Spare Hours Part 11

Then the effort to throw off the disease often quickens and purifies and corroborates the central powers of life; the flame burns more clearly; there is a cleanness, so to speak, about all the wheels of life.

Moreover, it is a warning, and makes a man meditate on his bed, and resolve to pull up; and it warns his friends, and likewise, if he is a clergyman, his people, who if their minister is always with them, never once think he can be ever anything but as able as he is.

Such a pause, such a breathing-time my father never got during that part of his life and labors when it would have availed most, and he was an old man in years, before he was a regular patient of any doctor. He was during life subject to sudden headaches, affecting his memory and eyesight, and even his speech; these attacks were, according to the thoughtless phrase of the day, called bilious; that is, he was sick, and was relieved by a blue pill and smart medicine. Their true seat was in the brain; the liver suffered because the brain was ill, and sent no nervous energy to it, or poisoned what it did send. The sharp racking pain in the forehead was the cry of suffering from the anterior lobes, driven by their master to distraction, and turning on him wild with weakness and fear and anger. It was well they did cry out; in some brains (large ones) they would have gone on dumb to sudden and utter ruin, as in apoplexy or palsy; but he did not know, and no one told him their true meaning, and he set about seeking for the outward cause in some article of food, in some recent and quite inadequate cause.

He used, with a sort of odd shame and distress, to ask me why it was that he was subjected to so much suffering from what he called the lower and ign.o.ble regions of his body; and I used to explain to him that he had made them suffer by long years of neglect, and that they were now having their revenge, and in their own way I have often found, that the more the nervous centres are employed in those offices of thought and feeling the most removed from material objects,-the more the nervous energy of the entire nature is concentrated, engrossed, and used up in such offices,-so much the more and therefore, are those organs of the body which preside over that organic life, common to ourselves and the lowest worm, defrauded of their necessary nervous food,-and being in the organic and not in the animal department, and having no voice to tell their wants or wrongs, till they wake up and annoy their neighbors who have a voice, that is, who are sensitive to pain, they may have been long ill before they come into the sphere of consciousness. This is the true reason-along with want of purity and change of air, want of exercise,[31] want of s.h.i.+fting the work of the body-why clergymen, men of letters, and all men of intense mental application, are so liable to be affected with indigestion, constipation, lumbago, and lowness of spirits, _melancholia_-black bile. The brain may not give way for long, because for a time the law of exercise strengthens it; it is fed high, gets the best of everything, of blood and nervous pabulum, and then men have a joy in the victorious work of their brain, and it has a joy of its own, too, which deludes and misleads.

[31] "The youth Story was in all respects healthy, and even robust; he died of overwork, or rather, as I understand, of a two years' almost total want of exercise, which it was impossible to induce him to take.'-_Arnold's Report to the Committee of Council on Education_, 1860.

All this happened to my father. He had no formal disease when he died-no structural change; his sleep and his digestion would have been quite sufficient for life even up to the last; the mechanism was entire, but the motive-power was gone-it was expended. The silver cord was not so much loosed as relaxed. The golden bowl, the pitcher at the fountain, the wheel at the cistern, were not so much broken as emptied and stayed.

The clock had run down before its time, and there was no one but He who first wound it up and set it who could wind it up again; and this He does not do, because it is His law-an express injunction from Him-that, having measured out to his creatures each his measure of life, and left him to the freedom of his own will and the regulation of his reason, He also leaves him to reap as he sows.

Thus it was that my father's illness was not so much a disease as a long death; life ebbing away, consciousness left entire, the certain issue never out of sight. This, to a man of my father's organization-with a keen relish for life, and its highest pleasures and energies, sensitive to impatience, and then over-sensitive of his own impatience; cut to the heart with the long watching and suffering of those he loved, who, after all, could do so little for him; with a nervous system easily sunk, and by its strong play upon his mind darkening and saddening his most central beliefs, shaking his most solid principles, tearing and terrifying his tenderest affections: his mind free and clear, ready for action if it had the power, eager to be in its place in the work of the world and of its Master, to have to spend two long years in this ever-descending road-here was a combination of positive and negative suffering not to be thought of even now, when it is all sunk under that "far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory."

He often spoke to me freely about his health, went into it with the fearlessness, exactness, and persistency of his nature; and I never witnessed, or hope to witness, anything more affecting than when, after it had been dawning upon him, he apprehended the true secret of his death. He was deeply humbled, felt that he had done wrong to himself, to his people, to us all, to his faithful and long-suffering Master; and he often said, with a dying energy lighting up his eye, and nerving his voice and gesture, that if it pleased G.o.d to let him again speak in his old place, he would not only proclaim again, and, he hoped, more simply and more fully, the everlasting gospel to lost man, but proclaim also the gospel of G.o.d to the body, the religious and Christian duty and privilege of living in obedience to the divine laws of health. He was delighted when I read to him, and turned to this purpose that wonderful pa.s.sage of St. Paul-"For the body is not one member, but many. If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? if the whole were hearing, where were the smelling? But now hath G.o.d set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him. And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee; nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you. Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary;" summing it all up in words with life and death in them-"That there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another. And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honored, all the members rejoice with it."

The lesson from all this is, Attend to your bodies, study their structure, functions, and laws. This does not at all mean that you need be an anatomist, or go deep into physiology, or the doctrines of prevention and cure. Not only has each organism a resident doctor, placed there by Him who can thus heal all our diseases; but this doctor, if watched and waited on, informs any man or woman of ordinary sense what things to do, and what things not to do. And I would have you, who, I fear, not unfrequently sin in the same way, and all our ardent, self-sacrificing young ministers, to reflect whether, after destroying themselves and dying young, they have lost or gained. It is said that G.o.d raises up others in our place. G.o.d gives you no t.i.tle to say this.

Men-such men as I have in my mind-are valuable to G.o.d in proportion to the time they are here. They are the older, the better, the riper and richer, and more enriching. Nothing will make up for this absolute loss of life. For there is something which every man who is a good workman is gaining every year just because he is older, and this nothing can replace. Let a man remain on his ground, say a country parish, during half a century or more-let him be every year getting fuller and sweeter in the knowledge of G.o.d and man, in utterance and in power-can the power of that man for good over all his time, and especially towards its close, be equalled by that of three or four young, and, it may be, admirable men, who have been succeeding each other's untimely death, during the same s.p.a.ce of time? It is against all spiritual, as well as all simple arithmetic, to say so.

You have spoken of my father's prayers. They were of two kinds; the one, formal, careful, systematic, and almost stereotyped, remarkable for fulness and compression of thought; sometimes too manifestly the result of study, and sometimes not purely prayer, but more of the nature of a devotional and even argumentative address; the other, as in the family, short, simple, and varied. He used to tell of his master, Dr. Lawson, reproving him, in his honest but fatherly way, as they were walking home from the Hall. My father had in his prayer the words, "that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death,-that is, the devil." The old man, leaning on his favorite pupil, said, "John, my man, you need not have said '_that is the devil_;' you might have been sure that _He_ knew whom you meant." My father, in theory, held that a mixture of formal, fixed prayer, in fact, a liturgy, along with _extempore_ prayer, was the right thing. As you observe, many of his pa.s.sages in prayer, all who were in the habit of hearing him could antic.i.p.ate, such as "the enlightening, enlivening, sanctifying, and comforting influences of the good Spirit," and many others. One in especial you must remember; it was only used on very solemn occasions, and curiously unfolds his mental peculiarities; it closed his prayer-"And now, unto Thee, O Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the one Jehovah and our G.o.d, we would-as is most meet-with the church on earth and the church in heaven, ascribe all honor and glory, dominion and majesty, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen." Nothing could be liker him than the interjection, "as is most meet." Sometimes his abrupt, short statements in the Synod were very striking. On one occasion, Mr. James Morison having stated his views as to prayer very strongly, denying that a sinner _can_ pray, my father, turning to the Moderator, said-"Sir, let a man feel himself to be a sinner, and, for anything the universe of creatures can do for him, hopelessly lost,-let him feel this, sir, and let him get a glimpse of the Saviour, and all the eloquence and argument of Mr. Morison will not keep that man from crying out, 'G.o.d be merciful to me a sinner.' That, sir, is prayer-that is acceptable prayer."

There must be, I fear, now and then an apparent discrepancy between you and me, especially as to the degree of mental depression which at times overshadowed my father's nature. _You_ will understand this, and I hope our readers will make allowance for it. Some of it is owing to my const.i.tutional tendency to overstate, and much of it to my having had perhaps more frequent, and even more private, insights into this part of his life. But such inconsistency as that I speak of-the co-existence of a clear, firm faith, a habitual sense of G.o.d and of his infinite mercy, the living a life of faith, as if it was in his organic and inner life, more than in his sensational and outward-is quite compatible with that tendency to distrust himself, that bodily darkness and mournfulness, which at times came over him. Any one who knows "what a piece of work is man;" how composite, how varying, how inconsistent human nature is, that each of us are

"Some several men, all in an hour,"

-will not need to be told to expect, or how to harmonize these differences of mood. You see this in that wonderful man, the apostle Paul, the true typical fulness, the _humanness_, so to speak, of whose nature comes out in such expressions of opposites as these-"By honor and dishonor, by evil report and good report: as deceivers, and yet true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and, behold, we live; as chastened, and not killed; as sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things."

I cannot, and after your impressive and exact history of his last days, I need not say anything of the close of those long years of suffering, active and pa.s.sive, and that slow ebbing of life; the body, without help or hope, feeling its doom steadily though slowly drawing on; the mind mourning for its suffering friend, companion, and servant; mourning also, sometimes, that it must be "unclothed," and take its flight all alone into the infinite unknown; dying daily, not in the heat of fever, or in the insensibility or lethargy of paralytic disease, but having the mind calm and clear, and the body conscious of its own decay,-dying, as it were, in cold blood. One thing I must add. That morning when you were obliged to leave, and when "cold obstruction's apathy" had already begun its reign-when he knew us, and that was all, and when he followed us with his dying and loving eyes, but could not speak-the end came; and then, as through life, his will a.s.serted itself supreme in death. With that love of order and decency which was a law of his life, he deliberately composed himself, placing his body at rest, as if setting his house in order before leaving it, and then closed his eyes and mouth, so that his last look-the look his body carried to the grave and faced dissolution in-was that of sweet, dignified self-possession.

I have made this letter much too long, and have said many things in it I never intended saying, and omitted much I had hoped to be able to say.

But I must end.

Yours ever affectionately,

J. BROWN.

"_MYSTIFICATIONS._"[32]

[32] Edinburgh: printed privately, 1859.

"_Health to the auld wife, and weel mat she be, That busks her fause rock wi' the lint o' the lee (_lie_), Whirling her spindle and twisting the twine, Wynds aye the richt pirn into the richt line._"

Those who knew the best of Edinburgh society eight-and-thirty years ago-and when was there ever a better than that best?-must remember the personations of an old Scottish gentlewoman by Miss Stirling Graham, one of which, when Lord Jeffrey was victimized, was famous enough to find its way into _Blackwood_, but in an incorrect form.

Miss Graham's friends have for years urged her to print for them her notes of these pleasant records of the harmless and heart-easing mirth of bygone times; to this she has at last a.s.sented, and the result is this entertaining, curious, and beautiful little quarto, in which her friends will recognize the strong understanding and goodness, the wit and invention, and fine _pawky_ humor of the much-loved and warmhearted representative of Viscount Dundee-the terrible Clavers.[33] They will recall that blithe and winning face, sagacious and sincere, that kindly, cheery voice, that rich and quiet laugh, that mingled sense and sensibility, which all met, and still, to our happiness, meet in her, who, with all her gifts and keen perception of the odd, and power of embodying it, never gratified her consciousness of these powers, or ever played

"Her quips and cranks and wanton wiles,"

so as to give pain to any human being.

[33] Miss Graham's genealogy in connection with Claverhouse-the same who was killed at Killiecrankie-is as follows:-John Graham of Claverhouse married the Honorable Jean Cochrane, daughter of William Lord Cochrane, eldest son of the first Earl of Dundonald. Their only son, an infant, died December 1689. David Graham, his brother, fought at Killiecrankie, and was outlawed in 1690-died without issue-when the representation of the family devolved on his cousin, David Graham of Duntrune. Alexander Graham of Duntrune died 1782; and on the demise of his last surviving son, Alexander, in 1804, the property was inherited equally by his four surviving sisters, Anne, Amelia, Clementina, and Alison.

Amelia, who married Patrick Stirling, Esq., of Pittendreich, was her mother. Clementina married Captain Gavin Drummond of Keltie; their only child was Clementina Countess of Airlie, and mother of the present Earl.

The t.i.tle of this memorial is _Mystifications_, and in the opening letter to her dear kinswoman and life-long friend, Mrs. Gillies, widow of Lord Gillies, she thus tells her story:-

DUNTRUNE, _April 1859._

MY DEAREST MRS. GILLIES,

_To you and the friends who have partaken in these "Mystifications," I dedicate this little volume, trusting that, after a silence of forty years, its echoes may awaken many agreeable memorials of a society that has nearly pa.s.sed away._

_I have been asked if I had no remorse in ridiculing singularities of character, or practising deceptions;-certainly not._

_There was no personal ridicule or mimicry of any living creature, but merely the personation or type of a bygone cla.s.s, that had survived the fas.h.i.+on of its day._

_It was altogether a fanciful existence, developing itself according to circ.u.mstances, or for the amus.e.m.e.nt of a select party, among whom the announcement of a stranger lady, an original, led to no suspicion of deception. No one ever took offence: indeed it generally elicited the finest individual traits of sympathy in the minds of the dupes, especially in the case of Mr. Jeffrey, whose sweet-tempered kindly nature manifested itself throughout the whole of the tiresome interview with the law-loving Lady Pitlyal._

_No one enjoyed her eccentricities more than he did, or more readily devised the arrangement of a similar scene for the amus.e.m.e.nt of our mutual friends._

_The cleverest people were the easiest mystified, and when once the deception took place, it mattered not how arrant the nonsense or how exaggerated the costume. Indeed, children and dogs were the only detectives._

_I often felt so identified with the character, so charmed with the pleasure manifested by my audience, that it became painful to lay aside the veil, and descend again into the humdrum realities of my own self._

_These personations never lost me a friend; on the contrary, they originated friends.h.i.+ps that cease only with life._

_The Lady Pitlyal's course is run; she bequeaths to you these reminiscences of beloved friends and pleasant meetings._

_And that the blessing of G.o.d may descend on "each and all of you," is the fervent prayer of her kinswoman and executrix,_

_CLEMENTINA STIRLING GRAHAM._

I now beg to "convey," as Pistol delicately calls it, or as we on our side the Border would say, to "lift," enough of this unique volume to make my readers hunger for the whole.

MRS. RAMSAY SPELDIN.

Another evening Miss Guthrie requested me to introduce my old lady to Captain Alexander Lindsay, a son of the late Laird of Kinblethmont, and brother to the present Mr. Lindsay Carnegie, and Mr. Sandford, the late Sir Daniel Sandford.

She came as a Mrs. Ramsay Speldin, an old sweetheart of the laird's, and was welcomed by Mrs. Guthrie as a friend of the family. The young people hailed her as a perfectly delightful old lady, and an original of the pure Scottish character, and to the laird she was endeared by a thousand pleasing recollections.

He placed her beside himself on the sofa, and they talked of the days gone by-before the green parks of Craigie were redeemed from the muir of Gotterston, and ere there was a tree planted between the auld house of Craigie and the Castle of Claypotts.

She spoke of the "gude auld times, when the laird of Fintry widna gie his youngest dochter to Abercairney, but tell'd him to tak them as G.o.d had gien them to him, or want."

"And do you mind," she continued, "the grand ploys we had at the Middleton; and hoo Mrs. Scott of Gilhorn used to grind lilts out o' an auld kist to wauken her visitors i' the mornin'.