The fair Hepburna, Humea, Campbella, and the rest may tempt the reader

to a smile; but the picture has its value, and is a detail of importance

in the realisation of that animated and crowded scene. By this time

probably Ramsay had removed his shop to the end of the Luckenbooths,

which faced "east" to the unencumbered portion of the High Street, where

the City Cross stood, and where all the notable persons made their daily

promenade. It was here that he was visited by a kindred spirit, the poet

Gay, who had been brought to Edinburgh by his patroness the Duchess of

Queensberry, and soon formed acquaintance with the local poet. The two

little roundabout bards used to stand together at the door of the shop

to watch the crowd, in which no doubt Ramsay would be gratified by a

friendly nod from the Lord President, and swell with civic and with

personal pride to point out to the English visitor that distinguished

Scotsman the loyal and the learned Forbes. The Cross, round which this

genteel and witty crowd assembled daily, stood then, according to the

plans of the period, in the centre of the High Street, where it had been

removed for the advantage of greater space in the previous century. And

the view from Ramsay's shop--from which by this time the wigs had

entirely disappeared, and which was now a refined and cultured

bookseller's, adorned outside with medallions of two poets, Scotch and

English, Ben Jonson and Drummond of Hawthornden--was bounded by the gate

of the Netherbow with its picturesque tower, and glimpses through the

open roadway, of the Canongate beyond, and the cross lines of busy

traffic leading to Leith. It was thus a wide space between the lines of

high houses, more like a Place than a street, upon which the two gossips

gazed, no doubt with a complacent thought that their living presence

underneath carried out the symbol of the two heads above--the poets of

England and of Scotland--and that in the teeming street below them were

many who pointed out to each other this new and delightful combination.

They were not great poets, either of these round, fat, oily men of

verse. And yet the association was pleasant. Perhaps the duchess's

coach-and-six, in which the English bard had been conveyed from London,

might drive through the open port, as the two stood delighted, watching

the pedestrians hurry out of the way and the great lawyers and officials

preparing to pay their devoirs to her Grace as she drew up before the

bookshop. No doubt they thought it a scene to be remembered in the

history of letters. She was at Penicuik House on a visit to the Clerks,

who were friends and patrons of Allan, and no doubt had supped or drunk

a dish of tea at New Hall, where the Lord President (who was only the

Lord Advocate in those days) often took his case in his cousin's house,

where Ramsay was a familiar and frequent guest. When Allan made wigs no

longer, when all his occupations were about books, and everybody in

Edinburgh, gentle and simple, knew him as the poet, he would be still

more free to make his jokes and his compliments to all those fine

people. But at no time was the genial little poet "blate," as he would

himself have said. There was no shyness in him. He "braw'd it," as he

says, with no doubt the finest of periwigs, long before he had ceased to

be a skull-thatcher, and swaggered through the wynds and about the Cross

with the best. The Edinburgh shopkeeper has never been "blate." He has

always maintained a freedom of independence which has nothing of the

obsequiousness of more common traders, and which gave the greater value

to the sly compliment which he would insinuate between two jests. No

doubt Campbella and Hamilla would laugh at the little man's compliments,

his bows and admiring glances, yet would not object to his exposition of

the tartan screen, the delicate silken plaid under which they shielded

their radiant complexions and golden locks.

Allan must have seen many curious sights from those windows. The riding

of the Parliament, when in gallant order two by two--the commissioners

of the boroughs and the counties leading the way, the peers following,

through the guards on either side who lined the streets--they rode up

solemnly from Holyrood to the Parliament House, with crown and sword and

sceptre borne before them, the old insignia, without which the Acts of

the ancient Parliaments of Scotland were not considered valid--marching

for the last time to their place of meeting to give up their

trust--would be one of the most remarkable. The commoners had each two

lackeys to attend him, the barons three, the earls four, a blue-coated

brigade, relic of the old days when no gentleman moved abroad without a

following; and Lyon King-at-arms in his finery to direct the line. With

lamentation and humiliation was the session closed; even wise men who

upheld the Union consenting to the general pang with which the last

Scots Parliament went its way. And the glare of the fire must have

lighted up the poet's rooms, and angry sparks fallen, and hoarse roar of

voices drowned all domestic sounds, when the Porteous Mob turned

Edinburgh streets into a fierce scene of tragedy for one exciting night.

It would be vain indeed to describe again what Scott has set before us

in the most vivid brilliant narrative. Such a scene breaking into the

burgher quietude--the decent households which had all retired into

decorous darkness for the night waking up again with lights flitting

from story to story, the axes crashing against the doors of the

Tolbooth, the wild procession whirling down the tortuous gloom of the

West Bow--was such an interruption of monotonous life as few towns in

the eighteenth century could have equalled; and it is curious to

remember the intense national feeling and keen patriotic understanding

of how far the populace would or could endure interference, which made

Duncan Forbes in his place in Parliament stand up as almost the defender

of that wild outburst of lawlessness, and John of Argyle turn from the

royal presence to prepare his hounds, as he said, against the Queen's

threat of turning the rebellious country into a desert. These proud

Scotsmen had supported the Union: they had perceived its necessity and

its use: but there was a point at which all their susceptibilities took

fire, and Whig lords and politicians were at one with every high-handed

Tory of the early times.

Allan Ramsay must also have seen, though he says nothing of it, the

brief occupation of Edinburgh by the unfortunate Prince Charles Edward,

and at a distance the pathetic little Court in Holyrood, the Jacobite

ladies in their brief glory, the fated captains of that wild little

army, in which the old world of tradition and romance made its last

outbreak upon modern prose and the possibilities of life. One would

imagine that for a man who had lived through that episode in the heart

of the old kingdom of the Stewarts, and whose house lay half-way between

the artillery of the castle, where a hostile garrison sat grimly

watching the invaders below, and the camp at Holyrood--there would have

been nothing in his life so exciting, nothing of which the record would

have been more distinct. But human nature, which has so many

eccentricities, is in nothing so wonderful as this, that the most

remarkable historical scenes make no impression upon its profound

everyday calm, and are less important to memory than the smallest

individual incident. The swarm of the wild Highlanders that took sudden

possession of street and changehouse, the boom of the cannon overhead

vainly attempting to disperse a group here and there or kill a rebel,

and the consciousness which one would think must have thrilled through

the very air, that under those turrets in the valley was the most

interesting young adventurer of modern times, the heir of the ancient

Scots kings, their undoubted representative--how could these things fail

to affect the mind even of the most steady-going citizen? But they did,

though we cannot comprehend it. Allan has a word for every little

domestic event in town or suburbs, but there is not a syllable said

either by himself or his biographers to intimate that he knew what was

going on under his eyes at that brief and sudden moment, the "one

crowded hour of glorious life," which cost so much blood of brave men,

and which the hapless Prince paid for afterwards in the disenchanted

tedium of many a dreary year.

[Illustration: SMOLLETT'S HOUSE]

It was before this time, however, that Ramsay reached the height of his

fame and of his productions in _The Gentle Shepherd_. He had written

some years before "A Pastoral Dialogue between Patie and Roger,"

published as usual in a sheet for a penny, and no doubt affording much

pleasure to the great popular audience to whom the "new piece" was as

the daily _feuilleton_, that friendly dole of fiction which sweetens

existence. It was evidently so successful that after a while the poet

composed a pendant--a dialogue between Jenny and Peggy. These two

fragments pleased the fancy of both the learned and the simple, and no

doubt called forth many a flattering inquiry after the two rustic pairs

and demands for the rest of their simple history, which inspired the

author to weave the lovers into the web of a continuous story, adding

the rural background, so fresh and true to nature, and the rustic and

humorous characters which were wanted for the perfection of the pastoral

drama. Few poems ever have attained so great and so immediate a success.

It went from end to end of Scotland, everywhere welcomed, read, conned

over, got by heart. Such a fame would be indeed worth living for. The

fat little citizen in his shop became at once the poet of his country,

as he had been of the Edinburgh streets. It was nearly two centuries

since Dunbar and Davie Lyndsay had celebrated their romantic town: and

though the name of the latter was still a household word ("You'll no

find that in Davie Lyndsay" being the popular scornful dismissal of any

incredible tale), yet their works had fallen into forgetfulness. The new

poet was received accordingly with acclamation. People did not talk of

sales and profits in those days, and we have no information as to the

numbers issued, or the time they took to find a home in every cottage,

as well as to receive the distinction of illustration and critical

discussion, which proved that it was not only the people who interested

themselves in the new poet, but a more highly trained and difficult

audience as well. We have before us two goodly octavos in which the

little rustical comedy is enshrined in hundreds of pages of notes; and

where the argument as to its localities, identifying every spot,

occupies chapter after chapter of earnest discussion, proving exactly

where every cottage is situated, and that New Hall, the home of the

Forbeses, was the mansion of the poem, with its little farm-steading

round. Shakspeare could not have been more closely followed, and we

doubt if the localities which he has made famous were ever discussed at

such length. I can remember nearly fifty years ago investigating, with

the eagerness of a child to whom books were the most precious objects in

existence, the little shelf high on the wall at the bedhead, where a

very old woman, an old nurse in her retirement, kept her treasures, and

mounted high upon a chair, finding a much-thumbed unbound copy of _The

Gentle Shepherd_ in the dim twilight, ruddy with the glimmer of the

fire, of the cottage room. In such places it was never absent; it was

the one book which held its ground by the side of the Bible and perhaps

a volume of old-world devotion, _The Crook in the Lot_, or _The Saint's

Rest_. Such a distinction is a far more true and genuine triumph than

the sale of many editions. It went straight into the heart of the

peasant, who understood and appreciated every scene and line. And it was

discussed by all the Edinburgh clubs, and by the literati who knew their

Theocritus and could write dissertations on pastoral poetry. The

greatest poet could have hoped for no more.

And pastoral poetry was the fashion of the time. Ramsay himself had made

various other attempts before he lighted upon this quite legitimate

strain. We read with a shudder of comic horror a dialogue "On the Death

of Mr. Addison," in which the interlocutors are "Richy and Sandy," to

wit, Sir Richard Steele and Mr. Alexander Pope! who bewail their loss,

which is far worse than misfortune to their flocks, or the scorn of

their lasses, being no less than this, that "Addie, that played and sang

so sweet, is dead"! The poet received, indeed, a complimentary copy of

verses upon this production, in which he is thus addressed--

"Well fare thee, Allan, who in mother tongue

So sweetly hath of breathless Addy sung:

His endless fame thy nat'ral genius fired,

And thou hast written as if he inspired.

'Richy and Sandy,' who do him survive,

Long as thy rural stanzas last, shall live."

The grotesque in poetry could scarcely go farther. Mr. Burchett, who

addressed good Allan in these rhymes, was the refined gentleman who put

the wigmaker's poems into English. "Richy and Sandy" was contained in a

volume which Ramsay published by subscription, and which brought him in,

to the immense admiration of his biographer, four hundred guineas

sterling, which no doubt was a very admirable recompense indeed for so

many foolish verses. This volume contained, among other things, Ramsay's

bold continuation of "Christ's Kirk on the Green," which the same

biographer describes as "King James the First's ludicrous poem," in

which the poet of the High Street skilfully turns the poet-monarch's

rustic revel into a vulgar village debauch. But these pieces of

presumption and non-comprehension are happily all dead and gone, and

Ramsay's reputation rests upon a happier basis. It is not a small matter

to have pervaded a whole country with the simple measures of a rural

idyll--a poem in which there are not perhaps five lines of poetry, but

which is fragrant of the moors and fields, full of rustic good sense and

feeling, and as free of harm or offence as the most severe moralist

could desire. This latter quality is all the more remarkable as it

belongs to an age not at all squeamish in these matters, and to which

the frankest assaults upon a heroine's virtue were supposed to be quite

adapted for the treatment of fiction. But there is no Lovelace in _The

Gentle Shepherd_; the rustic love-making is ardent, but simple and

without guile. The swains respect as much as they admire their nymphs:

the nymphs are confident in their frank innocence, and fear no evil; the

old fathers sit cheerful and sagacious at their doors and indulge in

their cracks, not less pleased with themselves and their share of life

than are the young ones with their livelier pleasures: the cows breathe

balmy breath into the wild freshness of the pastoral scenery. There is

scarcely anything affected, false, or even stilted in the poetical

dialogues which, with a little licence for the verse and something for

the sentiment, come naturally and simply from the wholesome, genial

young shepherds and their sweethearts. To say this is to say as much as

the most fastidious critic could desire from such a composition.

Nor is it spoiled by classic models or similes. How Ramsay succeeded in

keeping Venus and Cupid out of it, in forgetting all eclogues and

pastorals, Virgil or Theocritus, and indulging in nothing that was out

of place in Scotland, it is hard to tell. The Mantuan bard, the oaten

reed, Philomela and her songs, Hymen, Ganymede, Bacchus, and all the

Olympian band disport themselves in his other verses: but _The Gentle

Shepherd_ is void of those necessary adjuncts of the eighteenth-century

muse. The wimpling burn is never called Helicon nor the heathery braes

Parnassus, and nothing can be more genuine, more natural, and familiar

than the simple scenery of Habbie's Howe--in which the eager critics

identified every scene, and the sensible poet enhanced his art by a

perfect truth to nature. _The Gentle Shepherd_ is perhaps the only

so-called Pastoral of which this can be said, and it must have required

no small amount of self-denial to dispense with all those accustomed

auxiliaries. Even the sentiments are not too highflown for the locality.

If they are perhaps more completely purified from everything gross or

fleshly than would have been the case in fact, the poet has not been

afraid to temper passion with those considerations which naturally rise

to the mind of the young farmer in choosing his mate. His Peggy, though

she has beauty enough to make up for every deficiency, has also "with

innocence the wale of sense."

"In better sense without a flaw,

As in her beauty, far excels them a'."

She, on her part, anticipates not raptures and blisses in her marriage,

but the hallowed usages of life.

"I'll employ with pleasure all my art

To keep him cheerful, and secure his heart.

At e'en, when he comes weary frae the hill,

I'll have a' things made ready to his will;

In winter when he toils through wind and rain,

A bleezin' ingle, and a clean hearth-stane;

And soon as he's flung by his plaid and staff,

The seething pot's be ready to tak' aff."

Ramsay's sobriety here shines in comparison with all the fables and

idylls of his age. It is entirely natural, living, and of his time.

Patie plays upon a flute of "plum-tree made with ivory virls round,"

which he bought from the proceeds of "sax good fat lambs" sold at the

West Port, instead of the rustic pipe or oaten reed, which in his heart

of hearts no doubt our wigmaker thought much finer. Thus he secured his

audience, who knew nothing about oaten reeds, and instead of the

plaudits of the dilettanti secured the true fame of popular

comprehension and knowledge. Burns was far higher and nobler in genius,

and the worship awarded to him by his countrymen is one of the favourite

subjects of gibe and jest among writers on the other side of the Tweed.

But even Burns had not the universal acceptance, the absolute command of

his audience, which belonged to honest Allan. There were politicians and

there were ecclesiastics, and good people neither one nor the other, who

shook their troubled heads over the ploughman who would not confine

himself to the daisy of the field or the Saturday night's observances of

the Cottar, but was capable of Holy Willie and the Holy Fair. But Ramsay

had no gainsayer, and _The Gentle Shepherd_ was the first of books in

most Lowland homes. Its construction, its language and sentiments, are

all as commonplace as could be imagined, but it is a wholesome, natural,

pure, and unvarnished tale, and the mind that brought it forth (well

aware of what pleased his public) and the public who relished and bought

it, give us a better view of the honest tastes and morals of the period

than anything else which has come to us from that time. There has always

been a good deal of drinking, and other vices still less consistent with

purity of heart, in Scotland. Now and then we are frightened by

statistics that give us a very ill name; but it is difficult to believe

that if the national heart had been corrupt _The Gentle Shepherd_ could

have afforded it such universal and wholesome delight.

It is curious to find two very ordinary and prosaic tradesmen thus in

the front of popular literature in the beginning of the eighteenth

century. There is no comparison between Allan Ramsay and Samuel

Richardson in respect to genius. That humdrum old bookseller evoked by

some miraculous art the most delicate and lovely of creations out of the

midst of revolting and disgusting circumstances. Fielding was a far

finer gentleman, a much more accomplished writer, even a greater genius;

but there are none of his women who are fit to tie the shoes of Clarissa

Harlowe, to whom indeed there exists no fit companion out of Shakspeare.

Our good-humoured Allan had no such gift, but he had the art of

producing one spotless and lifelike tale, absolutely true to nature and

within the power of verification by any reader, which was accepted by a

whole country with enthusiasm as the best rendering of its rural life.

We doubt if there ever was a greater literary triumph.

Ramsay would not have been the true man he was to every tradition and

inheritance of his class had he not shown a modest complacency in his

own success. He was assailed, we are told, by nameless critics, who put

forth "A Block for Allan Ramsay's Wigs," "Remarks on Ramsay's Writings,"

and so forth--and retaliated, not without dignity: "Dull foes," he says,

"nought at my hand deserve."

"The blundering fellows ne'er forget,

About my trade to sport their fancies,

As if, forsooth, I would look blate,

At what my honour most advances.

"Auld Homer sang for's daily bread;

Surprising Shakspeare fin'd the wool;

Great Virgil creels and baskets made;

And famous Ben employed the trowel.

"Yet Dorset, Lansdown, Lauderdale,

Bucks, Stirling, and the son of Angus,

Even monarchs, and o' men the wale,

Were proud to be enrolled amang us."

It is true that Homer and Shakspeare might be surprised to find

themselves rubbing elbows with the wigmaker of the High Street. Still,

he shows a fine spirit, and his very strut is respectable.

[Illustration: ALLAN RAMSAY'S HOUSE]

In the end of his life, when the author of _The Gentle Shepherd_ by all

his trades, both as poet and shopkeeper, had amassed a fortune, he built

himself a house in the most glorious position which poet could have

chosen. It is on the crest of the hill, a little way below the castle,

and is still to be seen from Princes Street--a distinct feature in the

picturesque and varied line of building. He is said, though on what

authority we are not told, to have applied to the Crown for ground

enough to build a cage for _his burd_, meaning his wife: which is

supposed to be the reason why he built his house in an octagonal shape

like a cage: his wife, however, did not live long enough to inhabit it.

Additions and emendations have been made, so that there is no great

peculiarity in the form of the old square house on the summit of the

green slope, just clear of the rocks of the castle, as it is visible

to-day. When it was built the new town of Edinburgh was not yet dreamed

of, and nothing disturbed the panorama of green fields that lay between

Edinburgh and the Firth. The town wall was falling into ruin, yet still

existed in fragmentary towers and ramparts here and there, and low down

in the depths of the descent, which was not so precipitous there as

under the castle, the high houses and green braes were reflected in the

quiet waters of the North Loch. From thence the fields and scattered

farmhouses, the Calton Hill in unadorned greenness, a church spire and a

cluster of village roofs here and there, led the eye to the shining of

the Scottish Sea, the great water with its islands, the coast of Fife

with its dotted line of little fishing towns, the two green Lomonds

standing softly distinct against the misty line of more distant hills.

It was the same view that moved Fitz-Eustace to ecstasy, still but

little changed in the eighteenth century from what it had been in the

sixteenth. And picturesque as Edinburgh still continues to be in spite

of many modern disadvantages, it was no doubt infinitely more

picturesque then, crowning the rocky ridge, with straggling lanes and

wynds dropping steeply down into the valley--opening here and there a

glimpse of the green country and the shimmer of the Firth--while on the

edge of the hill, from all the high windows, the wide landscape softened

into distance on every side, into the far-off broken ranges of mountains

and cloudy rolling vapours, and the far-retiring sweep of a horizon

traversed by all the lights and all the storms--a wide world of air and

space and infinite variety. The life of our busy modern world had

scarcely yet invaded that city on the hill. It stood isolated on the

height of its rock, reigning from that domination over all the tranquil

country: while within its lines still thronged and clamoured an active

noisy population cooped up and packed together as if it were still

unsafe to stray away out of shelter of the walls, all the faculties and

trades, all the wit and the wealth, one above another, with the

concentration, the picturesqueness, the universal acquaintance and

familiarity of a mediaeval town. And beautiful as the prospect must have

been from those high-built houses, it could scarcely have exceeded the

sight of the old Edinburgh of the kings from without, standing high

above the level of the soil, with the open crown of St. Giles's rising

over its grey heights, its walls broken down by careless peace and

wellbeing, its tall tenements standing up like a line of castles. And in

the night with its glimmer of household lights at every window hanging

high in mid air, repeated with a gleam in the waters beneath and in the

stars above, which sparkled keen out of the northern blue, and the mist

of habitation, the smoke of the fires and the lamps hanging over

all--confusing outlines, yet revealing all the more brightly a higher

and a higher altitude of human lights--what a wonderful sight rising

sheer out of the green and silent champaign below!

Such was royal Edinburgh still, when the shopkeeper-poet, with his jokes

and his quips, and his good-humoured self-esteem, and certainty of his

own power, settled down in Ramsay Lodge. It would be well if all poets

had as prosperous and as fair a retirement for their old age. He lived

for some time in his quaint self-contained (according to the equally

quaint Scotch phraseology) birdcage upon the top of the hill, and

enjoyed his celebrity and his ease and the pleasant conviction that "I

the best and fairest please." His only son, the second Allan Ramsay, was

a painter of some reputation, and he had daughters to care for him and

keep his home cheerful as long as he lived. A man more satisfied with

his lot could not be. His chirrup of self-satisfaction, the flattery,

yet familiarity, of his address to all the noble lords and lairds, the

judges and advocates, his laugh of jovial optimism and personal content,

belong perfectly to the character of the comfortable citizen, "in fair

round belly with good capon lined," and the shopkeeper's rather than the

poet's desire to please. One can better fancy him at the door of his

shop looking down the High Street jocose and beaming, with a joke for

the Lord President and for the Cadie alike, hand in glove with all the

Town Council, with a compliment for every fair lady or smiling lass that

tripped by under her tartan screen, delighted with himself and all

around him--than retired in his garden on the Castle Hill, though with

all the variations of the heavens and magnificence of the landscape

before his eyes. He had no doubt the admiration of that landscape which

is never wanting to an Edinburgh citizen, a part of the creed to which

he is born; but the homely limits of the green glens and knowes, the

wimpling burn, the washing-green, the laird's hospitable house behind,

were more in Allan's way when he wanted any relaxation from the even

more attractive town. The High Street and Habbie's Howe are the true

centres of his soul.

It would be wrong not to note the collections of songs which made his

name dear to all the pleasant singers both of drawing-room and cottage.

It is a strange peculiarity in a nation possessing a characteristic and

melodious popular music of its own like Scotland, to find how little

place music as a science, or even in its more serious developments, has

ever had in the country. Nothing can be more sweet, more touching, more

tender, than the native growth of Scottish song--nothing more full of

fun and spirit than the brilliant dance music which, like the song,

seems to have sprung spontaneous from the soil. And no country has ever

more loved both songs and strathspeys, or clung to them with greater

devotion. It would be perhaps impossible for the most learned to decide

between the rival claims of Scotland and Ireland in respect to the airs

which seem native to both; but Ireland has always laboured under the

disadvantage of being far less homogeneous than Scotland, and certainly,

before the time of Moore at least, her native songs did not belong to

all classes as in the sister country. And Scotland has always through

all ages (previous to the present age) preferred her own songs to every

other. During the eighteenth century, when Edinburgh was almost more

completely the centre of society than ever before, the old tunes were

sung by ladies as much as by maid-servants, and the delicate old spinets

performed a soft accompaniment to ballads of the "Ewebuchting" and of

the "Corn Rigs," and prolonged the pathetic notes of "Waly, waly" and

the trembling wail of the "Flowers of the Forest" in the finest houses

as in the humblest. Music, more properly so called, the art which has

gradually made its way from being a modest handmaiden of poetry to full

rivalship, if not a half-implied superiority, was already a scientific

pursuit in England; and though the Italian opera aroused a violent

opposition, and Tweedledum and Tweedledee called forth the gibes of the

wits, there existed a vigorous English school of learned musicians, and

Handel and Haydn found an audience not incapable of appreciating their

best works. But while this development went on in London, Scotland still

sang her ancient simple melodies, and contemned everything else with

that audacious superiority which is born of ignorance. One might almost

imagine that this was the penalty of a national inheritance so ample and

so sweet, and that the comparative absence of traditionary music in

England opened the heart of the country to strains more ambitious and

classical. However it came about, there is no denying that so it was. If

there was any Scottish composer at all, his productions were only

imitations or modifications of the old airs. Music continued to be

represented by the songs of immemorial attraction, the woodnotes wild of

nameless minstrels, pure utterance of the soil. Perhaps the absence of

music, except in the kindred shape of psalm tunes, which was but another

form of popular song, in the Church, was one great prevailing cause of

the national insensibility to all more lavish and elaborate strains. But

this peculiarity and insensibility had at least one advantage--they kept

in constant cultivation a distinct branch of national literature, and

one that is always attractive and delightful. I do not think it is too

strong an utterance of national partiality to say that the songwriters

of Scotland are beyond comparison with those of either of the other

united kingdoms. The simplest of the old ditties brought out of the

ancient poets contain a grace of genuine poetry and real feeling far

above the unmeaning jingle of verse which is the most common utterance

of popular song; and the cultivation of this delightful gift has called

forth the most tender and artless poems from gentle writers whom nothing

but that inspiration could have made to produce what was in them. The

pathetic wail of the poor lady who found to her cost that

"Love is bonnie, a little time when it is new,"

but that

"When love's auld it waxeth cauld,

And fades away like morning dew";

and that touching lullaby in which the mother hushes the babe whose

"Father wrought her great annoy,"

with its tender and simple refrain--

"It grieves me sore to hear thee weep,"

breathe out of the ancient depths of human trouble with a reserve and

simplicity of feeling that seem almost personal. But the kindred

inspiration which called forth the two versions of the "Flowers of the

Forest" and the ballad of "Auld Robin Gray," along with many more, shows

how warm was the impulse to this expression of feelings, which were at

once intensified and drawn out of the sphere of revelations too

individual by the breath of the melody which carried them forth.

Allan Ramsay has the merit of being the first collector of Scottish

song. He was remorseless, like his century, and made the wildest havoc

with some of his originals, cutting and slashing as suited his fancy,

and adding of his own whenever it pleased him so to do. But with the

exception of a number of Strephons and Chloes, not always ungraceful, in

the newer fashion, and a sprinkling of ruder verses in which there is

more indecency than immorality, the first two volumes of the _Tea-table

Miscellany_ are full of merit, and include many delightful simple

lyrics, songs which compare most advantageously with the insipid "words"

which at this present advanced age are used as a sort of necessary evil

to serve the purpose of the music. "Say that our way is only an

harmonious speaking of many witty or soft thoughts after the poet has

dressed them in four or five stanzas," says Ramsay, with the apology

which is a veiled assertion of higher aims, "yet undoubtedly these must

relish best with people who have not bestowed much of their time in

acquiring a taste for that downright perfect music which requires none

or very little of the poet's assistance." And he tells us in the same

preface of a letter he has had from America informing him that there too

his manual of song has gone, and that his

"Soft verse made to a Scottish air

Is often sung by our Virginian fair."

The book is dedicated to the ladies--the _Donne qui hanno intelletto

d'amore_, long supposed to be the final critics and judges of such

productions: and is confidently recommended to these "fair singers" for

whose "modest eyes and ears," according to the poet (but with notable

exceptions, as has been said), they were prepared. The third volume

consisted almost exclusively of English songs, among which are many

classic verses. If it were but as a stepping-stone to those perfect

lyrics, so full of natural truth and feeling, with which Burns

afterwards brought to a climax the songs of his country, the _Tea-table

Miscellany_ would have a merit of its own.

Ramsay died in 1758, when the troubles of the country were over, the

last seeds of insurrection stamped out, and the powerful revolution

begun which made the clans loyal to Government and Scotch politicians

faithful to the Union. He was buried in the Greyfriars Churchyard, where

so many of the most notable of the citizens of Edinburgh were laid. A

hundred years or so after, the enlightened community placed his statue

in the gardens that lie between the old town and the new. And thus the

poet's career was run; it was a prosperous one, full of the success that

was most sweet to him; comfort and competence and reputation, at once

that of a warm and well-to-do citizen and that of a poet. Few poets have

lived to see their productions so popular. _The Gentle Shepherd_ may be

said to have been in every cottage in Scotland in its author's lifetime,

and his songs were sung by everybody. Nor did this fame interfere with

the citizen's well-earned and more substantial reward. The shop in which

he began his prosperous career, and which was crowded so continually by

eager messengers with their pennies in search of Allan Ramsay's last new

piece--the most immediate and one of the most pleasant evidences of

success--still exists, with its high steps and broad low windows, in the

heart of the old town with which his name is so completely associated;

and the quaint square house in which his later days of ease and

retirement were spent still keeps its place on the east of the Castle

Hill, surveying from its windows the enriched and amplified yet

unalterable panorama so dear and beautiful to all Scottish eyes.

[Illustration: ALLAN RAMSAY'S MONUMENT]

[Illustration: DOORWAY, LADY STAIR'S CLOSE]

CHAPTER II

THE GUEST OF EDINBURGH

Royal Edinburgh, the city of the Scots kings and Parliament, the capital

of the ancient kingdom, would seem to have become weary somewhere in the

eighteenth century of dwelling alone upon her rock. There were, to be

sure, reasons more prosaic for the construction of the New Town, the

partner and companion of the old historical city. The population had

increased, the desire for comfort and space, and many luxuries unknown

to the early citizens of Edinburgh, had developed among the new. It was

no longer agreeable to the lawyers and philosophers to be crowded up

with the other inhabitants of a common stair, to have the din of street

cries and commotion ever in their ears, and the lowest of the population

always about their feet, as was inevitable when gentle and simple were

piled together in the High Street and Canongate. The old houses might be

noble houses when they were finally got at, through many drawbacks and

abominations--though in those days there was little appreciation even of

the stately beauty of old masonry and ornament--but their surroundings

became daily more and more intolerable. And it was an anachronism to

coop up a learned, elegant, and refined class, living under the

Hanoverian Georges in peace and loyalty, within the circle of walls now

broken down and useless, which had been adapted to protect the subjects

of the old Scottish Jameses from continual attacks.

Happily the nature of the situation prevented any amalgamation or loss

of the old boundaries and picturesque features of the ancient city, in

the new. There was no question of continuation or enlargement. Another

Edinburgh rose at the feet of the first, a sober, respectable, modern,

and square-toed town, with wide streets and buildings solid and strong,

not without pretensions to a certain stateliness of size and design, but

in strong contrast with the architecture and fashion native to the

soil--the high gables and turreted stairs of the past. The old town had

to throw a drawbridge, permanent and massive, over the hollow at her

feet before she could even reach the terraced valley on which the first

lines of habitation were drawn, and which, rounding over its steep

slope, descended towards another and yet another terrace before it stood

complete, a new-born partner and companion in life of the former

capital, lavish in space as the other was confined, leisurely and

serious as the other was animated--a new town of great houses, of big

churches--dull, as only the eighteenth century was capable of making

them--of comfort and sober wealth and intellectual progress. The

architects who adorned the Modern Athens with Roman domes and Greek

temples, and placid fictitious ruins on the breezy hill which possessed

a fatal likeness to the Acropolis, would have scoffed at the idea of

finding models in the erections of the fourteenth century--that

so-called dark age--or recognising a superior harmony and fitness in

native principles of construction.

Yet though the public taste has now returned more or less intelligently

to the earlier canons, it would be foolish not to recognise that there

is a certain advantage even in the difference of the new town from the

old. It is not the historical Edinburgh, the fierce, tumultuous,

mediaeval city, the stern but not more quiet capital of the Reformers,

the noisy, dirty, whimsical, mirth-loving town, full of broad jest and

witty epigram, of the eighteenth century. The new town has a character

of its own. It is the modern, not supplanting or effacing, but standing

by the old. Those who built it considered it an extraordinary

improvement upon all that Gothic antiquity had framed. They were far

more proud of these broad streets and massive houses than of anything

their fathers had left to them, and flung down without remorse a great

deal of the antiquated building after which it is now the fashion to

inquire with so much regret. Notwithstanding the change of taste since

that time, the New Town of Edinburgh still regards the old with a little

condescension and patronage; but there is no opposition between the two.

They stand by each other in a curious peacefulness of union, each with a

certain independence yet mutual reliance. London and Paris have rubbed

off all their old angles and made themselves, notwithstanding the

existence of Gothic corners here and there, all modern, to the

extinction of most of the characteristic features of their former

living. But happy peculiarities of situation have saved our northern

capital from any such self-obliteration. Edinburgh has been fortunate

enough to preserve both sides--the ancient picturesque grace, the modern

comfort and ease. And though Mr. Ruskin has spoken very severely of the

new town, we will not throw a stone at a place so well adapted to the

necessities of modern life. Those bland fronts of polished stone would

have been more kindly and more congenial to the soil had they cut the

air with high-stepped gables and encased their stairs in the rounded

turrets which give a simple distinctive character to so many Scottish

houses; and a little colour, whether of the brick which Scotch builders

despise or the delightful washes[6] which their forefathers loved, would

be a godsend even now. But still, for a sober domestic partner, the new

town is no ill companion to the ancient city on the hill.

[6] In this respect I venture to think all Scotland errs. Many houses

throughout the country, built roughly with a rude and irregular but solid

mason-work, were made points of light in the landscape by these washes of

colour which poor dwellings retain. There is a yellow which I remember on

many old houses in which the stains of time and weather produced

varieties of tone almost as agreeable as the mellowing of marble under

the same influences, which are now stripped into native roughness and

rise in sombre grey, sometimes almost black, abstracting a much-needed

warmth from the aspect of the country round.

This adjunct to the elder Edinburgh had come into being between the time

when Allan Ramsay's career ended in the octagon house on the Castle

Hill, and another poet, very different from Ramsay, appeared in the

Scotch capital. In the meantime many persons of note had left the old

town and migrated towards the new. The old gentry of whom so many

stories have been told, especially those old ladies who held a little

court, like Mrs. Bethune Balliol, or made their bold criticism of all

things both new and old, like those who flourish in Lord Cockburn's

lively pages--continued to live in the ancestral houses which still kept

their old-fashioned perfection within, though they had to be approached

through all the squalor and misery which had already found refuge

outside in the desecrated Canongate; but society in the Scotch

metropolis was now rapidly tending across the lately erected bridge

towards the new great houses which contemplated old Edinburgh across the

little valley, where the Nor' Loch glimmered no longer and where fields

lay green where marsh and water had been. The North Bridge was a noble

structure, and the newly-built Register House at the other end one of

the finest buildings of modern times to the admiring chroniclers of

Edinburgh. And the historians and philosophers, the great doctors, the

great lawyers, the elegant critics, for whom it was more and more

necessary that the ways of access between the old town and the new might

be made more easy, presided over and criticised all those wonderful new

buildings of classic style and unbroken regularity, and watched the

progress of the Earthen Mound, a bold and picturesque expedient which

filled up the hollow and made a winding walk between, with interest as

warm as that which they took in the lectures and students, the books and

researches, which were making their city one of the intellectual centres

of the world.

This is a position to which Scotland has always aspired, and the pride

of the ambitious city and country was never more fully satisfied than in

the end of last and the beginning of the present century. Edinburgh had

never been so rich in the literary element, and the band of young men

full of genius and high spirit who were to advance her still one step

farther to the climax of fame in that particular, were growing up to

take the places of their fathers. A place in which Walter Scott was just

emerging from his delightful childhood, in which Jeffrey was a

mischievous boy and Henry Brougham a child, could not but be overflowing

with hope, especially when we remember all the good company there

already--Dugald Stewart, bringing so many fine young gentlemen from

England to wonder at the little Scotch capital, and a crowd of Erskines,

Hunters, Gregories, Monroes, and Dr. Blair and Dr. Blacklock, and the

Man of Feeling--not to speak of those wild and witty old ladies in the

Canongate, and the duchesses who still recognised the claims of

Edinburgh in its season. To all this excellent company, whose fame and

whose talk hung about both the old Edinburgh and the new like the smoke

over their roofs, there arrived one spring day a wonderful visitor, in

appearance like nothing so much as an honest hill farmer, travelling on

foot, his robust shoulders a little bowed with the habit of the plough,

his eyes shining, as no other eyes in Scotland shone, with youth and

genius and hope. He knew nobody in Edinburgh save an Ayrshire lad like

himself, like what everybody up to this time had supposed Robert Burns

to be. The difference was that the stranger a little while before had

put forth by the aid of a country printer at Kilmarnock a little volume

of rustic poetry upon the most unambitious subjects, in Westland Scotch,

the record of a ploughman's loves and frolics and thoughts. It is

something to know that these credentials were enough to rouse the whole

of that witty, learned, clever, and all-discerning community, and that

this visitor from the hills and fields in a moment found every door

opened to him, and Modern Athens, never unconscious of its own

superiority and at this moment more deeply aware than usual that it was

one of the lights of the earth, at his feet.

[Illustration: LADY STAIR'S CLOSE]

Burns was but a visitor, the lion of a season, and therefore we are not

called upon to associate with Edinburgh the whole tragic story of his

life. And yet his appearance was one of the most remarkable that has

distinguished the ancient town. He arrived among all the professors, the

men of letters, the cultured classes who held an almost ideal

pre-eminence, more like what a young author hopes than is generally to

be met with among men--his heart beating with a sense of the great

venture on which he was bound, and a proud determination to quit himself

like a man whatever were the magnitudes among which he should have to

stand. Mere Society so called, with all its bustle of gaiety and endless

occupation about nothing, might have exercised upon him something of the

fascination which fine names and fine houses and the sweep and whirl of

hurried life certainly possess; but he who expresses almost with

bitterness his disgust to see a blockhead of rank received by one of his

noble patrons with as much, nay more, consideration than is given to

himself, would probably have had very little toleration for the

butterflies of fashion: whereas Edinburgh society impressed him greatly,

as of that ideal kind of which the young and inexperienced dream, where

the best and brightest are at the head of everything, where poetry is a

passport to the innermost sanctuary and conversation is like the talk of

the gods. They were all distinguished for one literary gift or grace or

another, philosophers golden-mouthed, poets of the most polished sort:

their knowledge, their culture, their intellectual powers, were the

foundation upon which their little world was built. The great people who

were to be found among them were proud to know these scholars and

sages--it was they, and not an occasional family of rank, or still more

rare man of wealth, who gave character and meaning to Edinburgh. To be

received in such society was the highest privilege which a young poet

could desire; and it was worthy to receive and foster and encourage that

new light that came from heaven.

On their side the heads of society in Edinburgh were much interested in

this young man. There had been an article in the _Lounger_, fondly

deemed a Scotch _Spectator_, an elegant literary paper widely read not

only in Scotland but even beyond the Border, upon him and his works.

"The Ayrshire Ploughman" was the title of the article, and it set forth

all the imperfections of his breeding, his want of education, his

ignorance both of books and of the world, and yet the amazing verses he

had produced, which, though disguised in a dialect supposed to be

unknown to the elegant reader, and for which Henry Mackenzie, the Man of

Feeling, supplied a glossary--living, he himself, in an old-fashioned

house in the South Back of the Canongate and within the easiest reach of

those wonderful old ladies who spoke broad Scotch, and left no one in

any doubt as to the strong opinions expressed therein--were certified to

be worthy the perusal of the most fastidious critic. Lord Monboddo, who

was the author of speculations which forestalled Darwin and who

considered a tail to be an appendage of which men had not long got rid,

on the one side, and the metaphysicians and philosophers on the other,

would no doubt prick up their ears to hear of this absolutely new being

in whom there might be seen some traces of primeval man. We forget which

of the early Jameses it was who is said to have shut up two infants with

a dumb nurse in one of the islands of the Firth to ascertain what kind

of language they would speak when thus left to the teaching of nature.

The experiment was triumphantly successful, for the heaven-taught babies

babbled, the chroniclers tell us, a kind of Hebrew, thus proving beyond

doubt that the language of the Old Testament was the original tongue of

man. The Edinburgh savants must have received Burns with something of

the same feeling: for here was a new soul which had been shut up amid

the primeval elements, and the language it spoke was Poetry! yet poetry

disguised in imperfect dialect which might yet be trained and educated

into elegance. They asked him to dinner as a first step, and gathered

round him to hear what he would have to say; to observe the effect

produced by the sight of learning, criticism, knowledge; to enjoy his

awe, and note the improvement that could not but ensue. This curiosity

was full of kindness; their hearts were a little touched by the

ploughman, by his glowing eyes, and by the strange sight of him there

among them in the midst of their high civilisation, a rustic clown who

knew nothing better than a thatched cottage and a clay floor. No doubt

they had the sincerest desire that he should be made to understand how

much he was deficient, what a great deal he had to learn, and be taught

to use fine language, and turn his attention to higher subjects, and be

altogether elevated and brought on in the world. The situation is very

curious and full of human interest, even had the stranger been less in

importance than he was. It is wonderfully enlightening in any

circumstances to see such an encounter from both sides, to perceive the

light in which it appears to them, and the very different light in which

it is seen by _him_. There was the usual great divergence between the

views of the visitor and the highly-cultured community to which he came.

For he indeed did not come there at all to be enlightened and trained

and put in the way he should go. He came full of delightful hope that he

was coming among his own kind, that he was for the first time to meet

his own species, and recognise in other human faces the light that shone

about his own path, but in none of the other muddy ways of the

country-side; to make friends with his natural brethren, and be

understood of them as no one yet had been found to understand him. In

his high anticipations, in his warm enthusiasm of hope, he himself

figured dimly as a sort of noble exile coming back to his father's

house. So does every child of fancy regard the world of which he knows

nothing, the world of the great and famous, where to dazzled fancy all

the beautiful things, words, and thoughts for which he has been sighing

all his life are to be found.

They met, and they were, if not mutually disappointed, yet strangely

astonished and perplexed. Burns would seem to have been always on his

guard, too much on his guard we should be disposed to say, suspicious of

the intention to guide, to chasten, to educate and refine, which was

indeed in the kindest way at the bottom of everybody's thoughts. He was

determined to be astonished by nothing, to keep his head so that no one

should ever be able to say that it was turned by his new experiences--an

attitude which altogether bewildered the good people, who were willing

to give him every kind of education, to excuse any rudeness or roughness

or imperfection, but not to see a man at his ease, appearing among them

as if he were of them, requiring no allowance to be made for him,

holding his head high as any man he met. All the accounts we have of his

appearance in Edinburgh agree in this. He was neither abashed nor

embarrassed; no rustic presumption or vulgarity, but quite as little any

timidity or awkwardness, was in the Ayrshire ploughman. His shoulders a

little bent with the work to which he had been accustomed, his dress

like a countryman, a rougher cloth perhaps, a pair of good woollen

stockings rig and fur, his mother's knitting, instead of the silk which

covered limbs probably not half so robust--but so far as manners went,

nothing to apologise for or smile at. The accounts all agree in this. If

he never put himself forward too much, he never withdrew with any

unworthy shyness from his modest share in the conversation. Sometimes he

would be roused to eloquent speech, and then the admiring ladies said he

carried them "off their feet" in the contagion of his enthusiasm and

emotion. But this was a very strange phenomenon for the Edinburgh

professors and men of letters to deal with: a novice who had not come

humbly to be taught, but one who had come to take up his share of the

inheritance, to sit down among the great, as in his natural place. He

was not perhaps altogether unmoved by their insane advices to him, one

of the greatest of lyrical poets, a singer above all--to write a

tragedy, to give up the language he knew and write his poetry in the

high English which, alas! he uses in his letters. Not unmoved, and

seriously inclining to a more lofty measure, he compounded addresses to

Edinburgh:

"Edina, Scotia's darling seat!"

and other such intolerable effusions. One can imagine him roaming

through the fields between the old town and the new, and looking up to

the "rude rough fortress," and on the other side to the brand-new

regular lines of building, where

"Architecture's noble pride

Bids elegance and splendour rise,"

and musing in his mind how to celebrate them in polished verse so that

even the critics may be satisfied--

"Thy sons, Edina! social, kind,

With open arms the stranger hail;

Their views enlarged, their liberal mind,

Above the narrow, rural vale;

Attentive still to sorrow's wail,

Or modest merit's silent claim;

And never may their sources fail!

And never envy blot their name!"

One wonders what the gentlemen said to this in the old town and the

new--whether it did not confuse them still further, as well intended

perhaps, but not after all like the "Epistle to Davie," though they had

all advised him to amend that rustic style. A very confusing business

altogether--difficult for the kind advisers as well as for the poet, and

with no outlet that any one could see.

[Illustration: DUGALD STEWART'S MONUMENT]

We have, however, a more agreeable picture of the visitor on another

occasion when he walked out into the country with Dugald Stewart in a

spring morning to the hills of Braid and talked that gentle

philosopher's heart away, not now about Edina's palaces and towers. "He

told me ... that the sight of so many smoking cottages gave a pleasure

to his mind which none could understand who had not witnessed like

himself the happiness and worth which they contained." It is more

pleasant to think of the poet's dark eyes lighting up as he said this

than to watch him proud and self-possessed in the drawing-rooms holding

his own, taking such good care that nobody should divine how his heart

was beating and his nerves athrill.

But after all there is no such account given of this wonderful visitor

to Edinburgh as that we have from the after-recollections of a certain

"lameter" boy who was once present in a house where Burns was a guest.

The Scott boys from George Square had been admitted to the party which

they were too young to join in an ordinary way, in order that they might

see this wonder of the world, the ploughman-poet who was not afraid, but

behaved as well as any of the gentlemen. And it befell by the happiest

chance that Burns inquired who was the author of certain verses

inscribed upon a print which he had been looking at. No one knew but

young Walter, who we may be sure had not lost a look or a word of the

stranger, and who had read everything in his invalid childhood. The boy

was not bold enough to answer the question loud out, but he whispered it

to some older friend, who told the poet, no doubt with an indication of

the blushing and eager lad from whom it came, which procured him a word

and a look never forgotten. But there passed at the same time a thought

through young Walter's mind, the swift reflection of that never-failing

criticism of youth which pierces unaware through all wrappings and veils

of the soul. "I remember I thought Burns's acquaintance with English

poetry was rather limited; and also that having twenty times the ability

of Allan Ramsay and of Fergusson, he talked of them with too much

humility as his models." The much-read boy was a little shocked, no

doubt disturbed in his secret soul that the poet--so far above any other

poet that was to be seen about the world in those days--should not have

known that verse: though indeed men better read than Burns might have

been excused for their want of acquaintance with a minor poet like

Langhorne; but how true was the indignant observation, half angry, that

with "twenty times the ability" it was Allan Ramsay and the still less

important unfortunate young Fergusson to whom Burns looked up! Did the

boy wonder perhaps, though too loyal to say it--for criticism at his age

is always keen--whether there might be a something not quite real in

that devotion, and ask in the recesses of his mind whether it was

possible for such a man to be so self-deceived?

There were no doubt various affectations about Burns, as when he talks

big in his diary of observing character and finding this pursuit the

greatest entertainment of his life in Edinburgh, with a pretension very

general among half-educated persons: but there is no reason to believe

that he was not quite genuine about his predecessors. A poet is not

necessarily a critic; and Allan Ramsay's fame had been exactly of the

popular kind which would attract a son of the soil, whereas Fergusson

was the object of Burns's especial tenderness, pity, and regard. And it

is touching to recollect that the only sign he left of himself in

Edinburgh, where for the first time he learned what it was to mix in

fine company and to feel the freedom of money in his pocket, from which

he could afford a luxury, was to place a stone over the grave of

Fergusson in the Canongate Churchyard, where he lay unknown. His

application to the Kirk-Session for leave to do this is still kept upon

the books--a curious interruption amid the minutes of church discipline

and economics. One wonders if that homely memorial is kept as it ought

to be. It is a memorial not only of the admiration of one poet for

another, but of Burns's poignant pity--a wellnigh intolerable pang--for

a young soul who preceded himself in the way of poetry and despair, one

whose life, destined to better and brighter things, had been flung away

like a weed on the dismal strand. Only twenty-three years of poetry and

folly had sufficed that other reckless boy to destroy himself and

shatter his little lamp of light. Burns was only a few years older, and

perhaps, though on the heights of triumph, felt something of that

horrible tide already catching his own feet to sweep him too into the

abyss. There are few things in the world more pathetic than this tribute

of his to the victim who had gone before him.

I may perhaps venture to say, with an apology for recurring to a subject

dealt with in another book, that this poetic visit to Edinburgh reminds

me of the visit of another poet in every way very different from Burns

to another city which cannot be supposed to resemble Edinburgh except in

the wonderful charm and attraction for devotees which she possesses.

There is indeed no just comparison between Petrarch at Venice and Burns

at Edinburgh, nothing but the fantastic link, often too subtle to be

traced, which makes the mind glide or leap over innumerable distances

and diversities from one thing to another. The Italian poet came

conferring glory, great as a prince, and attended by much the same

honours and privileges, though he was but a half priest, the son of an

exile, in an age and place where birth and family were of infinitely

more importance than they are now. He was the perfection and flower of

learning and high culture, and a fame which had reached the point which

is high-fantastical, and can mount no farther--and he came to a palace

allotted to him by the Government, and every distinction which it was in

their power to bestow, and demeaned himself _en bon prince_, adorning

with skilful eloquent touches of description the glorious scene beneath

his windows, the pageants at which he was an honoured spectator. Nothing

could be more unlike the young, shy, proud, yet genial-hearted rustic,

holding firmly by that magic wand of poetry which was his sole right to

consideration, and facing the curious, puzzled, patronising world with a

certain suspicion, a certain defiance, as of one whom no craft or wile

could betray or pretension daunt--yet ready to melt into an enthusiasm

almost extravagant when a lovely young woman or a noble youth pushed

open with a touch the door always ajar, or at least unfastened, of his

heart.

"The mother may forget the child

That smiles sae sweetly on her knee;

But I'll remember thee, Glencairn,

And a' that thou hast done for me!"

What Glencairn had done was nothing but kindness, a warm reception which

not even the poet's susceptibility could think condescending: but he is

repaid with an exuberant, extravagant gratitude. Such was the man; ever

afraid to compromise his dignity, but with no measure for the

overflowings of his heart. Petrarch, so much more assured in his

eminence and superiority to all living poets, was driven from his palace

on the Riva and all his delights by the impertinent gibes of some

foolish young men. But Burns was flattered and caressed to the top of

his bent, and--forgotten, or at least dropped, and no more thought of.

He returned to Edinburgh only to find that, the gloss of novelty having

worn off, his friends were no longer ready to move heaven and earth in

order to bring him to their parties, though probably had he chosen he

might have worked himself back "into society" in a slower but more

permanent fashion. This, however, he did not choose, but fell back among

the convivial middle class, the undistinguished and over merry, where

nobody thought it too great humility to refer to Allan Ramsay and

Fergusson as his models. It must be recollected, however, that his

second visit to Edinburgh, and what seems in the telling a foolish and

almost vulgar flirtation, produced one of the most impassioned and

exquisite songs of love and despair which has ever been written in any

language.

"Ae fond kiss, and then we sever;

Ae farewell, alas! for ever!"

There is a stillness of exhausted feeling in this wonderful utterance

which is the very soul of despair.

There has been no more remarkable moment in the experience of the town

which has known so many strange and striking scenes, though its interest

has little to do with history or even with national feeling. It is pure

humanity in an unusual development, an episode in the life of the poet

such as has many less important parallels, but scarcely any so fully

representative and typical. It discloses to us suddenly, as by a flash

of light striking into the darkness, the persons, the entertainments,

the sentiments of a hundred years ago. We make improvements daily in

external matters, but society--we had almost said humanity--rarely

learns. There is not the smallest hope that in Edinburgh or elsewhere a

young man of genius in Burns's position would now be either more wisely

noticed or more truly benefited by such a period of close contact with

people who ought by experience and knowledge to know better than he. The

only thing that is probable is a falling-off, not an advance. I think it

highly doubtful whether a ploughman from Ayrshire, however superlative

his genius, would now be received at all in "the best houses" and by the

first men and women in Edinburgh; and if not in Edinburgh, surely

nowhere else would such a reception as that given to Burns await the

untutored poet. The world has seldom another chance permitted to it, and

in this case I cannot but think it would be worse and not better used.

[Illustration: BURNS'S MONUMENT]

CHAPTER III

THE SHAKSPEARE OF SCOTLAND

There are many variations in degree of the greatest human gifts, but

they are few in kind. The name we have ventured to place at the head of

this chapter is one not so great as that of Shakspeare, not so

all-embracing--though widely-embracing beyond any other second--not so

ideal, not so profound. Walter Scott penetrated with a luminous

revelation all that was within his scope, the most different kinds and

classes of men, those whom he loved (and he loved all whom it was

possible to love) and the few whom he hated, with the same comprehension

and power of disclosure. But Shakspeare was not restrained by the limits

of any personal scope or knowledge. He knew Lear and Macbeth, and Hamlet

and Prospero, though they were beings only of his own creation. He could

embody the loftiest passion in true flesh and blood, and show us how a

man can be moved by jealousy or ambition in the highest superlative

degree and yet be a man with all the claims upon our understanding and

pity that are possessed by any brother of our own. Nothing like Lear

ever came in our Scott's way: that extraordinary embodiment of human

passion and weakness, the forlorn and awful strength of the aged and

miserable, did not present itself to his large and genial gaze. It would

not have occurred to him perhaps had he lived to the age of Methuselah.

He knew not those horrors and dreadful depths of humanity that could

make such tragic passion possible. But he had his revenge in one way

even upon Shakspeare. Dogberry and Verges, as types of the muddle-headed

old watch--pompous, confused, and self-important--are always diverting;

but they would have been men not all ridiculous had Scott taken them in

hand--real creatures of flesh and blood, not watchmen in the abstract.

Our greater poet did not take trouble enough to make them individual,

his fancy carrying him otherwhere, and leaving him scarce the time to

put his jotting down. To Shakspeare the great ideals whom he almost

alone has been able to make into flesh and blood; to Scott all the

surrounding world, the men as we meet them about the common

thoroughfares of life. He knows no Rosalind nor Imogen, but on the other

hand Jeanie Deans and Jenny Headrigg would have been impossible to his

great predecessor. Both, we may remark, are incapable of a young

hero--the Claudios and the Bertrams being if anything a trifle worse

than Henry Morton and Young Lovel. But whereas Shakspeare is greatest

above that line of the conventional ideal, it is below that Sir Walter

is famous. The one has no restriction, however high he may soar; the

other finds nothing so common that he cannot make it immortal.

[Illustration: ST. GILES'S FROM PRINCES STREET]

It is, however, especially in the breadth and largeness of a humanity

which has scarcely any limit to its sympathy and understanding that the

great romancist of Scotland resembles the greatest of English poets.

They are both so great, so broad, so little restrained by any individual

limitations, that a perverse criticism has made this catholic and

all-comprehending nature a kind of reproach to both, as though that

great and limpid mirror of their minds, in which all nature was

reflected, was less noble than the sharp face of a stone which can catch

but one ray. They were both subject to political prejudices and

prepossessions. Shakspeare has made of many a youth of the nineteenth

century an ardent Lancastrian, ready to pluck a red rose with Somerset

and die for Margaret and her prince; and Scott in like manner has made

many a Jacobite, though in the latter case our novelist is too full of

sense even in the midst of his own inclinations to become ever an

out-and-out partisan. But, except these prepossessions, they have no

_parti pris_. Every faction renders up its soul of meaning, the most

diverse figures unclose themselves side by side. The wit, the scholar,

the true soldier, the braggart and thief, the Jew and the Christian, the

Hamlet, hero of all time, and Shallow and Slender from the fat pastures

of English rural life, come all together, each as true as if on him

alone the poet's eye had fixed. And Scott is like him, setting before us

with unerring pencil the old superstitious despot of mediaeval France,

the bustling pedant of St. James's, the ploughmen and shepherds, the

churchmen, the Border reivers and Highland caterans, the broad country

lying under a natural illumination, without strain or effort, large and

temperate as the day. Neither in the greatest poet nor the great

romancer is there any force put upon the natural fulness of life to

twist its record into a narrow circle with one motive only. It is the

round world and all that it inhabits, the grandeur and divinity of a

universe, that delights them. Their view is large as the vision of God,

or as nearly so as is given to mortal eyes. It is in this, above all,

that they resemble each other. In degree Shakspeare, it need not be

said, is all-transcendent, reaching heights such as no other man has

reached in delineation and creation: but Scott is of his splendid

species, one of his kind, the only one among all the many sons of genius

with whom this island has been blessed, for whom the boldest could make

such a claim.

Walter Scott belongs to all Scotland. He was, no man more, a lover of

the woods and fields, of mountain-sides and pastoral braes, of the river

and forest, Ettrick and Tweed and Yarrow, and Perthshire--that princely

district, half Highland, half Lowland--and the chain of silvery lochs

that pierce the mountain shadows through Stirling and Argyle: every

league of the fair country he loved. From the Western Isles and the

Orkneys to the very fringe of debatable land which parts the northern

and the southern half of Great Britain--is his, and has tokens to show

of his presence. When he came home to die at the end of almost the most

tragic yet most noble chapter of individual history which our century

has known, it was the longing of his sick heart above all other that he

should not be so unblest as to lay his bones far from the Tweed.

But yet, above all other places, it was to Edinburgh that Scott

belonged. His birth, his growth, the familiar scenes of his youth, his

education and training, the business and work of his life, were all

associated with the ancient capital. George Square--with its homely and

comfortable old-fashion, which has nothing to do with antiquity, the

first breaking out of the Edinburgh citizens into large space and air

outside the strait boundaries of the city, with the Meadows and their

trees beyond, and all the sunshine of the south side to warm the deep

_corps de logis_, the substantial and solid mansions which are so grey

without yet so full of warmth and comfort within--was the first home he

knew, and his residence up to manhood. No boy could be more an Edinburgh

boy. Lame though he was, he climbed every dangerous point upon the

hills, and knew the recesses of Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crags by

heart before he knew his Latin grammar. His schoolboy fights, his

snowballing, the little armies of urchins set in battle array, the

friendly feuds of gentle and simple (sometimes attended by hard knocks,

as among his own Liddesdale farmers), fill the streets with amusing

recollections. And when he was promoted in due time to the Parliament

House and to all the frolics of the youthful Bar, and his proud father

steps forth in the snuff-coloured suit which Mr. Saunders Fairford wore

after him, to tell his friends that "my son Walter passed his private

Scots law examination with good approbation," and on Friday "puts on the

gown and gives a bit chack of dinner to his friends and acquaintances,

as is the custom," how familiar and kindly is the scene, how the sober

house lights up, and the good wine about which we have known all our

lives comes out of the cellar and the jokes fly round--Parliament House

pleasantries and recollections of the witticisms of the Bench gradually

giving place to the sallies of the wild young wits, the shaft from the

new-bent bow of the young advocate himself. Nothing can be more true and

simple than he is through all the tale, or more real than the Edinburgh

atmosphere; the fun that is mostly in the foreground; the work that is

pushed into corners yet always gets done, though it has not the air of

being important except to the excellent father whose steps on the stair

are the signal for the disappearance of a chess-board into a drawer or a

romance under the papers,--well-known tricks of youth which we have all

been guilty of. There is a curious evidence, however, in Lockhart's

_Life_, less known than the usual tales of frolic and apparent idleness,

of the professional trick of Scott's handwriting, which showed how

steadily he must have laboured even in his delightful, easy, innocently

irregular youth. "I allude particularly to a sort of flourish at the

bottom of the page, originally, I presume, adopted in engrossing as a

safeguard against the intrusion of a forged line between the legitimate

text and the attesting signature. He was quite sensible," adds his

biographer, "that this ornament might as well be dispensed with; and his

family often heard him mutter after involuntarily performing it, 'There

goes the old shop again!'" Which of us now could see that flourish

without the water coming into our eyes?

[Illustration: THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH]

It is impossible to eradicate, from the minds of youthful students at

least, the admiration which always attends the performances of the young

man who gains his successes without apparently working for them. As a

matter of fact, it is the work which we ought to respect rather than

that apparently fortuitous accidental result: but nothing will ever cure

us of our native delight in an effect which appears to have no vulgar

cause, and great has been the misery produced by this prejudice to many

a youth who has begun with the tradition of easy triumph and presumed

upon it to the loss of all his after-life. But when there shows in the

apparent idler a sign like this of many a long hour's labour ignored and

lightly thought of, covered over with a pleasant veil of fun and ease

and happy leisure, the combination is one that no heart can resist.

Scott had read everything he could lay his hands on while he was still a

child, and boasted himself a virtuoso, that is, according to his

explanation, at six years old, "one who wishes and will know

everything;" but his boyish tastes and triumphs became more and more

athletic as he gained a firmer use of his bodily powers. No diseased

consciousness of disability in respect to his lameness, like that which

embittered Byron, could find a place in the rough wholesome atmosphere

of the Edinburgh High School and playgrounds, where nobody was too

delicate about reminding him of his infirmity, and the stout-hearted

little hero took it like a man, offering "to fight mounted," and being

tied upon a board accordingly for his first combat. "You may take him

for a poor lameter," said one of the Eldin Clerks, a sailor, with equal

friendly frankness to a party of strangers, "but he is the first to

begin a row, and the last to end it." To such a youth the imperfection

was a virtue the more. When the jovial band strolled forth upon long

walks the cheerful "lameter" bargained for three miles an hour, and kept

up with the best. They would start at five in the morning, beguiling the

way with endless pranks, on one occasion at least without a single

sixpence in all their youthful pockets with which to refresh themselves

during a thirty miles' round. "We asked every now and then at a cottage

door for a drink of water; and one or two of the goodwives, observing

our worn-out looks, brought forth milk instead of water, so with that

and hips and haws we came in little the worse." Little they cared for

fatigue and inconvenience; they were things to laugh over when the lads

got back. Scott only wished he had been a player on the flute, like

George Primrose in the _Vicar of Wakefield_, and his father shook his

head and doubted the boy was born "for nae better than a gangrel

scrapegut"--reproach of little gravity, as the expedition so poorly

provisioned was of little harm. Thus the young gentlemen bore cheerfully

what would have been hardship to a ploughman, and gibed even at each

other's weaknesses without a spark of unkindness, which made the

weakness itself into a robust matter of fact not to be brooded over.

High susceptibility might have suffered from the treatment, but high

susceptibility generally means egotism and inordinate self-esteem,

qualities which it is the very best use of public school and college to

conjure away.

Nothing indeed more cheerful, more full of endless frolic and enjoyment,

fresh air and fun and feeling, ever existed than the young manhood of

Walter Scott. Talk of Scotch gravity and seriousness! The houses in

which they were received as they roamed about--farmers' or lairds', it

was all the same to the merry lads--were only too uproarious in their

mirth; with songs and laughter they made the welkin ring. At home in

Edinburgh the fun might be less noisy, but it was not less sincere. In

the very Parliament House itself the young men clustered in their

corner, telling each other the last good things, and with much ado to

keep their young laughter within the bounds of decorum. The judge on the

Bench, the Lord President himself, greatest potentate of all, was not

more safe from the audacious wits than poor Peter Peebles. There was

nothing they did not laugh at, themselves and each other as much as Lord

Braxfield, and all the humours of a town more full of anecdote and jest,

laughable eccentricity and keen satire and amusing comment, than any

town in literature. The best joke of all perhaps was Sydney Smith's

famous _bon mot_ about the surgical operation, which no doubt he meant

as an excellent joke in the midst of that laughing community, where the

fun was only too fast and furious. Nowadays, when life is more temperate

and the world in general has mended its manners, the habits of that

period fill us with dismay; but perhaps after all there was less harm

done than appears, and not more of the fearful tribute of young life

which our fated race is always paying than is still exacted amid a

population much less generally addicted to excess. But that of course

increased rather than diminished the jovial aspect of Edinburgh life

when Walter Scott was young, and when the few cares he had in hand, the

occasional bit of work, interfered very little with the warm and lively

social life in the midst of which he had been born. He dwelt, in every

sense of the word, among his own people, his friends, the sons of his

father's friends, his associates all belonging to families like his own,

of good if modest rank and lineage, the "kent folk" of whom Scotland

loves to keep up the record. This, which is perhaps one of the greatest

advantages with which a young man can enter on life, was his from his

infancy. He and his companions had been at school together, together in

the college classes, in frequent social meetings, on the floor of the

Parliament House. Familiar faces and kind greetings were round him

wherever he went. No doubt these circumstances, so genial, so friendly

and favourable, helped to perfect the most kind, the most generous and

sunshiny of natures. And thus no man could be more completely at once

the best product and most complete representative of his native soil.

His life too was as prosperous and full of good fortune and happiness as

a man could desire. He married at twenty-six, and a few years later

received the appointment of Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire, which

rendered him independent of the precarious incomings of his profession,

and made the pleasure he always took in roaming the country into a

necessary part of his life's work. He had begun a playful and

pleasurable authorship some time before with some translations from the

German, Buerger's _Lenore_ and Goethe's _Goetz von Berlichingen_--the

first of which was hastily made into a little book, daintily printed and

bound, in order to help his suit with an early love, so easy, so little

premeditated, was this beginning. With equal simplicity and absence of

intention he slid into the Border Minstrelsy, which he intended not for

the beginning of a long literary career, but in the first place for "a

job" to Ballantyne the printer, whom he had persuaded to establish

himself in Edinburgh--the best of printers and the most attached of

faithful and humble friends--and for fun and the pleasure of scouring

the country in pursuit of ballads, which was a search he had already

entered upon to his great enjoyment. From this nothing was so easy as to

float into original poetry, inspired by the same impulse and inspiration

as his ballads. One of the ladies of the house of Buccleuch told him the

story of the elfin page, and begged him to make a ballad of it; and from

this suggestion the _Lay of the Last Minstrel_ arose. The time was ripe

for giving forth all that had been unconsciously stirring in his teeming

fertile imagination. It came at once like a sudden bursting into flower,

with a splendid _eclosion_, out-bursting, involuntary, unlaborious,

delightful to himself as to mankind. From henceforward his name stood in

one of the highest places of literature and his fame was assured.

[Illustration: PLAYFAIR'S MONUMENT, CALTON HILL]

Nothing could be more unintentional, more spontaneous, almost careless;

a thing done for his pleasure far more than with any serious purpose;

nothing--except the later beginning, equally unintentional, of a still

more important stream of production. The poems of Scott will always be

open to much criticism; even those who love them most--and there are

many whose love for this fresh, free, spontaneous, delightful fountain

of song is strong enough to repress every impulse of criticism and

transport it beyond the reach of comment to a romantic enchanted land of

its own, where it flows in native sunshine and delight for

ever--declining to pronounce any definite judgment as to their

greatness. But to Scott in his after-work we are inclined to say no man

worthy of expressing an opinion can give any but the highest place. It

is true, and the fact has to be admitted with astonishment and regret,

that one great writer, his countryman, speaking the same language and in

every way capable of pronouncing judgment, has failed to appreciate Sir

Walter. We cannot tell why, nor pretend to solve that amazing question.

Perhaps it was the universal acclaim, the consent of every voice, that

awoke the germ of perversity that was in Thomas Carlyle: an impulse of

contradiction, especially in face of an opinion too unanimous, which is

one of our national characteristics: perhaps one of those prejudices

pertinacious as the rugged peasant nature itself, which sometimes warps

the clearest judgment; perhaps, but this we find it difficult to

believe, a narrower intensity and passion of meaning in himself which

found little reflection in the great limpid mirror which Scott held up

to nature. The beginning of Scott's chief and greatest work was as

fortuitous, as accidental (if we may use the word), as the poetry. He

took up by some passing impulse the idea of a prose story on the events

of the 'forty-five, which perhaps he considered too recent to be treated

in poetry; wrote (everybody knows the story) half a volume, read it to a

trusted critic, who probably considered it foolish for a man who had

risen to the heights of fame by one kind of composition to risk himself

now with another. It is very likely that Scott himself was easily moved

to the same opinion. He tossed the MS. into a drawer, and gave it up.

There had been no special motive in the effort, and it cost him nothing

to put it aside, to whistle for his dogs, and go out for a long round by

wood and hill, or to take his gun or rod, or to entertain his

visitors--all of which were more rational, more entertaining, and

altogether important things to do than the writing of a dull story,

which after all was not his line. For years the beginning chapters of

_Waverley_ lay there unknown. They lay very quietly, we may well

believe, not bursting the dull enclosure as they might have done had the

Baron of Bradwardine been yet born; but that good young Waverley was

always a little dull, and might have slept till doomsday had nothing

occurred to disturb his rest. One day, however, some fishing tackle was

wanted for the use of one of Scott's perpetual visitors at

Ashiestiel--not even for himself, for some chance man taking advantage

of the Shirra's open house. Visitor arriving in a good hour! fortunate

sorner, to be thereafter blessed of all men! Let us hope he got just the

lines he wanted and had a good day's sport. For in his search Scott's

eyes lighted upon the bundle of written pages. "Hallo!" he must have

said to himself, "there they are! Let's see if they're as bad as Willie

Erskine thought." In his candid soul he did not think they were very

good, unless it was perhaps the description of Waverley Honour, a great

mild English mansion which he would admire all the more that it was so

unlike Tully Veolan. Perhaps it was the contrast which brought into his

teeming brain a sudden vision of that "Scottish manor-house sixty years

since," which he went off straightway and built in his eighth chapter

with the baron and all his surroundings, which must have been awaiting

impatient that happy moment to burst into life.

And thus by spontaneous accident, by delightful, careless chance, so to

speak, the thing was done. One wonders by what equally, nay more

fortunate unthought-of haphazard it was, that the country rogue

Shakspeare, his bright eyes shining with mock penitence for the wildness

of his woodland career, and the air and the accent of the fields still

on his honeyed lips, first found out that he could string a story

together for the theatre and make the old knights and the fair ladies

live again. Of this there is no record, but only enough presumption, we

think, to make it sufficiently clear that the discovery which has ever

since been one of the chief glories of the English name, and added the

most wonderful immortal inhabitants to the population, was made, like

Scott's, by what seems a divine chance, without apparent preparation or

likelihood. In our day much more importance is given to a development

which the scientific thinker would fondly hope to be traceable by all

the leadings of race and inheritance into an evolution purely natural

and to be expected; while, on the other hand, there is nothing which

appears more splendid and dignified to others than the aspect of a life

devoted to poetry, in which the man becomes but a kind of solemn

incubator of his own thoughts. It will always be, however, an additional

delight to the greater part of the human race to see how here and there

the greatest of all heavenly tools is found unawares by the happy hand

that can wield it, no one knowing who has put it there ready for his

triumphant grasp when the fated moment comes.

Everybody will remember as a pendant--but one so much more grave that we

hesitate to cite it, though the coincidence is curious--the pause made

by Dante in the beginning of the _Inferno_, which resembles so exactly

the pause in Scott's career. The great Florentine had written seven

cantos of his wonderful poem when the rush of his affairs carried him

away from all such tranquil work and left the Latin fragment, among

other more vulgar papers, shovelled hastily into some big cassone in the

house in Florence from which he was a banished man. It was found there

after five years by a nephew who would fain have tried his prentice hand

upon the poem, yet finally took the better part of sending it to its

author--who immediately resumed _Io dico sequitando_, in a burst of

satisfaction to have recovered what he must have begun with far more

zeal and intention than Scott. The resemblance, however, which is so

curiously exact, the seven cantos and the seven chapters, the five

years' interval, the satisfaction of the work resumed, is, different as

are the men and their work, one of those fantastic parallels which are

delightful to the fantastic soul. Nothing could be more unlike than that

dark and splendid poem to Scott's sunshiny and kindly art; nothing less

resembling than the proud embittered exile with his hand against every

man, and the genial romancer whose heart overflowed with the milk of

human kindness. Yet this strange occurrence in both lives takes an

enhanced interest from the curious dissimilarity which makes the

repetition of the fact more curious still.

The sudden burst into light and publicity of a gift which had been

growing through all the changes of private life, of the wonderful stream

of knowledge, recollection, divination, boundless acquaintance with and

affection for human nature, which had gladdened the Edinburgh streets,

the Musselburgh sands, the Southland moors and river-sides, since ever

Walter Scott had begun to roam among them, with his cheerful band of

friends, his good stories, his kind and gentle thoughts--was received by

the world with a burst of delighted recognition to which we know no

parallel. We do not know, alas! what happened when the audience in the

Globe Theatre made a similar discovery. Perhaps the greater gift, by its

very splendour, would be less easily perceived in the dazzling of a

glory hitherto unknown, and obscured it may be by jealousies of actors

and their inaptitude to do justice to the wonderful poetry put into

their hands. But of that we know nothing. We know, however, that there

were no two opinions about _Waverley_. It took the world by storm, which

had had no such new sensation and no such delightful amusement for many

a day. It was not only the beginning of a new and wonderful school in

romance, a fresh chapter in literature, but the revelation of a region

and a race unknown. Scotland had begun to glow in the sunshine of

poetry, in glimpses of Burns's westland hills and fields, of Scott's

moss-troopers and romantic landscapes, visions of battle and old

tradition: but the wider horizon of a life more familiar, of a broad

country full of nature, full of character, running over with fun and

pawky humour, thrilling with high enthusiasm and devotion, where men

were still ready to risk everything in life for a falling cause, and

other men not unwilling to pick up the spoils, was a discovery and

surprise more delightful than anything that had happened to the

generation. The books flew through the island like magic, penetrating to

corners unthought of, uniting gentle and simple in an enthusiasm beyond

parallel. How the multitude got at them at all it is difficult to

understand, for these were the days of really high prices, before the

actual cost of a book got modified by one-half as now, and when there

were as yet no cheap editions. _Waverley_ was printed in three small

volumes at the cost of a guinea. We believe that to buy books was more

usual then than now, and there were circulating libraries everywhere,

conveying perhaps the stream of literature more evenly over the country

than can be attained by one gigantic Mudie. At all events; by whatever

means it was procured, _Waverley_ and its successors were read

everywhere, not only in great houses but in small, wherever there was

intelligence and a taste for books; and the interest, the curiosity, the

eagerness, were everywhere overwhelming. I have heard of girls in a

dressmaker's workroom who kept the last volume in a drawer, from whence

it was read aloud by one to the rest, the drawer being closed hurriedly

whenever the mistress came that way. From this humble scene to the

highest in the land, where the Prince Regent sat--

"His table spread with tea and toast,

Death-warrants, and the _Morning Post_,"

these volumes went everywhere. One of them lies before me now in rough

boards of paper, with the "blue back" of which one of Scott's

correspondents talks, not a prepossessing volume, but independent of

externals and all things else except its own native excellence and

power.

For fifteen years after, this stream of living literature poured forth

in the largest generous volume like a great river, through every region

where English was spoken or known. His work was as the march of a

battalion, always increasing, new detachments appearing suddenly, now an

individual, now a group, to join the line. The Baron of Bradwardine with

his attendant bailie; Vich Ian Vohr and noble Evan Dhu, and all the

clan; the family at Ellangowan and that at Charlieshope, good Dandie and

all his delightful belongings; Jock Jabos and the rest; Monkbarns and

Edie Ochiltree, and all the pathos of the Mucklebackits; Bailie Nicol

Jarvie and the Dougal Cratur; humours of the clachan and the hillside;

Jeanie Deans in her perfect humbleness and truth. It would be vain to

attempt to name the new inhabitants of Scotland who appeared out of the

unseen wherever Scott moved. Neither to himself nor to his audience

could it seem that these friends of all were new created, invented by

any man. Scott, who alone could do it, withdrew the veil that had

concealed them. He opened up an entire country, a full world of men and

women, so living, so various, with their natural garb of fitting

language, and their heart of natural sentiment, and the thoughts which

they must have been thinking, by inalienable right of their humanity.

There might have been better plots or more carefully constructed

stories; as indeed in life, heaven knows, all our stories might be much

better constructed; but could we conceive it possible that these, our

country-folk and friends, could be dismissed again off the face of the

earth, how impoverished, how diminished, would Scotland be! The want of

them is more than we could contemplate, and we can well understand how

our country must have appeared to the world a poor little turbulent

country, without warmth or wealth, before these representatives of a

robust and manifold race were born.

Yet, amid the delightful enrichment of these productions to the nation

and the world, the man himself who produced them was perhaps the finest

revelation of all. And here he transcends for once the larger kindred

genius of whom we do not know, yet believe, that he was such a man as

Scott, though better off in one way and less well in others. Shakspeare

must have been somewhat oppressed with noble patrons, which Scott never

was--patrons to whom his own splendid courtesy and the magnifying

glamour in his poetic eyes must sometimes have made him more flattering

than was needful, overwhelming them with magnificent words; but on the

other hand he had not those modern drawbacks under which Scott's great

career was so bitterly burdened, the strain for money, the constant

combat with debt and liability. To bear the first yoke must have taken

much of a man's strength and tired him exceedingly: but to bear the

second is perhaps the severest test to which any buoyant spirit can be

put. And from the very beginning of his career as a novelist Scott had

this burden upon his shoulders. He bore the chains very lightly at first

with a hundred hairbreadth 'scapes which made the struggle--as even that

struggle can be made while the sufferer is strong and young--almost

exhilarating, with a glee in the relief and the power to surmount every

difficulty, and a faith strengthened by numberless examples of the

certainty--however dark things might seem up to the very last moment--of

bursting through, with an exquisite sensation of success, the hardest

coil of circumstance. But as Scott grew older these obstacles grew

stronger; he could not put sense or prudence into the heads of his

colleagues, and it was hard to teach himself, the most liberal, the most

hospitable and princely of entertainers, those habits of frugality which

are never harder to learn than by a Scots gentleman of the ancient

strain accustomed to keep open house. I do not think it has ever been

acknowledged that there is in this desperate struggle to keep afloat a

certain intoxication of its own. To foil your pursuers, your enemies,

whether they take the form of armed assailants or of pressing creditors,

by ever another and another daring combination, by sudden reliefs

unthought of, by a bold _coup_ executed at the very moment when the

crisis seems inevitable, by all the happy yet desperate chances of

warfare, has a fascination in it which no one could conceive as

attending a sordid struggle for money. The pursuit becomes exciting,

breathless, in proportion as it becomes desperate. Sometimes, when all

the stars in their courses have seemed to be fighting against the

combatant, a sudden aid like the very interposition of heaven will bring

him safety; and a confidence in this interposition takes possession of

him. He does not see how deliverance can come, but it will come. His

labouring breast strains, his brain whirls, he is at his last gasp: when

all at once the heart leaps up in his bosom, the wheels in his head

stand still, a flash of satisfaction comes over him. Once more and once

more, again and again, at the last gasp of the struggle he is saved.

No doubt something of this was in the long and desperate fight which

Scott waged with the creditors of the Ballantynes, who were also his

own. The worst of the struggle is that it almost legalises a prodigality

which to men always fixed on solid ground would be impossible. The

conviction that the money will come somehow, added to the still more

intoxicating conviction that this somehow depends oftenest upon your own

unrivalled power of work, and the confidence which all men have in you,

permits, almost sanctions, a yielding to personal temptations, and the

indulgence of a little taste and inclination of your own in the midst of

so many burdens for others. Thus Abbotsford grew, of which all the

critics have talked as if its, alas! somewhat sham antiquity and its few

acres had been the cause of all the trouble. One could have wished that

Scott's taste had been more true, that he had so dearly bought and so

fondly collected curiosities more worthy, that he should have had a

genuine old house, a direct and happy lineage, son and son's son, to

bear his name--not to posterity, with whom it was safe, but on Tweedside

among the other Scotts,--a kindly and not ignoble ambition. But he has

himself forestalled the criticisms of the antiquarians by that

delightful record of good Monkbarns's mistakes and deceptions which

would make us forgive him for any "lang ladle" or fictitious relic; and

it would be a hard heart that would be otherwise than thankful that he

had so much as Abbotsford to indemnify him for his labours and trials.

As the time approached when he was no longer able to maintain that

gallant struggle, and the power of labour failed and confidence was

lost, the position of the man becomes more tragical than the spectator

can well bear to look upon. Who can read unmoved the story of the time

when his faithful friends (though it was their necessities that had

pulled him down to the ground of this bitter failure) had to come and

tell him that his last romance was scarcely worth paper and print? who

could refrain from going down on his knees to kiss that failing hand

which could now only bring forth Count Robert of Paris where once it had

set out in glorious array of battle Sir Kenneth of Scotland, and the

stout old Constable of Chester, and Front de Boeuf, and the Scottish

archers--and which still could not be inactive, but would struggle on,

on--to pay that miserable money and leave behind a spotless name!

There is one melancholy and almost terrible consolation in such a

heartbreaking record, terrible from the light it throws upon the

constitution of human nature and the conditions of that supreme sympathy

which is the noblest kind of fame. Had Sir Walter been able to throw his

burdens from him, had he loosed the millstone from his neck and retired

in full credit and comfort to his Abbotsford to pass the conclusion of

peaceful and glorious days on the banks of the Tweed--had we known him

only as the greatest romancist of the world, the next to Shakspeare in

large creation and revelation of mankind, proud had every Scotsman been

of his name, and fondly had the nation cherished his memory. But when

his brilliant and wonderful life fell under the shadow of all these

tragical clouds, when its course was arrested by obstacles which are

usually unsurmountable, before which any other man must have broken

down, when he stood in the face of fate, in the face of every

misfortune, broken in health, in hope, in power, a lonely man where he

had been the centre of every joy in life, an enchanter with his magic

wand broken and his witchery gone--then, and then only, does Scott

attain his highest greatness and give the world most noble assurance of

a man. His diary as his life dwindles away, that life once so splendid

and so full, is like the noblest poem--its broken and falling sentences

go direct to the heart. _Fuimus_ was never written more grandly, with

more noble patience and valour. Without this downfall his triumph might

have been but as the other triumph--the tragedy of the conclusion is a

sight for men and angels. Lockhart, who preserves the record for us,

becomes for the time the greatest, with a subject more moving, more

noble, than any that his hero had selected from the records of the ages.

The pity and anguish grow too much for the spectator. We are spectators

no longer, but mournful and devoted retainers standing about, all hushed

and silent, scarcely able either to shed or to restrain the choking

tears.

One asks one's self, Is this the cost of supreme human power? is it to

be bought by nothing but the agony in which failure, real or apparent,

is a part, and in which all the exquisite tenement of reputation,

happiness, and delightsome life seems to crumble down like a house of

cards before our eyes? Dread question for the genius of the future, sad

yet sublime problem of the past! At all events it was so in the life of

Scott, which in all its greatness was never so great, so touching, so

secure of love and honour, as in the moment when his weapons fell from

his hands and his genius and being alike failed, breaking down in a last

supreme struggle for justice and honour and fair dealing, to avoid what

he thought disgrace and the intolerable stigma of having done any man

wrong.

It is a penalty of such greatness, especially in the midst of an

enthusiastic and unanimous country, that it becomes more or less a thing

to trade upon, the subject of vague patriotic vapourings, and much froth

of foolish talk from uninstructed lips in the following generations. As

Stratford-on-Avon is in respect to Shakspeare all Scotland is in respect

to Burns and Scott. It has even become a mark of culture and superiority

among certain fine spirits in consequence to pretend to despise the

former of these names--perhaps really to despise it, for there is no

fathom that can sound the depths of human foolishness even in the

learned and wise. The vulgarity of fame when it becomes the cry of the

most prosaic is, however, calculated justly to alarm the literary soul,

and in the excess of Scott monuments, and wooden quaighs, and tartan

paper-knives, there is a damping and depressing quality which we must

all acknowledge.

[Illustration: SIR WALTER SCOTT'S HOUSE]

We need not, however, in these follies forget the illuminating presence

of Scott in the midst of all the picturesque scenes of what he has

proudly called "mine own romantic town." From the High School Yards and

"the kittle nine steps," from George Square, lying cosy but grey in the

hollow amid the enlarged and beautiful openings of the Meadows, to the

Parliament House, withdrawn in the square, once blocked by the Old

Tolbooth, now confronted solely by an embellished and restored

cathedral, and to the sober street on the other side of the hollow,

where to 39 North Castle Street he took his bride and set up his

independent home, there is no corner of Edinburgh where his step and

voice have not been. And some of the most characteristic scenes which we

can call to mind in recent history rise before us in his narrative as if

we had been there. The Porteous Mob riots in our ears, the flare of the

sudden fire at the gates of the Tolbooth, the blinding smoke, the tramp

of the crowd, the sudden concentrated force of that many-headed

multitude stilled by stern resolve into unity and action, are as visible

as if they had happened yesterday. And after ransacking all the serious

volumes that tell the story and picture the aspect of old Edinburgh, we

turn back to that tale, and for the first time see the tortuous passage

between the church and the Tolbooth, the dark old prison with its lofty

turrets, the Luckenbooths linked on to its dark shadow, oppressing the

now wide thoroughfare of the High Street, where these buildings have

left no trace. No topographical record or painstaking print comes within

a hundred miles of that picture, dashed in boldly by the way, to the

entrancing tale. I cannot refrain from placing here one or two

vignettes, which I have no doubt the artist himself will allow to

surpass his best efforts, and which set the landscape before us with a

distinct yet ideal and poetical grace which pencil and graver can very

seldom equal. The first is of the exterior aspect of Edinburgh.

"Marching in this manner they speedily reached an eminence, from

which they could view Edinburgh stretching along the ridgy hill

which slopes eastward from the Castle. The latter, being in a state

of siege, or rather of blockade, by the northern insurgents, who had

already occupied the town for two or three days, fired at intervals

upon such parties of Highlanders as exposed themselves, either on

the main street, or elsewhere in the vicinity of the fortress. The

morning being calm and fair, the effect of this dropping fire was to

invest the Castle in wreaths of smoke, the edges of which dissipated

slowly in the air, while the central veil was darkened ever and anon

by fresh clouds poured forth from the battlements; the whole giving,

by the partial concealment, an appearance of grandeur and gloom,

rendered more terrific when Waverley reflected on the cause by which

it was produced, and that each explosion might ring some brave man's

knell."

The second introduces us to the interior of the city.

"Under the guidance of his trusty attendant, Colonel Mannering,

after threading a dark lane or two, reached the High Street, then

clanging with the voices of oyster-women and the bells of pie-men,

for it had, as his guide assured him, just 'chappit eight upon the

Tron.' It was long since Mannering had been in the street of a

crowded metropolis, which, with its noise and clamour, its sounds of

trade, of revelry and of license, its variety of lights, and the

eternally changing bustle of its hundred groups, offers, by night

especially, a spectacle which, though composed of the most vulgar

materials when they are separately considered, has, when they are

combined, a striking and powerful effect on the imagination. The

extraordinary height of the houses was marked by lights, which,

glimmering irregularly along their front, ascended so high among the

attics, that they seemed at length to twinkle in the middle sky.

This _coup d'oeil_, which still subsists in a certain degree, was

then more imposing, owing to the uninterrupted range of buildings on

each side, which, broken only at the space where the North Bridge

joins the main street, formed a superb and uniform Place, extending

from the front of the Luckenbooths to the head of the Canongate, and

corresponding in breadth and length to the uncommon height of the

buildings on either side."

Since then this great Place has become more majestic, as well as more

open, by the clearing away of the Luckenbooths: but nothing can be finer

than the touch of the graphic yet reticent pencil which sets down before

us the glimmering of the irregular lights which seemed at last to

twinkle in the middle sky. This was how the main street of Edinburgh

still appeared when Scott himself was a boy, and no doubt he must have

caught the aspect of the previous sketch on some king's birthday or

other public holiday, the 4th of June perhaps, that familiar festival in

other regions, when the guns of the Castle were saluting and the smoke

hanging about those heights like a veil.

It was one of the privations of Scott's life as it began to fall into

its last subdued and suffering stage that he had to give up his

Edinburgh house and the cheerful company which had so long made his

winters pleasant. He loved the country and his home there at all

seasons, as the readers of the poetical chapters of friendly dedication

and communing addressed to different friends between the cantos of

_Marmion_ will well remember: but yet the yearly change, the natural

transfer of life in the short days to the cheerful surroundings of town,

the twinkling of those very lights, the assembling of bright faces, the

meeting of old friends, were always dear to him, and this sacrifice was

not one of the least which he made during the tremendous struggle of his

waning years.

[Illustration: GEORGE STREET, EDINBURGH]

With no other name could we so fitly close the story of our ancient

capital, a story fitfully told with many breaks and omissions, yet

offering some thread of connection to link together the different eras

of a picturesque and characteristic national life. Had space and

knowledge permitted, there is, in the records of Scottish law alone,

much that is interesting, along with a still larger contribution of wit

and humour and individual character, to the elucidation of the period

which passed between the end of the history of Edinburgh under her

native kings and the beginning of her brilliant record under the modern

reign of literature and poetry. This book, however, does not pretend to

set forth the Edinburgh of the Kirk or the Parliament House, each of

which has an existing record of its own. Seated on the rocks which are

more old than any history, though those precipices are now veiled with

verdure and softness, and the iron way of triumphant modern science runs

at their feet; with her crown of sacred architecture hanging over her

among the mists, and the little primeval shrine mounted upon her highest

ridge; with her palace, all too small for the requirements of an

enlarged and splendid royalty, and the great crouched and dormant

sentinel of nature watching over her through all the centuries; with her

partner, sober and ample, like a comely matron, attended by all the

modern arts and comforts, seated at the old mother's feet,--Edinburgh

can never be less than royal, one of the crowned and queenly cities of

the world. It does not need for this distinction that there should be

millions of inhabitants within her walls, or all the great threads of

industry and wealth gathered in her hands. The pathos of much that is

past and over for ever, the awe of many tragedies, a recollection almost

more true than any reality of the present, of ages and glories gone--add

a charm which the wealthiest and greatest interests of to-day cannot

give, to the city, always living, always stirring, where she stands amid

traditionary smoke and mist, the grey metropolis of the North, the

Edinburgh of a thousand fond associations,

Our Own Romantic Town.

[Illustration]

THE END

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_Printed by R. & R. CLARK, Edinburgh_