The Book-Hunter Part 21

These books are fortunately rich in memorials of the great internal contest of the seventeenth century. The notes, for instance, of the proceedings of the Long Parliament, by Sir Ralph Verney, edited for the Camden by Mr Bruce, come upon us fresh from that scene of high debate, carrying with them the very marks of strife. The editor informs us that the ma.n.u.script is written almost entirely in pencil on slips of foolscap paper, which seem to have been so folded as to be conveniently placed on the knee, and transferred to the pocket as each was completed. "They are," he says, "full of abrupt terminations, as if the writer occasionally gave up the task of following a rapid speaker who had got beyond him, and began his note afresh. When they relate to resolutions of the House, they often contain erasures, alterations, or other marks of the haste with which the notes were jotted down, and of the changes which took place in the subject-matter during the progress towards completion. On several important occasions, and especially in the instance of the debate on the Protestation [as to the impeachment of Strafford], the confusion and irregularity of the notes give evidence to the excitement of the House; and when the public discord rose higher, the notes become more brief and less personal, and speeches are less frequently a.s.signed to their speakers, either from greater difficulty in reporting, or from an increased feeling of the danger of the time, and the possible use that might be made of notes of violent remarks. On several of the sheets there are marks evidently made by the writer's pencil having been forced upwards suddenly, as if by some one, in a full House, pressing hastily against his elbow while he was in the act of taking his note."

John Spalding.

Looking from the opposite end of the island, and from a totally different social position, another watchful observer recorded the events of the great contest. This was John Spalding, commonly supposed to have been Commissary-Clerk of Aberdeen, but positively known in no other capacity than as author of the book aptly ent.i.tled The Troubles, or, more fully, "Memorials of the Troubles in Scotland and in England," from 1624 to 1645. Little, probably, did the Commissary-Clerk imagine, when he entered on his snug quiet office, where he recorded probates of wills and the proceedings in questions of marriage law, that he was to witness and record one of the most momentous conflicts that the world ever beheld--that contest which has been the prototype of all later European convulsions. Less still could he have imagined that fame would arise for him after two hundred years--that vehement though vain efforts should be made to endow the simple name of John Spalding with the antecedents and subsequents of a biographical existence, and that the far-off descendants of many of those lairds and barons, whose warlike deeds he noticed at humble distance, should raise a monument to his memory in an inst.i.tution called by his name. He was evidently a thoroughly retiring man, for he has left no vestige whatever of his individuality. Some specimens of his formal official work might have been found in the archives of his office--these would have been especially valuable for the identification of his handwriting and the settlement of disputed questions about the originality of ma.n.u.scripts; but these doc.u.ments, as it happens, were all burnt early in last century with the building containing them. So ardent and hot has been the chase after vestiges of this man, that the fact was once discovered that with his own hand he had written a certain deed concerning a feu-duty or rent-charge of 25, 7s. 4d., bearing date 31st January 1663; but in spite of the most resolute efforts, this interesting doc.u.ment has not been found.

It is probably to this same un.o.btrusive reserve, which has shrouded his very ident.i.ty, that we owe the valuable peculiarities of the Commissary-Clerk's chronicle. He sought no public distinctions, took no ostensible side, and must have kept his own thoughts to himself, otherwise he would have had to bear record of his own share of troubles.

In this calm serenity--folding the arms of resignation on the bosom of patience, as the Persians say--he took his notes of the wild contest that raged around him, setting down each event, great or small, with systematic deliberation, as if he were an experimental philosopher watching the phenomena of an eclipse or an eruption. Hence nowhere, perhaps, has it been permitted to a mere reader to have so good a peep behind the scenes of the mighty drama of war. We have plenty of chroniclers of that epoch--marching us with swinging historic stride on from battle unto battle--great in describing in long sentences the musterings, the conflicts, and the retreats. In Spalding, however, we shall find the numbers and character of the combatants, their arms, their dresses, the persons who paid for these, and the prices paid--the amount they obtained in pay, and the amount they were cheated out of--their banners, distinguis.h.i.+ng badges, watchwords, and all other like particulars, set down with the minuteness of a bailiff making an inventory of goods on which he has taken execution. He is very specific in what one may term the negative side of the characteristics of war--the misery and desolation it spreads around. The losses of this "gudeman" and that lone widow are stated as if he were their law agent, making up an account to go to a jury for damages for the "spulzie of outside and inside plenis.h.i.+ng, nolt, horse, sheep, c.o.c.ks and hens, hay, corn, peats, and fodder." He specifies all the items of mansions and farm-houses attacked and looted, or "harried," as he calls it--the doors staved in, the wainscoting pulled down--the windows smashed--the furniture made firewood of--the pleasant plantations cut down to build sleeping-huts--the linen, plate, and other valuables carried off: he will even, perchance, tell how they were distributed--who it was that managed to feather his nest with the plunder, and who it was that was disappointed and cheated.

He had opportunities of bestowing his descriptive powers to good purpose. Besides its ordinary share in the vicissitudes and calamities of the war, his town of Aberdeen was twice pillaged by Montrose, with laudable impartiality--once for the Covenanters and once for the Royalists. Here is his first triumphant entry:--

"Upon the morne, being Sat.u.r.day, they came in order of battle, being well armed both on horse and foot, ilk horseman having five shot at the least, whereof he had ane carbine in his hand, two pistols by his sides, and other two at his saddle-torr; the pikemen in their ranks with pike and sword; the musketeers in their ranks with musket, musket-staff, bandelier, sword, powder, ball, and match. Ilk company, both horse and foot, had their captains, lieutenants, ensigns, sergeants, and other officers and commanders, all for the most part in buff coats and goodly order. They had five colours or ensigns, whereof the Earl of Montrose had one having his motto drawn in letters, 'For Religion, the Covenant, and the Countrie.' The Earl Marechal had one, the Earl of Kinghorn had one, and the town of Dundee had two. They had trumpeters to ilk company of hors.e.m.e.n, and drummers to ilk company of footmen. They had their meat, drink, and other provisions, bag and baggage, carried with them, done all by advice of his Excellency Field-Marshal Leslie, whose counsel General Montrose followed in this business. Then, in seemly order and good array, this army came forward and entered the burgh of Aberdeen about ten hours in the morning, at the Over Kirk gateport, syne came down through the Broadgate, through the Castlegate, over at the Justice Port to the Queen's Links directly. Here it is to be noted that few or none of this haill army wanted are blue ribbon hung about his craig [viz., neck] under his left arm, whilk they called 'the Covenanters'

ribbon,' because the Lord Gordon and some other of the Marquis's bairns had ane ribbon, when he was dwelling in the toun, of ane red flesh colour, which they wore in their hats, and called it 'the royal ribbon,'

as a sign of their love and loyalty to the King. In dispite or dirision whereof this blue ribbon was worn and called 'the Covenanters' ribbon'

by the haill soldiers of this army."

The well-ordered army pa.s.sed through, levying a fine on the Malignants, and all seemed well; but because the citizens had not resisted Montrose, the loyal barons in the neighbourhood fell on them and plundered them; and because they had submitted to be so plundered, the Covenanting army came back and plundered them also. "Many of this company went and brack up the Bishop's yetts, set on good fires of his peats standing within the close: they masterfully broke up the haill doors and windows of this stately house; they brake down beds, boards, aumries, gla.s.sen windows, took out the iron stauncheons, brake in the locks, and such as they could carry had with them, and sold for little or nothing; but they got none of the Bishop's plenis.h.i.+ng to speak of, because it was all conveyed away before their coming." On Sunday, Montrose and the other leaders duly attended the devotional services of the eminent Covenanting divines they had brought with them. "But," says Spalding, "the renegate soldiers, in time of both preachings, is abusing and plundering New Aberdeen pitifully, without regard to G.o.d or man;" and he goes on in his specific way, describing the plundering until he reaches this climax: "No foul--c.o.c.k or hen--left unkilled. The haill house-dogs, messens, and whelps within Aberdeen felled and slain upon the gate, so that neither hound nor messen or other dog was left that they could see." But there was a special reason for this. The ladies of Aberdeen, on the retiring of Montrose's army, had decorated all the vagabond street-dogs with the blue ribbon of the Covenant.

This was in 1639. Five years afterwards Montrose came back on them in more terrible guise still, to punish the town for having yielded to the Covenant. In Aberdeen, Cavalier principles generally predominated; but after being overrun and plundered successively by either party, the Covenanters, having the acting government of the country at their back, succeeded in establis.h.i.+ng a predominance in the councils of the exhausted community. Spalding had no respect for the civic and rural forces they attempted to embody, and speaks of a petty bailie "who brought in ane drill-master to learn our poor bodies to handle their arms, who had more need to handle the plough and win their livings."

Montrose had now with him his celebrated army of Highlanders--or Irish, as Spalding calls them--who broke at a rush through the feeble force sent out of the town to meet them. Montrose "follows the chase to Aberdeen, his men hewing and cutting down all manner of men they could overtake within the town, upon the streets, or in their houses, and round about the town, as our men were fleeing, with broadswords, but mercy or remeid. These cruel Irish, seeing a man well clad, would first tyr [_i.e._, strip] him and save the clothes unspoiled, then kill the man; ... nothing heard but pitiful howling, crying, weeping, mourning, through all the streets.... It is lamentable to hear how thir Irishes, who had gotten the spoil of the town, did abuse the samin. The men that they killed they would not suffer to be buried, but tirled them of their clothes, syne left their naked bodies lying above the ground. The wife durst not cry nor weep at her husband's slaughter before her eyes, nor the mother for her son--which if they were heard, then they were presently slain also; ... and none durst bury the dead. Yea, and I saw two corpses carried to the burial through the old town with women only, and not are man amongst them, so that the naked corpses lay unburied so long as these limmers were ungone to the camp."

The Commissary-Clerk was on Montrose's side, but he had the hatred of a Lowlander of that day for the Highlanders. He has a great many amusing episodes describing the light-fingered lads from the hills coming down, and in the general confusion of the times plundering Cavalier and Covenanter alike; and on these occasions he drops his usual placidity and becomes rabid and abusive, as the best-tempered Americans are said to become when they speak of n.i.g.g.e.rs, and deals out to them the terms limmers, thieves, robbers, cut-throats, masterful vagrants, and so forth, with great volubility. Of some of their chiefs, renowned in history, he speaks as mere robber-leaders, and when they are known by one name in their own country and another in the Lowlands, he puts an _alias_ between the two. The very initial words of his chronicle are, "Efter the death and burial of Angus Macintosh of Auldterlie, _alias_ Angus Williamson."

Montrose having departed, Argyle's troops commenced to plunder the district for having submitted to his enemy, and these, being doubly offensive as Covenanters and Highlanders, are treated accordingly. But it is necessary to be impartial; and having bestowed so much on the Cavalier annalist, let us take a glimpse at the other side.

Robert Wodrow.

From the collections of the Reverend Robert Wodrow, the historian of The Sufferings of the Church of Scotland, a rich harvest has been reaped by the northern clubs, one of which appropriately adopted his name. He was a voluminous writer and an inexhaustible collector. It is generally cla.s.sed among the failings of the book-hunter that he looks only to the far past, and disregards the contemporary and the recent. Wodrow was a valuable exception to this propensity. Reversing the spirit of the selfish bull which asks what posterity has done for us, he stored up contemporary literature for subsequent generations; and he thus left, at the commencement of the eighteenth century, such a library as a collector of the nineteenth, could he have sent a caterer before him, would have prepared to await his arrival in the world. The inestimable value of the great collection of the civil-war pamphlets made by George Thomason, and fortunately preserved in the British Museum, is very well known. Just such another of its kind is Wodrow's, made up of the pamphlets, broadsides, pasquinades, and other fugitive pieces of his own day, and of the generation immediately preceding. These are things easily obtained in their freshness, but the term fugitive is too expressive of their nature, and after a generation or two they have all flown away, save those which the book-hunter has exorcised into the vaults of some public collection. There is perhaps too little done in our own day in preserving for posterity these mute witnesses of our sayings and doings. They are too light and volatile to be caught by the Copyright Act, which so carefully deposits our quartos and octavos in the privileged libraries. It is pleasant, by the way, at this moment, to observe that the eminent scholar who has charge of the chief portion of Wodrow's gatherings, as keeper of the Advocates' Library, is following his example, by preserving a collection of the pamphlets of the present century which will keep our posterity in employment, if they desire to unwind the intricacies of all our civil and ecclesiastical sayings and doings.

Wodrow carried on an active correspondence about matters of contemporary policy, and the special inquiries connected with his History: selections from this ma.s.s have furnished three st.u.r.dy volumes. Besides pamphlets, he sc.r.a.ped together quant.i.ties of other people's ma.n.u.scripts--some of them rising high enough in importance to be counted State papers. How the minister of the quiet rural parish of Eastwood could have got his hands on them is a marvel, but it is fortunate that they were saved from destruction; and it is nearly equally fortunate that they have been well ransacked by zealous club-book makers, who have by this time probably exhausted the better part of their material. In the next place, Wodrow left behind several biographies of eminent members of his own Church, its saints and martyrs; and goodly ma.s.ses out of this storehouse have also been printed.

But by far the most luxurious morsel in the worthy man's intellectual larder was not intended to reach the profane vulgar, but destined for his own special rumination. It consists in the veritable contents of his private note-books, containing his communings with his own heart and his imagination. They were written on small slips of paper, in a hand direly cramped and minute; and lest this should not be a sufficient protection to their privacy, a portion was committed to certain ciphers, which their ingenious inventor deemed, no doubt, to be utterly impregnable. In stenography, however, the art of lock-picking always keeps ahead of the art of locking, as that of inventing destructive missiles seems to outstrip that of forging impenetrable plates. Wodrow's trick was the same as that of Samuel Pepys, and productive of the same consequences--the excitement of a rabid curiosity, which at last found its way into the recesses of his secret communings. They are now printed, in the fine type of the Maitland Club, in four portly quartos, under the t.i.tle, Wodrow's a.n.a.lecta. Few books would hold out so much temptation to a commentator, but their editor is dumb, faithfully reprinting the whole, page by page, and abstaining both from introduction and explanatory foot-note.

Perhaps in the circ.u.mstances this was a prudent measure. Those who enjoy the weaknesses of the enthusiastic historian have them at full length.

As to others partially like-minded with him, but more worldly, who would rather that such a tissue of absurdities had not been revealed, they are bound over to silence, seeing that a word said against the book is a word of reproach against its idolised author--for as to the editor, he may repeat after Macbeth, "Thou canst not say I did it."

Mr Buckle's ravenous researches into the most distant recesses of literature revealed to him this pose. He has taken some curious specimens out of it, but he might have made his anthology still richer had he been in search of the picturesque and ludicrous, instead of seeking solid support for his great theory of positivism. What he chiefly amuses one with in this part of the world, however, is the solemn manner in which he treats the responsibility of giving increased publicity to such things, and invokes the Deity to witness that his objects are sincere, and he is influenced by no irreverence. This feeling may arise from a very creditable source, but a native of Scotland has difficulty in understanding it. In this country, being, as many of us have been, within the very skirts of the great contests that have shaken the realm--Jacobitism on the one hand and Covenantism on the other--we are roughened and hardened, and what shocks our sensitive neighbours is very good fun to ourselves.

It appears that Wodrow had intended to publish a book on remarkable special providences--something of a scientific character it was to be, containing a cla.s.sification of their phenomena, perhaps a theory of their connection with revealed religion. The natural laws by which they are ruled, he could not, of course, have sought to discover, since the principle on which he set out predicated the non-existence of such laws.

The advantage of the peep enjoyed into his private note-book is, that we have his incompleted inquiries containing the stories as to which even he--a very poor adept at scepticism--required some confirmation. It is quite evident that we thus have something more valuable to philosophy, and infinitely more amusing, than his completed labours would have been.

Here, for instance, is one of his break-downs--an interesting phenomenon, but not irrefragably proved.

"This day I have an accompt from Marion Stevenson, who says she had it from one who was witness to it, that near Dungla.s.s there was a child found upon the highway by some shearers, to their uptaking lately born; and they brought it to the next house, where the woman putting on the pan to make some meat for it, the pan filled full of corn; and when she turned it out and put it on the second time, it filled full of bear; and when put on the third time, it filled full of blood; and upon this the child began to alter its shapes some way, and to speak, and told them this year should have great plenty, and the next year also, but the third the land should be filled with blood and fire and sword! and the child desired it might be taken to the place where it was found, and left there. I hear not yet what was done with it. This is so incredible, that I set it down only for after trial and inquiry about it--no confirmation."

His wife tells him a story which in her youth she had heard narrated by Mr Andrew Reid, minister of Kirkbean. It is a case of true love crossed by the interference of cruel relations. The swain leaves the country for several years--gets on--remembers the old love, and returns to fulfil his vows. It happens that on the day of his return the loved one dies. He is on his way to her house in the dusk of eve when he meets an old man, who tells him that he is going on a bootless errand--he will find a dead corpse for the warm living heart he expected. The stranger, however, pitying his distress, tells him there is a remedy--hands to the lover certain pills, and says, "If you will give her these, she will recover." So it turned out, and they were happily married. A certain visitor at the house, however, "a very eminent Christian," refused to salute the lady with the usual courtesies. He takes the husband aside, "and tells him that he was very much persuaded his wife was a devil, and indeed he could not salute her; and after some discourse prevailed so far with him as to follow his advice, which was to go with her and take her to that room where he found her, and lay her down upon the bed where he found her, and quit her of a devil. Which he did, and immediately she became a dead corpse half consumed." "This had need," says cautious Wodrow, "to be weel attested, and I have writ to Mr Reid anent it."

Curiosity urged me to look for and find among Wodrow's ma.n.u.scripts Mr Reid's answer. He says he often heard the story from his father as a truth, but had been unaccountably negligent in noting the particulars of it; and then he favours his correspondent with some special providences anent himself, which appear not to have been sufficiently pungent for Wodrow's taste.

A philosophical investigator of the established national superst.i.tions would find excellent types of all of them in the a.n.a.lecta. In the department of second-sight, for instance, restricted, with due observance to geographical propriety, within the Highland line, a guest disturbs a convivial meeting at Blair-Athol by exclaiming that he beholds a dirk sticking in the breast of their entertainer. That night he is stabbed to the heart; and even while the seer beheld the visionary dagger, a bare-legged gilly was watching outside to execute a long-cherished Highland vengeance. The Marquess of Argyle, who was afterwards beheaded, was playing with some of his clan at bowls, or bullets, as Wodrow calls them, for he was not learned in the nomenclature of vain recreations. "One of the players, when the Marquess stooped down to lift the bullet, fell pale, and said to them about him, 'Bless me! what is that I see?--my Lord with the head off, and all his shoulders full of blood.'"

In the department of fairy tricks, the infant of Thomas Paton, "a very eminent Christian," in its first use of speech, rattles out a volley of terrific oaths, then eats two cheeses, and attempts to cut its brother's throat. This was surely sufficient evidence to satisfy the most sceptical that it was a changeling, even had it not, as the result of certain well-applied prayers, "left the house with an extraordinary howling and crying."

Ghost and witch stories abound. The following is selected on account of the eminence of its hero, Gilbert Rule, the founder and first Princ.i.p.al of the University of Edinburgh: He was travelling on the dreary road across the Grampians, called the Cairn o' Mont, on which stood a lone desolate inn. It has now disappeared, but I remember it in its dreary old age, standing alone on the moor, with its grim gables and its loupin'-on stane,--just the sort of place where, in the romances, the horrified traveller used to observe a trap-door in his bedroom floor, and at supper picked the finger of a murdered man out of a mutton-pie.

There Rule arrived late at night seeking accommodation, but he could get none--the house was crammed. The only alternative was to make a bed for him in an empty house close by; it had been unoccupied for thirty years, and had a bad repute. He had to sleep there alone, for his servant would not go with him. Let Wodrow himself tell what came to pa.s.s.

"He walked some time in the room, and committed himself to G.o.d's protection, and went to bed. There were two candles left on the table, and these he put out. There was a large bright fire remaining. He had not been long in bed till the room door is opened, and an apparition, in shape of a country tradesman, came in and opened the curtains without speaking a word. Mr Rule was resolved to do nothing till it should speak or attack him, but lay still with full composure, committing himself to the Divine protection and conduct. The apparition went to the table, lighted the two candles, brought them to the bedside, and made some steps toward the door, looking still to the bed, as if he would have Mr Rule rising and following. Mr Rule still lay still, till he should see his way further cleared. Then the apparition, who the whole time spoke none, took an effectual way to raise the doctor. He carried back the candles to the table, and went to the fire, and with the tongs took down the kindled coals, and laid them on the deal chamber floor. The doctor then thought it time to rise and put on his clothes, in the time of which the spectre laid up the coals again in the chimney, and, going to the table, lifted the candles and went to the door, opened it, still looking to the Princ.i.p.al as he would have him following the candles, which he now, thinking there was something extraordinary in the case, after looking to G.o.d for direction, inclined to do. The apparition went down some steps with the candles, and carried them into a long trance, at the end of which there was a stair which carried down to a low room.

This the spectre went down, and stooped, and set down the lights on the lowest step of the stair, and straight disappears."

The learned Princ.i.p.al, whose courage and coolness deserve the highest commendation, lighted himself back to bed with the candles, and took the remainder of his rest undisturbed. Being a man of great sagacity, on ruminating over his adventure, he informed the sheriff of the county "that he was much of the mind there was murder in the case." The stone whereon the candles were placed was raised, and there "the plain remains of a human body were found, and bones, to the conviction of all." It was supposed to be an old affair, however, and no traces could be got of the murderer. Rule undertook the functions of the detective, and pressed into the service the influence of his own profession. He preached a great sermon on the occasion, to which all the neighbouring people were summoned; and behold, "in the time of his sermon, an old man near eighty years was awakened, and fell a-weeping, and before all the whole company acknowledged that, at the building of that house, he was the murderer."

In Wodrow's note-book the devil often cuts a humiliating figure, and is treated with a deal of rude and boisterous jeering. A certain "exercised Christian," probably during a fit of indigestion, was subjected to a heavy wrestling with doubts and irreconcilable difficulties, which raised in his mind horrible suggestions. The devil took occasion to put in a word or two for the purpose of increasing the confusion, but it had the directly opposite effect, and called forth the remark that, "on the whole the devil is a great fool, and outshoots himself oft when he thinks he has poor believers on the haunch." On another occasion the devil performed a function of a very unusual kind, one would think. He is known to quote Scripture for his purposes, but who ever before heard of his writing a sermon--and, as it seems, a sound and orthodox one?

There was, it appears, a youth in the University of St Andrews, preparing to undergo his trials as a licentiate, who had good reason to fear that he would be plucked. He found he could make nothing whatever of the trial sermon, and was wandering about by lonely ways, seeking in vain for inspiration. At last "there came up to him a stranger, in habit like a minister, in black coat and band, and who addressed the youth very courteously." He was mighty inquisitive, and at length wormed out the secret grief. "I have got a text from the Presbytery. I cannot for my life compose a discourse on it, so I shall be affronted." The stranger replied--"Sir, I am a minister; let me hear the text?" He told him. "Oh, then, I have an excellent sermon on that text in my pocket, which you may peruse and commit to your memory. I engage, after you have delivered it before the Presbytery, you will be greatly approven and applauded." The youth received it thankfully; but one good turn deserves another. The stranger had an eccentric fancy that he should have a written promise from the youth to do him afterwards any favour in his power; and there being no other liquid conveniently at hand for the signature of the doc.u.ment, a drop of the young man's blood was drawn for the purpose. Note now what followed. "Upon the Presbytery day the youth delivered an excellent sermon upon the text appointed him, which pleased and amazed the Presbytery to a degree; only Mr Blair smelt out something in it which made him call the youth aside to the corner of the church, and thus he began with him: 'Sir, you have delivered a nate sermon, every way well pointed. The matter was profound, or rather sublime; your style was fine and your method clear; and, no doubt, young men at the beginning must make use of helps, which I doubt not you have done.' So beginning, Blair, who was a man of mighty gifts and repute, pressed on so close with repeated questions that the awful truth at last came out."

There was nothing for it but that the Presbytery must engage in special exercise for the penitent youth. They prayed each in succession to no purpose, till it came to Blair's turn. "In time of his prayer there came a violent rus.h.i.+ng of wind upon the church--so great that they thought the church should have fallen down about their ears--and with that the youth's paper and covenant drops down from the roof of the church among the ministers."

A large proportion of Wodrow's special providences are performed for the benefit of the clergy, either to provide them with certain worldly necessaries of which they may happen to be in want, or to give effect to their pious indignation, or, as some might be tempted to call it, their vindictive spite, again those who revile them. Perhaps an interdicted pastor, wandering over the desolate moors where he and his hunted flock seek refuge, is sorely impeded by some small want of the flesh, and gives expression to his wishes concerning it; when forthwith he is miraculously supplied with a shoulder of mutton or a pair of trousers, according to the nature of his necessities. He encounters ridicule or personal insult, and instantly the blasphemer is struck dead, or idiotic, or dumb, after the example of those who mocked Elisha's bald head; and Wodrow generally winds up these judgments with an appropriate admonitory text, as, for instance, "Touch not His anointed, and do His prophets no harm." As the persons for whom these special miracles are performed generally happen to be sorely beset by worldly privations and dangers, which are at their climax at the very time when they are able to call in supernatural intervention, a logician might be inclined to ask why, if the operations, and, as it were, the very motives, of the Deity are examined in respect of those events which are propitious to His favourite, they should not also be examined with the same critical pertinacity as to the greatly predominating collection of events which are decidedly unpropitious to him, so as to bring out the reason why the simpler course of saving him from all hards.h.i.+ps and persecution had not been followed, instead of the circuitous plan of launching heavy calamities against him, and then issuing special miraculous powers to save him from a small portion of these calamities. But such logic would probably be unprofitably bestowed, and it is wiser to take the narratives as they stand and make the best use of them. Whoever looks at them with a cold scientific eye, will at once be struck by the close a.n.a.logy of Wodrow's vaticinations and miracles to those of other times and places, and especially to those credited to the saints of the early Catholic Church, to which many of them, indeed, bear a wonderfully exact resemblance.

The Early Northern Saints.

Carried on by the power of a.s.sociation, we are thus brought to the door of an exceedingly interesting department of book-club literature,--the restoration of the true text of the early lives of the saints--a species of literature now recognised and separated from others by the t.i.tle of Hagiology. Everybody knows, or ought to know, that the great library of this kind of literature, published by the Bollandists, begins with the beginning of the year, and gives the life of each saint successively according to his day in the calendar. Ignorance is more excusable on the question what const.i.tutes saints.h.i.+p, and, supposing you to have found your saint, on the criterion by which the day of his festival should be adjusted in the calendar. Technically, to make a saint, there should be an act of pontifical jurisdiction, all the more solemn than any secular judicial act as the interests affected are more momentous; but only a small number of the saints stand on record in the proceedings of the Vatican. In fact, the great body of them were in the enjoyment of their honours hundreds of years before the certifying process was adopted, and to investigate all their credentials was far too weighty a task to be attempted. It is taken for granted that they have been canonised, and if it be difficult to prove that they have gone through this ceremony, they hold their ground through the still greater difficulty of proving that they have not. Some of those whose sanct.i.ty is established by this kind of acclamation are so ill.u.s.trious, that it would be ludicrous to suppose even the Vatican capable of adding to their eminence--more so, to imagine any process by which they could be unsanctified; such are St Patrick, St George, and St Kentigern. But there is a vast crowd of village or parochial saints firmly established within their own narrow circles, but as unknown at the court of Rome as any obscure curate working in some distant valley, or among the poor of some great city. In such a crowd there will naturally be questionable personages. St Valentine, St Fiacre, St Boniface, St Lupus, St Maccesso, St Bobbio, St Fursy, and St Jingo, have names not endowed with a very sanctimonious sound, but they are well-established respectable saints.

Even Alban Butler, however, has hard work in giving credit to St Longinus, St Quirinus, St Mercurius, St Hermes, St Virgil, St Plutarch, and St Bacchus. It is the occurrence of such names that makes Moreri speak of the Bollandist selection as rather loose, since it contains "vies des saintes bonnes, mediocres, mauvaises, vrayes, douteuses, et fausses."

The saint's festival-day is generally the anniversary of his death, or "deposition," as it is technically termed; but this is by no means an absolute rule. Few compilers deserve more sympathy than those who try to adjust saints' days by rule and chronology, since not only does one saint differ from another in the way in which his feast is established, but for the same saint there are different days in different countries, and even in different ecclesiastical districts--the diocese of Paris having, for instance, some special saints' days of its own, which differ from the practice throughout the rest of Catholic Christendom. Some saints, too, have been s.h.i.+fted about from day to day by authority. Queen Margaret of Scotland, the wife of Malcolm, whose real source of influence was that she represented the old Saxon line of England, had two great days,--that of her deposition on July the 8th, and that of her translation on July the 19th; but, by a papal ordinance immediately after the Revolution, her festival was established upon the 10th of June. This was rather a remarkable day in Britain, being that on which the poor infant son of the last of the Jameses, afterwards known in Parliamentary language as the Pretender, was born. The adjustment of Queen Margaret's day to that event was a stroke of policy for the purpose of rendering the poor child respectable, and removing all doubts about warming-pans and other disagreeables; but it is not known that the measure exercised the slightest influence on the British Parliament.

Bollandus, who was the first seriously to lay his hand to the great work called after him, was a Belgian Jesuit. He had got through January and February in five folio volumes, when he died in 1658. Under the auspices of his successor, Daniel Papebroch, March appeared in 1668 and April in 1675, each in three volumes. So the great work crept on day by day and year by year, absorbing the whole lives of many devoted labourers, conspicuous among whom are the unmelodious names of Peter Bosch, John Stilting, Constantine Suyskhen, Urban Sticken, Cornelius Bye, James Bue, and Ignacius Hubens. In 1762, a hundred and four years after January, September was completed. It filled eight volumes, for the work acc.u.mulated like a snow-ball as it rolled, each month being larger than its predecessor. Here the ordinary copies stop in forty-seven volumes, for the evil days of the Jesuits were coming on, and the new literary oligarchy, where Voltaire, Montesquieu, and D'Alembert held sway, had not been propitious to hagiology. A part of October was accomplished under the auspices of Maria Theresa, the Empress Queen, but for some reason or other it came within the category of rare books, and was not to be easily obtained until it was lately reprinted.

Whatever effect such a phenomenon may have on some denominations of the religious world, it can afford nothing but pure satisfaction to all historical investigators to know that this great work has been resumed in this middle of the nineteenth century. I have before me the ninth volume for October, embracing the twentieth and twenty-first days of that month, and containing about as much matter as the five volumes of Macaulay's History. On the 21st of October there is, to be sure, a very heavy job to be got through in St Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins, whose bones may be seen in musty presses in the Church of the Ursulines in Cologne; but still as it moves forward, it is evident that the mighty work continues to enlarge its proportions. The winter is coming on too, a period crowded with the memorials of departed saints, as being unpropitious to men of highly ascetic habits, so that those who have undertaken the completion of the Bollandist enterprise have their work before them.

There is a marvellous uniformity in all the arrangements of this array of volumes which have thus appeared at intervals throughout two centuries. They dealt with matter too sublimely separated from the temporal doings of men to be affected by political events, yet could they not entirely escape some slight touches from the convulsions that had recast the whole order and conditions of society. When October was begun, Belgium, where the work is published, was attached to the Austrian Empire, and the French Revolution had not yet come. The Jesuits, though not favourites among monarchs, profess a decorous loyalty, and the earlier volumes of the month have portraits of the Empress Queen, and others of the Imperial family, in the most elaborate court costume of the days before the Revolution; while the later volumes, still loyal, are ill.u.s.trated by the family circle of the Protestant King of const.i.tutional Belgium, whose good-natured face and plain broad-cloth coat are those doubtless of the right man, though one cannot help imagining that he feels himself somehow in the wrong place.

The crowds of saints who come sometimes swarming in on a single day to these teeming volumes, give one an almost oppressive notion of the quant.i.ty of goodness that must have, after all, existed in this wicked world. The labours of the Bollandists, not only in searching through all available literature, but in a special correspondence established with their Jesuit brethren throughout the world, are absolutely astounding.

Their conscientious minuteness is wonderful; and many a one who thinks he is master of the ecclesiastical lore of his own parish, which he has made his specialty, has been petrified to find what he thought his discoveries all laid down with careful precision as matters of ordinary knowledge in some corner of these mighty volumes. The Bollandists obtained their information from the spot, and it is on the spot that this kind of literature must be worked out. A thoroughly accomplished antiquary, working within a limited district, will thus bring forth more full and satisfactory results, so far as they go, than even the Bollandists have achieved, and hence the great value of the services of the book clubs to hagiology.

The writer of the letters bearing the signature "Veritas," in all the newspapers, would, of course, specially object to the resuscitation of this cla.s.s of literature, "because it is full of fabulous accounts of miracles and other supernatural events which can only minister to credulity and superst.i.tion." But even in the extent and character of this very element there is a great significance. The size of a current falsehood is the measure of the size of the human belief that has swallowed it, and is a component part of the history of man.

The best critical writers on ancient history have agreed not to throw away the cosmogony and the hierology of Greece. It is part of Grecian history that the creed of the people was filled with a love of embodied fancies, so graceful and luxuriant. No less are the revel rout of Valhalla part of the virtual history of the Scandinavian tribes. But the lives of our saints, independently altogether of the momentous change in human affairs and prospects which they ushered in, have a substantial hold on history, of which neither the cla.s.sical nor the northern hierology can boast. Poseidon and Aphrodite, Odin and Freya, vanish into the indefinite and undiscoverable at the approach of historical criticism. But separately altogether from their miracles, Cuthbert and Ninian, Columba and Kentigern, had actual existences. We know when they lived and when they died. The closer that historical criticism dogs their steps, the clearer it sees them, and the more it knows about their actual lives and ways. Even if they were not the missionaries who introduced Christianity among us,--as men who, in the old days before Britain became populous and affluent in the fruits of advanced civilisation, trod the soil that we tread, it would be interesting to know about them--about the habitations they lodged in, the garments they wore, the food they ate, the language they spoke, their method of social intercourse among each other, and the sort of government under which they lived.

That by investigation and critical inquiry we can know more of these things than our ancestors of centuries past could know, is still a notion comparatively new which has not been popularly realised. The cla.s.sic literature in which our early training lies has nothing in it to show us the power of historical inquiry, and much to make us slight it.

The Romans, instead of improving on the Greeks, fell in this respect behind them. Father Herodotus, credulous as he was, was a better antiquary than any who wrote in Latin before the revival of letters.