very much as they pleased.
And--with no _general_ opinion to control--cliques and parties of their
wilder spirits soon formed in their sheds and workshops a standard of
opinion of their own, and found only too effectual means of compelling
their weaker comrades to conform to it. And hence a great deal of wild
dissipation and profligacy, united, of course, to the inevitable
improvidence. And though dissipation and improvidence are quite
compatible with intelligence in the first generation, they are sure
always to part company from it in the second. The family of the unsteady
spendthrift workman is never a well-taught family. It is reared up in
ignorance; and, with evil example set before and around it, it almost
necessarily takes its place among the lapsed classes. In the third
generation the descent is of course still greater and more hopeless than
in the second. There is a type of even physical degradation already
manifesting itself in some of our large towns, especially among degraded
females, which is scarce less marked than that exhibited by the negro,
and which both my Edinburgh and Glasgow readers must have often remarked
on the respective High Streets of these cities. The features are
generally bloated and overcharged, the profile lines usually concave,
the complexion coarse and high, and the expression that of a dissipation
and sensuality become chronic and inherent. And how this
class--constitutionally degraded, and with the moral sense, in most
instances, utterly undeveloped and blind--are ever to be reclaimed, it
is difficult to see. The immigrant Irish form also a very appreciable
element in the degradation of our large towns. They are, however,
_pagans_, not of the new, but of the old type: and are chiefly
formidable from the squalid wretchedness of a physical character which
they have transferred from their mud cabins into our streets and lanes,
and from the course of ruinous competition into which they have entered
with the unskilled labourers of the country, and which has had the
effect of reducing our lowlier countrymen to a humbler level than they
perhaps ever occupied before. Meanwhile, this course of degradation is
going on, in all our larger towns, in an ever-increasing ratio; and all
that philanthropy and the Churches are doing to counteract it is but as
the discharge of a few squirts on a conflagration. It is, I fear,
preparing terrible convulsions for the future. When the dangerous
classes of a country were located in its remote districts, as in
Scotland in the early half of the last century, it was comparatively
easy to deal with them: but the _sans culottes_ of Paris in its First
Revolution, placed side by side with its executive Government, proved
very formidable indeed; nor is it, alas! very improbable that the
ever-growing masses of our large towns, broken loose from the sanction
of religion and morals, may yet terribly avenge on the upper classes and
the Churches of the country the indifferency with which they have been
suffered to sink.
I was informed by Cousin George, shortly after my arrival, that my old
friend of the Doocot Cave, after keeping shop as a grocer for two years,
had given up business, and gone to college to prepare himself for the
Church. He had just returned home, added George, after completing his
first session, and had expressed a strong desire to meet with me. His
mother, too, had joined in the invitation--would I not take tea with
them that evening?--and Cousin George had been asked to accompany me. I
demurred; but at length set out with George, and, after an interruption
in our intercourse of about five years, spent the evening with my old
friend. And for years after we were inseparable companions, who, when
living in the same neighbourhood, spent together almost every hour not
given to private study or inevitable occupation, and who, when separated
by distance, exchanged letters enough to fill volumes. We had parted
boys, and had now grown men; and for the first few weeks we took stock
of each other's acquirements and experiences, and the measure of each
other's calibre, with some little curiosity. The mind of my friend had
developed rather in a scientific than literary direction. He afterwards
carried away the first mathematical prize of his year at college, and
the second in natural philosophy; and he had, I now found, great
acuteness as a metaphysician, and no inconsiderable acquaintance with
the antagonistic positions of the schools of Hume and Reid. On the other
hand, my opportunities of observation had been perhaps greater than his,
and my acquaintance with men, and even with books, more extensive; and
in the interchange of idea which we carried on, both were gainers: he
occasionally picked up in our conversations a fact of which he had been
previously ignorant; and I, mayhap, learned to look more closely than
before at an argument. I introduced him to the Eathie Lias, and assisted
him in forming a small collection, which, ere he ultimately dissipated
it, contained some curious fossils--among the others, the second
specimen of _Pterichthys_ ever found; and he, in turn, was able to give
me a few geological notions, which, though quite crude enough--for
natural science was not taught at the university which he attended--I
found of use in the arrangement of my facts--now become considerable
enough to stand in need of those threads of theory without which large
accumulations of fact refuse to hang together in the memory. There was
one special hypothesis which he had heard broached, and the utter
improbability of which I was not yet geologist enough to detect, which
for a time filled my whole imagination. It had been said, he told me,
that the ancient world, in which my fossils, animal and vegetable, had
flourished and decayed--a world greatly older than that before the
Flood--had been tenanted by rational, responsible beings, for whom, as
for the race to which we ourselves belong, a resurrection and a day of
final judgment had awaited. But many thousands of years had elapsed
since that day--emphatically the _last_ to the Pre-Adamite race--had
come and gone. Of all the accountable creatures that had been summoned
to its bar, bone had been gathered to its bone, so that not a vestige of
the framework of their bodies occurred in the rocks or soils in which
they had been originally inhumed; and, in consequence, only the remains
of their irresponsible contemporaries, the inferior animals, and of the
vegetable productions of their fields and forests, were now to be found.
The dream filled for a time my whole imagination; but though poetry
might find ample footing on a hypothesis so suggestive and bold, I need
scarce say that it has itself no foundation in science. Man had _no_
responsible predecessor on earth. At the determined time, when his
appointed habitation was completely fitted for him, he came and took
possession of it; but the old geologic ages had been ages of
immaturity--_days_ whose work as a work of promise was "good," but not
yet "very good," nor yet ripened for the appearance of a moral agent,
whose nature it is to be a fellow-worker with the Creator in relation to
even the physical and the material. The planet which we inhabit seems to
have been prepared for man, and for man only.
Partly through my friend, but in part also from the circumstance that I
retained a measure of intimacy with such of my schoolfellows as had
subsequently prosecuted their education at college, I was acquainted,
during the later years in which I wrought as a mason, with a good many
university-taught lads; and I sometimes could not avoid comparing them
in my mind with working men of, as nearly as I could guess, the same
original calibre. I did not always find that general superiority on the
side of the scholar which the scholar himself usually took for granted.
What he had specially studied he knew, save in rare and exceptional
cases, better than the working man; but while the student had been
mastering his Greek and Latin, and expatiating in Natural Philosophy and
the Mathematics, the working man, if of an inquiring mind, had been
doing something else; and it is at least a fact, that all the great
readers of my acquaintance at this time--the men most extensively
acquainted with English literature--were not the men who had received
the classical education. On the other hand, in framing an argument, the
advantage lay with the scholars. In that common sense, however, which
reasons but does not argue, and which enables men to pick their stepping
prudently through the journey of life, I found that the classical
education gave no superiority whatever; nor did it appear to form so
fitting an introduction to the realities of business as that course of
dealing with things tangible and actual in which the working man has to
exercise his faculties, and from which he derives his experience. One
cause of the over-low estimate which the classical scholar so often
forms of the intelligence of that class of the people to which our
skilled mechanics belong, arises very much from the forwardness of a set
of blockheads who are always sure to obtrude themselves upon his notice,
and who come to be regarded by him as average specimens of their order.
I never yet knew a truly intelligent mechanic obtrusive. Men of the
stamp of my two uncles, and of my friend William Ross, never press
themselves on the notice of the classes above them. A minister newly
settled in a charge, for instance, often finds that it is the dolts of
his flock that first force themselves upon his acquaintance. I have
heard the late Mr. Stewart of Cromarty remark, that the humbler
dunderheads of the parish had all introduced themselves to his
acquaintance long ere he found out its clever fellows. And hence often
sad mistakes on the part of a clergyman in dealing with the people. It
seems never to strike him that there may be among them men of his own
calibre, and, in certain practical departments, even better taught than
he; and that this superior class is always sure to lead the others. And
in preaching down to the level of the men of humbler capacity, he fails
often to preach to men of any capacity at all, and is of no use. Some of
the clerical contemporaries of Mr. Stewart used to allege that, in
exercising his admirable faculties in the theological field, he
sometimes forgot to lower himself to his people, and so preached over
their heads. And at times, when they themselves came to occupy his
pulpit, as occasionally happened, they addressed to the congregation
sermons quite simple enough for even children to comprehend. I taught at
the time a class of boys in the Cromarty Sabbath-school, and invariably
found on these occasions, that while the memories of my pupils were
charged to the full with the striking thoughts and graphic illustrations
of the very elaborate discourses deemed too high for them, they
remembered of the very simple ones, specially lowered to suit narrow
capacities, not a single word or note. All the attempts at originating a
cheap literature that have failed, have been attempts pitched too low:
the higher-toned efforts have usually succeeded. If the writer of these
chapters has been in any degree successful in addressing himself as a
journalist to the Presbyterian people of Scotland, it has always been,
not by writing _down_ to them, but by doing his best on all occasions to
write _up_ to them. He has ever thought of them as represented by his
friend William, his uncles, and his Cousin George--by shrewd old John
Fraser, and his reckless though very intelligent acquaintance Cha; and
by addressing to them on every occasion as good sense and as solid
information as he could possibly muster, he has at times succeeded in
catching their ear, and perhaps, in some degree, in influencing their
judgment.
FOOTNOTE:
[10] The extreme picturesqueness of these fires--in part a consequence
of the great height and peculiar architecture of the buildings which
they destroyed--caught the nice eye of Sir Walter Scott. "I can
conceive," we find him saying, in one of his letters of the period, "no
sight more grand or terrible than to see these lofty buildings on fire
from top to bottom, vomiting out flames, like a volcano, from every
aperture, and finally crashing down one after another, into an abyss of
fire, which resembled nothing but hell; for there were vaults of wine
and spirits which set up huge jets of flames whenever they were called
into activity by the fall of these massive fragments. Between the corner
of the Parliament Square and the Tron Church, all is destroyed excepting
some new buildings at the lower extremity."