"Life is a drama of a few brief acts;
The actors shift, the scene is often changed,
Pauses and revolutions intervene,
The mind is set to many a varied tune.
And jars and plays in harmony by turns."
ALEXANDER BETHUNE.
Though my wife continued, after our marriage, to teach a few pupils, the
united earnings of the household did not much exceed a hundred pounds
per annum--not quite so large a sum as I had used to think it a few
years before; and so I set myself to try whether I could not turn my
leisure hours to some account, by writing for the periodicals. My old
inability of pressing for work continued to be as embarrassing as ever,
and, save for a chance engagement of no very promising kind, which
presented itself to me unsolicited about this time, I might have failed
in procuring the employment which I sought. An ingenious self-taught
mechanic--the late Mr. John Mackay Wilson of Berwick-on-Tweed--after
making good his upward way from his original place at the compositor's
frame, to the editorship of a provincial paper, started, in the
beginning of 1835, a weekly periodical, consisting of "Border Tales,"
which, as he possessed the story-telling ability, met with considerable
success. He did not live, however, to complete the first yearly volume;
the forty-ninth weekly number intimated his death; but as the
publication had been a not unprofitable one, the publisher resolved on
carrying it on; and it was stated in a brief notice, which embodied a
few particulars of Mr. Wilson's biography, that, his materials being
unexhausted, "tales yet untold lay in reserve, to keep alive his
memory." And in the name of Wilson the publication was kept up for, I
believe, five years. It reckoned among its contributors the two
Bethunes, John and Alexander, and the late Professor Gillespie of St.
Andrews, with several other writers, none of whom seem to have been
indebted to any original matter collected by its first editor; and I,
who, at the publisher's request, wrote for it, during the first year of
my marriage, tales enough to fill an ordinary volume, had certainly to
provide all my materials for myself. The whole brought me about
twenty-five pounds--a considerable addition to the previous hundred and
odds of the household, but, for the work done, as inadequate a
remuneration as ever poor writer got in the days of Grub Street. My
tales, however, though an English critic did me the honour of selecting
one of them as the best in the monthly part in which it appeared, were
not of the highest order: it took a great deal of writing to earn the
three guineas, which were the stipulated wages for filling a weekly
number; and though poor Wilson may have been a fine enough fellow in his
way, one had no great encouragement to do one's very best, in order to
"keep alive his memory." In all such matters, according to Sir Walter
Scott and the old proverb, "every herring should hang by its own head."
I can show, however, that at least one of my contributions _did_ gain
Wilson some little credit. In the perilous attempt to bring out, in the
dramatic form, the characters of two of our national poets--Burns and
Fergusson--I wrote for the "Tales" a series of "Recollections," drawn
ostensibly from the memory of one who had been personally acquainted
with them both, but in reality based on my own conceptions of the men,
as exhibited in their lives and writings. And in an elaborate life of
Fergusson, lately published, I find a borrowed extract from my
contribution, and an approving reference to the whole, coupled with a
piece of information entirely new to me. "These Recollections," says the
biographer, "are truly interesting and touching, _and were the result of
various communications made to Mr. Wilson_, whose pains-taking
researches I have had frequent occasion to verify in the course of my
own." Alas, no! Poor Wilson was more than a twelvemonth in his grave ere
the idea of producing these "Recollections" first struck the writer--a
person to whom no communications on the subject were ever made by any
one, and who, unassisted save by one of the biographies of the
poet--that in Chambers' "Lives of Illustrious Scotsmen,"--wrote full two
hundred miles from the scene of his sad and brief career. The same
individual who, in Mr. Wilson's behalf, is so complimentary to my
"pains-taking research," is, I find, very severe on one of Fergusson's
previous biographers--the scholarly Dr. Irving, author of the Life of
Buchanan, and the Lives of the older Scottish Poets--a gentleman who,
whatever his estimate of the poor poet may have been, would have spared
no labour in elucidating the various incidents which composed his
history. The man of research is roughly treated, and a compliment
awarded to the diligence of the man of none. But it is always thus with
Fame.
"Some she disgraced, and some with honours crown'd;
Unlike successes equal merits found:
So her blind sister, fickle Fortune, reigns.
And, undiscerning, scatters crowns and chains."
In the memoir of John Bethune by his brother Alexander, the reader is
told that he was much depressed and disappointed, about a twelvemonth or
so previous to his decease, by the rejection of several of his stories
in succession, which were returned to him, "with an editor's sentence of
death passed upon them." I know not whether it was by the editor of the
"Tales of the Borders" that sentence in the case was passed; but I know
he sentenced some of mine, which were, I daresay, not very good, though
well-nigh equal, I thought, to most of his own Instead, however, of
yielding to depression, like poor Bethune, I simply resolved to write
for him no more; and straightway made an offer of my services to Mr.
Robert Chambers, by whom they were accepted; and during the two
following years I occasionally contributed to his _Journal_, on greatly
more liberal terms than those on which I had laboured for the other
periodical, and with my name attached to my several articles. I must be
permitted to avail myself of the present opportunity of acknowledging
the kindness of Mr. Chambers. There is perhaps no other writer of the
present day who has done so much to encourage struggling talent as this
gentleman. I have for many years observed that publications, however
obscure, in which he finds aught really praiseworthy, are secure always
of getting, in his widely-circulated periodical, a kind approving
word--that his criticisms invariably bear the stamp of a benevolent
nature, which experiences more of pleasure in the recognition of merit
than in the detection of defect--that his kindness does not stop with
these cheering notices, for he finds time, in the course of a very busy
life, to write many a note of encouragement and advice to obscure men in
whom he recognises a spirit superior to their condition--and that the
compositions of writers of this meritorious class, when submitted to him
editorially, rarely fail, if really suitable for his journal, to find a
place in it, or to be remunerated on a scale that invariably bears
reference to the value of the communications--not to the circumstances
of their authors.
I can scarce speak of my contributions to the periodicals at this time
as forming any part of my education. I acquired, in their composition, a
somewhat readier command of the pen than before; but they, of course,
tended rather to the dissipation of previous stores than to the
accumulation of new ones; nor did they give exercise to those higher
faculties of mind which I deemed it most my interest to cultivate. My
real education at the time was that in which I was gradually becoming
initiated behind the bank-counter, as my experience of the business of
the district extended; and that which I contrived to pick up in my
leisure evenings along the shores. A rich ichthyolitic deposit of the
Old Red Sandstone lies, as I have already said, within less than half a
mile of the town of Cromarty; and when fatigued with my calculations in
the bank, I used to find it delightful relaxation to lay open its fish
by scores, and to study their peculiarities as exhibited in their
various states of keeping, until I at length became able to determine
their several genera and species from even the minutest fragments. The
number of ichthyolites which that deposit of itself furnished--a patch
little more than forty yards square--seemed altogether astonishing: it
supplied me with specimens at almost every visit, for ten years
together; nor, though, after I left Cromarty for Edinburgh, it was often
explored by geologic tourists, and by a few cultivators of science in
the place, was it wholly exhausted for ten years more. The ganoids of
the second age of vertebrate existence must have congregated as thickly
upon that spot in the times of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, as herrings
ever do now, in their season, on the best fishing-banks of Caithness or
the Moray Firth. I was for some time greatly puzzled in my attempts to
restore these ancient fishes, by the peculiarities of their
organization. It was in vain I examined every species of fish caught by
the fishermen of the place, from the dog-fish and the skate to the
herring and the mackerel. I could find in our recent fishes no such
scales of enamelled bone as those which had covered the _Dipterians_ and
the _Celacanths_; and no such plate-encased animals as the various
species of _Coccosteus_ or _Pterichthys_. On the other hand, with the
exception of a double line of vertebral processes in the _Coccosteus_, I
could find in the ancient fishes no internal skeleton: they had
apparently worn all their bones outside, where the crustaceans wear
their shells, and were furnished inside with but frameworks of
perishable cartilage. It seemed somewhat strange, too, that the
geologists who occasionally came my way--some of them men of
eminence--seemed to know even less about my Old Red fishes and their
peculiarities of structure, than I did myself. I had represented the
various species of the deposit simply by numerals, which not a few of
the specimens of my collection still retain on their faded labels; and
waited on until some one should come the way learned enough to
substitute for my provisional figures words by which to designate them;
but the necessary learning seemed wanting, and I at length came to find
that I had got into a _terra incognita_ in the geological field, the
greater portion of whose organisms were still unconnected with human
language. They had no representatives among the vocables.
I formed my first imperfect acquaintance with the recent ganoidal fishes
in 1836, from a perusal of the late Dr. Hibbert's paper on the deposit
of Burdiehouse, which I owed to the kindness of Mr. George Anderson. Dr.
Hibbert, in illustrating the fishes of the Coal Measures, figured and
briefly described the Lepidosteus of the American rivers as a still
surviving fish of the early type; but his description of the animal,
though supplemented shortly after by that of Dr. Buckland in his
Bridgewater Treatise, carried me but a little way. I saw that two of the
Old Red genera--_Osteolepis_ and _Diplopterus_--resembled the American
fish externally. It will be seen that the first-mentioned of these
ancient ichthyolites bears a name compounded, though, in the reverse
order, of exactly the same words. But while I found the skeleton of the
Lepidosteus described as remarkably hard and solid, I could detect in
the _Osteolepis_ and its kindred genus no trace of internal skeleton at
all The Cephalaspean genera, too--_Coccosteus_ and
_Pterichthys_--greatly puzzled me: I could find no living analogues for
them; and so, in my often-repeated attempts at restoration, I had to
build them up plate by plate, as a child sets up its dissected map or
picture bit by bit--every new specimen that turned up furnishing a key
for some part previously unknown--until at length, after many an
abortive effort, the creatures rose up before me in their strange,
unwonted proportions, as they had lived, untold ages before, in the
primaeval seas. The extraordinary form of _Pterichthys_ filled me with
astonishment; and with its arched carpace and flat plastron restored
before me, I leaped to the conclusion, that as the recent Lepidosteus,
with its ancient representatives of the Old Red Sandstone, were sauroid
fishes--strange connecting links between fishes and alligators--so the
_Pterichthys_ was a Chelonian fish--a connecting link between the fish
and the tortoise. A gurnard--insinuated so far through the shell of a
small tortoise as to suffer its head to protrude from the anterior
opening, furnished with oar-like paddles instead of pectoral fins, and
with its caudal fin clipped to a point--would, I found, form no
inadequate representative of this strangest of fishes. And when, some
years after, I had the pleasure of introducing it to the notice of
Agassiz, I found that, with all his world-wide experience of its class,
it was as much an object of wonder to him as it had been to myself. "It
is impossible," we find him saying, in his great work, "to see aught
more bizarre in all creation than the _Pterichthyan_ genus: the same
astonishment that Cuvier felt in examining the Plesiosaurus, I myself
experienced, when Mr. H. Miller, the first discoverer of these fossils,
showed me the specimens which he had detected in the Old Red Sandstone
of Cromarty." And there were peculiarities about the _Coccosteus_ that
scarce less excited my wonder than the general form of the
_Pterichthys_, and which, when I first ventured to describe them, were
regarded by the higher authorities in Palaeontology as mere blunders on
the part of the observer. I have, however, since succeeded in
demonstrating that, if blunders at all--which I greatly doubt, for
Nature makes very few--it was Nature herself that was in error, not the
observer. In this strange _Coccostean_ genus, Nature _did_ place a group
of opposing teeth in each ramus of the lower jaw, just in the line of
the symphysis--an arrangement unique, so far as is yet known, in the
vertebrate division of creation, and which must have rendered the mouth
of these creatures an extraordinary combination of the horizontal mouth
proper to the vertebrata, and of the vertical mouth proper to the
crustaceans. It was favourable to the integrity of my work of
restoration, that the press was not waiting for me, and that when
portions of the creatures on which I wrought were wanting, or plates
turned up whose places I was unable to determine, I could lay aside my
self-imposed task for the time, and only resume it when some new-found
specimen supplied me with the materials requisite for carrying it on.
And so the restorations which I completed in 1840, and published in
1841, were found, by our highest authorities in 1848, after they had
been set aside for nearly six years, to be essentially the true ones
after all. I see, however, that one of the most fanciful and monstrous
of all the interim restorations of _Pterichthys_ given to the
world--that made by Mr. Joseph Dinkel in 1844 for the late Dr. Mantell,
and published in the "Medals of Creation," has been reproduced in the
recent illustrated edition of the "Vestiges of Creation." But the
ingenious author of that work could scarce act prudently were he to
stake the soundness of his hypothesis on the integrity of the
restoration. For my own part, I consent, if it can be shown that the
_Pterichthys_ which once lived and moved on this ancient globe of ours
ever either rose or sunk into the _Pterichthys_ of Mr. Dinkel, freely
and fully to confess, not only the possibility, but also the
_actuality_, of the transmutation of both species and genera. I am
first, however, prepared to demonstrate, before any competent jury of
Palaeontologists in the world, that not a single plate or scale of Mr.
Dinkel's restoration represents those of the fish which he professed to
restore; that the same judgment applies equally to his restoration of
_Coccosteus_; and that, instead of reproducing in his figures the true
forms of ancient Cephalaspeans, he has merely given, instead, the
likeness of things that never were "in the heaven above, or in the
earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth."
The place in the geologic scale, as certainly as the forms and
characters, of these ancient fishes, had to be determined. Mr. George
Anderson had informed me, as early as 1834, that some of them were
identical with the ichthyolites of the Gamrie deposit; but then the
place of the Gamrie deposit was still to fix. It had been recently
referred to the same geological horizon as the Carboniferous Limestone,
and was regarded as lying unconformable to the Old Red Sandstone of the
district in which it occurs; but, wholly dissatisfied with the evidence
adduced, I continued my search, and, though the process was a slow one,
saw the position of the Cromarty beds gradually approximating towards
determination. It was not, however, until the autumn of 1837 that I got
them fairly fixed down to the Old Red Sandstone, and not until the
winter of 1839 that I was able conclusively to demonstrate their place
in the base of the system, little more than a hundred feet, and in one
part not more than eighty feet, above the upper strata of the Great
Conglomerate. I had often wished, during my explorations, to be able to
extend my field of observation into the neighbouring counties, in order
to determine whether I could not possess myself, at a distance, of the
evidence which, for a time at least, I failed to find at home; but my
daily engagements in the bank fixed me down to Cromarty and its
neighbourhood; and I found myself somewhat in the circumstances of a
tolerably lively beetle stuck on a pin, that, though able, with a little
exertion, to spin round its centre, is yet wholly unable to quit it. I
acquired, however, at the close of 1837, in the late Dr. John Malcolmson
of Madras, a noble auxiliary, who could expatiate freely over the
regions virtually barred against me. He had been led to visit Cromarty
by a brief description of its geology, rather picturesque than
scientific, which had appeared in my legendary volume; and after I had
introduced him to its ichthyolitic beds on both sides of the Hill and
at Eathie, and acquainted him with their character and organisms, he set
himself to trace out the resembling deposits of the neighbouring shires
of Banff, Moray, and Nairn. And in little more than a fortnight he had
detected the ichthyolites in numerous localities all over an Old Red
Sandstone tract, which extends from the primary districts of Banff to
near the field of Culloden. The Old Red Sandstone of the north, hitherto
deemed so poor in fossils, he found--with the Cromarty deposits as his
key--teeming with organic remains. In the spring of 1838, Dr. Malcolmson
visited England and the Continent, and introduced some of my
Cephalaspean fossils to the notice of Agassiz, and some of the evidence
which I had laid before him regarding their place in the scale, to Mr.
(now Sir Roderick) Murchison. And I had the honour, in consequence, of
corresponding with both these distinguished men; and the satisfaction of
knowing, that by both, the fruit of my labours was deemed important. I
observe that Humboldt, in his "Cosmos," specially refers to the judgment
of Agassiz on the extraordinary character of the new zoological link
with which I had furnished him; and I find Murchison, in his great work
on the Silurian System, published in 1839, laying no little emphasis on
the stratigraphical fact. After referring to the previously formed
opinion that the Gamrie deposit, with its ichthyolites, was not an Old
Red one, he goes on to say--"On the other hand, I have recently been
informed by Dr. Malcolmson, that Mr. Miller of Cromarty (who has made
some highly interesting discoveries near that place) pointed out to him
nodules resembling those of Gamrie, and containing similar fishes, in
highly-inclined strata, which are interpolated in, and completely
subordinate to, the great mass of Old Red Sandstone of Ross and
Cromarty. This important observation will, I trust, be soon communicated
to the Geological Society, for it strengthens the inference of M.
Agassiz respecting the epoch during which the _Cheiracanthus_ and
_Cheirolepis_ lived." All this will, I am afraid, appear tolerably weak
to the reader, and somewhat more than tolerably tedious. Let him
remember, however, that the only merit to which I lay claim in the case
is that of patient research--a merit in which whoever wills may rival or
surpass me; and that this humble faculty of patience, when rightly
directed, may lead to more extraordinary developments of idea than even
genius itself. What I had been slowly deciphering were the _ideas_ of
God as developed in the mechanism and framework of His creatures, during
the second age of vertebrate existence; and one portion of my inquiries
determined the date of these ideas, and another their character.
Many of the best sections of the Sutors and the adjacent hills, with
their associated deposits, cannot be examined without boat; and so I
purchased for a few pounds a light little yawl, furnished with mast and
sail, and that rowed four oars, to enable me to carry out my
explorations. It made me free of the Cromarty and Moray Firths for some
six or eight miles from the town, and afforded me many a pleasant
evening's excursion to the deep-sea caves and skerries, and the
picturesque surf-wasted stacks of the granitic wall of rock which runs
in the Ben Nevis line of elevation, from Shadwick on the east to the
Scarfs Crag on the west. I know not a richer tract for the geologist.
Independently of the interest that attaches to its sorely-contorted
granitic gneiss--which seems, as Murchison shrewdly remarks, to have
been protruded through the sedimentary deposits in a solid state, as a
fractured bone is sometimes protruded through the integuments--there
occurs along the range three several deposits of the Old Red
ichthyolites, and three several deposits of the Lias, besides the
sub-aqueous ones, with two insulated skerries, which I am inclined to
regard as outliers of the Oolite. These last occur in the form of
half-tide rocks, very dangerous to the mariner, which lie a full
half-mile from the shore, and can be visited with safety only at low
water during dead calms, when no ground swell comes rolling in from the
sea. I have set out as early as two o'clock in a fine summer morning
for these skerries, and, after spending several hours upon them, have
been seated at the bank desk before ten; but these were mornings of very
hard work. It was the long Saturday afternoons that were my favourite
seasons of explorations; and when the weather was fine, my wife would
often accompany me in these excursions; and we not unfrequently anchored
our skiff in some rocky bay, or over some fishing bank, and, provided
with rods and lines, caught, ere our return, a basket of rock-cod or
coal-fish for supper, that always seemed of finer flavour than the fish
supplied us in the market. These were happy holidays. Shelley predicates
of a day of exquisite beauty, that it would continue to "live like joy
in memory." I do retain recollections of these evenings spent in my
little skiff--recollections mingled with a well-remembered imagery of
blue seas and purple hills, and a sun-lit town in the distance, and tall
wood-crested precipices nearer at hand, which flung lengthened shadows
across shore and sea--that not merely represent enjoyments which have
been, but that, in certain moods of the mind, take the form of enjoyment
still. They are favoured spots in the chequered retrospect of the past,
on which the sunshine of memory falls more brightly than on most of the
others.
When thus employed, there broke out very unexpectedly, a second war with
the Liberal Moderates of the town, in which, unwillingly rather than
otherwise, I had ultimately to engage. The sacrament of the Supper is
celebrated in most of the parish churches of the north of Scotland only
once a year; and, as many of the congregations worship at that time in
the open air, the summer and autumn seasons are usually selected for the
"occasion," as best fitted for open-air meetings. As, however, the
celebration is preceded and followed by week-day preachings, and as on
one of these week-days--the Thursday preceding the Sacramental
Sabbath--no work is done, kirk-sessions usually avoid fixing their
sacrament in a busy time, such as the time of harvest in the rural
districts, or of the herring-fishing in the seaport towns; and as the
parish of Cromarty has both its rural population and its fishing one,
the kirk-session of the place have to avoid both periods. And so the
early part of July, ere the herring-fishing or the harvest comes on, is
the time usually fixed upon for the Cromarty sacrament. In this year,
however (1838), it so chanced that the day appointed for the Queen's
coronation proved coincident with the sacramental Thursday, and the
Liberal Moderate party urged upon the Session that the preparations for
the sacrament should give way to the rejoicings for the coronation. We
had not been much accustomed to rejoicings of the kind in the north
since the good old times when respectable Tory gentlemen used to show
themselves drunk in public on the King's birthday, in order to
demonstrate their loyalty: the coronation days of both George IV. and
William IV. had passed off as quietly as Sabbaths; and the Session,
holding that it might be quite as well for people to pray for their
young Queen at church, and then quietly drink her health when they got
home, as to grow glorious in her behalf in taverns and tap-rooms,
refused to alter their day. Believing that, though essentially in the
right, they were yet politically in the wrong, and that a plausible case
might be made out against them by the newspaper press, I waited on my
minister, and urged him to give way to the Liberals, and have his
preparation-day changed from Thursday to Friday. He seemed quite willing
enough to act on the suggestion; nay, he had made a similar one, he told
me, to his Session; but the devout eldership, strong in the precedents
of centuries, had declined to subordinate the religious services of the
Kirk to the wassail and merriment sanctioned by the State. And so they
determined on keeping their day of sacramental preparation on the
Thursday, as their fathers had done. Meanwhile, the Liberals held what
was very properly termed a public meeting, seeing that, though the
public had failed to attend it, the public had been quite at liberty to
do so, nay, had even been specially invited; and there appeared in the
provincial newspapers a long report of its proceedings, including five
speeches--all written by a legal gentleman--in which it was designated a
meeting of the inhabitants of the town and parish of Cromarty. The
resolutions were, of course, of the most enthusiastically loyal
character. There was not a member of the meeting who was not prepared to
spend upon himself the last drop of his bottle of port in her Majesty's
behalf. Thursday came--the Thursday of the sacrament and of the
coronation; and, with ninety-nine hundredths of the church-going portion
of my townsfolk, I went to church as usual. The parochial resolutioners,
amounting in all to ten, were, I can honestly avouch, scarce at all
missed in a congregation of nearly as many hundreds. About mid-day,
however, we could hear the muffled report of their carronades; and,
shortly after the service was over, and we had returned to our homes,
there passed through the streets a forlorn little group of individuals,
that looked exceedingly like a press-gang, but was in reality intended
for a procession. Though joined by a proprietor from a neighbouring
parish, a lawyer from a neighbouring burgh, a small coast-guard party,
with its commanding officer, and two half-pay Episcopalian officers
besides, the number who walked, including boys, did not exceed
twenty-five persons; and of these, as I have said, only ten were
parishioners. The processionists had a noble dinner in the head inn of
the place--merrier than even dinners of celebration usually are, as it
was, of course, loyalty and public spirit to ignore the special claim
upon the day asserted by the Church; and the darkening evening saw a
splendid bonfire blazing from the brae-head. And the Liberal newspapers
south and north taking part with the processionists, in many a paragraph
and short leader, represented their frolic--for such it was, and a very
foolish one--as a splendid triumph of the people of Cromarty over
Presbyterial bigotry and clerical domination. Nay, so bad did the case
of my minister and his Session appear, thus placed in opposition to at
once the people and the Queen, that the papers on the other side failed
to take it up. A well-written letter on the subject by my wife, which
fairly stated the facts, was refused admission into even the
ecclesiastico-Conservative journal, specially patronized, at the time,
by the Scottish Church; and my minister's friends and brethren in the
south could do little else than marvel at what they deemed his wondrous
imprudence.
I had anticipated, from the first, that his position was to be a bad
one; but I ill liked to see him with his back to the wall. And though I
had determined, on the rejection of my counsel, to take no part in the
quarrel, I now resolved to try whether I could not render it evident
that he was really not at issue with his people, but with merely a very
inconsiderable clique among them, who had never liked him; and that it
was much a joke to describe him as disaffected to his sovereign, simply
because he had held his preparation services on the day of her
coronation. In order to make good my first point, I took the
unpardonable liberty of giving the names in full, in a letter which
appeared in our northern newspapers, of every individual who walked in
the procession, and represented themselves as the people; and challenged
the addition of even a single name to a list ludicrously brief. And in
making good the second, I fairly succeeded, as there were not a few
comical circumstances in the transaction, in getting the laughers on my
side. The clique was amazingly angry, and wrote not very bright letters,
which appeared as advertisements in the newspapers, and paid duty to
make evident the fact. There was a shallow and very ignorant young
shoemaker in the place, named Chaucer, a native of the south of
Scotland, who represented himself as the grandson of the old poet of the
days of Edward III., and wrote particularly wretched doggrel to make
good his claim. And, having a quarrel with the kirk-session, in a
certain delicate department, he had joined the processionists, and
celebrated their achievements in a ballad entirely worthy of them. And
it was perhaps the severest cut of all, that the recognised leader of
the band pronounced Chaucer the younger a greatly better poet than me.
There were representations, too, made to my superiors in the banking
department at Edinburgh, which procured me a reprimand, though a gentle
one; but my superior in Cromarty--Mr. Ross--as wise and good a man as
any in the direction, and thoroughly acquainted with the merits of the
case, was wholly on my side. I am afraid the reader may deem all this
very foolish, and hold that I would have been better employed among the
rocks, in determining the true relations of their various beds, and the
character of their organisms, than in bickering in a petty village
quarrel, and making myself enemies. And yet, man being what he is, I
fear an ability of efficient squabbling is a greatly more marketable one
than any ability whatever of extending the boundaries of natural
science. At least so it was, that while my geological researches did
nothing for me at this time, my letter in the procession controversy
procured for me the offer of a newspaper editorship. But though, in a
pecuniary point of view, I should have considerably bettered my
circumstances by closing with it, I found I could not do so without
assuming the character of the special pleader, and giving myself to the
advocacy of views and principles which I really did not hold; and so I
at once declined the office, as one for which I did not deem myself
suited, and could not in conscience undertake.
I found about this time more congenial employment, though, of course, it
occupied only my leisure hours, in writing the memoir of a townsman--the
late Mr. William Forsyth, of Cromarty--at the request of his relation
and son in-law, my friend Mr. Isaac Forsyth, of Elgin. William Forsyth
had been a grown man ere the abolition of the hereditary jurisdictions;
and from the massiveness and excellence of his character, and his high
standing as a merchant, in a part of the country in which merchants at
the time were few, he had succeeded, within the precincts of the town,
to not a little of the power of the hereditary Sheriff of the district;
and after acting for more than half a century as a laborious Justice of
the Peace, and succeeding in making up more quarrels than most country
lawyers have an opportunity of fomenting--for the age was a rude and
combative one, and the merchant ever a peace-maker--he lived long enough
to see Liberty-and-Equality Clubs and Processions, and died about the
close of the first war of the French Revolution. It was an important
half-century in Scotland--though it exhibits but a narrow, inconspicuous
front in the history of the country--that intervened between the times
of the hereditary jurisdictions and the Liberty-and-Equality Clubs. It
was specially the period during which popular opinion began to assume
its potency, and in which the Scotland of the past merged, in
consequence, into the very dissimilar Scotland of the present. And I
derived much pleasure in tracing some of the more striking features of
this transition age in the biography of Mr. Forsyth. My little work was
printed, but not published, and distributed by Mr. Forsyth of Elgin
among the friends of the family, as perhaps a better and more adequate
memorial of a worthy and able man than could be placed over his grave.
It was on the occasion of the death of his last-surviving child--the
late Mrs. Mackenzie of Cromarty, a lady from whom I had received much
kindness, and under whose hospitable roof I had the opportunity afforded
me of meeting not a few superior men--that my memoir was undertaken; and
I regarded it as a fitting tribute to a worthy family just passed away,
at once deserving of being remembered for its own sake, and to which I
owed a debt of gratitude.
In the spring of 1839, a sad bereavement darkened my household, and for
a time left me little heart to pursue my wonted amusements, literary or
scientific. We had been visited, ten months after our marriage, by a
little girl, whose presence had added not a little to our happiness;
home became more emphatically such from the presence of the child, that
in a few months had learned so well to know its mother, and in a few
more to take its stand in the nurse's arms, at an upper window that
commanded the street, and to recognise and make signs to its father as
he approached the house. Its few little words, too, had a fascinating
interest to our ears;--our own names, lisped in a language of its own,
every time we approached; and the simple Scotch vocable "awa, awa,"
which it knew how to employ in such plaintive tones as we retired, and
that used to come back upon us in recollection, like an echo from the
grave, when, its brief visit over, it had left us for ever, and its fair
face and silken hair lay in darkness amid the clods of the churchyard.
In how short a time had it laid hold of our affections! Two brief years
before, and we knew it not; and now it seemed as if the void which it
left in our hearts the whole world could not fill. We buried it beside
the old chapel of St. Regulus, with the deep rich woods all around, save
where an opening in front commands the distant land and the blue sea;
and where the daisies which it had learned to love, mottled, starlike,
the mossy mounds; and where birds, whose songs its ear had become
skilful enough to distinguish, pour their notes over its little grave.
The following simple but truthful stanzas, which I found among its
mother's papers, seem to have been written in this place--sweetest of
burying grounds--a few weeks after its burial, when a chill and backward
spring, that had scowled upon its lingering illness, broke out at once
into genial summer:--
Thou'rt "awa, awa," from thy mother's side,
And "awa, awa," from thy father's knee;
Thou'rt "awa" from our blessing, our care, our caressing,
But "awa" from our hearts thou'lt never be.
All things, dear child, that were wont to please thee
Are round thee here in beauty bright,--
There's music rare in the cloudless air,
And the earth is teeming with living delight.
Thou'rt "awa, awa," from the bursting spring time,
Tho' o'er thy head its green boughs wave;
The lambs are leaving their little footprints
Upon the turf of thy new-made grave.
And art thou "awa," and "awa" for ever,
That little face,--that tender frame,--
That voice which first, in sweetest accent
Call'd me the mother's thrilling name,
That head of nature's finest moulding,--
Those eyes, the deep night ether's blue
Where sensibility its shadows
Of ever-changing meaning throw?
Thy sweetness, patience under suffering,
All promised us an opening day
Most fair, and told that to subdue thee
Would need but love's most gentle sway.
Ah me! 'twas here I thought to lead thee,
And tell thee what are life and death,
And raise thy serious thought's first waking
To Him who holds our every breath.
And does my selfish heart then grudge thee,
That angels are thy teachers now,--
That glory from thy Saviour's presence
Kindles the crown upon thy brow?
O no! to me earth must be lonelier,
Wanting thy voice, thy hand, thy love;
Yet dost thou dawn a star of promise,
Mild beacon to the world above.