My Schools and Schoolmasters Part 17

[15] Professor Pillans.

[16] "For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and they twain shall be one flesh."

CHAPTER XXIV.

"Life is a drama of a few brief acts; The actors s.h.i.+ft, the scene is often changed, Pauses and revolutions intervene, The mind is set to many a varied tune.

And jars and plays in harmony by turns."

ALEXANDER BETHUNE.

Though my wife continued, after our marriage, to teach a few pupils, the united earnings of the household did not much exceed a hundred pounds per annum--not quite so large a sum as I had used to think it a few years before; and so I set myself to try whether I could not turn my leisure hours to some account, by writing for the periodicals. My old inability of pressing for work continued to be as embarra.s.sing as ever, and, save for a chance engagement of no very promising kind, which presented itself to me unsolicited about this time, I might have failed in procuring the employment which I sought. An ingenious self-taught mechanic--the late Mr. John Mackay Wilson of Berwick-on-Tweed--after making good his upward way from his original place at the compositor's frame, to the editors.h.i.+p of a provincial paper, started, in the beginning of 1835, a weekly periodical, consisting of "Border Tales,"

which, as he possessed the story-telling ability, met with considerable success. He did not live, however, to complete the first yearly volume; the forty-ninth weekly number intimated his death; but as the publication had been a not unprofitable one, the publisher resolved on carrying it on; and it was stated in a brief notice, which embodied a few particulars of Mr. Wilson's biography, that, his materials being unexhausted, "tales yet untold lay in reserve, to keep alive his memory." And in the name of Wilson the publication was kept up for, I believe, five years. It reckoned among its contributors the two Bethunes, John and Alexander, and the late Professor Gillespie of St.

Andrews, with several other writers, none of whom seem to have been indebted to any original matter collected by its first editor; and I, who, at the publisher's request, wrote for it, during the first year of my marriage, tales enough to fill an ordinary volume, had certainly to provide all my materials for myself. The whole brought me about twenty-five pounds--a considerable addition to the previous hundred and odds of the household, but, for the work done, as inadequate a remuneration as ever poor writer got in the days of Grub Street. My tales, however, though an English critic did me the honour of selecting one of them as the best in the monthly part in which it appeared, were not of the highest order: it took a great deal of writing to earn the three guineas, which were the stipulated wages for filling a weekly number; and though poor Wilson may have been a fine enough fellow in his way, one had no great encouragement to do one's very best, in order to "keep alive his memory." In all such matters, according to Sir Walter Scott and the old proverb, "every herring should hang by its own head."

I can show, however, that at least one of my contributions _did_ gain Wilson some little credit. In the perilous attempt to bring out, in the dramatic form, the characters of two of our national poets--Burns and Fergusson--I wrote for the "Tales" a series of "Recollections," drawn ostensibly from the memory of one who had been personally acquainted with them both, but in reality based on my own conceptions of the men, as exhibited in their lives and writings. And in an elaborate life of Fergusson, lately published, I find a borrowed extract from my contribution, and an approving reference to the whole, coupled with a piece of information entirely new to me. "These Recollections," says the biographer, "are truly interesting and touching, _and were the result of various communications made to Mr. Wilson_, whose pains-taking researches I have had frequent occasion to verify in the course of my own." Alas, no! Poor Wilson was more than a twelvemonth in his grave ere the idea of producing these "Recollections" first struck the writer--a person to whom no communications on the subject were ever made by any one, and who, una.s.sisted save by one of the biographies of the poet--that in Chambers' "Lives of Ill.u.s.trious Scotsmen,"--wrote full two hundred miles from the scene of his sad and brief career. The same individual who, in Mr. Wilson's behalf, is so complimentary to my "pains-taking research," is, I find, very severe on one of Fergusson's previous biographers--the scholarly Dr. Irving, author of the Life of Buchanan, and the Lives of the older Scottish Poets--a gentleman who, whatever his estimate of the poor poet may have been, would have spared no labour in elucidating the various incidents which composed his history. The man of research is roughly treated, and a compliment awarded to the diligence of the man of none. But it is always thus with Fame.

"Some she disgraced, and some with honours crown'd; Unlike successes equal merits found: So her blind sister, fickle Fortune, reigns.

And, undiscerning, scatters crowns and chains."

In the memoir of John Bethune by his brother Alexander, the reader is told that he was much depressed and disappointed, about a twelvemonth or so previous to his decease, by the rejection of several of his stories in succession, which were returned to him, "with an editor's sentence of death pa.s.sed upon them." I know not whether it was by the editor of the "Tales of the Borders" that sentence in the case was pa.s.sed; but I know he sentenced some of mine, which were, I daresay, not very good, though well-nigh equal, I thought, to most of his own Instead, however, of yielding to depression, like poor Bethune, I simply resolved to write for him no more; and straightway made an offer of my services to Mr.

Robert Chambers, by whom they were accepted; and during the two following years I occasionally contributed to his _Journal_, on greatly more liberal terms than those on which I had laboured for the other periodical, and with my name attached to my several articles. I must be permitted to avail myself of the present opportunity of acknowledging the kindness of Mr. Chambers. There is perhaps no other writer of the present day who has done so much to encourage struggling talent as this gentleman. I have for many years observed that publications, however obscure, in which he finds aught really praiseworthy, are secure always of getting, in his widely-circulated periodical, a kind approving word--that his criticisms invariably bear the stamp of a benevolent nature, which experiences more of pleasure in the recognition of merit than in the detection of defect--that his kindness does not stop with these cheering notices, for he finds time, in the course of a very busy life, to write many a note of encouragement and advice to obscure men in whom he recognises a spirit superior to their condition--and that the compositions of writers of this meritorious cla.s.s, when submitted to him editorially, rarely fail, if really suitable for his journal, to find a place in it, or to be remunerated on a scale that invariably bears reference to the value of the communications--not to the circ.u.mstances of their authors.

I can scarce speak of my contributions to the periodicals at this time as forming any part of my education. I acquired, in their composition, a somewhat readier command of the pen than before; but they, of course, tended rather to the dissipation of previous stores than to the acc.u.mulation of new ones; nor did they give exercise to those higher faculties of mind which I deemed it most my interest to cultivate. My real education at the time was that in which I was gradually becoming initiated behind the bank-counter, as my experience of the business of the district extended; and that which I contrived to pick up in my leisure evenings along the sh.o.r.es. A rich ichthyolitic deposit of the Old Red Sandstone lies, as I have already said, within less than half a mile of the town of Cromarty; and when fatigued with my calculations in the bank, I used to find it delightful relaxation to lay open its fish by scores, and to study their peculiarities as exhibited in their various states of keeping, until I at length became able to determine their several genera and species from even the minutest fragments. The number of ichthyolites which that deposit of itself furnished--a patch little more than forty yards square--seemed altogether astonis.h.i.+ng: it supplied me with specimens at almost every visit, for ten years together; nor, though, after I left Cromarty for Edinburgh, it was often explored by geologic tourists, and by a few cultivators of science in the place, was it wholly exhausted for ten years more. The ganoids of the second age of vertebrate existence must have congregated as thickly upon that spot in the times of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, as herrings ever do now, in their season, on the best fis.h.i.+ng-banks of Caithness or the Moray Firth. I was for some time greatly puzzled in my attempts to restore these ancient fishes, by the peculiarities of their organization. It was in vain I examined every species of fish caught by the fishermen of the place, from the dog-fish and the skate to the herring and the mackerel. I could find in our recent fishes no such scales of enamelled bone as those which had covered the _Dipterians_ and the _Celacanths_; and no such plate-encased animals as the various species of _Coccosteus_ or _Pterichthys_. On the other hand, with the exception of a double line of vertebral processes in the _Coccosteus_, I could find in the ancient fishes no internal skeleton: they had apparently worn all their bones outside, where the crustaceans wear their sh.e.l.ls, and were furnished inside with but frameworks of perishable cartilage. It seemed somewhat strange, too, that the geologists who occasionally came my way--some of them men of eminence--seemed to know even less about my Old Red fishes and their peculiarities of structure, than I did myself. I had represented the various species of the deposit simply by numerals, which not a few of the specimens of my collection still retain on their faded labels; and waited on until some one should come the way learned enough to subst.i.tute for my provisional figures words by which to designate them; but the necessary learning seemed wanting, and I at length came to find that I had got into a _terra incognita_ in the geological field, the greater portion of whose organisms were still unconnected with human language. They had no representatives among the vocables.

I formed my first imperfect acquaintance with the recent ganoidal fishes in 1836, from a perusal of the late Dr. Hibbert's paper on the deposit of Burdiehouse, which I owed to the kindness of Mr. George Anderson. Dr.

Hibbert, in ill.u.s.trating the fishes of the Coal Measures, figured and briefly described the Lepidosteus of the American rivers as a still surviving fish of the early type; but his description of the animal, though supplemented shortly after by that of Dr. Buckland in his Bridgewater Treatise, carried me but a little way. I saw that two of the Old Red genera--_Osteolepis_ and _Diplopterus_--resembled the American fish externally. It will be seen that the first-mentioned of these ancient ichthyolites bears a name compounded, though, in the reverse order, of exactly the same words. But while I found the skeleton of the Lepidosteus described as remarkably hard and solid, I could detect in the _Osteolepis_ and its kindred genus no trace of internal skeleton at all The Cephalaspean genera, too--_Coccosteus_ and _Pterichthys_--greatly puzzled me: I could find no living a.n.a.logues for them; and so, in my often-repeated attempts at restoration, I had to build them up plate by plate, as a child sets up its dissected map or picture bit by bit--every new specimen that turned up furnis.h.i.+ng a key for some part previously unknown--until at length, after many an abortive effort, the creatures rose up before me in their strange, unwonted proportions, as they had lived, untold ages before, in the primaeval seas. The extraordinary form of _Pterichthys_ filled me with astonishment; and with its arched carpace and flat plastron restored before me, I leaped to the conclusion, that as the recent Lepidosteus, with its ancient representatives of the Old Red Sandstone, were sauroid fishes--strange connecting links between fishes and alligators--so the _Pterichthys_ was a Chelonian fish--a connecting link between the fish and the tortoise. A gurnard--insinuated so far through the sh.e.l.l of a small tortoise as to suffer its head to protrude from the anterior opening, furnished with oar-like paddles instead of pectoral fins, and with its caudal fin clipped to a point--would, I found, form no inadequate representative of this strangest of fishes. And when, some years after, I had the pleasure of introducing it to the notice of Aga.s.siz, I found that, with all his world-wide experience of its cla.s.s, it was as much an object of wonder to him as it had been to myself. "It is impossible," we find him saying, in his great work, "to see aught more bizarre in all creation than the _Pterichthyan_ genus: the same astonishment that Cuvier felt in examining the Plesiosaurus, I myself experienced, when Mr. H. Miller, the first discoverer of these fossils, showed me the specimens which he had detected in the Old Red Sandstone of Cromarty." And there were peculiarities about the _Coccosteus_ that scarce less excited my wonder than the general form of the _Pterichthys_, and which, when I first ventured to describe them, were regarded by the higher authorities in Palaeontology as mere blunders on the part of the observer. I have, however, since succeeded in demonstrating that, if blunders at all--which I greatly doubt, for Nature makes very few--it was Nature herself that was in error, not the observer. In this strange _Coccostean_ genus, Nature _did_ place a group of opposing teeth in each ramus of the lower jaw, just in the line of the symphysis--an arrangement unique, so far as is yet known, in the vertebrate division of creation, and which must have rendered the mouth of these creatures an extraordinary combination of the horizontal mouth proper to the vertebrata, and of the vertical mouth proper to the crustaceans. It was favourable to the integrity of my work of restoration, that the press was not waiting for me, and that when portions of the creatures on which I wrought were wanting, or plates turned up whose places I was unable to determine, I could lay aside my self-imposed task for the time, and only resume it when some new-found specimen supplied me with the materials requisite for carrying it on.

And so the restorations which I completed in 1840, and published in 1841, were found, by our highest authorities in 1848, after they had been set aside for nearly six years, to be essentially the true ones after all. I see, however, that one of the most fanciful and monstrous of all the interim restorations of _Pterichthys_ given to the world--that made by Mr. Joseph d.i.n.kel in 1844 for the late Dr. Mantell, and published in the "Medals of Creation," has been reproduced in the recent ill.u.s.trated edition of the "Vestiges of Creation." But the ingenious author of that work could scarce act prudently were he to stake the soundness of his hypothesis on the integrity of the restoration. For my own part, I consent, if it can be shown that the _Pterichthys_ which once lived and moved on this ancient globe of ours ever either rose or sunk into the _Pterichthys_ of Mr. d.i.n.kel, freely and fully to confess, not only the possibility, but also the _actuality_, of the trans.m.u.tation of both species and genera. I am first, however, prepared to demonstrate, before any competent jury of Palaeontologists in the world, that not a single plate or scale of Mr.

d.i.n.kel's restoration represents those of the fish which he professed to restore; that the same judgment applies equally to his restoration of _Coccosteus_; and that, instead of reproducing in his figures the true forms of ancient Cephalaspeans, he has merely given, instead, the likeness of things that never were "in the heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth."

The place in the geologic scale, as certainly as the forms and characters, of these ancient fishes, had to be determined. Mr. George Anderson had informed me, as early as 1834, that some of them were identical with the ichthyolites of the Gamrie deposit; but then the place of the Gamrie deposit was still to fix. It had been recently referred to the same geological horizon as the Carboniferous Limestone, and was regarded as lying unconformable to the Old Red Sandstone of the district in which it occurs; but, wholly dissatisfied with the evidence adduced, I continued my search, and, though the process was a slow one, saw the position of the Cromarty beds gradually approximating towards determination. It was not, however, until the autumn of 1837 that I got them fairly fixed down to the Old Red Sandstone, and not until the winter of 1839 that I was able conclusively to demonstrate their place in the base of the system, little more than a hundred feet, and in one part not more than eighty feet, above the upper strata of the Great Conglomerate. I had often wished, during my explorations, to be able to extend my field of observation into the neighbouring counties, in order to determine whether I could not possess myself, at a distance, of the evidence which, for a time at least, I failed to find at home; but my daily engagements in the bank fixed me down to Cromarty and its neighbourhood; and I found myself somewhat in the circ.u.mstances of a tolerably lively beetle stuck on a pin, that, though able, with a little exertion, to spin round its centre, is yet wholly unable to quit it. I acquired, however, at the close of 1837, in the late Dr. John Malcolmson of Madras, a n.o.ble auxiliary, who could expatiate freely over the regions virtually barred against me. He had been led to visit Cromarty by a brief description of its geology, rather picturesque than scientific, which had appeared in my legendary volume; and after I had introduced him to its ichthyolitic beds on both sides of the Hill and at Eathie, and acquainted him with their character and organisms, he set himself to trace out the resembling deposits of the neighbouring s.h.i.+res of Banff, Moray, and Nairn. And in little more than a fortnight he had detected the ichthyolites in numerous localities all over an Old Red Sandstone tract, which extends from the primary districts of Banff to near the field of Culloden. The Old Red Sandstone of the north, hitherto deemed so poor in fossils, he found--with the Cromarty deposits as his key--teeming with organic remains. In the spring of 1838, Dr. Malcolmson visited England and the Continent, and introduced some of my Cephalaspean fossils to the notice of Aga.s.siz, and some of the evidence which I had laid before him regarding their place in the scale, to Mr.

(now Sir Roderick) Murchison. And I had the honour, in consequence, of corresponding with both these distinguished men; and the satisfaction of knowing, that by both, the fruit of my labours was deemed important. I observe that Humboldt, in his "Cosmos," specially refers to the judgment of Aga.s.siz on the extraordinary character of the new zoological link with which I had furnished him; and I find Murchison, in his great work on the Silurian System, published in 1839, laying no little emphasis on the stratigraphical fact. After referring to the previously formed opinion that the Gamrie deposit, with its ichthyolites, was not an Old Red one, he goes on to say--"On the other hand, I have recently been informed by Dr. Malcolmson, that Mr. Miller of Cromarty (who has made some highly interesting discoveries near that place) pointed out to him nodules resembling those of Gamrie, and containing similar fishes, in highly-inclined strata, which are interpolated in, and completely subordinate to, the great ma.s.s of Old Red Sandstone of Ross and Cromarty. This important observation will, I trust, be soon communicated to the Geological Society, for it strengthens the inference of M.

Aga.s.siz respecting the epoch during which the _Cheiracanthus_ and _Cheirolepis_ lived." All this will, I am afraid, appear tolerably weak to the reader, and somewhat more than tolerably tedious. Let him remember, however, that the only merit to which I lay claim in the case is that of patient research--a merit in which whoever wills may rival or surpa.s.s me; and that this humble faculty of patience, when rightly directed, may lead to more extraordinary developments of idea than even genius itself. What I had been slowly deciphering were the _ideas_ of G.o.d as developed in the mechanism and framework of His creatures, during the second age of vertebrate existence; and one portion of my inquiries determined the date of these ideas, and another their character.

Many of the best sections of the Sutors and the adjacent hills, with their a.s.sociated deposits, cannot be examined without boat; and so I purchased for a few pounds a light little yawl, furnished with mast and sail, and that rowed four oars, to enable me to carry out my explorations. It made me free of the Cromarty and Moray Firths for some six or eight miles from the town, and afforded me many a pleasant evening's excursion to the deep-sea caves and skerries, and the picturesque surf-wasted stacks of the granitic wall of rock which runs in the Ben Nevis line of elevation, from Shadwick on the east to the Scarfs Crag on the west. I know not a richer tract for the geologist.

Independently of the interest that attaches to its sorely-contorted granitic gneiss--which seems, as Murchison shrewdly remarks, to have been protruded through the sedimentary deposits in a solid state, as a fractured bone is sometimes protruded through the integuments--there occurs along the range three several deposits of the Old Red ichthyolites, and three several deposits of the Lias, besides the sub-aqueous ones, with two insulated skerries, which I am inclined to regard as outliers of the Oolite. These last occur in the form of half-tide rocks, very dangerous to the mariner, which lie a full half-mile from the sh.o.r.e, and can be visited with safety only at low water during dead calms, when no ground swell comes rolling in from the sea. I have set out as early as two o'clock in a fine summer morning for these skerries, and, after spending several hours upon them, have been seated at the bank desk before ten; but these were mornings of very hard work. It was the long Sat.u.r.day afternoons that were my favourite seasons of explorations; and when the weather was fine, my wife would often accompany me in these excursions; and we not unfrequently anch.o.r.ed our skiff in some rocky bay, or over some fis.h.i.+ng bank, and, provided with rods and lines, caught, ere our return, a basket of rock-cod or coal-fish for supper, that always seemed of finer flavour than the fish supplied us in the market. These were happy holidays. Sh.e.l.ley predicates of a day of exquisite beauty, that it would continue to "live like joy in memory." I do retain recollections of these evenings spent in my little skiff--recollections mingled with a well-remembered imagery of blue seas and purple hills, and a sun-lit town in the distance, and tall wood-crested precipices nearer at hand, which flung lengthened shadows across sh.o.r.e and sea--that not merely represent enjoyments which have been, but that, in certain moods of the mind, take the form of enjoyment still. They are favoured spots in the chequered retrospect of the past, on which the suns.h.i.+ne of memory falls more brightly than on most of the others.

When thus employed, there broke out very unexpectedly, a second war with the Liberal Moderates of the town, in which, unwillingly rather than otherwise, I had ultimately to engage. The sacrament of the Supper is celebrated in most of the parish churches of the north of Scotland only once a year; and, as many of the congregations wors.h.i.+p at that time in the open air, the summer and autumn seasons are usually selected for the "occasion," as best fitted for open-air meetings. As, however, the celebration is preceded and followed by week-day preachings, and as on one of these week-days--the Thursday preceding the Sacramental Sabbath--no work is done, kirk-sessions usually avoid fixing their sacrament in a busy time, such as the time of harvest in the rural districts, or of the herring-fis.h.i.+ng in the seaport towns; and as the parish of Cromarty has both its rural population and its fis.h.i.+ng one, the kirk-session of the place have to avoid both periods. And so the early part of July, ere the herring-fis.h.i.+ng or the harvest comes on, is the time usually fixed upon for the Cromarty sacrament. In this year, however (1838), it so chanced that the day appointed for the Queen's coronation proved coincident with the sacramental Thursday, and the Liberal Moderate party urged upon the Session that the preparations for the sacrament should give way to the rejoicings for the coronation. We had not been much accustomed to rejoicings of the kind in the north since the good old times when respectable Tory gentlemen used to show themselves drunk in public on the King's birthday, in order to demonstrate their loyalty: the coronation days of both George IV. and William IV. had pa.s.sed off as quietly as Sabbaths; and the Session, holding that it might be quite as well for people to pray for their young Queen at church, and then quietly drink her health when they got home, as to grow glorious in her behalf in taverns and tap-rooms, refused to alter their day. Believing that, though essentially in the right, they were yet politically in the wrong, and that a plausible case might be made out against them by the newspaper press, I waited on my minister, and urged him to give way to the Liberals, and have his preparation-day changed from Thursday to Friday. He seemed quite willing enough to act on the suggestion; nay, he had made a similar one, he told me, to his Session; but the devout elders.h.i.+p, strong in the precedents of centuries, had declined to subordinate the religious services of the Kirk to the wa.s.sail and merriment sanctioned by the State. And so they determined on keeping their day of sacramental preparation on the Thursday, as their fathers had done. Meanwhile, the Liberals held what was very properly termed a public meeting, seeing that, though the public had failed to attend it, the public had been quite at liberty to do so, nay, had even been specially invited; and there appeared in the provincial newspapers a long report of its proceedings, including five speeches--all written by a legal gentleman--in which it was designated a meeting of the inhabitants of the town and parish of Cromarty. The resolutions were, of course, of the most enthusiastically loyal character. There was not a member of the meeting who was not prepared to spend upon himself the last drop of his bottle of port in her Majesty's behalf. Thursday came--the Thursday of the sacrament and of the coronation; and, with ninety-nine hundredths of the church-going portion of my townsfolk, I went to church as usual. The parochial resolutioners, amounting in all to ten, were, I can honestly avouch, scarce at all missed in a congregation of nearly as many hundreds. About mid-day, however, we could hear the m.u.f.fled report of their carronades; and, shortly after the service was over, and we had returned to our homes, there pa.s.sed through the streets a forlorn little group of individuals, that looked exceedingly like a press-gang, but was in reality intended for a procession. Though joined by a proprietor from a neighbouring parish, a lawyer from a neighbouring burgh, a small coast-guard party, with its commanding officer, and two half-pay Episcopalian officers besides, the number who walked, including boys, did not exceed twenty-five persons; and of these, as I have said, only ten were paris.h.i.+oners. The processionists had a n.o.ble dinner in the head inn of the place--merrier than even dinners of celebration usually are, as it was, of course, loyalty and public spirit to ignore the special claim upon the day a.s.serted by the Church; and the darkening evening saw a splendid bonfire blazing from the brae-head. And the Liberal newspapers south and north taking part with the processionists, in many a paragraph and short leader, represented their frolic--for such it was, and a very foolish one--as a splendid triumph of the people of Cromarty over Presbyterial bigotry and clerical domination. Nay, so bad did the case of my minister and his Session appear, thus placed in opposition to at once the people and the Queen, that the papers on the other side failed to take it up. A well-written letter on the subject by my wife, which fairly stated the facts, was refused admission into even the ecclesiastico-Conservative journal, specially patronized, at the time, by the Scottish Church; and my minister's friends and brethren in the south could do little else than marvel at what they deemed his wondrous imprudence.

I had antic.i.p.ated, from the first, that his position was to be a bad one; but I ill liked to see him with his back to the wall. And though I had determined, on the rejection of my counsel, to take no part in the quarrel, I now resolved to try whether I could not render it evident that he was really not at issue with his people, but with merely a very inconsiderable clique among them, who had never liked him; and that it was much a joke to describe him as disaffected to his sovereign, simply because he had held his preparation services on the day of her coronation. In order to make good my first point, I took the unpardonable liberty of giving the names in full, in a letter which appeared in our northern newspapers, of every individual who walked in the procession, and represented themselves as the people; and challenged the addition of even a single name to a list ludicrously brief. And in making good the second, I fairly succeeded, as there were not a few comical circ.u.mstances in the transaction, in getting the laughers on my side. The clique was amazingly angry, and wrote not very bright letters, which appeared as advertis.e.m.e.nts in the newspapers, and paid duty to make evident the fact. There was a shallow and very ignorant young shoemaker in the place, named Chaucer, a native of the south of Scotland, who represented himself as the grandson of the old poet of the days of Edward III., and wrote particularly wretched doggrel to make good his claim. And, having a quarrel with the kirk-session, in a certain delicate department, he had joined the processionists, and celebrated their achievements in a ballad entirely worthy of them. And it was perhaps the severest cut of all, that the recognised leader of the band p.r.o.nounced Chaucer the younger a greatly better poet than me.

There were representations, too, made to my superiors in the banking department at Edinburgh, which procured me a reprimand, though a gentle one; but my superior in Cromarty--Mr. Ross--as wise and good a man as any in the direction, and thoroughly acquainted with the merits of the case, was wholly on my side. I am afraid the reader may deem all this very foolish, and hold that I would have been better employed among the rocks, in determining the true relations of their various beds, and the character of their organisms, than in bickering in a petty village quarrel, and making myself enemies. And yet, man being what he is, I fear an ability of efficient squabbling is a greatly more marketable one than any ability whatever of extending the boundaries of natural science. At least so it was, that while my geological researches did nothing for me at this time, my letter in the procession controversy procured for me the offer of a newspaper editors.h.i.+p. But though, in a pecuniary point of view, I should have considerably bettered my circ.u.mstances by closing with it, I found I could not do so without a.s.suming the character of the special pleader, and giving myself to the advocacy of views and principles which I really did not hold; and so I at once declined the office, as one for which I did not deem myself suited, and could not in conscience undertake.

I found about this time more congenial employment, though, of course, it occupied only my leisure hours, in writing the memoir of a townsman--the late Mr. William Forsyth, of Cromarty--at the request of his relation and son in-law, my friend Mr. Isaac Forsyth, of Elgin. William Forsyth had been a grown man ere the abolition of the hereditary jurisdictions; and from the ma.s.siveness and excellence of his character, and his high standing as a merchant, in a part of the country in which merchants at the time were few, he had succeeded, within the precincts of the town, to not a little of the power of the hereditary Sheriff of the district; and after acting for more than half a century as a laborious Justice of the Peace, and succeeding in making up more quarrels than most country lawyers have an opportunity of fomenting--for the age was a rude and combative one, and the merchant ever a peace-maker--he lived long enough to see Liberty-and-Equality Clubs and Processions, and died about the close of the first war of the French Revolution. It was an important half-century in Scotland--though it exhibits but a narrow, inconspicuous front in the history of the country--that intervened between the times of the hereditary jurisdictions and the Liberty-and-Equality Clubs. It was specially the period during which popular opinion began to a.s.sume its potency, and in which the Scotland of the past merged, in consequence, into the very dissimilar Scotland of the present. And I derived much pleasure in tracing some of the more striking features of this transition age in the biography of Mr. Forsyth. My little work was printed, but not published, and distributed by Mr. Forsyth of Elgin among the friends of the family, as perhaps a better and more adequate memorial of a worthy and able man than could be placed over his grave.

It was on the occasion of the death of his last-surviving child--the late Mrs. Mackenzie of Cromarty, a lady from whom I had received much kindness, and under whose hospitable roof I had the opportunity afforded me of meeting not a few superior men--that my memoir was undertaken; and I regarded it as a fitting tribute to a worthy family just pa.s.sed away, at once deserving of being remembered for its own sake, and to which I owed a debt of grat.i.tude.

In the spring of 1839, a sad bereavement darkened my household, and for a time left me little heart to pursue my wonted amus.e.m.e.nts, literary or scientific. We had been visited, ten months after our marriage, by a little girl, whose presence had added not a little to our happiness; home became more emphatically such from the presence of the child, that in a few months had learned so well to know its mother, and in a few more to take its stand in the nurse's arms, at an upper window that commanded the street, and to recognise and make signs to its father as he approached the house. Its few little words, too, had a fascinating interest to our ears;--our own names, lisped in a language of its own, every time we approached; and the simple Scotch vocable "awa, awa,"

which it knew how to employ in such plaintive tones as we retired, and that used to come back upon us in recollection, like an echo from the grave, when, its brief visit over, it had left us for ever, and its fair face and silken hair lay in darkness amid the clods of the churchyard.

In how short a time had it laid hold of our affections! Two brief years before, and we knew it not; and now it seemed as if the void which it left in our hearts the whole world could not fill. We buried it beside the old chapel of St. Regulus, with the deep rich woods all around, save where an opening in front commands the distant land and the blue sea; and where the daisies which it had learned to love, mottled, starlike, the mossy mounds; and where birds, whose songs its ear had become skilful enough to distinguish, pour their notes over its little grave.

The following simple but truthful stanzas, which I found among its mother's papers, seem to have been written in this place--sweetest of burying grounds--a few weeks after its burial, when a chill and backward spring, that had scowled upon its lingering illness, broke out at once into genial summer:--

Thou'rt "awa, awa," from thy mother's side, And "awa, awa," from thy father's knee; Thou'rt "awa" from our blessing, our care, our caressing, But "awa" from our hearts thou'lt never be.

All things, dear child, that were wont to please thee Are round thee here in beauty bright,-- There's music rare in the cloudless air, And the earth is teeming with living delight.

Thou'rt "awa, awa," from the bursting spring time, Tho' o'er thy head its green boughs wave; The lambs are leaving their little footprints Upon the turf of thy new-made grave.

And art thou "awa," and "awa" for ever, That little face,--that tender frame,-- That voice which first, in sweetest accent Call'd me the mother's thrilling name,

That head of nature's finest moulding,-- Those eyes, the deep night ether's blue Where sensibility its shadows Of ever-changing meaning throw?

Thy sweetness, patience under suffering, All promised us an opening day Most fair, and told that to subdue thee Would need but love's most gentle sway.

Ah me! 'twas here I thought to lead thee, And tell thee what are life and death, And raise thy serious thought's first waking To Him who holds our every breath.

And does my selfish heart then grudge thee, That angels are thy teachers now,-- That glory from thy Saviour's presence Kindles the crown upon thy brow?

O no! to me earth must be lonelier, Wanting thy voice, thy hand, thy love; Yet dost thou dawn a star of promise, Mild beacon to the world above.

CHAPTER XXV.

"All for the church, and a little less for the State."--BELHAVEN.

I had taken no very deep interest in the Voluntary controversy. There was, I thought, a good deal of over-statement and exaggeration on both sides. On the one hand, the Voluntaries failed to convince me that a State endowment for ecclesiastical purposes is in itself in any degree a bad thing. I had direct experience to the contrary. I had evidence the most unequivocal that in various parts of the country it was a very excellent thing indeed. It had been a very excellent thing, for instance, in the parish of Cromarty, ever since the Revolution, down to the death of Mr. Smith--in reality a valuable patrimony of the people there; for it had supplied the parish, free of cost, with a series of popular and excellent ministers, whom otherwise the paris.h.i.+oners would have had to pay for themselves. And it had now given us my friend Mr.

Stewart, one of the ablest and honestest ministers in Scotland, or elsewhere, whether Established or Dissenting. And these facts, which were but specimens of a numerous cla.s.s, had a tangibility and solidity about them which influenced me more than all the theoretic reasonings pressed on my attention about the mischief done to the Church by the over-kindness of Constantine, or the corrupting effects of State favour.

But then I could as little agree with some of my friends on the endowment side, that the Establishment, even in Scotland, was everywhere of value, as with some of the Voluntaries that it was nowhere of any. I had resided for months together in various parts of the country, where it would have mattered not a farthing to any one save the minister and his family, though the Establishment had been struck down at a blow.

Religion and morals would have no more suffered by the annihilation of the minister's stipend, than by the suppression of the pension of some retired supervisor or superannuated officer of customs. Nor could I forget, that the only religion, or appearance of religion, that existed in parties of workmen among which I had been employed (as in the south of Scotland, for instance), was to be found among their Dissenters--most of them, at the time, a.s.serters of the Voluntary principle. If the other workmen were reckoned, statistically at least, adherents of the Establishment, it was not because they either benefited by it or cared for it, but only somewhat in the way that, according to the popular English belief, persons born at sea are held to belong to the parish of Stepney. Further, I did not in the least like the sort of company into which the Voluntary controversy had introduced the good men on both sides; it gave a common cause to the Voluntary and the Infidel, and drew them cordially together; and, on the other hand, placed side by side, on terms portentously friendly, the pious a.s.serter of endowments and the irreligious old Tory. There was religion on both sides of the controversy, but a religious controversy it was not.

The position of my grandmother's family, including of course Uncles James and Sandy, was a sort of midway one between the Secession and the Establishment. My grandmother had quitted the family of Donald Roy long ere he had been compelled, very unwillingly, to leave the Church; and as no forced settlements had taken place in the parish into which she had removed, and as its ministers had been all men of the right stamp, she had done what Donald himself had been so desirous to do--remained an attached member of the Establishment. One of her sisters had, however, married in Nigg; and she and her husband, following Donald into the ranks of the Secession, had reared one of their boys to the ministry, who became, in course of time, the respected minister of the congregation which his great-grandfather had founded. And, as the contemporary and first cousin of my uncles, the minister used to call upon them every time he came to town; and my uncle James, in turn (Uncle Sandy very rarely went to the country), never missed, when in Nigg or its neighbourhood, to repay his visits. There was thus a good deal of intercourse kept up between the families, not without effect. Most of the books of modern theology which my uncles read were Secession books, recommended by their cousin; and the religious magazine for which they subscribed was a Secession magazine. The latter bore, I remember, the name of the "Christian Magazine, or Evangelical Repository." It was not one of the brightest of periodicals, but a sound and solid one, with, as my uncles held, a good deal of the old unction about it; and there was, in especial, one of the contributors whose papers they used to pick out as of peculiar excellence, and not unfrequently read a second time. They bore the somewhat Greek-looking signature of _Leumas_, as if the writer had been a brother or cousin-german of some of the old Christians to whom Paul used to notify kind regards and good wishes at the end of his epistles; but it was soon discovered that _Leumas_ was merely the proper name Samuel reversed, though who the special Samuel was who turned his signature to the right about, placing the wrong end foremost, and wrote with all the concise weight and gravity of the old divines, my uncles never knew. They had both pa.s.sed away ere, in perusing the "Second Gallery of Literary Portraits," I found myself introduced to worthy old _Leumas_, also a denizen of the unseen world at the time, as the father of the writer of that brilliant work--the Rev. George Gilfillan of Dundee. This kind of writing had, of course, its proper effect on my uncles, and, through them, on the family: it kept up our respect for the Secession. The Established Church, too, was in those days a tolerably faulty inst.i.tution. My uncles took an interest in missions; and the Church had none: nay, its deliberate decision against them--that of 1796--remained still unreversed. It had had, besides, its forced settlements in our immediate neighbourhood; and Moderatism, wise and politic in its generation, had perpetrated them by the hands of some of the better ministers of the district, who had learned to do what they themselves believed to be very wicked things, when their Church bade them--a sort of professional license which my uncles could not in the least understand. In short, the Secession better pleased them, in the main, than the Establishment, though to the Establishment they continued to adhere, and failed to see on what Seceder principle their old friends were becoming Voluntaries. On the breaking out of the controversy, I remembered all this; and, when told by good men of the Established Church that well-nigh all the vital religion of the country was on our side, and that it had left the Voluntary Seceders, though the good men themselves honestly believed what they said, I could not. Further, the heads of a conversation which I had overheard in my cousin the Seceder minister's house when I was a very young boy, and to which it could have been little suspected that I was listening--for I was playing at the time on the floor--had taken a strong hold of my memory, and often returned upon me at this period. My cousin and some of his elders were mourning--very sincerely, I cannot doubt--over the decay of religion among them: they were falling far short, they said, of the attainments of their fathers; there were no Donald Roys among them now; and yet they felt it to be a satisfaction, though a sad one, that the little religion which there was in the district seemed to be all among themselves. And now here was there exactly the same sort of conviction, equally strong, on the other side. But with all that liberally-expressed charity which forms one of the distinctive features of the present time, and is in reality one of its best things, there is still a vast amount of appreciation of this partial kind. Friends are seen in the Christian aspect; opponents in the polemic one; and it is too often forgotten that the friends have a polemic aspect to their opponents, and the opponents a Christian aspect to their friends. And not only in the present, but at all former periods, the case seems to have been the same. I am sometimes half disposed to think, that either the Prophet Elijah, or the seven thousand honest men who had not bowed the knee to Baal, must have been dissenters. Had the Prophet been entirely at one in his views with the seven thousand, it is not easy to conceive how he could have been wholly ignorant of their existence.

With all these lat.i.tudinarian convictions, however, I was thoroughly an Establishment man. The revenues of the Scottish Church I regarded, as I have said, as the patrimony of the Scottish people; and I looked forward to a time when that unwarrantable appropriation of them, through which the aristocracy had sought to extend its influence, but which had served only greatly to reduce its power in the country, would come to an end.

What I specially wanted, in short, was, not the confiscation of the people's patrimony, but simply its restoration from the Moderates and the lairds. And in the enactment of the Veto law I saw the process of restoration fairly begun. I would have much preferred seeing a good broad anti-patronage agitation raised on the part of the Church. As shrewdly shown at the time by the late Dr. M'Crie, such a course would have been at once wiser and safer. But for such an agitation even the Church's better ministers were not in the least prepared. From 1712 to 1784--a period of seventy-two years--the General a.s.sembly had yearly raised its voice against the enactment of the patronage law of Queen Anne, as an unconst.i.tutional encroachment on those privileges of the Church and those rights of the Scottish people which the Treaty of Union had been framed to secure. But the half century which had pa.s.sed, since through the act of a Moderate majority the protest had been dropped, had produced the natural effect. By much the greater part of even the better ministers of the Church had been admitted into their offices through the law of patronage; and, naturally grateful to the patrons who had befriended them, they hesitated to make open war on the powers that had been exerted in their own behalf. According to Solomon, the "gift"

had to a certain extent "destroyed the heart;" and so they were prepared to take up merely a half-way position, which their predecessors, the old popular divines, would have liked exceedingly ill. I could not avoid seeing that, fixed in a sort of overtopped hollow, if I may so speak, between the claims of patronage on the one hand, and the rights of the people on the other, it was a most perilous position, singularly open to misconception and misrepresentation on both sides; and as it virtually stripped the patrons of half their power, and extended to the people only half their rights, I was not a little afraid that the patrons might be greatly more indignant than the people grateful, and that the Church might, in consequence, find herself exposed to the wrath of very potent enemies, and backed by the support of only lukewarm friends. But however perilous and difficult as a post of occupation, it was, I could not avoid believing, a position conscientiously taken up; nor could I doubt that its grounds were strictly const.i.tutional. The Church, in a case of disputed settlement, might, I believed, have to forfeit the temporalities if her decision differed from that of the law courts, but only the temporalities connected with the case at issue; and these I deemed worth risking in the popular behalf, seeing that they might be regarded as already lost to the country in every case in which a parish was a.s.signed to a minister whom the paris.h.i.+oners refused to hear. It rejoiced me, too, to see the revival of the old spirit in the Church; and so I looked with an interest on the earlier stages of her struggle with the law courts, greatly more intense than that with which any mere political contest had ever inspired me. I saw with great anxiety decision after decision go against her; first that of the Court of Session in March 1838, and next that of the House of Lords in May 1839; and then, with the original Auchterarder case of collision, I saw that of Lethendy and Marnoch mixed up; and, as one entanglement succeeded another, confusion becoming worse confounded. It was only when the Church's hour of peril came that I learned to know how much I really valued her, and how strong and numerous the a.s.sociations were that bound her to my affections. I had experienced at least the average amount of interest in political measures whose tendency and principles I deemed good in the main--such as the Reform Bill, the Catholic Emanc.i.p.ation Act, and the Emanc.i.p.ation of the Negroes; but they had never cost me an hour's sleep. Now, however, I felt more deeply; and for at least one night, after reading the speech of Lord Brougham, and the decision of the House of Lords in the Auchterarder case, I slept none.

In truth, the position of the Church at this time seemed critical in the extreme. Offended by the usage which she had received at the hands of the Whigs, in her claims for endowments to her new chapels, and startled by their general treatment of the Irish Establishment, and the suppression of the ten bishoprics, she had thrown her influence into the Tory scale, and had done much to produce that reaction against the Liberal party in Scotland which took place during the Ministry of Lord Melbourne. In the representation of at least one county in which he was all-potent--Ross-s.h.i.+re--she had succeeded in subst.i.tuting a Tory for a Whig; and there were few districts in the kingdom in which she had not very considerably increased the votes on the Tory, or, as it was termed, Conservative side. The people, however, though they might, and did, become quite indifferent enough to the Whigs, could not follow her into the Tory ranks. They stood aloof--very suspicious, not without reason, of her new political friends--no admirers of the newspapers which she patronized, and not in the least able to perceive the nature of the interest which she had begun to take in supernumerary bishops and the Irish Establishment. And now, when once more in a position worthy of her old character, and when her Tory friends--converted at once into the bitterest and most ungenerous of enemies--were turning upon her to rend her, she had at once to encounter the hostility of the Whigs, and the indifferency of the people. Further, with but one, or at most two exceptions, all the newspapers which she had patronized declared against her, and were throughout the struggle the bitterest and most abusive of her opponents. The Voluntaries, too, joined with redoubled vehemence in the cry raised to drown her voice, and misinterpret and misrepresent her claims. The general current of opinion ran strongly against her. My minister, warmly interested in the success of the Non-Intrusion principle, has told me, that for many months past I was the only man in his parish that seemed thoroughly to sympathize with him; and I have no doubt that the late Dr. George Cook was perfectly correct and truthful when he about this time remarked, in one of his public addresses, that he could scarce enter an inn or a stage-coach without finding respectable men inveighing against the utter folly of the Non-Intrusionists, and the worse than madness of the Church Courts.

Could I do nothing for my Church in her hour of peril? There was, I believed, no other inst.i.tution in the country half so valuable, or in which the people had so large a stake. The Church was of right theirs--a patrimony won for them by the blood of their fathers, during the struggles and sufferings of more than a hundred years; and now that her better ministers were trying, at least partially, to rescue that patrimony for them from the hands of an aristocracy who, as a body at least, had no spiritual interest in the Church--belonging, as most of its members did, to a different communion--they were in danger of being put down, unbacked by the popular support which in such a cause they deserved. Could I not do something to bring up the people to their a.s.sistance? I tossed wakefully throughout a long night, in which I formed my plan of taking up the purely popular side of the question; and in the morning I sat down to state my views to the people, in the form of a letter addressed to Lord Brougham. I devoted to my new employment every moment not imperatively demanded by my duties in the bank office, and, in about a week after, was able to despatch the ma.n.u.script of my pamphlet to the respected manager of the Commercial Bank--Mr. Robert Paul--a gentleman from whom I had received much kindness when in Edinburgh, and who, in the great ecclesiastical struggle, took decided part with the Church. Mr. Paul brought it to his minister, the Rev. Mr.

Candlish of St. George's (now Dr. Candlish), who, recognising its popular character, urged its immediate publication; and the ma.n.u.script was accordingly put into the hands of Mr. Johnstone, the well-known Church bookseller. Dr. Candlish had been one of a party of ministers and elders of the Evangelical majority who had met in Edinburgh shortly before, to take measures for the establishment of a newspaper. All the Edinburgh press, with the exception of one newspaper, had declared against the ecclesiastical party; and even that one rather received articles and paragraphs in their behalf through the friends.h.i.+p of the proprietor, than was itself on their side. There had been a larger infusion of Whiggism among the Edinburgh Churchmen than in any other part of the kingdom. They had seen very much, in consequence, that the line taken by the Conservative portion of their friends, in addressing the people through the press, had not been an efficient one;--their friends had set themselves to make the people both good Conservatives and good Churchmen, and of course had never got over the first point, and never would; and what they now proposed was, to establish a paper that, without supporting any of the old parties in the State, should be as Liberal in its politics as in its Churchmans.h.i.+p. But there was a preliminary point which they also could not get over. All the ready-made editors of the kingdom, if I may so speak, had declared against them; and for want of an editor, their meeting had succeeded in originating, not the intended newspaper, but merely a formal recognition, in a few resolutions, of its desirableness and importance.

On reading my pamphlet in ma.n.u.script, however, Dr. Candlish at once concluded that the desiderated want was to be supplied by its writer.

Here, he said, is the editor we have been looking for. Meanwhile, my little work issued from the press, and was successful. It ran rapidly through four editions of a thousand copies each--the number, as I subsequently ascertained, of a popular non-intrusion pamphlet that would fairly _sell_--and was read pretty extensively by men who were not Non-Intrusionists. Among these there were several members of the Ministry of the time, including the late Lord Melbourne, who at first regarded it, as I have been informed, as the composition, under a popular form and a _nom de guerre_, of some of the Non-Intrusion leaders in Edinburgh; and by the late Mr. O'Connell, who had no such suspicions, and who, though he lacked sympathy, as he said, with the ecclesiastical views which it advocated, enjoyed what he termed its "racy English," and the position in which it placed the n.o.ble Lord to whom it was addressed.