THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES GIFT OF FREDERIC THOMAS BLANCHARD of the book that you may do the author justice. Please keep a Cover on this Book while using it. A. D. K I T^L J Bought Price $ l v_ Essays, HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL, POLITICAL, SOCIAL, LITERARY, AND SCIENTIFIC. BY HUGH MILLER, AUTHOR OF " THE OLD RED SANDSTONE," " MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS,' 1 "THE TESTIMONY OF THE ROCKS," ETC., ETC. \ EDITED, WITH A PREFACE, By PETER BAYNE, A.M. NEW YORK: ROBERT CARTER AND BROTHERS, 530 Broadway. 1882. TJNUSrAJ as it is to republish newspaper articles, no apology i3 deemed necessary in presenting this volume to the public. At the time of Mr. Hugh Miller's death, it was felt that a large proportion of his contributions to the " Witness " deserved a permanent place in the literature of his country. They were recognized as distinguished, both by their literary merit and their sterling value, from the fugitive and ephemeral produc- tions of every-day journalism. Assuming ihe conduct of a newspaper in the matu- rity of his pc :> a wspaper editors, during the last thirty years, wi_. ;j rftux tS M'Cul- lock, M'Laren, Buchanan, Dr. James Brown, Alexander Sutherland, and John Malcolm. The provincial news- paper press has also caught the general tone. Had there been no "Edinburgh Review," newspapers such as the "Dumfries Courier" and the " Inverness Courier " would have been prodigies. No later than the day on which Lord Jeffrey died, a gentleman of business habits, who had been for some time unsuccessfully engaged in looking out for an editor to conduct a weekly paper established in a large town, remarked to us, that of all men an efficient newspaper editor was perhaps the most difficult to find. LOUD JEFFREY. 83 It occurred to us not long after, on hearing of his lord- ship's death, that, in all probability, had he never lived, the difficulty would not have existed This indirect influence exercised on periodic literature by Lord Jeffrey was perhaps more important in the main than that which he wielded as a political writer or a critic. And yet in both departments he stood very high. His influence as a politician is of course mixed up with that of his associates, and must be regarded generally as that of the "Review" which he conducted. For about thirty years, as we had once before occasion to remark, the " Edinburgh Review " labored indefatigably with various political objects in view, mainly, however, to repress the dreaded growth of despotism, and to assert the cause of constitutional reform. And for at least the latter half of that period its exertions were accompanied by very marked success. During the war with France, the current ran strongly against it. It was thrown out in its calcula- tions, both by that infatuation of Napoleon which led to the Russian campaign, and by the military genius of Wellington. The consequent issue of the great revolu- tionary struggle was a struggle which it had not foreseen. There was, besides, a principle elicited in our state of war which ran counter in its influence to that of the "Review." The resentments of the people were so enraged with their enemies abroad, that they had comparatively little indig- nation to spare for their rulers at home. But a period of peace told powerfully in its favor. Men found leisure to look through the spectacles which it furnished at the defects of existing institutions ; its politics spi'ead and gathered strength; a second French revolution, achieved under immensely more favorable circumstances than the first, wrought as decidedly in favor of the Liberal cause in Britain as the first French revolution had wrought against it; and Whiggism at length saw its favorite scheme of political reform embodied into a bill, and passed into a la\* And in producing this result the "Edinburgh Review " had a 84 HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL. large and sensible share. But then, Jeffrey was simply- one of several powerful-minded men to whom the period- ical owed its- political potency. Regarded, however, in its purely critical character, and as a leader of the public taste in poetry and the belles lettres, the case was otherwise. Though Sir James Macintosh occasionally contributed a paper, such as his critique on the Poems of Rogers, which in this department fully sustained the general character of the periodical, Jeffrey to all intents and purposes was the Edinburgh Review." And in this his peculiar province he took his place, we have no hesi- tation in saying, as the nVst British critic of the age. He had his prejudices and his deficiencies, and occasionally put out in his reckoning by what the poet beautifully describes as "glorious faults, which critics dare not mend " he committed, as in the case of Wordsworth, grave mis- takes ; but, take him all in all, where, we ask, is the critic of the present century who is to be placed in the scale against Francis Jeffrey ? His peculiar fitness for his task resulted mainly from the exquisiteness of his taste, his fearless hongsty, and the integrity of his judgment. His few mistakes arose chiefly from certain partial defects in faculty. These, however, were important enough to prevent him, if not from taking his place as the first of contemporary critics, from at least entering those highest walks of British criticism in which a very few of the master minds of the past were qualified to expatiate, and but these few exclusively. There are snatches of criticism in the prefaces and dedications of Dryden, in Burke's " Ti aatise on the Sublime and Beautiful," and even in Johnson's " British Poets " (though there were important faculties which Johnson also lacked), which Jeffrey has not equalled. But that man rises high in an intellectual department, who, though not equal to some of the more illustrious dead, is first among his compeers. "We know not at t>nce a better illustration of what Jeffrey could do, and what he failed in doing, than that furnished by his LORD JEFFREY. 85 article on the Sense of the Beautiful. There is scarce a finer piece of writing in the language ; and yet it embodies, as part of its very essence, the great sophism that, apart from the influence of the associative faculty, there is no beauty in color. We know of but one other sophism in the language that at all approaches it in the elegance and delicacy of its form, and which resembles it, too, in its perfect honesty and good faith ; for both authors wrote as they felt, and failed in producing more than partial truth, which is always tantamount to error, simply because they both lacked a faculty all-essential to the separate inquiries which they conducted. Both were fully sensible of the immense power of association in eliciting images of delight ; but the one, insensible to the beauty of simple sounds, from the want of a musical ear, attributed all the power of music to association alone; and the other, insensible to the beauty of simple colors, attributed, from a similar want of appreciating faculty, all their power of gratifying the eye to a similar cause. All our readers are acquainted with the article on the Beauti- ful ; but the following fine stanzas, the production of John Finlay, a Scottish poet, who died early in the present century, when he had but mastered his powers, may be new to most of them : " Why does the melting voice, the tuneful string, A sigh of woe, a tear of pleasure bring? Can simple sounds or joy or grief inspire, Or wake the soul responsive to the wire? Ah, no ! some other charm to rapture draws, More than the finger's skill, the artist's laws; Some latent feeling at the string awakes, Starts to new life, and through the fibres shakes; Some cottage-home, where first the strain was heard, By many a tie of former days endeared ; Some lovely maid who on thy bosom hung, And breathed the note all tearful as she sung; Some youth who first awoke the pensive lay, Friend of thy infant years, now far away; 8 8G HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL. Some scene that patriot blood embalms in song; Some brook that winds thy native vales among, All steal into the soul, in witching train, Till home, the maid, the friend, the scene, return again. 'Twas thus the wanderer 'mid the Syrian wild Wept at the strain he caroll'd when a child. O'er many a weary waste the traveller passed, And hoped to find some resting-place at last, Beneath some branchy shade, his journey done, To shelter from the desert and the sun ; And haply some green spot the pilgrim found, And hailed and blessed the stream's delicious sound. When on his ear the well known ditty stole, That, as it melted, passed into his soul, ' O, Both well bank! ' each thrilling sound conveyed The Scottish landscape to the palm-tree shade; No more Damascus' streams his spirit held, No more its minarets his eye beheld: Pharpar and Abana unheeded glide,' He hears in dreams the music of the Clyde; And Bothwell's bank, amid o'er-arching trees, Echoes the bleat of flocks, the hum of bees. With less keen rapture on the Syrian shore, Beneath the shadow of the sycamore, His eye had turned, amid the burst of day, Tadmor's gigantic columns to survey, That sullenly their length of shadows throw On sons of earth, who, trembling, gaze below. 'Twas thus when to Quebec's proud heights afar Wolfe's chivalry rolled on the tide of war, The hardy Highlander, so fierce before, Languidly lifted up the huge claymore; To him the bugle's mellow notes were dumb, And even the rousing thunders of the drum, Till the loud pibroch sounded in the van, And led to battle forth each dauntless clan. Onrush the brave, the plaided chiefs advance; The line resounds, ' Lochiel's awa' to France! ' With vigorous arm the falchion lift on high, Fight as their fathers fought, and like their fathers die." Long as our extract is, there are, we suppose, few oi our readers who will deem it too long. Independently, LORD JEFFREY. 87 voo, of its exquisite vein, it illustrates better both the merits and the defects of Lord Jeffrey's theory of beauty than any other passage in the round of our literature with which we are acquainted. For there are scores whose degree of musical taste compels them to hold that there is a beauty in "simple sounds" altogether independent of association, for the single individuals whose sense of the beauty of " simple colors " is sufficiently strong to convince them that it, like the other sense, has an underived existence wholly its own. We have left ourselves but little space to speak of the distinguished man, so recently lost to us, as a lawyer, a statesman, and a judge. He will be long remembered in Edinburgh as one of the most accomplished and effective pleaders that ever appeared at the Scottish bar. It has become common to allude to his appearances in the House of Commons as failures. We know not how his speeches may have sounded in the old chapel of St. Stephen's ; but this we know, that of all the speeches in both Houses of which the Reform Bill proved the fruitful occasion, we remember only his : we can ever recall some of its happy phrases ; as when, for instance, he described the important measure which he advocated as a firmament which was to separate the purer waters above from the fouler and more turbulent waters below, the solid worth of the country, zealous for reform, from its wild, unprincipled licentious- ness, bent on subversion ; and, founding mainly on this selective instinct of our memory, we conclude that the speech, which is said to have disappointed friends and gratified opponents, must have been really one of the best delivered at the time, perhaps the very best. As a judge, the character of Jeffrey may be summed up in the vigorous stanza of Dryden : " In Israel's courts ne'er sat an Abethdin With more discerning eyes, or hands more clean, Unbribed, unsought, the wretched to redress, Swift of despatch, and easy of access." 88 HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL. All accounts agree in representing him as in private life one of the kindest and gentlest of mortals, ever surrounded by the aroma of a delicate sense of honor and a transpar- ent truthfulness, equable in temper, in conversation full of a playful case, and, with even his ordinary talk, ever glittering in an unpremeditated wit, "that loved to play, not wound." Never was there a man more thoroughly beloved by his friends. Though his term of life exceeded the allotted threescore and ten years, his fine intellect, like that of the great Chalmers, whom he sincerely loved and respected, and by whom he was much loved and respected in turn, was to the last untouched by decay. Only four days previous to that of his death he sat upon the bench ; only a few months ago he furnished an article for his old " Review," distinguished by all the nice discernment and acumen of his most vigorous days. It is further gratifying to know, that though infected in youth and middle age by the wide-spread infidelity of the first French revolu- tion, he was for at least the last few years of his life of a different spirit : he read much and often in his Bible ; and he is said to have studied especially, and with much solicitude, the writings of St. Paul. FIRE AT THE TOWER OF LONDON. 89 XI. FIRE AT THE TOWER OF LONDON. Three of the most interesting ancient buildings of Britain destroyed by fire within less than ten years ! " Are such calamities as these really unavoidable ? " asks a writer in the Times, " and ought we to make up our minds to hear of the conflagration of some great national treasure every five or ten years as a thing that must be ? " Treasures of at least equal value still survive to England, Windsor, Hampton Court, the British Museum, and the great University Libraries. How are they to be pro- tected ? Increased vigilance and care are recommended by this writer. Fires smoulder for hours ere they burst forth so as to be detected by the watchmen outside ; and they have then, in most cases, become too formidable to be got under. But by stationing careful persons within our more valuable buildings, instructed to visit every apartment and passage once every hour, might not the mischief be detected at a stage when it could be easily overmastered ? Statistical fact, however, comes in to show that the suggestion is less wise than obvious ; buildings so watched are found more liable to destruction from fire than those for whose safety no such precautions are taken. The private watchman has to use a light in his rounds ; in cold weather he requires a fire ; though essential that ho be of steady character, there is a liability to be deceived, on the part of the employer, considerable enough to tell in the statistical table as an element of accident. Even when there is no unsteadiness, inattention is apt to ci-eep on men watching against an enemy that has just a chance of visiting what they guard once in five hundred years. 8* 90 HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL. In short, the result of the matter is, that insurance offices, founding on their tables, demand a higher premium for houses guarded in this manner than for houses left alto- gether unprotected. To meet with the evil thus indicated, the writer in the Times suggests that the watchmen, in order to keep up their vigilance, should be changed once every two years ; that each at the end of his term should have to look forward to some certain promotion as a reward of his diligence and care; and that none but active, pru- dent, trustworthy men should be chosen for the office. The scheme, of course, lies open to the objection just hinted at; the inevitable liability of employers to be deceived in chai-acter would in not a few cases render the precaution useless. We question, too, whether the attention of a watchman who visited every part of a large building some ten or twelve times each night for two years together, could be. so continually kept up that more than a balance would be struck between the dangers he introduced and those he prevented. It is doubtful, we say, whether, even by a scheme thus improved, the statistician would find that the watchman did more than neutralize himself. One suggestion, however, may be made on the subject, which we are convinced the practical man will at once recognize as sound. The causes of the three great fires which within the last seven years have inflicted three great calamities on the country, seem, so far as they can be ascertained, to have been all pretty much alike : they all appear to have been connected with the overheating of flues. The buildings were all ancient ones, none of them at least less so than the times of William III. ; and they have all been destroyed by accidents originating in the modem mode of heating houses by stoves and metal flues. Any one practically acquainted with the subject must see that in every such case the liability to accidents of this nature is inevitably great. In building a house, the workman can take the necessary precautions as he proceeds. He can take care, for instance, that no beam FIRE AT THE TOWER OF LONDON. 01 or joist, or other piece of wood, approach any flue nearer than a foot, the distance specified by act of Parliament ; but in altering a house, he can, in striking out his flues, take no such precautions. In cutting through the hard walls, there may be wood within an inch of him, of which he can know nothing, wood covered up at times by a mere film of mortar ; and no possible care can guarantee him against accidents. He is of necessity a worker in the dark ; nor, in the circumstances, can it be otherwise. Still, however, one very effectual kind of precaution may be taken. A medium for heating such a flue may be employed through which fire cannot be communicated. A metal flue, heated in the ordinary manner, becomes not unfrequently red hot, and sets fire to whatever wood may be in contact with it ; and hence, we doubt not, the destruction of both Houses of Parliament, the Royal Exchange, and the National Armory. But steam, when employed as the heating medium, is restricted to a certain temperature, above which it cannot rise, and which cannot set fire to wood or any other substance employed in architecture. We would therefore suggest it should be laid down as a rule, that in all ancient buildings heated by metal flues, the heating medium should be steam, and that the furnance should always be in a fire-proof outhouse, disconnected from every other building. Simple as the precaution may seem, we are certain it would diminish the chances of accident from fire by full two thirds of their present amount. It is melancholy enough that in so brief a period three of the most interesting public buildings of England or the world should have thus perished. Each of the three has been associated for centuries with the history of Britain, in all for which Britain is most famous. Her emporium of trade is still a heap of blackened ruins, the noble and venerable pile that served to connect her commerce of the present day, spread over every land and every sea, with her commerce of three hundred years ago, 92 HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL. when a few adventurous traders struck out in quest of yet undiscovered shores, into oceans still undefined by the geographer, and whose remoter skirts seemed as if bounded by lines of darkness ! Her halls of legislation perished next, erections the history of which is that of civil liberty, not in Britain only, but over half the world, places suggestive of every great English name that mingles in the history of the lengthened contest between right and prerogative, from the days of Pryne and Hampden down to those of Chatham and Fox. And now the national magazine of trophies and arms has fallen a prey to the devouring element. The building representative of the wars and victories of Britain has shared the same fate with her halls of commerce and legislation ; and much has perished, as in the other cases, which cannot be estimated at a money value, and which money cannot replace ; the relics of Blenheim and of Waterloo, the remains of the two rebellions in Scotland, the arms of Tippoo Saib, the bows employed at Cressy and Agincourt, the spoils of the Armada and of Trafalgar, much that linked together the names and triumphs of many of our greatest warriors, by exhibiting their exploits, if we may so expi'ess ourselves, on one platform, that grouped together the memories, as well as the trophies, of Blake and of Nelson, that associated Henry the Fifth with William of Orange, and brought into close juxtaposition the names and histories of Marlborough and of Wellington. The loss is a national one, and we fear we would but lay ourselves open to a charge of extravagance were we to say at how great a rate we estimate it. Some of our readers must remember the instance given by Thomas Brown of the force with which distant existences or events are sometimes impressed on the mind through the medium of objects in themselves trivial and uninteresting. He relates the case of some English sailors moved to sudden tears by thoughts of home and their friends, on finding on the bleak coast of Labrador a metal spoon with FIRE AT THE TOWER OF LONDON". 93 the name "London" stamped on the handle. Such is the constitution of the mind, that the seen and the tangible impart to whatever we associate with them impressiveness and reality. The armor worn by an ancient king sets him much more vividly before us than the chronicles of his reign, however minute ; the trophies of a battle enable us better to realize it than the most graphic descriptions of the historian, or, rather, they give to the descriptions a new sense of truth, by rendering them in some degree evident to the senses ; they are the stone and earth by which we enfeoff ourselves in them as matters of solid belief. There is an interest, too, in such relics regarded in their connection with classical literature, as a sort of goods and chatties of cultivated minds. Who acquainted with letters, whether in our own country or abroad, did not regret, in the destruction of both Houses of Parlia- ment, the loss of the old and faded tapestry which sug- gested to Chatham his eloquent and impressive appeal ? Or who interested in Shakspeare does not feel that England was richer for possessing what it possessed only a week ago, the identical apartment in which Clarence was smothered in his Malmsey ? Whatever is intimately associated with the great names of a nation forms a portion of the national wealth. The feeling that it does so, says an eminent writer of the last age, is a feeling implanted by nature; "and when I find Tully confessing of himself, that he could not forbear, at Athens, to visit the walks and houses which the old philosophers had frequented or inhabited, and recollect the reverence which every nation, civil and barbarous, has paid to the ground where merit has been buried, I am afraid to declare against the general voice of mankind, and am inclined to believe that this regard which we involuntarily pay to the meanest relic of a man great and illustrious, is intended as an incite- ment to labor, and an encouragement to expect the same renown, if it be sought by the same virtues." 94 HISTORICAL AXD EIOGRAPHICA.L. XII. THE CENTENARY OF " THE FORTY-FIVEP The General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland held its first meeting at Inverness on Thursday the 21st ult. ; and on Tuesday the 19th, just two days before, a party of gentlemen and ladies, accompanied by half a dozen pipers, visited Glenfinnon in rather showery weather, and called their visit the "Centennial Commemoration of the Gathering of the Clans." A great reality, and the meagre ghost of what had been a great reality a hundred years ago, entered upon the stage at nearly the same place and time, but with a very different result from that which almost always takes place in the ghost scene in Hamlet. Hamlet the living a thing, as he himself informs us, of " too, too solid flesh " attracts but a small share of attention compared with that excited by the unsolid spectre of Hamlet the dead ; the shadow fairly eclipses the substance. But here, on the contrary, it was the sub- stance that fairly eclipsed the shadow. The solid reality so occupied the mind of the Highlands that it had not a thought to spare on the unsolid ghost ; and so the ghost, all drooping and disconsolate, passed off the stage unap- plauded and unseen. We could find no room at the time for the paragraph that formed the sole record of its en- trance and exit : our columns were occupied to the full with matters which the " clans " deemed of more serious concernment than the centenary of their gathering in Glenfinnon, -r- among the rest, with the very grave fact that not a few of their present chieftains are grossly out- raging their rights of conscience, and chasing them, when they meet to worship God on the brown moors and bleak THE CENTENARY OF " THE FORTY- FIVE." 95 hillsides of their country, to its exposed cross-roads and its wild sea-beaches. But we have found room for it now, not as a piece of news, for, after the lapse of a month, it has become somewhat stale, but as the record of an event which, though but a trifle in itself, is at least inter- esting in what it indicates. A feather has been held to the lips of dead Jacobitism, to ascertain whether there was breath enough left within to stir the fibres, and not a single fibre has moved ; and the paragraph on the " Cen- tennial Commemoration " records the experiment and its result. There are curious mental phenomena connected with the history of the decay of Jacobitism in Scotland. Like the matter of decomposing bodies, it passed, at a certain stage in its progress, from the solid to the gaseous form, and found entrance in the more subtle state into a class of minds from which, in its grosser and more tangible condition, it had been excluded. We are introduced in the letters of Burns to an ancient lady, stately and solemn, and much a Jacobite, who boasted that she had the blood of the Bruce in her veins, and who conferred, in virtue of her descent, the dignity of knighthood on the poet. We learn further, that the poet and the ancient lady, during the evening they spent together, agreed remarkably well : she would scarce have knighted him otherwise. She pro- posed toasts so full of loyalty to the exiled family that they were gross treason against the reigning one ; but, notwithstanding their extremeness, the poet cordially drank to them, and, in short, seemed in every respect as zealous a Jacobite as herselfT But there was a wide difference between the Jacobitism of Burns and that of the ancient lady. Hers was of the solid, his of the gaseous cast. Her mind was of the order in which effete opinions and. dying beliefs are cherished to the last ; his of the salient order, that are the first to receive new impressions and to take up new views. She would undoubtedly have died a Jacobite of the old grim type, that were content to forfeit 96 HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL. land and life in the cause of a shadowy loyalty ; he, on the other hand, only a few years after, incurred the suspicion and displeasure of Government by sending a present of artillery to the French Convention, to assist in defending a people who had deposed their king, against all other kings, and the Jacobites of their own country. The Jacobite of one year, who addressed enthusiastic verses to the "revered defenders of beauteous Stuart," and composed the " Chevalier's Lament," had become in the next the uncompromising Jacobin, who wrote " A man's a man for a' that." Now, through the very opposite classes of minds represented by the old lady and the poet has Jacobitism passed in Scotland, in its progress to extinction. The class of true Jacobites the men in whom Jacobitism was a solid principle died with the generation that fought at Culloden, and they were succeeded by the class to whom Jacobitism formed merely a sort of laughing-gas, that agreeably excited the feelings. These last bore ex- actly the same sort of relation to the race that preceded them, that our admirers of earnestness in the present day bear to the earnest men of a bygone time whom they admire. Their principle was ineffective as a principle of action : it was purely a thing of excited imaginations, and of feelings strung by the aspirations of romance ; and died away, even when elevated to its highest pitch, in tones of sweet music, or the wild cadences of ballad poetry. But this Jacobitism of the middle stage of decay had at least the merit of being a reflection of the real Jaco- bitism that had gone before. It was Jacobitism mirrored in poetry. Not such, however, the character of yet a third species of Jacobitism, that exists at the present in a few calculating minds wretchedly unfitted for the work of calculation. We have heard of an English divine of the last century, who, having grafted on his theology the phi- losophy of Bolingbroke and Pope, used to assert in his dis- courses that whatever was was right, and who was urged after sermon, on one occasion, by an individual of his THE CENTENARY OF " THE FORTY-FIVE." 97 congregation, a little, thin man, formed somewhat like the letter S, with one shoulder greatly higher and one leg greatly shorter than the other, to say whether he was all right. " Oh yes, all right," was the unhesitating reply of the reverend doctor ; " you are quite right for a crip- ple." Now, the middle stage of Scotch Jacobitism was in like manner quite a right thing of its kind : its legs and shoulders were not equal ; it stumped about on a Jacobit- ical leg to-day, and sometimes, as in the case of Burns, stood on a Jacobinical leg to-morrow ; but then it was all quite right for a cripple, and, if it could do nothing more, produced at least some pretty music and some exquisite song. The existing Jacobitism, or, rather, the Jacobitism not existing, but merely supposed to exist, a shadow of a shade, a cripple a thousand times more lame than the Jacobitism its immediate predecessor, for it has got no legs at all; and not only no legs, but it can neither sing nor make poetry, is rendered ridiculous by being represented as all right absolutely, and not as a cripple, as one of, not the fantasies, but the forces, of the country, as one, not of its mere night-dreams, but of its waking-day realities, as not a phantom, but a power. The grand mistake of the Times on this subject must still be fresh in the minds of our readers, as it took place little more than three years ago, during the time of her Majesty's first progress through Scotland. The Scotch Lowlanders, said this journal, usually so sagacious in its estimates, but sorely bemuddled in these days by its Puseyism, were no doubt a nai'row-minded, fanatical, puritanical, selfish set, all agog about non-intrusion and the independence of the Kirk ; but very different was the spirit of the Highlands. There the old generous loyalty still existed entire ; the long-derived devotion to hereditary claims, and the ancient implicit subjection to divine right. There, in short, ambitious Puseyism, eager to fling its shoe over Scotland, was to find in existing Jacobitism such a friend and. ally as the " king over the water " had found 9 98 HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL. in it a century ago. The Times has since been undeceived But there still exist quarters in which Highland Jacobitisra continues to be fondly clung to as an actual power, and a religious party that regard it as a bona fide ally. We found, when in the Western Highlands last summer, that the approaching commemoration was regarded as a popish movement at bottom ; and it would be certainly not un- interesting to know what proportion of the some three or four hundred Highlanders that are said to have turned out on the occasion belonged to the Romish communion. Certainly, if Rome wished, by masquerading at the Cen- tenary in the romance of " The Forty-five," to make an impression on the more active imaginations of the country, she has not been very successful. There is vastly more of the bizarre than of the solemn in the trappings of the Jacobite domino, as accident and pretension have conspired to trim it. It has got bells to its cap. We see it cham- pioned by " Young Scotland," a personage recognized by the half-dozen that ever heard of him as very young indeed, and headed by a Percie Shafton, the undoubted descendant of the royal Stuarts, that edits tartan patterns, the strips of which had been preserved in manuscript in the library of the Scotch Church at Douay, and trembles, meanwhile, lest some unlucky bodkin should establish the maternal relation of old Overstitch the tailor. Happy modern Jacobitism ! It is no more a great-grandson of the Pretender that you can boast of as the central figure in your picturesque group, but the Pretender himself, whole and entire. Yes; the river, with its deep pools and eddying currents, has turned into a different channel from that in which it flowed a century ago ; and it is but idle work to be wan- dering along the deserted course, with its few stagnant Bh allows, where a handful of landlocked minnows await the droughts that are to lay them dry, as if the water and the great fish were still there. The tide of Highland devotion has long since set in, in a direction entirely opposite. The THE CENTENARY OF " THE FORTY-FIVE." 99 meeting at Glenfiunon was a meaningless pageant, and, it would seem, a miserably poor pageant to boot. Its enthu- siasm, warmed up specially for the occasion, and but luke- warm after all, had no more truth or reality in it than that of the ancient Pistol in the play. The heart of the High- lands was to be found beating elsewhere. It was at the Assembly at Inverness, to which from distant valley and solitary hillside the earnest-minded Celtae had congregated by thousands, that the enthusiasm was spontaneous and the devotion true. There beat, with all its old truth and warmth, the heart of the Highlands. But alas for the poor Highlanders ! It seems to be their destiny as a peo- ple to give evidence of their earnest and truthful natures by endurance and suffering. Such was the evidence they had to tender of old of their devotion to the Stuarts, and such the evidence which they have to tender now of their devotion to the cause of evangelical religion and a preached gospel. We saw the stalwart Camerons of Lochiel, whose country a century ago had been wasted by fire and sword, and themselves chased to the rocks and hills, for a loyalty to a hereditary king, again chased from the tombs of their fathers and their little holdings to the oozy sea-beach, and there worshipping God under the tide-line ; and the Grants of Strathspey, of all our Highland clans the clan that last manifested, after the old type, its devotion to its hereditary lord ; for, little more than twenty years ago, on learning that his person was endangered in some electioneering contest in the Lowlands, five hundred of its fighting men marched down from their hills to protect him ; these poor clansmen, over a wide and exposed district, denied a place of shelter, have to worship in the open air. And in both cases the persecutor of the clan was its chief, anxious, ap- parently, that his hereditary followers should be his fol- lowers no longer, nor run any further risk of getting into awkward collisions with the law for his sake. We have heard wonder expressed that a single century should be sufficient to effect in the Highland mind so great a change 100 HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL. as the revolution indicated by the opposite aspects of the " Centenary of the Forty-five " and the Inverness Assem- bly. We do not see that there is much cause for wonder. The Presbyterian Highlander of the present day is removed further, by some ten or twelve years, from his popish ancestor who fought at Culloden, than the Presbyterian Covenanter of 1638 was removed from his popish ancestor who fought at Pinkie. It does not require centuries to effect the change in opinion and character which evangel- ism, when once introduced into a country, is sure always to induce. One peculiarity, however, of the Highlander's position, in reference to the comparative^ late introduc- tion of evangelism among his hills, seems not unworthy of mention. Unlike the Southern Scot, who recognizes the old Covenanter as his ancestor, and is, in some instances, a Free Churchman in virtue of the fact, the Highlander of at least the Western and Midland Highlands has no heredi- tary associations on the side of his beliefs. His hereditary associations, on the contrary, are ranged on the side of Jacobitism. But he is not the less, but the more earnest in his Free Churchism in consequence. His feelings are more fresh, direct, and simple. He is no mere admirer of the Covenanters ; he is what the Covenanters themselves were. Alas ! how the short-lived childi"en of men press on to the tomb! A century has "now passed since the clans mustered in Glenfinnon ; and there are few Scotchmen in middle life to whom that event does not stand as a sort of beacon in the tide of time, to indicate how wave after wave of the generations of the past has broken on the silent shores of eternity, arid disappeared from the world for ever. The writer of these remarks was born within the present century, and yet even he can look back on some three or four several generations of men, peculiarly marked in their neighborhood by the epoch of the rebellion, who have passed in succession from this visible scene of things, lighted up by the sun, to the dark land of forgetfulness. THE CENTENARY OF u THE FORTY-FIVE." 101 First, we remember a few broken vestiges of a generation that had beea engaged in the active business of life when the field of Culloden was stricken. We attended, when a mere boy, the funeral of an old Highlander, a Stuart, who had fought in it on the side of the Prince. We knew another old man, who had been a ship-boy at the time in a vessel with some government stores aboard, that, shortly before the battle, was seized by the rebels ; and have heard him tell how, when joking with them, for they were by no means a band of cut-throat-looking men, he ventured to speak of their Prince as the Pretender, and was cau- tioned by one of them to use a more civil word for the future. We remember, too, being brought by two grown- up relatives to visit an old man on his death-bed, who, like the first, had fought at Culloden, but on the side of Hanover. He had been settled in life at the time as the head gardener of a northern proprietor, and little dreamed of being engaged in war ; but the rebellion broke out ; his master, a kindly man, and a great Whig, volunteered in behalf of his principles under Duke William, and his at- tached gardener went with him. At the time of our visit, when stretched on the bed from which he never after- ward rose, he had outlived his century. He had been an extremely powerful man in his day ; and the large wrin- kled hand, and huge structure of bone, and deep, full voice, still remained, to testify, amid the general wreck, to what he had once been. His memory for all the later events of his life was gone, so that the preceding forty years of it seemed a blank; but well did he remember the battle, and still more vividly, and with deep execration, the succeed- ing atrocities of Cumberland. These vestiges of the age of Culloden passed away, and the generation immediately behind them fell into the front ranks, ancient men and women, who had been mere boys and girls at the time of the "fight," but who vividly remembered some of its details. We knew one of these, an aged woman, who, on the day of the battle, had been tending some sheep on a 9* 102 HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL. solitary moor, separated from that of Culloden by an arm of the sea, and screened by a lofty hill, and who had sat listening in terror to the boom of the cannon and the rattle of the musketry, scared as much by the continuous howl- ing of her dog, which she regarded as coupled with some supernatural cause, as by the deadly " thunders in the moors." We intimately knew another who witnessed the battle, though in no very favorable circumstances for mi- nute observation, from the Hill of Cromarty. The day, he has told us, was drizzly and thick ; and on reaching the brow of the hill, where he found a vast group of the towns- folk already assembled, he could scarce see the opposite land. But the fog gradually cleared away ; first one hill- top came into view, and then another, till at length the long range of coast, from the opening of the great Caledonian Valley to the promontory of Brugh-head, was dimly visible through the haze. A little after noon there arose a sudden burst of round white cloud from the moor of Culloden, and then a second burst beside it, and then they mingled to- gether, and went rolling slantways on the wind towards the west ; and he could hear the rattle of the smaller firearms mingling with the roar of the artillery. And then, in what seemed a wonderfully short space of time, the cloud dissi- pated and disappeared, and the boom of the greater guns ceased, and a sharp intermittent patter of musketry passed on towards Inverness. Such was the battle of Culloden, as witnessed by the writer's maternal grandfather, then a boy in his fourteenth year. The years passed by, and he and the generation to which he belonged followed the generation that had gone before ; and then the front rank in the general march to the tomb came to be occupied by those so long known in Scotland as the Culloden-year people, a class of persons who stood in no need of con- sulting records and registers for the date of their birth, for the battle had drawn, as if with the sword-edge, its deep score athwart the time, so that all took note of it. But the Culloden-year people passed from the stage also ; every THE CENTENARY OF " THE FORTY-FIVE." 103 season in its flight left them fewer and feebler ; and we now see the front rank composed of their children, a gray-haired generation, drooping earthwards, who have already spent in their sojourn the term so long since fixed by the psalmist. And thus as wave succeeds wave, storm- impelled, from the ocean, to break upon the shore pass away and disappear the generations of man. It were well, 6ince our turn must come next, to be distinguishing in time between- the solid and the evanescent, the things which wear out like the old Jacobitism of the past, and become sorry shows and idle mockeries, and the things immortal in their natures, which contumely cannot degrade nor persecution put down. XIII. THE HALF-QENTURY. The first fifty years of the nineteenth century terminated a few hours ago, and we have now entered upon the sec- ond fifty. As last night's clock struck twelve, the most important half-century of modern history came to its close, and a half-century which threatens to be scarce less event- ful began its course. The general progress made by Great Britain during the lapsed period has been great beyond all former precedent ; but there is one special department in which it is ominously, fearfully great ; and should the same ratio of increase continue throughout the succeeding fifty years, there will be problems for our country to solve, compared with which those of the present day, difficult as they may seem, may be regarded as the tasks of children. At the commencement of the half-century just closed, the population of England and Scotland united did not much 104 HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL. exceed eight millions of souls ; in 1841 it considerably ex- ceeded eighteen millions ; and, as the census of the present year will by and by show, it now exceeds twenty millions. For every two Britons that existed on their native soil when the century began, there now exist five, and in fifty years there has taken place in the population an increase of a hundred and fifty per cent. ; and at the close of the nineteenth century, should the same rate of increase con- tinue, the soil of Great Britain will be encumbered by fifty millions of human creatures. How the privileges of pro- prietors, as now defined, are to be made good in such a state of things should such a state of things ever arrive against the pressing claims of the crowded masses, it is at present difficult to see ; but in this element of increase alone an element which the inadequate expedient of emigration, that, when most active, sends only one abroad for every additional three born at home, may in vain ex- pect to counterbalance we recognize a disturbing agent, suited, even did it stand alone, to give more than employ- ment enough to the philanthropists and statesmen of the future. Since the death of Chalmers it has not been cus- tomary to press much on this topic ; but considerably less than half a century will serve to show how entirely he was in the right regarding it. Fifty years form a large proportion of the period as- signed to man ; and those whose powers of observation were active at the beginning of the present century, and their opportunities of exercising them considerable, must now be far advanced in life. We, however, reckon among our readers individuals who can compare from personal observation the Scotland of 1801 with Scotland in the present day, and who can tell how, over wide areas, the face of the country has changed. We ourselves, though born within the half-century, are acquainted with exten- sive localities in which, within our recollection, the breadth of corn-land has fully doubled. We have seen it slowly advancing over moory waste and brown hillside, till, THE HALF-CENTURY. 105 where only heath and ling and unproductive brushwood used to grow, every autumn mottles over the landscape with shocks of corn. In proportion as the population was increasing were the means of their support in these locali- ties increasing also. But it was chiefly in lowland districts, or in districts which merely bordered on the Highlands, that we witnessed this change for the better taking place. Much of the Highlands themselves has been the subject of a reverse process. During the last half-century many a sheltered glen and fertile valley have given their cultivated patches back to waste; and where human habitations once stood, and happy communities once lived, we find but moss-covered ruins and the solitude of a desert. And it would seem as if this state of management had already produced its crisis. Where the corn-land has more than doubled its area, or, what amounts to the same thing, more than doubled its produce, there is food and employment for the more than doubled population ; whereas in the Highlands, on the contrary, famine stares the unhappy inhabitants full in the face, and Lowland Scotland is told, that, unless it exert itself greatly in their behalf, thousands of them must perish. It will be a question for the next half-century practically to determine whether, as the population is growing, and seems destined to grow, the Highlands must not be compelled in the general be- half to sustain their own portion of it. There is another question which this continued increase in the numbers of the people will at length render all potent. Men have wondered how, in a country such as China, where the tone of morailty is low and the government is corrupt, education should have such honors and privileges attached to it, that it forms the sole means of rising into place and affluence. The true secret of the matter is to be read in the fact that China, with its three hundred millions of inhabitants, is the most populous country on the face of the earth. Ignorance, therefore, cannot be tolerated in China ; and knowledge, including, as a matter of course, a thorough 106 HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL, acquaintance with the arts by which men live, is at a piemium there. However unacquainted with what most ennobles man, the Chinese cannot be left ignorant of how to use their own homely phrase "men are to get their rice." Were the case otherwise, they would of necessity have to eat one another ; and so in this vast nation, still in some respects a semibarbarous one, a certain measure of education is universal ; and its cheap literature, notwith- standing its block-printing and its difficult character, is the most immense in the world. And, on a similar princi- ple, the growing population of Britain will force upon the country the question of an adequate education for the people. It is difficult to overpeople any nation with a taught and industrious race of men. China is not over- peopled with its three hundred millions. Ireland, that has not half the number of inhabitants to the square mile, and the Highlands of Scotland, that have not the one- fortieth part the number to the square mile, are, on the contrary, greatly overpeopled ; and the difference consists mainly in this, that whereas the Chinese have, with all their many faults, been taught hosv to " get their rice," the poor Highlanders and the Irish have not. But, in this special department at least, the extreme limits of the "let- alone system " have been well-nigh reached ; and the next half-century will see knowledge more largely spread abroad, as a matter of necessity in which the very existence of the nation is involved, than any former age of the world. The time has at length come when "many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased." But though knowledge during the last half-century did greatly increase, so that there are now single periodicals that possess a larger circle of readers than composed in the previous half-century, according to the estimate of Burke, the whole reading public of Great Britain, there is another, and, as has been generally supposed, antago- nistic principle, that has increased in a still greater ratio. Popery reckons, at the close of the first half of the nine- THE HALF-CENTURY. 107 teenth century, about ten times the number of adherents within the two kingdoms that it reckoned when the cen- tury began. In producing a result so disastrous, Puseyism has no doubt had its share. There are but two elements in the religious world of Europe, the Popish and the Puritanic; and when, some fifteen years ago, a zeal- ous and influential section of English Episcopalians set themselves to reinvigorate their Church by revivingthe ceremonies and doctrines of a Christianity absolutely an- cient, but comparatively modern, for it dates at least three hundred years later than the age of the New Testa- ment, they had inevitably committed themselves, little as they might be aware of the fact at the time, to the popish element. And we now see the fruit of the com- mittal in the perversions which are taking place almost every day in the English Church. But these, though of mighty importance to Rome, have done comparatively little to swell her numbers. She owes the vast increase which has filled the dingier dwellings and poorer lanes of our larger towns with her votaries, to the overflowings of the miserable population of Ireland. The Romish Church has been no doubt much encouraged by the revival of the ancient Christianity within the pale of the English one ; and, save for this encouragement, it is not in the least likely that the aggression of the past year would have taken place ; but there can be as little doubt that it is the poor, neglected Irish, sacrificed generation after generation to the Erastian secularities of Protestant Episcopacy, and latterly expatriated by the potato disease, that popery owes its increase in Britain. There will be work enougli in this department for all the Protestant churches of the country for the coming half-century, if they would escape defeat and disgrace at their own doors. The last half-century has shown how difficult it is to calculate on the strength of churches. Its first decade witnessed the dethronement of the Pope by Napoleon ; its terminating decade, his flight from Rome under the terror of his revolutionary subjects. 108 HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL. And yet popery possesses at the present time a vast empire in the minds of men; and it has just dared to per- petrate, in consequence, one of its boldest aggressions on the most powerful empire in the world. And that aggres- sion has brought out the great strength of another church, which, about the time of the passing of the Reform Bill, was deemed so far from stroug that statesmen of no incon- siderable calibre held that almost any sort of liberty might be taken with the status of her dignitaries, or with her property. It seems unquestionably true, that the present powerful anti-popish movement, which has done what the zeal of Dissent could never do, stirred the nation to its very depths, has arisen among the English Episcopa- lians, and has been a direct consequence of what the Dis- sent of England and the Presbyterians of Scotland regard as a very inconsiderable element in the matter, the en- croachment on the domains of the English bishops. We recognize in the fact the correctness of the impression made upon us when residing for a short time in England a few years ago. We crossed the borders in the belief, pretty general, we are disposed to think, among Scotchmen, that the active power of nonconformity in the southern kingdom was not much less than a match for the mere passive power of its Established Episcopacy : we came away full under the conviction that the two powers are so very unequal that it is scarce wise to name them together. Established Episcopacy in England represents the soldiers of a vast army leaning silently on their arms ; whereas Dissent may be rather likened to the handful led by Gideon, making great show and much noise, but, unless miracles be wrought in their behalf, not destined to make a very considerable impression on the country. And so evangelism in Scotland has a much larger stake in the doctrinal soundness of the English Church than it seems to be aware of. Judging from present appearances, the religion of the English Church, whatever that may come- to be, bids fair to be also the religion of the English Con- THE HALF-CENTURY. 109 stitution ; and therefore, though we respect many of the honest and good men who seem determined at the present crisis to do battle both with popery and Established Epis- copacy, we cannot think they have by any means fallen on the best way of dealing with the emergency. They will, we are afraid, find either opponent quite a match for them ; and should they set themselves to fight against both at once, neither Protestantism nor themselves will gain any- thing by their coming into the field. Another mighty increase has taken place during the lapsed half-century in the numbers of the poor. It is generally, and, we think, justly held, that that enormous amount of pauperism in Scotland which, at the time of the Revolution, Fletcher of Saltoun could deem so formi- dable, was, in great part at least, a result of the previous persecution. There can be at least as little doubt that it was the termination of the church controversy, not in an equitable adjustment, suited to place under the control of our civil courts all the temporalities of the church, and under her courts ecclesiastical all her spiritualities, but in the Disruption, an event gilded by the glory of con- scientious sacrifice, but not the less, but rather the more, on that account a calamity to the country, that brought the pauper question to a crisis, and saddled upon Scotland a crushing poor-law. It is a surely not uninstructive fact, that the proprietors of the country have paid for the support of the poor, since this event, a sum as large as would have purchased all their patronages three times over, a sum which previous to the collision they had not to pay, and which, had they urged the question to a different issue, they would not have to pay now. The settlement which the controversy received has been, eco- nomically at least, a very bad settlement for them. But there is no party that need triumph in such a result. Free Churchmen, as certainly as Established Churchmen, puffer in consequence ; and the hard problem subjected to the country through the event it may take the whole of 10 110 HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL. the next half-century to solve. It is something, however, that it is already compelling attention, and that Carlyle'a " Condition of the People Question " is recognized as the great question of the day. These are but desultory re- marks, and, withal, sufficiently prosaic ; but the magnitude of the subject oppresses us ; nor dare we attempt condens- ing into an article what, could we devote a whole volume to the survey, would require -J,o be even then greatly condensed. XIV. THE ECHOES OF THE WORLD. DR. CHALMERS. Has the reader ever heard a piece of heavy ordnance fired amid the mountains of our country ? First there is the ear-stunning report of the piece itself, the prime mover of those airy undulations that travel outwards, circle beyond circle, towards the far horizon ; then some hoary precipice, that rises tall and solemn in the immediate neighborhood, takes up the sound, and it comes rolling back from its rough front in thunder, like a giant wave flung far seaward from the rock against which it has broken ; then some more distant hill becomes vocal, and then an- other, and another, and anon another ; and then there is a slight pause, as if all were over, the undulations are travelling unbroken along some flat moor, or across some expansive lake, or over some deep valley, filled, haply, by some long withdrawing arm of the sea ; and then the more remote mountains lift up their voices in mysterious mut- terings, now lower, now louder, now more abrupt, anon more prolonged, each, as it recedes, taking up the tale in THE ECHOES OF THE WORLD. Ill closer succession to the one that had previously spoken, till at length their distinct utterances are lost in one low, continuous sound, that at last dies out amid the shattered peaks of the desert wilderness, and unbroken stillness settles over the scene, as at first. Through a scarce voluntary exercise of that faculty of analogy and comparison so nat- ural to the human mind, that it converts all the existences of the physical world into forms and expressions of the world moral and intellectual, we have oftener than once thought of the phenomenon, and its attendant results, as strikingly representative of effects produced by the death of Chalmers. It is an event which has, we find, rendei'ed vocal the echoes of the world; and they are still returning upon us, after measured intervals, according to the distan- ces. First, as if from the nearer rocks and precipices, they arose from the various towns and cities of Scotland that possess their periodicals ; then from the great southern metropolis, and the other towns and cities of England, as if from the hills immediately beyond ; from Ireland next; and next from France and Geneva, and the European Con- tinent generally. And then there was a slight pause. The tidings were passing in silence, without meeting an intelli- gent ear on which to fall, across the wide expanse of the Atlantic. And then, as if from more distant mountains, came the voices of the States, and the colonies, and the West Indian Islands. It was no uninteresting task to un- robe from their close brown covers, that spake in color and form of a foreign country, the Transatlantic journals, and read tribute after tribute to the worth and intellectual greatness of the departed ; and to hear of the funeral ser- mons preached far away, on the very verge of the civilized world, amid half-open clearings in the vast forest, or in hastily-erected towns and villages that but a few twelve- months before had no existence. Nor have all the echoes of the event returned to us even yet. They have still to arise from, if we may so express ourselves, the more dis- tant peaks of the landscape, from the Eastern Indies, 112 HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL. Australia, and the antipodes. Every more remote echo, while it indicates how great the distance which the original undulations have traversed, and how wide the area which they fill, serves also of necessity to demonstrate the far- piercing character and greatness of the event which first set them in motion. Dryden, in describing the grief occa- sioned by the death of some august and "gracious monarch," describes it as bounded, with all its greatness and extent, by his own dominions : "Thus, when some great and gracious monarch dies, Soft whispers first and mournful murmurs rise Among the sad attendants ; then the sound Soon gathers voice, and spreads the news around Through town and country, till the dreadful blast Is blown to distant colonies at last." There have been no such limitations to the sorrow for Chalmers. The United States and the Continent have sympathizingly responded of one mind in this matter, as of one blood, with ourselves to the regrets of Britain and the colonies. We have few men left whose names so completely fill the world as that of Chalmers. The group of great men to which Thomas Chalmers belonged has now well-nigh disappeared. Goldsmith has written an ingenious essay to show that the " rise or decline of literature is little dependent on man, but results rather from the vicissitudes of nature." The larger minds, he remarks, are not unfrequently ushered into the world in groups ; and after they have passed away, there intervene wide periods of repose, in which there are only minds of a lower order produced. " Some ages have been remark- able," he says, " for the production of men of extraordinary stature; others for producing particular animals in great abundance ; some for excessive plenty ; others, again, for seemingly causeless famine. Nature, which shows herself so very different in her visible productions, must surely THE ECHOES OP THE WORLD. 113 differ also from herself in the production of minds ; and, while she astonishes one age with the strength and stature of a Milo or a Maximian, may bless another with the wisdom of a Plato or the goodness of an Antonine." In glancing over the history of modern Europe, and more especially that of the British empire, civil and literary, one can scarce fail to mark a cycle of production of this character, which now seems far advanced in its second revolution. The seventeenth century was in this country peculiarly a period of great men. Cromwell and Shakspeare were so far contemporary, that when, little turned of fifty, the poet lay on his deathbed, the future Lord Protector, then a lad of seventeen, was riding beside his father, to enter as a student the University of Cambridge ; and the precocious Milton, though still younger, was, we find, quite mature enough to estimate the real stature of the giant that had fallen, and to deplore his premature death in stanzas des- tined to live forever. And when, in after life, the one great man sat writing, to the dictation of the other, the well-known noble letter to Louis in behalf of Continental Protestantism, the mathematician, Isaac Newton, sat en- sconced among his old books in the garret at Grantham ; the metaphysician, John Locke, was engaged at Oxford in his profound cogitation on the nature and faculties of mind ; John Bunyan was a soldier of the Commonwealth ; Cowley was studying botany in Kent ; Butler was pouring forth his vast profusion of idea in the dwelling of Sir Samuel Luke ; Dryden, at the ripe age of twenty-seven, was mak- ing his first rude efforts in composition in Trinity College ; Sir Matthew Hale was administering justice in London, and planning his great law works ; and, though Hampden and Selden were both in their graves at the time, the for- mer, had he escaped the fatal shot, would still have been in but middle life, and the latter was but four years dead. The group was assuredly a very marvellous one. It passed away, however, like all that is of earth ; and there arose that other group of men, admirable in their proportions, 10 114: HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL. but of decidedly lower stature, that all in any degree acquainted with English literature recognize as the wits of Queen Anne. To this lower but very exquisite group the Popes, Swifts, and Addisons, the Gays, Parnells, and Priors belong. It also passed ; and a still lower group arose, with, it is true, a solitary Johnson and Burke raising their head and shoulders above the crowd, but attaining not, at least in the mass, to the statui-e of their immediate predecessors. And they themselves were well aware of their inferiority. Is the reader possessed of a copy of An- derson's "Poets?" From its chronological arrangement, it illustrates very completely the progress of that first great cycle of production from the higher to the lower minds to which we refer ; and with the works of the Jenyns, the Whiteheads, the Cottons, and the Blacklocks, the collec- tion closes. And then the cycle, as if the moving spring had been suddenly wound up to its original rigidity, begins anew. The gigantic figure of Napoleon appears as the centre of a great historic group; and we see ranged around him the tall figures of statesmen such as Pitt and Fox ; of soldiers such as Soult, Ney, and Wellington ; of popular agitators such as Cobbett and O'Connell ; of theological writers and leaders such as Hall, Foster, and Andrew Thomson ; and of literary men such as Goethe, Chateau- briand, Sir Walter Scott, and Wordsworth. The group is very decidedly one of men large and massy of stature ; and to this group, great among the greatest, Thomas Chal- mers belonged. It has, we repeat, nearly passed away. Wellington, Wordsworth, and Chateaubriand all well stricken in years, turned very considerably, the young- est of them, of the threescore and ten alone survive. Immediately beneath these, and bearing to them a relation very similar to that which the wits and statesmen of Queen Anne bore to the Miltons and Cromwells, their predeces- sors, stands a group, the largest of their day, including as politicians the Peels and Russells, and as literary men the Lockharts and Macaulays, of the present time. Happily THE ECHOES OF THE WORLD. 115 the Free Church, though its great leader be removed, does not lack at least its proportional number of these. They may uc uescnbed generally, with reference to their era, as men turned of forty ; and, so far as may be judged from the present appearance of things, the younger and succeeding group, just entered on the stage, are composed, as during the middle of the last century, of men of a third class, that seem well-nigh as inferior in height and muscle to those of the second, as the second are inferior in bulk, strength, and massiveness to those of the first. The third stage of the second cycle of production is, it would ap- pear, already full in view. In the poetical department of our literature this state of things is strikingly appai'ent. Ere the Cowpers and Burnses arose to herald the new and great era, the latter half of the last century had its War- tons and its Langhorns, true and sweet poets, but, it must be confessed, of somewhat minute proportions. The present time has its Moirs and its Alfred Tennysons; and they are true poets also, but poets on a not large scale, decidedly men of the third era. In glancing over the various tributes to the memory of Chalmers, one is struck with a grand distinction by which they may be ranged into two classes. Belonging, as he did, to two distinct worlds, the worlds literary and religious, we find estimates of his character and career made by representatives of both. In the one, the appre- ciation hinges, as on a pivot, on a certain great turning incident in his life ; in the other, there is either no reference made to this incident, or the principles on which it occurred are represented as of a common and obvious, and not very important character. Is it not truly strange, that the most influential event that can possibly take place in the history of individual man which has lain at the found- ation of the greatest revolutions of which the annals of the species furnish any record, and which constitutes the main objective theme of revelation should be scarce at all appreciated, even in its palpable character as a fact^ 116 HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL by the great bulk of the acutest and most intelligent writers of the present age ? That change in the heart and life which sent the apostles forth of old to Christianize the world, and the Reformers at a later time to re-Chris- tianize it, which, forming the charm of the successes of Cromwell, preserved to Britain its free Constitution, and which altered in toto the destinies of Chalmers, that change, we say, is rightly appreciated, in even its obvious character as a fact, by none of our purely literary men ; or, at least, if we must make one exception, by Thomas Carlyle alone. It constitutes a mighty spring of action, by far the mightiest in this world, of which the rest are ignorant. Regarded in this point of view, the following extract from the " People's Journal" a periodical con- ducted chiefly, it is understood, by Unitarians is not uninstructive. It refers to the conversion of Chalmers, and describes that event as occurring on a few obvious com- monplace principles : " A new era in the development of Chalmers' mind commences with bis engagement upon the article ' Christianity.' The powerful devotional tendency of his mind had hitherto, to all appearance, lain dormant. The protracted and unintermitting attention to re- ligious questions which, in the compilation of that essay, he was compelled to bestow, was favorable to the formation of a devotional habit of mind in one who, like all men of poetical temperament, was eminently liable to take the tone and color of his mind from the element in which he lived. The Leslie controversy, too, had bridged over the gulf Which had hitherto intervened between the higher orders of minds among the literati and the orthodox clergy of Scotland. The Dugald Stewarts and the Jeffreys on the one hand, the Moncreiffs and Thomsons on the other, had, while acting !i. concert, learned to know and appreciate each other's peculiar merits. The sentiment of political independence, and that liberal tolerance, the most uniform feature of superior minds, had infused permanent feelings of mutual good-will into minds which by their or- ganization were irreconcilably different. Chalmers, who had been thrown among the purely intellectual class in a great measure by the accident of position, was now attracted to the religious class, THE ECHOES OP THE WORLD. 117 with whom his natural sympathies were, if anything, still greater. He devoted himself more exclusively to the duties of his ministerial office, and, carrying into the pulpit the same buoyant enthusiasm, the same Herculean powers, he soon became one of the most dis-- tinguished inculcators of ' evangelical ' views of religion." Among the numerous funeral sermons of which the death of Chalmers has proved the occasion, we know not a finer, abler, or better-toned than one of the Transatlantic discourses. It is from the pen of Dr. Sprague, of Albany, United States, so well known in this country by his work on revivals. His estimate of the great change which not only expanded the heart, but also in no slight degree developed the intellect, of Chalmers, differs widely, as might be expected from the general tone of his writings, from that of the Unitarian in the "People's Journal." It is strange on what analogies men ingenious in misleading themselves when great principles are at stake contrive to fall. We have lately seen Cromwell's love of the Scrip- tures, and his diligence, according to the divine precept, in searching them, attributed to the mere military instinct, gratified, in his case, by the warlike stories of the Old Testament, as the resembling instinct was gratified in that of Alexander the Great by the stories of the Illiad. " He [Dr. Chalmers] removed to Kilmeny," says Dr. Sprague, " in 1803, where he labored for several years, and where occurred at least one of the most remarkable events of his life. It was nothing less, as he himself regarded it, than a radical change of character. Pre- vious to that period he seems to have looked upon the duties of his profession as a mere matter of official drudgery ; and not a small part of his time was devoted to science, particularly to the mathema- tics, to which his taste more especially inclined him. But having been requested to furnish an article for the " Edinburgh Encyclopaedia " on the evidences of divine revelation, in the course of the investi- gation to which he was led in the prosecution of this effort he was brought into communion with Christianity in all its living and trans- forming power. He not only became fully satisfied of its truth, of which before he had had only some indefinite and inoperative im- 118 HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL. pression, but he discovered clearly its higb practical relations ; ho surrendered himself to its teachings with the: spirit of a little child ; he reposed in its gracious provisions with the confidence of a pen- itent sinner ; and from that time to his dying . hour he gloried in nothing save in the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. He stood forth before the world strangely unlike what he had ever been before. There was a sacred fervor, an unearthly majesty, in all his utterings and all his writings. Scotland, Britain, the world, soon came to look at him with wonder, as one of the brightest luminaries of his time, as destined to exert a controlling influence upon the age, if not to work an epoch in the world's history. It was quickly found that there was a far higher effect produced by his ministrations than mere admira- tion, that the sword of the Spirit, wielded with such unwonted energy, was doing its legitimate work ; for worldliness could not bear his rebuke ; scepticism could not stand erect in his presence ; while a pure and living Christianity was constantly reproducing itself in the hearts of some one or other of his enchained hearers." Dr. Sprague's estimate of the intellectual character of Chalmers seems eminently just, and, formed at the dis- tance of more than three thousand miles from the more immediate scene of Chalmers' personal labors, for dis- tance in space has greatly the effect in such matters of distance in time, it may be regarded as foreshadowing the judgment of posterity. " The intellectual character of Dr. Chalmers was distinguished chiefly by its wonderful combination of the imaginative, the profound, and the practical. If there be on earth a mind constituted with greater power of imagination than his, we know not where to look for it. And because he was so preeminent in respect to this quality, I am inclined to think that some have underrated his more strictly intellectual powers, his ability to comprehend the more distant bearings of things, or to grapple with the subtilties of abstract phi- losophy ; and they have reached their false conclusion on the ground that it were impossible that a mind so highly gifted in one respect should be alike distinguished in the other. But if his productions may be allowed to speak for him, I think it will be difficult to show that he was not equally at home in the depths as on the heights ; and some of his works, particularly that on Natural Theology, ex- THE ECHOES OP THE WORLD. 119 Libit the two qualities blended in beautiful proportions. I hesitate not to say, that any man who could reason like Chalmers and do nothing else, or any man who could soar like Chalmers and do nothing else, or any man who could contrive and execute like Chal- mers, as is evinced by his connection with the whole Free Church movement, and do nothing else, would be a great man in any country or in any age ; but the union of the several faculties in such propor- tion and such degree constitutes a character at once unparalleled and imperishable." Among the various references to this genius of Chalmers for the practical, which, according to Sprague, would have constituted him a great man even had it been his only faculty, we know not a finer or more picturesque than that which we find in a truly admirable article in a late number of the " North British Review." The picture for a picture it is, and a very admirable one exhibits specially the inspiriting effect of the quality in a time of perplexity and trial. It is when dangers run high that the voice of the true leader is known : the storm in its hour of dire extremity exhibits the skill of the accomplished pilot. " When the courts of law revoked," says the reviewer, " the lib- erty of the Scottish Church, much as he loved its old Establishment, much as he loved his Edinbui'gh professorship, and much more as he loved his two hundred churches, with a single movement of his pen he signed them all away. He had reached his grand climacteric ; and many thought that, smitten down by the shock, his gray hairs would descend in sorrow to the grave : it was time for him " to break his mighty heart and die." But they little knew the man. They forgot that spirit which, like the trodden palm, had so often sprung erect and stalwart from a crushing overthrow. We saw him that November. We saw him in its Convocation, the sublimest aspect in which we ever saw the noble man. The ship was fast aground ; and as they looked over the bulwarks, through the mist and the breakers, all on board seemed anxious and sad. Never had they felt prouder of their old first-rate, and never had she ploughed a braver path, than when, contrary to all the markings in the chart, and all the experience of former voyages, she dashed on this fatal 120 HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL. bar. The stoutest were dismayed ; and many talked of taking to the fragments, and, one by one, trying for the nearest shore ; when, calmer because of the turmoil, and with the exultation of one who saw safety ahead, the voice of this dauntless veteran was heard propounding his confident scheme. Cheered by his assurance, and inspired by his example, they set to work ; and that dreary winter was spent in constructing a vessel with a lighter draught and a sim- pler rigging, but large enough to carry every true-hearted man who ever trod the old ship's timbers. Never did he work more blithely, and never was there more of athletic ardor in his looks, than during the six months that this ark was building, though every stroke of the mallet told of blighted hopes, and defeated toil, and the unknown sea before him. And when the signal-psalm announced the new vessel launched, and leaving the old galley high and dry on the breakers, the banner unfurled, and showing the covenanting blue still spotless, and the symbolic bush still burning, few will forget the renovation of his youth, and the joyful omen of his shining counte- nance. It was not only the rapture of his prayers, but the radiance of his spirit, which repeated, ' God is our refuge.' It is something heart-stirring to see the old soldier take the field, or the old trader exerting every energy to retrieve his shattered fortunes ; but far the finest spectacle of the moulting eagle was Chalmers, with his hoary locks, beginning life anew. But, indeed, he was not old. They who can fill their veins with every hopeful, healthful thing around them, those who can imbibe the sunshine of the future, and transfuse life from realities not come as yet, their blood need never freeze. And his bosom heaved with all the newness of the Church's life, and all the bigness of the Church's plans. And, best of all, those who wait upon the Lord are always young. This was the reason why on the morning of that exodus he did not totter forth from the old Establishment a blank and palsy-stricken man, but, with flashing eye, snatched up his palmer-staff', and, as he stamped it on the ground, all Scotland shook, and answered with a deep God-speed to the giant gone on pilgrimage." Of all the tributes to the memory of Chalmers which we have yet seen, one* of at once the ablest and most generous is that by Dr. Alexander of this city. 1 Belong- i A Discourse on the Qualities and Worth of Thomas Chalmers, D.D. LL.l>,, etc. By William Lindsay Alexander, D.D. THE ECHOES OF THE WORLD. 121 tug to a different family of the church catholic from that whose principles the illustrious deceased maintained and defended, and at issue with him on points which neither deemed unimportant, the doctor has yet come forward, in the name of their common Christianity, to record his es- timate of his character and his sorrow for his loss. It was one of the points worthy of notice in Chalmers, that none of his opponents in any controversy settled down into personal enemies. We saw, among the thousands who attended his funeral, Principal Lee, with whom he had the controversy regarding the Moderatorship ; Dr. Wardlaw, his opponent in the great controversy on establishments ; and the carriage of the Lord Provost, as representative of the Provost himself, with whom he had the controversy regarding the Edinburgh churches and their amount of accommodation, and who was on business in London at the time. And to this trait, and to what it indicated, Dr. Alexander finely refers. The doctor was one of Chalmers' St. Andrew's pupils ; and his opportunities of acquaint- anceship at that period furnish one or two singularly in- teresting anecdotes illustrative of the character of the " Sometimes it was my lot to be his companion," says the doctor, "to some wretched hovel, where I have seen him take his seat by the side of some poor child of want and weakness, and patiently, affectionately, and earnestly strive to convey into his darkened mind some ray of truth that might guide him to safety and to God. On such occasions it was marvellous to observe with what simplicity of speech that great mind would utter truth. One instance of this I must be allowed to mention. The scene was a low, dirty hovel, over whose damp and uneven floor it was difficult to walk without stumbling, and into which a small window, coated with dust, ad- mitted hardly enough of light to enable an eye unaccustomed to the gloom to discern a single object. A poor old woman, bedridden, and almost blind, who occupied a miserable bed opposite the fire- place, was the object of the doctor's visit. Seating himself by her side, he entered at once, after a few general inquiries as to her health, etc., into religious conversation with her. Alas ! it seemed 11 122 HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL. all in vain. The mind which he strove to enlighten had been bo long closed and dark that it appeared impossible to thrust into it a single ray of light. Still, on the part of the woman there was an evident anxiety to lay hold upon something of what he was telling her ; and, encouraged by this, he persevered, plying her, to use his own expression, with the offers of the gospel, and urging her to trust in Christ. At length she said, Ah, Sir, I would fain do as you bid me, but I dinnaken how : how can I trust in Christ ? ' ' Oh, woman,' was his expressive answer, in the dialect of the district, 'just lippen to Him.' ' Eh, Sir,' was her reply, ' and is that a' ? ' ' Yes, yes,' was his gratified response ; 'just lippen to Him, and lean on Him, and you'll never perish.' To some, perhaps, this language may be obscure ; but to that poor, blind, dying woman it was as light from heaven ; it guided her to the knowledge of the Saviour ; and there is good reason to believe it was the instrument of ultimately con- ducting her to heaven." We had marked for quotation various passages in this admirable discourse, unequalled, we hold, by aught that has yet appeared, as an analysis of the mental and moral constitution of him whom Dr. Alexander at once elo- quently and justly describes as "a man of brilliant genius, of lovely character, of sincere devotion, of dignified and untiring activity, the most eminent preacher our country has produced, the greatest Scotchmen the nineteenth century has yet seen." We have, however, much more than ex- hausted our space, and so must be content for the present with recommending to our readers an attentive perusal of the whole. One passage, however, we cannot deny our- selves the pleasure of extracting. It meets, we think, very completely, a frequent criticism on one of the peculiarities of Chalmers, and shows that what has been often in- stanced as a defect was in reality a rarely attainable excellence : 44 In handling his subjects Dr. Chalmers displayed vast oratorical power. He usually selected one great truth or one great practical duty for consideration at a time. This he would place distinctly before his hearers, and then illustrate, defend, and enforce it through- out his discourse, again and again bringing it up before them, and THE ECHOES OF THE WORLD. 123 nrging it upon them. By some this has been regarded as a defect rather than a merit in his pulpit addresses ; and it has been ascribed to some peculiarity of his mind, in virtue of which he has been sup- posed incapable of turning away from a subject when once he had hold on it, or, rather, it had laid hold on him. I believe this criticism to have been quite erroneous. That his practice in this respect was not an accidental result of some mental peculiarity, but was purposely and designedly followed by him, I know from his own assurance ; in- deed, he used publicly to recommend it to his students as a practice sanctioned by some of the greatest masters in oratory, especially the great parliamentary orator Charles James Fox ; and the only reason, I believe, why it is not more frequently adopted, is, that it is immeas- urably more difficult to engage the minds of an audience by a discourse upon one theme, than by a discourse upon several. That it constitutes the highest grade of discourse, all writers on oratory, from Aristotle downward, are agreed. But to occupy it successfully requires genius and large powers of illustration. When the speaker has to keep to one theme, he must be able to wield all the weapons of address. He must be skilled to argue, to explain, persuade, to apply, and, by a fusion of all the elements of oratory, to carry his point whether his audience will or no. Now these requisites Dr. Chalmers possessed in a high degree. He could reason broadly and powerfully ; he could explain and illustrate with exhaustless profusion ; he could persuade by all the earnestness of entreaty, all the pathos of affection, and all the terrors of threatening ; he could apply, with great skill and knowledge of men's ways, the truth he would inculcate ; and he could pour, in a torrent of the most impassioned fervor, the whole molten mass of thought, feeling, description, and appeal, upon the hearts and consciences of his hearers. Thus singularly endowed, and thus wisely using his endowments, he arrived at a place of the highest eminence in the highest walk of popular oratory." 124 HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL. XV. GLEN TILT TABOOED. A rencounter of a somewhat singular character Las taken place in Glen Tilt between the Duke of Atholl, backed by a body of his gillies, and a party of naturalists headed by a learned professor from Edinburgh. The gen- eral question regarding right of way in Scotland seems fast drawing to issue between the people and the exclusives among the aristocracy, and this in a form, we should fain hope, rather unfavorable to the latter, seeing that the popular cause represents very generally, as in this case, that of the sentiment and intellect of the country, while the cause of the exclusives represents merely the country's brute force, luckily a considerably smaller portion of even that than falls to the share of even our physical force Chartists. Should thews and muscles come to sway among us, the regime must prove a very miserable one for Dukes of Leeds and of Atholl. From time immemorial the public road between Blair- Athole and Braemar had lain through Glen Tilt. In most questions regarding right of roadway witnesses have to be examined ; the line of communication at issue is of too local and obscure a character to be generally known ; and so the claim respecting it has to be decided on the evidence of people who live in the immediate neighborhood. Not such, however, the case with Glen Tilt. There is scarce in the kingdom a better-known piece of roadway than that which runs through the glen ; and all our ampler Guide- Books and Traveller's Companions assume the character of witnesses in its behalf. Here, for instance, is the Guide- Book of the Messrs. Anderson of Inverness, at once one GLEN TILT TABOOED. 125 of the most minute and most correct in its details with which we are acquainted, and which has the merit of being derived almost exclusively from original sources. It does not indicate a single route which the writers had not trav- elled over, nor describe an object which they had not seen and examined. And in it, as in all the other works of its class, we find the road running through Glen Tilt which connects Blair-Athole and Braemar laid down as open to the tourists, equally with all the other public roads of the coun- try. The reader will find it marked, too, in every better map of Scotland. In the " National Atlas " a work worthy of its name it may be seen striking off, on the authority of the geographer to the Queen, Mr. A. K. John- ston, at an acute angle from the highway at Blair-Athole ; then running on for some twelve or thirteen miles parallel to the Tilt ; and then, after scaling the heights of the up- per part of the glen, deflecting into the valley of the Dee, and terminating at Castleton of Braemar. The track which it lays open is peculiarly a favorite one with the botanist, for the many interesting plants which it furnishes; and so much so with the geologist, that what may be termed the classic literature of the science might, with the guide-books of the country, be brought as evidence into court in the case. Playfair's admirably-written " Illustrations of Hut- ton " take part against the Duke and his gillies. That curious junction of the granite and stratified schists in which Hutton recognized the first really solid ground for his theory, and of which, as forming the great post of van- tage in the battle between his followers and those of Werner, a representation may be found in almost every geological treatise since published, occurs in Glen Tilt, and possesses a more than European celebrity. There is not a man of science in the world who has not heard of it. The history of its discovery, and of what it establishes, as given in a few sentences by one of the most popular of modern geologists, we must present to the reader. 11* 126 HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL. u The absence of stratification in granite," says Mr. Lyell, " and ita analogy in mineral character to rocks deemed of igneous origin, led Hutton to conclude that granite must also have been formed from matter in fusion ; and this inference, he felt, could not be fully con- firmed, unless he discovered, at the contact of granite and other strata, a repetition of the phenomena exhibited so constantly by the trap rocks. Resolved to try his theory by this test, he went to the Grampians, and surveyed the line of junction of the granite and superincumbent stratified masses, and found in Glen Tilt, in 1785, the most clear and unequivocal proofs in support of his views. Veins of red granite are there seen branching out from the principal mass, and traversing the black micaceous schists and primary lime- stones. The intersected stratified rocks are so distinct in color and appearance as to render the example in that locality most striking ; and the alteration of the limestone in contact is very analogous to that produced by trap veins on calcareous strata. This verification of his system filled him with delight, and called forth such marks of joy and exultation that the guides who accompanied him, says his biographer, were convinced that he must have discovered a vein of silver or gold." There are various other objects interesting to the geolo- gist on this track through the property of the Duke of Atholl. We understand that when Agassiz was last in this country, he accompanied to the locality an Edinburgh professor, well known both in the worlds of letters and of science, with the intention of visiting a quarry on the grounds of his Grace ; but, on addressing his Grace for permission, there was no answer returned to his letter, and the distinguished foreigner had to turn back disappointed, to say how much more liberally he had been dealt with elsewhere, and to contrast, not very favorably for our coun- try, the portion of liberty doled out to even the learned and celebrated among the Scottish people, with that en- joyed under the comparably free and kindly despotisms of the Continent. The incident happily illustrates the taste and understanding of his Grace the Duke of Atholl, and intimates the kind of measures which the public should keep with such a man. If the Scottish people yield up to GLEN TILT TABOOED. 127 his Grace their right of way through Glen Tilt, they will richly deserve to be shut out of their country altogether ; and be it remarked, that to this state of things matters are fast coming with regard to the Scottish Highlands. It is said of one of the Queens of England, that in a moment of irritation she threatened to make Scotland a hunting-park ; and we know that the tyranny of the Norman Conqueror did actually produce such a result over extensive tracts of England. The formation of the New Forest is instanced by all our historians as one of the most despotic acts of a foreign conqueror. William, in order to indulge his tastes as a huntsman, depopulated the country, and barred out the human foot from an extent, says Hume, of more than thirty miles. It is to this act of despotism, and its conse- quences, that the master-poet of the times of Queen Anne refers in his exquisite description : " The land appeared in ages past A dreary desert and a gloomy waste, To savage beasts and savage laws a prey, And kings more furious and severe than they, Who claimed the skies, dispeopled air and floods, The lonely lords of empty wilds and woods." The pleasures of the chase are necessarily jealous and un- social. The shepherd can carry on his useful profession without quarrel with the chance traveller ; the agricultur- ist in an open country has merely to fence against the en- croachments of the vagrant foot the patches actually under cultivation at the time ; whereas it is the tendency of the huntsman possessed of the necessary power, to " empty " the " wilds and woods " of their human inhabitants. The traveller he regards as a rival or an enemy : he looks upon him as come to lessen his sport, either by sharing in it or by disturbing it ; and so, when he can, he reigns, according to the poet, a "lonely lord," and the country spreads out around him, as in the days of the Conqueror, " a dreary desert and a gloomy waste." Aud into this state of savage 128 HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL. nature and jealous appropriation characteristic, in the sister kingdom, of the times of the Conquest many dis- tricts in the Highlands of Scotland are fast passing. The great sheep-farms were permitted, in the first instance, to swallow up the old agricultural holdings ; and now the let shootings and game-parks are fast swallowing up the great sheep-farms, The ancient inhabitants were cleared off, in the first process, to make way for the sheep ; and now the people of Scotland generally are to be shut out from these vast tracts, lest they should disturb the game. There is no exception to be made by cat-witted dukes and illiterate lords in favor of the man of letters, however elegant his tastes and pursuits ; or the man of science, however pro- found his talents and acquirements, or however important the objects to which he is applying them. The Duke of Leeds has already shut up the Grampians, and the Duke of Atholl has tabooed Glen Tilt. The gentleman and scholar who, in quest of knowledge, and on the strength of the prescriptive right enjoyed from time immemorial by even the humblest of the people, enters these districts, finds himself subjected to insult and injury; and should the evil be suffered to go on unchecked, we shall by and by see the most interesting portions of our country barred up against us by parishes and counties. If one proprietor shut up Glen Tilt, why may not a combination of proprie- tors shut up Perthshire? Or if one sporting tenant bar against us the Grampians, why, when the system of shoot- ing-farms and game-parks has become completed, might not the sporting tenants united shut up against us the entire Highlands? They would be prevented, it may be said, by certain rights of roadway. No ; these rights of roadway as certainly exist in the case of Glen Tilt and the Gram- pians as over the Highlands generally. Regretting, as we do, that a gentleman and scholar, with his friends, of character resembling his own, should have been subjected to unworthy treatment, we yet deem it fortunate that it should have fallen rather on men 6uch a8 GLEN TILT TABOOED. 129 he and they than on some party of humble individuals, possessed of no adequate means of making their case known, or of attracting for it any general sympathy even if they had. Were, however, the party of humble men to be very numerous, some such pleasure party as occa- sionally, in these days, sets out from Edinburgh for Ber- wick, Glasgow, or the land of Burns, we could afford to wish them substituted for the naturalist and the professor. There is, we repeat, a right of roadway through Glen Tilt : the Duke of Atholl is quite at liberty to challenge that privilege in a court of law ; but he has no right whatever violently to arrest travellers on the public way ; and all good subjects, when the policeman or the soldier is not at hand to protect them, in the name and authority of the civil magistrate, from illegal violence, have a right to pro- tect themselves. And we are pretty sure a few scores of our working men could defend themselves very admirably amid the solitudes of Glen Tilt, even though assailed by the Knight of the Gael and all his esquires. As the case chanced, however, it is well that a learned professor and a party of amateur naturalists should have been the suffer- ers. We may just mention in the passing, as a curious coincidence, that the professor in question is one of the nearest living relatives of the philosophic Hutton, who sixty-two years ago rendered Glen Tilt so famous ; the professor's father is, we understand, the philosopher's near- est living relative. We trust to see the country roused all the sooner and the more widely in consequence of the charac- ter of the outrage, to assert for the people a right to walk over the country's area, to share in that cheap enjoy- ment of the beauties of its scenery which softens and hu- manizes the heart, and to trace unchallenged, amid its wild moors, on its lonely hilltops, or in the rigid folds of its strata, those revelations of the All-wise Designer which serve both to expand the imagination and to exercise the understanding. Not merely the rights of the poor man, but the privileges of the man of literature, and the inter* ISO HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL. ests of the man of science, are involved in this question, those rights, interests, and privileges which the true aris- tocracy of the country have ever been the first to recog- nize. Our better proprietors have often admitted where they might have excluded, never excluded where they ought to have admitted ; and the experience of our men of literature and of science, save in those singularly rare instances in which they come in contact with men of the peculiar mental cast of the Duke of Atholl, has been invari- ably that of Cowper's in the park of the Throckmortons : " The folded gates would bar my progress now, But that the lord of this enclosed demesne, Communicative of the good he owns, Admits me to a share : the guiltless eye Commits no wrong, nor wastes what it enjoys." We will not instance the case of Sir Walter Scott, nor say how, in his kindliness of heart, he flung open the grounds of Abbotsford to his humbler neighbors, without ever finding occasion to repent his liberality ; for Sir Walter was no ordinary proprietor, nor, perhaps, was he dealt with in this matter according to the ordinary expe- rience of the class. The passage, however, in which, in his " Letters of Malachi Malagrowther," he sums up some of the balancing advantages which make up to the poor Highlander for the general hardness of his lot, seems so entirely to our purpose that we cannot forbear reference at least to it. Taken in connection with the shutting np of Glen Tilt and the Grampians, it forms a piece of peculiarly exquisite irony : " The inhabitants of the wilder districts in Scotland," says Sir Walter, " have actually some enjoyments, both moral and physical, which compensate for the want of better subsistence and more comfortable lodging. In a word, they have more liberty than the inhabitants of the richer soil. Englishmen will start at this as a par- adox ; but it is very true, notwithstanding, that if one great privilege GLEN TILT TABOOED. 131 of liberty be the power of going where a man pleases, the Scottish peasant enjoys it much more than the English. The pleasure of viewing ' fair nature's face,' and a great many other primitive enjoy- ments, for which a better diet and lodging are but indifferent substi- tutes, are more within the power of the poor man in Scotland than in the sister country. A Scottish gentleman in the wilder districts is seldom severe in excluding his poor neighbors from his grounds ; and I have known many that have voluntarily thrown them open to all quiet and decent persons who wish to enjoy them. The game of such liberal proprietors, their plantations, their fences, and all that is apt to suffer from intruders, have, I have observed, been better protected than when severe measures of general seclusion were adopted. But in many districts the part of the soil which, with the utmost stretch of appropriation, the first-born of Egypt can set apart for his own exclusive use, bears a small proportion indeed to the uncultivated wastes. The step of the mountaineer on his wild heath, solitary mountains, and beside his far-spread lake, is more free than that which is confined to a dusty turnpike, and warned from casual deviations by advertisements, which menace the summary vindication of the proprietor's monoply of his extensive park by spring-guns or man-traps, or the more protracted, yet scarce less formidable, denunciation of what is often, and scarce un- justly, spelled 'persecution according to law.' Above all, the peas- ant lives and dies, as his father did, in the cot where he was born, without ever experiencing the horrors of a workhouse. This may compensate for the want of much beef, beer, and pudding, in those to whom habit has not made this diet indispensable." " Give us a good trespass act," say some of our propri- etors, " and we care not though you abolish the game-laws to-morrow." The country sees in the affair of Gen Tilt and the Grampians what a good trespass act means, and has fair warning to avoid effecting the work of abolition for effected it will be in a careless and slovenly style, that might result ultimately in but shutting the Scotch out of Scotland. We trust, meanwhile, that the rencounter of the Duke of Atholl with the Edinburgh professor will not be unproductive of consequences. The general ques- tion could not be fought on more advantageous ground ; and at least nineteen twentieths of the population of the 132 HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL. kingdom have an interest in taking part in it, and fighting it out. There already exists in Edinburgh a " Footpath Society ; " and we think the country could not do better than make the Society the nucleus of a great league, and, in the case of the professor, bring his Grace the Duke into court. By scarce any other means, in times like the pres- ent, can the rights of the people be asserted. Combination and a general fund formed the policy of Cobden and of O'Connell, and of a greater than either, Thomas Chal- mers ; and only through combination and a common fund can our country be now preserved to its people from the ungenerous and narrow-minded aggressions of Dukes of Atholl and of Leeds. EDINBURGH AN AGE AGO. 133 XVI. EDINBURGH AN AGE AGO. Edinburgh for about a hundred and thirty years after the Union continued to be in effect, and not in name merely, the capital of a kingdom, and occupied a place in the eye of the world scarcely second to that of London. In population and wealth it stood not higher than the third-class towns of England ; it had no commerce, and very little trade, nor did it form a great agricultural centre ; and as for the few members of the national aristocracy that continued to make it their home after the disappear- ance of its parliament, they were not rich, and they were not influential, and added to neither its importance nor its celebrity. The high place which Edinburgh held among the cities of the earth it owed exclusively to the intellect- ual standing and high literary ability of a few distinguished citizens, who were able to do for it greatly more in the eye of Em*ope than had been done by its court and par- liament, or than could have been done through any other agency, by the capital of a small and poor country, peopled by but a handful of men. Ireland produced many famous orators, shrewd statesmen, and great authors ; but they did comparatively little for Dublin, even previous to the Union. With the writings of Swift, Goldsmith, Burke, Sheridan, and Thomas Moore before us, we can point to only one work which continues to live in English literature, "The Draper's Letters," that issued originally from the Dublin press. London drew to itself the literary ability of Ireland, and absorbed and assimilated it just as it did a portion of that of Scotland represented by the Burnets, Thomsons, Armstrongs, Arbuthnots, Meikles, and Smolletta 12 134 HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL. of the three last ages ; and in London the Irish became simply Britons, and served to swell the general stream of British literature. But Scotland retained not a few of her most characteristic authors ; and her capital in many respects less considerable than Dublin formed a great literary mart, second at one time, in the importance and enduring character of the works it produced, to no other in the world. Nothing, however, can be more evident than that this state of things is passing away. During the last quarter of a century one distinguished name after another has been withdrawn by death from that second great constellation of Scotchmen resident in Edinburgh to which Chalmers, Sir "Walter Scott, and Lord Jeffrey belonged ; and with Sir William Hamilton the last of the group may be said to have disappeared. For the future, Edinburgh bids fair to take its place simply amrize of their humble offer- ings, and confiscated them, on behalf of the pauperism of the country, forsooth ? There was an irony in the pretext which those who employed it could not have fully under- stood at the time, but which they will come to appreciate by and by. And who, through the Stewarton and Auch- terarder decisions, have fully completed what the Brechin decision began? Truly, the parties who had most at stake in the exertions of the champion who took the field in their behalf have been wonderfully successful in disarm* THE SCOTCH POOR-LAW. 239 ing and forcing him aside ; and all that is necessary for them now is, just to be equally successful in grappling with the o'ermastering and enormous evils which he set himself so determinedly to oppose. We trust, however, that they will no longer attempt deceiving the country, by speaking of a moral force as a thing still in the field, in opposition to the merely pecuniary force recommended by Dr. Alison. The moral force is in the field no longer ; Dr. Alison stands alone. For the present, however, we must conclude. Very im- portant questions of morals are on the eve of becoming questions of arithmetic in Scotland; and the wealth of the country, though it may find the exercise a reducing one, will be quite able to sum them up in their new character. Let us just touch one two of them by way of specimen. We have adverted oftener than once to the evils of the bothy system. They are going to take the form of a weighty assessment ; and our proprietary may be induced to inquire into them in consequence. There is another great evil to which we have not referred so directly. All our readers must have heard of vast improvements which have taken place during the present century in the northern Highlands. The old small farm, semi-pastoral, semi-agri- cultural system was broken up, the large sheep-farm system introduced in its place, and the inland population of the country shaken down, not without violence, to the skirts of the land, there to commence a new mode of life as la- borers and fishermen. And all this was called improve- ment. It was called great improvement not many years since, in most respectable English, in the pages of the " Quarterly Review." And we heard a voice raised in re- ply. It was the scrannel voice of meagre famine from the shores of the northern Highlands, prolonged into a yell of suffering and despair. But, write as you may, apologists of the system, you have ruined the country, and the fact is on the eve of being stated in figures. The poor-law assess- ment will find you out. 240 POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. X. PAUPERISM. The utterly miserable are always unsafe neighbors. In former days, when a barbarous jurisprudence, with its savage disregard of human life, extended to our prisons, and every place of confinement in the kingdom was a stagnant den of filth and wretchedness, the contagious disease originated in these receptacles of horror and suffering, and which from this circumstance bore the name of the j'ail-distemper, frequently burst out on the inhabitants of the surrounding town or village, and carried them off by hundreds at a time. It is recoraeu, *Lat, after a criminal court had been held on one occasion, in the reign of James VI., at which the cele- brated Lord Bacon took some official part, a malignant fever bx-oke out among the persons who had attended, which terminated fatally in the case of several of the jury and of some of the gentlemen of the bar, and that the philosophic Chancellor expressed his conviction that the contagion had been carried into the court-room by a posse of wretched felons from the tainted atmosphere of their dungeon. Self-preservation in these cases enforced the dictates of humanity : the same all-powerful principle enforces them still. It is more than probable that the misery of the neglected classes occasionally breaks out upon that portion of our population which occupies the upper walks in society, in the form of contagious disease, in the form of typhus fever, for instance : there can be no doubt whatever that it often breaks out upon them in the form of crime. But where is the true remedy to be found ? It was com- paratively an easy matter to ventilate our prisons, and to PAUPERISM. 241 introduce into them the various improvements recom- mended alike by the dictates of humanity and prudence. But how are the suffering masses to be ventilated, and their condition permanently improved ? It does not do to grope in the dark in such matters. It is well, surely to meet with the evil in its effects when it has become utter misery and destitution, and to employ every possible means for relieving its victims. It is infinitely better, however, to meet with it in its causes, to meet with it in the forming, and to check it there. It was not by baling back the waters of the river that Cyrus laid bare the bed of the Euphrates; it was by cutting off the supply. Where are the sources of this fearfully accumulated and still accu- mulating misery to be found ? At what particular point, or in what particular manner, should the enlightened ben- efactor of the suffering classes interfere to cut off the sup- ply ? The reader anticipates a truism, one of those important and unquestioned truths which, according to Goethe, seem divested of their proper effect, as important just from the circumstance of their being unquestioned, and which, gliding inefficiently along the stream of universal assentation, are allowed to weigh less with the public mind than the short-lived and unfruitful paradoxes of the pass- ing time. Instead, however, of laying down a principle, we shall simply state a few facts of a kind which many of our humbler readers the " men of handicraft and hard labor " will be able fully to verify from their own expe- rience, and that embody the principle which seems to bear most directly on the subject. We passed part of two years in the neighborhood of Edinburgh immediately before the great crisis of 1825, and knew perhaps more about the working classes of the place than can well be known by men who do not live on their own level. The speculations of the time had given an impulse to the trading world. Employment was abundant, and wages high ; and we had a full opportunity of seeing in what degree the mere commercial and trading prosper- 21 242 POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. ity of a country the mere money-welfare which men such as Joseph Hume can appreciate is truly beneficial to the laboring portion of the community. We shall pick out, by way of specimen, the case of a single party of about twenty workmen, engaged at from twenty-four to twenty-seven shillings per week, most of them young, un- married men, in the vigor of early manhood. Remember we are drawing no fancy sketch. Fully two thirds of that number were irreligious, and in a greater or less degree dissipated. They were paid by their employer regularly once a fortnight, on the evening of Saturday ; and imme- diately as they had pocketed their wages, a certain num- ber of them disappeared. On the morning of the following Wednesday, but rarely sooner, they returned again to their labors, worn out and haggard with the excesses of three days grossly spent, and without a single shilling of the money which they had earned during the previous fort- night. And such was the regular round with these unfor tunate men, until the crisis arrived, and they were thrown out of employment in a state of as utter poverty as if they had never been employed at all. There was a poor laborer attached, with a few others, to the party we describe, whose wages amounted to about half the hire of oue of the mechanics. His earnings at most did not exceed fourteen shillings per week. This laborer supported his aged mother. On Sundays he was invariably dressed in a neat, clean suit ; he occasionally in- dulged, too, in the purchase of a good book; and we have sometimes seen him slip, unnoticed as he thought, a few coppers into the hands of a poor beggar. And yet this man saved a little money. We lived nine months under the same roof with him ; and as we were honored with his confidence and his friendship, we had opportunities of seeing the character in its undress. Never have we met with a man more thoroughly a Christian, or a man who felt more continually that he was living in the presence of Deity. Now, in the ordinary course of events, and debar- PAUPERISM. 243 ring the agency of accident, it is well-nigh as impossible that men such as this laborer can sink into pauperism, as *jhat men of the opposite stamp can avoid sinking into it. The dissipated mechanics, with youth and strength on their side, and with their earnings of twenty-four and twenty-seven shillings per week, were yet paupers in em- bryo. It is according to the inevitable constitution of society, too, that vigorous working-men should have rela- tives dependent upon them for sustenance, aged parents or unmarried sisters, or, when they have entered into the marriage relation, wives and families. And hence the mighty accumulation of pauperism when the natural prop fails in yielding its proper support. We have another fact to state regarding our old acquaint- ances, which is not without its importance, and in which, we are convinced, the experience of all our humbler readers will bear us out. Some of the most skilful mechanics of the party, and some, too, of the most intelligent, were among the most dissipated. One of the number, a power- ful-minded man, full of information, was a great reader ; there was another, possessed of an intellect more than commonly acute, who had a turn for composition. The first, when thrown out of employment, and on the extreme verge of starvation, enlisted into a regiment destined for some of the colonies, whence he never returned ; the other broke down in constitution, and died, before his fortieth year, of old age. What is the proper inference here ? Mere intellectual education is not enough to enable men to live well, either in the upper or lower walks of society, and especially in the latter. The moral nature must also be educated. Was Robert Burns an ignorant or unintelli- gent man ? or yet Robert Ferguson ? Facts such as these and their amount is altogether incalculable indicate the point at which the sources of pauperism can alone be cut off. The disease must be antici- pated ; for when it has passed to its last stage, and actually become pauperism, there is no remedy. Every effort which 244 POLITICAL AKL SOCIAL.' an active but blind humanity can suggest in such, desperate circumstances is but a baling back of the river when Jhe floods are rising. If there be a course of moral and reli- gious culture to which God himself sets his seal, and through which even the dissipated can be reclaimed, and the uncontaminated preserved from contamination, a course through which, by the promised influences of a divine agent, characters such as that of our friend the poor laborer can be formed, that course of moral and religious culture is the only remedy. The pauperism of Scotland, in its present deplorable extent, is comparatively new to the country ; and certain it is, that in the last age the spirit of anti-pauperism and of anti-patronage were insep- arable among the Presbyterian people. There is a close connection between the non-intrusion principle and the formation of characters such as that of our friend the la- borer. What were the religious sentiments of the class, happily not yet forgotten in our country, who bore up in their honest and independent poverty, relying for support on the promise of their Heavenly Father, but who asked not the help of man, and who, in so many instances, would not receive it even when it was extended to them ? To what party in the church did the poor widows belong who refused the proffered aid of the parish, if they had children, lest it should be " cast up " to them in after-life, if they had none, " because they had come of honest people ? " Much of what was excellent in the Scottish character in the highest degree arose directly out of the Scottish Church in its evangelical integrity ; much, too, of what was excellent in the main, though perhaps somewhat dashed with eccentricity, arose out of what we may term the church's reflex influences. PAUPER LABOR. 24-S XI. PAUPER LABOR. We hold that the only righteous and practical check on vv\ult pauperism, the only check at once just and efficient, % the compulsory imposition of labor on every pauper to whom God has given, in even the slightest degree, the laboring ability. One grand cause of the inefficiency of workhouses arises mainly from the circumstance that their names do not indicate their character. The term work- house has become a misnomer, seeing that it designates buildings in which, for any one useful purpose, no work is done. We say for any useful purpose; for in some cases there is work done in them which is of a most mischievous, pauper-producing kind. They enter, in the character of competitors, into that field of unskilled, or at least very partially skilled labor, which is chiefly occupied by the self-sustaining c/asses that stand most directly on the verge of pauperism; and their hapless rivals, backed by no such bounty as that upon which they trade, sink in the ill- omened contest, and take refuge within their walls, to assist in carrying on teat war against honest industry in which they themselves nave gone down. Folly of this extreme character in the management of the pauperism of the country admits of no apology, from the circumstance that it is as palpable as it is mischievous. The legitimate employment of the inmates of a workhouse we find unmis- takably indicated by the nature of their wants. What is it that constitutes their pauperism ? Nature has given them certain wants, which, from some defect either in character or person, they themselves fail to supply; they lack food and they lack raiment; and these two wants 21* 246 POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. comprise the wants of a poorhouse. Then let the direct supply of these wants be the work of a poorhouse, its direct, not its circuitous work, not its work in the com- petition market, to the inevitable creation of more paupers, but its work in immediate connection with the soil, out of which all food and all raiment are produced, and with the wants of its own inmates. The organization of labor in society at large we regard as an inexecutable vision. In even the most despotic nations of Europe that compulsory power is wanting which must constitute man being what he is the moving force of organized labor; but within the precincts of a workhouse the compulsory power does exist ; and there, in consequence, the organization of labor is no inexecutable vision, but a sober possibility. It would impart to our workhouses their proper character, by not only furnishing them with an efficient labor check, and convert- ing them into institutions of discipline, in which the useless member of society, that could but would not work, would be compelled to exert himself in his own behalf; but it would also convert them into institutions in which a nu- merous pauper class, of rather better character, too in- efficient, either from lack of energy or of skill, to provide for themselves, amid that pressure and bustle of competition which obtains in society at large, might, by being shielded from competition, and brought into immediate contact with the staple of their wants, become self-supporting. All that would be necessary in any poorhouse would be simply this, that its class of raiment-producers should produce clothes enough for both themselves and its sustenance- producers; and that its sustenance-producers should, in turn, produce food enough for both themselves and its raiment-producers. And, brought fairly into contact with the soil and its productions in the raw state, with their wants reduced to the simple natural level, the profits of the trader superseded, the pressure of taxation removed, the enormous expenses of the dram-shop cut off by that law of compulsory temperance which the lack of a com- TAUPER LABOR. 247 mand of money imposes, we have little fear but that many of those institutions would become self-supporting, or at least very nearly so. The country would still have to bear some of the expense of what has been well termed its heaven-ordained poor, the halt, the maimed, and the fatuous ; but be it remembered that these always bear a definite proportion to the population ; and that the present alarming increase in the country's pauperism is not a con- sequence of any disproportionate increase in that modicum of its amount which the heaven-ordained poor composes. So much for the country's adult pauperism. With regard to its juvenile pauperism, the labor scheme is more impor- tant still. The country has many poor children living at its expense in workhouses, or boarded in humble cottages in the country ; and there are many more that either want parents, or worse than want them, that are prowling about its larger towns, and scraping up a miserable livelihood by begging or theft. Unless in the season of youth ere the mind becomes rigid under the influence of habit, and takes the set which it is to bear through life these juvenile paupers and vagabonds be converted into self-sustaining, honest members of society, they will inevitably become the adult paupers or criminals of the future, and the country will have to support them either in poorhouses or penal settlements, or, worse still, to pay executioners for hanging them. Of all non-theological things, labor is the most sacred ; of all non-ethical things, labor is the most moral. The working habit the mere homely ability of laboring fairly and honestly for one's bread is of more value to a country, when dilfused among its people, than all the other gifts be they hills of gold or rocks of diamonds that can possibly fall to its share. And if its people, or any very considerable part of them, possess not that habit and ability, it matters not what else it may possess : there is an element of weakness in its constitution for which no amount of even right principle among them will ever form an adequate compensation. There is, we believe, no part iM8 POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. of her Majesty's dominions in which there is more right principle than in the Highlands of Scotland ; hut, from causes which it might be a mournful, but certainly no un- instructive task to trace, their people possess the working habit and ability in a comparatively small degree ; and so they can do exceedingly little for the propagation of the principles which they hold, and, when disease touches the root of the potato, they find themselves in circumstances in which, save for the charity of their neighbors, they would perish. Principle, even when held truly and in sincerity, as among many of our poor Highlanders, is not enough of itself; and the mere teaching of principle in early life, in lessons which may or may not be received efficiently and in truth, must of itself be still less sufficient. Even if the best churches in the country had the country's vagabond and pauper children subject to their instruction, sup- posing the thing possible, though, of course, if the churches did not feed them, it is not ; and supposing, further, that they turned them out on society, the course completed, destitute of industrial habits or skill, what would be the infallible result ? The few converted to God by a vital change of heart, and in all ages of the church the num- bers of such have been proportionably few, would no doubt either struggle on blamelessly through life, or, sink- ing in the hard contest, would resign life rather than sustain it by the fruits of a course of crime ; but the great bulk of the others would live as paupers or criminals: they would be simply better instructed vagabonds than if they had been worse taught. The welfare of a country has two foundations. Right principle is the one; and the other, and scarce less important foundation, is industrial habit combined with useful skill. And in order to obviate the great danger of permitting juvenile paupers to grow up into adult paupers and criminals, it is essentially necessary that the skill should be communicated to them, and the habits formed in them. And hence the impoi'tance of the scheme that, by finding regular employment for the youth- PAUPER LABOR. 249 ful paupers of the country, would rear them up in honest, industrial habits, and thus qualify them for being useful members of society. It has been alleged against Presbyterianism by excellent men of the English Church, among the rest by Thomas Scott the commentator, that in its history in the past it has been by much too political, and has busied itself too en- grossingly with national affairs. There can be little doubt that its history during the seventeenth and the latter half of the sixteenth century is very much that of Scotland. Presbyterianism was political in those days, and fought the battles of civil as certainly as those of religious liberty. During a considerable part of the eighteenth century it was not political. From the suppression of the Rebellion of 1745 to the breaking out of the great revolutionary war, the life led by the Scottish people was an exceedingly quiet one, and there were no exigencies in their circum- stances important enough to make large demands on the exertions of the patriot or the ingenuity of the political economist. The people of the empire rather fell short than exceeded its resources, and were somewhat less than sufficient to carry on its operations of agriculture and trade ; and hence the comfortable doctrine of Goldsmith and Smollett regarding population, a comfortable doc- trine, for it never can obtain save when a nation is in comfortable circumstances. The best proof of the welfare of a country, they said, was the greatness of its population. It was unnecessary in such an age that Presbyterianism should be political. The pauperism which had deluged Scotland immediately after the Revolution had been all absorbed ; the people, in at least the Lowlands, were a people of good working habits; and in the Highlands little work served ; and all that had to be done by such of the ministers of religion in the country as were worthy of the name was to exert themselves in adding right principle and belief in relation to the realities of the unseen world, to the right habits in relation to the present one that had 250 POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. already been formed among the people of their charges. But with the revolutionary war and the present century the state of matters greatly altered. Pauperism began mightily to increase ; the recesses of our large towns, that some forty or fifty years before used to pour out to the churches, at the sound of the Sabbath bells, a moral and religious population, became the foul dens in which a worse than heathen canaille festered in poverty and ignorance ; habits of intemperance had increased twenty-fold among the masses ; the young were growing up by thousands in habits of idleness and crime to contaminate the future ; even the better people, placed with their children in peril- ous juxtaposition with the thoroughly vitiated, were in the circumstances of men in health located per force in the fever-ward of a hospital. The Scottish Highlanders, too, ruined by the clearing system, had come to be in circum- stances greatly different from those of their fathers ; and it had grown once more necessai-y that the Presbyterian minister should, like his predecessors of the sixteenth cen- tury, interest himself in a class of secular questions that are shown by experience to be as clearly allied to spiritual ones as the body is to the soul. The one great name specially connected with this altered state of things, and the course of action which it demands, is that of Chalmers, Chalmers, the true type and exemplar of the Presbyte- rian minister as specially suited to the exigencies of the time. But there are other names. The late Dr. Duncan with his savings banks, Guthrie with his ragged schools, Begg and Mackenzie with their dwellings for the working classes, Tasker in his West Port laboring in the footsteps of his friend the great deceased, must be regarded as true successors of those Presbyterian ministers of the seven- teenth century who identified themselves with their people in all their interests, and were as certainly good patriots as sound divines. And there are signs in the horizon that their example is to become general. We have scarce met a single Highland minister for the last three or four yea-rs, PAUPER LABOR. 251 y especially those of the northwestern Highlands, who Jki not ask, however hopeless of an answer, " What is to be done with our poor people ? " The question indi- cates an awakening to the inevitable necessity of inquiry and exertion in other fields than the purely theological one ; and one of these, in both Lowlands and Highlands, is that in which Chalmers so long labored. The case of the poor must be wisely considered, or there will rest no blessing on the exertions of the churches. But we must bring our remarks to a close ; and we would do so by citing an instance, only too lamentably obvious at the present time, of how very much, in our mixed state of existence as creatures composed of soul and body, a purely physical event may affect the religious interests of a great empire. The potato disease was a thing purely physical. It seemed to have nothing of the nature of a missionary society about it ; it dhl not engage missionaries, nor appoint committees, nor hire committee-rooms, nor hold meetings ; and it seemed to have as little favor foi popish priests as for Episcopalian curates or Presbyterian ministers. And yet, by pressing out the popish population of Ireland on every side, and surcharging with them the large towns of England, Scotland, and the United States, it has done more in some three or four years for the spread of popery in Britain and America than all the missionary societies of all the evangelistic churches of the world have done for the spread of Protestantism during the last half- century. He must be an obtuse man who fails to see, with such an example before him, how intimately associated with the ecclesiastical the secular may be. 252 POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. XII THE CRIME-MAKING LAWS. If there was a special law enacted against all red-haired men and all men six feet high, red-hah-ed men and men six feet high would in a short time become exceedingly dangerous characters. In order to render them greatly worse than their neighbors, there would be nothing more necessary than simply to set them beyond the pale of the constitution, by providing by statute that whoever lodged informations against red-haired men or men six feet high should be handsomely rewarded, and that the culprits themselves should be lodged in prison, and kept at hard labor, on every conviction, from a fortnight to sixty clays. The country would at length come to groan under the in- tolerable burden of its red-haired men and its men six feet high. There would be frequent paragraphs in our columns and elsewhere to the effect that some three or four re- spectable white-haired gentlemen, varying in height from five feet nothing to five feet five, had been grievously mal- treated in laudably attempting to apprehend some formi- dable felon, habit and repute six feet high ; or to the effect that Constable D. of the third division had been barba- rously murdered by a red-haired ruffian. Philosophers would come to discover, that so deeply implanted was the bias to outrage and wrong in red-haired nature, that it held by the scoundrels even after their heads had become bald and their whiskers gray ; and that so inherent was ruffian- ism to six-feet-highism, that though four six-feet fellows had, for the sake of example, been cut short at the knees, they had remained, notwithstanding the mutilation, as in- corrigible ruffians as ever. From time to time there would THE CRIME-MAKING LAWS. 253 be some terrible tragedy enacted by some tremendous in- carnation of illegality and evil, who was both red-haired and six feet high to boot. Of course, to secure the pro- tection of the lieges, large additions would be made to the original statute ; and thus the mischief would go on from bad to worse, unmitigated by the teachings of the pulpit or the press, and unrestrained by the terrors of the magis- tracy, until some bold reformer, rather peculiar in his notions, would suggest, as a last resource, the repeal of what ere now would come to be very generally lauded as the sole safeguards of the public peace and the glory of the Constitution, the anti-red-hair, an ti -six-feet-high enactments. And after the agitation of some fifteen or twenty years after articles innumerable had been writ- ten on both sides, and speeches without number had been spoken the enactments would come to be fairly re- scinded, and the tall and the red-haired, in the lapse of a generation or two, would improve, in consequence, into good subjects and quiet neighbors. Is the conception too wild and extravagant ? Let the reader pause for a moment ere he condemns. England lit- tle more than a century ago was infamous for the number of its murders committed on the highway. Hawksworth's story, in the "Adventurer," of the highwayman who mur- dered a beloved son, just restored, after a long absence, to his country and his friends, before the eyes of his father, and then threw the old man a shilling, lest, said the ruffian, he should be stopped at the tolls, was not deemed out of nature at the time. It was, on the contrary, quite a prob- able occurrence in the days of Jack Sheppard, Turpin, and Captain Macheath. About an age earlier, as shown by the "London Gazette," one of the oldest of English newspa- pers, there were from six to eight murders perpetrated yearly by foot-pads on the public roads ; and paragraphs such as the following, which we extract from this ancient journal, were comparatively common : "On the 23d of this month [Mar r .-h, 1682], three highwaymen, two on horse- 22 254 POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. back and one on foot, set upon two persons on Hindhead Heath, in Surrey, one of whom they mortally wounded, and took from them a black crop gelding near fifteen hands high ;" or such notices as the following, inserted as a gen- eral citation of witnesses, by the keeper of the Newgate : " Whereas many robberies are daily committed on the highways, to the great prejudice of his Majesty's subjects, these are to give notice that there has lately been taken and are now in the custody of Captain Richardson, Mas- terof his Majesty's jail at Newgate, several supposed high- way robbers, of whom here followeth the names and de- scriptions," etc. Such was the state of things in times when the earlier British novelists, desirous of making the incidents lie thick in their fictions, gave them the form of a journey, and sent their heroes travelling over England. The evil, however, was at length put down, partly through the marked improvement which took place in the police of the country, but still more through the great increase of its provincial newspapers, and the vast acceleration in the rate of its travelling, circumstances which have united to render the escape or concealment of the highwayman impossible. And so highway murder has become one of almost the rarest offences in the criminal register of the country. Very different is the case, however, with mur- ders of another kind. Our newspapers no longer contain in their English corner paragraphs at all resembling those we have just quoted, by way of specimen, from the "Lon- don Gazette," and which so strike in the perusal, as char- acteristic of an age only half escaped from barbarism ; but they exhibit, instead, their paragraphs, to the barbarity of which the accommodating influence of custom can alone rec- oncile the reader, and which will be held, we trust, in less than half an age hence, to bear as decidedly the stamp of savageism. Within the last few years there have been no fewer than twenty-five gamekeepers murdered in England. The cases were all ascertained cases ; coroners' juries sat upon the bodies, and verdicts of wilful murder were re- THE CRIME-MAKING LAWS. 255 turned against certain parties, known or unknown ; and these were, of course, but the murders on the one side. We occasionally hear of the death of a poacher; and all our readers must remember a late horrible instance, in which an unfortunate man of this class, captured after a des- perate resistance, was found to be so dreadfully injured in the fray that his bowels protruded through his Avounds. But in by far the greater number of cases the poor wounded wretch has strength enough left to bear him to his miserable home, and the parish hears little more of the matter than that there has been a brief illness and a sudden death. It is quite bad enough that IJawksworth's story of the highwayman should be a not improbable one in the times of the first two Georges ; it is still worse that Oabbe's story of the rival brothers who killed each other in a mid- night fray, in which the one engaged in the character of a poacher the other in that of a gamekeeper, should be as little improbable in the times of William and Victoria. Be it remembered, too, that the peculiar barbarism of the modern period is greatly more a national reproach than that of the ancient. The older enormities were enormities in spite of a good law ; the newer enormities are enormi- ties that arise directly out of a bad one. There is sound sense as well as good feeling in the remark of Mrs. Saddle- tree on the law, in Effie Dean's case, as laid down by her learned husband the saddler. " The crime," remarked the wiseacre to his better half, "is rather a favorite of the law, this species of murder being one of its own creating." " Then, if the law makes murders," replied the matron, " the law should be hanged for them ; or if they would hang up a lawyer instead, the country would find nae faut." All the twenty-five ascertained murders to which we have referred, and the at least equally great number of concealed ones, were crimes of the law's making, murders which as certainly originated in the law, and which, if the law did not exist, would as certainly not have been, as the supposed crimes of our illustration under the anti-red-hair, 256 POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. anti-six-fcet-high statutes. No murders arise out of the killing of seals and sea-gulls ; why should there arise any murders out of the killing of hares and pheasants? Simply because there is a pabulum of law in the one case, out of which the transgression springs, and no producing pabu- lum of law in the other. There can be nothing more peril- ous to the morals of the people than stringent laws, that, instead of attaching their penalties to actual crime, and having, in consequence, like the laws against the house- breaker and the highwayman, the whole weight of the popular conscience on their side, create the crime which they punish, and have thus the moral sense of the country certainly not for, mayhap against them. They become invariably, in all such cases, a sort of machinery for con- verting useful subjects and honest men into rogues and pub- lic pests. Lacking the moral sanction, their penalties are neither more nor less than a certain amount of peril, which bold spirits do not hesitate to encounter, just as a keen sportsman does not hesitate to encounter the modicum of risk which he runs from the gun that he carries. It may burst and kill him ; or in drawing it through a hedge a sprig may catch the trigger, and lodge its contents in his body ; or it may hang fire, and send its charge through his head half a minute after he has withdrawn it from his shoulder. Accidents of the kind happen in sporting coun- tries almost every month, for such is the natural law of accident in the case ; but there is no moral stigma attached, and so men brave the penalty every day. And such is the principle, when the law, equally dissociated from the promptings of the moral sense, is not a law of accident, but of the statute-book. Men brave the danger of the penalty, as they do the peril of the fowling-piece. But there is this ultimate difference : without being in any de- gree a felon tried by his own conscience, the traverser of the statutory enactment becomes legally a felon ; he may be dealt with, like the red-haired or six-feet-high felon of our illustration, as decidedly criminal. He is fero<**ously THE CRIME-MAKING LAWS. 257 attacked with lethal weapons as a felon ; and, defending himself in hot blood with the resembling weapons, without which his amusements cannot be carried on, he becomes a murderer ; or he is apprehended, manacled, tried, con- demned, imprisoned, transported, as a felon, and, in passing through so degrading a process, becomes at length the ac- tual criminal which he had been in the eye of the law all along. Few of our readers can have any adequate concep- tion of the immense mass of criminalty created yearly in the empire by this singularly deteriorating process. In the year 1843 there were in England and Wales alone no fewer than four thousand five hundred and twenty-nine convic- tions under the game-laws. Forty of that number were deemed cases of so serious a nature that the culprits were transported. In all the other cases they were either fined or imprisoned, the fines taken in the aggregate averaging two pounds sterling, the imprisonments seven weeks. And it is out of this system of formidable penalties that the numerous murders have arisen, and that the game-laws of the country have, like those of Draco, come to be written in blood. The character of the ordinary Scotch poacher must be familiar to all our readers. "E'en in our ashes," says the poet, " live our wonted fires." There are few things more truly natural to man than a love of field-sports. Voyagers have remarked of the wild dogs of Juan Fernandez, that they hunt in packs. It needs, it would seem, no previous training to make them hunting animals: they are such by nature ; and, placed in the proper circumstances, the nature at once develops itself. Now, it would appear as if man were also a hunting animal : the peculiar occupation which the first circumstances of society in almost every country render imperative upon the species, and for which, in an early age of the world, ere the human family was yet dis- persed, Nimrod became so famous, is perhaps of all others the most natural to us. What the passion which leads to it is in the aristocracy, the game-laws serve of themselves 22* 258 POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. sufficiently to testify; and the humbler classes feel the impulse as strongly. It is truly wonderful how soon men brought up in a state of civilization accommodate them- selves, when thrown by circumstances among a barbarous people, or into a state of seclusion from their fellows, to the life of the hunter 1 , and learn to love it. And the inherent feeling is, of course, as little blamable in the humble as in the wealthy or titled man. We have seen it greatly indulged in by dwellers along the seashore, farmers, cottars, mechanics, and almost every more spir- ited young man in the locality becoming in a lesser or greater degree a marksman. For a certain period, a young fellow of fair character has been shooting east, over the beaeh, towards the sea, and picking down the scart and the gray goose, the coot and duck, and now and then sending a bullet through the head of an otter or seal. A tempting opportunity occurs, however; and, instead of shooting east, he shoots west, over the beach, towards the land, and lodges his shot, not in a scart or seal, but in a woodcock or hare. Formerly he was in danger from his gun, or in scrambling among the rocks: he is now in dan- ger of being fined, and, should he frequently repeat the oiFence, of being imprisoned ; but in his own estimate and that of his neighbors the one kind of danger is no more connected with any moral stigma than the other. Had he fired west, and wilfully shot a sheep or goat, the case would, of course, be altogether different; but he is merely an occasional poacher, not a scoundrel. And if the game- laws be not strictly enforced in the district, he remains, as at first, a good and useful member of society, in no degree either the better or the worse for now and then shooting a coot or wild goose that has no standing in the game-list, and now and then picking down a partridge or heath hen that has. But in those parts of England where game are rigidly preserved, and the game-laws strictly enforced, the process Is different. The commencement of the poacher's course THE CRIME-MAKING LAWS. 259 is nearly the same in both cases. There is the same in- stinctive love of sport, and the same general conviction that game is not real property, a conviction which every view of the subject serves but to strengthen and confirm. The Englishman sees that if his neighbor the shopkeeper or banker detects a rascal robbing his till or breaking his strong box, he never once thinks of engaging him as his shopman or cashier; smd that, on the same principle, the sheep-feeder or farmer avoids hiring as his shepherd a man notorious for stealing sheep, or declines employing as his farm-servant a man who has been tried and cast for stealing horses. He finds, too, that the fair trader never bargains with habit-and-repute thieves for their stolen goods. But he sees that an entirely different principle obtains among game-preservers. Not a few of them, bent on stocking their preserves, deal freely with poachers for live game ; and still more of them, in choosing their game- keepers, prefer poachers clever, active fellows, exten- sively acquainted among their own class to any other sort of persons whatever. Nor, if the poachers be nothing worse than poachers, can there be a single objection to the ar- rangement, save on the unrecognizable, untenable ground that game is property. It is, however, the tendency of the poacher, in a country where the game-laws are strictly enforced, to become something worse. He goes to the woods, shoots or traps game, and finds himself, in conse- quence, in the circumstances of the red-haired or six-feet- high men of our illustration. He is apprehended and fined; and as his wages as a laborer are small, he has just to go to the woods again, in order we quote a remark grown into a proverb among the class that he may seek his money in the place where he lost it. He is again appre- hended, and imprisoned for some six or eight weeks, during which time he is occasionally visited by the chaplain of the prison, who tells him he has done wrong, but always, somehow, forgets to quote the text which proves it, and is besides not particularly clear in his argument. He re* 260 POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. ceives, too, visits of a different character, those of hard- ened felons; and their lessons impress him much more deeply than the teachings of the chaplain. He is again discharged ; but he has now become rather an unsettled sort of person, and fails not unfrequently to procure employ- ment. But the neighboring preserves prove an unfailing tesource: he is time after time surprised and apprehended; but he at length becomes weary of passive submission ; the hour is late, the thicket dark and lonely, the gamekeeper alone ; they are simply man to man ; and in the scuffle which ensues the keeper is baffled and beaten off. Better a brief fray than a heavy fine or a long imprisonment. The poacher's associates, ere he has reached this stage, are chiefly desperate men. * There are notorious poachers," says Mr. Bright, in his speech on the game-laws with which he prefaced his motion for a parliamentary committee on the subject, " who have by a long succession of offences and imprisonments been driven out almost from the pale of society, a kind of savages, living in hovels, or wher- ever they can find shelter. One of this outcast class was recently tried at the assizes for an act of incendiarism." Such company can have, of course, no tendency to improve a man's morals, or to increase his tenderness of human life. He engages in the forest in one fray more ; and he who commenced his career as a law-made criminal, and free of moral stain in the abstract, terminates it in the character of an atrocious felon in the sight both of God and man, a red-handed murderer, through whom two human lives have been lost to society, that of his victim and his own. It must be miserable policy that balances against the lives of human creatures and the morals of thousands of our humbler people, the mere idle amusements of a privi- leged class, comparatively few in number, and who have a great marry other amusements full within their reach. Even were their claims to the game of the country clear, and all know that a right of property in wild animals can be THE CRIME-MAKING LAWS. 2G1 constituted by taking and keeping them, as Cowper did his hares, still, did these claims interfere with the public good, they ought of necessity to give way. Justice, as certainly as humanity, demands the sacrifice. We are much pleased, in this point of view, with an anecdote re- lated by Mr. Jesse in his "Gleanings in Natural History," an exceedingly interesting volume, from which the reader may learn that there are many other ways of deriving amusement from animals besides killing them. " One of the keepers in Richmond Park informs me," says the natu- ralist, "that he has often heard his father, who was also a keeper, mention that, in the reign of George II., a large flock of turkeys, consisting of not less than three thousand, was regularly kept up as part of the stock of the park. In the autumn and winter they fed on acorns, of which they must have had an abundant supply, since the park was then almost entirely wooded with oak, with a thick cover of furze ; and although at present eleven miles in circum- ference, it was formerly much larger, and connected with extensive possessions of the Crown, some of which are now alienated. Stacks of barley were also put up in different places of the park for their support ; and some of the old turkey-cocks are said to have weighed from twenty-five to thirty pounds. They were hunted with dogs, and made to take refuge in a tree, where they were frequently shot by George II. I have not been able to learn how long they had been preserved in the park before his reign ; but they were totally destroyed towards the latter end of it, in consequence of the danger to which the keepers were exposed in protecting them from poachers, with whom they had many bloody fights, being frequently overpowered by them." Here we have a pleasing instance of even the monarch of the country yielding up his amusements in order that the lives of his servants might not be endan- gered. David would not drink of the water which was, he said, " the blood of the men that went for it in jeopardy of their lives," and so he " poured it out unto the Lord." 262 POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. XIII. IS GAME PROPERTY? When we last walked out through several of our busier Edinburgh streets into the country, we did not see a single article in the shop-windows or elsewhere which we did not at once recognize as property, and of whose general line- age, as such, we could not give some satisfactory account. Human skill and labor had been employed upon them all, from the nicely-fashioned implement or machine in which the baser metals had become more valuable than silver, or the elaborate strip of gossamer-like tissue in which the original vegetable fibre had been made to outprice its weight in gold, to the wild intertropical nut or date gathered from their several palms under the burning sun of the African or Asiatic desert, or the costly furs of the Arctic hunter, purchased by the adven nrous merchant of a civilized country amid the wild wastes of Lapland, or on the icy confines of Baffin's Bay or Mackenzie River. All was property on which the eye rested, that of individ- uals or the community ; houses, churches, public halls, the paved streets, the lamps, the railings, the shrubs and flowers in the squares and gardens, the very stones on the macadamized road, all was property. As we cleared the suburbs, with their reticulations of cross walls, their scattered trees, and their straggling houses, there opened upon us a wide extent of country, with its woods and fields, its proprietors' seats, and its farm-stead- ings. And here was property of another kind, property in land, emphatically termed by our laws in contradis- tinction to the portable valuables which we had just seen IS GAME PROPERTY ? 263 in passing outwards, in the shops, and on the persons of the passengers, real property. And real property the land of the country unquestionably is, more obscure in its lineage, mayhap, than the furs furnished in barter by the American Indian, or the flowered piece of netting elaborated to order by the incessant toil, prolonged for months, of the poor lace-maker, but obscure merely on the principle through which the early history of an ancient people or long-derived family is obscure, obscure simply because its beginnings reach far beyond the era of the annalist and the chronicler. It has been property so long that the metaphysician can but surmise how it became such ; nor can the historian decide which of the philoso- pher's many guesses on the subject is the best one. We incline to the solution of Locke, though in some respects inadequate, in preference to that of Paley, who holds, most unphilosophically we think, that the real foundation >f right in the case is the law of the land. Law of the land ! We could as soon believe that a son was the producing cause through which his father came into being, or that a daughter was the producing cause of her mother's existence. Property in the land existed long ere there were laws in the land. Cain must have been as certainly the proprietor of the field which he rendered valuable by incorporating his labor with its soil, as Abel of the flock which his labor had tamed or reared. Both the land and the animals were general gifts to the species from the Beneficent Giver of all; and the individual right was fairly constituted ir the one case by the man who broke in the animals from their state of original wildness, and in the other by the man who cleared and tilled and sowed the hitherto uncultiva- ted waste, and converted it into a patrimony worthy of being bequeathed to his children. There must have been at least as much labor expended in the case of the s-gri- culturist as in that of the shepherd ; and, if the poets are to be regarded as authorities, and there are instances in which they wonderfully approximate to the truth. 264 POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. considerably more. Paley tells us that the first partition of an estate which we read of was that which took place be- tween Abram and Lot, " If thou wilt take the left hand, then I will go to the right ; or if thou depart to the right hand, then I will go to the left." Had he examined his Bible just a little more carefully, he would have found that the transaction was not a partition of land, for Abram had none at the time, but a mere temporary ar- rangement regarding the occupation for a certain term of a certain extent of common ; that the portions of land in that country with which, according to Locke, human labor had been mixed up, had already, in consequence of the incorporation, become property; and that when Abram desired the field of Machpelah, with the sepulchral " cave that was in the end thereof," he had to purchase it of the proprietor for "four hundred shekels of silver." If the sole foundation of men's rights to their landed properties was, as Paley holds, the law of the land, if there had been no previous foundation of right on which the law itself rested, we would have to regard as miserably inadequate and precarious indeed the tenures of our laird- ocracy, and to recognize the aspirations of the levelling Chartist and the agrarian ten-acre man as at once rational and fair. The right which the law had created at one time it might without blame disannul at another; for if the law did not rest on a heaven-derived justice, but was itself a primary foundation, and rendered just whatever rested on it, justice would of course be as variable in its nature as opinion among the law-making majorities of the country ; and so it would not be more than equally just for the Con- servative majorities of to-day to secure their estates to the existing proprietors, than for the Chartist majorities of to- morrow to break up these estates into single fields, and give a field apiece to the working-men of the country. The law of the land cannot create property : it can merely extend its sanction and protection to those previously existing rights of property on which all legislation on the IS GAME PROPERTY ? 265 subject must rest, or be mere enacted violence and outrage, abhorrent to that ancient underived justice which existed ere man was, and which shall long survive every merely human law. Nay, even in cases where man's labor has not yet been incorporated with the soil, on wide moors and among rugged hills, where he has neither ploughed nor planted, it is for the benefit of the species that individual rights of proprietorship should exist and be recognized. The pro- prietor virtually holds, in many such cases, not merely in his own behalf, but in that of the country also. We were never more forcibly struck by the fact than when travelling several months ago in the mainland of Orkney, in a local- ity where the properties are small, and there exists a vast breadth of undivided common. Wherever the rights of individual proprietors extended, we found land of some value ; we at least found vegetation and a vegetable soil. On the common, on the contrary, there was almost no vegetable soil, and scarce any vegetation. The upper layer of mould, scanty at first, had been stripped off by repeated parings, and carried away for fuel ; and for hundreds of acres together the boulder clay lay exposed on the surface, here and there mottled by a tuft of stunted heath, but covered by no continuous carpeting of even moss or lichen. Were such the state of the entire island, it would be wholly uninhabitable : it is the rights of individual prop- erty alone that have preserved Pomona to its people. Even a wood of any value is never suffered to grow on a common, unless, perchance, in the uninhabited recesses of a country : no peasant ever dreams of sparing a sapling in order that it may expand into a tree for the benefit of his neighbor's children. The winter is severe, and, standing in need of fuel, he cuts the promising plant down by a stroke of his bill, and, fagoting it up with several hundred others, he carries it home to his fire. Property in land is, we repeat, real property, pi*operty held not merely for the benefit of individual proprietors, but also for the best 23 266 POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. interests of the community ; for, did all the land belong to all, it would be of no value to any. Such were some of our reflections as we walked on from field to field into the open country. In approaching a small stream that divided the lands of two proprietors, we startled a hare that had been couching amid a plot of tur- nips. It ran downwards for a few score yards along a fur- row, stopped short, looked round, resumed progress, cleared the little stream at a bound, and was then lost to our view amid a brake of furze that skirted one of the fields of the neighboring proprietor. As we walked on, and, after cross- ing the streamlet, were rising on the hillside, beside a field laid down with wheat, we raised a covey of partridges. They went whirring above our head, and, reversing the course of the hare, flew over the stream, and settled in a second field of wheat, just beside the turnip one. Thathare and these partridges were, it seems, property ; and we had witnessed on this occasion a curious transferrence of valua- bles that had taken place without bargain or agreement on the part of any one. Up to a certain moment the hare had belonged to one proprietor ; when we had first started it, and when it was running along the furrow, and when it had turned round to reconnoitre, it had belonged to the proprietor of the turnip-plot ; but no sooner had it cleared the stream, than it straightway belonged to the proprietor of the wheatfield and the furze-brake. And, as if to make the first amends for the loss which he had just sustained, the partridges we had raised, from being the property of him of the field and the brake, had, on flying over the run- nel, become the property of him of the turnip-plot. Cer- tainly a strange mode of conveyancing ! It seemed equally strange, too, that the turnips on which the hare had just been feeding, and the wheat which expanded the crops of the partridges, did not belong to either of the proprietors, but were the property of certain third parties called tenants. We saw within view at the time a considerable number of the tame animals. Enclosed within a fold of stakes and IS GAME PROPERTY ? 267 network, in a corner of the turnip-plot, there was a flock of sheep bearing on their necks a certain red mark to dis- tinguish them from those of any other sheep-owner; and a half-dozen cattle were picking up their sustenance for the day amid the furze of the brake. The cattle belonged to the farmer who rented the brake, and the sheep to the owner of the turnips. The one could recognize his cattle, the other his sheep. If the cattle crossed the stream into the turnip-plot, or the sheep broke loose, and, o'erleaping the runnel from the opposite side, did damage to the sprouting wheat, or picked the brake bare, either tenant would have a legitimate claim for damages done his prop- erty, but there would be no actual transfer of property in the case. The sheep would have an owner equally on both sides of the streamlet, in the tenant whose red mark they bore ; and the cattle, whether in the furze-brake or the turnip-field, would be equally the property of the ten- ant who farmed the brake. Certainly, if the game of the country be property, it must be property of a very anoma- lous kind. Is it personal, or real ? We find it conveyanced from one nominal owner to another, without these owners knowing aught of the matter; we find that they have no marks by which to distinguish it ; we find that, unlike all other live stock, it is fed on food not theirs ; we find that they can give no account of its origin or lineage in relation to themselves, it was neither gifted to them nor bought by them ; it runs away from them, and beyond a certain point they dare not follow it ; it is brought to them when dead, and, unable to recognize it as theirs, they purchase it on the ordinary terms. It is not personal property; it is not real property ; it belongs to an entirely different cate- gory : it is simply imaginary property. We are acquainted with an extensive district in the north of Scotland in which some thirty years ago there was not a single wild rabbit. Rabbits there had once been in the locality, though at a very early period. The laborer, in running his ditches through a sandy soil, or casting up 268 POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. the foundation of some farmhouse or stone fence, laid open, not unfrequently, underground excavations greatly larger than those of the mole, with here and there a black- ened nest-like bunch of decayed grass and leaves, huddled up far from the light, and here and there a few minute bones strewed along the passages ; and he would point out the remains to his employer, and say that the site had been once that of a rabbit-warren. But the rabbits them- selves had become as thoroughly extinct in the locality as the wolf or bear. About a quarter of a century since, however, one of the minor proprietors of the district, a gen- tleman possessed of some two or three hundred acres, let loose a few pairs of rabbits ; and so enormous has been the increase, that, over a space of some two or three hun- dred square miles, rabbits abound ; and of that large area, scarcely one thirtieth part is in the hands of the proprietary; it is farmed by tenants who pay large rents. To whom be- long the millions of rabbits by which it is infested, and who gobble up yearly many hundred pounds' worth of the pro- duce? To the proprietor who originally turned them loose? Alas ! no : the two or three pair, the progenitors of the whole, that, so long as they were in his possession, were assuredly his, would have scarce brought him half a crown in the market ; besides, he has long since sold his little property, and left that part of the kingdom. His claim would be exactly that of the Italian boy, who, having turned loose his two tame mice in a granary, came back some twenty years after, and found their descendants twenty millions strong. Do they belong, then, to the proprietors of the dis- trict in general? On what plea? They were not theirs originally ; they have been supported, not on their produce, but on that of their tenants. The non-farming, non-resi- dent proprietors have not a particle of property in them ; they are simply a certain amount of the grass, corn, and tur- nips of the farmers and farming proprietors, converted into animal food, and running about on all fours. They are mischievous vermin when alive, which no one ought to be IS GAME PROPERTY ? 26$ prevented from destroying, and which the farmer has a positive right to destroy ; and, when dead, they ought surely, just like the fur-bearing animals of Siberia or Hud- son's Bay, to be the property of the man who has taken the trouble of killing them. All quite right, says the game-preserver. You are, however, rather unfortunate in your illustration ; rabbits are not game. We are quite aware of that fact, we reply, and might have chosen what you would have deemed a better illustration. In Pomona, twenty years ago, there were no hares. A young man, the son of a proprietor, procured a very few from the mainland of Scotland ; and hares have in consequence be- come comparatively common in Orkney, just as rabbits have become common in the Black Isle ; and, in propor- tion to their number, they do as much mischief. It is the part of the game-preserver to show how or why the hares, in such circumstances, should have become property, and the rabbits not. Wherein lies the difference between two tribes of animals that so nearly resemble each other? There can be but one reply ; the law has made the hare property, which means simply, say we, that the game-laws exist, a fact which it requires no profound process of argumenta- tion to demonstrate. We would never once have thought of writing our present article if the game-laws did not exist. But the unreal and imaginary property, which has no other foundation than human enactment, which the law makes to-day and unmakes to-morrow, which a few years ago comprised the wild rabbit, and which a few years hence will not comprise the wild hare, is property of an emi- nently precarious nature. It resembles property in ice in a warm summer. Laws which are themselves not founded in moral right and the nature of things form but unsolid foundations for aught else. There was a law in Russia, en?,2ted in the days of the capricious Paul, which rendered it imperative on the male portion of Paul's subjects to wear small-clothes, and empowered the police to cut short at the knees the trowsers of the refractory. There was a 23* 270 POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. law in Great Britain in the days of George II., that made it treasonable for a Scotch Highlander to wear tartan. Put neither the one law nor the other was based on the principles of ever-enduring justice. Independently of conventional enactment, it is no more a moral offence to wear trowsers than to knock down a partridge, or to sport tartans than to shoot a hare ; and so trowsers are now worn in Russia, and tartans in the Highlands. Our views on this subject are in no respect novel : they do not belong to the times of the Chartist and the leveller. They have, on the contrary, been long embodied in our literature. The conventional game-laws had never the effect of creating in Britain a conventional morality, that learned to respect these laws as its code and standard. On this point our masters of fiction the men whose special work it was to draw character as they found it, draperied in the manners of their age, and modified by its opinions are high authorities. When Goldsmith re- quires for the purposes of his story \,o get a thoroughly honest fellow into Newgate, he makes him knock down a hare. "When Fielding an honorable magistrate at least, however lax in other matters, and a determined enemy of thieving wishes to bring his hero into trouble without rendering him culpable, he sends him, with all the eagerness of the young sportsman, after a covey he had started on his benefactor's grounds, into the grounds of a neighboring proprietor, and makes him kill them there. " The Ed- wardses of Southhill," says Mackenzie, " and a worthy family they were ! " how came these same worthy Ed- wardses to be ruined ? Young Edwards, " who was a remarkably good shooter, and kept a pointer," knocked down a partridge one day in the field of his neighbor, a country justice, and so the ruin was quite a matter of course. But there is no end of such instances ; and the report on the game-laws shows on how broad a basis of reality these adepts in fictitious narrative (the prose- maJcers) founded their inventions. Unfortunately, in not IS GAME PROPERTY ? 271 a few cases a poacher becomes a bad character, and a source of loss and annoyance to the community ; but it is not in the beginning of his career, when he is simply a poacher, that he is in any degree a bad character. He is in most cases either an adventurous young fellow, a " good shooter," like young Edwards, and fond of sport, like the game- preserving proprietors whom he annoys, or else some poor man out of employment, with a wife and family dependent on him, and much in terror of the neighboring workhouse. The evidence of Mr. M. Gibson, Inspector of Prisons in England, is jDeculiarly valuable on this head: "There are certainly many," he says, "who poach and are sent to prison, who would not commit a robbery." "There are poachers," he adds, "from the love of adventure and of sport, who are the most irreclaimable of any ; there are poachers from poverty ; and there is the young man, always in the fields, who from early life has set his bird-trap, and cannot resist the impulse of subjugating the wild animals." Such is Mr. Gibson's opinion of a numerous class of poach- ers ; and their opinion of themselves seems, as might be expected, not greatly worse than his. " Have you had any opportunity," he is asked by the committee, "of ascertaining the opinions of chaplains and officers of prisons at all gen- erally as to the operation of the present game-laws?" The reply is eminently worthy of being carefully noted and pondered. " Yes," he says ; " with regard to the effect on the prisoners, the opinion of the chaplains generally is, that they can produce no moral effect whatever upon them under the game-laws ; that they leave the prison only to return ; frequently replying to the proffered advice by say- ing that the game was made for the poor as well as the rich, and that God -made the birds of the air and thefshes of the sea for alV It so happens, curiously enough, that Judge Blackstone, and most of the philosophic thinkers which the country has yet produced, were of the same opinion ; but, more curious still, not a few of even the more zealous game-preserving proprietors seem also to entertain it, 272 POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. though of course in a greatly more covert style. They are indisputably gentlemen, and would neither employ as their servants habit-and-repute thieves, nor yet act the part of the Jonathan Wilds of the last age by being receivers of stolen goods. And yet there are two facts which come fully out in the evidence. They have no hesitation what- ever in employing as gamekeepers and gamewatchers active habit-and-repute poachers ; and hundreds of them, when stocking their preserves, drive a trade with the poachers that are still actually such, in live leverets and pheasants' eggs. Now these live leverets and pheasants' eggs cannot be property, or else these same game-preserving proprietors would to a certainty be not gentlemen, but Bcoundrels. By their doings at least they virtually decide the question against themselves. THE FELONS OF THE COUNTRY. 273 XIV. THE FELONS OF THE COUNTRY. It is very generally felt that life and property are less secure in this country at the present time than they were some eight or ten years ago. In the course of nearly a century Britain had greatly changed its character for the better, in the degree of security which the civil magistrate afforded to the peaceable subject. So late as the year 1750, it was unsafe to walk at night the streets of our larger towns ; and the man who sauntered unprotected after sunset into their quieter suburbs, or traversed even their more frequented approaches, might be almost certain of being struck down and robbed, if not murdered. Fielding, who was not only a great novelist but also one of the most efficient magistrates that ever lived, relates in his narrative of the earlier stages of that illness which ultimately carried him off, that the symptoms were much aggravated by the fatigue which he incurred in long examinations regarding the street robberies and murders of London, in especial by the examinations respecting "Jive different murders, all committed within the space of a week by different gangs of street robbers." The materials of his comparatively little- known volume, "The Life of Jonathan Wild," were col- lected during this period of crime and outrage ; nor does the work, as a whole, exaggerate the actual state of things at the time. Another of his works he entitled an " Inquiry into the Increase of Thieves and Robbers," "a work which contains several hints," says Sir Walter Scott, " which have been adopted by succeeding statesmen, and some of which are worthy of still more attention than they have received." If an "increase" of the robber class actually 274 POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. took place at the time, as the title indicates, matters must have been bad indeed ; for, about an age earlier, so sadly were the roads that approach the metropolis infested by highwaymen, as to be scarce at all passable by the solitary traveller. "Whatever might be the way in which a jour- ney was performed," says Macaulay, " the travellers, unless they were numerous and well armed, ran considerable risk of being stopped and plundered. The mounted highway- man, a marauder known to our generation only by books, was to be found on every main road. The waste tracts which lay on the main routes near London were especially haunted by plunderers of this class. Hounslow Heath, on the great western road, and Finchley Common, on the great northern road, were perhaps the most celebrated of these spots. The Cambridge scholars trembled when they approached Epping Forest, even in broad daylight; and seamen who had just been paid off at Chatham were often compelled to deliver their purses on Gadshill." Long after the times that Macaulay describes, long after the times of Fielding too, even in country districts, the law served but imperfectly to protect the peaceable subject from the housebreaker and the highwayman. Cowper's graphic description, written in the year 1783, must be familiar to all our readers : " Now, ere you sleep, See that your polished arms be primed with care, And draw the night-bolt : ruffians are abroad, And the first 'larum of the cock's shrill throat May prove a trumpet summoning your ear To horrid sounds of hostile feet within. Even daylight has its dangers ; and the walk Through pathless wastes and woods, unconscious once Of other tenants than melodious birds Or harmless flocks, is hazardous and bold." But a gradual improvement took place, especially in the larger towns. The great increase of newspapers, which recorded every act of violence and outrage as it occurred, THE FELONS OF THE COUNTRY. 275 and set the whole country on its guard, that quickening of the postal arrangements which soon overtook and dis- tanced the culprit in his escape, the admirable organi- zation of the police, effected by the act of Sir Robert Peel, above all, the outlet furnished through the discovery of Botany Bay, and its appropriation as a penal colony for the country, had all their effect in producing a favorable change ; and, while a great increase took place in the list of minor offences, a consequence of the growth of what are known as the lapsed classes, crimes of blacker dye, perpetrated by professional felons, became considerably more rare and less atrocious than in an earlier time. Dur- ing the first two decades of the present century a few terrible cases occurred. The Williams murders of 1812, and the general panic they occasioned, must be remembered by some of our older readers ; and such as belong to a later generation may find their startling effects reproduced in some degree by the vigorous pen of De Quincey, in his grim but singularly powerful essay, " Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts." The murder by the M'Keans, also permanently recorded by the same graphic writer, belongs to a somewhat later period, and is marked by similar cir- cumstances of atrocity. We do not refer to the Burke and Bishop murders, which may be considered as wholly sui generis / nor yet to those of the Thurtle or Tawell class, which occurred in private society, and lay outside what may be regarded as the professional pale. Within that pale great improvement took place ; robbery accom- panied by violence became rare, and robbery accompanied by mui'der rarer still. The streets and lanes of our larger cities might be traversed in comparative safety at all hours ; the great bulk of offences committed against the person were offences committed under the influence of drink, quite a bad enough symptom of the condition and morals of a great portion of the humbler classes, but in several material respects greatly preferable to that class of offences against the person which obtained in the days of Fielding, 276 POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. and respecting which he had to conduct, as has been said, five examinations in a single week. The means, too, bj which the darker class of crimes has been suppressed in our own days are equally in advance of those to which the novelist unrivalled, as his writings show, in his knowledge of the worse traits and specimens of human nature had been compelled to have recourse a century ago. In the introduction of the " Voyage to Lisbon," he relates that, when consulted by the Premier of the day, the Duke of Newcastle, respecting the best mode of put- ting down the robbers and murderers of the metropolis, he could advise nothing better than the employment of money in corrupting their associates. "I had the most eager desire," we find him saying, " of demolishing these gangs of villains and cut-throats, which I was sure of ac- complishing the moment I was enabled to pay a fellow who had undertaken for a small sum to betray them into the hands of a set of thief-takers whom I had enlisted into the service, all men of known and approved fidelity and intre- pidity. After some weeks," he adds, " the money was paid at the treasury ; and within a few days after two hundred pounds of it had come into my hands, the whole gang of cut-throats were entirely dispersed, seven of the thieves were in actual custody, and the rest driven, some out of the town and others out of the kingdom." For the last six or eight years, however, there has cer- tainly been no improvement of the nature which took place in the criminal records of the country during the previous quarter of a century ; on the contrary, the course has been retrograde ; and at the present time we seem as if passing to the state of matters which obtained during the days of Justice Fielding and Jonathan Wild. Murders have been committed during the last month of the old mercenary class, that, in circumstances of merciless barbarity, do not yield to any in the "Newgate Calendar;" assaults on the person for the same object have rendered the new term garrotting a completely naturalized one of familiar use ; THE FELONS OF THE COUNTRY. 277 and housebreakings on a large scale have become such common events that almost every succeeding newspaper records their occurrence. In some cases the respectable trader goes to his bed square with the world, and rises in the morning a ruined man. And yet never was there a time when certain of the causes which formed so powerful a check on crime in the past were so influentially in opera- tion as now. Never were there so many newspapers to spread over the country the intelligence of every offence in all its details, and to direct public attention on the offend- ers ; never was there a time when such intelligence could be transmitted with even a tithe of the 2)resent speed, the act of Sir Robert Peel has certainly not been suffered to fall into desuetude ; and never had the country a more active or intelligent magistracy. What, then, can be the more than neutralizing causes of such various circumstances of advantage, under which crime of what we have termed the professional class is so obviously on the increase ? The question is easily answered. The causes are two. In the first place, that change through which Britain no longer possesses penal colonies has led to a great accumulation of criminals in the country ; and it has got, in consequence, into the unhealthy condition of living subjects when the natural evacuations are stopped ; and in the second place, the ticket-of-leave system a system essentially false in principle in the circumstances has greatly exaggerated the evil. We cannot, however, agree with those who give a paramount place to the latter cause. Were it to be abol- ished to-morrow, and criminals imprisoned for the shorter periods, whether five, seven, or fourteen years, in no case released until the close of the legitimate terms re- corded in their sentences, the master evil would still remain. The felon, now let loose upon the public at the end of some two or three years, would in the other case not be let loose upon it until the end of five years, or of seven, or fourteen ; but ultimately he would be let loose upon it ; and, even if inclined to live honestly, he would 24 278 POLITICAL AKD SOCIAL. have quite as little chance of procuring the necessary era ployment at the end of the longer as of the shorter term. There is only one way in which the master evil in the case is to be remedied. The old means of evacuation must, at whatever cost, be procured. Britain, whatever difficulties may lie in the way, must again have recourse to the scheme of penal colonies, or both life and property must continue to remain insecure. And, though difficulties do lie in the way, we do not see that they are by any means insurmount- able. Half the trouble which our ancestors had in extirpat- ing the native wolves would suffice to rid us of a greatly more formidable class of wild beasts, the incorrigible criminals. It is surely not at all necessary that a penal colony should be a paradise. It was no advantage; but, on the contrary, much the reverse, that during even the healthiest state of the country the incipient felon looked with longing eyes on the representations of New South Wales given in the print-shop windows, and then went off to qualify himself by some bold act for a free passage. A penal colony should be simply a country in which the dis- charged felon could earn his bread by the sweat of his brow ? just as our humbler people do at home, and in which the circumstances of the community would be such as to ren- der the life of the marauder not only a more dangerous, but also a more toilsome and difficult one than that of the honest worker who labored fairly for his bread. And a colony of this character ought not to be difficult to find. The country once heard a great deal about the Falkland Islands. Rather more than eighty years ago (1771), it was on the eve of entering, mainly on their account, into a war with France ; and on that occasion Johnson wrote his fa- mous tract to dissuade Britain from the contest, by showing that the islands were of really little value, and would be dearly purchased at such a price. But now that all dispute regarding them has ceased, for the last quarter of a cen- tury they have been in the uninterrupted possession of this country, they might be found very valuable as a THE FELONS OF THE COUNTRY. 279 penal colony. They have an area of about thirteen thou- sand square miles; their mean temperature during the year is exactly that of Edinburgh, with summers, however, a little warmer, and winters a little colder, than our Scotch ones ; their surface is green ; the grass-lands are peculiarly luxuriant, and form such a paradise for cattle that the tame breeds are becoming wild in the interior, and promise to be very numerous ; and the bays and sounds which indent the coast abound in fish. Further, so imperfectly are they colonized, that though the expense of maintaining them costs the country about six thousand pounds per annum, their entire exports fall short of four thousand. In fine, at a very slight sacrifice these islands could be converted into a hopeful penal colony, that would fully absorb the more dangerous criminals of the country for a quarter of a centmy to come. But while recognizing the lack of penal colonies, and the consequent accumulation of our criminals within the country, as the main causes of that increase of serious crime against both the person and property which has taken place during the last eight or ten years, we must not un- dervalue the influence of the other cause, that ticket- of-leave system which has let loose so many dangerous felons on society ere half their terms of punishment had expired. The principle of the system is utterly false and unsolid in all its circumstances and details. A fond mother was once heard addressing her son as follows : " Be a good, religious boy, my little Johnnie ; fear God, and honor your parents ; and I will give you two pretty red-cheeked apples." Nor is it difficult to say what sort of a religion would be the effect of such a promise. Little Johnnie's two apples'-worth of the fear of God and the honor of parents would be a very hypocritical fear, and a very fictitious honor. And the ticket-of-leave system proceeds wholly on the same principle. Be religious and moral, it virtually says to the convict, for a given time, and you will get, when it has expired, the two red-cheeked apples. It has 280 POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. a grand disadvantage, too, over the scheme of the fond mother. She might no doubt succeed in making little Johnnie a little hypocrite ; but the two apples, when made over to him, if really good ones, might be productive of further hurt to neither himself nor the family. Not so the premium for behavior held out to the convict. The prof- fered reward bears simply to the effect that he is to be let loose on society, to prey upon it anew. There is in reality no scheme in existence by which convicts in the mass can be dealt with as our paper-makers deal with their filth-be- grimmed rags. We cannot put them in at the one end of a penitentiary in the soiled state, and take them out white and pure at the other. True, we must not limit the grace of God. It is just possible, however improbable, that lit- tle Johnnie, notwithstanding the sad stumbling-block of the two apples, or that a convict, notwithstanding the greatly sadder stumbling-block of the ticket-of-leave system, might be in reality converted ; but neither on the apple scheme nor any other will there be any wholesale conver- sions of either the little Johnnies or the greater felons of the country. Regarded as a whole, the latter will enter the penitentiaries as felons, and as felons they will leave them ; but if, by seeming to be religious, and by exercising a degree of self-constraint in a place in which there is ex- ceedingly little to tempt, they will have the prospect held out to them of quitting their place of confinement at an early day, the men of strong wills and of self-control among them always the more dangerous class will not fail to conform to the conditions. And thus the picked felons will be ever and anon let loose long ere their time, to rob in order that they may live, and to murder in order that their robberies may be concealed. In the brief passage which we have quoted from Sir Walter's " Life of Field- ing," we find him remarking, that one of the less known publications of the old magistrate and novelist contained hints, some of which had been adopted, and " some of which are worthy of more attention than they have re THE FELONS OF THE COUNTRY. 281 ceived." And we would reckon among the latter the hints contained in the chapter entitled, " Of the Encour- agement given to Robbers by frequent Pardons." Pardons at the time a consequence of the extreme severity of the English criminal code were very numerous and very capricious, though neither so numerous nor so capricious as the ticket-of-leave system has rendered them now. And what were the effects which they produced ? Simply this, as determined by a singularly shrewd and sagacious man, who knew more of the matter than any one else, that from the hope of impunity which they created, they hanged ten times more felons than they saved from the gallows, and greatly increased the amount of crime. 24* 282 POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. XV. THE LEGISLATIVE COURT. "On the 22d of Aprile" (1532), says Calderwood, in his "Ecclesiastical History," so recently published, for the first time, by the Wodrow Society, " the Collegde of the Judges was established in Edinburgh," "for judgment of pecuni- all and civil causes." " In the beginning," continues the historian, " many things were profitable devised by them, and justice ministered with equitie. But the event an- swered not the expectatioun of men ; for, seeing in Scotland there be almost no lawes except the acts of Parliament, whereof manie are not perpetuall but temporarie, and the judges hinder what they may the making of such lawes, the goods of all men are committed to the arbitriement and decisioun of fyfteen men that have perpetuall power, which, in truth, is but tyranicall impyre, seeing their own arbitriements stand for lawe." Such was the objection raised by Calderwood two hun- dred years ago to the constitution and practice of the Court of Session, at a time when no case of harassing and irritating collision with the ecclesiastical courts had arisen to disturb the equanimity or cloud the judgment of the shrewd old churchman. Such, too, was the decision pro- nounced regarding it nearly a century earlier by Buchanan, whom, in this significant and very pregnant passage, the ecclesiastical chronicler has been content closely to follow, so closely, indeed, that the passage may be deemed rather a translation than a piece of original writing. The court was comparatively in its infancy an institution of about fifty years' standing when it was characterized by the older historian as an arbitrary erection, opposed in THE LEGISLATIVE COURT. 283 its constitution to the very genius of freedom. And why ? It is according to the genius of freedom that a people be governed by laws which they themselves have made. The principle is at once so obvious and fundamental that there is scarce a writer on civil liberty who has not laid it down as his very basis. And it would certainly be no easy mat- ter to conceive of aught in more direct and hostile antag- onism to such a proposition, than the proposition that a people should be governed, not by laws of their own making, but by the legislative decisions of some fifteen irresponsible judges, chosen by the monarch to "have per- petuall power," and " whose arbitriements should stand for lawe." Such were some of the grounds of Buchanan's judgment on the "Colledge of Judges;" and they serve to demonstrate the peculiar sagacity of the man, a sagacity altogether wonderful when we take into account the early period in which he flourished. His reflections on the barbarous tor- ments to which the assassins of James I. were subjected has been instanced by Dugald Stewart, in his "Disserta- tion on the Rise of Metaphysical Science," as fraught with philosophy of a deeper reach than can be found in the works of any other w T riter of so early a period. We would place over against it as scarce less vivaciously instinct with the philosophic spirit, and as even a still better ex- ample of that discriminating ability in the political field which enabled him to take his place as an asserter of the just principles of civil liberty so mightily in advance of his age his remark on the constitution of the Court of Ses- sion. It serves at once to remind us of the eulogium of Sir James Macintosh and to justify it. " The science which teaches the rights of man," says this elegant and powerful writer, " the eloquence which kindles the spirit of free- dom, had for ages been buried with the other monuments of the wisdom and relics of the genius of antiquity. But the revival of letters first unlocked only to a few the sacred fountain. The necessary labors of criticism 284 POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. and lexicography occupied the earlier scholars, and some time elapsed before the spirit of antiquity was transferred into its admirers. The first man of that period who uni- ted elegant learning to original and masculine thought was Buchanan ; and he, too, seems to have been the first scholar who caught from the ancients the noble flame of republican enthusiasm. This praise is merited by his neg- lected though incomparable tract, 'De Jure Regni,' in which the principles of popular politics and the maxims of a free government are delivered with a precision, and enforced with an energy, which no former age had equalled and no succeeding has surpassed." A history of the many decisions of the Court of Session that, according to Buchanan and Calderwood, are legisla- tive, not judicial, that, instead of explaining existing law, are in reality creations of laws which have no existence save in the decisions themselves, would form a very cu- rious and a very useful work. It would be well, surely, to know how much of the national code is the production of the "fyfteen men that have perpetuall power, and whose arbitriements stand for lawe," and how much of it has been made by the people themselves, through the people's rep- resentatives. It would be at least particularly well to know how much of what is practically the national code is not merely law created by the " fyfteen men " where no law existed before, but law created by them in direct op- position to existing laws, law directly subversive of the law made by the people. Nor can there be any doubt that the time is coming when such a work will be imperatively called for by the public. Scotland, through the decisions of this court, is on the eve of being placed in circumstances exactly similar to those in which the disastrous wars of five hundred years have placed Ireland. The religion of the country is on the eve of being disestablished, disestab- lished, too, at a time when in a state of greater vigor, and more truly popular, than at any other period during the last hundred years ; and as revolutions never occur with- THE LEGISLATIVE COURT. 285 out at least awakening a spirit of inquiry regarding the causes which have produced them, the period must be inevitably at hand when the legislative decisions of the Court of Session shall be examined, and that with no ordi- nary degree of attention, in the light of Calderwood and Buchanan. We have specified on several occasions decisions which, in their character as precedents, have actually become law, that traverse, and practically abrogate, the statutory law of the kingdom. We adduced one very striking in- stance when setting against each other the existing mode of provision for the building and repairing of parish churches as settled by decision, and the diametrically op- posite mode as arranged and provided by enactment. According to statute, " the parishioners of parish kirks " are charged and empowered to "elect and chuse certain of the most honest qualified men within their parochins," to tax the parish for the expenses of the necessary erection or repair ; and in the event of the parishioners " failing or delaying to elect or chuse, through sloth or unwillingness, the power of making such choice or election of such honest qualified men falls to the ecclesiastical authorities." Such is the enacted statutory law on this head, the people's law. But what is the actual law of precedent in the case, the law of " the fyfteen ? " That any such election " of honest men " would be altogether illegal; that so far are the parishioners or ecclesiastical authorities from possessing any such right of election, that, even were they to make a voluntary contribution among themselves for the repair or improvement of the parish church, they could be legally pre- vented from lifting a tool upon the building ; that, in short, the whole matter of erecting, repairing, improving, is not in the hands of the parishioners or the ecclesiastical author- ities, where statute has placed it, but exclusively in hands in which statute never placed it, in the hands of the heritors. How very striking an illustration of the sagacity of Buchanan ! 286 POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. We need scarce refer to the still more striking illustration which our present ecclesiastical struggle furnishes, an illustration which, we have said, will scarce fail of being appreciated over the whole empire by and by. We shall venture, however, on one remark. It is not according to the nature of things that the decisions of the Court of Session should traverse statutory enactments, which have originated amid the ebullitions of strong popular feeling, and are in reality embodiments of the popular will, so long as these enactments are recent, and the impulse to which they owed their existence is still predominant in the coun- try as a moving power. Nothing less probable, for in- stance, than that the court should have reversed any of the more broad and obvious provisions of the Reform Bill when Earl Grey's ministry were still in office, or any of the more thoroughly understood clauses of the Roman Catholic Emancipation Act ere it had attained to a twelve- month's standing. The state of these measures as recent as measures which had agitated the whole country whose meanings all the people understood, not so much in their character as statutes as in their character as embodiments of either their own will or the will of the Roman Catholics of Ireland would have prevented most effectually any judicial reversal of the main principles which they involved. The Court of Session might as safely declare that Ernest of Hanover, not Victoria, is the monarch of these realms, as that ten-pound freeholders have no legal right to vote in the election of members of Parliament, or that at least ten-pound freeholders have no legal right to vote in the election of members of Parliament who are Roman Catho- lics. The character of such acts, as recent, restricts our judges to the exercise of their purely judicial functions. They cannot, they dare not, reverse them. Taking this obvious principle into account, and it is certainly not easy to say how any principle could be more obvious, --it is of vast importance to ascertain the opinions which our judges held regarding the powers and jurisdiction of the THE LEGISLATIVE COURT. 287 church at a time when both the Revolution and the Union were events as fresh in men's memories as the Reform Bill and the Emancipation Act are now. Hence, in part, the great value of those views and sentiments of our older lawyers on the point, to which we have so often referred. Lord Cullen, with whose admirable tract on patronage most of our readers must be acquainted, was a grown man at the time of the Revolution. His son, Lord Prestongrange, must have remembered the Union as the great event of Scotland in that age. The Lord President Dundas and the Lord President Forbes were lawyers of much the same standing as the latter. Kames, Monboddo, Dreghorn, were all reared at the feet of these men ; and though all i , ; ' .... of them could, no doubt, occasionally unite to their judicial functions those legislative powers which so excited, at an earlier period, the jealousy of Buchanan, all of them must have felt that, regarding the more palpable conditions of those two great events, the Revolution and the Union, they were at liberty to exercise their judicial functions only. The fundamental conditions of these events were present to the national mind as great living principles ; they still engaged the feelings of the country; they still exercised its reasoning faculties; they were something other than dead statutory enactments for legislative judges to dissect at will, and on which spruce half-fledged lawyers might try their hand at an amputation, without the neces- sity of using the tourniquet. Their true meaning was as thoroughly exhibited in the living intellect of the country as in the statute-book itself. And hence, of necessity, the rectitude of judicial opinion regarding them. Is this view of the matter in any degree a rational one ? If so, what estimate must we form of the view taken by Lord Cuninghame in his last note ? The church has never yet disputed that the judicial sentence of the civil court may legitimately effect a separation between her spiritu- alities and the temporalities of the state ; but this, she contends, is the utmost extent to which any such legiti- 288 POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. mate decision can effect her; and in proof of the doctrine she appeals not only to the statutory enactments in which it is embodied, but also to the opinions on the subject of all the Scotch lawyers and more eminent judges of the last century, men who lived under the direct influence of the immensely important events by which the Constitu- tion of the country had been ultimately fixed at the Rev* olution and the Union. " There appears to be little doubt," says his lordship, in reply, " that at a certain period in the last century, when ecclesiastical questions first were the subject of discussion in our courts, an opinion was enter- tained by lawyers of learning and reputation, such as Lord Prestongrange, Mr. Crosbie, and others, that such a sepa- ration was in certain cases legitimate and competent, and admitted of no remedy in this court. But, able as the persons were, they had not the benefit of the anxious and elaborate arguments which the questions have undergone in modem times, and which have thrown a light on cases of this nature that writers at no former period enjoyed." Surely we may be permitted to exclaim, " O unhappy law- yers of the last century ! hapless Henry Home, unlucky Duncan Forbes, unfortunate Monboddo, ill-fated Dreg- horn ! O ye Dundases, Cullens, Crosbies, and Preston- granges ! why were ye all born a hundred years too soon? Poor blind gropers in quest of truth, men of deficient law and slender intellect, why were you not fated to imbibe wisdom from the philosophic notes of my Lord Cuninghame, and to inhale at once wit and knowledge from the lucid and sparkling speeches of my Lord Justice- Clerk Hope ? Thou, O Karnes ! hadst thou but lived to see these luminaries, mightest have remained unenlightened thyself notwithstanding, like those very obstinate gentle- men of our own times, Lords Jeffrey and Moncreiff ; but in taking measure of the vast intellectual stature of oui Hopes and Cuninghames, thou wouldest have at least found it necessary to introduce into thy 'Sketches' one Adam more, and he a giant. And thou, O Monboddo ! hadst THE LEGISLATIVE COURT. 289 thou but seen the sort of persons who follow in their train, thou wouldest surely have rejoiced, whatever else thou mightest have done, in the return of the men with tails. But ah ! unhappy lawyers, ye lived an age too soon, and so must content yourselves now with just the pity of the Lord Ordinary." There is assuredly a time coming when our ecclesiastical question, viewed in the clear light of history, shall be judged one of the best possible for illustrating the charac- ter of the court in both its judicial and legislative aspects. It will exhibit the Janus-like head of this institution, with its one countenance bent tranquilly upon the past century, and its other countenance breathing war and horror on the present. It will be seen that in the last century, the court, with regard to the church, presented only its judicial aspect: we have shown why. It will be found that it is the legislative aspect which it presents with respect to the church now. And there will doubtless be some interest in marking the exact point at which the one character has been taken up and the other character laid down, with all the various causes which have led to the change. But the prejudices and prepossessions of men interfere, and prevent the question from being one of the best possible illustrations of this in the present time. We have a case before us which at least our antagonists will recognize as happier in its application. It is a case in which the decision arrived at by the court traverses not quite so palpably the laws of the country as the fixed laws of nature. We submitted to our readers, rather more than a week since, the report of a trial which had taken place a short time previous, before the court in Edinburgh, regarding a right to the fishing of salmon in the Frith of Dornoch, and which had gone against the defendant. We stated further that a similar case, involving a similar right to the fishing of sal- mon in the Frith of Cromarty, had been tried with a similar result a few years before. The principles of both cases may be stated in a few words. Salmon, according to the 25 290 POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. statutory laws of Scotland, may be fished for in me s^y with wears, yairs, and other such fixed machinery ; but it- is illegal to fish for them alter this fashion in rivers. The statutes, however, which refer to the case are ancient and brief, and contain no definition of what is river or what sea. They leave the matter altogether to the natural sensa of men. But not such the mode pursued by the Court of Session. In its judicial capacity it can but decide that salmon are not to be fished for in rivers after a certain manner in which they may be fished for in the sea. In its? legislative capacity it sets itself to say what is sea and what river, and proves so eminently happy in its definition, that" we are now able to enumerate among the rivers of Scotland the Frith of Dornoch and the Frith of Cromarty. Yes, gentle reader, it has been legally declared by that "infalli- ble civil court" to which there lies an appeal from all the decisions of our poor "fallible church," that Scotland pos- sesses two rivers of considerably greater volume and breadth than either the St. Lawrence or the Mississippi '. Genius of Buchanan ! It is well that thou, who didst so philosophically describe the Court of Session, didst describe also, like a fine old poet as thou wert, the glorious bay of Cromarty ! Some of our readers must be acquainted with the pow- erful writing of Tacitus in his "Life of Agricola," in which he describes the Roman galleys as struggling for the first time with the tides and winds of our northern seas. The wave rose sluggish and heavy to the oars of the rowers, and they saw all around them, in the indented shores scooped into far withdrawing arms of the sea, evidences of its ponderous and irresistible force. Buchanan must have had the passage in his mind when he drew the bay of Cro- marty. He tells us how " the waters of the German Ocean, opening to themselves a way through the stupendous cliffs of the most lofty precipices, expand within into a spacious basin, affording certain refuge against every tempest, and in which the greatest navies may rest secure from winds THE LEGISLATIVE COURT. 291 and waxes." The Court of Session, in the wise exercise of its legislate functions, reverses the very hasis of this description. The rowers of Agricola must have been mis- erably in error: the old shrewd historian must have fallen into a gross mistake. The Frith of Cromarty is not the inlet of a mighty sea, ; it is merely the outlet of an incon- siderable river. It is not an arm of the German Ocean ; it is simply a prolongation of the Conon. Prolongation of the Conon ! Why, we know a little of both. We have waded a hundred times mid-leg deep across the one, and picked up the large brown pearl mussels from the bottom without wetting our sleeve ; we have guided our little shal- lop a thousand times along the green depths of the other, and have seen the long sea-line burying patch after patch, as it hurried downwards, and downwards, and downwards, till, far below, the lead rested in the darkness, amid shells, and weeds, and zoophytes, rare indeed so near the shore, and whose proper habitat is the profound depths of the ocean. We have seen the river coming down, red in flood, with its dark whirling eddies and its patches of yellow foam, and then seen it driven back by the tidal wave, within even its own banks, like a braggart overmastered and struck down in his own dwelling. We have seen, too, the frith agitated by storm, the giant waves dashing against its stately portals, to the height of a hundred feet ; and where on earth was the power that could curb or stay them? The Frith of Cromarty a prolongation of the Conon ! Were the Court of Session to put the Conon in its pocket, the Frith of Cromarty would be in every respect exactly what it is, the noble tortus Salutis of Buchanan, the wide ocean bay, in which the whole British navy could ride at anchor. Is it not a curious enough circumstance, that .much about the same time in which the Court of Session, in the due exercise of its legislative functions, stirred up the church to rebellion, it so laid down the law with re- spect to the Frith of Cromarty, in the exercise of exactly the same functions, that it stirred it up to rebellion also ? 292 POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. Yes, it is a melancholy fact, but it cannot be denied, that this splended sheet of water has been in a state of open rebellion for the last four years. In obedience to its own ocean laws, it has been going on producing its own ocean products, its prickly sea-urchins, its sea-anemones, its dulce, its tangle, "its roarin' buckies," and its "dead men's fingers;" when, like a good subject, it should have been river-mouth to all intents and purposes, nor have ventured on growing anything less decidedly fluviatile than a lymnea or a cyclas, or a freshwater polypus. It has been so utterly outrageous in some of its doings, that, albeit inclined to mercy, we are disposed to advise the court to deal with it somewhat closely. There might be trouble, perhaps, in bringing it to the bar, more by a great deal than sufficed to bring the Presbytery of Dunkeld there ; but with the precedent of Canute on record, we do not think the court would lower its dignity much below the present level by just stepping northwards to rebuke it. It would be per- haps well, too, to select as the proper time the height of a stiff" nor'easter. For our own part, we would be extremely happy to furnish the information necessary to convict, whether geological or of any other kind. We can satisfac- torily prove, that no further back than last year, this frith gave admission, in utter contempt of court, to so vast a body of herrings, that all its multitudinous waves seemed as if actually heaving with life; nay, that it permitted them, by millions and thousands of millions, to remain and spawn within its precincts. We can prove, further, that it suffered a plump of whales vast of back and huge of fin to pursue after the shoal, rolling, and blowing, and splashing the white spray against the sun ; and that it furnished them with ample depth and ample verge for their gambols, though the very smallest of them was larger considerably strange as the fact may seem than the present Dean of Faculty. Is all this to be suffered ? The Lords of Session must assuredly either bring the rebel to its senses, or be content to leave their own legislative THE LEGISLATIVE COURT. 293 wisdom sadly in question. For ourselves, we humbly pro- pose that, until they make good their authority, they be provided daily with a pail of its clear fresh water, drawn from depths not more than thirty fathoms from the surface, and be left, one and all, to make their toddy out of the best of it and to keep the rest for their tea. Nothing like river-water for such purposes, and the waters of the Conon are peculiarly light and excellent. XVI. THE PEACE MEETINGS. It is indisputable that peace societies are becoming of importance enough to constitute one of the peculiar fea- tures of the time. We learn from Sir Charles Lyell's recent work of travels in the United States, that they appear to be telling on the American mind, albeit naturally a war-breathing mind, combative in its propensities and fiery in its elements. The late peace meetings at Paris, London, Birmingham, and Manchester, seem to have been it once very largely attended and animated by the enthu- uasm of a young and growing cause; and newspapers such is the "Times," the " Chronicle," the "Herald," and the l< Post," and periodicals such as the " Quarterly Review," evidently deem the movement, of which they are a result, Jbrmidable enough to justify the attempt to write it down. (t is certain, too, that the substratum of right feeling in which the movement has originated, and which it repre- sents in a rather exaggerated form, is vastly broader and more extensive than the movement itself. There are many thousands both in Britain and America, and not a the stamp of antiquity ; while those of the civilized na- tions, save where, in a few cases, a false taste has led to .i retrograde movement, bear the true modern air. They are things, not of the past, but of the present. Not a few of the ideas which they embody are absolutely old : their sculpture is formed on the old model of Greece, their architectural ideas are either Grecian or Gothic ; and yet, though associations and recollections of the ancient do IMPRESSIONS OF THE GREAT EXHIBITION. 315 mix themselves np with the later style, we feel that, unlike the semi-barbarous productions of the less civilized nations, they are not old-fashioned, but new. In one sense, new and true, old and false, are evidently convertible terms. A false idea in art always becomes old ; while a true idea lives on, and bears about it the freshness of youth. The false idea is consigned to the keeping of but the antiquary ; whereas civilized man, as such, becomes the depository of the true one ; and in his countless reproductions it con- tinues to bear about it the fresh gloss of youth. And at length, with even the recent, if false, we come to associate ideas of the obsolete and the old. I was much struck, in the mediaeval department of the Exhibition, a depart- ment which we owe to Puseyism, by the large amount of the false in art which this superstition has been the means of calling back from its grave. The Gothic archi- tecture is true, one, as we have already said, of the two great architectural ideas of the world. But the Gothic sculpture and the Gothic painting are both false ; and Puseyism has, with the nonsense and false doctrine of the middle ages, been restoring both the false painting and the false sculpture. The grotesque figures gaudily stained into glass, or grimly fretted into stone, harmonized well with tall candles of beeswax and cotton wick, to light which is worship, and with snug little cages of metal, into which priests put their god when they have made him out of a little dried batter. We are told that James VII. strove hard to convert his somewhat unscrupulous favorite, the semi-infidel Sheffield, to Popery. " Your Majesty must excuse me," said the courtier : " I have at length come to believe that God made man, which is something; but I cannot believe that man, to be quits with his Maker, turns round and discharges the obligation by making God." In such a display of human faculty as the Great Exhibition, the strangely-expressed feeling of Sheffield must surely have come upon many a visitor of the mediaeval apartment. What man is, how glorious in intellect, how rich in 316 LITERACY AND SCIENTIFIC. genius, and how powerful in his control over the blind forces of nature, was manifested, in by much the larger part of the Exhibition, in a manner in which none present had ever seen it manifested before. And what then must be the character and standing of that Great Being by whom man was created ? Under the ample roof, however, there were here and there grotesque corners filled with the false and the old-fashioned ; and, curiously enough, there were posted in these grotesque corners, as specimens of human workmanship, false, old-fashioned gods, gods with paunch bellies, and gods with bloated, negro-like faces, and gods with from fourteen to twenty hands and arms apiece ; and here, in yet one other grotesque corner, amid a false sculpture, we found copes, and albs, and painted candles seven feet high, and little cages for holding what the early reformers termed the " bread-god," which priests manufacture. Here, as in the other idolatrous apartments, false, old-fashioned arts were associated with a false, old- fashioned religion, and both wore alike on their foreheads the stamp of mortality and decay. Popery, however, had, I found, one grand advantage over Puseyism in its use of art. With Puseyism all was restoration from a barbarous age, that possessed only one true artistic idea among many false ones ; whereas Po- pery, on the other hand, had availed itself of art in all its stages; and so all its artistic ideas were the best and truest of their respective ages. When a Michel Angelo appeared, it forthwith adopted the sculpture of a Michel Angelo ; when a Raphael appeared, it forthwith adopted the paint- ing of a Raphael. Instead of perpetuating an obsolete fashion in its trinkets and jewels, it set its Benvenuto Cellini to model and set them anew; nay, in Italy, sur- rounded by noble fragments of the old classic architecture, it broke off its associations with the Gothic, and erected its fairest temples in the old Vitruvian symmetry, under the eye of a Palladio. This great difference between the two churches was most instructively shown in the portion IMPRESSIONS OF THE GREAT EXHIBITION. 317 of the Exhibition devoted to the display of stained glass. The English contributions, manufactured for the Puseyite market, abounded in ugly saints and idiotical virgins, flaming in tasteless combinations of gaudy color ; whereas in much of the stained glass contributed by the popish countries of the Continent the style is exquisitely RapTi- aelesque. But I cannot better describe the difference be- tween the two schools than in the admirable pictures of Warton, with which, as representative of the wisdom of Popery in its generation, compared with the folly of Pu- seyism, we for the present conclude. It is of the mediaeval style that the poet speaks : "Ye brawny prophets, that, in robes so rich. At distance due possess the crisped niche; Te saints, who, clad in crimson's bright array, More pride than humble poverty display; Ye virgins meek, that wear the palmy crown Of patient faith, and yet so fiercely frown; Ye angels, that from clouds of gold recline, But boast no semblance to a race divine ; Shapes that with one broad glare the gazer strike; Kings, bishops, nuns, apostles, all alike; No more the sacred window's round disgrace, But yeld to Grecian groups the opening space. * * * * And now I view, instead, the chaste design, The just proportion, and the genuine line; Those native portraitures of Attic art, That from the lucid surface seem to start; The doubtful radiance of contending dyes, That faintly mingle, yet distinctly rise 'Twixt light and shade; the transitory strife, The feature blooming with immortal life; The stole, in causal foldings taught to flow, Not with ambitious ornaments to glow; The tread majestic, and the beaming eye, That, lifted, speaks its commerce with the sky; Heaven's golden emanation, gleaming mild O'er tht? mean cradle of the virgin's child. * * * 27* SI 8 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. Thy powerful hand has broke the Gothic chain, And brought the bosom back to tro again, To truth, by no peculiar taste confined, Whose universal pattern strikes ma. "kind." SECOND ABTICLE. I found the various articles of the Exhibition ranged under the four great heads of raw materials, manufactures, machinery, and the fine arts. In the first department I saw the stuff, whether furnished by the buwels of the earth or produced on its surface, on which man has to work ; in the second, that into which, for purposes of use or of ornament, he succeeds in fashioning it ; in the third, his various most ingenious modes of making dead matter his fellow-laborer and slave in the task of moulding the stubborn materials into shape and form ; and in the fourth, his strainings after something higher than mere utility, and his wonderful ability of creating a perfection in form and expression greater than that which he finds in living na- ture. I could have wished that into this last department fine pictures, as certainly as fine statues, had been admis- sible. The display of either was not properly the object of the Great Exhibition ; and yet it would have been incomplete without them. From the two sister arts, those of the painter and of the statuary, all that im- parted elegance and beauty to the labors of the manufac- turer had been derived. The workers in wood, stone, and metal had borrowed their delicate sculpturings from the statuary ; the workers in silk and thread, in clay and in glass, in dyes and in paints, in japans and in varnishes, had borrowed their choicest patterns from the painter; all that added beauty to comfort in the implements and appliances of a high civilization had been derived from the twin arts ; they had thrown, as if by reflection, the flush of IttR^SSIONS OF THE GREAT EXHIBITION. 319 gen t> on the common and ordinary things of life ; I saw their vivid impress at almost every stall ; and as sculpture was present in some of her higher productions, I hold that painting in some of her higher productions should have been present also, as that other art which, in the staple productions of tne Exhibition, had added beauty to com- fort, and the exquisite and the ideal to the common and the ordinary. In examining the raw materials furnished by the various countries of the world, some of them many thousand miles apart, what first struck was the great uniformity of character and appearance which prevailed among the sections devoted to mineral and mining products, and the great diversity which marked tne animal and vegetable ones. Whatever was furnished by the primary rocks bore almost the same character all over the world. The granites and porphyries of the southern hemisphere differed in no respect from those of the northern one ; or the iron, lead, and copper ores of the Old World from those of the New. Even specimens sent by one state or kingdom as marvels from their size or purity, were in most cases tally matched by specimens of the same kind sent by some other state or kingdom thou- sands of miles apai't. Russia, for instance, furnished plates of mica a full foot across ; but then the United States did the same ; and a mass of virgin copper from Massachusetts, which weighed two thousand five hundred and forty-four pounds, was more than matched by a block of similar cop- per from Trenanze in Cornwall, which weighed only two thousand five hundred pounds, but was merely a portion of a mass fifty superficial feet in extent, of so much greater weight that it could not be raised entire out of the mine. The frequent occurrence of copper in a virgin that is, pure and malleable state, among the ores of the world, as presented to view in the Exhibition, threw light on the place which the bronze age holds in the chronology of the antiquary. Its place is always second to the age of stone. All the iron ores exhibited existed as mere stones. If a 320 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. bit of virgin iron be here and there occasionally found, the chemist ascertains that, unlike any of the iron of earth, it is mixed with nickel and chrome, and concludes that it came as a meteorolite from heaven ; for it is still doubtful whether there be properly any virgin iron on earth which the earth itself has pi-oduced ; at least, if it at all exists, it is a greatly rarer substance than gold. And iron in the stony state is a much less eligible substance for tool or weapon making than ordinary stone. But virgin copper is greatly superior to either flint or jasper in at least duc- tility ; and such is its purity, that the savage who found the first mass of it in the rock could beat it out into a sword or spear-head, with simply one stone for his anvil and another for his hammer. In every country of the world in which copper is to be found at all, the copper or bronze age is found to have come immediately after that of stone, and in advance of that of iron. That resem- blance borne among themselves by the mineral productions of the earth in all countries, which the Exhibition made so sti'ikingly manifest, has been remarked both by Hum- boldt and by Captain Basil Hall. " Humboldt," says the latter writer, in his voyage to Loo Choo, " somewhere re- marks the wonderful uniformity which obtains in the rocks forming the crust of the globe, and contrasts this regularity with the diversity prevailing in every other branch of natural history. The truth of this remark was often for- cibly impressed upon our notice during the present voyage for. wherever we went, the vegetable, the animal, and the moral kingdom, if I may use such an expression, were dis- covered to be infinitely varied : even the aspect of the skies was changed ; and new constellations and new cli- mates cooperated to make us sensible that we were far from home. But on turning our eyes to the rocks upon which we were standing, we instantly discovered the most exact resemblance to what we had seen elsewhere." There were, however, a few centres to be found in this Exhibition of the world's industry, where the production IMPRESSIONS OF THE GREAT EXHIBITION. 821 of some mineral in larger and finer masses than it had beeK detected elsewhere, among at least the civilized nations, had originated some branch of art or manufacture unique in the show. Of this, perhaps the most striking example was furnished by the Kussian department, where the mal- achite furniture and ornaments, wholly unlike aught dis- played in any other section, were of the most gorgeous and impressive beauty. A few specimens of the material in its rude state lay on a table beside the wrought articles, and were certainly of much greater size and mass than any specimens of the mineral which I had hitherto seen in any collection. One fragment seemed about a foot square on its larger surface, and from six to eight inches in depth. Malachite is one of the ores of copper. It consists of from fifty to sixty per cent, of that metal, combined with oxygen, carbonic acid gas, and water, in the solid form ; it may, in fine, be regarded as a green verdigris, hardened by its union with the gases into a compact marble, susceptible of a fine polish, and occurring usually in cavities in the stalac- titical or botryoidal form. Its color internally is found to vary from darker to lighter, as in most stalactites, in gi-ace- ful lines parallel to its lines of surface, and that speak, in those flowing curves, of aqueous deposition. The worker in malachite cuts it up into thin veneers, which, according to the nature of his work, he lays down upon a ground either of stone or of metal, taking care that the curve of one fragment merges gracefully into the curves of the neighboring ones ; and thus large and apparently contin- uous planes of the substance are formed, as in tables, chimney-pieces, and doors ; or it is curved and hollowed so as to wrap round noble vases bordered with gold, or even wrought into ornately carved chairs. The beauty of the articles thus produced is so great that they formed one of the centres of the Exhibition, upon which the liv- ing tide constantly set in ; but their great cost must restrict their use to what their exquisite beauty peculiarly fits them to grace, the palaces of princes and the man- 322 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. sions of nobles. One magnificent door of this substance, which from top to bottom looked like an opaque emerald, was valued, we understood, at about ten thousand pounds sterling. The vegetable and animal substances exhibited under the head of raw materials formed a marked contrast, in their great diversity, to the mining and mineral products. In the colonial department, almost every climate and zone sent specimens of its plants and trees, its mammals, rep- tiles, fishes, and birds ; and the variety was of course very great. There were, however, a few of the mineral pro- ducts of the latter geological ages that came under the same law of diversity as that which obtained among the plants, and animals. Coal and the coal plants, judging from the specimens, seem to bear well-nigh the same char- acter all over the world, and to be spread very widely in each hemisphere ; but amber, the fossilized resin of an ex- tinct species of pine, seems very much restricted, like some of our existing pines, to a European centre ; and though there were specimens in the Exhibition furnished from va- rious European localities, among the rest, from the Nor- folk coast, all the finer and larger specimens came, we found, from Northern Germany, and in especial from the southern coast of the Baltic. In the glass case of one ex- hibitor, beautiful pieces of amber, dug out of the ground, lay side by side with fragments of the fossil pine (pinus succinifer, which had produced it ; in another there were large masses which had been cast up by the sea, of a quality so fine that similar masses have been sold at the rate of a hundred dollars per pound weight ; in yet another case there were specimens of the various implements and orna- ments into which amber is formed, and which rendered it of old, and in some degree still, an important article of commerce ; and in yet another and vastly more interesting case still, had one but the time and opportunity necessary to observation, there was a set of specimens of amber se- lected for the sake of the organisms, vegetable and animal, IMPRESSIONS OF THE GKEAT EXHIBITION. 323 which they contained, and which had taken so said the catalogue twenty-rive years to collect. It is a curious circumstance, that naturalists have now discovered in this substance fossilized fragments of forty-eight different spe- cies of shrubs and trees, and no fewer than eight hundred different species of insects. We looked with no little re- spect on the various specimens of amber furnished by the Exhibition, as of great interest to the geologist, from the circumstance that it has formed the best of all matrices for the preservation of the minuter organisms of the later ter- tiary periods ; and of great interest to the historian, from the circumstance that it was the means of first awakening the commercial spirit in northern Europe, and of inducing the equalizing tides of civilization to set in from the shores of the genial Mediterranean to those of the frozen Baltic. In the vegetable department, though the intertropical colonies sent their splendid exotics, and the woods, roots and plants of the New World contended with those of the Indian Archipelago and the southern hemisphere, I saw nothing that at all equalled in completeness the collection of the Messrs. Lawson of Edinburgh. It consists of all plants, seeds, and trees which are reared in Scotland for the use of man ; and, interesting at all times, it would have formed, had it been made in the last age, one of the best possible apologetic defences for Scotland against the gibes of the English. "Do you ever bring the sloe to per- fection in your country?" inquired Johnson, in one of his merrier moods, of the obsequious Boswell. The Messrs. Lawson show most conclusively that we bring to perfection a great deal more. We find it stated that the making of their collection cost them about two thousand pounds ster- ling, evidence enough of itself that the vegetable pro- ductions of Scotland useful for food and in the arts cannot be few. There are many Scotchmen, and in especial Scotch women, who complain of the climate of their country. I dare say it must have occurred to some of them, amid the beautiful specimens of the Messrs. Lawsons' collection, 324 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC, that the wonder is, not that the climate of Scotland should be occasionally severe, but that in the average it should be so mild and genial. There is not another country in the world lying between the fifty-fifth and fifty-ninth degreed of latitude, whether in the northern or southern hemisphere, that could mature one-half the productions exhibited by the Messrs. Lawson. On the American coast, under the same degrees, the isothermal line is that of the north of Iceland ; the ground always remains frozen hard as a rock to the depth of a few feet from the surface ; and as the winter sets in, the sea forms into a continuous cake of ice along the shores. The lines of latitude fairly taken into account, we challenge for Scotland the finest climate and the most productive soil in the world. And yet, at a time comparatively recent to the geologist, though, of course, removed beyond the historic period, the case was widely different. The scratched and polished rocks of the Pleis- tocene period, its moraines and travelled stones, its drift gravels, its boulder clays, and its semi-arctic shells, testify to an age of ice and snow, of local glaciers and drifting icebergs, in which not a tithe of the vegetable productions exhibited by the Messrs. Lawson could have been reared in Scotland. I am glad to learn that this interesting col- lection, so honorable to the skill and industry of the collec- tors, and which so thoroughly bears out the deductions of science regarding the isothermal conditions of Scotland, is to be transferred entire to the horticultural museum at Kew Gardens. In the exhibition of birds and beasts, which came in part under the head of materials derived from the animal king- dom, and in part illustrated the art of the animal-stuffer, I saw some cabinets of rare interest ; but I could fain have wished that the general section had been more complete. Such a collection of the birds, fishes, and quadrupeds of Scotland as that which the Messrs. Lawson exhibited of its plants would have well repaid the study of days. Nor, of course, would less of interest have attached to the animals IMPRESSIONS OF TIIE GREAT EXHIBITION. 325 of other countries, with their rivers and seas. I saw one tastefully-arranged case of stuffed birds from the wild west coast of Assynt, and recognized in the name of the exhibitor, Mr. W. Dunbar, an intelligent naturalist resident at Loch Inver, whose freely communicated stores of knowledge occupy, though not always with the due acknowledgment, a large space in a popular work on Sutherlandshire. His case contained chiefly the game-birds of the county, which might be regarded either as the raw material which our sporting gentlemen convert into food at the very moder- ate cost, when they are eminently successful in the process, of about thirty pounds sterling per stone ; or, a more pleas- ing view, as adequately representative of an important portion of the natural history of the county. Nothing could be more perfectly life-like or natural than these stuffed birds of Mr. Dunbar. The great achievement presented by the Exhibition, however, in this department, was furnished by a German State. On no one object under the vast crystal roof, not even on the Kohinoor itself, did a greater tide of visitors set in, whether on shilling or on half-crown days, than on what were known, though not so entered in the official catalogue, as " The Comical Creatures of Wurtem- burg." The catalogue simply bore that Herman Ploucquet, preserver of objects of natural history at the Royal Mu- seum of Stuttgardt, had contributed to the show " groups of stuffed animals and birds, nests of birds of prey, hawks pouncing upon owls," etc., etc. ; and certainly nothing could be more natural and true than these groups. They were made to represent, with all the energy of life, the scenes so frequently enacted in the animal world. It was not, how- ever, to the purely natural that the Exhibition owed its interest, but to the introduction of an idea long familiar to the poet and the fabulist, and which painting and sculp- ture, in at least some of their humble departments, have borrowed from literature, but which, to at least the bird and animal stuffer, seems to be new. Most of Mr. Plouc- quet's groups, though animals are the actors, represent 28 326 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. scenes, not of animal, but of human life. The " Batracho- maomachia" of Homer, in which frogs and mice enact the part of the heroes of the Trojan war, and " make an Iliad of a day's campaign," furnished merriment to the old Greeks. ^Esop and his numerous imitators followed in the same wake ; until at length the representation of men under the forms, and bearing the characters of animals, became one of the commonest of literary ideas. And from literature it found its way, as we have said, into painting and sculpture. But the introduction of the animals themselves into such scenes seems to be anew, and, judging from the great pop- ularity of Ploucquet's figures, a most successful idea. It is interesting, and really not uninstructive, to mark how thoroughly the animal physiognomy can be made to express at least the lower passions and more earthy moods of the human subject. One of the stories illustrated by the in- genious German is an eminently popular one on the Con- tinent, that of Reynard the Fox. " Among the people," says Carlyle, " it was long a house-book and universal best companion. It has been lectured on in universities, quoted in imperial council-halls, lain on the toilets of princes, and been thumbed to pieces on the bench of artisans." Rey- nard bears, of course, in the story, his character of consum- mate cunning and address ; and in the opening scene, where a bona fide fox is introduced, lolling at his ease on a sofa, with his hind legs set across, his tail issuing from between them and curled jauntily round his left fore-paw, and his head reclining upon his right, there is an expression of cool, calculating cunning, as strongly, we had almost said aa artistically marked, as in the Lovat or the John Wilkes of Hoo arth. CRITICISM FOIv THE UNINITIATED. 327 II. CRITICISM FOE THE UNINITIATED. FIRST ARTICLE. We have just been spending a few hours for the first time among the pictures of the Exhibition of the Royal Scottish Academy, and spending them very agreeably. A good picture is inferior in value to only a good book ; and in one important respect at least bad ones are better than inferior books, seeing one can determine their true charac- ter at scarce any expense of time. There are no second and third pages to turn after perusing the first ; and if there be nothing to strike or nothing to please, this negative quality of the piece, as fatal surely to a picture as to a book, is discovered at a cost proportioned to its value. The con- noisseur, like the critic, has his rules of art and his vocab- ulary ; but though some eyes are doubtlessly more prac- tised than others, and some judgments better informed, I do not deem the art itself of very difficult attainment. To please is the grand end of the painter ; and he can attain his object in only two different ways, by either a close imitation of the objects he represents, or by the choice of objects interesting in themselves. Now, it needs no art whatever to decide whether or no he has succeeded in the first and simpler department, the faithful representation of what he intended to delineate. The birds that pecked at the grapes of the ancient painter ; the countryman who attempted to scale the painted flight of stairs ; the artist who stretched his hand to draw aside the well-simulated curtain which seemed to half-conceal the work of his rival, all these were equally skilful judges. Even the decision 328 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. of the birds themselves was such a decision as no connois- seur would have dared dispute; and many an ingenious piece of criticism has the memory of it survived. In the same way, the mastiff who came running up to his master's portrait wagging his tail was a perfectly qualified judge of its fidelity. The other department of the art r the choice of subjects requires higher qualities in the con- noisseur ; but it is not exclusively in picture-galleries that his skill is to be acquired. Nay, I am mistaken if it may not be acquired outside of the picture-gallery altogether, and in utter ignorance of the technicalities of the art. Take landscape, for instance. Who can doubt that Shenstone, who had of all men the most exquisite eye for the real scenes of nature, must have had an eye equally exquisite for those very scenes when transferred to canvas ? He was more than a great connoisseur: he was also a great artist, an artist who dealt in realities exclusively, and planted his thickets and formed his waterfalls with all the exquisite perception and inventive originality of high genius. No one can suppose that Shenstone's taste and skill would not have served him in as good stead amid a collection of pictures as at Hagley or in the Leasowes; or that, however unskilled in the connoisseur's vocabulary, he would have proved other than a first-rate connoisseur. The "poet's lyre," says Cowper, "must be the poet's heart ; " he must feel warmly before he can express strongly. I suppose nearly the same remark may be applied both to the painter and the men best qualified to appreciate the pointer's productions. An intense feeling of the beautiful and a nice perception of it invariably go together ; and. unless a person has experienced this feeling, in the first instance, amid the delights of the original nature, there is no virtue in rules or phrases to convey it to him from the painter's copy. I am not aware that Professor Wilson knows anything of these rules or phrases. Certain I am, however, that this master of gorgeous description, who makes the reader more than see the scene he paints, for he CRITICISM FOR THE UNINITIATED. 329 makes him feel it too, must have an exquisite eye for land- scape, whether it be on or off canvas. He is one of the born connoisseurs. And what this man of genius possesses in so great a degree is possessed as really, though in im- mensely varied gradations, by almost all. Akenside de- scribes the untaught peasant lingering delighted amid the glories of a splendid sunset, intensely happy, and yet scarcely able to say why. Assuredly that same peasant would be quite qualified to distinguish between a daub and a fine picture. Imagine him passing homeward, after " his long day's labor," in one of those exquisite evenings of early June that live with a " sunshiny freshness in mem- ory," as Shelley finely expresses it, long after they have passed. There is a splendid drapery of clouds in the west, tinted by those hues of heaven which can be fully expressed by neither the words nor the colors of earth, those hues of exquisite glory of gold, and flame, and pearl, and amber which the prophets describe as encircling the chariot of Deity. The sun rests in the midst, less fiercely bright than when he looked down from the middle heavens, but dilated apparently in size, and more glorious to the conception, because more accessible to the eye. The land- scape below is soft and pastoral. There is a dim undulat- ing line of blue hills on the one hand, and the far-off sea on the other. A light, fleecy cloud hangs over the distant village, and seems a bar of pale silver relieved against the wooded hill behind. A lonely burying-ground, surrounded by ancient trees, and with the remains of an old time-shat- tered edifice rising in the midst, occupies the foreground. We see the white tombstones glittering to the sun, and the alternate bars of light and shadow that mark more dimly the sepulchral ridges of yellow moss which rise so thickly over the sward ; while beyond, on the side of a wide- spreading acclivity, there is a quiet scene of fields, and hedgerows, and clumps of wood, with here and there a group of white cottages, all basking in the red light. And mark the loiterer, one of the intellectual peasants of our 28* 3^0 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. own country, a well-selected specimen of the class which, in at least thought, feeling, and power, has found its meet type and representative in "Him who walked in glory and in joy, Following his plough upon the mountain-side." How his steps become gradually fewer and more slow ! and how at length, unconscious of aught except what Aken- sicle exquisitely describes as the "form of beauty smiling at his heart," ho stands still, to lose, in the happiness of the present, every gloomier recollection of the past, and every darker anticipation of the future! Undoubtedly that un- taught peasant is a connoisseur of the higher class. The birds peck the grapes, the mastiff recognizes the portrait ; but the peasant can judge of more than mere likeness, lie can exquisitely feel the beautiful; and he is perfectly qualified to say that the work of art which can reawaken in him this feeling is assuredly a work of genius. But why all this wild radicalism, this lowering of the aristocracy of criticism, this breaking down of the fictitious distinctions of connoisseurship ! In the first place, I am merely mak- ing my apology for having derived very exquisite pleasure from even a first visit to the pictures of the Academy ; and, in the second, for daring to do what I am just on the eve of doing, for daring to assure the reader, that, if he has an eye and a heart for nature, he may go there, however unskilled in the rules of the vocabulary of criticism, and derive much pleasure from them too. I am merely stand- ing up, as Earl Grey and Cobbett have expressed it, for my order, the uninitiated. I have spent some of my happiest hours amid exhibitions of a different kind from the Exhibition in the Academy; and some of my most vivid recollections refer to scenes redolent of the wild and the sublime of nature, and to the emotions which these have awakened. May I venture to describe the feeling in connection with one sweet scene a wooded dell in the far north in which I have perhaps CRITICISM FOR THE UNINITIATED. 331 oftenest experienced it, and which came rushing into my mind as I lingered in front of one of the richest landscapes of the Exhibition ? It is a l-ecess of deepest solitude ; but the sweet Highland stream that comes winding through it, passing alternately from light to shadow and from motion to repose, imparts to it an air of life and animation, and we do not feel that it is lonely. Man is so little an ani- mal, says Rousseau, that he is as effectually sheltered by a tree twenty feet in height as by one of sixty. True ; but his ideas are much larger than himself, and he has too close a sympathy with nature not to experience an ampler expansion of feeling under the loftier than under the lower cover. In this solitary dell, the banks, which on either hand, at every angle and indentation, advance their grassy ridges or retire in long, sloping hollows, partake perhaps rather of the picturesque than of the magnificent ; but the trees which rise along their sides, and which for the last century have been slowly lifting themselves to the freer air of the upper region, look down from more than the higher altitude instanced by Rousseau. Often, when the evening sun was casting its slant red beams athwart their topmost branches, and all beneath was brown in the shade, I have sauntered along this little stream, lost in delicious musings, whose intermingled train of thought and feeling I have no language to convey. I have felt that the cog- itative faculty in these moods had not much of activity ; but then, though it wrought slowly, it wrought willingly and unbiddeu ; and around every minute thought there would swell and expand an atmosphere of delightful feel- ing, which somehow seemed to owe its origin as much to the magnitude as to the quiet beauty of the surrounding ob- jects, and which has reminded me fancifully, but strongly, of that minutest of all the planets, of the asteroids rather, whose atmosphere rises over it to more than ten times the height of the atmosphere of our own planet ; I have looked up to the branches that twisted and interlaced themselves so high over head, and the leaves that seemed 32 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. sleeping in the light; I have seen the deep blue sky far beyond ; I have caught glimpses through the chance vistas of little open spaces, shaggy with a rank vegetation, and which I have loved to deem the haunts of a solitude still deeper than that which surrounded me ; I have marked the varieties of beauty which distinguish the several deni- zens of the foresi, the ash, with his long massy arms, that shoot off from the trunk at such acute angles, and his sooty blossoms spread over him as if he wore mourning ; the elm, with his trunk gnarled and furrowed like an Egyptian column, and his flake-like foliage laid on in strips that lie nearly parallel to the horizon ; the plane, with his dark green leaves and dense, heavy outline, like that of a thunder-cloud ; the birch, too, a tree evidently of the gen- tler sex, with her long flowing tresses falling down to her knee ; and as I looked above and around, I felt my heart swelling with an exquisite emotion, that feasts on the grand and the beautiful as its proper food ; and surely that mind must be chilled and darkened by the pall of a death- like scepticism, that does not expand with love and grati- tude, under the influence of so exquisite a feeling, to the great and wonderful Being who has imparted so much of good and fair to the forms of inanimate nature, and has bestowed on the creature such a capacity of enjoying them. SECOND ARTICLE. In the middle of the second exhibition-room, on the west side, there is a picture of Allan's which almost every visitor star-ds to study and admire ; and we observed not a few who, like ourselves, came back a second and a third time to look at it again and again. Let criticism say what it please, this is praise of the very highest order. The piece represents one of the first heroes and greatest men CRITICISM FOR THE UNINITIATED. 333 of Scotland, Robert the Bruce ; and represents him when greatest and noblest, uniting to a courage truly heroic the tenderness and compassion of a gentle and affectionate nature. It embodies with exquisite truth Barbour's affect- ing story ol the king and the * poore lavender." The scene, as all our readers must remember, is laid in Ireland. The redoubtable hero of Bannockburn had been compelled to retreat before the immensely superior forces of the English and their Irish allies. Both the retreating and the pursuing army had been resting for the night, the one in a valley, the other on an adjoining hill; but the pursuers were early astir, and their long array had been seen from the Scottish encampment stretching far into the background on the ridge of the neighboring height, and all in full advance. The Scotch, too, had been preparing for a hasty retreat ; Edward Bruce and the Black Douglas had mounted their war-horses, and the warriors behind were all on foot and in marching column, when they were suddenly arrested by the voice of the king. He had heard a woman shrieking in despair when just on the eve of mounting his horse, and had been told by his attendants, in reply to a hurried inquiry, that one of the female follow- ers of the army, a " poore lavender " (that is, laundress), mother of an infant who had just been born, was about to be left behind, as being too weak to travel, and that she was shrieking in utter terror at thoughts of falling into the hands of the Irish, who were accounted very cruel. We quote the words of Sir Walter, who softens, with a tact and delicacy worthy of study, the less tasteful, though scarcely less powerful, narrative of the metrical historian. "King Robert was silent for a moment when he heard the story, being divided betwixt the feeling of humanity occa- sioned by the poor woman's distress, and the danger to which a halt would expose his army. At last he looked round his officers with eyes which kindled like fire. ' Ah, gen- tlemen, never let it be said that a man who was born of a woman, and nursed by a woman's tenderness, should leave 334 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. a mother and an infant to the mercy of barbarians. In the name of God, let the odds and the risk be what they will, 1 will fight Edmund Butler rather than leave these poor crea- tures behind me. ' " The painter has chosen the moment of this noble excla- mation for fixing the scene on his canvas. King Robert occupies the centre, a wonderfully perfect transcript of Sir Walter's exquisite description in the " Lord of the Isles," and one of the most commanding figures we have ever seen. There is a strength more than Herculean in the deep broad chest and the uplifted arm, the very arm which clave Sir Henry Bohun to the teeth through the steel headpiece; but, to employ the language of Lava- ter, "it is not the inert strength of the rock, but the elastic strength of the spring." The ease is admirable as the force ; the figure possesses the blended power of an Achil- les, alike unmatched in the race and the combat. His look is raised to heaven, a look intensely eloquent, for it unites the indomitable resolution of the unmatched war- rior with a devout awe for the Being in whose strength he has determined to abide the battle. The features, too, grave and rugged like those of his countryrhen, possess that beauty of expression, far surpassing the beauty of mere form, which a mind conversant with high thoughts and noble emotions can alone impart to the countenance. The painter has drawn the Bruce, mind and body, the master- spirit of the time, and through whom, under Providence, Scotland at this day is a country of free men, not of de- graded helots, like at least two thirds of the unfortunate Irish. On the left of the warrior-king is the new-made mother with her infant ; she is a poor young creature, of simple beauty, such a one as the Mary of Burns or the Jessie of Tannahill. It would really have been a great pity to have left her to the barbarous, pitiless Irish, the ruthless savages who, even in the times of the first Charles, could so cruelly destroy the Protestant females of the country, CRITICISM FOR THE UNINITIATED. 335 quite as unable to resist, and quite as unoffending, as the "poore lavender." There is something very admirable in the air of lassitude which invests the whole figure : one hand barely sustains the infant, which, in the midst of danger and extreme weakness, she evidently regards with all the intense, though but newly-awakened, affection of the mother; the other finely-formed arm I had almost said supports her in her half-reclining position ; but it is by much too weak for that, and tells eloquently its story of utter exhaustion and recent suffering. There is much good taste, too, shown in the painter's selection of the surrounding attendants ; in the old woman, and in the girl, who half-compassionates the mother, half-admires the child ; in the aged monk, too, evidently a good, benevolent man, who in all probability directed the devotions of his countrymen when they knelt at Bannockburn, and who is particularly well pleased that the Bruce has determined rather to fight Edmund Butler than to desert the " poore lavender." On the king's right are his brother Edward Bruce, and James, Lord of Douglas, mounted, as we have said, on their war-steeds. Edward is well-nigh as perfect a concep- tion as his brother the king. It needs no Lavater to tell us, from the speaking countenance, that the warrior on the right cannot be other than the frank, fearless, rashly- spoken, affectionate man, who hastily wished Bannockburn unfought because his friend had been killed in the battle. His whole figure is instinct with character. There he stands, a capital man-at-arms, first in the charge and last in the retreat; especially good at a light joke too, partic- ularly when matters come to the worst ; but not at all to be trusted as a leader. He is right well pleased on this occasion with brother Robert. " Fight Edmund Butler ! ay, ten Edmund Butlers, if they choose to come ; but we can't leave the poor woman." Possibly enough, however, the poor woman would have been left had Edward been first in command, not certainly from any indifference, 336 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. but out of sheer thoughtlessness. Edward would never have thought of asking what the cry meant. We are not quite so satisfied with the Black Douglas. Pie is a stalwart warrior, keen and true in the hour of danger as his steel battleaxe ; but the tenderness of the character is wanting. The painter has given us rather the Black Douglas of Sir Walter as drawn in his last melan- choly production, " Castle Dangerous," when the mind of our greatest master of character was more than half gone, than the good Lord James of Barbour. Barbour devotes an entire page to the personal appearance of the Douglas, and certifies his description by assuring the reader that he had derived his information solely from men who had seen him with their own eyes. His metrical history was given to the country rather less than half a century after the death of his hero. He describes him as tall and im- mensely powerful, and with a "visage some dele gray;" and the painter, true to the description, has made him just gray enough. The expression, however, was peculiarly soft, modest, and pleasing ; and, in accordance with his appearance, he spoke with a slight lisp, " which set him wonder well." He was a mighty favorite, too, we are told, with the ladies of King Robert's company, the Queen, and her attendants, he was so gentle and so amusing; and when, early in the king's career, they were hard beset among the mountains, no one exerted himself half so much as the Douglas in supplying all their little and all their great wants, in providing them with venison from the hillside and fish from the river, or, as the Arch-Dean quite as well expresses it, " in getting them meit." After dwelling, however, on all his amiabilities of character and expression, and particularly the latter, the historian tells us in his happiest manner, " But who in baittle mocht him see, Another countenance had hee." Old James Melville gives us nearly a similar description of CRITICISM FOR THE UNINITIATED. 3-37 Kivcaldy of Grange, " Anelyon in thefeild,and ane lambe in the hous ; " and what does not quite please us in the Doug- las of the picture, because it runs somewhat counter to oui associations, is, that, though the spectator of a scene sc moving, he should yet have got on his battle countenance. We have the lion, not the lamb. This, however, is not intended for criticism. The picker of minute faults in works of great genius reminds us always of the philosophei in Wordsworth's epitaph, the " man who could peep and botanize upon his mother's grave." There is another point in the picture of great interest, and very admirably brought out. It is at once exquisitely true to nature, and illustrates finely one of the most mas- terly strokes in Barbour. We are told by the ancient poet, that when the king, single-handed, had defended the rocky pass beside the ford against the troop of Galloway men, and had succeeded in beating them back, after " dotting the upgang with slain horse and men," his followers, just awakened from the slumbers in which he had been watch- ing them so sedulously, came rushing up to him. They found him sitting bareheaded beside the ford, " for he was het," and had taken off his helmet, to breathe the more freely after his hard exercise. The exploit had gone far beyond all they had ever seen him accomplish before. He had defended them against " a hail troop, him alone ;" and they came crowding round to get a glimpse of him. The very men who were with him every day, and who saw him al- most every minute, were actually jostling one another, that they might look at him. Now, this is surely exquis- ite nature; and the idea is as happily brought out by Allan as by Barbour himself. The men are crowding to see their king ; and never were there countenances more eloquent. There is love and admiration in every feature ; and we feel that such a general with such followers could be in no imminent danger of defeat, after all, from the multitudes of Edmund Butler. The minor details of the picture seem to be finely managed. There is a clear, gray 29 338 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. light ; the sun has not yet risen, but it is on the eve of rising ; all is seen clearly that any one wishes to see, and the rest is thrown into the soft, bluish, tinted shade pecu- liar to the hour. Randolph appears in the middle distance ; and no person acquainted with the strictly just but stern- hearted warrior would desire to see him brought a step nearer. He would merely have come to say, with that severe face of his, that he really thought there was too much ado about a poor washerwoman ; but that, if Ed- mund Butler was to be met with, why, he would just meet with him. Edmund Butler, however, was not met with on this occasion. The wary leader knew that Robert the Bruce was the first general of his age ; and that when he halted to offer battle, it could not be without some hidden rea- son, which rendered it no safe matter to accept the chal- lenge which the halt implied. And so the English leader halted too, until the king resumed his march ; and thus the " poore lavender " was saved at no actual expense to her countrymen. The story is one of those which deserve to live ; nor is it probable that what Allan has painted, and Sir Walter described, " the country will willingly let die." We felt, when standing in front of this admirable picture, that the art of the painter, all unfitted as it is for serving devotional purposes, may yet be well employed in giving effect to a moral one. THIRD ARTICLE. \ In estimating the real strength of a country, one has always to take into account its past history. The statistics of its existing condition are no doubt very important. It is well to know the exact amount of its population, and the extent of its resources. It is a great deal more impor- tant, however, to ascertain what its people were doing a CRITICISM FOR THE UNINITIATED. 339 century or two ago, what the nature of their contests and their success in them, and what the issue of their bat- tles. It is not enough to count heads, or to calculate on the mere physical power of a certain quantum of thews and sinews. If the country's history be that of an en- slaved and degraded race, who took their law from every new invader, neither its physical strength nor the great- ness of its revenues matters anything : it is utterly weak and powerless. If, on the contraiy, its battles were hard- fought, and terminated either in signal victory on the part of its people, or in a defeat that led merely to another bat- tle, if, in all its struggles, however protracted, the enemy was eventually boi'ne down, and the object of the struggle secured, depend upon it, that country, whether it reckon its population by thousands or by millions, is rich in the elements of power. The national history in these cases is more than a test of character; it is also an ingredient of strength. The past breathes its invigorating influences upon the present ; the battles won centuries before become direct guarantees, through the enthusiasm which they awaken, for the issue of battles to be fought in the future ; the names of the brave and the good among the ancestors become watchwords of tremendous efficacy to the descend- ants ; the children " honor their fathers," and " their days, therefore, shall be long in the land." But what has all this to do with criticism? A great deal. As you enter the second exhibition-room, turn just two steps to the left, and examine the large picture before you. It is one of the masterpieces of Harvey, " The Covenanters' Communion ; " and very rarely has the same extent of canvas borne the impress of an equal amount of thought or feeling. The Covenanters themselves are be- fore us, and we return to the times of which, according to "Wordsworth, the " echo rings through Scotland till this hour." Not in vain did these devoted people assemble to worship God among the hills ; not in vain did these vener- able men, these delicate women and tender maidens, un 340 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. hesitatingly lay down their lives for the cause of Christ and his church. Their solitary graves form no small portion of the strength and riches of the country. They retain a vivifying power, like the grave of Elisha, into which when the dead man was thrown he straightway revived. Those opponents of the church who assert, in the present struggle, that the cherished memory of our martyrs serves only to foster a spirit of fanatical pride among the people, are as opposed to right reason as devoid of true feeling. It fos- ters a truly conservative spirit, which it is well and wise to cherish; and one of the eminently wholesome effects of the present struggle is the reciprocity of feeling, if we may so express ourselves, which it awakens between the past and the present. The determination of the present revives the memory of the past, and the memory of the past gives tenfold force and effect to the determination of the present. Martrys never die in vain. We doubt not there is a time coming when even the memory of the noble Spaniards of the sixteenth century who perished unseen, for their adher- ence to Protestantism, in the dungeons of the Inquisition, and that of the noble Venetians of the same dark period who were consigned at midnight, and in chains, for the same sacred cause, to the depths of the Adriatic, will yet awaken among their countrymen, as an animating spirit to urge them on with double vigor to the attack, when Baby- lon is to be utterly destroyed. Most assuredly, Scotland at least has not yet reaped the entire benefit which she is to derive from the blood of her martyrs. The commonest seeds retain their vitality for centuries; the seed of the church retains its vitality for centuries too. I shall attempt a description of Harvey's exquisite pic- ture, for the sake of such of my readers as live at a distance. The locale of the scene represents one of those wild upland solitudes so common among our lower mountain ranges, one of those hollows amid the hills known only to the shepherd and the huntsman, which are shut out by the surrounding summits from the view of the neighboring CRITICISM FOR THE UNINITIATED. 341 country, and which, rising high over the reign of corn, and almost over that of wood, presents only a widespread bar- renness. There is a solitary fir bush in the background, which at a lower elevation would have been a tree ; and its stunted and dwarf-like appearance tells of the ungenial climate and the unproductive soil. All else up to the very hill-tops is dark with heath ; and there is a sky well-nigh as dark beyond ; for there is scarce transparency enough in the accumulated masses of heavy clouds, that betoken a night of tempest, to relieve the outline. But there is a light in the foreground. The previous service of the day has been protracted for many hours ; there has been a long " action sermon " on the wrestlings of the Kirk, and a long, impressive prayer ; and the sun at his setting is throwing his last red gleam on the group, with one of those striking fire-light effects which only nature and genius ever succeed in producing. The rays reach not beyond, but are absorbed in the heath ; and there is truth in this too : one of the most striking effects of the moon when just rising, or the sun when just setting, is, that the light seems to be looking at darkness, and the darkness abiding the look. These, however, are but the minor features of the picture. The congregation is but a small one ; the fierce persecu- tion has been long protracted, and all the chaff has blown off. The battle of Bothwell has been fought and lost: many have laid down their lives on the scaffold, and many on the hillside. The flower of the country is wasting in dungeons, or toiling in chains in the colonies. There is no hope of deliverance from man ; and we have in the little group before us a mere remnant, tried in the very extrem- ity of suffering, and found faithful and true. There is more than a Sabbath-day sacredness impressed upon the scene; and the utter poverty in which the solemn feast is cele- brated adds powerfully to the effect. A cottage bench, barely large enough to bear the ."communion elements," serves for the long, low table ; but, in the recollection of other days, they have covered it with a white linen cloth. 29* 342 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. The flagon is evidently not of silver, nor yet the plate which bears the bread ; but the cups are : they have been carefully secreted from the spoiler, and devoutly reserved in the midst of extreme want, and though the fines of Mid- dleton and Lauderdale have fallen ruinously heavy on the recusants, for the seiwice of the sanctuary. The commu- nicants are ranged on the heath on both sides. Three rev- erend elders are standing in front of the table, grave, strong-featured men, well stricken in years, with high, thoughtful foreheads, and in both form and countenance so thoroughly Scotch that the spectator is convinced at a glance they could belong to no other country in the world except our own. Had I met them in the north of Scotland, I would have said they were three of the men, and that I was very sure they could all speak judiciously to the ques- tion. There is an air of reasoning sagacity about them. Their very type of forehead is metaphysical, high, full, erect. They could not have stopped short of Calvinism, even had they wished it. The clergyman stands alone on the opposite side, with his back to the setting sun, and the pale reflected light from the linen cloth thrown upon his face. I have striven to read the expression. The spare figure and the attenuated hands tell at once their story ; but the countenance yields its full meaning more slowly, and, I would almost say, more doubtfully. But it has evi- dently much to tell. What was the character of the latter divines of the covenant, its Camerons, Pedens, Renwicks, and Cargills, the men who excommunicated in the Tor- wood that " man of blood, Charles Stuart," for his " cruel slaughter of the saints of God," the men who, when the persecution waxed hotter and hotter, became only the more determined to resist, but who, though the will re- mained unsubdued and unshaken, experienced, in the in- tensity of their distress, something approaching to aber- ration in the other faculties, and in their more unsettled moods did battle in lonely caves with shades of darkness from the abyss, or saw in their waking visions the events CRITICISM FOR THE UXINTTIAfED. 343 of the future rising up thick before them. Well did Solo- mon say that persecution maketh even wise men mad. The spectator has but to think of the character which the coun- tenance really should express, and he will find it no easy matter to conceive how the painter could have expressed it differently. There is an air of intense melancholy that tells almost of a weariness of life, mingled with what, for want of a better word, I must term a ghostly expression. There is the appearance, too, of fatigue and exhaustion, and the impression of a strangely-mixed feeling, that hov- ers, as it were, between the visible and the spiritual world. The whole figure and countenance, in short, gives us the idea of human nature tried over-severely, and the " willing spirit" failing through the "weakness of the flesh." On the spectator's left hand there is a group of the com- municants thrown much into the shade. There are two stern-looking men among the others, who have evidently perused with great satisfaction the chapter in the " Hind Let Loose " " Concerning owning tyrants' authority," and the other equally emphatic chapter, " Defensive arms vindicated." The one rests upon his broadsword ; and there is a powder-horn and carabine lying beside the other. The group on the right is decidedly the most exquisite I ever saw, eitrer on or off canvas. It is instinct with char- acter, and rich in beauty. The communicants have just partaken of the bread ; and never was the devotional feeling the awe and reverence proper to the occasion more truthfully expressed. One of the men, young in years but old in sufferings, still retains the bread in his hand. His air has all the solemnity of prayer. A young girl sits be- side him, the very beau-ideal of a beautiful Scotch female in humble life, simple, modest, devout, a very Jeanie Deans, too, in quiet good sense, only a great deal hand- somer than Jeanie. I could not look at her without think- ing of the young and delicate female, her contemporary and countrywoman, whom the cruel dragoons bound to a stake below flood-mark, while the tide was rising, and 344 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. whom they urged, as the water rose inch by inch, to abjure her church and close with " black Prelacy," but who, faith- ful to the last, chose rather to perish amid the waves of the sea. There is a still younger girl beside her, who has evidently not yet been admitted into full communion with the church, and with whose deep seriousness there mingles an air of dejection. An old woman, on the extreme edge of life, is seated in the middle of the group ; and there is perhaps some exaggeration in the figure, but the mind and the feeling with which it is animated triumphs over the defects. It is not the thin, sharp features, and the almost skeleton arm, that attract our attention ; it is the all-per- vading intensity of the devotional feeling. The old man who sits beside her with his face covered is admirably in keeping with the rest. Such is an imperfect description of a picture which must not only be seen, but also carefully perused, ere its excellence can be adequately appreciated. The gentleman who criticized it in our last, rates it consid- erably lower than I have done ; and there are other pic- tures which he estimates highly that lie perhaps beyond the reach of my sympathy. I am unable to understand them. I therefore again remind the reader that I pretend to no critical skill, and that my only criterion of merit in a picture is simply the amount of pleasure which I derive from it, and the quantum of thought which I find embodied in it. I have literally to feel my way along the canvas. Allan's picture of the Bruce reads a high moral lesson. What is the moral taught by Harvey's Communion? It is a controversial picture on the side of the church. It sets before us, with all the truth of impartial history, the rebels and outlaws of the bloody and dissolute reign of Charles II., and teaches powerfully. the useful truth that these offend- ers against the majesty of the law were in reality the pre- serving salt of the age, that these dwellers in dens and caves were the meet representatives for the time of the dwellers in dens and caves described by the apostle, and of whom the " world was not worthy." The dissolute Mid- CRITICISM FOR THE UNINITIATED. 345 dleton, the crafty Rothes, the brutal Lauderdale, the bloody Mackenzie, were the judges and law authorities of the time. A gross and profligate atheist, bribed against his owu peo- ple by foreign gold, sat upon the throne. His court was a sty of licentiousness and impurity. Wickedness had bro- ken loose in those "evil days;" and for twenty-eight years together the people of God were hunted upon the hills. But a time of retribution came; the wicked died "even as the beast dieth," and went to their place leaving names behind them that sound like curses in the ears of posterity. The reigning family those infatuated and low-thoughted Stuarts, who, in their short-sighted and debasing policy, would have rendered men faithful to their princes by mak- ing them untrue to their God were driven from their high places and their country to wander homeless under the curse of Cain, to bring disaster on every nation that sheltered them, and death and ruin on every adherent that espoused their cause. And at length, when the spectacle of their misery and degradation was fully shown to the kingdoms of the earth, the last vial of wrath was poured upon their heads, and they passed into utter extinction. But the names of the persecuted survive in a different savor; their sufferings have met with a different reward; the noble constancy of the persecuted, the high fortitude of the martyr, still live ; a halo encircles their sepulchres; and from many a solitary grave and many a lonely battle- field there come voices like those which issued from behind the veil, voices that tell us how this world, with all its little interests, must pass away, but that for those who fight the good fight there abideth a rest that is eternal. I heartily thank this man of genius and right feeling for the lesson which his pencil has taught. Such pictures more than please, they powerfully instruct. 346 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. FOURTH ARTICLE. At the further end of the first exhibition-room, on the left hand, there is a moonlight scene by M'Cnlloch, " Deer Startled," which only a man of genius could have transferred from nature to the canvas. It is actually what it professes to be, a landscape lighted up by the moon ; and the scene itself, a deep Highland solitude, is full of a wild and yet quiet poetry. The mind of every man has its picture-gallery, scenes of beauty or magnificence, or of quiet comfort, stamped indelibly upon his memory. More than half the exile's recollections of home are a series of landscapes. The poor untaught Highlander carries with him to Canada pictures enough in the style of M'Culloch to store an exhibition- room, pictures of brown solitary moors, with here and there a gray cairn, and here and there a sepulchral stone, pictures, too, of narrow, secluded glens, each with its own mossy stream that sparkles to the light like amber, and its shaggy double strip of hazel and birch, of hills, too, that close around the valleys, and vary their tints, as they re- tire, from brown to purple, and from purple to blue. He carries them all with him to the distant country. The gloomy forest rises thick as a hedge on every side of his wooden hut; the huge stumps stand up abrupt and black from amid his corn, in the little angular patch which his labor has laid open to the air and the sunshine. These are the objects which strike the sense ; but the others fill the mind ; and when year after year has gone by, and he sits among his children's children a wornout old man, full of narratives about the brown moors and the running streams of his own Scotland, his eyes moisten as the scenes rise up before him in more than their original freshness ; and he tells the little folk, as they press around him, that there is no place in the world that can be at all compared with the Highlands, and that no plant equals the heather. CRITICISM FOR THE UNINITIATED. 347 One of Wordsworth's earliest lyrics, a sweet little poem which he gave to the world at a time when the world thought very little of it, though it has become wiser since, embodies a similar thought. The poet represents a poor girl originally from a rural district, who had been both happier and better ere she had come to form a unit in the million of London passing in the morning along Cheapside, when a bird, caged against the sunny wall, breaks out in a sudden burst of song. Her old recollec- tions are awakened at the sound ; the street disappears, and the dingy houses ; she sees the meadow tract, with the overhanging trees, where she used to milk her cows; she sees, too, the cattle themselves waiting her coming; and, in the words of the lyric, "a river flows down through the breadth of Cheapside." Poor Susan ! " Her heart is stirred," and her eyes fill. Every human mind has its pictures. Were it otherwise, who would care anything for the art of the painter? When standing in front of M'Culloch's exquisite landscape, I was enabled to call up some of my own, moonlight scenes of quiet and soothing beauty, or of wild and lonely graudem*. I stood on a solitary seashore. A broken wall of cliffs, more than a hundred yards in height, rose abruptly behind, here advancing in huge craggy tow- ers, tapestried with ivy and crowned with wood, there re- ceding into deep, gloomy hollows. The sea, calm and dark, stretched away league after league in front to the far horizon. The moon had just risen, and threw its long fiery gleam of red light across the waters to the shore. A solitary vessel lay far away, becalmed in its wake. I could see the sail flapping idly against the mast, as she slowly rose and sank to the swell. The light gradually strength- ened ; the dark bars of cloud, that had shown like the grate of a dungeon, wore slowly away; the white sea birds, perched on the shelves, became visible along the clifi's; the advancing crags stood out from the darkness; the recesses within seemed, from the force of contrast, to 'SA8 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. deepen their shades ; the isolated spire-like crags that rise thick along the coast, half on the shore, half in the sea, Hung each its line of darkness inwards along the beach. A wide cavern yawned behind me, rugged with spiracles of stalactites, that hung bristling from the rocf like icicles at the edge of a waterfall; and a long rule of light that penetrated to the innermost wall, leaving the sides en- veloped in thick obscurity, fell full on what seemed an ancient tomb and a reclining figure in white, sports of nature in this lonely cave. There was an awful grandeur in the scene : the deep solitude, the calm still night, the huge cliffs, the vast sea, the sublime heavens, the slowly rising moon, with its broad, cold face ! I felt a half-super- stitious feeling creep over me, mingled with a too oppress- ive sense of the weakness and littleness of man. Pride is not one of the vices of solitude. It grows upon us among our fellows ; but alone, and at midnight, amid the sublime of nature, we must feel, if we feel at all, that we ourselves are little, and that God only is great. The scene passed, and there straightway arose another. I stood high in an open space, on a thickly-wooded ter- race, that stretched into an undulating plain, bounded with hills. The moon at full looked down from the mid- dle heavens, undimmed by a single cloud ; but far to the west there was a gathering wreath of vapor, and a lunar rainbow stretched its arch in pale beauty across a secluded Highland valley. A wide river rolled at the foot of the wooded terrace ; but a low silvery fog had risen over it, bounded on both sides by the line of water and bank ; and I could see it stretching its huge snake-like length adown the hollow, winding with the stream, and diminishing in the distance. The fiosts of autumn had dyed the foliage of the wood ; the trees rose around me in their winding- sheets of brown and crimson and yellow, or stretched, in the more exposed openings, their naked arms to the sky. There was a dark moor beyond the fog-covered river, that seemed to absorb the light ; but directly under the nearest CRITICISM FOR THE UNINITIATED. 349 hill, which rose like a pyramid, there was a tall solitary ruin standing out from the darkness, like the sheeted spectre of a giant. The distant glens glimmered indistinct to the eye ; but the first snows of the season had tipped the upper eminences with white, and they stood out in bold and prominent relief, nearer, apparently, than even the middle ground of the landscape. The whole was exquisitely be3^itiful, a scene to be once seen and ever remembered. I must attempt a description of the picture of M'Culloch. The moon is riding high over head in a cloudy and yet a quiet sky. There is a greenish transparency in the piled and rounded masses. Even where most dense, the thinner edges are light and fleecy ; and the whole betokens what White of Selborne would have termed a mild and delicate evening. There is a lonely moor in front, a piece of water, and a stunted fir tree. The light falls strongly both upon the water and where the heathy bank shelves gradually toward it on the right, while the middle ground of the picture, with its scattered trees, lies more in the shade. The clouded sky tells us, however, that the whole country on such an evening cannot be other than checkered with a carpeting of alternate light and shadow. There is a screen of hills behind, dim and yet distinct ; and a few startled deer startled we know not why are grouped in front. Such are the main features of the picture ; but it is one thing merely to tell these over as in a catalogue, and quite another to convey an adequate idea of the wild and yet simple poetry which they express. The extreme loneliness of the scene, the calm beauty of the evening, the unknown cause of fright among these untamed deni- zens of the moors and mountains, what can they have seen ? what can they have heard ? It is night, and deep solitude. Are the spirits of the dead abroad ? M'Culloch has another very sweet picture in the exhibi- tion of this year, "A Highland Solitude with Druidical Stones." We find it in the large middle room, on the left 30 350 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. hand as we pass inwards. It is, though equally Highland, an entirely different scene from the other ; and yet, in de- scribing it, for the pen has no such variety of shades as the pencil, and no such pliant flexibility of outline, I must employ some of the same words. I must repeat, for instance, that there is a heathy moor in the foreground, and a screen of hills behind, and that a sky checkered with cloudo has dappled the landscape with sunshine and shadow. There is a transient shower sweeping gloomily along a narrow glen, while the hills to the right are smil- ing in purple to the sun. The Druidical stones rise gray in the mid-ground ; and the smoke, apparently of a shep- herd's fire, is ascending slant ways from among them, be- fore a light breeze. It is, as I have said, a sweet picture, but inferior in feeling to the other, and perhaps not alto- gether what its name would have led us to expect. I question, however, whether that blended feeling of the sublime and the solemn, with which it is natural to con- template the monuments of an antiquity so remote that they lie wholly beyond the reach of history, and which form the sole and yet most doubtful memorials of unknown rites and usages, and of tribes long passed away, can be reawakened by the imitations of the painter. I have felt it strongly on the scene of some forgotten battle sprinkled with cairns and tumuli, and where the stone-axe and the flint-arrow are occasionally turned up to the light, to tes- tify of a period when the aborigines of the country were making their first rude essays in art, and when the man had not yet risen over the savage. I have felt it when, standing where some ancient burial mound had been just laid open, I saw the rude unglazed sepulchral urn filled with half-burned fragments of bone, or with rudely-formed ornaments of jet or amber, fashioned evidently ere the discovery of iron. I have felt it, too, amid the Druidical circle, and beside the tall unshapen obelisk. But I did not feel it when standing before M'Culloch's second pic- ture ; an 1 I questioned whether in what he had failed any \ CRITICISM FOR THE UNINITIATED. 351 other could have succeeded. With what Johnson terms the u honest desire of giving pleasure."* I shall briefly at- tempt a description of the scene in which I have felt it most strongly, a scene to be visited in the gray of the evening, or by the light of the moon. There is a soft pastoral valley, formed by the river Nairn, not much more than a mile to the southwest of the field of Culloden. Low-swelling eminences rise on either hand. The view is terminated, as we look downward, by a prom- inent rounded hill, on which are the remains of one of those ancient earthen forts or duns combinations of green mounds and deep angular fosses which seem to have constituted in our own country, like the hill-forts of New Zealand in the present day, the very first efforts of ingenuity in defensive warfare, the very first inventions of the weaker party in their attempts to withstand the stronger. As we look up the glen towards the west, we see the view shut in by another rounded hill, and it also bears its ancient stronghold, one of those puzzles of the antiquary, a vitrified fort. The low rude wall all around the top of the eminence has been fixed into one solid mass by the force of fire ; and we marvel how the rude savage who applied the consolidating agent, all unacquainted as he was with mortar, and unfurnished with tools, should have been so expert a chemist. He was a glassrnaker on a large scale, probably before the discovery of the Phoeni- cian merchants. It is in the valley below, however, on a level meadow-plain beside the winding Nairn, known as the plain of Clava, that we find most to interest and to astonish. It is a city of the ancient dead, thickly mottled in its whole extent with sepulchral cairns, standing stones, and Druidical temples. Detached columns of undressed stone, shaggy with moss and spotted with lichens, rise at wide intervals apparently in lines, as if to unite the other structures in one general design. There are cairns beside cairns, and circles within circles ; and there rose high over the rest only a few years ago, but they have since been 352 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. injured by some curious excavator, three accumulations of stone, immensely more huge than the others, and more artificially constructed, that seemed to mark out the rest- ing-place of the kings or chieftains of the tribe. The bases of these larger cairns were hemmed in by circular rings of upright stones ; and a wider ring, of larger masses, en- circled the outside. A dark, low-roofed, circular chamber occupied the space within. Its walls were consti*ucted of upright stones ; and uncemented flags, overlapping each other until they closed atop, formed the rude, dome-like roof. In the fat, unctuous earth which composed the floor there were found unglazed earthen urns, as rudely fashioned as the surrounding building, and filled with ashes and half-calcined bones. It is a curious fact, that, even so late as the close of the last century, Highlanders in the neigh- borhood buried amid these ancient tombs such of their children as died before baptism. For, according to a su- perstition derived from the Church of Rome, and in some remote localities not yet worn out, unbaptized children were deemed unholy ; and in this belief their remains were consigned to the same unconsecrated ground which contained the dust of their remote pagan ancestors. It is another striking fact, a fact full of poetry, that near the western end of the plain of Clava there are the remains of an ancient Christian chapel, which still bears the name of the clachan, or church ; and a traditional be- lief survives in the district that it was planted in this cit- adel of idolatry by the first Christian missionaries. Would that we were acquainted with its story ! and yet it would probably be merely another illustration of the fact that the religion that most inculcates humility and self-denial is of all animating principles the most daring and heroic CRITICISM FOR THE UNINITIATED. 353 FIFTH ARTICLE. What sort of painters, think you, do the Scotch promise to become ? Why, painters equal to any the world ever produced, if the national mind be only suffered to get into a national track, and our artists have sense and spirit enough, however much they may admire the pictures of other countries, not to imitate them. The genius of our countrymen, as shown in their literature, is eminently of a pictorial character. The national feeling is vividly de- scriptive. As early even as the days of James IV., old Gavin Douglas, and his contemporary Will Dunbar, could fill page after page with splendid descriptions, as minutely faithful as the descriptions of Cowper in his " Task," and scarcely less poetical. The " Seasons " of Thomson form a series of landscapes ; and never, sui'ely, were there land- scapes more felicitously conceived or more exquisitely finished. It has become the fashion of late to decry M'Pherson ; but rarely has Europe seen a mightier master of description. The scenery of Burns is nature itself. Who ever excelled Grahame in pictures of quiet beauty, or Professor Wilson in the wild and the sublime of Alpine landscape ? And, last and greatest, we stake Sir Walter Scott for the vividly graphic, for strength of outline and beauty of color, against every painter of every school, and all the writers of the world. The people whose litera- ture exhibits such powers have, if they v/ish to become painters, only to try. But let them beware of imitation. The straight-nosed beauties of Greece were no doubt very great beauties, and its historical characters very fine char- acters indeed. There is something very admirable, too, in the genius of Italy. No people ever excelled the Italians in drawing legendary saints, with glories of yellow ochre round their heads, or angels mounted on the wings of pigeons. But what of all that ? It is not by painting the straight-nosed beauties of Greece or the winged angels of 31* * 354 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. Italy that the Scotch artist need expect to confer honor on either Scotland or himself. Let him do what was done by Thomson and Burns and Sir Walter Scott, and what Wilkie and Allan and Harvey are employed in doing, let him walk abroad into nature, and study the history of his country. The mere imitative faculty is one of the lowest ; the Chinese possess it in perfection, and so does the chimj:>anzee. But am I not evincing a barbarous and Gothic disregard of the classical ? Very far from it. I have read all Cow- per's " Homer" and Dryden's "Virgil" again and again. I could almost repeat that portion of the Odyssey in which the wanderer of Ithaca is described sitting apart in his own hall, a poor, despised beggar, when his enemies are expending their strength in vain attempts to bend his bow ; and I have felt my heart leap within me, when, scorning reply to their rude taunts, he leaned easily forward on the well-remembered weapon, and, bending it with scarce more of effort than the musician employs in straightening the strings of his harp, sent the well-aimed arrow through all the rings and the double planks of the oaken gate be- yond. I have luxuriated, too, over the exquisite descrip- tions of the ^Eneid, amid the horrors of the burning town, for instance, till I almost saw the pointed flames shooting far aloft into the darkness, and almost heard the tramplings and shouts of the enemy in the streets, amid the terrors, too, of the tempest, when the fierce surge rolled resistless over the foundering vessel, and the scattered fleet labored heavily amid the loud dash of the billows and the wild howl of the wind. And when I looked for the first time on Laocoon and his children crushed in the ruthless coil of the serpent, a too faithful allegory of the human race, the story of Virgil rose at once before me, and I felt the blended genius of the poet and the sculptor breathing in an intense human interest from the group. But what classical artists and authors were born to accomplish has been accomplished already ; and no man CKITTCISM FOR THE UNINITIATED. 355 ever became great, nor ever will, by servilely following in their track. The more an author or artist copies them, the less is he like them ; for the imitative turn, which de- lights in catching their manner, is altogether incompatible with the originality of their genius. And hence it is that our modern classics, whether painters or sculptors, or man- ufacturers of unreadable epics, rank invariably among the men of neglected merit. They overshoot those sympathies of a common humanity to which their masters could so powerfully appeal in the past, and which their contempo- raries are scarcely less successful in awakening in the pres- ent, each in a track of his own opening. The sculptors of Great Britain were classical and imitative for a whole century ; and all they produced in that time, in conse- quence, was a lumbering mass of unreadable allegories in stone, which no one cares for ; groups of Prudences with fine necks; of Mercies, too, with well-turned ankles ; and of Cupids looking sly ; and, had they been employed in cutting them in white-sugar or gingerbread, all would have now agreed that the choice of the material mightily heightened the value of the work. Among the rising painters of our country, I know no artist whose productions better serve to corroborate the truth of remarks such as these than the pictures of Thomas Duncan. Brown justly reckons the principle of contrast, or conti'ariety, among the causes which suggest and connect ideas. One of Duncan's living pictures " Prince Charles and the Highlanders entering Edinburgh after the battle of Preston," a picture exquisitely Scotch, instinct with character and rich in interest shows more powerfully, on this principle, the folly of toiling in the dead school of classical imitation, than even the effete of the artists who irrecoverably lose themselves within its precincts of death. I spent two full hours before his picture, and regretted I could not spend four. The morning sun has risen high over the Old Town of Edinburgh, and the beams fall clear and bright through a 356 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. cloudless autumn sky, on half the high-piled, picturesque tenements of the Canongate, and half the street below. The other half lies gray in the shade. I saw, just in front, on the sunny side, the castellated jail of the burgh, with its blackened turrets and its Flemish -looking clock-house. The barred windows are thronged with faces ; and a few disarmed, half-stripped, forlorn-looking soldiers, huddled together on an outer staircase, show that the incarcerated crowd are military prisoners from the field of Preston. The street lies in long perspective beyond, house rising over house, and balcony projecting beyond balcony. Every flaw and weather-stain has the mark of truth ; every pe- culiarity of the architecture reminded me of the scene and the age. A dense crowd occupies the foreground. The Highlanders, after totally routing the superior numbers of Cope, have entered the city with their Prince at their head, and have advanced thus far on their march to Holyrood House. The apparently living mass seems bearing clown upon the spectator. There is a mischievous-looking, ragged urchin, half-extinguished by the cap of some luckless gren- adier, who has possibly no further use for it, scampering out of the way ; and an unfortunate barber, the very type of Smollett's Strap, has got himself fast jambed between a projecting outside stair and the brandished war-axe of a half-naked and more than half-savage gillie, who is exert- ing himself with tremendous vigor in clearing a passage, and who, as if to add to the poor barber's distress and peril, is looking in another direction. There are other strokes of the comic in the piece. In one corner a Jaco- bite laird, blirC fou, is threatening destruction with un- sheathed whinyard to all and sundry who will not drink the Prince's health. In another, two pipers are marching side by side. The one, a long-winded young fellow, cast in the Herculean mould of his country, and proud of his strength and his music, is adjusting the drone of his pipe with a degree of self-complacency that might serve even the Dean of Faculty himself. The other, an old man of CRITICISM FOR THE UNINITIATED. 357 at least seventy-five, with features fiercely Celtic, and an expression like a thunder-cloud, is evidently enraged at the better breath of his opponent ; but, collecting his strength for another effort, he seems determined rather to die than give in. The Prince rides in the centre on a noble steed, that seems starting out of the canvas. We recognize him at once, not only from his prominent place and princely bearing, but from the striking truth of the portrait, one of the most spirited, perhaps, that has yet appeared, and most like the man when at his best. Has the reader never noticed the striking resemblance which the better portraits of Prince Charles bear to those of his remote ancestress, Queen Mary ? I was first struck by it when, in glancing my eye over a bookseller's window, I saw side by side the frontispieces of " Chambers' History of the Rebellion " and the " Life of Mary Queen of Scots," both numbers of " Constable's Miscellany ; " and I have had since repeated opportunities of verifying the remark. It is, I believe, no uncommon matter for resem- blances of this kind to reappear in families at distant in- tervals. Sir Walter, no ordinary observer of whatever pertained to the nature of man, whether physical or intel- lectual, has repeatedly embodied the fact in his inventions ; but I do not know a more striking instance of it in real history than the one adduced. All the more celebrated heroes of the rebellion are grouped round the Prince, full, evidently, of a generous enthusiasm, in which the spectator can hardly avoid sym- pathizing. There was little of moral worth or of true kingly dignity in the latter Stuarts ; and I could not for- get that the "gallant adventurer," who, with at least all the courage of his ancestors, threw himself upon the gen- erosity of the devoted and warm-hearted Highlanders, was in reality a cold, selfish man, who sunk in after life into a domestic tyrant and a besotted debauchee. And yet I could not avoid sharing in the well-expressed excitement of the Prince's gallant adherents, as they drink in his 858 LITERACY AND SCIENTIFIC. looks with all the intense and rapturous exultation of a loyalty which has passed from the earth with the genera- tion that cherished it. No such pervading love or deep devotion awaits the kings or princes of the present time. Behind the Prince rides Clanranald, the chief of Clan- Colla. His Highlanders take precedence of the other clans, for the Bruce had assigned them their place of honor in the right when they fought at Bannockburn. Young Clanranald, a tall, handsome youth, and his cousin Kinloch Moidart, have advanced in front ; old Hugh Stewart, a rugged, deep-chested veteran of the Black Watch, who fought in all the battles of Charles, and whose portrait is still preserved, presses on behind them ; and the gigantic miller of Inverrahayle's Mill, a tremendous specimen of the wild mountaineer, is still more conspic- uous among a group of clansmen on the left. There is a dense crowd behind, and what seems a thick wood of spears and axes, with here and there a banner, among the rest, an English standard taken from the dragoons at Preston. A heap of other trophies lies in front, over which Hamish M'Gregor, the son of the celebrated outlaw Rob Roy, keeps watch. An intensely interesting group occupies the left. There we see Lord George Murray, the cool-headed, far-seeing statesman of the expedition, who dared honestly to tell his Prince disagreeable truths, and who was liked none the better because he did so; the gallant Lochiel, too, who in his devoted loyalty joined in the enterprise with his brave Camerons, even though he had anticipated from the first that the result would be disastrous. There also is the Marquis of Tullibarden, the original of Sir Walter's Baron of Bradwardine, a fine old Lowland cavalier, dressed, in honor of the Prince, in a birthday suit, half-covered with lace, and of a fashion at least twenty years earlier than the time. There is a galaxy of high-born dames beside him, relatives of the family, one of them at least of exquisite beauty, and all of them what clever artists do CRITICISM FOR THE UNINITIATED. 359 not invariably succeed in painting, even when they try most ladies. Their countenances seem lighted up with the triumph of the occasion ; and the children of the family, sweet little things, worth all the cupids that the imitators ever chiselled or painted, are employed in strew- ing white roses in the path of the Prince. The opposite side of the picture is occupied by a group of a different but not less interesting character. On an outer stone stair, on the shady side of the street, one of those appendages characteristic of the Scoto- Flemish style of domestic architecture, there is a group of citizens. Professor Maclaurin, the celebrated mathe- matician, the man who first brought down the philosophy of Newton to the level of common minds, and whose sim- ple, unpretending style rises in some passages to the dig- nity of the sublime, purely from the force and magnitude of his thoughts, leans calmly over the rail. The good zealous Whig had proposed to the magistrates his well- laid scheme for fortifying and defending the city, and had exerted himself in carrying it into effect ; but the neces- sary courage to carry out his measures was lacking on the part of the people, and so he has had just to fall back and rest him on his philosophy. John Home, the author of '< Douglas," and one of the first historians of the Rebellion, stands beside him. He, too, though a mere youth at the time, had bestirred himself vigorously in the same cause, and is now evidently bearing the reverse of his party as he best can. But the figure behind them, one of the most masterly in the picture, is instinct with a sterner spirit. Had there been five hundred such men in the city to back the philosopher, the Highlanders, with all their valor, would have been kept outside the wall. He stands at the stair-head, scowling at the enemy and all their array of spears and battleaxes, one of the followers of Richard Cameron, girt with a buff belt, from which his Andrea Ferrara hangs suspended, and bearing a heavy Bible. De- pend on it, had that man fought at Preston, he would 360 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. have stood beside the good and gallant Colonel Gardiner unmoved in the midst of rout and panic, and have left, like him, a gashed and mangled corpse to mark where the tide of the battle had turned. Such is a meagre out- line of Duncan's exquisite picture. It is said to have cost the almost continuous labor of two years ; and the antici- pated expense of multiplying it by the graver and never was there a picture more worthy is calculated at about three thousand pounds. The pictorial history of Scotland promises to excel all its other histories, and it does not contain a more brilliant page than that contributed by Duncan. Gallant Highlanders, men of warm hearts and tender feelings, and spirits that kindle as the danger comes, the phantom of mistaken loyalty deludes you no longer ; you have closed with a better faith ; and, while the strength of the character still remains unbroken, all its fierceness is gone. I have lived amid the quiet solitude of your hills, and, as I have passed your cottages at the close of evening, have heard the voice of psalms from within. I have sat with you at the humble board, to share your proffered hospitality, the hospitality of willing hearts, that thought not of the scanty store whence the supply was derived. I have marked your untaught courtesy, ever ready to yield to the stranger, and have laid me down in security at night amid your hamlets, with only the latch on the door. I have seen you pouring forth your thousands from brown distant moors and narrow glens, to listen with devout attention to the words of life from the lips of your much- loved pastors, and to worship God among your mountains in the open air. I know, too, the might that slumbers amid your gentleness of nature ; and that, when the day of battle comes, " and level for the charge your arms are laid," desperate indeed must that enemy be, and much in love with death, that awaits the onset. A day may yet arrive, should Socialism and Chartism, with their coward cruelty, inundate society in the plains, when we may look CRITICISM FOR THE UNINITIATED. 361 to your hills for succor ; but that day has not yet come. You tell us that, though little able to assist the church with the pen or on the platform in her present troubles, your hearts are all with us ; and that, should the worst come to the worst, we may reckon on the Highlanders of Scotland as thirty thousand fighting men. And we know what sort of fighting men you are, and what sort of hearts you bear. But reserve your strength, brave countrymen, for another day and a diiFerent quarrel. Should the church which you love fall prostrate before her adversaries, and wickedness rush unchecked over the land to trample and destroy, your swords may be required, not to protect her friends from her enemies, but to protect both her friends and her enemies too. SIXTH ARTICLE. Immediately below one of Wilkie's admirable pictures, " The Spanish Posado," there is a painting, not par- ticularly showy, and which might possibly enough come to be overlooked among productions of less merit and more glitter, but which is at once so simple, unaffected, and true to nature, that it bears the formidable neighborhood won- derfully well. It is the work of a young and rising artist, Tavernor Knott, a gentleman who, at the age of twenty- two, has learned to compress a large amount of just thought and fine feeling within a few square feet of canvas, and who, I am convinced, will be better known to his country- folks in the future than he is at present. I do not know whether his subject might not have" prejudiced me in his favor, "A Scotch Family Emigrating ; " but I have cer- tainly derived much pleasure from an attentive perusal of his picture, and it has served to recall to my recollection a good many similar scenes from real life, of a half-pleasing, half-melancholy character. I have never yet seen a party 31 362 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. of emigrants quitting their country forever, half-broken- hearted, as they almost always are, without forgetting all my political economy, and sympathizing with them in their regret. Hazlitt says, very truly though somewhat quaintly, that when men compassionate themselves, other men com- passionate them too. We admire the fortitude of the stoic, but we never pity his sufferings. But a kindly, manly Scot, proud of his country, and attached to his friends, and yet compelled by stern necessity to part from both, and parting from them with a swelling heart and wet eyes, we must pity the poor fellow, and feel sorry that he is leaving us, let population increase as it may. I know of scenes which have taken place in the Highlands of Scot- land which I hope neither Malthus nor M'Culloch could have contemplated with a dry eye ; and I shall instance one of them. All the Highlanders of an inland district in Sutherlandshire were ejected from their homes by the late Duke a good many years ago, to make way for a few sheep- farmers. The poor people, a moral and religious race, bound to their rugged hills with a strength of attachment hardly equalled in any other country, could not be made to believe the summonses of removal real. Their fathers had lived and died among these very hills for thousands of years. They had spent their blood, and had laid down their lives of old, for the good Earls of Sutherland. Nay, when their Countess, in her maiden years, had expressed a wish to raise a regiment among them for the service of the country, a regiment had risen at the bidding of their chief's daughter, and had marched off to the war. Every man among them brought his Bible with him, and the enemy never bore them down in the charge. And now could it be possible that they were to be forced out of their own country! They at first thought of resistance ; and, had they carried the thought into action, it would have af- forded perilous employment to a thousand armed men to have ejected every eight hundred of them; but they had read their New Testaments, and they knew that the Duke CRITICISM FOR THE UNINITIATED. 363 had become proprietor of the soil ; and so the design dropped. Shall we write it? some of their houses were actually fired over their heads, and yet there was no blood- shed ! Convinced at length that no other alternative remained for them, they gathered in a body in the church- yard of the district to take leave of their country for ever, and of the dust of their fathers last. And there, seated among the graves, men and women, the old and the young, with one accord, and under the influence of one feeling, they all " lifted up their voices and wept." This tract of the Highlands is now inhabited by sheep. Mr. Knott's picture represents rather a Lowland than a Highland scene. There is a humble cottage, half over- shadowed by trees, in the foreground, surrounded by a level country. The sea spreads beyond. We see the ship in the distance which is to bear away the emigrants ; and the loaded wagon in the middle ground is evidently con- veying their effects to the shore. The group stands in front of the cottage. There are a few supplementary fig- ures introduced into the scene, partly for the sake of height- ening the effect by the force of contrast, for they have no direct interest in it, and partly to bring out its minor details; for, though little moved by it, they are yet all employed in it. One, an elderly man, with spectacles on, is painfully scrawling out a direction-card for a box ; there is a rough, thick-set, sun-burned sailor from the beach, who is leaning over him, evidently criticising the penmanship, but satisfied, apparently, that it may just pass; and a tall stripling stands directly in front, prepared with a coil of cord to bear the box away. In an opposite corner there is a boy of the family parting with a favorite dog, which he is handing over, bound in a string, to a companion. The poor little fellow is much dejected, and not at all likely soon to forget Scotland, nor his dog either. The stroke is a fine one ; but there is a still finer stroke in the same part of the group. A barefooted, simple-looking lassie, of about fifteen, who has been living with the family, taking 364 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. care of the child, a sweet, chubby thing, is kissing her charge, not dry-eyed, and bidding it farewell ; and baby, though it does not exactly know what is the matter, is quite disposed to return the caress. A vigorous man, in the prime of early manhood, the father of the boy and the infant, and of two little girls in the foreground, has turned round in a half-absent mood to the shut door. He has been bearing up, with apparent fortitude, for the sake of the others, and under a high sense of what constitutes the firm and the manly in char- acter. The present, however, is a moment of partial for- getfulness ; the assumed firmness is laid down, and his thoughts are hovering in sadness, as he looks back on his humble dwelling, between the enjoyments of the past and the uncertainties of the future. His wife, a woman of great beauty, not merely that of feature and complexion, which may exist wholly disjoined from all that we most value in the sex, but that of expression and character also, is leaning on the arm of her father-in-law, a venerable old man. Unlike her husband, she has had no part to act on the occasion, nor has she simulated the fortitude or the indifference which she does not possess nor feel. She is drowned in tears. The sweet little girl who holds on by her gown, and the girl beside grandpapa, are both too young to participate in the general regret ; and yet they, too, have an air of absence and unhappiness about them, caught, as it were, by sympathy from the others. The old man, the patriarch of the family, is one of the most striking figures in the picture. Wilkie himself has rarely produced anything more characteristically Scotch. There is a deep seriousness impressed on the somewhat rugged features, blent with a dash of sadness ; for he, too, feels that he is leaving his home and the country of his fathers. But he has thought of another and more certain home ; and the consolations which he is pressing on his daughter-in-law, whose hand he is affectionately grasping in his own, are evidently of the highest character. Venerable old man ! CRITICISM FOR THE UNINITIATED. 365 Divested of hopes and beliefs such as yours, the aged emi- grant would be of all men the most unhappy. It has been well said by Goldsmith, that " a mind long habituated to a certain set of objects insensibly becomes fond of seeing them, visits them from habit, and parts from them with reluctance ; " and it is chiefly from such objects that age derives its pleasures. It cannot give to novelty the feelings appropriated by recollection ; and must fare ill, therefore, in a foreign land, in the midst of what is strange, and what, from its very nature, cannot become otherwise, in the midst, too, of hardships and privation. The old man in such circumstances must be either like the cottar of Burns, the " priest-like father " of the family, or he must be by much the unhappiest member of it. Such is an imperfect description of Mr. Knott's picture, as I have been enabled to read it. It has no doubt its faults, like every other; but these seem mostly to be mere faults of execution, from which no young artist can be wholly free, whatever his genius, not faults of concep- tion. The foliage of the trees which half-embosom the cottage does not repose in the softened sunshine with per- haps all the grace of nature, and the tiled cottage does not strike as characteristically Scottish. A roof of heath, or fern, or straw, with here and there a patch of stone-crop, and here and there a tuft of grass or a cluster of house- leek, would better repay the painter's study. But these are very minute matters ; and he would be a connoisseur worth looking at who would place such things in the bal- ance against the large amount of thought and feeling dis- played in the group. The painter who can impart character to men and women, both national and individual, can well afford to leave a tree or a cottage without much to dis- tinguish them, and be a superior painter still. Of all the figures of the piece, the old man pleases me the best, though the female, his daughter-in-law, is also very exquisite. I have perused with deep interest the let- ters of an aged emigrant, who quitted the north of Scot 31* 366 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. land for Upper Canada about eight years ago. He was one of the excellent though now fast diminishing body known in Ross-shire and the neighboring districts by the name of the men / and, though marked perhaps by a few eccentricities, he was by no means a low specimen of the class. He settled among some of the outer townships, I forget which, where there were no ministers and no churches ; and he saw for the first time, in his seventieth year, the Sabbath rise over the wild and trackless woods of America, all unmarked from the other days of the week. But John Clark had brought his Bible with him, and no superficial knowledge of its contents ; and, regularly as the day came round, he assembled his family, like one of the Pilgrim fathers of old, for the purpose of religious worship, and to press upon them the importance of religious truth. Some of the neighbors learned to drop in. His fervent prayers, and his homely but forcible expositions, full of masculine thought, had the true popular germ in them ; and John's log cottage became the meetinghouse of the thinly-peopled district; until at length the accumu- lating infirmities of a period of life greatly advanced in- terfered with his self-imposed duties, and set him aside. He is still alive, however, at least he was so a few months ago ; and at that time, in the midst of great bodily de- bility, far removed from all his Christian friends of the same stamp or standing with himself, and with the near prospect of laying down his worn-out frame, to mingle with the soil in some gloomy recess of the wild forest, thousands of miles from the lonely Highland churchyard where the remains of his fathers and of some of his children are laid, with those of the wife of his youth, John was yet more than resigned ; he was rejoicing, will our readers guess for what? He had just heard of the revival at Kilsyth, and of the attitude assumed by the Church of Scotland in behalf of the rights of the Christian people and of the Headship of her Divine Master. What, I CRITICISM FOR THE UNINITIATED. 367 marvel, does infidelity propose giving to such men in exchange for their religion ? I am impressed by the absolute necessity which exists for emigration. Circumstances have settled the point. Whatever the sacrifice of feeling, it has ceased to be an open question whether or no our countrymen should leave us for other fields of exertion. The population of the country is already redundant in a degree which occasions much distress among the working classes, and much consequent bad feeling ; for the true cause of the evil is misunderstood ; and this already redundant population is increasing at the portentous rate of nearly a thousand per day. Besides, it is according to the design of Providence that the human race should spread forth as they multiply. The Scotch are only doing for Canada and the insular regions of the far south what the Celtas and the Scandina- vians did for Scotland three thousand years ago ; and is it not well that the process should be so different now from what it was when the Goths and the Vandals overwhelmed the Roman emniie? It is civilization and the arts that are advancing on the regions of barbarism, and sending out their pickets and their advanced guards far into the waste, not barbarism that is bursting in, as of old, to bear down civilization and the arts. But we can at once recognize these principles, principles, indeed, too obvious not to be recognized, and yet regret cases of what we may term wholesome emigration none the less. Nothing can be more healthy than the drain on a redundant town or country population : it is blood-letting to an apoplectic patient ; and the emigrating thousands are as little missed as water withdrawn from the ocean. " The crowds close in, and all's forgotten." Very different is the case, how- ever, when the population of upland districts have been torn up root and branch, and uninhabited wildernesses formed where a simple-hearted but surely noble race lived contented in times of quiet, and constituted the strength of their country in the day of war. There have been 368 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. cottages on many a hillside emptied of their inhabitants within the last twenty years, which shall never again be gladdened by the domestic circle ; and the heath is creep- ing slowly in lonely dells and sweejnng acclivities, over many a narrow range of meadow, and many a little field whose flattened and sinking furrows shall never again yield to the plough. The contemplation of such scenes amid the depopulated solitudes of the Highlands has always inclined me to sadness, especially in the inland districts which, as they nad no dependence on the fluctuations of trade, were little exposed to those extreme depressions which have borne so heavily of late years on the inhabi- tants of the islands and the sea-coasts, and in which, I know from experience, much happiness has been enjoyed, and an intense love of country cherished. Rather more than twelve years ago I was led into the central Highlands of the north. I first left behind me the comparatively level fields of the low country, with their hedgerows and intervening belts of planting, and then the upper skirting of forest, which waved mile after mile on the lower declivities of the hills. I next passed on a half- obliterated path along the upper ridges, rising and de- scending alternately, now shut out from the widening landscape in some brown moory hollow, roughened with huge fragments of rock, now on a swelling eminence that, overtopping the previously surmounted height, blended in one vast prospect the region of moor, of forest, and of corn, and, far beyond, the widely extended sea. The last eminence was at length surmounted, and a broad tract of table-land, slightly depressed toward the middle, bounded on the opposite side by low craggy hills, with here and there an inky pool and here and there a gloomy morass, spread out for miles before me in black and unvaried ster- ility. I toiled drearily across, and reached the opposite boundary of hill. It overlooked a deep pastoral valley of considerable extent. A wild Highland stream, skirted on either bank by a straggling vow of alders, went winding CKITICISM FOR THE UNINITIATED. 369 through the midst. On either side there were patches of vivid green, encircled by the brown heath, like islands by the ocean, which had once been furrowed by the plough. As I advanced I saw the ruins of deserted cottages. All was solitary and desolate. Roof-trees were decaying within mouldering walls. A rank vegetation had covered the si- lent floors, and was waving over hearths the fires of which had been forever extinguished. A solitary lapwing was screaming over the ruins, rising and falling in sudden starts, darting off along the ground, now to the right, now to the left, and then turning abruptly round in mid air, and almost brushing me as she passed. She had built her nest within some deserted cottage, and was employing her every instinct to lure me away. A melancholy raven was croaking on a neighboring eminence. There was the faint murmur of the stream, and the low moan of the breeze ; but every sound of man had long passed from the air ; and the bright sunshine seemed to fall idly on the brown slopes and greener levels of this uninhabited and desolate valley. I have rarely been more impressed. I was re- minded of what I had read of eastern armies, whose track may be followed years after their march by ruined villages and a depopulated country, of scenes, too, described by the prophets, lands once populous "grown places where no man dwelleth, or son of man passeth through." 370 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. III. GEOLOGY VERSUS ASTRONOMY. It was remarked early in the last century by a French wit, who was also an astronomer, that when the potentates of earth ceased to quarrel about their sublunary territories, they would in all likelihood begin to dispute about the plains and mountain ranges of the moon. They would give, he said, their own names to its peaks and craters, and fall to blows for the nominal possession of some of its more prominent eminences or profounder hollows. The prediction, however, seems to be as far from its fulfilment as ever. The present war with Russia shows that the quar- rels of rulers respecting their earthly territories, so far from being at an end, or nearly so, are as serious and irreconcil- able as at any former period ; and hitherto, at least, kings and princes have left all disputes about the nomenclature of the moon's geography to be settled by the moon's ge- ographers. The celestial map-makers have already had their quarrels on the subject. One of them named the places on the moon's surface after philosophers eminent in all the various departments of mind ; another named them after the terrestrial seas and mountains which they seemed to resemble ; a third, interposing, strove to give them back to the philosophers again, but struck off the former list all philosophers save the astronomical ones ; and now the moon's surface bears, in the maps at least, marks of all the three combatants. It has its Alps and its Apennines and its Caucasus, its Sea of Serenity and its Sea of Storms, its Aristarchus and its Plato, its Tycho and its Coper- nicus. There is, as we may perceive, no danger of a too unbroken peace on earth regarding the condition of the GEOLOGY VERSUS ASTRONOMY. 371 moon, or of any of the other heavenly bodies, even though neither Napoleon nor Nicholas should interfere in the quarrel. In fine, every department of science has its controver- sies ; and it is well that it should be so. It saves the world from all danger of connivance to deceive it, on the part of scientific men, a thing which the world is some- what prone to suspect, and proves, on the whole, the best mode of eliciting truth. There are certain stages, too, in the course of discovery, when controversy becomes inevi- table. "Tempests in the state are commonly greatest," says Bacon, " when things grow to equality, as natural tempests are greatest about the equinoctia." And we find that it is so in science also. When comparatively new sciences rise, in certain departments specially their own, to assert an equality with old ones, that, when they stood alone, had been extended beyond their just limits, contro- versies almost always result from the new-born equality in the disputed province. In the middle ages, for instance* there existed but one great science, theology ; and, pressed far beyond its just limits, it impinged on almost every province of physical research and every department of mind. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries pecu- liarly the ages of maritime discovery geography rose into importance ; and after a prolonged controversy, which at one time had well-nigh crushed Columbus, it was finally established, in opposition to the findings of St. Augustine and Lactantius, that the world is round, not flat, and that it has antipodes. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centu- ries astronomy became a great and solid science ; and-, after a still fiercer controversy than that of the geographers, it asserted a supremacy in its own special walk against popish theologians such as Caccini and Bellarmine, and against Protestants such as Turretine. We have seen a similar controversy carried on in the present century which has witnessed the rise of geology, just as the fif- teenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries witnessed that 372 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. of geography and astronomy, between theologians who were also geologists, such as Chalmers, Sedgwick, and Sumner, and theologians who were wholly ignorant of geology, such as Granville Pen, Eleazor Lord, and Moses Stuart. And, as in astronomy and geography, the contro- versy may now be regai'ded as ultimately settled in favor of the new science, within at least the new science's own proper province. There are, however, other controversies than theological ones, wich rise when, according to Bacon, " things grow to equality ; " and that equality to which geology has attained with astronomy during the last fifty years may be properly regai'ded as the real cause of the very interesting controversy carried on at the present time between the author of the " Essay on the Plurality of Worlds," understood to be one of the distinguished or- naments of English science, and our great countryman Sir David Brewster, a philosopher who, while supreme in his own special walk, is perhaps of all living men the most extensively acquainted with the general domain of physi- cal science. The English writer, though he presses his argument by much too far, may be regarded as representa- tive of the geological side ; Sir David of the astronomical. There are, we have said, certain stages in the course of discovery at which controversy becomes inevitable ; and it seems demonstrative of the fact that the new arguments in which these controversies originate arise much about the same time, without concert or communication, in minds engaged in the same or similar pursuits. Had they not been originated by the man who first made them known, they would have been originated almost contem- poraneously by some one else. Almost all discovery has a similar course. Adams and Le Verrier were engaged at the same time in calculating the irregularities of Uranus, and inferred from them the existence and position of the great planet, actually discovered almost simultaneously, shortly after, by Dr. Galle and Professor Challis ; and it is a known fact that Mr. Lassel and Professor Bond discov- GEOLOGY VERSUS ASTRONOMY. 373 ered on the same evening the eighth moon of Saturn, though the Atlantic flowed between them at the time. And we And a resembling simultaneousness of inference and conclu- sion exemplified by the work which has given occasion to the present controversy. The argument which it ampli- fies and expands, and, as we think, carries by much too far, and into conclusions not legitimate, was first given to the world seven years ere the appearance of this English volume, in the columns of a Scotch newspaper, and full six years in a separate work, published and rather exten- sively circulated both in Britain and America. And in glancing over the first edition of the " Essay on the Plu- rality of Worlds," we had expected not, perhaps, taking sufficiently into account that simultaneity of thought at certain stages of acquirement to which we refer that some acknowledgment ought to have been made to the writer who had originated the argument so long before. We ascertain, however, from the second edition of the English work now before us, that its author had framed his argument for himself, independently altogether of the previously-published one. " I have no wish," he says, " to lay any stress upon the originality of the views pre- sented in the Essay. I now know that, several years ago (in 1849), Hugh Miller, in his 'First Impressions of Eng- land ' (chap, xvii), presented an argument from geology very much of the nature of that which I have employed / and that the Rev. Mr. Banks, in a little tract published in 1850, urged the very insecure character of the doctrine that the planets and stars are inhabited. These coincidences with my views I did not know till my Essay was not only written but printed. As to myself, the views which I have at length committed to paper have long been in my mind." There is an error in the date given here. The argument to which the author of the Essay refers as "much of the nature" of his own was first published, not in 1849, but in October, 1846, when it appeared in the columns of the "Witness" as part of one of the chapters 32 874 LTTKRARY AND SCIENTIFIC. of " First Impressions, 9 a work which was published in the collected form as a volume early in the following year. Essentially, however, the reference is perfectly satisfactory and, mayhap, not wholly uninteresting, as corroborative of our position, that at certain periods, after a certain amount of fact in some new department has been ac- quired, inferences never drawn before come to be drawn simultaneously by minds cut off by circumstances from all intercourse with each other. The argument, as originally stated in the " Witness," we shall take the liberty to re- peat, slightly abridged, not only from its bearing on one of the most curious controversies of modern times, but as it may also serve to indicate what we deem the just de- gree in which the inferences of astronomers regarding the inhabitability of the planets are to be qualified by the facts of the geologist. " There is a sad oppressiveness in that sense of human littleness which the great truths of astronomy have so direct a tendency to inspire. Man feels himself lost amid the sublime magnitudes of creation, a mere atom in the midst of infinity; and trembles lest the scheme of revelation should be found too large a manifestation of the divine care for so tiny an ephemera. Now, I am much mis- taken if the truths of geology have not a direct tendency to restore him to his true place. When engaged some time since in perusing one of the sublimest philosophic poems of modern times, the ' Astronomical Discourses ' of Dr. Chalmers, there occurred to me a new argument that might be employed against the infidel objection which the work was expressly written to remove. The infidel points to the planets ; and, reasoning from an analogy which on other than geologic data the Christian cannot challenge, asks whether it be not more probable that each of these is, like our own earth, not only a scene of creation, but also a home of rational, accountable creatures. And then follows the objection, as fully stated by Dr. Chalmers, Does not the largeness of that field which astronomy lays open to the view of modern science throw a suspicion over the truth of the gospel his- tory ? and how shall we reconcile the greatness of that wonderful movement which was made in heaven for the redemption of fallen man with the comparative meanness and obscurity of our species ? ' GEOLOGY VERSUS ASTRONOMY. 375 Geology, when the Doctor wrote, was in a state of comparative in- fancy. It has since been largely developed ; and we have been introduced, in consequence, to the knowledge of some five or six different creations of which this globe was the successive scene ere the present creation was called into being. At the time the ' Astro- nomical Discourses ' were published, the infidel could base his analogy on his knowledge of but one creation ; whereas we can now base our ana!ogy on the knowledge of at least six creations, the various productions of which we can handle, examine, and compare. And how, it may be asked, does this immense extent of basis affect the objection with which Dr. Chalmers has grappled so vigorously ? It annihilates it completely. You argue, may not the geologist say to the infidel, that yonder planet, because apparently a scene of crea- tion like our own, is also a home of accountable creatures like our- selves. But the extended analogy furnished by geologic science is full against you. Exactly so might it have been argued regarding the earth during the early creation represented by the Silurian system, and yet the master-existence of that extended period was a crustacean. Exactly so might it have been argued regarding the earth during the term of the creation represented by the Old Red Sandstone ; and yet the master-existence of that scarce less extended period was a fish. During the creation represented by the Carboniferous period, with all its rank vegetation and green-reflected light, the master- existence was a fish still. During the creation represented by the Oolite, the master-existence was a reptile, a bird, or a marsupial animal. During the creation of the Cretaceous period, there was no further advance. During the creation of the Tertiary formation, the master-existence was a mammiferous quadruped. It was not until the creation to which we ourselves belong was called into existence that a rational being, born to anticipate a hereafter, was ushered upon the scene. Suppositions such as yours would have ' been false in at least five out of six instances ; and if in five out of six consecutive creations there existed no accountable agent, what shadow of reason can there be for holding that a different arrange- ment obtains in five out of six contemporary creations ? Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus may have all their plants and animals, and yet they may be as devoid of rational, accountable creatures, as were the creations of the Silurian, Old Red Sandstone, Carboniferous, Oolitic, Cretaceous, and Tertiary periods. They may bo merely some of the ' many mansions ' prepared in the 1 ' Father's house ' for the immortal existence of kingly destiny made 376 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. in the Father's own image, to whom this little world forms but the cradle and the nursery. " But the effect of this extended geologic basis may be neutralized, the infidel may urge, by extending it yet a little further. Why, he may ask, since we draw our analogies regarding what obtains in the other planets from what obtains in our own, why not conclude that each one of them has also had its geologic eras and revolutions, its Silurian, Old Red Sandstone, Carboniferous, Oolitic, Creta- ceous, and Tertiary periods ; and that now, contemporary with the creation of which man constitutes the master-existence, they have all their fully-matured creations, headed by rationality ? Why not carry the analogy thus far? Simply, it may be unhesitatingly urged in reply, because to carry it so far would be to carry it beyond the legitimate bounds of analogy ; and because analogy pursued but a single step beyond the limits of its proper province is sure always to land the pursuer in error. Analogy is not identity A saga- cious guide in its own legitimate field, it is utterly blind and senseless in the precincts that lie beyond. It is nicely correct in its generals, perversely erroneous in its particulars ; and no sooner does it quit its proper province the general for the particular than there start up around it a multitude of solid objections, sternly to challenge it as a trespasser on grounds not its own. How infer, we may well ask the infidel, admitting, for the argument's sake, that all the planets come under the law of geologic revolution, how infer that they have all, or any of them save our own earth, arrived at the stage of stability and ripeness essential to a fully developed creation, with a reasoning creature as its master-existence ? Look at the immense mass of Jupiter, and at that mysterious mantle of cloud, barred and streaked in the direction of his trade-winds, that forever conceals his face. May not that dense robe of cloud be the ever- ascending steam of a globe that, in consequence of its vast bulk, has not sufficiently cooled down to be a scene of life at all ? Even the analogue of our Silurian creation may not yet have begun in Jupiter. Look, again, at Mercury, where it bathes in a flood of light, en- veloped within the sun's halo, like some forlorn smelter sweltering beside the furnace mouth. A similar state of things may obtain on the surface of that planet, from a different though not less adequate cause. But it is unnecessary to deal further with an analogy so palpably overstrained, and whose aggressive place and position in a province not its own so many unanswerable objections start up to elucidate and fix." GEOLOGY VERSUS ASTRONOMY. 377 Such, virtually, is the argument which has been repro- duced and greatly expanded in the " Essay on the Plurality of Worlds." We think, however, that the ingenious and accomplished author of that work has pressed it too far, and forgotten that, though it introduces into the reason- ings of the astronomer, regarding the existence of rational inhabitants in the planets, the modifying element of time, it does not affect his general conclusions. It merely shows, from the extended experience of the earth's history which geology furnishes, that these conclusions may not refer to the now of the planetary universe, but to some period in a perhaps very remote future. For the argument of the as- tronomer, in a condensed form, let us draw on Fontenelle, a man who wrote ere geology had yet any existence as a science. It is thus he makes his philosopher reason with his lady friend the Marchioness, in a general summary : "We cannot pretend to make you see them [the inhab- itants of the planets] ; and you cannot insist upon demon- stration here, as you would in a mathematical question ; but you have all the proofs you could desire in our world, the entire resemblance of the planets with the earth which is inhabited, the impossibility of conceiving any other use for which they were created, the fecundity and magnificence of nature, the certain regards which she seems to have had to the necessities of the inhabitants, as in giv- ing moons to those planets remote from the sun, and more moons still to those yet more remote ; and, what is still very material, there are all things to be said on one side, and nothing on the other. In short, supposing that these inhabitants of the planets really exist, they could not de- clare themselves by more marks, or by marks more sensi- ble." Such is the statement of Fontenelle ; and, though it can be no longer affirmed that nothing can be said on the opposite side, seeing that we have now a very ingenious volume written on the opposite side, by not merely a clever, but also a highly scientific man, it will be found that in the course of discovery the argument has rather strength- 32* 378 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. ened than weakened. Let us take, for instance, the por- tion of it founded on the existence and distribution of moons. It was known when Fonteuelle wrote his " Con- versations on the Plurality of Worlds," that the earth had one moon, Jupiter four moons, and Saturn five. It is now farther known that Saturn has eight moons, and Uranus also eight ; and if only one has yet'been detected revolving round Neptune, it must be taken into account that the latter planet is twice further distant from our earth than Saturn, and so dimly discernible that it is still a question whether it possesses a ring or no, that our earliest acquaintance with it is not yet more than eight years old, that even Saturn's eighth moon was discov- ered only six years ago, and that not only not a few of the moons of Neptune, but even some of the moons of Uranus, may be still to find. The general fact still holds good, that in proportion as the larger planets most distant from the sun require, in consequence, moons to light them, the necessary moons they have got; just as on our own earth the animals who live most distant from the sun, and require, in consequence, thicker protective coverings to keep them warm, have got these necessary protective cov- erings, whether of fatty matter or of fur. But the argu- ment derivable from the light and heat of the sun himself seems scarce less strong. Let us avail ourselves of it, as condensed by Sir David Brewster, from Sir Isaac Newton's first letter to Dr. Bentley. " He [Sir Isaac] thought it inexplicable by natural causes, and to be ascribed to the counsel and contrivance of a voluntary agent, that the matter [of which the solar system is formed] should divide itself into two sorts, part of it composing a shining body like the sun, and part an opaque body like the planets. Had a natural and blind cause, without contrivance and design, placed the earth in the centre of the moon's orbit, and Jupiter in the centre of his system of satellites, and the sun in the centre of the planetary system, the sun would have been a body like Jupiter, and the earth that GEOLOGY VERSUS ASTRONOMY. 379 is, without light and heat; and, consequently, he [Sir Isaac] knew no reason why there is only one body qual- ified to give light and heat to all the rest, but because the Author of the system thought it convenient, and because one was sufficient to warm and enlighten all the rest." "To warm and enlighten all the rest!" Newton recog- nizes the hand of the Divine Designer in that peculiar collocation of matter through which the lamp and furnace of the system is placed in its centre, and the opaque objects to be warmed and heated arranged at certain dis- tances around it. But why the application of light and heat to masses of dead matter ? Light and heat, in a lesser or greater degree, are necessary to the existence of all organisms, plant and animal, but not to the exist- ence of matter not organized. A lamp is necessary in a railway carriage that travels by night, if there be passen- gers within, but not in the least necessary to the carriage itself, if there be only the empty seats to shine upon. And if, of all the planets that not only revolve round the central lamp and furnace, but have also special lamps of their own, the earth be the only inhabited one, not only is the waste most enormous, but the argument of design, so pro- foundly deduced by Sir Isaac, must be pronounced to be of no force in more than thirty cases for one, that is, in the cases of all the supposed uninhabited planets In which there exists nothing capable of being benefited by being either lighted or warmed. Or, to avail ourselves of Sir David's happy illustration, the Creator of a solar system with many uninhabited planets, and only a single inhabited one, would resemble some " mighty autocrat who should establish a railway round the coasts of Europe and Asia, and place upon it an enormous train of first-class carriages, impelled year after year by tremendous steam-power, while there was a philosopher and a culprit in a humble van, attended by hundreds of unoccupied carriages and empty trucks." And, of course, were the unoccupied carriages to be lighted up with lamps apparently for the benefit of 380 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. the passengers which they had not, and were these lamps to be fewer or more numerous in each case in meet pro- portion with the degree of darkness to be encountered, and as the necessities of actual passengers would require, the puzzle involved in the why and wherefore of the whole concern would be still increased. The old argument for the inhabitancy of the planets, regarded as an argument of ultimate design, still remains unaffected by the discov- eries of the geologist. But, on the other hand, let not the modifying influence of these discoveries be denied. Such is their effect on the argument, that, though we may receive it in full as truly solid, we may yet, in perfect consistency with its conclu- sions, deem it a moot point whether there be at the present time a single inhabited world in the system save our own. We cannot express, either by figures or by algebraic signs, save by the signs that express unknown quantity, the ge- ologic periods. We only know that they were of enormous extent. Let us, however, for the argument's sake, repre- sent the period during which man has been upon earth by the sum 5000, the periods during which the successive plant-and-animal-bearing systems of the geologist were in being by the sum 1,000,000, and the earlier death periods, during which the gneiss, the older quartz rock, the mica schist, and the non-fossiliferous clay slate were formed, by the sum 500,000 ; and let us then suppose that some intel- lectual being, wise as a Newton, and reasoning on exactly his principles and those of Sir David Brewster, had existed during all these terms, converted into years, at a distance from the earth as great as that which separates the earth from the planets Mars or Venus; further, let us suppose that once in every five thousand years for the first half- million, the query had been propounded to him by the Creator, as the Creator questioned Job of old, "Intel- lectual being, is yonder planet inhabited, or no ? " and that during the million of years that followed, the query should be repeated after the same intervals in the modified form, GEOLOGY VERSUS ASTRONOMY. 881 " Is yonder planet inhabited by rational, accountable creatures, or no ? " Now, nothing can be more clear than that, reasoning on Sir Isaac's and Sir David's premises, the reply would be given in each instance in the affirma- tive. It would be seen by the reasoning creature that the distant earth-planet was lighted up and heated by the great central furnace and lamp, the sun ; that it had its clouds, and therefore its atmosphere ; that it had its grate- ful interchange of day and night, of summer and winter, autumn and spring ; and, further, that it had its attendant moon, to stir up its seas with purifying tides, and to light up its nights. And yet most probable it is that the first hundred answers to the query those which related to the existence of mere animal being would have been false ones ; and most certain it is that the next two hun- dred answers to the query those which related to the existence of natural life would be false also. Not until after the lapse of a million and a half of years, when the question would come to be put for the three hundred and first time, would it elicit the true response. And let us remember that whatever was may be ; and that what were the first states of our own planet may be the present states of the various planets that revolve with it round the central furnace and lamp. Here again we cannot cast our argument into an exact geometrical or arithmetical shape. We cannot even say, founding on the assumption of pro- portionate periods already given, that as our earth was for three hundred periods of five thousand years each without rational inhabitants, and possessed of such an inhabitant during only the three hundred and first period of that length, so it is probable that of three hundred and one contemporary planets only one is a scene of rational ex- istence, and the others either not inhabited at all, or in- habited by but sentient irrationality. We cannot give the argument any such exact form, seeing that an unreckoned but possible, nay, probable element, comes in to destroy its exactitude. The other planets may, nay, in all likeli- 382 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. hood, have bnen ripening as certainly as our own, and the period of rational inhabitancy may have arrived in not a few of them. Quite as perilous, however, would it be to argue from the particular analogy furnished by the history of the earth, that all, or even the greater part of them, had so ripened. Why, even the fruit of one season, whether apples or apricots, does not all ripen at the same time on the same tree ; far less do the fruits of different trees ripen at the same time. And we are sufficiently acquainted with the planets to know that, with certain general resem- blances, they are very different fruit indeed from our own earth. Even supposing Jupiter, for instance, to be in every respect save size a second earth (which, by the way, demonstrably he is not), he would take, on the soberest calculations of the geologist, many hundred times more time to ripen than our small planet. And so may it be predicted of Saturn and Uranus, and Neptune also, and most probably, from the different circumstances in which they are placed, of the smaller planets Mercury and Venus. But while this geological question, in relation to the pres- ent time of ripe or unripe, must be now brought in to qualify the reasonings of the astronomer, let us not forget that these reasonings have, with reference to ultimate re- sults, a value as positive as ever. From the crustaceous eyes of many facets that existeel during the times of the Silurian period, and the ichthyic eyes of but one facet or capsule that existed during the times of the Old Red Sand- stone, the geologist infers that during these periods there existed light ; while the astronomer, taking up the con- verse of the argument, infers that where there is light (joined, of course, to the other necessary conditions of life, such as planetary matter existing in the twofold form of solid nucleus and surrounding atmosphere) there must be eyes, eyes, therefore light, solar or lunar, etc., light, solar or lunar, therefore eyes. And just as the geologic argument is noways invalidated by. the fact that there are animals in the foetal state furnished with eyes darkly GEOLOGY VERSUS ASTRONOMY. 383 veiled in the womb, for which light does not yet exist, it in no degree invalidates the astronomical argument that there have been, and most probably now axe, foetal planets furnished with light, solar or lunar, for which eyes do not yet exist. Such, in this controversy, seems to be the due balance and adjustment of the opposite arguments, as- tronomic and geologic arguments that modify, but in no degree destroy, each other. We can of course do little more, within the limits of a single article, than just touch at a few points, on a subject upon which men such as Sir David Brewster, and, shall we say, Professor Whewell, fill each a volume apiece. Let us, however, submit to them, as very admirable, both in form and substance, the claims of geology, as stated by the English Professor : " Astronomy claims a sort of dignity over other sciences, from her antiquity, her certainty, and the vastness of her discoveries. But the antiquity of astronomy as a science had no share in such speculations as we are discussing ; and if it had had, new truths are better than old conjectures ; new discoveries must rectify old errors ; new an- swers must remove old difficulties. The vigorous youth of geology makes her fearless of the age of astronomy. And as to the certainty of astronomy, it has just as little to do with these speculations. The certainty stops just where these speculations begin. There may, indeed, be some danger of delusion on this subject. Men have been so long accustomed to look upon astronomical science as the mother of certainty, that they may possibly confound astronomical discov- eries with cosmological conjectures, though these be slightly and illogically connected with those. And then, as to the vastness of as- tronomical discoveries, granting that character, inasmuch as it is to a certain degree a matter of measurement, we must observe that the discoveries of geology are no less vast ; they extend through time, as those of astronomy do through space ; they carry us through millions of years, that is, of the earth's revolutions, as those of as- tronomy do through millions of the earth's diameter, or of diameters of the earth's orbit. Geology fills the regions of duration with events, as astronomy fills the regions of the universe with objects. She carries us backward by the relation of cause and effect, as astronomy carries 384 LITEKARY AND SCIENTIFIC. us upward by the relation of geometry. As astronomy steps on from point to point of the universe by a chain of triangles, so geology steps from epoch to epoch of the earth's history by a chain of me- chanical and organical laws. If the one depends on the axioms of geometry, the other depends on the axioms of causation. " So far, then, geology has no need to regard astronomy as her superior, and least of all when they apply themselves together to speculations like these. But, in truth, in such speculations geology has an immeasurable superiority. She has the command of an im- plement in addition to all that astronomy can use, and one, for the purpose of such speculations, adapted far beyond any astronomical element of discovery. She has for one of her studies, one of her means of dealing with her problems, the knowledge of life, animal and vegetable. Vital organization is a subject of attention which has in modern times been forced upon her. It is now one of the main points of her discipline. The geologist must study the traces of life in every form ; must learn to decipher its faintest indications and its fullest development. On the question, then, whether there be in this or that quarter evidence of life, he can speak with the con- fidence derived from familiar knowledge ; while the astronomer, to whom such studies are utterly foreign, beause he has no facts that bear upon them, can offer on such questions only the loosest and most arbitrary conjectures ; which, as we have had to remark, have been rebuked by eminent men as being altogether inconsistent with the acknowledged maxims of his science. " When, therefore, geology tells us that the earth, which has been the seat of human life for a few thousand years only, has been the seat of animal life for myriads, it may be millions, of years, she has a right to offer this as an answer to any difficulty which astronomy, or the readers of astronomical books, may suggest, derived from the consideration that the earth, the seat of human life, is but one globe of a few thousand miles in diameter, among millions of other globes at distances millions of times as great. Let the difficulty be put in any way the objector pleases. Is it that it is unworthy of the great- ness and majesty of God, according to our conception of him, to bestow such peculiar care on so small a part of his creation ? But we know from geology that he has bestowed upon this .small part of his creation mankind this special care. He has made their period, though only a moment in the ages of animal life, the only period of intelligence, morality, religion. If, then, to suppose that he had done this is contrary to our conceptions of his greatness and GEOLOGY VERSUS ASTRONOMY. 385 majesty, it is plain that our conceptions are erroneous : they have taken a wrong direction. God has not judged as to what is worthy of Him as we have judged. He has found it worthy of him to bestow upon man his special care, though he occupies so small a portion of time ; and why not, then, although he occupies so small a portion of space ? " Or is the objection this, that if we suppose the earth only to be occupied by inhabitants, all the other globes of the universe are wasted, turned to no purpose ? Is waste of this kind considered as unsuited to the character of the Creator ? But here again we have the like waste in the occupation of the earth. All its previous ages, its seas, and its continents, have been wasted upon mere brute life, often, so far as we can see, for myriads of years upon the lowest, the least conscious form of life, upon shell-fishes, crabs, sponges Why, then, should not the seas and continents of other planets be occupied at present with a fife no higher than this, or with no life at all?" 88 386 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. IV. THE SPACES AND THE PERIODS. That vast development of natural science which forma a leading characteristic of the present age gives an im- portance to questions such as that which it involves which they did not possess at any former period ; and must, we doubt not, materially affect in the future the entire front of that ever-fresh controversy which has been maintained since the earliest ages of the church around the Christian evidences. Let us address ourselves to the present portion of our subject, the great extent of the geologic periods, through the medium of a simple illustration. Let us suppose that shortly after the arrival of the May- flower at the shores of New England, and just as the Pilgrim Fathers are preparing to begin their labors among the deep primeval forests which cover the country, there occurs a friendly controversy between two of the party regarding the age of these vast woods. All the trees are of kinds unknown at home ; and though loftier, many of them, than the great oaks of England, and not a few of them not less bulky, it is maintained by one of the dispu- tants that they may yet have come under very different laws of growth, and may not be one twentieth part so old. These hoary forests, he argues, though it would require some three or four centuries to form such on the eastern shores of the Atlantic, may on its western shores be less than fifty years old ; nay, not only may the woods of the country be as of yesterday compared with those of Eng- land, but even its animals may. be of such rapid growth that the mouse-deer, though of ponderous bulk and size, may be in reality only a few months old ; and the oyster, THE SPACES AND THE PERIODS. 387 which on the English beds takes from five to seven years, as shown by its annual shoots, to be fit for market, may in the greatly larger American species be equally mature in as many weeks. The disputant contends and at this stage of the controversy contends truly that they are furnished with no correct unit by which to measure the age of either the unknown plants or unfamiliar animals of the new country. Let us yet further suppose that in the immediate neighborhood of the infant settlement there is a small lake, which the settlers find it necessary for sani- tary purposes to drain, and that they cut through, in the work, one of those deep mosses of northern America in which the gigantic bones, and not unfrequently the entire skeletons, of the mastodon occur. Let us suppose that they first cut through several yards of solid peat ; that they then reach a tier of rather small tree-stumps sticking in the soil ; that a second tier of somewhat larger tree- stumps lies beneath ; that they then reach a third tier of still larger stumps ; that under the stratum of earth which underlies these they find a thick bed of marl composed chiefly of very minute shells ; and that embedded in the marl they find the skeleton of a mastodon. Judging from data furnished on the eastern side of the Atlantic, the Pilgrim who has been asserting, in opposition to his neigh- bor, the antiquity of the American woods, argues from these appearances that the moss deposit must be of great age, and the underlying skeleton of an age greater still. Mosses in Old England, containing three tiers of stumps, are demonstrably as old as the times of the Roman inva- sion. Even the Roman axe has in some instances been found sticking in the lower trunks ; and at least the huge unknown skeleton just found in the moss must, he urges, be quite as ancient as the times of Agricola or Julius Cassar. His antagonist, however, challenges the inference. The previous question has, he asserts, first to be settled. The rate of growth of the American wood and the American shells has to be determined ere any calculation can be 388 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. founded on either the three tiers of stumps or the over- lying or intervening deposits of vegetable matter, or yet on the thickness of the shell-marl which underlies the whole. For if, as he contends, the growth of animals and vegetables be, as is possible, very rapid in the new world, the moss and shells, instead of being at least sixteen or seventeen hundred years old, may not be above sixty or seventy years old, and the huge animal beneath may have been living only eighty or a hundred years ago. At length, however, the required unit of measui-ement turns up. In cutting a tree for the erection of his hut, the Pilgrim who maintains the opposite side of the argument finds it strongly marked by the annual rings. And there can be no doubt that the rings are annual ones. Between the tropics, when rings occur at all, they may indicate the checks given to vegetation by the dry seasons ; and as the year has in certain localities two of these, each twelvemonth may be represented in the tree, not by one, but by two rings. But in the latitude of New England, where winter presses his iron signet on the soil with much firmness, one strongly- marked ring represents the year; and so, if it be found that a tree of some eighteen or twenty inches in diameter has its hundred concentric rings, it may be safely predicated that it has stood its century. And such, in the supposed case, is the inference of the Pilgrim. He has at length got a unit, in reality fixed by the great, never-varying astronomic movements which give to the world its seed- time and its winter; and finding, as he cuts tree after tree, the same evidence repeated, ring answering to ring, here larger and there smaller, but in their average proportions corresponding with those of the English woods, he is constrained definitively to conclude that the trees of the new country grow as slowly, or nearly so, as those of the old one ; and he confidently challenges his antagonist to test the data on which he founds. Nor can he hold that his newly-found unit, though, strictly speaking, only a measure of the age of the various forest trees in which it THE SPACES AND THE PERIODS. 389 occurs, has bearing only on them. If trees grow as slowly in the new country as in the old, can he rationally hold that its other classes of vegetables its ferns, equisetacae, club- mosses, grasses, and herbaceous plants generally grow much faster than their cogeners at home ? Further, though his unit does not enable him to measure exact'y the age by the mossy deposit, with its three tiers of stumps and its underlying mastodon, it at least enables him to deter- mine that it must be very old. It gives him in succession the age of each tier ; and when he infers respecting the intervening and overlying deposits of vegetable matter, that, as the trees grow slowly, the deposits must have been formed correspondingly slow in about the average ratio of similar formations on the other side of the Atlantic, it jus- tifies the inference ; nay, it is not without its bearing on the probable growth of the animals of the country also. It would be utterly wild to hold that in a country in which an ordinary-sized pine was the slow growth of a century, a mouse-deer or a grizzly bear shot up to its full size in a few weeks or months. And if in the foliaceous shells of the coast, such as its oysters, he finds exactly such layers of growth, or shoots, as those from which the oyster-fisher at home computes the age of the animals, each " shoot " being the work of a year, can he avoid the conclusion that here also he has got a unit by which to measure the time during which the organisms have lived, and from which he may conclude, in all sobriety, that if the bed of shell- marl which contains the remains of the mastodon be very thick, it must of necessity be very old ? If he cannot, in strictness, apply his units to every plant or every shell, or yet to every deposit of vegetable or animal origin, they at least tell him that the same general laws of growth obtain on the one side of the Atlantic as on the other, and warn him against inferring, like his antagonist, that the cases in which he has not yet been able to apply them are in any degree anomalous, or under laws that are different. We have but to apply to the geological periods of at 33* 390 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. least the Secondary and Tertiary divisions the reasoning of our illustration here, in order to determine that they must have been immensely prolonged. In no degree is the argument more affected by the portion of time which separates our age from the ages of the Oolite, than by the portion of space which separates our country from the eastern shores of America. In the woods of the great palaeozoic division the lines of growth are uncertain and capricious. Many of the trees furnish no trace of them whatever, just as there are recent intertropical trees in which they do not occur ; and in some of the others they appear capriciously and irregularly, as in those intertropical trees in which the growth is checked from time to time by intense heats and occasional droughts. But in the woods of the Lias and Oolite winter has set his seal; the annual rings of Peuce Eiggensis and Peuce Lindleiana are as regularly and strongly marked as those of the Scotch fir or Swiss pine ; nor, be it added, are they of larger size. In one specimen of our collection, but in one only, the rings average nearly a quarter of an inch in breadth ; the tree added in a single twelvemonth almost half an inch to its diameter ; but the specimen is an exceptional one. In the others they average from about a line to an eighth part ; and in one specimen no fewer than twenty-eight rings occur in the space of an inch. The slow-growing tree, of which 1t formed a portion, sluggish in its progress as a Norwegian pine on some exposed mountain-side, added only half an inch to its diameter in seven years. The unit here tells certainly of no rapid development of life, but, on the contrary, of a development quite as tardy as that of the present age of the world in latitudes as high as onr own ; and, though we cannot decide with the same certainty respecting the rate of growth in the animals contemporary with those trees, we may surely most natu- rally infer that ostrea of some ten or twelve layers, or gryphites (extinct members of the same family) of some fifteen or twenty, could not have been very young ; that THE SPACES AND THE PERIODS. 391 as the ammonite, though thinly walled, was as solid in its substance as the nautilus, and had a great many more chambers, which were added to it peacemeal, one at a time, it could not have been of much quicker growth ; and that, as the internal shell of the belemnite was much more pon- derous than that of its successor the cuttle-fish, it must have attained to maturity quite as slowly. Further, not only can it be demonstrated that ivory teeth were every whit as dense in those ages as they are now, a remark that applies equally to the later palaeozoic periods, but it can be shown also that some of these teeth were as sorely worn as in existing animals when very old. In short, the evidence that life, animal and vegetable, existed on the further side of the Tertiary geologic periods under the same laws as now, is as conclusive as that it exists under the same laws on the further side of the Atlantic. And these laws cast much light, as in the case of the peat- moss of our illustration, on the rate at which many of the mechanical deposits must have gone on. The Lias of Eathie, for instance, consist, for about four hundred feet in vertical extent, of an almost impalpable shale, divided into layers scarce thicker than pasteboard. It might well be predicated, from the merely mechanical character of the deposit, that its formation could not have been rapid. But how greatly is the argument for the lapse of a vast period of time for its growth strengthened by the fact that each one of these many thousand layers formed a crowded platform of animal life, and that so thickly are they covered with the remains of not only free shells, such as ammonites, but also of sedentary shells, such as the ostrea, that the organisms of but two of the more crowded platforms could not find room on a single one ! And these shells were the contemporaries of slow-growing pines, that on the average increased in diameter little more than the fifth of an inch yearly. Nor, though we lack the regulating unit, is the evidence of the lapse of vast periods during the deposition of the 392 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. palaeozoic systems much less complete. The oldest wood that pi*esents its structure to the microscope a fossil of the Lower Old Red Sandstone exhibits no annual rings; but it presents as dense a structure as the Norfolk Island pine. The huge araucarian of Granton has a structure nearly as dense. We have already incidentally referred to the solid ivory and much-worn teeth of the reptile fishes of the Coal Measures. In the Mid-Lothian basin there are thirty seams of workable coal intercalated among deposits of various character, whose united thickness amounts to nearly three thousand feet, and under most of these seams the original soil may still be detected on which the plants that formed their coal flourished and decayed. Whole beds of the Mountain Limestone are composed almost exclusively of marine shells and the stems of lily encrinites. In the Old Red Sandstone there are three different form- ations abounding in fishes ; and yet, so far as is yet known, there is not a single species of fish common to any two of them. And who shall tell us that the life-term of a crea- tion is a brief period ? In the Upper Silurian system we have examined a deposit more than fifty feet thick, every fragment of which had once been united to animal life, crustaceous, molluscan, or radiated. And how wonderfully, too, the further geologists explore, and the more carefully they examine, are their formations found to expand ! Phillips estimated the thickness of the Coal Measures at ten thousand feet. Sir Charles Lyell, in one of his recent visits to America, found that the Coal Measures of Nova Scotia had a thickness of more than fourteen thousand six hundred feet. Phillips estimated all the deposits beneath ths Old Red Sandstone at twenty thousand feet. The geologists of the Government survey find that the Silurians alone amount to about thirty thousand feet; and under these, in Scotland at least, lie the clay-slates, the mica- schists, and the enormous deposits of the gneisses. On the Continent, the remains of whole creations have been found intercalated between what had been deemed con- THE SPACES AND THE PERIODS. 393 tiguous systems. An entire system, the Permian, has been detected between the Coal Measures and the Trias ; and that shell-deposit that extends between the Gironde and the Pyrenees, once regarded as of the same age with the Coraline Crag, has yielded seven hundred species of shells nearly twice the number of all the species found on the coasts of Britain that belong neither to the Crag nor to the older Eocene. It is yet another creation that has appeared, for which fitting space must be found in the record. The more thoroughly the field- geologist examines, the larger become his demands on the eternity of the past for periods which it is certainly very competent to supply. His sibyl ever returns upon him ; but, unlike her of old, it is with an increased, not a dimin- ished store of volumes ; and she ever demands for them a larger and yet larger price. And why should the tale of years be refused her? Let year be heaped upon year, until the numerals that repre- sent them, consisting all of nines, would extend in a close line from the sun to the planet Neptune, and they would still form but an inappreciable item in the lifetime of the Creator. We see nothing to regret in the truth, destined to become greatly more evident in the future than it is now, that there is nothing in all history, or in all creation, vast enough to be measured off against the periods of the geologist, save the spaces of the astronomer; or that, with relation to at least our own planet, rational existence is still in its immature infancy. Could we wish it to be otherwise ? The world is still sowing its wild oats ; and, though somewhat better, on the whole, than it has been, there is surely nothing in its present aspect to reconcile any one to the belief that it has attained to its ultimate devel- opment. Its present most prominent features, if we may so express ourselves, are the horrible sufferings of war and the lies of stock-jobbers. 394 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. V. UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACES.* There are certain typical forms of error that never die, though their details alter, and the facts and analogies on which they purport to be based vary with the increase of knowledge and the progress of the human mind. And it is of great importance that these should be studied, not only in their essential, and. if we may so express ourselves, generic character, but also historically, in the various mod- ifications of shape and color which have marked them at their several periods of revival, and which will almost al- ways be found to depend on some peculiarity of pursuit or opinion prevalent at the time, or, if connected with the physical sciences, on some newly-opened course of discov- ery. The various species of error once thoroughly mas- tered, the student will find ever after that it is with but its varieties he has to deal. Nay, by thoroughly knowing the species, and the history of the changes through which they passed at their several appearances, he may be able to anticipate the exact course which they would have to run should they reappear in his own times, when men worse taught, and unacquainted with this cycloidal char- acter of error, will neither know whence they come nor whither they are going. The native sagacity of the late Dr. M'Crie was greatly sharpened by a knowledge of this kind, derived from his profound acquaintance with church history; and he is said to have predicted, while Rowism was 1 The Unity of the Human Races proved to be the Doctrine of Scripture, Reason, Science, etc. By the Rev. Thomas Smyth, D.D., Member of the Amer lean Association for the Advancement of Science. UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACES. 395 yet a howling enthusiasm, gibbering the untranslatable tongues, and stretching forth its hand to work miracles, that it was to end at no very remote period as a decrepit superstition. The fluttering butterfly was destined, agree- ably to its previously-determined constitution, to produce a brood of creeping caterpillars, though only the laborious student who had acquainted himself with its specific char- acter, as exhibited in former manifestations, knew that such was to be the case. This perception of the specific essentials and consequents of both truth and error consti- tutes, too, at once the charm and the value of such a mas- tery over the controversies which have arisen within the church, or in which, in self-defence, the church has been compelled to engage, as that possessed by the Principal of our Free Church College, Dr. Cunningham ; and there are not a few opposed to college extension on the principle that, even in the Free Church, Professors of Church History of similar calibre and acquirement are not to be had in every district of country, and that yet such are impera- tively demanded by the emergencies of the time. To dis- tinguish between the permanent forms and the accidental circumstances, between the ever-recurring cycloidal types and those mere varieties which belong to but one phase or period in the appearance of these, must ever form no inconsiderable portion of the science of ecclesiastical his- tory. Nay, save for this tendency in the typical forms of error to return upon the world altered in their features but unchanged in their framework, at least two thirds of all ecclesiastical history would be but a profitless record of the nonsense and errors of the past ; and the beau ideal of a church history would be a work such as that of Milner, which is little else than a record of the better thoughts and deeds of Christian men chronologically arranged, and useless for the most important ends served by ecclesiasti- cal history of the better type. It sounds no note of warn- ing, and furnishes no armor of defence, against the cycloi- dal errors. 896 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. There are two of these returning errors of a diametri- cally opposite character, which arise out of natural science, and of which the last century has seen several revivals, and the centuries to come must witness many more. The one that of Maillet and Lamarck sees no impassable line between species, or even genera, families, and classes, and so holds that all animals the human race as certainly as the others may have commenced in the lowest forms, and developed during the course of ages to what they now are. The other that of Karnes and Voltaire recog- nizes in even the varieties of the species impassable lines, and holds, in consequence, that the human race cannot have sprung from a single pair. And both beliefs are as incompatible with the fundamental truths of revelation as they are with one another. The Lamarckian form of error has been laid on the shelf for a time ; nor will it be very efficiently revived until some new accumulation of fact, gleaned from the yet unexplored portions of the geologic field, or the obscurer fields of natural history, and preg- nant with those analogical resemblances between the course s of creation and the progress of embryology with which nature is full, will give it new footing, by associating it with novel and interesting truth. The antagonist error is at present all alive and active in America, where it has been espoused by naturalists of high name and standing ; and it has already produced volumes of controversy. Nor is there a country in the world where, from purely politi- cal causes, there must exist a predisposition equally strong to receive as true the hypothesis of Voltaire. The exist- ence of slavery in the Southern States, and the strong dislike with which the black population are regarded by the whites throughout the country generally, must dispose the men who hate or enslave them to receive with favor whatever plausibilities go to show that they are not of one blood with themselves, and that they owe to them none of the duties of brotherhood. We have perused with in- terest and instruction a very learned and able volume on UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACES. 397 this subject by the Rev. Dr. Thomas Smyth of Charleston, one of the most accomplished Presbyterian ministers of the United States, with whose works on the " Apostolical Succession" and the " Claims of the Free Church of Scot- land " many of our readers must be already acquainted, and who, though residing in the centre of a slave district, nncl exposed to much odium on the part of the abolitionists, has been the first to come forward in this controversy to assert in behalf of the black man the " unity of the human races," and that all men have fallen in one common father, the first Adam, " created a living soul," and that there is salvation to all in one common Saviour, the " last Adam," " made a quickening Spirit." Much of the volume is taken up in dealing with the question in its older form. Vol- taire held that there were " as well-marked species of men as of apes." Karnes was more unhappy in his illustration. " If the only rule afforded by nature for classing animals can be depended upon," we find him saying, " there are different species of men as well as of dogs." Gibbon, though his remark on the subject takes the characteristic form of an ironical sneer, in which he says the contrary of what he means, deemed it more natural to hold that the various races of men originated in those tracts of the globe which they inhabit, than that they had all proceeded from a common centre and a single pair of progenitors. To the view, however, taken by these distinguished scep- tics, men eminent in the literary world, but of little weight in that of science, all the greater naturalists of the last century were opposed. Kames, in the chapter of his " Sketches " specially devoted to the question, had to combat both Linnaeus and Buffon ; and the later natural- ists who have specially concentrated themselves on the subject, such as Pritchard, Bachman, and Lawrence, have irrofragably shown that, tried by the marks which are re- garded as constituting specific differences among the lower animals, the family of man consists of but one species But the question raised in the modern form, without dia- 34 398 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. puting this conclusion, eludes it by a new statement ; and we could fain wish that Dr. Smyth had devoted a larger portion of his valuable volume to the controversy in its new phase. The fact is, while in its old form the greater naturalists were on the side of the orthodox theologian, some very distinguished naturalists take in its new form the opposite side. The difference in the statement may be summed up in a few words. It was held by Voltaire and his coadjutors that there are several species of men, who must of necessity have originated from several pairs ; whereas, what is held by Professor Agassiz and several of the American naturalists is, that though the species be properly but one, it is according to the known analogies both of plants and animals that it should have originated in various centres, a conclusion which the strongly- marked varieties of the race which occur in certain well- defined geographic areas serve, it is held, to substantiate, or at least to render the most probable. It will be seen that against this restatement of the question many of the old facts and arguments do not bear. Theologically, however, in every instance in which it assumes the positive form, and in which, building on its presumed analogies, and the extreme character and remote appearance of the several varieties of the species to which it points, it asserts that the beginnings of the race must be diverse, and its Adams and Eoes many, it is in effect the same. On the consequences of the result it can be scarce necessary to insist. The second Adam died for but the descendants of the first. Nay, so thoroughly is reve- lation pledged to the unity of the species, that if all nations be not " made of one blood," there is, in the theological sense, neither first nor second "Adam;" "Christ," accord- ing to the apostle, " hath not risen ; " conversion is an idle fiction ; and all men are yet in their sins. Further, that kind of brotherhood which unites the species by those ties of neighborhood illustrated by our Saviour is broken ; and there are races of men reckoned up by millions and UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACES. 399 tens of millions in which we may recognize our slaves and victims, but not our brothers and neighbors. Nay, why should we respect the life of creatures not of our own blood ? Bill Sykes tells Fagin the Jew, in " Oliver Twist," that he wished he was his dog; "for," said he, "the gov- ernment that cares for the lives of men like you lets a man kill a dog how he likes." But if these tribes be men not of our own blood, men who did not spring from the same source with ourselves, and for whom therefore Chris- tianity can make no provision, why the distinction ? It is only to those whom we believe to be of our own blood that the distinction extends. It is as lawful to shoot an orang-outang or a chimpanzee as a dog or a cat ; and with but mere expediency to regulate the matter, it might become quite as necessary to hunt down and destroy wild men as to hunt down and destroy wild dogs. Nay, we are not sure whether a somewhat mysterious admission to this effect may not be found in a passage quoted by Dr. Smyth from the writings of one of the American assertors of the diversity of races, Dr. Nott. " The time must come," says this latter gentleman, "when the blacks will be worse than useless to us. What then ? Emancipation must follow, which, from the lights before us, is but an- other name for extermination? But though the remark, viewed in connection with such a doctrine, seems strangely ominous, we do not profess fully to understand it. Within the limits of a newspaper article narrow for such a subject when amplest we can scarce be expected even to indicate the line which we think ought to be taken up in this controversy by the churches. To the historic evidence we find ample justice done by Dr. Smyth; and the historic evidence, so far as it goes, is, be it remembered, positive, not merely inferential. We are less sure, Low- ever, of the line specially adopted against Agassiz in the field of natural history. The analogies may be on the side of the naturalist, as he says they are, and he may be quite right in holding that varieties of the race so extreme 400 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. as that of the negro on the one side, and the blue-eyed, fair-haired, diaphanous Goth on the other, could not have originated naturally in a species possessed of a common origin during the brief period limited by authentic history on the one hand, and the first beginnings of a family so recent as that of maYi on the other. But though he may possibly be right as a naturalist, though we think that matter admits of being tried, for it is far from settled, he may be none the less wrong on that account as a the- ologian. His inferences may be right and legitimate in themselves, and yet the main deduction founded upon them be false in fact. Let us illustrate. There is nothing more certain than that the human species is of compara- tively recent origin. All geological science testifies that man is but of yesterday ; and the profound yet exquisitely simple argument of Sir Isaac Newton, as reported by Mr. Conduit, bears with singular effect on the same truth. Almost all the great discoveries and inventions, argued the philosopher, are of comparatively recent origin. Per- haps the only great invention or discovery that occurs in the fabulous ages of history is the invention of letters. All the others such as the mariner's compass, printing, gunpowder, the telescope, the discovery of the New World and Southern Africa, and of the true position and relations of the earth in the solar system lie within the province of the authentic annalist; which, man being the inquisi- tive, constructive creature that he is, would not be the case were the species of any very high antiquity. We have seen, since the death of Sir Isaac, steam, gas, and electricity introduced as new forces into the world ; the race, in consequence, has in less than a century and a half grown greatly in knowledge and in power; and by the rapid rate of the increase, we argue with the philosopher that it can by no means be very ancient. Had it been on the earth twenty, fifty, or a hundred thousand years ago, steam, as, and electricity would have been discovered hundreds of ages since, and it would at this date have no UNITY OP THE HUMAN KACES. 401 such room to grow. And the only very ancient history which has a claim to be authentic that of Moses con- firms, we find, the shrewd inference of Sir Isaac. Now, with this fact of the recent origin of the race on the one hand, and the other fact, that the many various languages of the race so differ that there are some of them which have scarce a dozen words in common, a linguist who confined himself to the consideration of natural causes would be quite justified in arguing that these languages could not possibly have changed to be what they are, from any such tongue, in the some five or six thousand years to which he finds himself restricted by history, geology, and the inference of Sir Isaac. It takes many centuries thoroughly to change a language, even in the present state of things, in which divers languages exist, and in which commerce and conquest, and the demands of litera- ture, are ever incorporating the vocables of one people with those of another. After the lapse of nearly three thousand years, the language of modern Greece is essen- tially that in which Homer wrote; and by much the larger part of the words in which we ourselves express our ideas are those which Alfred employed when he propounded his scheme of legislative assemblies and of trial by jury. And were there but one language on earth, changes in words or structure would of necessity operate incalculably more slowly. Nor would it be illogical for the linguist to argue, that if, some five or six thousand years ago, the race, then in their extreme infancy, had not a common language, they could not have originated as one family, but as sev- eral, and so his conclusion would in effect be that of the American naturalist. But who does not see that, though right as a linguist, he would be wrong as a theologian, wrong in fact ? Reasoning on but the common and the natural, he would have failed to take into account, in his calculation, one main element, the element of miracle, as manifested in the confusion of tongues at Babel ; and his ultimate finding would, in consequence, be wholly 31* 402 LITERAKT AND SCIENTIFIC. erroneous. Now, it is perhaps equally possible for the naturalist to hold that two such extreme varieties of the human family as the negro and the Goth could not have originated from common parents in the course of a few centuries ; and certainly the negro does appear in history not many centuries after the flood. He had assumed his deep black hue six hundred years before the Christian era, when Jeremiah used his well-known illustration, " Can the Ethiopian," etc. ; and the negro head and features appear among the sculptures and paintings of Egypt several cen- turies earlier. Nay, negro skulls of a very high antiquity have been found among the mummies of the same ancient kingdom. But though, with distinguished naturalists on the other side, we would not venture authoritatively to determine that a variety so extreme could have originated in the ordinary course of nature in so brief a period, just as we would hesitate to determine that a new language could originate naturally in other than a very extended term, we would found little indeed upon such a circum- stance, in the face of a general tradition that the negroid form and physiognomy were marks set upon an offending family, and were scarce less the results of miracle than the confusion of tongues. We are far from sure, however, that it is necessary to have recourse to miracle. The Goth is widely removed from the negro ; but there are interme- diate types of man that stand in such a midway relation to both, that each variety, taking these as the central type, is divested of half its extremeness. Did such of our Ed- inburgh readers as visited the Exhibition of this season mark with what scholar-like exactness and artistic beauty the late Sir William Allan restored, in his last great pic- ture (" The Cup found in Benjamin's Sack "), the original Egyptian form, as exhibited in the messengers of Joseph ? Had the first men, Adam and Noah, been of that mingled negroid and Caucasian type, and who shall say that they were not? neither the Goth nor the negro would UNITY OF THE HUMAN RACES. 403 be so extreme a variety of the species as to be beyond the power of natural causes to produce. - We had purposed referring at some length to that por- tion of the argument which is made to rest on analogy. We have, however, more than exhausted our space, and merely remark that it is not at all a settled point that the analogies are in favor of creation in i plurality of centres. Linnaeus and his followers in the past, and men such as Edward Forbes in the present, assert exactly the contrary ; and, though the question is doubtless an obscure and dif- ficult one, so much so that he who takes up either side, and incurs the onus probandi of what he asserts, will find he has but a doubtful case, the doubt and obscurity lie quite as much on the one side as the other. Even, how- ever, were the analogies with regard to vegetables and the lower animals in favor of creation in various centres, it would utterly fail to affect the argument. Though the dormouse and the Scotch fir had been created in fifty places at once, the fact would not yield us the slightest foundation for inferring that man had originated in more than a single centre. Ultimately, controversies of this character will not fail to be productive of good. They will leave the truth more firmly established, because more thoroughly tried, and the churches more learned. Nay, should such a controversy as the present at length con- vince the churches that those physical and natural sciences which, during the present century, have been changing the very face of the world and the entire region of human thought, must be sedulously studied by them, and that they can no more remain ignorant without sin than a shepherd can remain unharmed in a country infested by beasts of prey without breach of trust, it will be produc- tive of much greater good than harm. 404 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. VI. NORWAY AND ITS GLACIERS. 1 There is a striking resemblance in form and aspect be- tween the Scandinavian races of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, and the people of the northeastern coasts of Scotland. The resemblance, however, is not restricted to the races, it extends also to the countries which they inhabit. The general features of Denmark and Sweden are very much those of the southern districts of our own country, mayhap rather tamer on the whole, from a less ample development of the trap-rocks. And in Norway we have, if we except a small portion of its southern ex- tremity, simply a huge repitition of the Western High- lands of Scotland ; it is a Highlands roughened by greater hills, and intersected by deeper and more extensive lochs, and prolonged far beyond the Arctic circle. In, however, their physical conditions, both Norway and the Highlands are wonderfully alike ; but with this interesting difference, that some of the great agents which modified, in the re- mote past, the form of the rougher portions of our coun- try, and regarding which we can only speculate and theorize, are still in active operation in Norway. The loftier Norwegian mountains rise to nearly twice the height of Ben Macdhui and Ben Nevis ; the country, too, sti-etches about twelve degrees further to the north than Cape Wrath, and runs more than three hundred miles within the Arctic circle. And so it has its permanent i Norway and its Glaciers visited in 1851, etc. By James D. Forbes, P.C.L., F.K.S., Sec. R S., Ed., etc. etc., and Professor of Natural Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh. NORWAY AND ITS GLACIERS. 405 sncw-fields and its great glaciers, that are in the present day casting up their moraines, lateral and transverse, and grooving and rounding the rocks beneath, just as our own country had them in some remote and dateless age, ere, mayhap, the introduction of man upon our planet. There are other respects in which it is representative rather of the past than of the present of Scotland. It still retains its original forests, and presents, over wide areas, an ap- pearance similar to that which was presented by the more mountainous parts of our own country ere the formation of our great peat-mosses. The range of the Grampians, when first seen by Agricola, must have very much resem- bled in its woody covering the southern Highlands of Norway at the present day. Professor Forbes, on nearing the Norwegian coast, was struck, on first catching sight of the land, by the striking resemblance which it bore to some of the gneiss tracts of the mainland of Scotland and the Hebrides. The gneiss islands of Tyree and Coll first occurred to his mind ; and " doubtless," he says, " the same causes have produced this similarity of character, acting in like circumstances. Both belong to that great gneiss formation so prevalent in Norway, and also in Scotland, with which few rocks can compare in their resistance to atmospheric action and mechanical force. In both cases they have been subjected forages to the action of the most tremendous seas which wash any part of Europe ; and they have probably been abraded by mechanical forces of another kind, which have given the rounded outlines to even their higher hills." As, however, the Professor ap- proached the shore, he became sensible of a grand distinc- tion between the mountain scenery of Norway and the Scotch Hebrides. It was the Scotland of eighteen hun- dred years ago on which he was looking. " On closer observation," he says, " I pei'ceived that the low, rounded, and rocky hills which I had at first believed to be bare were almost everywhere covered, or at least dotted over, with woods of pine, which, descending almost to the shore, 405 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. gave a peculiarity of character to the scenery, at the same time, that it afforded a scale by which to estimate its mag- nitude." The low hills which had at first rather disap- pointed him were now, he found, a full thousand feet in height. There are several respects in which Norway may be re- garded as a country still in its green youth. These prime- val forests are of themselves demonstrative of the fact. Humboldt well remarks, that " an early civilization of the human race sets bounds to the increase of forests;" for " nations," he says, " in their change-loving spirit, gradu- ally destroy the decorations which rejoice our eye in the north, and which, more than the records of history, attest the youthfulness of our civilization." There are other evi- dences that at least the northern portions of both Norway and Sweden were unappropriated by man during the earlier ages of British and Continental history. It is a curious fact, adverted to by Mr. Robert Chambers in his " Tracings of the North of Europe," that in the great Museum of Antiquities at Copenhagen, the relics of the stone period have been furnished by only Denmark and the southern provinces of Sweden and Norway. They are not to be found in the far provinces of the north ; and the only district beyond the Baltic in which they occur in the ordinary proportions of the south and middle portions of Europe, is the low-lying, comparatively temperate prov- ince of Scania. It is doubtless an advantage, in some respects, at least for a wild and mountainous country to be still in its youth. Large tracts of the more ancient Scottish Highlands lie sunk in the hopeless sterility of old age. In many of their so-called forests, that are forests without a living tree, such as the Moin in Sutherland- shire, or that tract of desert waste which spreads out around Kingshouse in Argyleshire, the traveller sees, in the sections opened by the winter torrents, two periods of death represented, with a comparatively brief period of life intervening between. There is first, reckoning from NORWAY AND ITS GLACIERS. 407 the rock upward, a stratum of gray angular gravel, formed of the barren primary rocks, and identical with the angu- lar gravels still in the course of forming under the attrition of the glaciers of Norway and the Alps. And it speaks of the ice-period of death, when the country had its per- manent snow-fields and its great glaciers. Next in order immediately over the dead gravel, there occurs usually a thin stratum of mossy soil, bearing its tier of buried stumps the representatives of an age of vegetable life when the Highlands were what Norway is now, a scene of wide- spreading forests. And then over all, to the depth often of six or eight feet, we find, as representative of a second and permanent period of death, a cold, spongy, ungenial peat-moss, in which nothing of value to man finds root, save, perhaps, a few scattered spikes of deer-grass, that, springing early, furnish the flocks of the shepherd with a week or two's provision, just as the summer begins. But for every agricultural purpose these mossy wastes are in their effete and sterile old age, and the yearly famines show how the poor settlers upon them fai*e. Man failed to appropriate them during their cheerful season of youth and life ; and over wide tracts they are dead past resuscitation now. In Norway, with all its bleakness, the chances in favor of the people are better. The Norwegians have escaped the curse of clanship ; and the country, still in the vigor of youth, is parcelled out among many proprietors, who till the lands which they inherit. Even in its wild animals, Norway is a larger Scotland, post-dated some ten or fifteen centuries. It has the identical beaver, bear, and wolf still living in its forests, whose remains are occasionally found in our mosses and marl-pits. In another respect, however, Norway resembles our country at a greatly earlier time than that of the primeval forests. Its long line of western coast, with its many islands and long-withdrawing fiords, presents everywhere the appearance of a land not yet fairly arisen out of the sea. The islands are simply the tops of great mountains, 408 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. that at once sink sheer into deep water ; and the fiords, great glens, like Glen Nevis and Glencoe, that have not yet raised themselves out of the sea. One may voyage for many miles along this bold coast without finding a bit of shore on which to land ; and such must have been very much the appearance of our Western Highlands in the old ice-ages, when the sea stood from five hundred to a thou- sand feet higher along our steep hillsides than it does now, or rather the land sat from five hundred to a thousand feet lower. Both Professor Forbes and Mr. Chambers refer to the great freshness of the raised terraces which stretch at various heights along the coast, as if to show where the surf had beat during prolonged intervals in the course of upheaval ; and the latter gentleman seems to have been particularly struck by the freshness of the sea-shells that occur at great heights, and by their identity with those which now live in the neighboi'ing seas. Professor Keilhau showed Mr. Chambers serpulze on a rock-face, scarce a mile from the busy city of Christiania, still firmly adhering to the spot on which the creatures that inhabited them had lived and died. And yet that rock is now one hun- dred and eighty-six feet over the level of the sea. The great abundance and freshness of the shells found on some of the raised beaches of the country is of itself an object of wonder. " TJdd walla," says Mr. Chambers, in his " Trac- ings," "is a name of no small interest in science, because of a great bed of ancient shells found near it. The effect was novel and startling, when, on the hill-face o'erlooking the fiord, and at the height of two hundred feet above its waters, I found something like a group of gravel-pits, but containing, instead of gravel, nothing but shells! It is a nook among the hills, with a surface which had originally been flat in the line of the fiord, though sloping forward toward it. We can see that the whole space is filled to a great depth with the exuviae of marine molluscs, cockles, mussels, whelks, etc., all of them species existing at this time in the Baltic, with only a thin covering of vegetable NORWAY AND ITS GLACIERS. 409 mould on the surface. I feel sure that some of these ex- cavations are twenty feet deep; yet that is not the whole thickness of the shell-bed." In the fact of the identity of these shells with those that still live in the neighboring sea, we have an evidence of the comparative recentness of the upheaval of the land. In our own country, it is only those shells that lie embedded in the terrace which underlies the old coast-line that are identical, in at least the gro&p, with the existing ones of the littoral and lamiu- arian zones beyond. The higher-lying shells, not yet ex- tinct, which occur in Britain at various heights, from fifty to fourteen hundred feet over the present sea-line, are, as a group, sub-arctic, and belong to the ice-age. In one important circumstance, however, Norway and our own country must have had an exactly similar history. In both, the climate has been greatly more mild since at least the historic ages began than it was in an earlier time. When Scotland had its glaciers and snow wastes, Norway seems to have been enveloped in ice ; whereas its climate is now one of the finest in the world for the same lines of latitude. That great gulf-stream which casts so liberally on the northern shores of Europe the tepid water of the tropics, is no doubt one of the main causes of this superi- ority in the climate of both Norway and our own country over all other countries in the same parallels. "It has been calculated," says Professor Forbes, "that the heat thrown into the Atlantic Ocean by the gulf-stream in a winter's day would suffice to raise the temperature of the part of the atmosphere which rests upon France and Great Britain from the freezing point to summer heat." And such are the effects on the distant coast of Norway, that, under the Arctic circle, or at least the sea-coast, the mercury rarely sinks beneath zero. The absence of the great gulf- stream would of course leave both countries to the climatal conditions proper to their position ; it would insure to Scotland the severe and wintry climate of Labrador, and to Norway the still severer climate of northern Greenland. 35 410 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. Nor, as has been shown of late by Professor Hopkins, would it require a very considerable depression of the cen- tral parts of^North America to rob northern Europe of the signal advantages of the gulf-stream. A greatly less considerable sinking of what is now the vast valley of the Mississippi, and of the lake district beyond, than that of which we have the evidence in our own country, would divert its waters into Hudson's Bay and the arctic seas be- yond ; and both Great Bi-itain and Norway would be left to the severe cliraatal conditions of their latitudinal position on the globe. Nor is it in the least improbable that such, during the glacial ages, was the actual state of things. North America, as certainly as our own country, gives evidence of extensive submergence during the period of the existing plants and shells. We must add, that Professor Forbes's volume is remark- ably well written, and not less rich in the picturesque and the poetic than in the severely scientific. There has been a mighty improvement in this respect in what may be termed the pure literature of science during the last cen- tury ; and at the present time some of the severest thinkers of the age take their place also among its best writers. Humboldt, the late Arago, Sir David Brewster, and Sir John Herschel, far excel, in the purely artistic department of authorship, most of our mere litterateurs. We have exhausted our space ; but, referring our reader to Professor Forbes's interesting volume for his more scientific facts and observations, we must be permitted to show by the follow- ing extract how graphically he describes : " We are at the head of the Naraedal, one of those singular clefts common in Norway, bounded on either side by cliffs usually perpen- dicular, to a height of perhaps fifteen hundred or even two thousand feet ; the bottom flat and alluvial, and terminating abruptly at the head of a steep but not precipitous slope. Down the slope the road is conducted by a series of zigzags, or rather coils, in a masterly manner, through a vertical height of eight hundred feet, a very striking waterfall rushing down on either hand, and rendering the NORWAY AND ITS GLACIERS. 411 view in the opposite direction wonderfully grand. It is generally agreed that no more genuine specimen exists of Norwegian scenery than the Naraedal. From the foot of the descent to Gudvangen, on the banks of the Narae-fiord, the road is nearly level, the whole descent on several miles being little more than three hundred feet. The mountains, however, preserve all their absolute elevation on either side, so that the ravine, though not quite so narrow, is deeper. The masses of rock on the right rise to five thousand or six thousand feet, and a thread of water forming the Keel-foss de- scends a precipice estimated at two thousand feet. The arrival at Gudvangen takes one by surprise. The walls of the ravine are un- interrupted ; only the alluvial flat gives place to the unruffled and nearly fresh waters of this arm of the sea, which reaches the door of the inn. After dining, and procuring a boat and three excellent rowers, we proceeded to the navigation of the extensive Sogne-fiord, of which the Narae-fiord, on which we now were, is one of the many intricate ramifications. The weather, which had fortunately cleared up for a time, was now again menacing, and a slight rain had set in when we embarked. The clouds continued to descend, and settled at length on the summits of the unscalable precipice which for many miles bound this most desolate and even terrific scene. I do not know what accidental circumstances may have contributed to the impression, but I have seldom felt the sense of solitude and isola- tion so overwhelming. My companion had fallen into a deep sleep ; the air was still damp and calm ; the oars plashed with a slow mea- sure into the deep, blank, fathomless abyss of water below, which was bounded on either side by absolute walls of rock, without, in general, the smallest slope of debris at the foot, or space enough anywhere for a goat to stand, and whose tops, high as they indeed are, seemed higher by being lost in clouds, which formed, as it were, a level roof over us, corresponding to the watery floor beneath. Thus shut in above, below, and on either hand, we rowed on amidst the increasing gloom and thickening rain, till it was a relief when we entered on the wider though still gloomy Aurlands- fiord." 412 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. VII. THE AMENITIES OF LITERATURE. The love of literature amounts, with those who enter- tain it most strongly, to an engrossing passion ; and there are few men of cultivated minds, however much engaged with other pursuits, who do not derive from it a sensible pleasure. Even when politics ran highest, and first-class periodicals, such as the " Edinburgh Review " and the " Quarterly," were toiling in the front of their respective parties, none but the most zealous partisans could deem their literary articles second in interest to their political ones ; and to the great bulk of their readers, however sin- cere as Whigs or hearty as Tories, the literary ones always took the first place. They were read with avidity imme- diately on the delivery of the numbers which contained them, while the more serious disquisitions had to wait. Literature, in fine, was the sweetened pabulum in which the political principle of these works was conveyed to the public ; and had the pabulum been less palatable in itself, or less generally suited to the public taste, the medicine would have failed to take. It has the advantage, too, of being so general a pebulum, that men of all parties and professions, if of equal acquirement and cultivation, take an equal interest in it. It is the most catholic of predilec- tions, and neutralizes, more than any othr, the bias of caste, church, and party. The Protestant, forgets, in hit admiration of their writings, that Pope ard Dryden wen Papists ; the High Churchman luxuriates over Milton ; ola Samuel Johnson is admired by the Liberal and the Scot; and the Tory forgets that Addison wa* a Whig. In this, as in other respects, a love of literature is one of the hu- THE AMENITIES OF LITERATURE. 413 H&niiifcjr principles, and in ages of controversy and con- tention lte tendencies are towards union. It gives to men who differ in otner matters a common ground on which they can meet and agree, and has led to many friendships and acts of foroearance and good-will between men who, had they been devoid of it, would have been bitter antag- onists and personal enemies. There have been mutual respect and admiration from this cause between partisans on the opposite sides of very important questions. Swift and Addison still called each other friend, at a time when the point at issue between their respective septs was vir- tually the Protestant Succession ; and Scott and Jeffrey were on fair terms when Whigs and Tories were engaged in a death-grapple, with the Reform Bill looming in the distance. Doubtless one of the causes of the often-re- marked circumstance that while fifth and sixth rate parti- sans are almost always bitter in the feelings with which they regard their opponeuts, and ungenerous towards them in their resentments, the leaders of parties are compara- tively tolerant and humane, may be traced in part to a community of tastes and sentiments in this important de- partment, and in part to that superior tone of thought and feeling which it is one of the great functions of literature to foster and develop. Many of our readers must have had opportunity of remarking how pleasant it is, after one has been shut up for months, mayhap, in some country sol- itude, or engaged in some over-busy scene, without intelli- gent companionship, to meet with an accomplished, well- read man, with whom to beat over all the literary topics, and settle the merits of the various schools and authors. It is not less pleasant to turn to one's books after some period of close-engrossing engagement, and to clear off, among the masters of thought and language, all trace of the homely cares and narrow thinking which the season of hard labor had imperatively demanded. And it is so with peoples as certainly as with individuals. During the war so happily terminated, the nation was too busy and too 35* 414 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. much engrossed to listen patiently to disquisitions, how- ever ingenious, on literature and the belleslettres. Leaders and articles on the state of the army and the prospect of the campaign, or the narratives and descriptions of "cor- respondents " in the Crimea, formed the staple reading of the time; and some of our most respectable booksellers could tell very feelingly, on data furnished by their bal- ance-sheets, how little, in comparison, was the interest that attended reading of any other kind. The roar of war drowned the voice of the muses. Now, however, the country has got a breathing time ; its period of all-engross- ing occupation is over for the present ; and works of gen- eral literature will once more form the staple reading of its more cultivated intellects. Good books will begin to sell better, when, at least, the publishing season commences, than they have done for the last two years ; and by their measure of success they will certify respecting the tastes and leisure-hour occupations of that great and influential portion of the people which constitutes the reading public. And we recognize in a work now before us "Essays, Biographical and Critical, chiefly on English Poets," by Professor David Masson, 1 which has just issued from the Cambridge press one of the class of books which, in the circumstances of the time, this portion of the public will delight to read, and be the better and happier for reading. Professor Masson is a high representative of a class of literary men peculiar to the age, men who a century ago would have stood pi'ominently forward in the ranks of authorship as the writers of elaborate volumes, but who, in the altered circumstances of a more hurried age than any of those which preceded it, are engaged mainly in provid- ing the reading public with its daily bread, and, for the sake of present influence and usefulness, are content in some degree, so far as they themselves are concerned, to subordinate the future to the passing time. Almost all the i Essays, Biographical and Critical, chiefly on English Poets. By David Masson, A.M.., Professor of English Literature in University College, London. THE AMENITIES OP LITERATURE. 415 writing produced in our first-class newspapers, however distinguished for ability or influential in directing opinion, passes away with the day, or at least with the week, in which it has been produced. Like those ephemeridae which, born in the morning, deposit their eggs and die before night, it makes its nidus in the public mind, and then drops and disappears. Contributions, however, to the higher quarterlies and first-class magazines have a better chance of life; and we have already a class of works drawn from these sources which bid as fair to live as almost any of the more elaborate authorship of the age. Such are the collected critiques of Jeffrey and Sydney Smith, the phi- losophic papers of Macintosh, the brilliant essays of Ma- caulay, and the soberer contributions of Henry Rogers. And to this class the Essays of Professor Masson belong ; nor are they unworthy of being ranked among the very foremost of their class. There are essays in this volume which, for the minute knowledge of English literature which they display, and their nice appreciation of the dis- tinctive and characteristic in our higher writers, we would place side by side with the chef cPoeuvres of Jeffrey. Though consisting chiefly of contributions to the quarter- lies, written at various times, and published in different periodicals, the pieces which compose the work have been so arranged that they form, with but few gaps, which are more than compensated for by at least as many happy epi- sodes, a history of English literature from the early days of Milton down to those of Wordsworth. Nor are there backward glances wanting, which bring before the reader the primeval English literature of the times of Chaucer and Spencer. There are just two blanks in the work, which we could wish to see filled in some future edition, a blank representative of that period which intervened between the times of Swift and of Chatterton, during which old Samuel Johnson gave law to the world of letters, and was well-nigh all that Dryden had been for the decade that preceded and the decade which succeeded the Revo- 416 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. lution ; and a second, though lesser blank, representative of the times during which Burns and Cowper flourished, and in which the school of Pope gave place to a more national, natural, and less elaborate school. Among what may be termed the episodes of the work, we would spe- cially instance a dissertation on what we may term the boundary limits of prose and poetry, which we deem by far the ablest and most satisfactory which we have yet seen on the subject. Much has been written on what may be termed the conterminous limits of the two provinces ; and the suits have been many that have originated in an erroneous drawing of the line. As in the famous case be- tween Dandy Dinmont and Jack Dawson of the Cleugh, one party affirms that " the march rins on the tap o' the hill, where the wind and water sheers;" while another "contravenes that, and says that it hands down by the auld drove road ; and that makes an unco difference ; " some critics so draw the line, that, like Bowles in his con- troversy with Campbell, they almost wholly exclude poets such as Pope and Dryden from their own proper domains ; while others affirm that there exists no line between the two domains at all, but that whatever in thought or feeling finds expression in verse, may with equal propriety be ex- pressed in prose. Byron's terse couplet on Wordsworth, whom it describes as a writer " Who, both by precept and example, shows That prose is verse, and verse is only prose," has, though in a somewhat exaggerated form, made this special view better known than even the men who assert it. Certainly there are broad grounds common to both prose and verse ; and such is the groundwork of truth in Byron's satirical couplet, though in a widely different sense from that which the satirist himself intended, that there is not much in even the highest flights of the poetry of Words- worth to which prose might not attain. We know not, for instance, a single passage in his greatest poem, "The Ex- THE AMENITIES OP LITERATUBE. 417 cursion," that might not find adequate expression, not only in the magnificent prose of Milton, or Raleigh, or Jeremy Taylor, but, so far at least as the necessary expression is required, in even that of Dryden or of Cowley. The same may be said of the poetry of Scott. The flights in "Mar- mion " or the " Lady of the Lake " rise no higher than those in Waverley or Ivanhoe. And yet, as Professor Masson well shows, there certainly is verse under whose burden the highest prose would utterly sink. We have remarked, in travelling through the Highlands of Scotland, that almost all the first-class hills of the country take the char- acter of hills of the average size, with other hills placed, as if by accident, on the top of them ; and there is a very lofty poetry that attains to its greatest elevation on a sim- ilar principle. The imagination, in the plenitude of its power, is ever piling, like the giants of old, mountain on the top of mountain. Let us draw our illustration from Milton. After comparing the arch-fiend, as he " lay float- ing many a rood " on the burning lake, to the old Titanian monster that warred on Jupiter, the poet rushes into an- other and richer comparison : he compares him to " That sea-beast Leviathan, which God of all his works Created hugest that swim the ocean stream." And here, on the ground common to prose and verse, the comparison should stop. But the imagination of the great poet has been aroused ; the glimpse of the huge sea- beast so fascinates him that he must look again; and a picture is the consequence, invested with circumstances of poetic interest, and finished with a degree of elaboration far beyond the necessities of the comparison : " Him haply slumbering on the Norway foam, The pilot of some small night-foundered skiff Deeming some island, oft, as seamen tell. With fixed anchor in his scaly rind, Moors by his side, under the lee, while nigur Invests the sea, and wished morn delays." 418 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. What a pile. of imagery! Mountain cast on the top of mountain, a feat for the greatest of the giants, and far beyond the reach of the most poetic prose-man, or the capabilities of prose itself. Our other example, though of a more homely character, will be found scarce less illustra- tive of this piled-up style, peculiar to the higher poesy. Burns, in his decidedly anti-teetotal "Earnest Cry and Prayer," after adverting to the deteriorating effects of the wines of southern Europe on the nerves and framework of the Continental soldiery, describes a Scottish soldier an- imated for the contest by the inspiration of usquebagh: " But bring a Scotsman frae his hill, Clap in his cheek a Highland gill, Say, Such is royal George's will, An' there's the foe : He has nae thought but how to kill Twa at a blow." Now, here is a vigorous stanza, terse, clear, epigram- matic, and charged with thought equally fitted to do service either as prose or verse. But the poet catches a glance of the Highland soldier, the poetic blood gets up, and it be- comes impossible, for the time, to arrest in his career either soldier or poet : " Nae cauld faint-hearted doubtings tease him ; Death comes; wi' fearless eye he sees him; Wi' bloody ban' a welcome gi'es him ; An' when he fa's, His latest draught o' breathin' lea's him In faint huzzas." Here, again, we find the hill piled on the top of the hill after a different manner, but as decidedly as in Milton, and alike beyond the necessities or the reach of prose. This peculiar region of poetry seems to have formed a sort of inextricable wilderness to the more prosaic class of crit- ics. Lord Karnes, though a coarse, was an eminently sen- sible man ; and his " Elements of Criticism " is a work that THE AMENITIES OF LITERATURE. 419 contains many striking things. What, however, the French critic termed " comparisons with a tail," seem fairly to have puzzled him. He could no more understand why similes should have caudal appendages, than his brother Judge, Lord Monboddo, could understand why men should want them. And so he instances as a mere " phantom simile, that ought to have no quarter given it," the very exquisite one which Coriolanus employs in describing Va- leria, " The noble sister of Pophlicola, The moon of Rome; chaste as the icicle That's curdled by the frost from purest snow, And hangs on Dian's temple." The shrewd magistrate, who, to employ the delicate periphrase of Hector in the " Antiquary," used to address his learned compeers on the bench by the name ordinarily used to designate " a female dog," could not understand why the temple of Dian should be introduced into this comparison, or what right the icicle had in it at all ; and so he ruled that it was palpably illegal for Shakspeare to write what he, a judge and a critic, could not intelli- gently read. The conclusion of Professor Masson on the respective provinces of poesy and prose is worthy of being carefully pondered by the reader : " In the whole vast field of the speculative and the didactic," says the Professor, "a field in which the soul of man may win triumphs nowise inferior, let illiterate poetasters babble as they will, to those pf the mightiest sons of song, prose is the legitimate monarch, receiving verse but as a visitor and guest, who will carry back bits of rich ore, and other specimens of the land's produce ; in the great business of record also, prose is preeminent, verse but volun- tarily assisting ; in the expression of passion, and the work of moral stimulation, verse and prose meet as coequals, prose under- taking the rougher and harder duty, where passion intermingles with the storm of current doctrine, and with the play and conflict of social interests, sometimes, when thus engaged, bursting into such strains of irregular music that verse takes up the echo and prolongs 420 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. it in measured modulation, leaving prose rapt and listening to hear itself outdone ; and, lastly, in the noble realm of poetry or imagination, prose also is capable of a 1 exquisite, beautiful, and magnificent etfects, but that by reason of a greater ease with fancies when they come in crowds, and of a greater range and arbitrariness of combination, verse here moves with the more royal gait. And thus prose and verse are presented as two circles or spheres, not en- tirely separate, as some would make them, but intersecting and inU) pene- trating through a large portion of both their bulks, and disconnected only in two crescents outstanding at the right and left, or, if you adjust them differently, at the upper and lower extremities. The left or lower crescent, the peculiar and sole region of prose, is where we labor amid the sheer didactic, or the didactic combined with the practical and the stern. The right or upper crescent, the peculiar and sole region of verse, is where pathesis, at its utmost thrill and ecstasy, interblends with the highest and most darting poiesis." This is vigorous thinking and writing; and the Profes- sor's volume contains many such passages. We would in especial instance the Essays on the " Literature of the Restoration," on " Wordsworth," and on " Scottish Influ- ence on British Literature." But the longest and finest composition of the work a gem in literary biography is its "Chatterton, a Story of the Year 1770." There is perhaps no name in British poetry, of the same frequency of occurrence, that is so purely a name, as that of " The marvellous boy, The sleepless soul that perished in his pride." Such of his poems as were written in modern English, and in his own proper name and character, are not pleasing, and, sooth to say, not more than clever; while his poems written in the character of Rowley are locked up in what is virtually a dead tongue, considerably different from that of Chaucer or the " King's Quair," or, in short, from any other tongue ever written by any other poet. And as there is but little temptation to master a language, and that, too, a language which never was spoken, for th i a sake of a few THE AMENITIES OF LITERATURE. 421 poems, however meritorious, most men are content to take the fame of the Rowley writings on trust, or at least to determine by brief specimens that they are in reality the wonderful compositions which the critics of the last age pronounced them to be. And so Chatterton is now very much a bright name associated with a dark story. Further, of the story, little more survived in the public mind than would have furnished materials for an ordinary newspaper paragraph. Chatterton had not been very fortunate in his biographers; and it was but known, in consequence, that, living in an age not unfamiliar with literary forgery, it is unnecessary to give instances within sight of the great Highland mountains, he had fabricated a volume of old English poems greatly superior to any old English poems ever written, with the single exception of those of Chau- cer; that, quitting his native place, where he had succeeded in earning not more than the modicum of honor which prophets ordinarily achieve for themselves when at home, he had gone to force his upward way among the wits of London ; and that there, in utter destitution and neglect, he had miserably destroyed himself. Such was all that was generally known of Chatterton, even by men of read- ing. Professor Masson's singularly interesting and power- ful biography fills up this sad outline as it was never filled up before; and shows how deep a tragedy that of the poor boy was, who, after achieving immortality, "perished in his pride," at about the age when lads who purpose pur- suing the more laborious mechanical professions are pre- paring to enter on their apprenticeships. Further, without aught approaching to formal apology for the offences and shortcomings of the hapless lad, it shows us what a mere boy he was, in all except genius, at the time of his death. Sir Walter, in referring, in his "Demonology," to the young rascals on whose extraordinary evidence so many old women were burnt as witches in Sweden, has some very striking, and, we think, very just remarks, on the obtuse- ness of the moral sense in most children, especially boys 36 422 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. " The melancholy truth, that the ' human heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked,' is by nothing proved so strongly," we find him saying, " as by the imper- fect sense displayed by children of the sanctity of moral truth. Both gentlemen and the mass of the people, as they advance in years, learn to despise and avoid falsehood, the former out of pride, and from a remaining feeling, derived from the days of chivalry, that the character of a liar is a deadly stain on their honor ; the other, from some general reflection upon the necessity of presei-ving a char- acter for integrity in the course of life, and a sense of the truth of the common adage that ' honesty is the best policy.' But these are acquired habits of thinking. The child has no natural love of truth, as is experienced by all who have the least acquaintance with early youth. If they are charged with a fault while they can hardly speak, the first words they stammer forth are a falsehood to excuse it. Nor is this all. The temptation of attracting attention, the pleasure of enjoying importance, the desire to escape from an unpleasing task, or accomplish a holiday, will at any time overcome the sentiment of truth, -so weak is it within them." A sad picture, but, we fear, a true one ; and in reading the tragic story of Chatterton, we were oftener than once reminded of it. We see in almost every stage of his progress the unripe boy, pre- cocious in intellect, and in that only. But with the follow ing powerful passage, taken from the closing scene in the sad drama, we must conclude, meanwhile recommending Professor Masson's work to our readers as one of singular interest and ability : " He called on me,' is Mr. Cross's statement, ' about half-past eleven in the morning. As usual, he talked about various matters ; and at last, probably just as he was going away, he said he wanted some ar- senic for an experiment.' Mr. Cross, Mr. Cross, before you go to your drawer for the arsenic, look at that boy's face I Look at it steadily ; look till he quails ; and then leap upon him and hold him ! Mr. Cross does not look. He sells the arsenic (yes, sells, for somehow THE AMENITIES OF LITERATURE. 423 during that walk, in which he has disposed of the bundle [of manu- scripts], he has procured the necessary pence), and lives to repent it. Chatterton, the arsenic in his pocket, does not return to his lodging immediately, but walks about, God only knows where, through the vast town. ' He returned,' continued Mrs. Angell, ' about seven in the evening, looking very pale and dejected, and would not eat any- thing, but sat moping by the fire with his chin on his knees, and muttering rhymes in some old language to her. After some hours he got up to go to bed, and he then kissed her, a thing he had never done before.' Mrs. Angell, what can that kiss mean ? Detain the boy ; he is mad ; he is not fit to be left alone ; arouse the whole street rather than let him go. She does let him go, and lives to repent it. ' He went up stairs,' she says, stamping on every t tair as he went slowly up, as if he would break it.' She hears him reach his room. He enters, and locks the door behind him. " The devil was abroad that night in the sleeping city. Down narrow and squalid courts his presence was felt, where savage men clutched miserable women by the throat, and the neighborhood was roused by yells of murder, and the barking of dogs, and the shrieks of children. Up in wretched garrets his presence was felt, where solitary mothers gazed on their infants, and longed to kill them. He was in the niches of dark bridges, where outcasts lay huddled together, and some of them stood up from time to time, and looked over at the dim stream below. He was in the uneasy hearts of un- liscovered forgers, and of ruined men plotting mischief. He was in prison cells, where condemned criminals condoled with each other in obscene songs and blasphemy. What he achieved that night in and about the vast city came duly out into light and history. But of all the spots over which the Black Shadow hung, the chief, for that night at least, was a certain undistinguished house in the narrow street, which thousands who now dwell in London pass and repass, scarce observing it, every day of their lives, as they go and come along the thoroughfare of Holborn. At the door of one house in that quiet street the Horrid Shape watched ; through that door he passed in, towards midnight; and from that door, having done his work, he emerged before it was morning. " On the morrow, Saturday the 25th August, Mrs. Angell noticed that her lodger did not come down at the time expected. As he had lain longer than usual, however, on the day before, she was not alarmed. But about eleven o'clock, her husband being then out, and Mrs. Wolfe having come in, she began to fear that something 424 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. might be the matter ; and she and Mrs. Wolfe went up stairs and knock 2d at the door. They listened awhile, but there was no answer. They then tried to open the door, but found it locked. Being then thoroughly alarmed, one of them ran down stairs, and called a man who chanced to be passing in the street to come and break the door open. The man did so ; and on entering they found the floor lit- tered with small pieces of paper, and Chatterton lying on the bed, with his legs hanging over, quite dead. The bed had not been lain in. The man took up some of the pieces of paper ; and on one of them he read, in the deceased's own handwriting, the words, ' I leave my soul to its Maker, my body to my mother and sisters, and my curse to Bristol. If Mr. Ca ' : the rest was torn off. ' The man then said,' relates Mrs. Angell, ' that he must have killed him- self; which we did not think till then. Mrs. Wolfe ran immediately for Mr. Cross, who came, and was the first to point out a bottle on the window containing arsenic and water. Some of the bits of ar- senic were between his teeth, so that there was no doubt that he had poisoned himself.' " A STRANGE STORY, BUT TRUE. 425 VIII. A STEANGE STOUT, BUT TRUE. 1 It is now nearly forty years since an operative mason, somewhat dissipated in his habits, and a little boy, his son, who had completed his twelfth year only a few weeks pre- vious, were engaged in repairing a tall, ancient domicile, in one of the humbler streets of Plymouth. The mason was employed in re-laying some of the roofing ; the little boy, who acted as his laborer, was busied in carrying up slates and lime along a long ladder. The afternoon was slowly wearing through, and the sun hastening to its set- ting; in little more than half an hour, both father and son would have been set free from their labors for the eve- ning, when the boy, in what promised to be one of his concluding journeys roofwards for the day, missed footing just as he was stepping on the eaves, and was precipitated on a stone pavement thirty-five feet below. Light and slim, he fared better than an adult would have done in the circumstances ; but he was deprived of all sense and rec- ollection by the fearful shock ; and, save that he saw for a moment the gathering crowd, and found himself carried homewards in the arms of his father, a fortnight elapsed ere he awoke to consciousness. When he came to himself, in his father's house, it was his first impression that he had outslept his proper time for rising. It was broad daylight ; and there were familiar forms round his bed. He next, * Memoirs of Dr. John Kitto, D.D., F.S.A., Editor of the " Pictorial Bible " and the " Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature," Author of" Daily Bible Il'ustra- tions," etc. Compiled chiefly from his Letters and Journals. By J. E. ltyland, M.A. With a Critical Estimate of Dr. Kitto's Life and Writings- B/ Professor Eadie, D.D., LL.D., Glasgow. 36* 426 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. however, found himself grown so weak that he could scarce move his head on the pillow ; and was theu struck by the profound silence that prevailed around him, a silence which seemed all the more extraordinary from the circumstance that he could see the lips of his friends in motion, and ascertain from their gestures that they were addressing him. But the riddle was soon read. The boy, in his terrible fall, had broken no bone, nor had any of the vital organs received serious injury; but his sense of hear- ing was gone forever ; and for the remainder of the half- century which was to be his allotted term on earth he was never to hear more. Knowledge at one entrance was shut out forever. As is common, too, in such circum- stances, the organs of speech become affected. His voice assumed a hollow, sepulchral tone, and his enunciation be- came less and less distinct, until at length he could scarce be understood by even his most familiar friends. For al- most all practical purposes he became dumb as well as deaf. Unable, too, any longer to assist in the labors of his dis- sipated father, he had a sore struggle for existence, which terminated in his admission into the poor-house of the place as a pauper. And in the workhouse he was set to make list-shoes, under the superintendence of the beadle. He was a well-conditioned, docile, diligent little mute, and made on the average about a pair and a half of shoes per week, for which he received from the manager, in rec- ognition of his well-doing, a premium of a weekly penny, a vei-y important sum to the poor little deaf pauper. Darker days were, however, yet in store for him ; he was not a little teased and persecuted by the idle children in the workhouse, who made sport of his infirmity ; his grand- mother, to whom he was devotedly attached, and with whom he had lived previous to his accident, was taken from him by death ; and, to sum up his unhappiness at this time, he was apprenticed by the workhouse to a Plymouth shoemaker, a brutal and barbarous wretch, who treated him with the most ruthless indignity and cruelty, threw A STRANGE STORY, BUT TRUE. 427 shoes at his head, boxed him on the ears, slapped him on the face, and even struck him with the broad-faced ham- mer used in the trade. Such of our readers as are ac- quainted with Crabbe's powerful but revolting picture of Peter Grimes, the ruffian master who murdered his appren- tices by his piecemeal cruelties, would scarce fail to find the original of the sketch in this disreputable wretch, with this aggravation, too, in the actual as set off against the fictitious case, that the apprentices of Peter Grimes were not poor, helpless mutes, already rendered objects of commiseration to all well-regulated minds " through the visitation of God." And who could anticipate a different end for the sadly-injured and sorely-misused boy than that which overtook Peter's apprentices as they dropped in succession into the grave ? Were it to be seen, how- ever, that the deaf little fellow, apparently so shut out from the world, could record his sufferings at this time in very admirable English, the hope might arise that there was some other fate in store for one who had mind and energy enough to triumph over circumstances so unprece- dentedly depressed and depressing. The following are ex- tracts from a journal which he kept while under the brute master : " O misery, thou art to be my only portion ! Father of mercy, forgive me if I wish I had never been born ! Oh that I were dead, if death were an annihilation of being ; but as it is not, teach me to endure life : to enjoy it I never can. Mine is indeed a severe and cruel master Threw this morning a shoe in my face : I had made a wrong stitch Struck again Again. I could not bear it : a box on the ear, a slap on the face. I did not weep in April [when his grandmother died], but I did at this unkind usage. I did all in my power to suppress my inclination to weep, till I was almost suffocated : tears of bitter anguish and futile indignation fell upon my work, and blinded my eyes. I sobbed convulsively. I was half mad with myself for suffering him to see how much I was affected. Fool that I was ! Oh that I were again in the workhouse ! He threw his pipe in my face, which I had accidentally bro- ken ; it hit me on the temple, and narrowly missed my eye I 428 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. held the thread too short : instead of telling me to hold it longer, he struck me on the hand with the hammer (the iron part). Mother can bear witness that it is much swelled ; not to mention many more indignities I have received, many, many more. Again, this morning, I have went. What's the matter with my eyes ! " Alas, poor boy ! And all this took place in proud Eng- land, the land of liberty and of equal rights and laws! Flogging is not a punishment for men, but a very suitable one for brutes ; and had the brute master in this case been tied up to the halberts and subjected to a round hundred, he would be a squeamish reformer indeed who could have objected to so just and appropriate a use of the lash. Suddenly, however, this dire tyranny came to a close. A few excellent men connected with the management of the workhouse had been struck by the docility and intel- ligence of the young mute. One of them, Mr. Burnard, a gentleman w T ho still survives, struck by his powers of thought and expression, had furnished him with themes on which to write. He had shown him attention and kind- ness, and the lad naturally turned to him as a friend and protector ; and, stating his case to him by letter, the good man not only got him relieved from the dire thraldom of his tyrannical master, but, by interesting a few friends in his behalf, secured for him the leisure necessary to prose- cute his studies, for, even when his circumstances were most deplorable, the little deaf and dumb boy had been dreaming of making himself a name in letters, by produc- ing books which even the learned would not despise, and, by means of a liberal subscription, he was now en- abled to go on reading and writing, with wonderful change for him whose premium pence used to be all spent in the purchase of little volumes ! the whole books of a subscription library at his command. It is customary to augh at the conceit and egotism of the young, as indica- tive of a mere weakness, which it is the part of after years *-f sober experience to dissipate or cure. There are cases, however, in which the apparent weakness is real strength, A STRANGE STORY, BUT TRUE. 429 a moving power, without which, in very depressing cir- cumstances, there would be no upward progress, for there would be no hope and no motive to exertion ; and so the poor mute boy's estimate of himself, while yet an inmate of the workhouse, though it may provoke a smile, may be deemed not uninteresting, as in reality representative of an undercurrent in the character, destined to produce great results. "Dec. 5th, 1821. Yesterday I completed my sixteenth year; and I shall take this opportunity of describing, to the best of my ability, my person. I am four feet eight inches high ; my hair is stiif and coarse, of a dark brown color, almost black ; my head is very large, and, I believe, has a tolerable good lining of brain within ; my eyes are brown and large, and are the least exceptional part of my person ; my forehead is high, eyebrows bushy, nose large, mouth very big, teeth well enough, and limbs not ill-shaped You have asked me why I have in many places used the expression, ' When I am old enough in other people's opinion.' The customs of this coun- try have declared that man is not competent to his own direction until he has attained the age of twenty-one. Not so I. I never was a lad. From the time of my fall, deprived of many external sources of occupation, 1 have been accustomed to find sources of occupation within myself, to think as I read, as I worked, or as I walked. While other lads were employed with trifles, I have thought, felt, and acted as a man. At ignominious treatment, at blows, I have sup- pressed my indignation and my tears till I have felt myself almost choked. I have, however, felt also the superiority of genius, which would not allow ignorance to triumph. I have walked hours on hours in the most lonesome lanes I could find, abstracted in melancholy musing ; or, with a book in my hand, 1 have sat for hours under a hedge or tree. Sometimes, too, sheltered from observation by a rock, I have sat in contemplation by the riverside. At such times I have felt such a melancholy pleasure as I have not known since I have been in the hospital. O Nature ! why didst thou create me with feel- ings such as these V Why didst thou give such a mind to one in my condition V Why, O Heavens ! didst thou enclose my proud scul within such a casket ? Yet, pardon my murmurs ; I will try to be convinced that ' whatever is is right.' Kind Heaven, endue me with resignation to thy will, and contentment with whatever situation it is thy pleasure I should fill." 430 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. Such was the estimate formed of himself by the deaf workhouse boy, and such his mode of expressing it. De- pressed as his circumstances might at this time seem, and little favorable, apparently, to the development of mind, they were yet not without their peculiar balance of advan- tage. Lads born deaf and dumb rarely master in after life the grammar of the language ; for, though they acquire a knowledge of the words which express qualities and senti- ments, or which represent things, they seen^ unable to attain to the right use of those important particles, adverbs, conjunctions, and prepositions, which, as the smaller stones in a wall serve to keep the larger ones in their places, give in speech or writing order and coherency to the others. But the deaf lad had not been born deaf: he had read and conversed, and even attempted composition, previous to his accident ; so that his grandmother could boast of the self-taught boy, not without some shadow of truth, that bar " Johnnie was the best scholar in all Plymouth." And now, writing having become his easiest and most ready mode of communication, the speech by which he communicated his ideas, he had attained to a facility in the use of the pen, and a command of English, far from common among even university-bred youths, his seniors by several years. He had acquired, too, the ability of looking at things very intently. It has been well said by the poet, " That oft when one sense is suppressed, It but retires into the rest." And it would seem as if the hearing of this deaf lad had retreated into his eyes, which were ever after to exercise a double portion of the seeing function. All this, however, could not be at once understood by his friends. There seemed to be but few openings through which the poor deaf and dumb lad could be expected to make his way to independence, and what is termed respectability ; and it was suggested that he should set himself to acquire the art of the common printer, and attach himself to a mission of A STRANGE STORY, BUT TRUE. 431 the English Church, still, we believe, stationed in Malta, that sends forth from its press many useful little books, chiefly for distribution in the East. Accordingly, in a comparatively short time the deaf lad did acquire the art of the common printer, nay, more, he became skilful in setting the Arabic character ; and, having a decided turn for acquiring languages, though unable to speak them, he promised, judging from his me- chanical and linguistic abilities, to be a useful operative to the mission. Unfortunately, however, for such was the estimate of the mission's conductors, he was not content to be a mere operative : his instincts drew him strongly towards literature ; and, ere quitting England for Malta, he had such a quarrel on this score with some very excel- lent men, that he threw up his situation, which, however, through the mediation of kind friends, he was again in- duced and enabled to resume. But at Malta, where the poor deaf lad suffered much from illness, and much from wounded affections, for, shut out though he was from his fellows, he had yet had his affair of the heart, and the course of true love did not run smooth in his case, the quarrel was again resumed, and he received a reprimand from the committee of the mission in England, which was virtually a dismissal. "The habits of his mind," said the committee, " were likely to disqualify him from that steady and persevering discharge of his duties which they con- sidered as indispensably requisite." And to this harsh resolution the late excellent Mr. Bickersteth, by whom it was forwarded, added the following remark: "You are aware our first principles as Christians are the sacrifice of self-will and self-gratification. If you can rise to this, and steadily pursue your work, as you engaged to do, you may yet fill a most important station, and glorify our Great Master. But if you cannot do this, it is clear that the So- ciety cannot continue in its service those who will not devote themselves to their engagements." The deaf, soli- tary man felt much aggrieved. He said, and said truly, 432 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. " I gave the Society a pledge, which there does not live a man who could prove to an impartial person that I have not redeemed. When, after the labors of eight or nine hours, the office was closed for the day, I felt that I was at liberty to partake of some mental refreshment. This is the ground of my dismissal. Even if my attach- ment to literature were an evil, it might be tolerated whilst it did not (and it did not) interfere with my defined duties." It is not now difficult to adjudicate between the poor deaf man and this learned and influential Missionary Soci- ety. No ordinary master printer in Edinburgh, or else- where, would think of treating one of his journeymen, or even one of his apprentices, after this fashion. The limits of a printer's work are easily ascertained. Nine tenths of the printers of Great Britain and Ireland are employed by the piece, the others are placed on what is known as a set- tlement/ and, under either scheme, there is a portion of their time which is not sold to their masters, and with which, therefore, a master cannot honestly interfere. But the grand mistake of the committee, and of worthy Mr. Bickersteth, in this not uninstructive case, seems to have been founded on a certain goody sentiment, from which missionaries such as the brethren of the Society of Jesus would have been saved by their sagacious discernment of the capabilities and spirits of men, and the ordinary master printer, by his knowledge of the proper tale of work which an operative ought to furnish, and his full recognition of the common business rule, that the time is not the master's, but the operative's own, for which the master does not pay. The committee and Mr. Bickersteth evidently held, on the other hand, that the deaf lad, being a missionary printer, ought to have his heart and soul in the missionary printing, and in nothing else ; that the work of writing and trans- lating was a work to be done by other heads and hands than his, heads and hands trained, mayhap, at Cambridge or Oxford ; and that the literary studies pursued by the A STRANGE STORY, BUT TRUE. 433 lad after office-hours were over were mere works of " self- will " and "self-gratification," and not suited to "glorify the Great Master." In order to glorify the Great Master, it was necessary, they held, that the deaf lad should give his heart exclusively to the printing of the mission. Alas! the good men were strangely in error. The Great Master had, we now know, quite other work for the deaf lad. We are ignorant of what the Oxford and Cambridge men of the Malta Mission have done, what they could, we dare say, and we are sure they think it all too little ; but their labors will scarce ever be brought into competition with those of the greatest Biblical illustrator of modern times. "What Dr. Chalmers used to term his Biblical library con- sisted of four great standard works ; and of these select four, Dr. Kitto's "Pictorial Bible" was much a favorite. "I feel quite sure," we find him saying, in his "Daily Scrip- ture Readings," "that the use of the sacred dialogues as a school-book, and the pictures of Scripture scenes which interested my boyhood, still cleave to me, and impart a peculiar tinge and charm to the same representations when brought within my notice. Perhaps when I am moulder- ing in my coffin, the eye of my dear Tommy his grandson] may light upon this page ; and it is possible that his rec- ollections may accord with my present anticipations of the effect that his delight in the ' Pictorial Bible ' may have in endearing still more to him the holy Word of God." In the peculiar walk in which Dr. John Kitto specially ex- celled all other writers, the great Chalmers was content to accept him as his teacher, and to sit at his feet ; and the poor, friendless, deaf lad, who so offended the committee of the Maltese Mission by devoting to literature the time which was indisputably his own, not theirs, was this same John Kitto, a name now scarce less widely known, though in a different walk, than that of Chalmers himself. Dismissed from his situation, he returned to England with but forlorn prospects. There was, however, work for him to do ; and an unexpected opening, which provi- 37 434 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. dentially occurred shortly after his arrival, served greatly to fit him for it. A missionary friend, bound for central Persia, engaged him to accompany him on the journey as tutor to his two boys, a charge for which his previous studies, pursued under the direst disadvantages, adequately fitted him ; and, with his eyes all the more widely open from the circumstance that his ears were shut, he travelled through Russian Europe into Persia, saw the greater and lesser Ararats, passed through the Caucasian range of mountains, loitered amid the earlier seats of the human family, forded the Euphrates near its source, resided for about two years in Bagdad, witnessed the infliction of war, famine, and pestilence, and then his task of tuition com- pleted journeyed homeward by Teheran, Tabreez, Treb- izond, and Constantinople, to engage in his great work. His quiet life was not without its due share of striking in- cident. We have referred to a story of wounded affection. On his return to England, he found that she who had de- ceived and forsaken him had deeply regretted the part she had acted, and was now no more ; and for years after, he bore about with him a sad and widowed heart. In his second return he had a companion, a young man in deli- cate health, who, when detained with him in quarantine at the mouth of the Thames, sickened and died. The de- scription of the quarantine burying-ground, in which his remains were deposited, is suited to remind the reader of some of the descriptions of similar places given by Dickens. " We went," says Kitto, in his journal, " in a boat of the vessel, to a kind of low island devoted to the burial of persons dying in quar- antine. The coffin was plain, without a plate, and with pieces of ropes for handles, but had the honor of being covered with the ensign of the doctor's ship as a pall. The grave-place, overgrown with long, reedy grass, was not more than a few paces from the water's edge ; and its uses were indicated only by what the captain calls ' wooden tombstones,' of which there are only two, both dated 1832, and all of wood, painted of a stone color, the first I have seen in England. S was carried to his last home by the sailors of our vesv>L A STRANGE STORY, BUT TRUE. 435 On arriving at the grave, we found it of dark clay, with water at the bottom; a wet ditch being near, above its level. It was also too small, and we had to wait till it was enlarged ; and then, the coffin being brought to the side, ready to be let down, the doctor's head servant took out a prayer-book, and, all uncovering, read a part of the burial service. We waited till the grave was filled up and banked over; and then, with a sigh, not the last, returned to the boat. On our return, the flags, which had hitherto been floating half-mast high, were raised to their usual position." Kitto's fellow-traveller, whose dust he saw thus con- signed to the dark, obscure burial-yard at the mouth of the Thames, had been engaged to a young lady, on whom, after his release from quarantine, the deaf man waited, to communicate to her the fate of her lover. The two wid- owed hearts drew kindly together ; and in course of time the lady became Mrs. Kitto, a match from which her husband, now entering on a literary life of intense labor, derived great comfort and support. Never did literary man toil harder or more incessantly. His career as an author commenced in 1833, and termi- nated at the close of 1853 ; and during that period he produced twenty-one separate works, some of them of profound research and great size. Among these we may enumerate the "Pictorial Bible," the "Pictorial History of Palestine," the " Plistory of Palestine from the Patri- archal Age to the Present Time," the " Cyclopaedia of Bib- lical Literature," the " Lost Senses," " Scripture Lands," and the "Daily Bible Illustrations." And in order to pro- duce this amazing amount of elaborate writings, Dr. Kitto used to rise, year after year, at four o'clock in the morning, and toil on till night. But the overwrought brain at length gave way, and in his fiftieth year he broke down and died. Could he have but retained the copyright of his several works, he would have been a wealthy man ; he would at least have left a competency to his family. But commencing without capital, and compelled, by the inev- itable expense of a growing family, to labor for the book* 436 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. sellers, he was ever engaged in "providing," according to Johnson, "for the day that was passing over him," and died, in consequence, a poor man. And his widow and family have, we understand, a direct interest in the sale of the well-written and singularly interesting biographic work to which we are indebted for the materials of our article, and which we can recommend with a good con- science to the notice of our readers. We know not a finer example than that which it furnishes of the " pursuit of knowledge under difficulties," nor of a devout and honest man engrossingly engaged in an important work, in which he was at length to affect the thinking of his age, and to instruct and influence its leading minds. It may be in- teresting to remark how such a man received the first decided direction in his course of study; and so the fol- lowing extract, with which we conclude, of a letter on the subject from a gentleman much before the public at the present time, from his, we believe, honest and fearless report on the mismanagement of our leading officers in the Crimea during the campaign now brought happily to a close, may be regarded by our readers as worthy of perusal ; " My first meeting with Kitto," says Sir John M'Neill, " was at Tabrcez, in 1829. He was going with Mr. and Mrs. Groves and their two sons to Bagdad, where Mr. Groves intended to establish himself as a missionary. Kitto was then acting as tutor to the two boys, who were lively and intelligent ; and I was struck with the singularity of his position, as the deaf and almost dumb teacher of boys who were very far from being either deaf or dumb. This cir- cumstance, and the loneliness of mind which was a necessary conse- quence of his inability to communicate with the persons whom he was thrown amongst at Tabreez, led me to put some questions to him in writing, with the view of drawing him into conversation ; but I found great difficulty in comprehending his answers, in consequence of the peculiarity of his voice and enunciation. With the assistance of his pupils, however, who spoke with great rapidity on their fingers, and appeared to have no difficulty in understanding what he said, J succeeded in engaging him in such conversation as could he so carried A STRANGE STORY, BUT TRUE. 437 on. I found his intelligence and his information vastly greater than I had anticipated. He had evidently the greatest avidity for informa- tion ; but was restrained from pressing his inquiries, apparently by his modesty, and the fear of being considered obtrusive or troublesome. Finding him well read and deeply interested in the Scriptures, I di- rected his attention to the many incidental allusions in the Bible to circumstances connected with Oriental habits and modes of life, which had become intelligible to me only after I had been for some time in the East. I remember he was particularly interested in something I had said in illustration of the importance attaching to the fact that ' Jacob digged a well.' I had explained to him, that, in arid coun- tries, where cultivation could only be carried on by means of irriga- tion, the land was of no value unless when water could be brought to irrigate it ; and that in Persia the theory of the law still is, that he who digs a well in the desert is entitled to the land which it will irrigate. He came to me more than once for fuller information upon this subject, and was greatly delighted with some illustrations of Scripture which I pointed out to him in ' Morier's Second Journey to Persia.' I refer to these circumstances because I believe that they relate to the first steps of that inquiry which he prosecuted so assiduously and successfully during the remainder of his life, and to which he constantly recurred almost every time I met him afterwards* either in Asia or in England." 37* 438 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. IX. THE IDEALISTIC SCHOOL. It is not often in these latter days that a metaphysical question is forced on the notice of the public. The muse of abstract thought the genius that asserts as her special province the region of "being and knowing" has been dozing for at least an age in a state of partial hybernation, sucking her paws in closets and class-rooms, and getting so marvellously thin and spiritual under the process, that her attenuated form has long since failed to make any very distinct impression on the retina of the community. The cas'e was widely different once. During the latter half of the last century no other class of questions pos- sessed half so great an intex^est in Scotland as metaphysical ones. Metaphysical had succeeded to theological disqui- sition, and was pursued with equal earnestness ; partly, no doubt, because the metaphysics of the age had set the theology of the age that had gone before virtually on its trial, but in great part also because the largest minds of the time had given themselves to the work; and, further, because the limited character of that cycle in which the mental philosophy is doomed to expatiate was not yet known. Early in the present century the interest had in some degree begun to flag, and the keen eye of Jeffrey was one of the first to detect the slacking of the tide. And in his ingenious critique on "Stewart's Life of Reid," he attempted to render a reason for it. The age had al- ready started forward in that course of natural, physical, and mechanical experiment in which such distinguished trophies have since been won, and which have given its THE IDEALISTIC SCHOOL. 439 peculiar character to the time ; and it had become impa- tient, said the critic, of barren, non-productive observation. And it was a grand distinction, he held, between the physical and the metaphysical walks, that, while experiment reigned paramount in the one, and formed the all-potent key by which man could lay open at will the arcana of nature, and arm himself with her powers, observation only could be employed in the other, a mere passive faculty, that had an ability of seeing, but none whatever of con- trolling. Hence, he argued, the unproductive character of metaphysical science, and the natural preference which the public had begun to manifest, on ascertaining such to be its character, for pursuits through which solid benefits were to be secured. " In the proper experimental philos- ophy," he said, "every acquisition of knowledge is an in- crease of power, because the knowledge is necessarily de- rived from some intentional disposition of materials, which we may always command in the same manner. In the philosophy of observation, it is merely a gratification of our curiosity. The phenomena of the human mind are al- most all of the latter description. We feel, and perceivt, and remember, without any purpose or contrivance of ours, and have evidently no power over the mechanism by which those functions are performed. We cannot decom- pose our perceptions in a crucible, nor divide our sensations by a prism ; nor can we by act and contrivance produce any combination of thoughts or emotions besides those with which all men have been provided by nature. No metaphysician expects by analysis to discover a new power, or to excite a new sensation, in the mind, as a chemist dis- covers a new earth or a new metal ; nor can he hope by any process of synthesis to exhibit a mental combination different from any that nature has produced in the minds of other persons." Certainly metaphysical found in physical science at the beginning of the present century a formidable rival, that could reward her followers much more largely than she 440 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. could ; and even ere the retirement of Dngald Stewart, her decline in interest and influence, which the keen eyo of Jeffrey had remarked at an earlier period, might be seen by all. The genius of Thomas Brown created a diversion in her favor; but he sank and died in middle life, and his science in Scotland might be said to die with him. His successor in the moral philosophy chair of our university Avas at least his equal in genius ; but the bent of Wilson was literary, not scientific ; and the enthusiasm which he excited among his pupils was an enthusiasm for the sensu- ous, not the abstract. But while all must agree in the fact remarked by Jeffrey, many may fail to acquiesce in the cause which he assigns for it. Pursuits not more prof- itable than metaphysical ones have been eminently popu- lar in the age just gone by, and are so still. We know not that we should instance theology, seeing that on theo- logical truth man's most important interests may be re- garded as suspended ; but we surely may instance that department of philosophic criticism in which Jeffrey him- self won his laurels. We may instance, besjdes, at least two of the natural sciences, astronomy and geology, neither of them more rich of dowry than metaphysical science it- self, and which cannot be advantageously prosecuted save at a much greater expense. And yet both have been zeal- ously cultivated, especially the latter, in the age during which metaphysics have been neglected. We must look for some other cause; nor do we think it ought to be diffi- cult to find. Metaphysical pursuit fell into abeyance in this country, not because it rested on a mere basis of ob- servation, not experiment, or because it led to no such tan- gible results as the pursuit of the physical sciences ; but simply in consequence of a thorough divorce which took place, through the labors of some of the most acute and ingenious metaphysicians the world ever saw, between the deductions of the science and the conclusions of common sense. Reid, who raised one of the most vigorous protests ever made on the other side, has well remarked that " it is THE IDEALISTIC SCHOOL. 441 genius, and not the want of it, that adulterates philosophy, and fills it with error and false theory." And certainly none but very superior men could have run their science so high and dry upon the beach, that, with all the interest which attaches to its objects, men have preferred leaving it there to taking the trouble of getting it afloat again. We have before us Brown's " Philosophy of the Human Mind," open at one of the most ingenious portions of the work, that on the phenomena of simple suggestion, and would cite one of his views by way of example. Plume had previously shown that there is no other visi- ble connection between cause and effect than that of inva- riable contiguity. Cause and effect were Siamese twins persistently seen together, but with the connecting liga- ment, if any such really existed, invariably concealed. And Brown, following close in the wake of the elder dialectician, deliberately erased the very words from his metaphysic vocabulary, and substituted antecedent and consequent in- stead. The very terms cause and effect vanished from his speculations, and with the terms the doctrine they in- volved ; and he taught, instead, that power is nothing more than the relation of one object or event as antecedent to another object or event, its immediate and invariable con- sequent. Hume, whose vigorous common-sense was ever raising protests against his ingenuities, and in whose ever- recurring asides, if we may so speak, the germ of the Scotch philosophy may be found, had stopped short when he showed that no known argument existed by which it could be proved that effects were the necessary results of causes, and that it could only be shown instead, and thus simply as a matter of experience, not reason, that they were always associated with causes, always tagged to them in the exhibiting areas of space and time, as the cart is tagged to the horse, or as a train of railway carriages is tagged to the engine. And in summing up these links of the associative faculty, which keeps up the ever-moving train of thinking in the human mind, and constitutes one 442 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. thought master of the ceremonies in introducing another, lie enumerated, as distinct and separate, first, the link of contiguity in time and place ; and, second, the link of cause and effect. And well he might. Let a misemployed ingenuity compound them as they may, they are wide as the poles asunder. They are separated by the entire breadth of the human intellect; nay, by the entire breadth of the brute and human intellect united. The prevailing link of association in the mind of the highest philosopher is the link of causation. It was the link that connected the sublime thoughts of Newton, when, sitting in his arbor, he saw the apple fall from the tree, and traced in profound meditation the effect of the great law to which it owed its fall, from the earth to the moon, and from thence to the sun and all the planets. And, on the other hand, the link of mere contiguity is the prevailing link in those minds in which intellect is feeblest; it was the link on which the ideas of Dame Quickly were suspended. Her recollections hung upon the parcel-gilt goblet, the sea-coal fire, and the chance visit of goodwife Keech, the butcher's wife. Nay, even the inferior animals are not too low to be under its influence. The horse quickens his pace when some contiguous object reminds him of the neighborhood of his stable, with its corn and hay ; and the cat learns to associate the dinner-bell with the dinner which it precedes. And yet we find one of the most ingenious of the idealistic metaphysicians fusing these two widely-distant links of association into one, the prevailing Newtonian link into the prevailing link of the cat and horse ; or, as he himself expresses it, suppressing the link of causation as superfluous, and leaving instead, in conformity with his ado])tion of the doctrine of Hume (though Hume himself avoided the absurdity), only the link of contiguity in time and space. The "olde polde-headed manne," who held that Tenter- den steeple was the cause of the Goodwin Sands, because the steeple had been built in their neighborhood, he said, just immediately before they began to form, has been a THE IDEALISTIC SCHOOL. 443 standing joke in English literature for the last four hun- dred years. He made the mistake of substituting conti- guity in time and place for causality, and has become a jest in consequence. But what shall be said of a scheme of metaphysics that does deliberately and knowingly, in order to preserve the consistency of a foregone conclusion, what the " polde-headed manne" did in his simplicity and igno- rance ? The shrewd natural philosopher who saw in the slow deposition of a few particles of earth or mud in still water, formed by the opposing action of two currents, a future sandbank, and, reasoning from cause to effect, was reminded, through the associative link thus furnished, of the brown wastes of the Goodwin Sands strewed with wrecks, and with the white surf beating over them, and the garrulous old woman to whom a print of Tenterden steeple suggested the contiguous sand-pit along whose margin she had been accustomed to pick up bits of broken planks for her fire, would be, on the showing of Dr. Brown, under the influence of identical suggestions ; for contiguous cause and contiguous steeple he has virtually placed in the same category. Is there any wonder that a busy age should leave philosophers who argued after such a fashion, however nice their genius or however excessive their in- genuity, to milk their rams unheeded (we borrow the old illustration), and that only a few ill-employed students should be found idle enough to hold the pail ? And yet, such is no extreme illustration of the idealistic philosophy. It is, in truth, the grand objection to this philosophy, that it sets itself in direct opposition to mind engaged in all the practical walks. Let us adduce another instance. It is one of the fundamental principles of an ingenious met- aphysician of the present time, a principle in which he is virtually at one with Berkeley, that being is to be regarded as tantamount to knowing ; and that whatever is not an object of consciousness cannot be regarded as existent. Berkeley held that the absolute existence of unthinking beings, without any relation to their being perceived, was 444 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. wholly unintelligible ; and we at once grant that a bar of metal kept in the fire until it glows a bright red has no consciousness of redness, that the caloric with which it is charged has no sense of heat, and, further, that the bar itself has no feeling whatever of expansion or solidity. Redness, heat, expansion, and the idea of solidity are all impressions of sentient existence, accidents or qualities to be seen, felt, or conceived of. But it docs not follow, that, because a heated bar of iron is not conscious of heat, solidity, or redness, it is not therefore a heated bar of iron ; or that because the senses can testify to its existence only as the senses of the living can testify of the existence of what is non-vital and non-sentient, it has therefore no existence as a non-vital, non-sentient substance. The leap in the logic seems most extraordinary, from the fact of the non-sentient character of the heated bar to the non-exist- ence of the heated bar. And yet such virtually was the conclusion of Berkeley. " Some truths are so near and obvious to the mind," he said, " that a man need only open his eyes to see them. And such," he added, "I take this important one to be, namely, that all the choir of heaven and furniture of earth in a word, all those bodies which compose the mighty framework of the world have not any substance without a mind ; that their being is to be perceived or known : to be convinced of which, the reader need only reflect and try to separate in his own thoughts the being of a sensible thing from its being perceived." In this last sentence the sophism seems to lie. It confounds conceiving with existing, light with eye and the optic nerve, and caloric and solidity with feel- ing and the tactile sense. It would date the beginning of the sun, not from that early period during which the sun influenced the yearly motions of our planet, but from the long posterior period during which eyes began to exist. And such essentially is the philosophy of that other in- genious metaphysician of our own time to which we refer. "He" also "goes so far as to afBrm," says Mr; Cairns, THE IDEALISTIC SCHOOL. 445 in his admirable pamphlet, " that thought ana existence are identical. Knowledge of existence, he says, the apprehension of one's self and other things, is alone true existence." Yes, true rational existence ; but, judged by the common-sense of mankind, it would be an emi- nently irrational existence that would deny the reality of existence of any other kind, that would recognize the bona fide being of an Edinburgh professor, but deny, in an argument four hundred pages long, that the university in which he lectured had any being whatever. And if, while such a teacher of moral philosophy, seated in its logic chair, mayhap, was lecturing in one room on the general nonentity of things, there was a professor of natural science demonstrating in another, on evidence which no ingenuous mind could resist, that, during immensely pro- tracted periods, this old earth of our3 had moved round the sun in a state so nearly approximating to the incan- descent, that its diurnal motion propelled outward its mat- ter at the meridian, so that its equatorial diame'ter still exceeds its polar one, in consequence, by about twenty-six miles, that for periods more than equally protracted, when it became a home of sentient existence, its highest creatures were in succession but trilobites, fishes, reptiles, birds, and mammals, and that not until comparatively of yesterday did its rational existence come into being, we could not regard such neighborhood as other than formidable to the logician to whom this brief latter day would be the only one recognized as a reality. It would be such a neighborhood as that of a disciple of Newton busied in weighing and measuring the planets or calculat- ing the return of a comet on the parallax of a fixed star, to an old sophist engaged in showing his lads, on what he deemed excellent grounds, that if a tortoise which crept a hundred yards in an hour had got the start by a few fur- rows' breadth of Achilles, who ran a mile in five minutes, the tieet warrior might be engaged for ever and ever \v vain attempts to come up with it 88 446 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. One of two things would of necessity occur in a state of matters so little desirable, either the pupils of the lo- gician would become such mere triflers in argument as the Jack Lizard of Steele's essay, who, when his mother scalded her fingers, angered the honest woman by assuring her there was no such thing as heat in boiling water ; or they would learn .to despise both their professor and his science. It gives us sincere pleasure to find that the Edinburgh University is in no such danger. So long as the logic chair remained vacant, we purposely abstained from making any allusion to the subject, in the fear that any expression of opinion, even in a matter so impersonal as the respective merits of two schools of philosophy, might and would be misinterpreted. But we are in no such danger now; and we must be permitted to express our sincere pleasure that the election of Tuesday has resulted in the selection of an asserter of the Scotch school of philosophy to teach in the leading Scotch university. Nor are we influenced by any idle preference for the mere name Scotch. We know not that so large an amount of ingenuity has yet been expended on that common-sense school of which Reid was the founder, and Beattie, Hamilton, and Dugald Stewart the exponents, as on the antagonistic school, which at least equally dis- tinguished Scotchmen, such as Hume and Thomas Brown, have illustrated and adorned. George Primrose, in the " Vicar of Wakefield," found that the best things remained to be said on the wrong side ; and so, in the determination of astonishing the world, he set himself to dress up his three paradoxes. And, unquestionably, the paradoxes of the idealistic philosophy have been admirably dressed. But the Scotch philosophy has at least this grand advan- tage over the opponent school, that all its principles and deductions can be brought into harmony with those of all the other departments of science. It is not a jarring discord in the great field of mental exertion, a false bar, to be slurred over or dropped in the general concert, but a well-toned and accordant part, consistent with the bar- THE IDEALISTIC SCHOOL. 447 mony of the whole. It was acknowledged by Hume, that it was only in solitude and retirement that he could yield any assent to his own philosophy. Nor was he always true to it even in solitude ; for in solitude he wrote his admirable political essays, and his "History of England." And the Scotch school is simply an appeal, on philosophic grounds, from Hume the metaphysical dreamer, wrapped up in the moonshine of sceptical speculation, to Hume the practical politician and shrewd historian. And we know no man better fitted to be an exponent of this true and solid school, or whose mind partakes more of the character of that of its founder Reid, than the gentleman on whom the choice of the council h;is fallen. We trust he has a long career of usefulness before him ; and have every reason to hope that his expositions will be found not unworthy of the chair of Hamilton, nor of a philosophy destined ultimately, we cannot doubt, to give law in the regions of mental philosophy, at a time when the inge- nuities of its opponents shall have shared the fate of tho paradoxes of George Primrose. 448 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. X. THE POESY OF INTELLECT AND FANCY. It has been well said of singing B song, in reference, of course, to the extreme commonness of musical accom- plishment in a low degree, and its extreme rarity in a high one, that it is what every one can do, and not one in a thousand can do well. A musical ear is, like seeing and hearing, one of the ordinary gifts of nature, just because music was designed to be one of the ordinary delights of the species ; but while the class capable of being delighted is a very large one, the class capable of delighting is one of the smallest. A not large apartment could contain all the first-class singers in the world ; and, mayhap, judged by men of the highest degree of taste, a closet roomy enough to contain Jenny Lind might be found sufficient to accommodate for a time its preeminent musical talent. And it is so as certainly with poetry as with music. There are a few men in every community wholly destitute of both the musical and the poetic sense, just as in every community there are a few men born blind and a few more born deaf; but, with these exceptions, all men have poetry and music in them, music enough, if their education has not been wholly neglected, to derive pleasure from music, and poetry enough to derive pleasure from poetry. And in due accordance with this fact, we find that in what man's Creator appointed from the beginning to be the commonest of all things, religion, he has made large use of both. Every church has its music, and a large portion of the divine revelation has been made in poetry. But if the great musicians who can exquisitely delight be few, the great poets are still fewer. There is but one Jenny THE POESY OF INTELLECT AND FANCY. 449 Lincl in the world ; but then the world has not had a Shakspeare for the last two hundred and forty years ; and, though greatly more than a century has elapsed since Dryden took tale, in his famous epigram, of all the great epic poets, and found them but three, no one has since been able to add a fourth to the list. Of all rare and admirable gifts, the poetic faculty in the high and perfect degree is at once the most admirable and the most rare. It mny, however, be very genuine and exquisite, though not full-orbed, as in a Homer or a Milton. Nature, when she makes a poet of the first class, adds a powerful imag- inative faculty, and a fancy of great brilliancy, to an un- derstanding the profoundest ; she takes all that makes the great philosopher and all that is peculiar to the true poet, and, adding them together, produces, once in a thousand years or so, one of her fully-i-ounded and perfect intellects. But a man may have much though he may not have all ; nay, a very few faculties, if of a rare order and wisely employed, may well excite admiration and wonder. Tan- nahill could achieve only a song ; but as the songs which he did achieve were very genuine ones, with the true faculty in them, Scotland seems to be in no danger of forgetting them. Beranger, the greatest of living song- writers, is a man of similar faculty with Tannahill. He is known as a song-writer, and as that only ; but never had France such songs before, and France knows how to value them. The one thing which Beranger can do, no other man can do equally well ; and not a few of the fairest names among the poets of antiquity are those of poets equally limited, apparently, in what they were fitted to produce, but also equally exquisite in the quality of their productions. Anacreon has left only little odes, and Pin- dar only great ones ; but scholars tell us that it is almost worth while acquiring Greek in order to be able to read them. Ancient Rome has immortalized her Lucretius for his single faculty of transmuting not very good philosophy into very noble verse, and modern Italy her Petrarch for 38* 450 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. his rar3 skill in turning a sonnet. In short, almost all the poets of the second order have been poets, not full-orbed in their brightness, like the sun or the great outer planets of the system, but, like the inner planets, and like the moon ere her full term has come, mere segments and cres- cents of glory. There can be no very adequate division made of these partially orbed poets ; and yet they naturally enough divide into two classes, a class in whom intellect is comparatively strong and genius weak, and, vice versa, a class in whom intellect is comparatively weak and genius strong. Pure intellect dissociated from the poetic faculty can of course accomplish but little in the fields of poesy. And yet, such is the power of determination, diligence, and high culture, that a little it has accomplished. If it has not produced brilliant poems, it has at least produced pointed stanzas and pleasing stories, narrated in easy and elegant verse. We greatly question whether Hayley was born a poet ; but his " Triumphs of Temper," though they triumphed over the temper of Byron, certainly did not tri- umph over ours. On the contrary, we found the piece, in its character as a metrical tale, at least as readable as if it had been written in good prose ; and there are even some of its stanzas which we still remember. The few lines in which the father of the heroine is described may not be poetry, but they are nearly as good as if they were. There are not many characters better hit off in a few lines, in the whole round of English verse, than that of " The good Sir Gilbert, to his country true, A faithful Whig, who, zealous for the state, In freedom's service led the loud debate; Yet every day, by transmutation rare, Turned to a Tory in his elbow-chair, And made his daughter pay, howe'er absurd, Passive obedience to his sovereign word." But of all the achievements of the prose men in the prov- ince of verse, that of Swift is the greatest. Dryden was THE POESY OP INTELLECT AND FANCY. 451 quite in the right when he said that the young clergyman was no poet ; and yet the " no poet " has so fixed his name in the poesy of the country that in mo general biography of the English poets do we find his life omitted, and in no general collection of English poetry do we fail to find his verses. The works of a class of writers not certainly so devoid of poetry as Swift and Hayley, but who were rather men of fine taste and vigorous intellect than of high poetic genius, represent in large measure the common staple of English poesy during the earlier and middle part of the last century. Not only the Broomes, Fentons, and Lytteltons, but even the Armstrongs and Akensides, be- longed to this class. The men who assisted Pope in trans- lating the "Odyssey;" the man who wrote that work on the Conversion of St. Paul which still maintains its place in what may be termed the higher literature of the "Evidences;" in especial, the men who produced the "Pleasures of the Imagination" and the "Art of Pre- serving Health," had all very vigorous minds. Akenside would have made a first-class metaphysical professor, par- ticularly in the aesthetic department ; and Armstrong could have effectually grappled with very severe and rugged subjects ; but the poetic faculty that was in them was very subordinate to their intellect. It was true so far as it ex- tended, but embroidered only thinly and in a threadbare way the strong tissue of their thinking. And yet both the " Art of Preserving Health " and the " Pleasures of the Imagination" are noble poems. The latter is the better known of the two : Thomas Brown used to repeat almost the whole of it every season in his class, as at once good poetry and good metaphysics. But the former deserves to be known as well. The man who could transmute such a subject into passable poetry, and render his composition readable as a whole, and much of the poetry is more than passable, and the piece as a whole eminently reada- ble, must be regarded as having accomplished no ordi- nary achievement. It is, however, from the strong intellect 452 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. displayed in the staple texture of the piece, rather tLan from its poetic embroidery, that it derives its merit. The second class the class composed of men whoso poetic genius overrode their intellect is not so largely represented in English poetry as the other. It may be 6afely said, however, that in the writings of men of the last century, such as Collins, Chatterton in his Rowley poems, and perhaps Meikle, we find more of poetry than of pure intellect ; and in writings of men of the present century, such as those of Keats, Wilson, and perhaps Leigh Hunt, we find much more. In the writings of Wil- son there is often scarce tissue enough to support the load of gorgeous embroidery that mantles over it. In especial in his " Isle of Palms " do we find the balance of the poetry preponderately cast against the intellect. It is, as a poem, in every respect the antipodes of the " Art of Preserving Health." In Keats the preponderance is also very marked. What a gorgeous gallery of poetic pictures that "Eve of St. Agnes" forms, and yet how slim the tis- sue that lies below ! How thin the canvas on which the whole is painted ! For vigorous sense, one deep-thoughted couplet of Dryden would make the whole kick the beam. And yet what can be more exquisite in their way than those pictures of the young poet ! Even the old worn-out gods of Grecian mythology become life-like when he draws them. They revive in his hands, and become vital once more. In " Rimini " we detect a similar faculty. A man of profound, nay, of but rather strong intellect, would scarce have chosen such a repulsive story for poetic adorn- ment ; but, once chosen, only a true poet could have adorned it so well. Such are specimens of the class of poets which we would set off against that to which the Lytteltons, Akensides, and Armstrongs belonged, and at whose head Pope and Dryden took their stand. And it is a class that, compar- atively at least, the sum total of the poetic stock taken into account, is largely represented at the present time. THE POESY OF INTELLECT AND FANCY. 453 Wo shall not repeat the nickname which has been era- ployed to designate them ; for, believing, whatever may be their occasional aberrations, that they possess " the vis- ion and the faculty divine," we shall not permit ourselves to speak other than respectfully of them. We could fain wish that they oftener rejected first thoughts, and waited for those second ones which, according to Bacon, are wiser: we could fain wish that what was said of Dryden " Who either knew not, or forgot, That greatest art, the art to blot," could not be said so decidedly of them. But we must not forget that their compositions, though not without fault in their character as wholes, and often primed in, as a painter might say, on too thin a groundwork, contain some of the most brilliant passages in the wide range of modern poetry. To this school Gerald Massey, a name already familiar to most of our readers, has been held to belong. He has less of its peculiar faults, however, than any of its other members, with certainly not less of its peculiar beau- ties. With all the marked individuality of original genius, he reminds us more of Keats than of any other English poet ; but with the same rare perception of external beauty, and occasionally the same too extreme devotion to it, he adds a lyrical power and a depth of feeling which Keats did not possess. And from these circumstances we augur well of his future. It is ever the tendency of genuine feel- ing to pass from the surface of nature to its depths; and though, as we see exemplified in the songs of Burns, the true lyrist may find in description adequate employment for his peculiar powers, it is always in preparation for some burst of sentiment, or by way of garnishing to some strik- ing thought. Mr. Massey's new poem " Craigcrook Castle " furnishes admirable illustrations of the various phases of his genius. The plan of the work is one of which our literature has furnished many examples, from the times of the " Canterbury Tales " down to those of the " Queen's 454 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. Wake," and which is taken up year after year in the Christ- mas stories of the writers connected with the "Household Words." There is a meeting of friends at the hospitable board, over which Jeffrey once presided, and at which a man of similar literary tastes and feelings presides now ; and each guest, in passing the evening, brings forward his contribution of song or story. The introduction, with none of the cadences of Keats, reminds us in every line of that poet's delight in sensuous imagery and influences, and of the crust of rich thought, if we may so express ourselves, that mantled over the surface of his poetry. The advent of the morning at Craigcrook we find thus described : " The meek and melting amethyst of dawn Blushed o'er the blue hills in the ring o' the world; Up purple twilights come the shining sea Of sunlight breaking in a silent surge, Whence morning, like the birth of beauty, rose; While at a rosy touch, the clouds, that lay In sullen purples round the hills of Fife, Adown her pathway spread their paths of gold. * * * * " Sweet lilies of the valley, tremulous fair, Peep through their curtains, clasped with diamond dew By fairy jeweller's working while they slept; The arch laburnum droops her budding gold From emerald fingers with such taking grace; The fuchsia fans her fairy chandclry, And flowering current crimsons the green gloom; The pansies, pretty little puritans, Come peering up with merry, elvish eyes; At summer's call the lily is alight; Wallflowers in fragrance burn themselves away With the sweet season on her precious pyre; Pure passionate aromas of the rose, And purple perfume of the hyacinth, Come like a color through the golden day." There is much of Keats in this passage, and yet Keats was not in the mind of the writer: the similarity of result is an effect, evidently, not of imitation, but of a similarity THE POESY OP INTELLECT AND FANCY. 455 of genius. The following passage, much in the same vein, has been greatly criticized, and yet none but a true poet could have produced it. It is a remarkable picture of a remarkable man, with points about it which might easily be laid hold of in a mocking spirit, but which impart not a little of its character and individuality to the portrait. We quote from the second edition : " We gathered all within the house, and there Shook off the purple silence of the night. Cried one, Come, let us a symposium hold, And each one to the banquet bring their best In song or story : all shall play a part. So, for a leader simple and grand, we chose Our miracle-worker in midwifery, he Who wrestled with the fiend of corporal pain, And stands above the writhing agony Like Michael with the dragon 'neath his heel; Who is in soul Love riding on a lion; In body, a Bacchus crowned with the head of Jove : The keen life looks out in his lighted face So fulgent, that the gazer brightens too; He bravely towers above our fume and fret, Like the old hills, whose feet are in the surge, And on their lifted brows the eternal calm; For he is one of those prophetic spirits That, ere the world's night, dreams of things to come." There may be faults here, as the reviewers suggest, nay, it may be all fault; but it certainly does remind us of those aberrations of genius specially described by the poet as "glorious faults, that critics dare not mend." In illus- tration of the lyrical spirit and deep tenderness of Mr. Massey, we give the following extracts from a series of simple triplets on the death of a beloved child : " Within a mile of Edinburgh town We laid our little darling down, \j^ Our first seed in " God's acre " sown. "The city looketh solemn and sweet; It bares a gentle brow to greet The mourners mourning at its feet. 456 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. "The sea of human life breaks round This shore o' the dead with softened sound; Wild flowers climb each mossy mound To place in resting hands their palm, And breathe their beauty, bloom, and balm, Folding the dead in fragrant calm. * * * * " Lone mother, at the dark grave-door She kneeleth, pleading o'er and o'er; But it is shut for evermore. " She toileth on the mournfulest thing At the vain task of emptying The cistern where the salt tears spring. * * * "The spirit of life may leap above, But in that grave her prisoned dove Lies cold to th' warm embrace of love; " And dark though all the world is bright, And lonely with a city in sight, And desolate in the rainy night. "Ah, Godl when in the glad life-cup The face of Death swims darkly up, The crowning flower is sure to droop! " And so we laid our darling down, When summer's cheek grew ripely brown; And still, though grief has milder grown, Unto the stranger's land we cleave, Like some poor birds that grieve and grieve Bound the robbed nest, so loth to leave." There are one or two obscurities of figure here that crave a second thought to unlock them ; but nothing can be more sadly tender than the whole, and there is poetry in every stanza. Gerald Massey is still a young man, and much of his time in the past must have been spent in shaking off the stiff soil that clogs round for a time the thoughts and expres- sions of untutored genius. A man still under thirty, who never attended any school save a penny one for a brief period, and who at eight years of age was sent to toil in a THE UNTAUGHT POKTS. 457 silk manufactory from five o'clock in the morning till half- past six at night, may well be regarded as still but partially developed ; and we are convinced the world has not yet seen his best. He has but to give his intellect as full scope as his fancy and imagination, and to bestow upon his pieces that elaboration and care which high excellence demands from even the happiest genius, in order to become one of the enduring lights of British song. XI. THE UNTAUGHT POETS. In more than one respect the untaught poets of England have fared better than those of our own country. In the first place, Southey, perhaps the raciest English writer of his day, wrote their history, and made not a few of them known who had succeeded but indifferently in making known themselves ; and in the second, we find from his nar- ratives that, with few exceptions, their poetry served them as a sort of stepping-stone, by which they escaped upwards from the condition of hard labor and obscurity, to which they seemed born, into a sphere of comparative affluence and comfort. For one of the first of their number, John Taylor, the "Water Poet," a man who was certainly not a water-poet in the teetotal sense, nothing could have been done. He was a bold, rough, roystering fellow, quite as famous for his feats and wagers as for his rhymes. On one occasion he navigated his cockle-shell of a wherry all the way from London Bridge to York ; on another, he rowed it across the German Sea from London to Ham- burg; on yet another, in 1618, he undertook to travel from London to Edinburgh, and thence into the Highlands, 39 458 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. u not carrying money to or fro, neither begging, borrowing, nor asking meat, drink, or lodging; " and what he under- took to do he did, and bequeathed to us, in his history of his " Pennyless Pilgrimage," the best account extant of hunting in the Highlands by the " Tinckhell," and of the " wolves and wild horses " which, at even that compara- tively recent period, abounded in the ruder districts of Scotland. It would have been scarce possible to elevate such a man, even had a very generous patronage been the order of the age ; but Taylor had all his days enough to eat and drink, and died the keeper of a thriving public house, much frequented, during the times of the Common- wealth, by the cavaliers. And no sooner did men of this class arise, to whom a judicious patronage could be ex* tended, than they were admitted to its benefits. Stephen Dick, the " Thresher," was rather a small poet, but he was an amiable and conscientious man ; and, mainly through the exertions of the Rev. Mr. Spence, Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford, he obtained orders in the English Church, and was preferred to a not uncomfortable living. Dodsley, still known by his " King and Miller of Mansfield," was elevated, through the exercise of a genial patronage, from his original place as a table-boy, to be one of the most respectable London booksellers of his day, a man whose name still imparts a recognizable bibliograph- ical value to the works to which it is attached. The shoe- maker Woodhouse, and the tobacco-pipe-maker Bryant, were also fortunate in their patrons ; Gilford was eminently so; all seems to have been done for Ann Yearsley, the poeti- cal milkwoman, that her own unhappy temper allowed ; and in our own times, John Clare was kindly and liberally dealt with ; though not more in his case than in that of his predecessor Duck could the degree of favor with which he was treated ward off the cruel mental malady that darkened his latter years. With, in short, the exception of one of the best, and in every respect most meritorious and deserving of the class, poor Robert Bloomfield, who THE UNTAUGHT POETS. 459 was suffered to die in great poverty, we know not a single untaught English poet who gave evidence of the possession of the true faculty, however narrow its scope, and had at the same time character enough to be capable of being benefited by a liberal patronage, that failed to re- ceive the encouragement which he deserved. And we find Southey laying down very admirably, in combating a remark of the elder Sheridan, whom he terms an ill- natured, perverse man, the generous principle on which this had been done. " Wonder," says the author of the first " Pronouncing Dictionary," a man whom the greater lexicographer, Johnson, described as not only nat- urally dull, but as also rendered, through dint of immense effort on his own part, vastly duller than nature had made him, " wonder, usually accompanied by a bad taste, looks only for what is uncommon ; and if a work comes out under the name of a thresher, a bricklayer, a milkwo- man, or a lord, it is sure to be eagerly sought after by the million." " Persons of quality," remarks the poet-laureate, " require no defence when they appear as authors in these days ; and, indeed, as mean a spirit may be shown in tra- ducing a book because it is written by a lord, as in extolling it beyond its deserts for the same reason. But when we are told that the thresher,. the milkwoman, and the tobac- co-pipe-maker did not deserve the patronage they found, when it is laid down as a maxim of philosophical criti- cism that poetry ought never to be encouraged unless it is excellent in its kind ; that it is an art in which infe- rior execution is not to be tolerated, a luxury, and must therefore be rejected unless it is of the very best, such reasoning may be addressed with success to cockered and sickly intellects, but it will never impose upon a healthy understanding, a generous spirit, or a good man. .... If the poet be a good and amiable man," continues Southey, " he will be both the better and the happier for writing verses. ' Poetry,' says Landon, ' opens many sources of tenderness that lie forever in the rock without 460 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. it The. benevolent persons who patronized Stephen Duck did it, not with the hope of rearing a great poet, but for the sake of placing a worthy man in a station more suited to his intellectual endowments than that in which he was born. Bryant was befriended in a manner not dissimilar, for the same reason. In the case of Wood- house and Ann Yearsley the intention was to better their condition in their own way of life. And the Woodstock shoemaker was chiefly indebted for the patronage which he received to Thomas Warton's good nature ; for my predecessor Warton was the best-natured man that ever wore such a wig." There is the true English generosity of sentiment here, a generosity which, in such well-known cases as that of Henry Kirke White and John Jones, was actually exemplified by Southey himself; and his remark regarding the humanizing influence of poesy on even its humbler cultivators will scarce fail to remind some of our readers of the still happier one which our countryman Mackenzie puts into the mouth of " old Ben Silton." "There is at least," said the stranger, "one advantage in the poetical inclination, that is an incentive to philan- thropy. There is a certain poetic ground on which a man cannot tread without feelings that enlarge the heart. The causes of human depravity vanish before the romantic en- thusiasm he professes ; and many who are not able to reach the Parnassian heights may yet approach so near as to be bettered by the air of the climate." The untaught poets of Scotland have fared much more hardly than those of the sister country. Some of them forced their way through life simply as energetic, vigorous men. Allan Ramsay throve as a tradesman, and built for himself a house in Edinburgh, which continues to attract the eye of the stranger by its picturesqueness, and which few literary men of the present day could afford to pur- chase. And Falconer, though he died a sailor's death in the full vigor of his prime, had first risen from the fore- castle to the quarter-deck as a bold and skilful seaman. THE UNTAUGHT POETS. 461 Allan Cunningham, too, made his way good as a hard- working business man. But, if unable to help themselves after the manner of Falconer, Cunningham, and Ramsay, the untaught poets of Scotland received but little help from the patronage of their countrymen. The aristocracy of Scotland made Burns a gauger, and employed one of the noblest intellects which his country ever produced in u searching," as he himself in bitter mirth expressed it, " auld wives' barrels." And neither Alexander Wilson nor poor Tannahill ever received even the miserable measure of patronage that gave Burns seventy pounds a year, and demanded, in return, that he should waste three fourths of his time in a half-reputable and uncongenial employ- ment. Poor Tannahill, the harmless, the gentle, the affec- tionate, was left to perish unhappily when he was but little turned of thirty ; and Wilson, a stronger, though not a finer spirit, quitted his country in disgust, and made himself an enduring fame in the United States as a nat- uralist, by the great work which Prince Charles Lucien Bonaparte did not disdain to complete. We cannot point to a single untaught poet in the literary history of our country that ever enjoyed a pension. Pensions were re- served for the friends and relatives of the statesmen to whom Toryism in Edinburgh and elsewhere built senseless columns. But though the untaught poets of Scotland fared thus differently from those of England, it was cer- tainly not because they deserved less. On the contrary, if we except Shakspeare, one of those extraordinary minds that, according to Johnson, "bid help and hinder- ance alike vanish before them," our untaught Scotchmen have been men of larger calibre, and greater masters of the lyre, than the corresponding class in England. Pass- ing over the John Taylors and Ned Wards as deserving of no special remark, we would stake Ramsay with his " Gentle Shepherd " against his brother poet and brother bookseller Dodsley with his " Miller of Mansfield " and his " Toy Shop," taking odds nf ten to one any day ; Bloom- 39* 462 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. field, though a worthy personage, and possessed of the true faculty, was a small man compared with Robert Burns ; and the Ducks, Woodhouses, Bryants, and Ben- nets were slim and stunted of stature compared with the Falconers, Tannahills, Wilsons, Allan Cunninghams, and Hoggs. In this, as in other walks, though English genius of the highest class takes the first place in the literature of the world, its genius of the second class fails to equal second-class genius in Scotland. There have been poets among our countrymen whose lives no one thinks of writ- ing, and whose verses have failed to attract any very large share of notice who possessed powers greatly superior to most of the authors enumerated by Southey in his Essay on the Uneducated Poets, and who, had they written in England, would have been extensively known. To one of these, still among us, we find pleasing reference made in the correspondence of Jeffrey. " The greater part of your poems," we find him saying, in a note to the self- taught poet Alexander Maclagan, " I have perused with singular gratification. I can remember when the appear- ance of such a work would have produced a great sensa- tion, and secured to its author both distinction and more solid advantages." And in another note, written in ref- erence chiefly to a second and enlarged edition of Mr. Maclagan's poems, and which occurs in the volume of " Correspondence," edited by Lord Cockburn, we find the distinguished critic specifying the pieces which pleased him most. "I have already," says his lordship, "read all [the poems] on the slips, and think them, on the whole, fully equal to those in the former volume. I am most pleased, I believe, with that which you have entitled 'Sisters' Love,' which is at once very touching, very graphic, and very elegant. Your ' Summer Sketches ' have beautiful passages in all of them, and a pervading joyousness and kindliness of feeling, as well as a vein of grateful devotion, which must recommend them to all good minds. The Scorched Flowers,' I thought the most picturesque." THE UNTAUGHT POETS. 463 We have read over Mr. Maclagan's works, both the volume of poems which so gratified the taste of Jeffrey, 1 and an equally pleasing volume, of subsequent appearance, dedicated to the Rev. Dr. Guthrie, and devoted to the cause of ragged schools. 2 The general strain of both is equally pleasing ; though we know not whether we do not prefer the simplicity and pathos of some of the " Ragged School Rhymes" to even those compositions of the earlier volume on which Jeffrey has stamped his imprimatur. Let us, however, ere quoting from the latter work, submit to the reader a few stanzas of the piece which most pleased the critic. It is a younger sister that thus addresses in strains that, for their quaint beauty, remind us of some of the happier pieces of Marvell a sister older than her- self, but still young, that had been to her, in her state of orphanage, as a mother. " Lo ! whilst I fondly look upon Thy lovely face, drinking the tone Of thy sweet voice, my early known, My long, long loved, my dearest grown, I feel thou art A joy, a part Of all I prize in soul and heart. " Sweet guardian of my infancy, Hast thou not been the blooming tree Whose soft green branches sheltered me From withering want's inclemency? No cloud of care Nor bleak despair Could blight me 'ncath thy branches fair. " And thou hast been, since that sad day We gave our mother's clay to clay, The morning star, the evening ray, That cheered me on life's weary way, A vision bright, Filling my night Of sorrow with thy looks of light. I Sketches from Nature, and other Poems. By Alexander Maclagan. 1 Ragged School Rhymes. By Alexander Maclagan. 464 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. " Yet there were hours I'll ne'er forget Ere sorrow and thy soul had met, Ere thy young cheeks with tears were wet, Or grief's pale seal was on them set, Ere hope declined, And cares unkind Threw sadness o'er thy sunny mind. " In glorious visions still I see The village green, the old oak tree, The sun-bathed banks where oft with thee I've hunted for the blaeberrie, Where oft we crept, And sighed and wept, Where our dead linnet soundly slept. " Again I see the rustic chair In which you swung me through sweet air, Or twined fair lilies with my hair, Or dressed my little doll with care; In fancy's sight Still rise its bright Blue beads, red shoes, and boddice white. *' And at the sunsets in the west, And at my joy when gently prest To the soft pillow of thy breast, Lulled by thy mellow voice to rest, Sung into dreams Of woods and streams, Of lovely buds, and birds, and beams. ** When wintry tempests swept the vale, When thunder and the heavy hail And lightning turned each young cheek pale, Thine ever was the Bible tale Or psalmist's song The wild night long, Fresh from the heart where faith is strong. " Now summer clouds, like golden towers, Fall shattered into diamond showers : Come, let us seek our wildwood bowers, And lay our heads among the flowers; Come, sister dear, That we may hear Our mother's spirit whispering near." THE UNTAUGHT POETS. 465 These stanzas are, as the great Scotch critic well re- marked, at once "touching," "graphic," and "elegant," and certainly exhibit no trace of what Johnson well terms the " narrow conversation " to which untaught men in humble circumstances " are inevitably condemned." But regarding the difficulties with which Mr. Maclagan has had to contend, we must quote from himself : " That a working-man," we find him saying, "should write and publish a volume of verse, is no phenomenon : many of the brightest lights of literature in all countries have toiled for years at the press, the plough, the loom, and the ham- mer. That wealth and education in themselves have never made a true minstrel, is proverbial ; nevertheless, they are powerful allies in his favor. Take, for instance, a youth from school, ten years of age, and bind him at thirteen or fourteen to a laborious trade. See him work- ing ten hours a day for years without, intermission, strug- gling to unravel, meanwhile, the mysteries of literature, science, and art, without assistance or encouragement, and you will find that he has many hard battles to fight before he can hope to attain even standing-room in the literary arena. Such, literally, has been the position of the author of the present volume." Let us remark, however, that untaught men possessed of the true poetic faculty are usually, in one important respect, happier in their genius than untaught men whose intellect is of the reflective cast, and their bent scientific. The poets are developed much earlier, and lose less in life. Ramsay began to publish his poems, in detached broad-sheets, in his five-and-twentieth year ; Burns in his twenty-sixth year had written the greater part of his Kilmarnock volume, including his " Twa Dogs," " Halloween," and the " Cottar's Saturday Night ; " Alexander Wilson produced his " Watty and Meg " at the same age ; and the writings of both Tannahill and Allan Cunningham saw the light ere either writer was turned of thirty. But self-taught men of science have usually to undergo a much longer probationary period ere they can 466 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. elevate themselves into notice. James Ferguson wa9 nearly forty before he began to give public lectures on his favorite subjects, astronomy and mechanics. Franklin was in his forty-third year ere he had demonstrated the iden- tity of lightning with the electric spark ; and not until he had attained the same age did Sir William Herschel render himself known as a great astronomer and the discoverer of a new planet. Both in national and individual history, poetry is of early and science of late growth. The self- taught poet is not unfrequently developed at as early an age as men of a similar cast of genius who have enjoyed all the advantages of complete culture; judging from the experience of the past, he need not lose a single year of life ; whereas the self-taught man of science may deem himself more than usually fortunate if he does not lose at least ten. We have said that in some respects we prefer Mr. Mac- lagan's second publication, the " Ragged School Rhymes," to his first. It is, in the main, a more earnest, and, in the poetic sense, more truthful work. When the poet, in his earlier volume, sings, as he does at times, though rarely, of drinking " cronies " and usages, we know that he is catching but the dying echoes of a bypast time, when there was not a little staggering on the top of Parnassus, and Helicon used to run at times, like a town cistern on an election day, whiskey punch by the hour. But there is none of this in the other volume. The distress which it exhibits, the sympathy which it expresses, the views of nature which it embodies, are all realities of the present day. The earlier volume, however, contains more think- ing ; and the possession of both are necessary to the man desirous of rightly appreciating the untaught poet Mac- lagan. We find some little difficulty in selecting from the "Ragged School Rhymes" an appropriate specimen, not from the poverty, but from the wealth, of the volume. We fix, however, on the following, as suited to remind the reader of that passage in one of the larger poems of THE UNTAUGHT POETS. 467 Langhorne which, according to Sir Walter Scott, power- fully elicited the sympathy of Burns, though we are pretty certain Mr. Maclagan had not the passage in his eye when he wrote. Indeed, the latter part of his poem could have been written in only the present age : THE OUTCAST. " And did you pity me, kind sir? Say, did you pity me? Then, oh how kind, and oh how warm, Your generous heart must be! For I have fasted all the day, Ay, nearly fasted three, And slept upon the cold, hard earth, And none to pity me; And none to pity me, kind sir, And none to pity me. " My mother told me I was born On a battlefield in Spain, Where mighty men like lions fought, Where blood ran down like rain ! And how she wept, with bursting heart, My father's corse to see, When I lay cradled 'mong the dead, And none to pity me; And none to pity me, kind sir, And none to pity me. " At length there came a dreadful day, - My mother too lay dead, And I was sent to England's shore To beg my daily bread, To beg my bread; but cruel men Said, Boy, this may not be, So they locked me in a cold, cold cell, And none to pity me ; And none to pity me, kind sir, And none to pity me. 468 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. "They whipped me, sent me hungry forth; I saw a lovely field Of fragrant beans ; I plucked, I ate : To hunger all must yield. The farmer came, a cold, a stern, A cruel man was he; He sent me as a thief to jail, And none to pity me; And none to pity me, kind sir, And none to pity me. " It was a blessed place for me, For I had better fare ; It was a blessed place for me, Sweet was the evening prayer. At length they drew my prison bolts, And I again was free, Poor, weak, and naked in the street, And none to pity me; And none to pity me, kind sir, And none to pity me. " I saw sweet children in the fields, And fair ones in the street, And some were eating tempting fruit, And some got kisses sweet; And some were in their father's arms, Some on their mother's knee; I thought my orphan heart would break. For none did pity me; For none did pity me, kind sir, For none did pity me. " Then do you pity me, kind sir? Then do you pity me? Then, oh how kind, and oh how warm, Your generous heart must be! For I have fasted all the day, Ay, nearly fasted three, And slept upon the cold, hard ground, And none to pity me; And none to pity me, kind sir, And none to pity me." .OUR NOVEL LITERATURE. 469 XII. OUR NOVEL LITERATURE. What are the most influential writings of the present time, the writings that tell with most effect on public opinion ? Not, certainly, the graver or more eleaborate productions of the press. Some of these in former times exerted a prodigious influence. There were four great works, in especial, that appeared at wide intervals during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the last of their number about eighty years ago, that revolutionized, on their respective subjects, the thinking of all Europe ; and these were, the "Laws of Peace and War," the " Essay on the Human Understanding," the " Spirit of Laws," and the " Wealth of Nations," all works of profound elabo- ration, that contain the thinking of volumes condensed into single pages. At an earlier period there were theological works that stirred men's minds to their utmost depths, and changed the political relations of states and kingdoms over all Christendom. Such was the influence exerted by the treatises of Luther, whose written " words were half- battles ; " and by those " Institutes of Calvin " that gave form and body to the thinking of half the religious world. But whether it be that we live in an age too superficial to produce, or too busy too read, such works, or at once su- perficial and busy both, without either the works to read or the time to read them in, it is certain that almost all power has passed away from the grave and the elaborate to the light and the clever, and that what would have been pronounced about a century ago the least influential kinds of writing must now be recognized as by far the most influential. Had one said to a literary man in the 40 470 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. early days of Johnson, " Pray, what do you regard as the least important departments of your literature, both in themselves and their effects, and that tell least on the public mind ? " the reply would probably have been, " Why, the writing in our newspapers and our novels." And now the same reply would serve at least equally well to indicate the kinds of writing that are most telling and influential. None others exert so great a power over the general mind of the community as novels and newspaper articles. And the mode of piecemeal publication recently resorted to by our more popular novelists gives to the effect proper to their compositions as pictures of great genius and power the further effect of pamphlets or mag- azines: they are at once novels and newspaper articles too. Considerably more than a century has passed, however, since a judicious critic might have seen how very influ- ential a class of compositions well-written novels were to become. "The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe" appeared as far back as the year 1719, and at once rose to the popularity which it has ever since maintained. But it failed to attract the notice of the critics. The men who sat in judgment on the small elegances of the wits of the reign of George I., and marked how sentences were bal- anced and couplets rounded, could not stoop to notice a composition so humble as a novel, more especially a novel written by a self-taught man. But his singularly vivacious production forced a way for itself, leaving the fine sen- tences and smart couplets to be forgotten. In a short time it was known all over Europe ; several translations appeared simultaneously in France, much about the period when Le Sage was engaged in writing, in one of the smaller houses of one of the most neglected suburbs of Paris, his Cil Bias " and his Devil on Two Sticks ; " and such was the rage of imitation which it excited in Germany, that no fewer than forty-one German novels were produced that had Robinson Crusoes for their heroes, OUR NOVEL LITERATURE. 471 arid fifteen others, that, though equally palpable imitations, had heroes that bore a different name. Eight years after the publication of Defoe's great work, there appeared an English novel of a more extraordinary form, and of higher literary pretensions, in the " Travels of Gulliver ; " and it too at once attained to a popularity which has never since flagged or diminished. Thirteen years more elapsed, and Richardson had produced his "Pamela," and, shortly after, Fielding his " Joseph Andrews." Smollett came upon the scene with his " Roderick Random " in eight years more. There followed in succession, after the lapse of about ten other years, the " Rasselas " of Johnson and the " Candide " of Voltaire, both works which spread over the world ; and in yet seven other years Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wake- field " appeared, and attained to even a more extensive popularity than either. And yet still, after the teaching of nearly half a century, nay, after nearly two centuries had elapsed since a novel was recognized as the most pop- ular and influential of all the works ever produced by Spain, grave and serious people continued to speak of novels as mere frivolities, that were to be in every case eschewed by the young, but were scarce of importance enough to be heeded by the old at all. Nor even yet, after the novels of Scott have, if we may so express our- selves, taken possession of the world, after the most po- tent work of Germany, the " Wilhelm Meister" of Goethe, has appeared, like that of Spain, in the form of a novel, after the modern novels of France have been measuring lances with even its priesthood, and approving themselves, in at least the larger towns, the mightier power of the two, and after, in our own country, it has been accepted altogether as a marvel that history, in the case of Macau- lay's, should have its thirty thousand subscriber's, but as quite an expected and ordinary thing that fiction, in Dick- ens's current work, should have at least an equal number, the old estimate in the minds of many has been suffered to remain uncorrected, and the novel is thought of rather 472 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. as a light, though not always very laudable toy, than as a tremendously potent instrument for the origination or the revolutionizing of opinion. Some of our great lawyers could make sharp speeches, about two years ago, against what they termed the misrepresentations of "Bleak House," evidently regarding it, as they well might, as the most formidable series of pamphlets against the abuses of chancery, and the less justifiable practices of the legal profession, that ever appeared. We are by no means sure, however, that the church is as thoroughly awake to the tendencies of his present work as members of the legal faculty, wise in their generation, were to the design of his last. Most of the novelists have been hostile to virtue of a high or severe kind in general; and there were few of eminence produced in our own country that did not leave on record their dislike of evangelism in particular. We are afraid Byron was in the right in holding that Cervantes laughed away the chivalry of Spain : Spain produced no he- roes after the age of Don Quixote. As for Le Sage, Vinet is at least as just in his criticism as Byron in his, when he says that "his novels do not contain a single honest char- acter, nothing but knaves and weaklings, and even the very weaklings are far from being honest." "In a word," we find the critic again remarking, " Gil Bias ' is but a paraphrase of the celebrated maxim of Rochefoucauld, ' Virtue is only a word ; it is nowhere found on the earth ; and we must be resigned." Most of the modern novelists of France stand on a still lower level than that of their great master, Le Sage. He did not inculcate virtue, and they teach positive vice. Nor is Goethe a safer guide. The "Sorrows of Werter" and "Wilhelm Meister's Ap- prenticeship" are both very mischievous books. The nov- elists of our own country have been more mixed in their character. Defoe we must regard as, with all his faults, a well-meaning man, who had been an object of persecution himself, and had learned to sympathize with the persecu- OUR NOVEL LITERATURE. 473 ted. The Scotch were very angry with him for the part he took in the Union ; but that did not prevent his doing justice, in his history, to their long struggles for ecclesias- tical independence ; and religion never conies across him in his novels, some of them quite loose enough, but he has always a good word to say in its behalf. He was no very profound theologian : Friday, in the dialogue parts of " Crusoe," is nearly as subtle a divine as his master ; and when poor Olivia Primrose instances, as a proof of her large acquirements in controversy and her consequent abil- ity of converting 'Squire Thornhill, that she had read all the " Religious Courtship," another of Defoe's works, we at once agree that the worthy doctor, her father, did quite right in sending her off to "help her mother in making the gooseberry pie." Swift, clergyman as he was, mani- fested, however, a very different spirit from that of Defoe : in proportion as he knew more he reverenced less ; and there is perhaps nothing in our literature more essentially profane than his essay on the " Mechanical Operation of the Spirit," and his " Tale of a Tub." Richardson, no doubt, deemed himself a friend to virtue and religion. He patronized both after a sort, and many good ladies and clergymen were moved, in consequence, to patronize him ; and yet, as Vinet pointedly says of the general literature of France in that age, his " very morality was in fact im- moral." We know not whether we would not give " Tom Jones" as readily into the hands of a young person as the virtuously written " Pamela." There is more of a whole- some, generous, unselfish spirit about the scapegrace, than in the demure, designing girl, who, after behaving herself well for a time, sets her cap to catch her master, and is at length rewarded with a fine house, a fine coach, and Mr. Booby. And yet Fielding, like his hero, was a sad scape- grace. He had a respect for what he deemed religion. We see it in his novels even. Of the few thoroughly honest men he ever drew, and, unlike Le Sage, he did occasionally draw honest men, two are clergymen, 40* 474 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. Dr. Harrison in " Amelia," and the world-renowned Parson Adams in "Joseph Andrews;" and both are represented, though in the case of the latter with many a ludicrous accompaniment, as at least as good and sincere Christians as Fielding could make them. Nay, curiously enough, one of the novelist's last works, a work which he did not live to finish, was a defense of religion against Bolingbroke, and a very ingenious one. But alas for a Christianity such as that of Whitefield when it came across him ! If the devoted missionary could have been annoyed by any- thing, it would have been by the ruthless humor with which his brother and his brother's wife are introduced by name into " Tom Jones," as the landlord and landlady of the Bell public house in Gloucester ; and the terms in which the lady is spoken of as " a very sensible person," who, though at first the preacher's "documents" made so much impression on her " that she put herself to the ex- pense of a long hood in order to attend the extraordinary movements of the Spirit," got tired of emotions, " which proved to be not worth a farthing," and at once " laid by the hood, and abandoned the sect." Smollett was of a similar spirit. We know nothing better on the subject in our language than the essay in which he argues against Shaftesbury that ridicule is not the test of truth ; but no little ridicule does he himself heap on Methodism in his " Humphrey Clinker." There is no bitterness in his exhibition ; his untaught Methodist preacher is not a disagreeable fool, like the Rev. Mr. Chad- band, or a greedy rogue, like the Methodist preacher in " Pickwick," whom old Weller treats to a ducking ; but, on the contrary, a thoroughly honest fellow, and, in his own proper sphere, a sensible and useful one. He is, in short, no other than the faithful Clinker himself. But he never associates religion of any earnestness save with characters of humble parts and acquirements, and always accompanied with points of extreme ludicrousness. Gold- smith was of a more genial temperament than Smollett. OUR NOVEL LITERATURE. 475 His Vicar is one of the most thoroughly honest men that ever lived, and has all the religion that poor Goldie could give him. It was not until a later time, however, and in Scotland too, for we need not reckon on the now forgotten novel of Mrs. Hannah More, that religious characters were most largely introduced into our novel literature. Scott, Lockhart, Wilson, Gait, Ferrier, have all brought religion in review before the public in their novels, some of them with great power, some with con- siderable truth, some with truth and with power too ; and at least one novelist of considerable ability, the excellent authoress of " Father Clement," made it her leading sub- ject. They all at least knew more of religion than the earlier novelists; and, save when carried away, as in the case of Scott, by Jacobite predilections, or in that of Lock- hart, by moderate ones, did it more justice. Even in some of Scott's pictures there is wonderful truth. The few words in which poor Nanty Ewart is made, in his remorse, to describe his father, are those of a great master of char- acter. "There was my father (God bless the old man !), a true chip of the old Presbyterian block, walked his parish like a captain on the quarter-deck, and was always ready to do good to rich and poor. Off went the laird's hat to the minister as fast as the poor man's bonnet. When the eye saw him, Pshaw ! what have I to do with that now? Yes, he was, as Virgil hath it, ' Vir sapientia et pietate gravis? " Still more distinctive is he, however, when he speaks of him in connection with two charitable ladies of the Roman Catholic Church. " These Misses Arthciret," says Nanty, " feed the hungry and clothe the naked, and such like acts, which, my poor father used to say, were filthy rags / but he dressed himself out with as many of them as most folk." There is not such a stroke as this in all Dickens. The writer who could draw such a feature with a single dash of the pencil well knew what he was about. But it would be easy to multiply remarks such as these 476 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. on the novelists. The fact of their mighty influence on opinion cannot, we think, be challenged ; and so it is of great importance that the influence should be a good one, or at least so far negatively good as not to be hurtful. We are aware that there are very excellent people who would altogether taboo this class of works ; they would fain render them the subject of a sort of Maine law, make the open perusal of them unlawful, and severely punish all smuggling. But their attempts hitherto have been at- tended with but miserable success. We have often had occasion to know, that, even among their own children, they succeeded w T ith only the very stupid ones, who have no turn for reading; and that model-grown men or women of their training, ignorant of our novel literature, are usu- ally scarce less ignorant of literature of any other kind, and yet not a whit better than their neighbors. Besides, even were the case otherwise, even were they to be really successful in their own little spheres, the great fact of the influence and popularity of the genuine novel would still remain untouched. Dickens would have his thirty thousand subscribers for every new work, and at least his half million of readers ; and the proprietor of the Scott novels would continue to sell sixty thousand volumes yearly. Further, the novel per se, the novel regarded sim- ply as a literary form, is morally as unexceptionable as any other literary form whatever, as unexceptionable as the epic poem, for instance, or the allegory, or the parable. The "Vicar of Wakefield," as a form, is as little blamable as the " Deserted Village," or " Waverley " as " Marmion " or the " Lay of the Last Minstrel." And so we must hold, that, on every occasion in which the form is made the ve- hicle of truth, truth of external nature, truth of character, historic truth in at least its essence, and ethical truth in its bearings on the great problem of society, it should be received with merited favor, not frowned upon or rejected. We have been much pleased, on this principle, with the novels of a writer to whom we ought to have OUR NOVEL LITERATURE. 477 referred approvingly long ago, the authoress of " Mrs. Margaret Maitland," one of the most thoroughly truth- ful writers of her class, and one of the most pleasing also. We have now before us what may be regarded as a contin- uation of her first work, in " Lilliesleaf," a concluding series of passages in the life of " Mrs. Margaret Maitland." It is, of course, a formidable matter to introduce a second time to the public any character that had on its first ap- pearance engaged and interested it. Shakspeare could do it with impunity. Falstaff, on even his third appearance, an appearance, however, which, had the great dramatist been left to himself, he would never have made, is Fal- staff still. But even Scott has been but partially success- ful in an attempt of the kind. The Cceur de Lion of the " Talisman " is not at all so interesting a personage as the Cceur de Lion of " Ivanhoe." And so we took up these new volumes with some little solicitude regarding Mrs. Margaret. The old lady has, however, acquitted herself admirably, in some passages more admirably, we will venture to say, in the face of an opposite opinion which we have seen elsewhere expressed, than on her first ap- pearance. In the early part of the first volume we were, indeed, sensible of an air of languor, and the narrative moved on too slowly, Mrs. Maitland seemed to have grown greatly older than when we had last seen her ; though even in this part of the work we found some very admirable things, among the rest, a true life-picture of the ancient dowager lady of Lilliesleaf, with her broken health and failed understanding, ever carping and fault-finding; and, while beyond the reach of all advice herself, always obtruding her^ worse than useless advices on other people, who did not want them, and could not take them, and had no need of them. As the work goes on, however, the interest increases ; there are new characters introduced, truthful glimpses of the Scotch people given, the incidents thicken, and the narrative, though always quiet, as becomes the grave and gentle narrator, gathers headway, and grows 478 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. more rapid, We know few things more masterly than the character of Rhoda, a wild, clever, ill-taught girl, brought up by a reckless, extravagant father, who, after utterly neglecting her himself, introduces her into the house of her half-sister, an excellent but somewhat proud and cold woman, who evinces but little sympathy for her provoking and haughty but very unhappy relation. Mrs. Margaret, however, after encountering many a rebuff, at length wins her; and there are few things finer in our novel literature than the scene in which she does so : M As I was going to my bed, I tarried in the long gallery, where Miss Rhoda's door opened into, to look at the bonnie harvest moon mounting in the sky, the which was so bright upon the fields and the garden below the window, that I could not pass it by without turn- ing aside to glance upon the grand skies,, and the warm earth with all routh and plenty yet upon her breast, that were both the handi- work of the Lord. I had put my candle upon a table at the door of my own room; and as I was standing here, I heard a sound of crying and wailing out of Miss Rhoda's room. It was not loud, but for all that it was very bitter, as if the poor bairn was breaking her heart. Now, truly, when I heard that, I never took two thoughts about it, nor tarried to ponder whether I would be welcome to her or no ; but hearing that it was her voice, and that she was in distress, I straightway turned and rapped at the door. " The voice stoppit in a moment ; so quick I scarce could think it was real ; and then I heard a rustling and motion in the room. I thought she might be feared, seeing it was late ; so I said, ' It is me, my dear ; will you let me speak to you ? ' It was all quiet for a moment more, and then the door was opened in an impatient way, and I entered in. Rhoda was there, turning her back upon me ; and there was no light but the moonlight, which made the big room, eerie though it was, so clear that you could have read a book. The curtains of the bed were drawn close, as Cecy had drawn them when she sorted the room for the young lady, and Rhoda's things were lying about on the chairs ; and through the open door of the small room that was within there was another eerie glint of the white moonlight ; and pale shadows of it, that, truly, I liked not to look upon, were in the big mirror that stood near. It was far OUR NOVEL LITERATURE. 479 from pleasant to me, and I was like to be less moved by fancy than a young thing like Rhoda, the look this room had. " ' My dear bairn,' said I, being more earnest than I ever was with her before, ' will you let me hear what ails you ? I ken what trouble is myself; and many a young thing has told her trouble to me. And you are lone and solitary and motherless, my poor bairn ; and I am an aged woman, and would fain bring you comfort if it was in my power. Sit down here, and keep no ill thought in your heart of me ; for I ken what it is to be solitary and without friends mysel.' " " She stood awhile, and would not mind what I said, nor the hand I put upon her arm. And then she suddenly fell down upon her knees in a violent way, and laid her face upon the sofa, and cried. Truly, I kent not of such tears. I have shed heavy ones, and have seen them shed ; but I kent not aught like the passion and anger and fierceness of this. " ' I can't tell you what grieves me,' she said, starting up, and speaking in her quick way, that was so strange to me, ' a hundred thousand things everything ! I should like to go and kill myself I should like to be tortured oh I anything anything rather than this ! ' " ' My dear, is it yourself you are battling with ? ' said I ; 'for that is a good warfare, and the Lord will help you if you try it aright. But if it is not yourself, what is it, my bairn ? ' " She flung away out of my hand, and ran about the room like a wild thing. Then she came, quite steady and quiet, back again. ' Yes,' she said, ' I suppose it is myself I am fighting with. I am a wild beast, or something like it ; and I am biting at my cage. I wish you would beat me, or hurt me, will you ? I should like to be ill, or have a fever, or something to put me in great pain. For you are a good old lady, I know, though I have been very rude to you. No, I am sure I cannot tell you what grieves me ; for I cannot fight with you. It is all papa's fault, that is what it is ! He persuaded me that people would pay attention to me here. But I am nobody here, nobody even takes the trouble to be angry with me 1 And I cannot hate you all, either, though I wish I could. Oh ! old lady, go away ! ' " ' Na, Miss Rhoda,' said I ; ' I am not going away.' " ' That ridiculous Scotch, too ! ' cried out the poor bairn, with a sound that was meant for laughter. * But I can't laugh at it ; and sometimes I want to be friends with you. How do you know that I 480 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. never had a mother ? for it is quite true I never had one, never from the first day I was in the world. And I love papa with my whole heart, though he is not good to me ; and I hate every one that hates him ; and I will not consent to live as you live here, however good you may pretend to be.' " ' But, Miss Rhoda,' said I, what ails you at the way we live here ? ' " ' It is not living at all,' said the poor bairn. * I never can do anything very well when I try ; but I always want to be something great.' I cannot exist and vegetate as you quiet people do. What is the good of your lives to you ? I am sure I cannot tell ; but.it will kill me.' " ' You have never tried it, my dear,' said I j * so whether it will kill you or no, you can very ill ken. But till me how you would like to be great.' a i "Why should I speak of such things ? You would not under- stand me,' said Rhoda. ' I would like to be a great writer, or a great painter, or a great musician, though I never would be a ser- vant to the common people, and perform upon a stage. I know I could do something, indeed, indeed, I know it ! And you would have me take prim walks, and do needlework, and talk about schools and stuff", and visit old women. Such things are not for me.' " ' Such things have been fit work for many a saint in heaven, my dear,' said I ; 'but truly I ken no call that has been made upon you, either for one thing or another. Great folk, so far as I have heard, are mostly very well pleased with the common turns of this life to rest themselves withal ; and truly it is my thought, that the greater a person is, the less he will disdain a quiet life, and kindness, and charity. But it has never been forbidden you, Miss Rhoda, to take your pleasure ; and I wot well it never will be.' " This surely is powerful writing, so entirely worthy of Mrs. Margaret Maitland, that we know not whether we could quite equal it by any extract of the same length from her former work. There is much quiet power, too, iu the sketches given of external nature in the present volumes, and much originality of observation. We know not that we ever before met in books with what we may term the echo of that peculiar sound characteristic of a furzy moor under a hot sun which is so well described as in OUR NOVEL LITERATURE. 481 the following passage. All our readers must remember the incessant " crack, crack, crack," which they have so often heard when the sun was hot and high, mingling, amid the long broom or prickly whins, with the chirp of the grass- hopper and the hum of the bee : " Naw, we had scarce ended our converse, when, looking out at the end window, I saw Rhoda coming her lane along the road ; and, seeing she might be solitary in her own spirit among such a meeting of near friends, I went out to the door to bring her in myself. It was a very bonny day, as I have said, and, the bairns being round upon the lawn at the other side, there was but a far-off sound of their voices, and everything else as quiet as it could be under the broad, warm, basking sun, so quiet, that you heard the crack of the seed husks on a great bush of gorse near at hand, a sound that ever puts me in mind of moorland places, and of the very heart and heat oj sunny days. Rhoda, poor bairn, was in very deep black, as it be- hoved her to be, and was coming, in a kind of wandering, thoughtful way, her lane down the bright sandy road, and below the broad branches of the chestnut trees, that scarce had a rustle in them, so little air was abroad ; and the bit crush of her foot upon the sand was like to a louder echo of the whins, and made a very strange kind of harmony in the quietness." This wholesome and very interesting novel is calculated to exert a salutary influence, and to yield, besides, much pleasure in the perusal. Like all the other works of its authoress, it is thoroughly truthful : there is no exaggera- tion of character or incident ; events such as it narrates occur in real life ; and the men and women which it por- trays may be met in ordinary society, though the better ones are unluckily not very common. And yet a wild romance, full of all sorts of marvels and monstrosities, could scarce amuse so much even a youthful reader, far less readers of sober years. In nothing, however, has the work more merit than in its representations of the religious character. Here, also, there is no exaggeration. The nat- ural temperament is exhibited as exerting its inevitable influence. Rhoda's half-sister, Grace, for instance, though 41 482 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. one of the excellent, is not at all so lovable a person as Mrs. Margaret, just because in her religion was set on what was originally a more wilful and less loving nature ; and we find this thoroughly truthful distinction maintained throughout. In short, this latest production of Mrs. Mar- garet Maitland is a book which may be safely placed in any hands ; and, seeing that novels must and will exist, and must and will exercise prodigious influence, whether the religious world gives its consent or no, we think the good people should by all means try whether they cannot conscientiously patronize the good ones. XIII. EUGENE SUE It is not from the formal histories of a country, as his- tory has hitherto been written, that the manner and morals of its people may best be learned. Its works of fiction, if they have been produced by the hand of a master, and have dealt with the aspects of contemporary society, are vastly more true to the lineaments of its internal life than its works of sober fact. Smollett's " History of the Reign of George II." is a dull record, that bears on its weary series of numbered paragraphs no distinguishable impress of the character of the age ; whereas Smollett's " Humph- rey Clinker " is one of the most admirable pictures of Eng- ush society during that reign which anywhere exists. The uevere history, with all its accuracy of names and dates, wants truth ; the amusing novel, that seems but to play with ideal characters, is, in all its multitudinous lights and shadows, a true portraiture of the time. And the rule seems general. Does the student wish to acquaint himself EUGENE SUE. 483 with the aspect of English society in the days of our great grandfathers ? he will gain wonderfully little by poring over heavy sections in the "Annual Registers" of Dodsley, but a very great deal in the study of the graphic sketches of Richardson and Fielding. The " Waverley " of Scott is truer beyond comparison to the real merits of the Re- bellion of 1741 than the authentic history of Home, though Home was himself an actor in many of the scenes which he describes. It is partly at least from a consideration of this kind that we have placed at the head of our article the name of one of the most popular French novelists of the present day, a writer whose fictions have been introduced nearly as ex- tensively to the people of London, through the medium of cheap translations, as to those of Paris in the original French, and which are widely circulated over the Conti- nent generally. His novels, with all their extravagances, give a striking picture of the state of society among at least the city-reared masses of France, and are singularly efficient vehicles in spreading over Eui'ope the contagion of their principles. We find in them more of the philoso- phy of the late movement in Switzerland against the Jesuits, though they contain not a single allusion to that event, than in any of the narratives of the outbreak which we have yet seen. They serve to show how opinion among the anti-Jesuit party came first to be formed, the nature, too, of that opinion, and how it happens that they are not merely an anti-Jesuit, but also an anti-evangelistic and anti-tolerant party. Their views and principles are exactly those of Eugene Sue ; and their numbers bid fair to increase over Europe, wherever the influence of his writing shall be found to prevail. But a brief sketch of some of the lead- ing characters in one of his latest and most characteristic works the "Wandering Jew," of which we perceive a cheap English translation has just appeared may better serve to show what his fictions teach than a general refer- ence to their tendency or effects. Rome, in the course of 484 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. its history, has been signally damaged by two great revo- lutions in religious opinion, the Reformation of Luther, and the great revolt of Voltaire. The revived Christianity of the New Testament was the formidable antagonist with which it had to deal in the one case, and a singularly enthu- siastic and fanatical infidelity the enemy "with which it had to contend in the other; and, for a time, the injury which it received seemed in both cases equally severe. But they were in reality very different in their nature. The wound dealt by infidelity was a flesh wound, and soon healed ; whereas the blow dealt by the revived Christianity ampu- tated the members on which it took effect, and separated them forever from the maimed and truncated carcass. In- fidelity dips its idle bucket into the sea of superstition, and labors to create a chasm, where, in the nature of things, no chasm can exist ; there is a momentary hollow formed, but the currents come rushing in from every side, and fill it up. But evangelism not only scoops out the hollow, but also occupies it, leaving no vacuum for aught else to flow in. France, in less than an age after the canonization of her atheists, had again become popish ; the tides flowed in, and the vacuum was annihilated : whereas evangelistic Scotland is as little popish now as she was two centuries ago ; for in her that perilous space which must be occupied either by religion or superstition was thoroughly filled by the doc- trines of the New Testament. The remark bears very directly on the nature of the warfare waged on Rome and the Jesuits by Eugene Sue. His labors, like those of Vol- taire, serve but to create a vacuum, abhorrent to the nature of man. The chief group in his recent no\ftl, round which all its other groups are made to revolve, and on whose designs their destiny is made to hang, is the Society of the Jesuits. We see them pursuing their schemes of ambition and aggrandizement undeterred by any sense of justice, and without any feeling of pity or remorse. And the picture, Ve are afraid, is scarce exaggerated. As exhibited in this EUGENE SUE. 485 work of fiction, there is no part of it so black as to be with- out its counterpart in real history. There are two grand circumstances which have conspired to render the Jesuits what they are, the specific nature of their principles, and their generic character as a society. An able man, possessed of much power, who held by the principles of the Jesuits, and cared not what means he employed in effecting his ends, would be eminently dangerous. Their principles are, in fact, the principles of the great bad man, who subordi- nates to his designs whatever is venerable in morals or sacred in religion, and regards the end as justifying the means. The Machiaevel-taught despot, whether he be a Charles I. or a Louis XIV., is, to the extent of his principles, a Jesuit on his own behalf. But then the individual bad man has what the bad society has not, he has human feelings ; and these often create a diversion against his principles in favor of his suffering fellows. Even a Nero could weep. But societies have no tears : they are abstract embodiments of their principles ; and if their principles be bad, it is in vain to look for protection against them to their feelings. They don't feel. Even when their prin- ciples are not ostensibly bad, when the cord by which they are united is a mere love of gain, it is too much their tendency, as well described by Cowper, to become cruel and unjust : " Man in society is like a flower Blown in its native bed : 'tis there alone His faculties, expanded in full bloom, Shine out, there only reach their proper use. But man associated and leagued with man By regal warrant, or self-joined by bond For interest's sake, or swarming into clans Beneath one head, for purposes of war, Like flowers selected from the rest, and bound And bundled close, to fill some crowded vase, Fades rapidly, and, by compression marred, Contracts defilement not to be endured." But when their end is not vulgar gain, but power, however 41* 486 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. attained, and the aggrandizement of a false and bloody church, when their principles, untrue to the first laws of morals, strike at the very foundations of all justice, and are, in short, what Pascal has so well described, and when to all this the inevitable lack of human feeling is added, the result is, not a corporation of ordinary and every-day iniquity, but a society without parallel in the annals of the world, the Society of the Order of Jesus. And so Eugene Sue has not done them less than justice in his fiction. Moliere, in one of his dramas, introduces a character who, after he had been guilty of almost every crime, after he had abandoned his wife, cheated his friends, deceived and insulted his father, and made an open profession of his atheism, completes the climax of his infamy by becoming hypocrite. Eugene Sue, in holding up the Jesuits to abhorrence, improves on the design. Such is the character which he gives to but the second worst Jesuit in the piece. In early life the Jesuit had been a traitor to his country, and had fought against it ; he had been the ungenerous enemy of a brave and honest man who abhorred his treachery, and had pursued with bitter hatred his unprotected wife and defenceless children. His prevailing passion was a vulgar love of power ; and in order to obtain it, there was no intrigue too mean for him to stoop to, no crime too atrocious for him to perpetrate; but, with all his baseness and villany, he is drawn as not wholly devoid of human feeling: his mother on her death- bed enjoins that he should visit her; and it is with re- luctance, and hesitatingly, that he sets aside the dying injunction, and sets out in an opposite direction on some business of the Society; and this one touch of inoperative human feeling is rendered a sufficiently grave fault in the hands of the novelist to reduce him from a first to a second place in the community of Loyola. The first place is assigned to a wretch whom we recognize as actually a man and not a demon, when we find that he has a frame which can be acted upon by poison and the cholera, but not be- EUGENE SUE. 487 fore. In the development of the plot, we see the mach- inations of the Society involving in ruin all that is good and lovable among the dramatis personal of the piece : the just, the generous, the honorable, the unsuspecting maiden, the kind master, the attached father, the devoted friend, all become, in turn, the victims of the meanest and basest villany ; and Jesuitism, devoid of all tinge of pity and remorse, exults over them as they perish. We do not wonder how the admirers of such a work should learn to hate the Jesuits. It seems suited to accomplish, amid the superficiality of the present age, in the innumer- able class of French novel-readers, the effects which were produced in a higher order of minds, rather more than a century and a half ago, by the tt Provincial Letters of Pascal." The English reader who has read the " Wan- dering Jew " will be better able to estimate from the pe- rusal than before the intense hatred of the Jesuits which animated, in their late outbreak, the insurgent Switzers of Vaud and Argovia. But we can see no elements of permanency in the prin- ciples marshalled against them, either as embodied in the characters of Eugene Sue, or as illustrated from time to time by the minute portions of passing history. The con- troversy does not lie between truth and error, but between antagonist errors. The determined assailants of priestly superstition and villany are themselves the asserters of principles which, if reduced to practice, would subvert all public morals ; and for the false belief which they would so fain extinguish, they would substitute an unnatural vacuum, into which other false beliefs would assuredly crowd. Nay, in the fictions of Eugene Sue we already see the phantoms of a false faith crowding into the gap. All the honest devotees which he draws are exhibited as weak in proportion to the strength of their religious feelings. Their religion is represented as forming a mere handle by which they are converted into the tools of designing hypocrites ; and yet, in the supernatural machinery of 488 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. the piece, we see, as in the athestic poetry of Shelley, the elements of a new religion coming into view, and embody- ing, in an incipient state, not a few of the woi'st errors f Rome. One of the leading characters in the novel a young lady of high birth and talent, whose destruction the Jesuits at length effect, and are rendered detestable by effecting is represented as adorned by qualities the most generous and lovable. We must select one trait of many, not merely as a specimen of the character, but of the art also with which the novelist addresses himself to the independent feelings of the French people, which have been so prominently developed since the Revolution. The heroine of the following passage is, as we have said, a lady of birth and fortune ; and it is a poor journeyman mechanic, of spirit and talent, however, who is the second actor in the scene : " When Adrienne entered the saloon, Agricola was examining a magnificent silver vase, which bore the words, ' Jean Marie, working- chaser, 1823.' Adrienne trod so lightly, that she had approached the blacksmith without his being aware of it. " * Is not that a handsome vase, sir ? ' she said, in a silver-toned voice. " Agricola started, and replied, in confusion, ' Very handsome, mademoiselle.' " ' You see that I am an admirer of what is just and right,' said Adrienne, pointing to the words engraved on the vase. ' A painter puts his name to a picture, a writer to his book ; and I hold that a workman who distinguishes himself in his trade should put his name to his workmanship. When I bought this vase it bore the name of a wealthy goldsmith, who was astonished at my fantasies, for I caused him to erase it, and to insert that of the maker of this wonderful piece of art ; so that if the workman lack riches, his name at least will not be forgotten. Is this just, sir ? ' " ' As a workman, mademoiselle, I feel sensible of this act of justice.' " ' A skilful artisan merits esteem and respect. But take a seat, sir.' " This is a fine trait, and the character of Adrienne ia EUGENE SUE. 489 mainly composed of such ; but the author takes particular care to iuform us that she is not a Christian ; and when we come to learn her views on marriage, we find that they are exactly those of Mary Wolstonecraft. The sentiments which she is made to express in the following scene are not unworthy of being examined. They are not simply those of a writer of fiction, struck out at a sitting, and then given to the world merely to amuse it, and keep up the interest of his work: they are, on the contrary, widely dis- seminated over the cities of Europej and very extensively acted upon. Socialism in our own country ostensibly adopts them as its own ; and there ai-e many not Socialists, who, though the usages of society prevent their acting upon them, have not hesitated to adopt them. We need scarce remind the reader that the subject is one upon which the Saviour has authoritatively spoken, and that if he be Truth, the modern theory is a lie : " ' Something is wanting to consecrate our union ; and in the eyes of the world there is only one way, by marriage, which is binding for life.' " Djalma looked at the young girl with surprise. " * Yes, for life ; and yet who can answer for the sentiments of a whole life? A Deity able to look into futurity could alone bind irrevocably certain beings together for their happiness. But, alas' the future is impenetrable to us ; therefore we can only answer foj our present sentiments. To bind ourselves indissolubly is a foolish., selfish, and impious action, is it not ? ' " ' That is sad to think of,' said Djalma, after a moment's reflection, ' but it is true.' He then regarded her with an expression of increas- ing surprise. " Adrienne hastily resumed, in a tender tone, ' Do not mistake my meaning, my friend. The love of two beings who, like ourselves, after a patient investigation of heart and mind, have found in each other all the assurances of happiness, a love, in short, like ours, is so noble, so divine, that it must be consecrated from above. I am not of the religion of my venerable aunt ; but I worship God, from whom we derive our ardent love. For this he must be piously adored. It is therefore by invoking his name with deep gratitude 490 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. that we ought to promise not to love each other forever, not to remain always together.' " 'What ! ' cried Djalma. " ' No,' resumed Adrienne, * for no one can take such an oath with- out falsehood or folly ; but we can, in the sincerity of our hearts, swear to do faithfully everything in our power to preserve our love. Indissoluble ties we ought not to accept ; for if we should always love each other, of what use are they ? and if not, our chains are then only an instrument of odious tyranny. Is it not so, my friend ? ' " Djalma did not reply ; but with a respectful gesture he signed to the young girl to continue. " And, in fine,' resumed she, with a mixture of tenderness and pride, ' from respect to your dignity as well as my own, I would never promise to observe a law made by man against women with brutal selfishness, a law which seems to deny to woman mind, soul, and heart, a law which she cannot obey without being a slave or a perjurer, a law which deprives her of her maiden name, and de- clares her, as a wife, in a state of incurable imbecility, by subjecting her to a degrading state of tutelage ; as a mother, refuses her all right and power over her children ; and as a human being, subjects her son even to the will and pleasure of another human being, who is only her equal in the sight of God. You know how I honor your noble and valiant heart ; I am not, therefore, afraid of seeing you employ those tyrannical privileges against me ; but I have never been guilty of falsehood in my life, and our love is too holy, too pure, to be subjected to a consecration which must be purchased by a double perjury.' " Such are the principles of this Parisian heroine, and such are some of the plausibilities with which she defends them. There are two other female characters in the work, twin sisters, of great beauty, whom the Jesuits also succeed in destroying ; and they, too, are devoid of religion. Unlike Adrienne, however, they are not intellectually infidel, they have simply never heard of Christianity ; and when they pray, it is to their deceased mother.' Yet another of the female characters, a poor seamstress, possessed, however, of a cultivated mind and a noble heart, finds no time to attend to the duties of religion ; and when, through the machinations of the Jesuits, she becomes destitute and EUGENE SUE. 491 wretched, she proposes to go out of the world by her own act, as convinced that she is in the right in doing so, as if, wearied and overcome by sleep, she had prepared to go to bed. She is joined in the purpose of death by her sister ; and the scene throws light on the acts of social suicide so common in France, and of which we have had a few instances of late years in our own country. " The sisters embraced each other for some minutes amid a pro- found and solemn silence. " ' heavens,' cried Cephysi, ' how cruel, to love each other thus, and be compelled to part forever ! ' " ' To part ! ' exclaimed the Mayeux, while her pale face was sud- denly lighted up with a ray of divine hope ; 'to part ! Oh no, sister, no : what makes me so calm is, that I feel certain we are going to another world, where a happier life awaits us. Come, hasten ; come where God reigns alone, and where man, who on this earth brings about the misery and despair of his fellow-creatures, is noth- ing. Come, let us depart quickly, for it is late.' " The sisters, having laid the charcoal ready for lighting, proceeded with incredible self-possession to stop up the chinks in the door and windows ; and during this sinister operation, the calmness and mournful resignation of these two unfortunate beings did not once forsake them." We had intended referring to several other points in this mischievous work of fiction, which at once serves to exhibit the opinions entertained by no inconsiderable proportion of the anti-Jesuit party on the Continent, and to spread these opinions more widely. Wherever we find the devo- tional feeling introduced, some disaster is sure always to follow. One of the best characters in the novel is a highly intellectual and generous manufacturer, more bent on ministering to the happiness of his workmen than on the accumulation of gain. He provides them with comfortable dwellings, extends their leisure hours, gives them a share in the profits of his trade, conducts his manufactory, in short, on the model of the philanthropic economist ; and all this when he is an avowed Freethinker; but, falling 492 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. into bad health, and meeting with a crushing disappoint- ment, he becomes a devotee, loses all his interest in the welfare of his workmen, becomes enfeebled in body and mind, and the Jesuits ruin him. The wife of a brave and faithful soldier, a thoroughly excellent man, but devoid of all sense of religion, has also the misfortune, though a very honest and good sort of person, to be devout ; and the weakness, like the dead fly in the apothecary's ointment, imparts a dangerous taint to the whole character. And thus the lesson of the tale runs on. We see in it the secret of the hostility entertained to evangelism by the insurgents of Vaud and Argovia, and which rendered them not less tolerant of a vital Protestantism than even the Jesuits whom they so determinedly opposed. We see in it, too, the grand error of Voltaire repeated, miserable attempts to create a blank where, in the nature of things, no blank can exist ; and an utter ignorance of the great fact, that the religion of the New Testament is the only efficient antidote against superstition, and a widely-circulated Bible the sole permanent protection against the encroachments of an ambitious priesthood. It would be bold to conjecture what the rising crop of opinion, so thickly sown over Europe, is ultimately to produce. There exists a widely-extended belief that Popery, when its final day has come, is to have infidelity for its executioner. Do we see in works such as those of Eugene Sue the executioner in training? or is the old cycle again to revolve, and the blank formed by infidelity to be filled up by superstition ? We would fain see a safer expose of the Jesuits than the fiction of the in- sidious novelist,: an expose at once so just to the order that they could raise no effectual protest against it, and so true to the interests of religion and the nature of man that it could contain no elements of reaction favorable to the body it assailed. When are we to have a translation of the " Provincial Letters " at once worthy of Pascal and of the existing emergency? THE ABBOTSFORD BARONETCY. 493 XIV. TEE ABBOTSFORD BARONETOT. The intimation in our last of the death of Lieutenant- Colonel Sir Walter Scott, and the extinction of the Ab- botsford baronetcy, must have set not a few of our readers athinking. The lesson of withered hopes and blighted prospects which it reads is, sure enough, a common one, a lesson for every-day perusal in the school of experience, and which the history of every day varies with new in- stances. But in this special case it reads with more than the usual emphasis. The literary celebrity of the great poet and novelist of Scotland, the intimate knowledge of his personal history which that celebrity has induced, and which exists coextensive with the study of letters, the consequent acquaintance with the prominent foible that stood out in such high relief in his character from the gen- eral groundwork of shrewd good sense and right feeling, have all conspired to set the lesson, as it were, in a sort of illuminated framework. Sir Walter says of Gawin Douglas, in his picture of the "noble lord of Douglas blood," whose allegorical poem may still be perused with pleasure, notwithstanding the veil cf obsolete language which mars its sentiment and obscures its imagery, that it " pleased him more " " that in a barbarous age He gave rude Scotland Virgil's page, Than that beneath his rule he held The bishopric of fair Dunkeld." Not such, however, was the principle on which Sir Walter estimated his own achievements or prospects. It pleased 42 494 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. him more to contemplate himself in the character of the founder, as seemed likely, of a third-rate border family, of importance enough, however, to occupy its annual line in the almanac, than that his name should be known as widely as even Virgil's own. And the ambition was one to which he sacrificed health, and leisure, and peace of mind, with probably a few years of life itself, and undoubt- edly the very wealth which for this cause alone he so anxiously strove to realize. Never was there one who valued money less for its own sake ; but it flowed in upon him, and, save for his haste to be rich that he might be a landholder on his family's behalf, Sir Walter would have died a man of large fortune, quite able to purchase three such properties as that of Abbotsford. And in last week's obituary we see the close of all he had toiled and suffered for, in the extinction of the family in which he had so fondly hoped to live for hundreds of years. One is reminded by the incident of some of the more melancholy strokes in his own magnificent fictions. He describes, for instance, in the introduction to the "Monastery," a weather-wasted stone fixed high in the wall of an ancient ecclesiastical edi- fice, and bearing a coat-of-arms which no one for ages before had been able to decipher. Weathered as it was, however, it was all that remained to testify of the stout Sir Halbert Glendinning, who had so bravely fought his way to a knighthood and the possession of broad lands, but whose wealth and honors, won solely by himself, he had failed to transmit to other generations, and whose extinct race and name had been lost in the tomb for centuries. Henceforth the honors of the Abbotsford baronetcy will be exhibited on but a hatchment whitened with the painted tears of the herald. A sepulchral tablet in Dryburgh Abbey will form, if not their only record, as in the imaginary case of the knight of Glendinning, at least their most striking memo- rial. It is a curious enough fact, that Shakspeare, like Sir Walter Scott, cherished the ambition of being the founder THE ABBOTSFORD BARONETCY. 495 of a family. " All his real estate," says one of his later biographers, Mr. C. Knight, " was devised to his daughter, Susanna Hall, for and during the term of her natural life. It was then entailed upon her first son and his heirs-male ; and, in default of such issue, on her second son and his heirs-male ; and so on, in default of such issue, to his grand- daughter, Elizabeth Hall ; and, in default of such issue, to his daughter Judith and her heirs-male. By this strict entailment," remarks the biographer, "it was manifestly the object of Shakspeare to found a family; but, like many other such purposes of short-sighted humanity," it is added, "the object was not accomplished. His elder daughter had no issue but Elizabeth, and she died childless. The heirs-male of Judith died before her. And so the estates were scattered after the second generation ; and the de- scendants of his sister were the only transmitters to pos- terity of his blood and lineage." We see little of the great poet's own character in his more celebrated writings ; he was too purely dramatic for that; and, like the " mirror held up to nature " of his own happy metaphor, reflected rather the features of others than his own. It is, however, a curious fact, that in the portion of his writings which do most exhibit him his sonnets there is no pleasure on which he dwells half so much as the pleasure of living in one's posterity. And, in urging the young friend to whom these exquisite compositions are addressed to marry, he rings the changes on this motive alone throughout twenty sonnets together. We rather wonder how the circumstance should have escaped the thousand and one critics and commentators who have written on Shakspeare, but cer- tain it is that an intense appreciation of the sort of pro- spective, shadowy immortality that posterity confers on the founder of a family forms one of the most prominent fea- tures of the poetry in which he most indulged his own feelings, and that with this marked appreciation the pro- visions of his will thoroughly harmonize. He tells his friend that the sear leafless autumn of old age, and the 496 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. u hideous winter " of death, draw near, when beauty " shall be o'ersnowed," and " bareness left everywhere ; " and that unless the odors of the summer flowers continue to survive, distilled by the art of the chemist, they shall be as if they had never been, things without mark or memorial. " Then, were no summer's distillation left A liquid prisoner, pent in walls of glass, Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft, Nor it, nor no remembrance what it was: But flowers distilled, though they the winter meet, Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet." And then the poet, with the happy art in which he excelled all men, applies the figure by urging his young and hand- some friend to live in his posterity, as the vanished flowers live in their distilled odors ; and expatiates on the solace of enduring throughout the future in one's offspring: " Be it ten for one, Ten times thyself were happier than thou art, If ten of thine ten times re-figured thee; Then, what could Death do, if thou shouldst depart, Leaving thee living in posterity? Bo not self-willed, for thou art much too fair To be Death's conquest, and make worms thine heir." What strange vagaries human nature does play in even the greatest minds! Shakspeare was thoroughly aware that his verse was destined to immortality. We have his own testimony on the point to nullify the idle conjectures of writers who have set themselves to criticize his works, without having first taken, as would seem, the necessary precaution of reading them. He tells us in his sonnets, that "not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes," would outlive "his powerful rhime." And, again, address- ing his friend, he says : " I'll live in this poor rhime While Death insults o'er dull and specchless~trihes; And thou in this shalt find thy monument, When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent." THE ABBOTSFORD BARONETCY. 497 And yet again, with still greater beauty, if not greater energy, he says : " Your life from hence immortal life shall have, Though I, once gone, to all the world must die. The earth can yield me but a common grave, While you entombed in men's eyes shall lie. Your monument shall be my gentle verse, Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read, And tongues to be your being shall rehearse, When all the breathers of this world are dead; You still shall live (such virtue hath my pen) Where breath most breathes, e'en in the mouths of men." And yet this great poet, so conscious of the enduring vitality that dwelt in his verse, could find more pleasure in the idea of living in future ages in his descendants, a sort of pleasure in which almost every Irish laborer may indulge, than in being one of the never-dying poets of his country and the world. What may be termed the human instinct of immortality, the natural sentiment which, when rightly directed, rests on that continuity of life in the individual in which the dark chasm of the grave makes no break or pause, may be found, though wo- fully misdirected, both in the sentiment that rejoices in the prospect of posthumous celebrity, always so shadowy and unreal, and the sentiment that gloats over the fancied, delusive life which one lives in one's descendants. Shafc- spearefelt himself sure of posthumous celebrity; and find- ing it, like every sublunary good, when once fairly secured, valueless and unsatisfactory, he fixed his desires with much solicitude on the other earthly immortality, and sought to live in his offspring. It would have been well had the instinct been better directed, both in Sir Walter and his great prototype the dramatist of Avon. It would be also well, with such significant lessons before us, to be reading them aright. They tell us that the longings after immor- tality, in which it is the nature of man to indulge, are not to be satisfied by the world-wide, ever-enduring fame of 42* 498 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. the poet, and that the humbler and not less unsubstantial shadow of future life which one lives in one's children and their descendants is at least not more satisfying in its na- ture, and that it lies greatly more open than the other to the blight of accident and the influence of decay. Judging from the history of the past, there is no class of men less entitled to indulge in the peculiar hope of Shak- speare and Sir Walter Scott than the greater poets, men whose blow of faculty, ratiocinative and imaginative, has attained to the fullest development at which, in the human species, it ever arrives. Has the reader ever bethought him how exceedingly few of the poets of the two last cen- turies have bequeathed their names to posterity through their descendants? No doubt by much the greater part of them ill-hafted in society, and little careful how they guided their course were solitary men, who, without even more than their characteristic imprudence, could not have grappled with the inevitable expense of a family. Thus it was that Cowley, Butler, and Otway died child- less, with Prior and Congreve, Gay, Phillips, and Savage, Thomson, Collins, and Shenstone, Akenside, Goldsmith, and Gray. Pope, Swift, Watts, and Cowper were also un mated, solitary men ; and Johnson had no child. Evei the poets in more favorable circumstances, who could not say, in the desponding vein of poor Kirke White, " I sigh when all my happier friends caress, They laugh in health, and future evils brave; Them shall a wife and smiling children bless, While I am mould'ring in the silent grave," even of this more fortunate class, how very few were happy in their offspring ! The descendants of Dryden, Addison, and Parnell did not pass into the second generation ; those of Shakspeare and Milton became extinct in the second and the third. It would seem as if we had an illustration, in this portion of the literary history of our country, of Doubleday's curious theory of population. TIIE ABBOTSFORD BARONETCY. 499 The human mind attained in these remarkable men to its full intellectual development, as the rose or the carnation, under a long course of culture, at length suddenly stocks, and doubles, and widens its gorgeous blow of a thousand petals ; and then, when in its greatest perfection, transmis- sion ceases, and there is no further reproduction of the variety thus amplified and expanded to the full. Nature does her utmost, and then, stopping short, does no more. Abbotsford, a supremely melancholy place heretofore, will be henceforth more melancholy still. Those associa- tions of ruined hopes and blighted prospects which cling to its picturesque beauty will now be more numerous and more striking than ever. The writings of Scott are the true monuments of his genius ; while Abbotsford, on which he rested so much, will form for the future a memorial equally significant of his foibles and his misfortunes, of bright prospects suddenly overcast, and sanguine hopes quenched in the grave forever. Is the reader acquainted with the poem in which the good Isaac Watts laments the untimely death of his friend Gunston, a man who died childless, in the vigor of early manhood, just as he had finished a very noble family seat ? The verse flows more stiffly than that of Shakspeare or Sir Walter Scott, for Watts was not always happiest when he attempted most ; and there is considerable more poetry in his hymns for children than in his "Pindaric Odes" or his "Elegies." Still, however, his funeral poem on his friend brings out not unhappily the sentiment which must breathe for the future from the deserted halls of Abbotsford : " How did he lay the deep foundations strong, Marking the bounds, and reared the walls along, < ^"*" Solid and lasting, where a numerous train Of happy Gunstons might in pleasure reign, While nations perished and long ages ran, Nations unborn and ages unbegan; Nor time itself should waste the blest estate, Nor the tenth race rebuild the ancient seat. How fond our fancies are ! * * * \ 500 LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC. And must this building, then, this costly frame, Stand hei-e for strangers ? Must some unknown name Possess these rooms, the labors of my friend ? Why were these walls raised for this hapless end, Why these apartments all adorned so gay, Why his rich fancy lavished thus away? The unhappy house looks desolate and mourns, And every door groans doleful as it turns." We find we cannot better conclude our desultory re- marks than in the words of the London " Morning Herald," whom we find thus referring to the death of the Lieu- tenant-Colonel, Sir Walter : " The deceased Baronet was the last of a family which it cost one precious life to create, and for whose perpetuation its founder would have accounted no purchase too dear, and reckoned no sacrifice too costly. It was not sufficient for the head of that house, whose last member has so recently quitted the earth, that he stood foremost in the ranks of celebrated men during life, that he secured immor- tality upon his departure. Beyond the prodigal gifts of Heaven he esteemed the factitious privileges of earth, and treated lightly an imperishable wealth, for the sake of dross as poor as it was passing. The memoirs of the first Sir Walter albeit penned by no unlov- ing hand leave painful impressions upon the minds of all who have made for themselves the character of the great magician, as far as it was possible, from his undying works. If the history teaches anything at all, it is one of the saddest lessons that can be brought home to humanity, that of gigantic powers ill used, of insatiable though petty ambition derided and destroyed. The vocation of Sir Walter Scott was to enlighten and instruct mankind : he believed it was to found a family, and to become a great landed proprietor. To achieve the ignoble mission, the poet and the novelist embarked the genius of a Shakspeare, and the result is now before us. The family is extinct ; the landed proprietor was a bankrupt in his prime. Who that has read the life of Sir Walter but has wept at his misfor- tunes, and marvelled at the sacrifices heaped upon sacrifices, freely made, in furtherance of a low and earthly seeking ? Heaven pointed one way, human frailty another. 'Be mighty amidst the great,' said the former ; ' be high amongst the small,' whispered the latter. He obeyed the latter, and lo the consequence 1 The small know THE ABBOTSFORD BARONETCY. 501 him not : amidst the great he still continues mighty. The history of Scott is the history of mankind. We cannot violate the will, expressed or understood, of Heaven, and be happy. We cannot sinfully indulge a single passion, and not be disappointed. The spiritual and moral laws which regulate our life are as constant and invariable as any to be found in matter. Had Scott not enlisted every hope, thought, and energy in his miserable aim at power and position, he would in all probability have been alive to-day. He was a hale and hearty man when the failure of the booksellers com- pelled him to those admirable and superhuman exertions which crushed and killed him. That failure would have been nothing to the poet, if he had not involved himself in trade in order the more rapidly to secure the purpose which he had at heart, for which he wrote and lived. ' The spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us.' All that Scott bargained for at the outset of life he possessed for an instant before he quitted it. He cared not to be renowned, he wished to be rich. To be spoken of as the master of prose and verse was nothing, if the term could not be coupled with that of master of Abbotsford. The dream was realized. Money came in abundance, and with it lands and increasing possessions. The mansion of the laird rose by degrees, and child after child promised to secure lands and house, as the founder would have them, in the immediate possession of a Scott. Then came, as if to com- plete the fabric and to insure the victory, honors and titles fresh from the hand of Majesty itself. Nothing was wanting; all was gained, and yet nothing was acquired. The gift melted in the grasp ; the joy passed away in the possession. With his foot on the topmost step of the ladder, Scott fell. His ambition was satisfied, but Prov- idence was avenged. All that could be asked was given, but only to show how vain are human aspirations, how less than childish are misdirected aims. Scott lived to see his property, his house and lands, in the hands of the stranger ; we have lived to see hia children one by one removed. Is there no lesson here ? ' \i > o m -p