To return to our more immediate subject:—It will enable us more distinctly to conceive the state of Edinburgh society ninety or ninety-five years ago if we enumerate the more important of the individuals, old and young, who then figured in it. In doing so, it will be well to fix on some one year, at which to take our census. For various reasons the year 1802 may be selected. It was the first year of the short peace, or “armed truce,” which intervened between the two wars with France; it was the first year, also, of that short and perplexing interregnum in home affairs during which Addington was prime minister and Pitt and Dundas were out of office.
Few of the intellectual chiefs of the former generation were now alive in Edinburgh. David Hume and the poet Fergusson had been dead more than a quarter of a century; Kames and Gilbert Stuart for nearly twenty years. Dr. Henry, Adam Smith, the physician Cullen, Blacklock, Lord Hailes, the elder Tytler of Woodhouselee, and Robertson the historian, had disappeared more recently, and were still remembered. Fresher still was the local recollection of Lord Monboddo, Dr. Hugh Blair, the chemist Black, whose death had occurred in 1799, and of such minor celebrities as the Rev. Dr. Macknight and Dr. Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk. Of nearly all these men Lord Cockburn could remember something, either as having known them domestically in his boyhood, or as having watched them taking their daily walk in the “Meadows”; and it was one of the gratifications of his after-life to think that, while privileged to live into the splendours of a new age, he had been born early enough to see the departing skirts of the old. Some remnants of the old age,however, did survive as connecting links between it and the new. Home, the author of “Douglas,” was alive in 1802, an infirm veteran of eighty, with flashes of his former spirit in him, and still capable of his claret. Another survivor was Dr. Adam Ferguson, two years the junior of Home and much of an invalid, but with fourteen years of life still before him. Henry Mackenzie, called “The Man of Feeling,” but as shrewd a man of the world as there was in Edinburgh, was another of the veterans,—fifty-seven years old, but destined to reach the age of eighty-six. Dugald Stewart was verging on his fiftieth year, and his philosophical reputation was still on the increase. To these survivors in the world of philosophy and letters add, as notables in the department of science, Robison, the Professor of Natural Philosophy, and Playfair, the Professor of Mathematics, and, as the ablest remaining specimens of the old Edinburgh clergy, Dr. John Erskine and Sir Henry Moncreiff. Passing into the miscellaneous society amid which those men moved, and which they linked intellectually with the past, we may distribute their Edinburgh contemporaries of the year 1802 into three categories:—(1)The Old Worthies.—This category includes a considerable number of surviving citizens, belonging, by their age, habits, and costume, to the same past generation as the notabilities above named, and many of them, indeed, older than the younger notabilities of that list. Most conspicuous among them were the old dons of the Parliament House; of some of whom Lord Cockburn gives wonderful portraits. The awful Braxfield was dead; but his successor on the bench, David Rae, Lord Eskgrove,—more familiarly known as “Esky,”—was keeping the Parliament Housein a constant roar with the daily rumour of his last absurdities. What a blessing for a moderately-sized community to have at its heart such a preventive against insipidity, such a clove or cassia-bud of all-diffusive relish, as this famous Lord Justice-Clerk Esky; whom Lord Cockburn once heard sentence a tailor to death for the murder of a soldier in these terms,—“Not only did you murder him, whereby he was berea-ved of his life, but you did thrust, or push, or pierce, or project, or propell the le-thall weapon through the belly-band of his regimen-tal breeches, which were his Majes-ty’s,” and of whom Lord Cockburn further vouches that his customary formula of address to a criminal in concluding the sentence of death was,—“Whatever your religi-ous persua-shon may be, or even if, as I suppose, you be of no persua-shon at all, there are plenty of reverend gentlemen who will be most happy to show you the way to yeternal life.” Of the rest of the fifteen judges, the most remarkable for their talents and their character were the Lord President Hay Campbell, Lord Glenlee, Lord Hermand, Lord Meadowbank the first, and Lord Cullen. After Esky, Hermand was the most notorious oddity of the bench. At the bar, the witty Harry Erskine, and Charles Hay, afterwards Lord Newton, might be ranked among the older men. Coevals of these dons of the Parliament House, were Andrew Dalzel, the Professor of Greek in the University, and Dr. Finlayson, the Professor of Logic; with whom may be mentioned the simple-hearted Dr. Adam, Rector of the High School, the Rev. Dr. Struthers, a distinguished preacher of the Secession Church, and the veteran bookseller Creech. (2)The Middle-AgedMen.—Taking this class to include all who, while old enough to have obtained some standing in life, were still not past their maturity, we may enumerate in it such leading lawyers as Robert Dundas of Arniston (nephew of the great Dundas, and promoted to the office of Chief Baron of the Exchequer in 1801, after having been Lord Advocate for twelve years), and Robert Blair, Charles Hope, Adam Gillies, John Clerk of Eldin, David Cathcart, and David Boyle, all of whom subsequently rose to the Bench; Malcolm Laing, then also an advocate, but subsequently better known as an antiquarian and historian; James Gibson, Writer to the Signet, afterwards Sir James Gibson Craig; the Presbyterian clergyman, Dr. John Inglis, and the Rev. Archibald Alison of the Scottish Episcopal Church; in the medical profession, Dr. Andrew Duncan, Dr. James Gregory, and Dr. John Bell; and, among miscellaneous residents, Nasmyth, the portrait painter, and George Thomson, the correspondent of Burns. (3)Young Edinburgh.—Here also the Bar had the preponderance. Reckoning among the juniors at the bar all who had been called after 1790, one has to include these in the list,—John Macfarlan, Archibald Fletcher, Walter Scott, William Erskine, Thomas Thomson, George Cranstoun, George Joseph Bell, James Grahame, James Moncreiff, Francis Jeffrey, Francis Horner, J. A. Murray, John Richardson, Henry Cockburn, and Henry Brougham. Of this group of young advocates, all afterwards locally eminent, some had already revealed the faculties which were to make them known far beyond the precincts of the Parliament House. Brougham was about the youngest of them, being then only in his twenty-third year; but he was the recognised dare-devil of the whole group,the most vehement of the orators of the Speculative, and the terror of old Esky. “That man Broom or Broug-ham,” Esky used to say, “is the torment of my life.” Older than Brougham by a year, Horner was already a leader among his associates by the solid strength and integrity of his character. Jeffrey was in his twenty-ninth year, a married young barrister, waiting for briefs. Scott, then also married and past his thirtieth year, was more comfortably settled: he was Sheriff of Selkirkshire, had some practice at the bar, and had already some literary reputation by metrical translations from the German, a few Scottish ballads, and his edition ofThe Border Minstrelsy. But the bar did not include all the young talents. Among the hopes of the medical profession were John Allen, John Thomson, and Thomas Brown, the future meta-physician. Leyden, the poet and linguist, was then one of the rising stars of Edinburgh; and Thomas Campbell, whosePleasures of Hopehad been for three years before the public, was for the time a resident. Nor was a sprinkling of English residents wanting, to exchange ideas with so many fervid young Scots, and banter them about their dialect and their prejudices. Had not the philosophic Lord Webb Seymour chosen Edinburgh for his home; and was not Sydney Smith there on his memorable visit? Finally, if any one in Edinburgh wanted to have his portrait splendidly painted, to whom could he go but to Henry Raeburn? Or, if any one wanted information about books which old Creech, or Miller, or Bell and Bradfute could not give, from whom was he so likely to obtain it as from the energetic and ambitious young bookseller, Archibald Constable?
Looking down in fancy on the sea of 80,000 headswhich in the year 1802 constituted the population of Edinburgh,—some gray with age, many wigged and powdered, and many more wearing the brown or light locks of natural youth,—it is on the above-named sixty or seventy that the instructed eye now rests as the most conspicuous in the crowd. But the instructed eye sees something more than the mere mass of heads, with here and there one of the conspicuous sixty. It sees the mass swaying to and fro,—here solid and restful, there discomposed and in motion, and the conspicuous heads unequally distributed amid the wavering parts. In other words, the society of Edinburgh in 1802, like every other society before or since, presented the phenomenon of division into two parties,—the party of rest and conservation, and the party of change or progress. The main fact in the history of Edinburgh at that time was that an incessant house-to-house battle was going on in it between old Scottish Toryism and a new and vigorous Scottish Whiggism. Numerically, the Tories were immensely in the majority, and the Whigs were but in small proportion. But it is not by the numerical measure in such cases that History judges or portions out her interest. The party that is largest may be the lump, and that which is smallest may be the leaven. So it was most remarkably in the Edinburgh of 1802. To any one surveying the society of Edinburgh then, with something of that knowledge which we now possess, two facts would have seemed significant: first, that, though the majority were on the Tory side, most of the conspicuous heads were on the Whig side; secondly, and still more obviously, that among the conspicuous heads the Whigs claimed nearly all the young ones. If, for example, Toryism could claim a full half of the veteransthat have been named, the potent old chiefs of the Parliament House included, yet even of those veterans a few, such as Erskine, Dugald Stewart, Playfair, old Dr. Adam, and Sir Henry Moncreiff, were Whigs; if among the middle-aged Toryism was equally strong, yet here also Whiggism could count representatives in Gillies, Clerk of Eldin, Malcolm Laing, and the resolute James Gibson; and, if still, after surveying those two classes, there had been any doubt which of the two political parties had the higher pretensions intellectually, it was only necessary to descend among the young and adolescent to see that amongthemat least Whiggism had most recruits. Of the younger men of Edinburgh then entering life who afterwards rose to be something in the world’s eye, Scott alone, remarks Lord Cockburn, was unmistakably a Tory. The exception is certainly a weighty one; and there are some,—myself among them,—who would willingly take one Walter Scott at any time as a sufficient offset against a Jeffrey, a Horner, a Sydney Smith, a Brougham, an Allen, a Thomas Brown, and a Tom Campbell, all put together. If the standard of judgment, however, is to be that of the right and the wrong in politics, this will hardly be now the general opinion.
We do not now associate Whiggism with any idea of the heroic. But in the year 1802 one had to judge otherwise. Whiggism all over Britain, but especially Scottish Whiggism, then required some courage, some spirit of self-sacrifice, in its adherents. The actual creed of the Scottish Whigs was moderate enough. It consisted in believing that there were a great many remediable abuses in the Scottish political and administrative system, that the people had too little power and the lairds too much, that the Revolution in Francehad not been unmitigated madness, that at any rate the dread of its effects on this country had been monstrously exaggerated, and that, on the whole, the policy of Fox and his associates was a policy to be supported in preference to that of his rival, Pitt. The creed, we say, was moderate; and it was, undoubtedly, in large measure, true. What made it heroism to hold to it was that the holding of it involved serious personal consequences,—exclusion from all share in the good things going, and even, to a considerable extent, from popular confidence and favour; with no prospect either (for who could tell when George III. might die, or how his son might act when he came to the throne?) that this state of things would soon end. That in such circumstances so many men in Scotland, and especially so many men of the legal profession, should have maintained the obnoxious creed, and maintained it with such tenacity and mutual fidelity in spite of all temptation, is a fact of which Scotland may well be proud. As a body, the Scottish Whigs of 1802 seem to have been as courageous and pure-minded a set of men as there were in Great Britain. Theirs, in the most literal sense, was “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Most creditable of all, perhaps, was the persevering Whiggism of so many of the younger men. Beating their heels idly in a particular corner of the Parliament House, where no agents came to them with briefs, and whiling away the rest of their time with essays and debates in the Speculative Society, ambitious dreams in secret, convivial meetings at each others’ houses, and eternal jokes about Esky, those light-hearted young Whig lawyers had not even that sense of social consequence to support them which their seniors on the same sideof politics could feel as an inspiration. They formed a little band by themselves, cherishing their Whiggism for its own sake, and not even visited by much countenance from their Whig seniors. And yet upon them, to a greater extent than they or their seniors were aware, depended the future history of Scotland.
The moving force in Scottish society at that time was consciously possessed by the Whigs. Though by far the smaller party numerically over Scotland as a whole, they could not but feel that they must eventually win. The great want of the party hitherto had been some voice or organ, some public means of proclaiming collectively the views which they entertained individually, of propagating these views in new quarters, and of exhibiting them again and again in contrast with those of their opponents. No such means of utterance existed. The senior Edinburgh Whigs had been in the habit of dining together on Fox’s birthday, on which occasions constables were stationed at the doors by the authorities to take down the names of the guests as they entered; they also occasionally fought their opponents on a temporary local question. This, however, was all; and Scottish Whiggism, though working as a social ferment, had no organisation and no flag. The year 1802,—the country then, as we have seen, in the lull of the brief peace with France, and Pitt and Dundas out of office,—was a time when it began to seem possible to supply this want. “Events,” says Lord Cockburn, “were bringing people into somewhat better humour. Somewhat less was said about Jacobinism, though still too much; and sedition had gone out. Napoleon’s obvious progress towards military despotism opened the eyes of those who used to see nothingbut liberty in the French Revolution. Instead of Jacobinism, Invasion became the word.” In short, though the old habits and all the old abuses still remained, the state of the public mind was such that it became more easy to establish a means for publicly attacking them and advocating reform.
Whence was the expected demonstration to come, and what form was it to take? Where in Scotland was the standard of Scottish Whiggism to be first raised, and who was to step forth as the standard-bearer?
Scotland had recently lost one man who, had he lived till 1802, might have been called on to act this part. Six or eight years before, when it was most dangerous to be a Scottish Whig,—when to be too zealous a Scottish Whig, unless one were powerfully connected, meant to run a risk of trial for sedition,—there had not been a more daring Whig in Scotland than the poet Burns. True, he was a Whig, as he was everything else, after an uncovenanted fashion of his own, which did not keep touch with any of the current definitions of Whiggism; but, for all that, he was, and he called himself, a Scottish Whig. “Go on, sir,” he wrote from Dumfries, in the end of 1792, to the Whig, or rather Whig-Radical, editor of the shortlivedEdinburgh Gazetteer, to which he had become a subscriber: “Go on, and lay bare, with undaunted heart and steady hand, that horrid mass of corruption called politics and statecraft. Dare to draw in their native colours those ‘calm-thinking villains whom no faith can fire,’ whatever be the shibboleth of their pretended party.” This was Whiggism and a vast deal more; but the following song, written at the same time, or not long after, shows that, all in all, asmatters then stood, it pleased Burns to be known as a Whig of the Fox school:—
“Here’s a health to them that’s awa,Here’s a health to them that’s awa;And wha winna wish guid luck to our cause,May never guid luck be their fa’!It’s guid to be merry and wise,It’s guid to be honest and true,It’s guid to support Caledonia’s causeAnd bide by the buff and the blue.Here’s a health to them that’s awa,Here’s a health to them that’s awa;Here’s a health to Charlie, the chief o’ the clan,Although that his band be sma’!May liberty meet wi’ success!May prudence protect her frae evil!May tyrants and tyranny tine in the mist,And wander their way to the Devil!”
“Here’s a health to them that’s awa,Here’s a health to them that’s awa;And wha winna wish guid luck to our cause,May never guid luck be their fa’!It’s guid to be merry and wise,It’s guid to be honest and true,It’s guid to support Caledonia’s causeAnd bide by the buff and the blue.Here’s a health to them that’s awa,Here’s a health to them that’s awa;Here’s a health to Charlie, the chief o’ the clan,Although that his band be sma’!May liberty meet wi’ success!May prudence protect her frae evil!May tyrants and tyranny tine in the mist,And wander their way to the Devil!”
“Here’s a health to them that’s awa,Here’s a health to them that’s awa;And wha winna wish guid luck to our cause,May never guid luck be their fa’!It’s guid to be merry and wise,It’s guid to be honest and true,It’s guid to support Caledonia’s causeAnd bide by the buff and the blue.
“Here’s a health to them that’s awa,
Here’s a health to them that’s awa;
And wha winna wish guid luck to our cause,
May never guid luck be their fa’!
It’s guid to be merry and wise,
It’s guid to be honest and true,
It’s guid to support Caledonia’s cause
And bide by the buff and the blue.
Here’s a health to them that’s awa,Here’s a health to them that’s awa;Here’s a health to Charlie, the chief o’ the clan,Although that his band be sma’!May liberty meet wi’ success!May prudence protect her frae evil!May tyrants and tyranny tine in the mist,And wander their way to the Devil!”
Here’s a health to them that’s awa,
Here’s a health to them that’s awa;
Here’s a health to Charlie, the chief o’ the clan,
Although that his band be sma’!
May liberty meet wi’ success!
May prudence protect her frae evil!
May tyrants and tyranny tine in the mist,
And wander their way to the Devil!”
Had Burns lived till 1802, who knows to what his politics might have led him? He would then have been still only in his forty-fourth year; and what fate more imaginable for him, had he been still alive, than that, deprived of his gaugership, or throwing it up, he should have left Dumfries for Edinburgh, and, associating himself there with the many who would have welcomed him, and with whom, whatever their rank, there was no fear that his relations would have ever been other than those of perfect equality, he should have become the editor, mayhap, of a Whig newspaper? If so, who can doubt that prose would have become easier to him, that he would have been a power among the Scottish Whigs, and that his influence would have been felt, in his new character, by them and by the nation? Ah! and, had he lived on through all their coming struggles, would he not have been but seventy-three years of age at the time of the passing of the Reform Bill; and,in gratitude to him as a veteran Whig and ex-editor, might not his fellow-citizens at last have returned him to the House of Commons as the senior colleague of young Macaulay?—“Profanation! profanation!” is the cry that will rise to all Scottish lips on the mere muttering of such a fancy. Nature herself had been of that opinion. Burns had died in 1796, in the thirty-eighth year of his age, a broken-down exciseman, in Dumfries; and he was to be remembered to all eternity,—thank God!—simply as Robert Burns.
The required party-standard was raised by the young Whigs of Edinburgh. It was in Jeffrey’s humble domicile, in an upper storey in one of the houses of Buccleuch Place, that, on one memorable day in the year 1802, Sydney Smith first started the idea of a new periodical, combining literature with politics, to be published quarterly, and kept up by contributions from the teeming minds of the members of the Speculative Society. No sooner said than done: Constable at once undertook the publication; and on the 10th of October 1802 the first number of theEdinburgh Reviewsaw the light. For a number or two the editorship was the joint-occupation of Sydney Smith, Jeffrey, Horner, Brougham, and a few others,—Sydney Smith officiating in chief; but, on Smith’s return to London soon afterwards, the management fell exclusively on Jeffrey.
The establishment of theEdinburgh Review, as all the world knows, was the beginning of a new era in the history of British politics. For a while, indeed, it was rather as a power in the general thought and literature of the country than as a direct force in politics that the new organ made itself felt. For its success in the latter function circumstances for the first two or threeyears were not very propitious. The war with France having been renewed in 1803, and the Addington ministry having resigned in May 1804, and Pitt having then resumed the Premiership with Dundas (now Lord Melville) as again his principal colleague and at the head of the Admiralty, not only were the Scottish Tories once more in a mood of placid satisfaction over this change, and over the prospect which it brought of a reassured term of the Dundas proconsulship in Scotland; but the very occasion of the recall of Pitt to power, the very nature of the business in which Pitt and Dundas had to exert themselves, tended for the time to a modification, or at least a postponement, of party differences. Napoleon was now Emperor of the French; what he threatened now was an actual invasion of Britain; how could party differences continue operative in any virulent degree in face of such a common danger?
Party differences did subside for the while. All over the island Whigs and Tories alike were in a ferment of volunteering and drilling for resistance to the French when they should land; and was it not a Whig admiral that, having won for all Britain the glory, willingly bequeathed to a Tory Government the usufruct, of the great battle of Trafalgar? People were at no leisure to listen with sufficient attention at such a time to expositions of the superiority of Whig principles, even from such an organ as theEdinburgh Review.
In 1806, however, the face of things was suddenly altered. The death of Pitt in the January of that year, when his second administration was already tottering under the blow inflicted upon it by the impeachment of Lord Melville, brought it to an abrupt close; andthe Whigs, no less to their own surprise than to that of the country, found themselves again in power, after an interval since their last real experience of that ecstasy which could be spanned by the memory only of old people then living. The accession to office of the Whig ministry of Fox and Grenville was startling enough, even had there been no especially Whiggish acts to correspond. But, during the thirteen months of the Fox and Grenville ministry (January 1806—March 1807), therewereacts to correspond, over and above the prosecution of the Melville Impeachment to its conclusion. As places fell vacant, Whigs were appointed to them; an attempt was made to open negotiations for peace with Napoleon; and various measures of domestic reform were introduced into Parliament. To the Scottish Tories it was as if chaos had come again. Could they have foreseen that the crisis was to be so short,—could they have foreseen that the new Whig ministry, after having been weakened by the death of Fox in September 1806, would be able to struggle on but for six months more, and that then the Whigs would be driven back into their accustomed place as a minority in opposition, with another quarter of a century of uninterrupted Tory administration for Britain, and of a modified Dundas rule in Scotland, to intervene before they should again rise to supremacy,—it is possible that the consternation would have been less. But this at the time could not have been foreseen. The accession of the Whigs to power, and their retention of it during a whole year, were a rude awakening to men who had been asleep; and from that moment Toryism had bad dreams.
The crisis was powerfully felt in Edinburgh; and all that remains for us in this paper is to move forwardfrom 1802 to 1806, for a glance at the state of Edinburgh in this latter year, when the effects of the crisis there were most acute.
As was natural, the mere lapse of time, independently of the special events that had been happening, had produced some changes. Of the seniors, both of the Whig and of the Tory party, that have been noted as alive in 1802, some had been removed by death; and, by these and other deaths, those who in 1802 had occupied junior positions in their respective parties found themselves promoted to higher places, and to more active concern in party affairs. Among the Tories of the Parliament House the most active heads, besides Robert Dundas of Arniston as Chief Baron of Exchequer, were Hope, now Lord Justice-Clerk in the place of old Esky, and Blair, afterwards Lord President; but among the younger men who acted with these there was no one whose name stood higher, or whose Toryism was more enthusiastic, than Scott. During the four years that had elapsed since 1802 his literary reputation had been gradually rising; and the publication in 1805 of hisLay of the Last Minstrelhad given him rank among the most popular poets of his age, and diffused among his countrymen for the first time some adequate conception of the nature and the measure of his genius. His literary celebrity had not been without its effect on his worldly circumstances; for, besides retaining his Sheriffship, he was now settled for life in the Clerkship of the Court of Session. Very similar to the position which Scott thus held among the Edinburgh Tories in 1806 was the position which Jeffrey then held among the Edinburgh Whigs. The active heads of the Whig party in the Parliament House were such seniors asHarry Erskine, John Clerk of Eldin, and Adam Gillies. On the accession of the Fox and Grenville Ministry to office, Erskine had become Lord Advocate, Clerk had been made Solicitor-General, and Hay, another of the older set of Whig lawyers, had been raised to the bench. But, under those men, Jeffrey was now a person of far more consequence than he had been in 1802. Then he was only a rising junior in that set of independent young Whigs whom their elders were disposed rather to slight than to encourage; but his rapidly increasing distinction at the Bar, not to speak of the distinction accruing to him from the fame of theEdinburgh Review, had broken down the reserve of his seniors and compelled them to yield him due respect. Had Horner and Brougham remained in Edinburgh, they and Jeffrey might have been a kind of triumvirate, dividing among them the increased consideration which was now accorded to the younger portion of the Whig bar. But Horner and Brougham, as well as Allen and others of the little band of 1802, had by this time migrated to London, whence they kept up their connection with Edinburgh chiefly by correspondence and by contributions to theReview; and, as Cockburn and Murray had not yet attained a standing at the bar equal to Jeffrey’s, there was no doubt as tohisindividual supremacy among the younger resident Edinburgh Whigs.
Scott and Jeffrey: these names represent, therefore, the heartiest Toryism of Scotland and its most hopeful and opinionative Whiggism, as they stood opposed to each other in Edinburgh society in the year 1806. Remembering this, and with the well-known portraits of the two men in our minds, we can read thefollowing passage in Lockhart’sLife of Scottwith a new sense of its significance:—
“Scott’s Tory feelings appear to have been kept in a very excited state during the whole of the short reign of the Whigs. He then, for the first time, mingled keenly in the details of county politics—canvassed electors—harangued meetings; and, in a word, made himself conspicuous as a leading instrument of his party. But he was, in truth, earnest and serious in his belief that the new rulers of the country were disposed to abolish many of its most valuable institutions; and he regarded with special jealousy certain schemes of innovation with respect to the courts of law and the administration of justice which were set on foot by the crown-officers for Scotland. At a debate of the Faculty of Advocates on some of these propositions he made a speech much longer than he had ever before delivered in that assembly; and several who heard it have assured me that it had a flow and energy of eloquence for which those who knew him best were quite unprepared. When the meeting broke up, he walked across the Mound, on his way to Castle Street, between Mr. Jeffrey and another of his reforming friends, who complimented him on the rhetorical powers he had been displaying, and would willingly have treated the subject-matter of the discussion playfully. But his feelings had been moved to an extent far beyond their apprehension. He exclaimed ‘No, no—’tis no laughing matter; little by little, whatever your wishes may be, you will destroy and undermine, until nothing of what makes Scotland Scotland shall remain.’ And, so saying, he turned round to conceal his agitation—but not until Mr. Jeffrey saw tears gushing down his cheek,—resting his head, until he recovered himself, on the wall of the Mound.”
Edinburgh in 1806 is painted for us in that incident. Of the two men seen standing together on the Mound, under the tall clump of old houses which still on that spot arrests the eye of the visitor, the stalwart fair-haired one, leaning his head on the wall to conceal his tears, is the genius of the Scottish past, while his less moved companion, of smaller stature, with dark keen features and piercing hazel eyes, is the confident spirit of the Scottish future. There was, indeed, one element, then in making for the Scottish future, no representation of which was discernible in Jeffrey, and which was notlogically involved in any ostensible form of Scottish Political Whiggism. This was that fervour of a revived Evangelicism in Theology the effects of which on the national character and the national polity of Scotland have been so strikingly visible through the last two generations and more. But this was a manifestation of later date, which even the closest observer of 1806 could hardly have pre-imagined. The traditional germ existed in Sir Henry Moncreiff; but the full development was to come with the combative Calvinistic and Presbyterian energy of Andrew Thomson, and the grander and richer genius of Thomas Chalmers.