"Beware, Lorenzo, a slow, sudden death."--YOUNG.
There was one special subject which my friend, in our quiet evening
walks, used to urge seriously upon my attention. He had thrown up, under
strong religious impressions, what promised to be so good a business,
that in two years he had already saved money enough to meet the expenses
of a college course of education. And assuredly, never did man determine
on entering the ministry with views more thoroughly disinterested than
his. Patronage ruled supreme in the Scottish Establishment at the time;
and my friend had no influence and no patron; but he could not see his
way clear to join with the Evangelical Dissenters or the Secession; and
believing that the most important work on earth is the work of saving
souls, he had entered on his new course in the full conviction that, if
God had work for him of this high character to do, He would find him an
opportunity of doing it. And now, thoroughly in earnest, and as part of
the special employment to which he had devoted himself, he set himself
to press upon my attention the importance, in their personal bearing, of
religious concerns.
I was not unacquainted with the standard theology of the Scottish
Church. In the parish school I had, indeed, acquired no ideas on the
subject; and though I now hear a good deal said, chiefly with a
controversial bearing, about the excellent religious influence of our
parochial seminaries, I never knew any one who owed other than the
merest smattering of theological knowledge to these institutions, and
not a single individual who had ever derived from them any tincture,
even the slightest, of religious feeling. In truth, during almost the
whole of the last century, and for at least the first forty years of the
present, the people of Scotland were, with all their faults,
considerably more Christian than the larger part of their schoolmasters.
So far as I can remember, I carried in my memory from school only a
single remark at all theological in its character, and it was of a kind
suited rather to do harm than good. In reading in the class one Saturday
morning a portion of the Hundred and Nineteenth Psalm, I was told by the
master that that ethical poem was a sort of alphabetical acrostic--a
circumstance, he added, that accounted for its broken and inconsecutive
character as a composition. Chiefly, however, from the Sabbath-day
catechizings to which I had been subjected during boyhood by my uncles,
and latterly from the old divines, my Uncle Sandy's favourites, and from
the teachings of the pulpit, I had acquired a considerable amount of
religious knowledge. I had thought, too, a good deal about some of the
peculiar doctrines of Calvinism, in their character as abstruse
positions--such as the doctrine of the Divine decrees, and of man's
inability to assume the initiative in the work of his own conversion. I
had, besides, a great admiration of the Bible, especially of its
narrative and poetical parts; and could scarce give strong enough
expression to the contempt which I entertained for the vulgar and
tasteless sceptics who, with Paine at their head, could speak of it as a
weak or foolish book. Further, reared in a family circle, some of whose
members were habitually devout, and all of whom respected and stood up
for religion, and were imbued with the stirring ecclesiastical
traditions of their country, I felt that the religious side in any
quarrel had a sort of hereditary claim upon me. I believe I may venture
to say, that previous to this time I had never seen a religious man
badgered for his religion, and much in a minority, without openly taking
part with him; nor is it impossible that, in a time of trouble, I might
have almost deserved the character given by old John Howie to a rather
notable "gentleman sometimes called Burly," who, "although he was by
some reckoned none of the most religious," joined himself to the
suffering party, and was "always zealous and honest-hearted." And yet my
religion was a strangely incongruous thing. It took the form, in my
mind, of a mass of indigested theology, with here and there a prominent
point developed out of due proportion, from the circumstance that I had
thought upon it for myself; and while entangled, if I may so speak, amid
the recesses and under cover of the general chaotic mass, there
harboured no inconsiderable amount of superstition, there rested over it
the clouds of a dreary scepticism. I have sometimes, in looking back on
the doubts and questionings of this period, thought, and perhaps even
spoken of myself as an infidel. But an infidel I assuredly was not: my
belief was at least as real as my incredulity, and had, I am inclined to
think, a much deeper seat in my mind. But wavering between the two
extremes--now a believer, and anon a sceptic--the belief usually
exhibiting itself as a strongly-based instinct,--the scepticism as the
result of some intellectual process--I lived on for years in a sort of
uneasy see-saw condition, without any middle ground between the two
extremes, on which I could at once reason and believe.
That middle ground I now succeeded in finding. It is at once delicate
and dangerous to speak of one's own spiritual condition, or of the
emotional sentiments on which one's conclusions regarding it are often
so doubtfully founded. Egotism in the religious form is perhaps more
tolerated than in any other; but it is not on that account less perilous
to the egotist himself. There need be, however, less delicacy in
speaking of one's beliefs than of one's feelings; and I trust I need not
hesitate to say, that I was led to see at this time, through the
instrumentality of my friend, that my theologic system had previously
wanted a central object, to which the heart, as certainly as the
intellect, could attach itself; and that the true centre of an efficient
_Christianity_ is, as the name ought of itself to indicate, "the Word
made Flesh." Around this central sun of the Christian
system--appreciated, however, not as a _doctrine_ which is a mere
abstraction, but as a Divine Person--so truly Man, that the affections
of the human heart can lay hold upon Him, and so truly God, that the
mind, through faith, can at all times and in all places be brought into
direct contact with Him--all that is really religious takes its place in
a subsidiary and subordinate relation. I say subsidiary and subordinate.
The Divine Man is the great attractive centre, the sole gravitating
point of a system which owes to Him all its coherency, and which would
be but a chaos were He away. It seems to be the existence of the human
nature in this central and paramount object that imparts to
Christianity, in its subjective character, its peculiar power of
influencing and controlling the human mind. There may be men who,
through a peculiar idiosyncrasy of constitution, are capable of loving,
after a sort, a mere abstract God, unseen and inconceivable; though, as
shown by the air of sickly sentimentality borne by almost all that has
been said and written on the subject, the feeling in its true form must
be a very rare and exceptional one. In all my experience of men, I never
knew a genuine instance of it The love of an abstract God seems to be as
little natural to the ordinary human constitution as the love of an
abstract sun or planet. And so it will be found, that in all the
religions that have taken strong hold of the mind of man, the element of
a vigorous humanity has mingled, in the character of its gods, with the
theistic element. The gods of classic mythology were simply powerful men
set loose from the tyranny of the physical laws; and, in their purely
human character, as warm friends and deadly enemies, they were both
feared and loved. And so the belief which bowed at their shrines ruled
the old civilized world for many centuries. In the great ancient
mythologies of the East--Buddhism and Brahmanism--both very influential
forms of belief--we have the same elements, genuine humanity added to
god-like power. In the faith of the Moslem, the human character of the
man Mahommed, elevated to an all-potential viceregency in things sacred,
gives great strength to what without it would be but a weak theism.
Literally it is Allah's supreme prophet that maintains for Allah himself
a place in the Mahommedan mind. Again, in Popery we find an excess of
humanity scarce leas great than in the classical mythology itself, and
with nearly corresponding results. Though the Virgin Mother takes, as
queen of heaven, a first place in the scheme, and forms in that
character a greatly more interesting goddess than any of the old ones
who counselled Ulysses, or responded to the love of Anchises or of
Endymion, she has to share her empire with the minor saints, and to
recognise in them a host of rivals. But undoubtedly to this popular
element Popery owes not a little of its indomitable strength. In,
however, all these forms of religion, whether inherently false from the
beginning, or so overlaid in some after stage by the fictitious and the
untrue as to have their original substratum of truth covered up by error
and fable, there is such a want of coherency between the theistic and
human elements, that we always find them undergoing a process of
separation. We see the human element ever laying hold on the popular
mind, and there manifesting itself in the form of a vigorous
superstition; and the theistic element, on the other hand, recognised by
the cultivated intellect as the exclusive and only element, and
elaborated into a sort of natural theology, usually rational enough in
its propositions, but for any practical purpose always feeble and
inefficient. Such a separation of the two elements took place of old in
the ages of the classical mythology; and hence the very opposite
characters of the wild but genial and popular fables so exquisitely
adorned by the poets, and the rational but uninfluential doctrines
received by a select few from the philosophers. Such a separation took
place, too, in France in the latter half of the last century; and still
on the European Continent generally do we find this separation
represented by the assertors of a weak theism on the one hand, and of a
superstitious saint-worship on the other. In the false or corrupted
religions, the two indispensable elements of Divinity and Humanity
appear as if blended together by a mere mechanical process; and it is
their natural tendency to separate, through a sort of subsidence on the
part of the human element from the theistic one, as if from some lack of
the necessary affinities. In Christianity, on the other hand, when
existing in its integrity as the religion of the New Testament, the
union of the two elements is complete: it partakes of the nature, not of
a mechanical, but of a chemical mixture; and its great central
doctrine--the true Humanity and true Divinity of the Adorable
Saviour--is a truth equally receivable by at once the humblest and the
loftiest intellects. Poor dying children possessed of but a few simple
ideas, and men of the most robust intellects, such as the Chalmerses,
Fosters, and Halls of the Christian Church, find themselves equally able
to rest their salvation on the _man_ "Christ, who is over all, _God_
blessed for ever." Of this fundamental truth of the two natures, that
condensed enunciation of the gospel which forms the watchword of our
faith, "Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved," is a
direct and palpable embodiment; and Christianity is but a mere name
without it.
I was impressed at this time by another very remarkable feature in the
religion of Christ in its subjective character. Kames, in his "Art of
Thinking," illustrates, by a curious story, one of his observations on
the "nature of man." "Nothing is more common," he says, "than love
converted into hatred; and we have seen instances of hatred converted
into love." And in exemplifying the remark, he relates his anecdote of
"Unnion and Valentine." Two English soldiers, who fought in the wars of
Queen Anne--the one a petty officer, the other a private sentinel--had
been friends and comrades for years; but, quarrelling in some love
affair, they became bitter enemies. The officer made an ungenerous use
of his authority, and so annoyed and persecuted the sentinel as almost
to fret him into madness; and he was frequently heard to say that he
would die to be avenged of him. Whole months were spent in the
infliction of injuries on the one side, and in the venting of complaints
on the other; when, in the midst of their mutual rage, they were both
selected, as men of tried courage, to share in some desperate attack,
which was, however, unsuccessful; and the officer, in the retreat, was
disabled, and struck down by a shot in the thigh. "Oh, Valentine! and
will you leave me here to perish?" he exclaimed, as his old comrade
rushed past him. The poor injured man immediately returned; and, in the
midst of a thick fire, bore off his wounded enemy to what seemed a place
of safety, when he was struck by a chance ball, and fell dead under his
burden. The officer, immediately forgetting his wound, rose up, tearing
his hair; and, throwing himself on the bleeding body, he cried, "Ah,
Valentine! and was it for me, who have so barbarously used thee, that
thou hast died? I will not live after thee." He was not by any means to
be forced from the corpse; but was removed with it bleeding in his arms,
and attended with tears by all his comrades, who knew of his harshness
to the deceased. When brought to a tent, his wounds were dressed by
force; but the next day, still calling on Valentine, and lamenting his
cruelties to him, he died in the pangs of remorse and despair.
This surely is a striking story; but the commonplace remark based upon
it by the philosopher is greatly less so. Men who have loved _do_ often
learn to hate the object of their affections; and men who have hated
sometimes learn to love: but the portion of the anecdote specially
worthy of remark appears to be that which, dwelling on the o'ermastering
remorse and sorrow of the rescued soldier, shows how effectually his
poor dead comrade had, by dying for him "while he was yet his enemy,"
"heaped coals of fire upon his head." And such seems to be one of the
leading principles on which, with a Divine adaptation to the heart of
man, the scheme of Redemption has been framed. The Saviour approved his
love, "in that while we were yet sinners, He died for us." There is an
inexpressibly great power in this principle; and many a deeply-stirred
heart has felt it to its core. The theologians have perhaps too
frequently dwelt on the Saviour's vicarious satisfaction for human sin
in its relation to the offended justice of the Father. How, or on what
principle, the Father was satisfied, I know not, and may never know. The
enunciation regarding vicarious satisfaction may be properly received in
faith as a _fact_, but, I suspect, not properly reasoned upon until we
shall be able to bring the moral sense of Deity, with its requirements,
within the limits of a small and trivial logic. But the thorough
adaptation of the scheme to man's nature is greatly more appreciable,
and lies fully within the reach of observation and experience. And how
thorough that adaptation is, all who have really looked at the matter
ought to be competent to say. Does an earthly priesthood, vested with
alleged powers to interpose between God and man, always originate an
ecclesiastical tyranny, which has the effect, in the end, of shutting up
the mass of men from their Maker?--here is there a High Priest passed
into the heavens--the only Priest whom the evangelistic Protestant
recognises as really such--to whom, in his character of Mediator between
God and man, all may apply, and before whom there need be felt none of
that abject prostration of the spirit and understanding which man always
experiences when he bends before the merely human priest. Is
self-righteousness the besetting infirmity of the religious man?--in the
scheme of vicarious righteousness it finds no footing. The
self-approving Pharisee must be content to renounce his own merits, ere
he can have part or lot in the fund of merit which alone avails; and yet
without personal righteousness he can have no evidence whatever that he
has an interest in the all-prevailing imputed righteousness. But it is
in the closing scene of life, when man's boasted virtues become so
intangible in his estimation that they elude his grasp, and sins and
shortcomings, little noted before, start up around him like spectres,
that the scheme of Redemption appears worthy of the infinite wisdom and
goodness of God, and when what the Saviour did and suffered seems of
efficacy enough to blot out the guilt of every offence. It is when the
minor lights of comfort are extinguished that the Sun of Righteousness
shines forth, and more than compensates for them all.
The opinions which I formed at this time on this matter of prime
importance I found no after occasion to alter or modify. On the
contrary, in passing from the subjective to the objective view, I have
seen the doctrine of the union of the two natures greatly confirmed. The
truths of geology appear destined to exercise in the future no
inconsiderable influence on natural theology; and with this especial
doctrine they seem very much in accordance. Of that long and stately
march of creation with which the records of the stony science bring us
acquainted, the distinguishing characteristic is progress. There appears
to have been a time when there existed on our planet only dead matter
unconnected with vitality; and then a time in which plants and animals
of a low order began to be, but in which even fishes, the humblest of
the vertebrata, were so rare and exceptionable, that they occupied a
scarce appreciable place in Nature. Then came an age of fishes huge of
size, and that to the peculiar ichthyic organization added certain
well-marked characteristics of the reptilian class immediately above
them. And then, after a time, during which the reptile had occupied a
place as inconspicuous as that occupied by the fish in the earlier
periods of animal life, an age of reptiles of vast bulk and high
standing was ushered in. And when, in the lapse of untold ages, _it_
also had passed away, there succeeded an age of great mammals.
Molluscs, fishes, reptiles, mammals, had each in succession their
periods of vast extent; and then there came a period that differed even
more, in the character of its master-existence, from any of these
creations, than they, with their many vitalities, had differed from the
previous inorganic period in which life had not yet begun to be. The
human period began--the period of a fellow-worker with God, created in
God's own image. The animal existences of the previous ages formed, if I
may so express myself, mere figures in the landscapes of the great
garden which they inhabited. Man, on the other hand, was placed in it to
"keep and to dress it;" and such has been the effect of his labours,
that they have altered and improved the face of whole continents. Our
globe, even as it might be seen from the moon, testifies, over its
surface, to that unique nature of man, unshared in by any of the
inferior animals, which renders him, in things physical and natural, a
fellow-worker with the Creator who first produced it. And of the
identity of at least his intellect with that of his Maker, and, of
consequence, of the integrity of the revelation which declares that he
was created in God's own image, we have direct evidence in his ability
of not only conceiving of God's contrivances, but even of reproducing
them; and this, not as a mere imitator, but as an original thinker. He
may occasionally borrow the principles of his contrivances from the
works of the Original Designer, but much more frequently, in studying
the works of the Original Designer does he discover in them the
principles of his own contrivances. He has not been an imitator: he has
merely been exercising, with resembling results, the resembling mind,
_i.e._, the mind made in the Divine image. But the existing scene of
things is not destined to be the last. High as it is, it is too low and
too imperfect to be regarded as God's finished work: it is merely one of
the _progressive_ dynasties; and Revelation and the implanted instincts
of our nature alike teach us to anticipate a glorious _terminal_
dynasty. In the first dawn of being, simple vitality was united to
matter: the vitality thus united became, in each succeeding period, of a
higher and yet higher order;--it was in succession the vitality of the
mollusc, of the fish, of the reptile, of the sagacious mammal, and,
finally, of responsible, immortal man, created in the image of God. What
is to be the next advance? Is there to be merely a repetition of the
past--an introduction a second time of "man made in the image of God?"
No! The geologist, in the tables of stone which form his records, finds
no example of dynasties once passed away again returning. There has been
no repetition of the dynasty of the fish--of the reptile--of the mammal.
The dynasty of the future is to have glorified man for its inhabitant;
but it is to be the dynasty--the "_kingdom_"--not of glorified man made
in the image of God, but of God himself in the form of man. In the
doctrine of the two natures, and in the further doctrine that the
terminal dynasty is to be peculiarly the dynasty of Him in whom the
natures are united, we find that required progression beyond which
progress cannot go. Creation and the Creator meet at one point, and in
one person. The long ascending line from dead matter to man has been, a
progress Godwards--not an asymptotical progress, but destined from the
beginning to furnish a point of union; and, occupying that point as true
God and true man, as Creator and created, we recognise the adorable
Monarch of all the Future. It is, as urged by the Apostle, the especial
glory of our race, that it should have furnished that point of contact
at which Godhead has united Himself, not to man only, but also, through
man, to His own Universe--to the Universe of Matter and of Mind.
I remained for several months in delicate and somewhat precarious
health. My lungs had received more serious injury than I had at first
supposed; and it seemed at one time rather doubtful whether the severe
mechanical irritation which had so fretted them that the air-passages
seemed overcharged with matter and stone-dust, might not pass into the
complaint which it stimulated, and become confirmed consumption.
Curiously enough, my comrades had told me in sober earnest--among the
rest, Cha, a man of sense and observation--that I would pay the forfeit
of my sobriety by being sooner affected than they by the stone-cutter's
malady: "a good _bouse_" gave, they said, a wholesome fillip to the
constitution, and "cleared the sulphur off the lungs;" and mine would
suffer for want of the medicine which kept theirs clean. I know not
whether there was virtue in their remedy: it seems just possible that
the shock given to the constitution by an overdose of strong drink may
in certain cases be medicinal in its effects; but they were certainly
not in error in their prediction. Among the hewers of the party I was
the first affected by the malady. I still remember the rather pensive
than sad feeling with which I used to contemplate, at this time, an
early death, and the intense love of nature that drew me, day after day,
to the beautiful scenery which surrounds my native town, and which I
loved all the more from the consciousness that my eyes might so soon
close upon it for ever. "It _is_ a pleasant thing to behold the sun."
Among my manuscripts--useless scraps of paper, to which, however, in
their character as fossils of the past epochs of my life, I cannot help
attaching an interest not at all in themselves--I find the mood
represented by only a few almost infantile verses, addressed to a docile
little girl of five years, my eldest sister by my mother's second
marriage, and my frequent companion, during my illness, in my short
walks.
TO JEANIE.
Sister Jeanie, haste, we'll go
To whare the white-starred gowans grow,
Wi' the puddock flower o' gowden hue.
The snaw-drap white and the bonny vi'let blue.
Sister Jeanie, haste, we'll go
To whare the blossomed lilacs grow--
To whare the pine-tree, dark an' high,
Is pointing its tap at the cloudless sky.
Jeanie, mony a merry lay
Is sung in the young-leaved woods to-day;
Flits on light wing the dragon-flee,
An' bums on the flowrie the big red-bee.
Down the burnie wirks its way
Aneath the bending birken spray,
An' wimples roun' the green moss-stane,
An' mourns. I kenna why, wi' a ceaseless mane.
Jeanie, come; thy days o' play
Wi' autumn-tide shall pass away;
Sune shall these scenes, in darkness cast,
Be ravaged wild by the wild winter blast.
Though to thee a spring shall rise,
An' scenes as fair salute thine eyes;
An' though, through many a cludless day,
My winsome Jean shall be heartsome and gay;
He wha grasps thy little hand
Nae langer at thy side shall stand,
Nor o'er the flower-besprinkled brae
Lead thee the low'nest and the bonniest way.
Dost thou see yon yard sae green,
Spreckled wi' mony a mossy stane?
A few short weeks o' pain shall fly,
An' asleep in that _bed_ shall thy puir brither lie.
Then thy mither's tears awhile
May chide thy joy an' damp thy smile;
But sune ilk grief shall wear awa',
And I'll be forgotten by ane an' by a'.
Dinna think the thought is sad;
Life vexed me aft, but this mak's glad:
When cauld my heart and closed my e'e,
Bonny shall the dreams o' my slumbers be.
At length, however, my constitution threw off the malady; though--as I
still occasionally feel--the organ affected never quite regained its
former vigour; and I began to experience the quiet but exquisite
enjoyment of the convalescent. After long and depressing illness, youth
itself appears to return with returning health; and it seems to be one
of the compensating provisions, that while men of robust constitution
and rigid organization get gradually old in their spirits and obtuse in
their feelings, the class that have to endure being many times sick have
the solace of being also many times young. The reduced and weakened
frame becomes as susceptible of the emotional as in tender and delicate
youth. I know not that I ever spent three happier months than the
autumnal months of this year, when gradually picking up flesh and
strength amid my old haunts, the woods and caves. My friend had left me
early in July for Aberdeen, where he had gone to prosecute his studies
under the eye of a tutor, one Mr. Duncan, whom he described to me in his
letters as perhaps the most deeply learned man he had ever seen. "You
may ask him a common question," said my friend, "without getting an
answer--for he has considerably more than the average absentness of the
great scholar about him; but if you inquire of him the state of any one
controversy ever agitated in the Church or the world, he will give it
you at once, with, if you please, all the arguments on both sides." The
trait struck me at the time as one of some mark; and I thought of it
many years after, when fame had blown the name of my friend's tutor
pretty widely as Dr. Duncan, Hebrew Professor in our Free Church
College, and one of the most profoundly learned of Orientalists. Though
separated, however, from my friend, I found a quiet pleasure in
following up, in my solitary walks, the views which his conversations
had suggested; and in a copy of verses, the production of this time,
which, with all their poverty and stiffness, please me as true, and as
representative of the convalescent feeling, I find direct reference to
the beliefs which he had laboured to instil. My verses are written in a
sort of metre which, in the hands of Collins, became flexible and
exquisitely poetic, and which in those of Kirke White is at least
pleasing, but of which we find poor enough specimens in the
"Anthologies" of Southey, and which perhaps no one so limited in his
metrical vocabulary, and so defective in his musical ear, as the writer
of these chapters, should ever have attempted.
SOLACE.
No star of golden influence hailed the birth
Of him who, all unknown and lonely, pours,
As fails the light of eve,
His pensive, artless song;
Yea, those who mark out honour, ease, wealth, fame,
As man's sole joys, shall find no joy in him;
Yet of far nobler kind
His silent pleasures prove.
For not unmarked by him the ways of men;
Nor yet to him the ample page unknown,
Where, traced by Nature's hand,
Is many a pleasing line.
Oh! when the world's dull children bend the knee,
Meanly obsequious, to some mortal god,
It yields no vulgar joy
Alone to stand aloof;
Or when they jostle on wealth's crowded road,
And swells the tumult on the breeze, 'tis sweet,
Thoughtful, at length reclined,
To list the wrathful hum.
What though the weakly gay affect to scorn
The loitering dreamer of life's darkest shade,
Stingless the jeer, whose voice
Comes from the erroneous path.
Scorner, of all thy toils the end declare!
If pleasure, pleasure comes uncalled, to cheer
The haunts of him who spends
His hours in quiet thought.
And happier he who can repress desire,
Than they who seldom mourn a thwarted wish;
The vassals they of fate--
The unbending conqueror he,
And thou, blest Muse, though rudely strung thy lyre,
Its tones can guile the dark and lonesome day--
Can smooth the wrinkled brow,
And dry the sorrowing tear.
Thine many a bliss--oh, many a solace thine!
By thee up-held, the soul asserts her throne,
The chastened passions sleep,
And dove-eyed Peace prevails.
And thou, fair Hope! when other comforts fail--
When night's thick mists descend--thy beacon flames,
Till glow the dark clouds round
With beams of promised bliss.
Thou failest not, when, mute the soothing lyre,
Lives thy unfading solace: sweet to raise
Thy eye, O quiet Hope,
And greet a friend in heaven!--
A friend, a brother, one whose awful throne
In holy fear heaven's mightiest sons approach:
Man's heart to feel for man--
To save him God's great power!
Conqueror of death, joy of the accepted soul,
Oh, wonders raise no doubt when told of thee!
Thy way past finding out,
Thy love, can tongue declare?
Cheered by thy smile, Peace dwells amid the storm;
Held by thy hand, the floods assail in vain;
With grief is blent a joy,
And beams the vault of death.
Passing, in one of my walks this autumn, the cave in which I used to
spend in boyhood so many happy hours with Finlay, I found it smoking, as
of old, with a huge fire, and occupied by a wilder and more careless
party than even my truant schoolfellows. It had been discovered and
appropriated by a band of gipsies, who, attracted by the soot-stains on
its roof and sides, and concluding that it had been inhabited by the
gipsies of other days, had without consulting factor or landlord, at
once entered upon possession, as the proper successors of its former
occupants. They were a savage party, with a good deal of the true gipsy
blood in them, but not without mixture of a broken-down class of
apparently British descent; and one of their women was purely Irish.
From what I had previously heard about gipsies, I was not prepared for a
mixture of this kind; but I found it pretty general, and ascertained
that at least one of the ways in which it had taken place was
exemplified by the case of the one Irish woman. Her gipsy husband had
served as a soldier, and had married her when in the army. I have been
always exceedingly curious to see man in his rude elements--to study him
as the savage, whether among the degraded classes of our own country,
or, as exhibited in the writings of travellers and voyagers, in his
aboriginal state; and I now did not hesitate to visit the gipsies, and
to spend not unfrequently an hour or two in their company. They at first
seemed jealous of me as a spy; but finding me inoffensive, and that I
did not bewray counsel, they came at length to recognise me as the
"quiet, sickly lad," and to chatter as freely in my presence as in that
of the other pitchers with ears, which they used to fabricate out of tin
by the dozen and the score, and the manufacture of which, with the
making of horn spoons, formed the main branch of business carried on in
the cave. I saw in these visits curious glimpses of gipsy life. I could
trust only to what I actually witnessed: what was told me could on no
occasion be believed; for never were there lies more gross and monstrous
than those of the gipsies; but even the lying formed of itself a
peculiar trait. I have never heard lying elsewhere that set all
probability so utterly at defiance--a consequence, in part, of their
recklessly venturing, like unskilful authors, to expatiate in walks of
invention over which their experience did not extend. On one occasion an
old gipsy woman, after pronouncing my malady consumption, prescribed for
me as an infallible remedy, raw parsley minced small and made up into
balls with fresh butter; but seeing, I suppose, from my manner, that I
lacked the necessary belief in her specific, she went on to say, that
she had derived her knowledge of such matters from her mother, one of
the most "skeely women that ever lived." Her mother, she said, had once
healed a lord's son of a grievous hurt in half a minute, after all the
English doctors had shown they could do nothing for him. His eye had
been struck out of its socket by a blow, and hung half-way down his
cheek; and though the doctors could of course return it to its place, it
refused to stick, always falling out again. Her mother, however, at once
understood the case; and, making a little slit at the back of the young
man's neck, she got hold of the end of a sinew, and pulling in the
dislodged orb at a tug, she made all tight by running a knot on the
controlling ligament, and so kept the eye in its place. And, save that
the young lord continued to squint a little, he was well at once. The
peculiar anatomy on which this invention was framed must have, of
course, resembled that of a wax-doll with winking eyes; but it did well
enough for the woman; and, having no character for truth to maintain,
she did not hesitate to build on it. On asking her whether she ever
attended church, she at once replied, "O yes, at one time very often. I
am the daughter of a minister--a _natural_ daughter, you know: my
father was the most powerful preacher in all the south, and I always
went to hear him." In about an hour after, however, forgetting her
extemporary sally, and the reverend character with which she had
insisted her sire, she spoke of him, in another equally palpable
invention, as the greatest "king of the gipsies" that the gipsies ever
had. Even the children had caught this habit of monstrous mendacity.
There was one of the boys of the band, considerably under twelve, who
could extemporize lying narratives by the hour, and seemed always
delighted to get a listener; and a little girl, younger still, who
"lisped in _fiction_, for the _fiction_ came." There were two things
that used to strike me as peculiar among these gipsies--a Hindu type of
head, small of size, but with a considerable fulness of forehead,
especially along the medial line, in the region, as the phrenologist
would perhaps say, of _individuality_ and _comparison_; and a singular
posture assumed by the elderly females of the tribe in squatting before
their fires, in which the elbow rested on the knees brought close
together, the chin on the palms, and the entire figure (somewhat
resembling in attitude a Mexican mummy) assumed an outlandish
appearance, that reminded me of some of the more grotesque sculptures of
Egypt and Hindustan. The peculiar type of head was derived, I doubt not,
from an ancestry originally different from that of the settled races of
the country; nor is it impossible that the peculiar position--unlike any
I have ever seen Scottish females assume--was also of foreign origin.
I have witnessed scenes among these gipsies, of which the author of the
"Jolly Beggars" might have made rare use, but which formed a sort of
materials that I lacked the special ability rightly to employ. It was
reported on one occasion that a marriage ceremony and wedding were to
take place in the cave, and I sauntered the way, in the hope of
ascertaining how its inmates contrived to do for themselves what of
course no clergyman could venture to do for them--seeing that, of the
parties to be united, the bridegroom might have already as many wives
living as "Peter Bell," and the bride as many husbands. A gipsy marriage
had taken place a few years previous in a cave near Rosemarkie. An old
male gipsy, possessed of the rare accomplishment of reading, had
half-read, half-spelled the English marriage-service to the young
couple, and the ceremony was deemed complete at its close. And I now
expected to witness something similar. In an opening in the wood above,
I encountered two very drunk gipsies, and saw the first-fruits of the
coming merriment. One of the two was an uncouth-looking monster,
sallow-skinned, flat-faced, round-shouldered, long and thinly limbed, at
least six feet two inches in height, and, from his strange
misproportions, he might have passed for seven feet any day, were it not
that his trousers, made for a much shorter man, and rising to the middle
of his calfless leg, gave him much the appearance of a big boy walking
on stilts. The boys of the place called him "Giant Grimbo;" while his
companion, a tight dapper little fellow, who always showed off a
compact, well-rounded leg in corduroy inexpressibles, they had learned
to distinguish as "Billy Breeches." The giant, who carried a bagpipe,
had broken down ere I came up with them; and now, sitting on the grass,
he was droning out in fitful blasts a diabolical music, to which Billy
Breeches was dancing; but, just as I passed, Billy also gave way, after
wasting an infinity of exertion in keeping erect; and, falling over the
prostrate musician, I could hear the bag groaning out its soul as he
pressed against it, in a lengthened melancholious squeal. I found the
cave bearing an aspect of more than ordinary picturesqueness. It had its
two fires, and its double portion of smoke, that went rolling out in the
calm like an inverted river; for it clung close to the roof, as if by a
reversed gravitation, and turned its foaming surface downwards. At the
one fire an old gipsy woman was engaged in baking oaten cakes; and a
great pot, that dispensed through the cave the savoury odour of unlucky
poultry out short in the middle of their days, and of hapless hares
destroyed without the game licence, depended over the other. An ass, the
common property of the tribe, stood meditating in the foreground; two
urchins, of about from ten to twelve years a-piece--wretchedly supplied
in the article of clothing--for the one, provided with only a pair of
tattered trousers, was naked from the waist upwards, and the other,
furnished with only a dilapidated jacket, was naked from the waist
downwards--were engaged in picking up fuel for the fire, still further
in front; a few of the ordinary inmates of the place lounged under cover
of the smoke, apparently in a mood not in the least busy; and on a couch
of dried fern sat evidently the central figure of the group, a young,
sparkling-eyed brunette, more than ordinarily marked by the Hindu
peculiarities of head and feature, and attended by a savage-looking
fellow of about twenty, dark as a mulatto, and with a profusion of long
flexible hair, black as jet, hanging down to his eyes, and clustering
about his cheeks and neck. These were, I ascertained, the bride and
bridegroom. The bride was engaged in sewing a cap--the bridegroom in
watching the progress of the work. I observed that the party, who were
less communicative than usual, seemed to regard me in the light of an
intruder. An elderly tinker, the father of the bride, grey as a leafless
thorn in winter, but still stalwart and strong, sat admiring a bit of
spelter of about a pound weight. It was gold, he said, or, as he
pronounced the word, "guild," which had been found in an old cairn, and
was of immense value, "for it was peer guild and that was the best o'
guild;" but if I pleased, he would sell it to me, a very great bargain.
I was engaged with some difficulty in declining the offer, when we were
interrupted by the sounds of the bagpipe. Giant Grimbo and Billy
Breeches had succeeded in regaining their feet, and were seen staggering
towards the cave. "Where's the whisky, Billy!" inquired the proprietor
of the gold, addressing himself to the man of the small clothes.
"Whisky!" said Billy, "ask Grimbo." "Where's the whisky, Grimbo?"
reiterated the tinker. "Whisky!" replied Grimbo, "Whisky!" and yet
again, after a pause and a hiccup, "Whisky!" "Ye confounded blacks!"
said the tinker, springing to his feet with an agility wonderful for an
age so advanced as his, "Have you drunk it all? But take that, Grimbo,"
he added, planting a blow full on the side of the giant's head, which
prostrated his vast length along the floor of the cave. "And take that,
Billy," he iterated, dealing such another blow to the shorter man, which
sent him right athwart his prostrate comrade. And then, turning to me,
he remarked with perfect coolness, "That, master, I call smart hitting."
"Honest lad," whispered one of the women immediately after, "it will be
a _reugh_ time wi' us here the nicht: you had just better be stepping
your ways." I had already begun to think so without prompting; and so,
taking my leave of the gipsies, I failed being, as I had proposed, one
of the witnesses of the wedding.
There is a sort of grotesque humour in scenes of the kind described,
that has charms for artists and authors of a particular class--some of
them men of broad sympathies and great genius; and hence, through their
representations, literary and pictorial, the ludicrous point of view has
come to be the conventional and ordinary one. And yet it is a sad enough
merriment, after all, that has for its subject a degradation so extreme.
I never knew a gipsy that seemed to possess a moral sense--a degree of
_Pariahism_ which has been reached by only one other class in the
country, and that a small one--the descendants of degraded females in
our large towns. An education in Scotland, however secular in its
character, always casts a certain amount of enlightenment on the
conscience; a home, however humble, whose inmates win their bread by
honest industry, has a similar effect; but in the peculiar walks in
which for generations there has been no education of any kind, or in
which bread has been the wages of infamy, the moral sense seems so
wholly obliterated, that there appears to survive nothing in the mind to
which the missionary or the moralist can appeal. It seems scarce
possible for a man to know even a very little of these classes, without
learning, in consequence, to respect honest labour, and even secular
knowledge, as at least the _second-best_ things, in their moral bearing
and influence, that can exist among a people.