A HIGHLAND CLEARING.

‘The glorious hopes which flattered not––Dawned on him by degrees.’

He found the Saviour whom she had worshipped; and one of the last subsidiary hopes in which he indulged ere he bade the world farewell, was that in the place to which he was going he should meet with his beloved grandmother. We have occupied so much space with our narrative, brief as it is, that we cannot follow up our original intention of showing how, in principle, the intellectual history of Bethune is an epitome of that of his country; but we must add that it would be well if, in at least one important respect, the history of his country resembled his history more. The thoughtful piety of the grandmother prepared an atmosphere of high-toned thought, in which the genius of the grandson was fostered. It constituted, to vary the figure, the table-land from which he arose; but how many of a resembling class, and indebted in a similar way, have133directed the influence of their writings to dissipate that atmosphere––to lower that table-land! We refer the reader to the interesting little work from which we have drawn our materials. It is edited by the surviving Bethune, the brother and biographer of the poet, and both a vigorous writer and a worthy man. There are several of the passages which it comprises of his composition; among the rest, the very striking passage with which the memoir concludes, and in which he adds a few additional facts illustrative of his grandmother’s character, and describes her personal appearance. The description will remind our readers of one of the more graphic pictures of Wordsworth, that of the stately dame on whose appearance the poet remarks quaintly, but significantly,

‘Old times are living there.’

‘From the date of her birth,’ says Alexander Bethune, ‘it will be seen that she (Annie M’Donald) was in her ninety-fourth year at the time of her death. In person she was spare; and ere toil and approaching age had bent her frame, she must have been considerably above the middle size. Even after she was far advanced in life, there was in her appearance a rigidity of outline and a sinewy firmness which told of no ordinary powers of endurance. There was much of true benevolence in the cast of her countenance; while the depth of her own Christian feelings gave an expression of calm yet earnest sympathy to her eye, which was particularly impressive. Limited as were her resources, she had been a regular contributor to the Bible and Missionary Societies for a number of years previous to her death. Nor was she slow to minister to the necessities of others according to her ability. Notwithstanding the various items thus disposed of during the latter part of her life, she had saved a small sum of money, which at her death was left to her unmarried daughters.’134

The touching description of the poet we must also subjoin. No one can read it without feeling its truth, or without being convinced that, to be thoroughly true in the circumstances, was to be intensely poetical. The recollection of such a relative affectionately retained was of itself poetry.

MY GRANDMOTHER.Long years of toil and care,And pain and poverty, have passedSince last I listened to her prayer,And looked upon her last;Yet how she spoke, and how she smiledUpon me, when a playful child––The lustre of her eye––The kind caress––the fond embrace––The reverence of her placid face,––All in my memory lieAs fresh as they had only beenBestowed and felt, and heard and seen,Since yesterday went by.Her dress was simply neat––Her household tasks so featly done:Even the old willow-wicker seatOn which she sat and spun––The table where her Bible lay,Open from morn till close of day––The standish, and the penWith which she noted, as they rose,Her thoughts upon the joys, the woes,The final fate of men,And sufferings of her Saviour God,––Each object in her poor abodeIs visible as then.Nor are they all forgot,The faithful admonitions given,And glorious hopes which flattered not,But led the soul to heaven!These had been hers, and have been mineWhen all beside had ceased to shine––135When sadness and disease,And disappointment and suspense,Had driven youth’s fairest fancies hence,Short’ning its fleeting lease:’Twas then these hopes, amid the darkJust glimmering, like an unquench’d spark,Dawned on me by degrees.To her they gave a lightBrighter than sun or star supplied;And never did they shine more brightThan just before she died.Death’s shadow dimm’d her aged eyes,Grey clouds had clothed the evening skies,And darkness was abroad;But still she turned her gaze above,As if the eternal light of loveOn her glazed organs glowed,Like beacon-fire at closing even,Hung out between the earth and heaven,To guide her soul to God.And then they brighter grew,Beaming with everlasting bliss,As if the eternal world in viewHad weaned her eyes from this:And every feature was composed,As with a placid smile they closedOn those who stood around,who felt it was a sin to weepO’er such a smile and such a sleep––So peaceful, so profound;And though they wept, their tears expressedJoy for her time-worn frame at rest––Her soul with mercy crowned.

MY GRANDMOTHER.

Long years of toil and care,And pain and poverty, have passedSince last I listened to her prayer,And looked upon her last;Yet how she spoke, and how she smiledUpon me, when a playful child––The lustre of her eye––The kind caress––the fond embrace––The reverence of her placid face,––All in my memory lieAs fresh as they had only beenBestowed and felt, and heard and seen,Since yesterday went by.Her dress was simply neat––Her household tasks so featly done:Even the old willow-wicker seatOn which she sat and spun––The table where her Bible lay,Open from morn till close of day––The standish, and the penWith which she noted, as they rose,Her thoughts upon the joys, the woes,The final fate of men,And sufferings of her Saviour God,––Each object in her poor abodeIs visible as then.Nor are they all forgot,The faithful admonitions given,And glorious hopes which flattered not,But led the soul to heaven!These had been hers, and have been mineWhen all beside had ceased to shine––135When sadness and disease,And disappointment and suspense,Had driven youth’s fairest fancies hence,Short’ning its fleeting lease:’Twas then these hopes, amid the darkJust glimmering, like an unquench’d spark,Dawned on me by degrees.To her they gave a lightBrighter than sun or star supplied;And never did they shine more brightThan just before she died.Death’s shadow dimm’d her aged eyes,Grey clouds had clothed the evening skies,And darkness was abroad;But still she turned her gaze above,As if the eternal light of loveOn her glazed organs glowed,Like beacon-fire at closing even,Hung out between the earth and heaven,To guide her soul to God.And then they brighter grew,Beaming with everlasting bliss,As if the eternal world in viewHad weaned her eyes from this:And every feature was composed,As with a placid smile they closedOn those who stood around,who felt it was a sin to weepO’er such a smile and such a sleep––So peaceful, so profound;And though they wept, their tears expressedJoy for her time-worn frame at rest––Her soul with mercy crowned.

August 10, 1812.

136A HIGHLAND CLEARING.

How quickly the years fly! One twelvemonth more, and it will be a full quarter of a century since we last saw the wild Highland valley so well described by Mr. Robertson in his opening paragraphs.[1]And yet the recollection is as fresh in our memory now as it was twenty years ago. The chill winter night had fallen on the brown round hills and alder-skirted river, as we turned from off the road that winds along the Kyle of the Dornoch Frith into the bleak gorge of Strathcarron. The shepherd’s cottage, in which we purposed passing the night, lay high up in the valley, where the lofty sides––partially covered at that period by the remnants of an ancient forest––approach so near each other, and rise so abruptly, that for the whole winter quarter the sun never falls on the stream below. There were still some ten or twelve miles of broken road before us. The moon in its first quarter hung low over the hills, dimly revealing their rough outline, and throwing its tinge of faint bronze on the broken clumps of wood in the hollows. A keen frost had set in; and a thick trail of fog-rime, raised by its influence in the calm, and which at the height of some eighty or a hundred feet hung over the river––scarce less defined in its margin than the river itself, for it winded wherever the stream winded, and ran straight as an arrow wherever the stream ran straight––occupied the whole length of the valley, like an enormous snake lying uncoiled in its den.137The numerous turf cottages on either side were invisible in the darkness, save that ever and anon the brief twinkle of a light indicated their existence and their places. In a recess of the stream the torch of some adventurous fisher now gleamed red on rock and water, now suddenly disappeared, eclipsed by the overhanging brushwood, or by some jutting angle of the bank. The distant roar of the stream mingled sullenly in the calm, with its nearer and hoarser dash, as it chafed on the ledges below, filling the air with a wild music, that seemed the appropriate voice of the impressive scenery from amid which it arose. It was late ere we reached the shepherd’s cottage––a dark, raftered, dimly-lighted building of turf and stone. The weather for several weeks before had been rainy and close, and the flocks of the inmate had been thinned by the common scourge of the sheep-farmer at such seasons on marshy and unwholesome farms. The rafters were laden with skins besmeared with blood, that dangled overhead to catch the conservative influences of the smoke; and on a rude plank table below there rose two tall pyramids of dark-coloured joints of braxy mutton, heaped up each on a corn riddle. The shepherd––a Highlander of colossal proportions, but hard and thin, and worn by the cares and toils of at least sixty winters––sat moodily beside the fire. The state of his flocks was not particularly cheering; and he had, besides, seen a vision of late, he said, that filled his mind with strange forebodings. He had gone out after nightfall on the previous evening to a dank hollow on the hill-side, in which many of his flock had died; the rain had ceased a few hours before, and a smart frost had set in, that, as on this second evening, filled the whole valley with a wreath of silvery vapour, dimly lighted by the thin fragment of a moon that appeared as if resting at the time on the hill-top. The wreath stretched out its grey folds beneath him, for he had climbed half-way up the acclivity, when suddenly what138seemed the figure of a man in heated metal––the figure of a brazen man brought to a red heat in a furnace––sprang up out of the darkness; and after stalking over the surface of the fog for a few seconds––in which, however, it traversed the greater part of the valley––as suddenly disappeared, leaving an evanescent trail of flame behind it. There could be little doubt that the old shepherd had merely seen one of those shooting lights that in mountain districts, during unsettled weather, so frequently startle the night traveller, and that some peculiarity of form in the meteor had been exaggerated by the obscuring influence of the frost-rime and the briefness of the survey; but the apparition had filled his whole mind, as one of strange and frightful portent from the spiritual world. And often since that night has it returned to us in recollection, as a vision in singular keeping with the wild valley which it traversed, and the credulous melancholy of the solitary shepherd, its only witness,––

‘A meteor of the night of distant years,That flashed unnoticed, save by wrinkled eldMusing at midnight upon prophecies.’

By much the greater part of Strathcarron, in those days, was in the possession of its ancient inhabitants; and we learn from the description of Mr. Robertson, that it has since undergone scarce any change. ‘Strathcarron,’ he says, ‘is still in the old state.’ Throughout its whole extent the turf cottages of the aborigines rise dark and thick as heretofore, from amid their irregular patches of potatoes and corn. But in an adjacent glen, through which the Calvie works its headlong way to the Carron, that terror of the Highlanders, a summons of removal, has been served within the last few months on a whole community; and the graphic sketch of Mr. Robertson relates both the peculiar circumstances in which it has been issued, and the feelings which it has excited. We find from his139testimony, that the old state of things which is so immediately on the eve of being broken up in this locality, lacked not a few of those sources of terror to the proprietary of the country, that are becoming so very formidable to them in the newer states. A spectral poor-law sits by our waysides, wrapped up in death-flannels of the English cut, and shakes its skinny hand at the mansion-houses of our landlords,––vision beyond comparison more direfully portentous than the apparition seen by the lone shepherd of Strathcarron. But in the Highlands, at least, it is merely the landlord of the new and improved state of things––the landlord of widespread clearings and stringent removal-summonses––that it threatens. The existing poor-law in Glencalvie is a self-enforcing law, that rises direct out of the unsophisticated sympathies of the Highland heart, and costs the proprietary nothing. ‘The constitution of society in the glen,’ says Mr. Robertson, ‘is remarkably simple. Four heads of families are bound for the whole rental of £55, 13s. a year; the number of souls is about ninety. Sixteen cottages pay rent; three cottages are occupied by old lone women, who pay no rent, and who have a grace from the others for the grazing of a few goats or sheep, by which they live. This self-working poor-law system,’ adds Mr. Robertson, ‘is supported by the people themselves; the laird, I am informed, never gives anything to it.’ Now there must be at least some modicum of good in such a state of things, however old-fashioned; and we are pretty sure such of our English neighbours as leave their acres untilled year after year, to avoid the crushing pressure of the statute-enforced poor-law that renders them not worth the tilling, would be somewhat unwilling, were the state made theirs, to improve it away. Nor does it seem a state––with all its simplicity, and all its perhaps blameable indifferency to modern improvement––particularly hostile to the development of mind or the growth of morals. ‘The people of140Amat and Glencalvie themselves supported a teacher for the education of their children,’ says Mr. Robertson. ‘The laird,’ he adds, ‘has never lost a farthing of rent. In bad years, such as 1836 or 1837, the people may have required the favour of a few weeks’ delay, but they are now not a single farthing in arrears.’

Mr. Robertson gives us the tragedy of a clearing in its first act. We had lately the opportunity of witnessing the closing scene in the after-piece, by which a clearing more than equally extensive has been followed up, and which bids fair to find at no distant day many counterparts in the Highlands of Scotland. Rather more than twenty years ago, the wild, mountainous island of Rum, the home of considerably more than five hundred souls, was divested of all its inhabitants, to make way for one sheep-farmer and eight thousand sheep. It was soon found, however, that there are limits beyond which it is inconvenient to depopulate a country on even the sheep-farm system: the island had been rendered too thoroughly a desert for the comfort of the tenant; and on the occasion of a clearing which took place in a district of Skye, and deprived of their homes many of the old inhabitants, some ten or twelve families of the number were invited to Rum, and may now be found squatting on the shores of the only bay of the island, on a strip of unprofitable morass. But the whole of the once peopled interior remains a desert, all the more lonely in its aspect from the circumstance that the solitary glens, with their green, plough-furrowed patches, and their ruined heaps of stone, open upon shores every whit as solitary as themselves, and that the wide untrodden sea stretches drearily around. We spent a long summer’s day amidst its desert recesses, and saw the sun set behind its wilderness of pyramidal hills. The evening was calm and clear; the armies of the insect world were sporting by millions in the light; a brown stream that ran through the141valley at our feet yielded an incessant poppling sound from the myriads of fish that were incessantly leaping in the pools, beguiled by the quick glancing wings of green and gold that incessantly fluttered over them; the half-effaced furrows borrowed a richer hue from the yellow light of sunset; the broken cottage-walls stood up more boldly prominent on the hill-side, relieved by the lengthening shadows; along a distant hill-side there ran what seemed the ruins of a grey stone fence, erected, says tradition, in a very remote age to facilitate the hunting of deer: all seemed to bespeak the place a fitting habitation for man, and in which not only the necessaries, but not a few also of the luxuries of life, might be procured; but in the entire prospect not a man nor a man’s dwelling could the eye command. The landscape was one without figures. And where, it may be asked, was the one tenant of the island for whose sake so many others had been removed? We found his house occupied by a humble shepherd, who had in charge the wreck of his property,––property no longer his, but held for the benefit of his creditors. The great sheep-farmer had gone down under circumstances of very general bearing, and on whose after development, when in their latent state, improving landlords had failed to calculate; the island itself was in the market, and a report went current at the time that it was on the eve of being purchased by some wealthy Englishman, who purposed converting it into a deer-forest. The cycle––which bids fair to be that of the Highlands generally––had already revolved in the depopulated island of Rum.

We have said that the sheep-farmer had gone down, in this instance, under adverse circumstances of very extensive bearing. In a beautiful transatlantic poem, a North American Indian is represented as visiting by night the tombs of his fathers, now surrounded, though reared in the depths of a forest, by the cultivated farms and luxurious dwellings of the stranger, and there predicting that the race142by whichhishad been supplaced should be in turn cast out of their possessions. His fancy on the subject is a wild one, though not unfitted for the poet. The streams, he said, were yielding a lower murmur than of old, and rolling downwards a decreasing volume; the springs were less copious in their supplies; the land, shorn of its forests, was drying up under the no longer softened influence of summer suns. Yet a few ages more, and it would spread out all around an arid and barren wilderness, unfitted, like the deserts of the East, to be a home of man. The fancy, we repeat, though a poetic, is a wild one; but the grounds from which we infer that the clearers of the Highlands––the supplanters of the Highlanders––are themselves to be cleared and supplanted in turn, is neither wild nor poetic. The voice which predicts in the case is a voice, not of shrinking rivulets nor failing springs, but of the ‘Cloth Hall’ in Leeds, and of the worsted factories of Bradford and Halifax. Most of our readers must be aware that the great woollen trade of Britain divides into two main branches––its woollen cloth manufacture, and its worsted and stuff manufactures: and in both these the estimation in which British wool is held has mightily sunk of late years, never apparently to rise again; for it has sunk, not through any caprice of fashion, but in the natural progress of improvement. Mr. Dodd, in his interesting little work on theTextile Manufactures of Great Britain, refers incidentally to the fact, in drawing a scene in the Cloth Hall of Leeds, introduced simply for the purpose of showing at how slight an expense of time and words business is transacted in this great mart of trade. ‘All the sellers,’ says Mr. Dodd, ‘know all the buyers; and each buyer is invited, as he passes along, to look at some “olives,” or “browns,” or “pilots,” or “six quarters,” or “eight quarters;” and the buyer decides in a wonderfully short space of time whether it will answer his purpose to purchase or not. “Mr. A., just143look at these olives.” “How much?” “Six and eight.” “Too high.” Mr. A. walks on, and perhaps a neighbouring clothier draws his attention to a piece, or “end,” of cloth. “What’s this?” “Five and three.” “Too low.” The “too high” relates, as may be supposed, to the price per yard; whereas the “too low” means that the quality of the cloth is lower than the purchaser requires. Another seller accosts him with “Will this suit you, Mr. A.?” “Any English wool?” “Not much; it is nearly all foreign;” a question and answer which exemplify the disfavour into which English wool has fallen in the cloth trade. But it is not the cloth trade alone in which it has fallen into disfavour. The rapid extension of the worsted manufacture in this country,’ says the same writer in another portion of his work, ‘is very remarkable. So long as efforts were made by English wool-growers to compel the use of the English wool in cloth-making––efforts which the Legislature for many years sanctioned by legal enactments––the worsted fabrics made were chiefly of a coarse and heavy kind, such as “camlets;” but when the wool trade was allowed to flow into its natural channels by the removal of restrictions, the value of all the different kinds of wool became appreciated, and each one was appropriated to purposes for which it seemed best fitted. The wool of one kind of English sheep continued in demand for hosiery and coarse worsted goods; and the wool of the Cashmere and Angora goats came to be imported for worsted goods of finer quality.’ The colonist and the foreign merchant have been brought into the field, and the home producer labours in vain to compete with them on what he finds unequal terms.

Hence the difficulties which, in a season of invigorated commerce and revived trade, continue to bear on the British wool-grower, and which bid fairto clearhim from the soil which he divested of the original inhabitants. Every new sheep-rearing farm that springs up in the colonies––whether144in Australia, or New Zealand, or Van Diemen’s Land, or Southern Africa––sends him its summons of removal in the form of huge bales of wool, lower in price and better in quality than he himself can produce. The sheep-breeders of New Holland and the Cape threaten to avenge the Rosses of Glencalvie. But to avenge is one thing, and to right another. The comforts of our poor Highlander have been deteriorating, and his position lowering, for the last three ages, and we see no prospect of improvement.

‘For a century,’ says Mr. Robertson, ‘their privileges have been lessening: they dare not now hunt the deer, or shoot the grouse or the blackcock; they have no longer the range of the hills for their cattle and their sheep; they must not catch a salmon in a stream: in earth, air, and water, the rights of the laird are greater, and the rights of the people are smaller, than they were in the days of their forefathers. Yet, forsooth, there is much talk of philosophers of the progress of democracy as a progress to equality of conditions in our day! One of the ministers who accompanied me had to become bound for law expenses to the amount of £20, inflicted on the people for taking a log from the forest for their bridge,––a thing they and their fathers had always done unchallenged.’

One eloquent passage more, and we have done. It is thus we find Mr. Robertson, to whose intensely interesting sketch we again direct the attention of the reader, summing up the case of the Rosses of Glencalvie:––

‘The father of the laird of Kindeace bought Glencalvie. It was sold by a Ross two short centuries ago. The swords of the Rosses of Glencalvie did their part in protecting this little glen, as well as the broad lands of Pitcalnie, from the ravages and the clutches of hostile septs. These clansmen bled and died in the belief that every principle of honour and morals secured their descendants a right to subsisting on the soil. The chiefs and their children had the same145charter of the sword. Some Legislatures have made the right of the people superior to the right of the chief; British law-makers have made the rights of the chief everything, and those of their followers nothing. The ideas of the morality of property are in most men the creatures of their interests and sympathies. Of this there cannot be a doubt, however: the chiefs would not have had the land at all, could the clansmen have foreseen the present state of the Highlands––their children in mournful groups going into exile––the faggot of legal myrmidons in the thatch of the feal cabin––the hearths of their loves and their lives the green sheep-walks of the stranger.

‘Sad it is, that it is seemingly the will of our constituencies that our laws shall prefer the few to the many. Most mournful will it be, should the clansmen of the Highlands have been cleared away, ejected, exiled, in deference to a political, a moral, a social, and an economical mistake,––a suggestion not of philosophy, but of mammon,––a system in which the demon of sordidness assumed the shape of the angel of civilisation and of light.’

September 4, 1844.

146THE POET MONTGOMERY.

The reader will find in our columns a report, as ample as our limits have allowed, of the public breakfast given in Edinburgh on Wednesday last[1]to our distinguished countryman James Montgomery, and his friend the missionary Latrobe. We have rarely shared in a more agreeable entertainment, and have never listened to a more pleasing or better-toned address than that in which the poet ran over some of the more striking incidents of his early life. It was in itself a poem, and a very fine one. An old and venerable man returning to his native country after an absence of sixty years––after two whole generations had passed away, and the grave had closed over almost all his contemporaries––would be of itself a matter of poetical interest, even were the aged visitor a person of but the ordinary cast of thought and depth of feeling. How striking the contrast between the sunny, dream-like recollections of childhood to such an individual, and the surrounding realities––between the scenes and figures on this side the wide gulf of sixty years, and the scenes and figures on that: yonder, the fair locks of infancy, its bright, joyous eyes, and its speaking smiles; here, the grey hairs and careworn wrinkles of rigid old age, tottering painfully on the extreme verge of life! But if there attaches thus a poetic interest to the mere circumstances of such a visit, how much more, in the present instance, from the character of the visitor,––a man whose thoughts and feelings,147tinted by the warm hues of imagination, retain in his old age all the strength and freshness of early youth!

Hogg, when first introduced to Wilkie, expressed his gratification at finding him so young a man. We experienced a similar feeling on first seeing the poet Montgomery. He can be no young man, who, looking backwards across two whole generations, can recount from recollection, like Nestor of old, some of the occurrences of the third. But there is a green old age, in which the spirits retain their buoyancy, and the intellect its original vigour; and the whole appearance of the poet gives evidence that his evening of life is of this happy and desirable character. His appearance speaks of antiquity, but not of decay. His locks have assumed a snowy whiteness, and the lofty and full-arched coronal region exhibits what a brother poet has well termed the ‘clear bald polish of the honoured head;’ but the expression of the countenance is that of middle life. It is a clear, thin, speaking countenance: the features are high; the complexion fresh, though not ruddy; and age has failed to pucker either cheek or forehead with a single wrinkle. The spectator sees at a glance that all the poet still survives––that James Montgomery in his sixty-fifth year is all that he ever was. The forehead, rather compact than large, swells out on either side towards the region of ideality, and rises high, in a fine arch, into what, if phrenology speak true, must be regarded as an amply developed organ of veneration. The figure is quite as little touched by age as the face. It is well but not strongly made, and of the middle size; and yet there is a touch of antiquity about it too, derived, however, rather from the dress than from any peculiarity in the person itself. To a plain suit of black Mr. Montgomery adds the voluminous breast ruffles of the last age––exactly such things as, in Scotland at least, the fathers of the present generation wore on their wedding-days. These are perhaps but small details; but we notice148them just because we have never yet met with any one who took an interest in a celebrated name, without trying to picture to himself the appearance of the individual who bore it.

There are some very pleasing incidents beautifully related in the address of Mr. Montgomery. It would have been false taste and delicacy in such a man to have forborne speaking of himself. His return, after an absence equal to the term of two full generations, to his native cottage, is an incident exquisitely poetic. He finds his father’s humble chapel converted into a workshop, and strangers sit beside the hearth that had once been his mother’s. And where were that father and mother? Their bones moulder in a distant land, where the tombstones cast no shadow when the fierce sun looks down at noon upon their graves. ‘Taking their lives in their hands,’ they had gone abroad to preach Christ to the poor enslaved negro, for whose soul at that period scarce any one cared save the United Brethren; and in the midst of their labours of piety and love, they had fallen victims to the climate. He passed through the cottage and the workshop, calling up the dream-like recollections of his earliest scene of existence, and recognising one by one the once familiar objects within. One object he failed to recognise. It was a small tablet fixed in the wall. He went up to it, and found it intimated that James Montgomery the poet had been born there. Was it not almost as if one of the poets or philosophers of a former time had lighted, on revisiting the earth as a disembodied spirit, on his own monument? Of scarce less interest is his anecdote of Monboddo. The parents of the poet had gone abroad, as we have said, and their little boy was left with the Brethren at Fulneck, a Moravian settlement in the sister kingdom. He was one of their younger scholars at a time when Lord Monboddo, still so well known for his great talents and acquirements, and his scarce less marked eccentricities,149visited the settlement, and was shown, among other things, their little school. His Lordship stood among the boys, coiling and uncoiling his whip on the floor, and engaged as if in counting the nail-heads in the boarding. The little fellows were all exceedingly curious; none of them had ever seen a real live lord before, and Monboddo was a very strange-looking lord indeed. He wore a large, stiff, bushy periwig, surmounted by a huge, odd-looking hat; his very plain coat was studded with brass buttons of broadest disk, and his voluminous inexpressibles were of leather. And there he stood, with his grave, absent face bent downwards, drawing and redrawing his whip along the floor, as the Moravian, his guide, pointed out to his notice boy after boy. ‘And this,’ said the Moravian, coming at length to young Montgomery, ‘is a countryman of your Lordship’s.’ His Lordship raised himself up, looked hard at the little fellow, and then shaking his huge whip over his head, ‘Ah,’ he exclaimed, ‘I hope his country will have no reason to be ashamed of him.’ ‘The circumstance,’ said the poet, ‘made a deep impression on my mind; and I determined––I trust the resolution was not made in vain––I determined in that moment that my country should not have reason to be ashamed of me.’

Scotland has no reason to be ashamed of James Montgomery. Of all her poets, there is not one of equal power, whose strain has been so uninterruptedly pure, or whose objects have been so invariably excellent. The child of the Christian missionary has been the poet of Christian missions. The parents laid down their lives in behalf of the enslaved and perishing negro; the son, in strains the most vigorous and impassioned, has raised his generous appeal to public justice in his behalf. Nor has the appeal been in vain. All his writings bear the stamp of the Christian; many of them––embodying feelings which all the truly devout experience, but which only a poet could express––have150been made vehicles for addressing to the Creator the emotions of many a grateful heart; and, employed chiefly on themes of immortality, they promise to outlive not only songs of intellectually a lower order, but of even equal powers of genius, into whose otherwise noble texture sin has introduced the elements of death.

28th October 1841.

151CRITICISM––INTERNAL EVIDENCE.

The reader must have often remarked, in catalogues of the writings of great authors––such as Dr. Johnson, and the Rev. John Cumming, of the Scotch Church, London––that while some of the pieces are described asacknowledged, the genuineness of others is determined merely byinternal evidence. We know, for instance, that the Doctor wrote theEnglish Dictionary, not only because no other man in the world at the time could have written it, but also because he affixed his name to the title-page. We know, too, that he wrote some of the best of Lord Chatham’s earlier speeches, just because he said so, and pointed out the very garret in Fleet Street in which they had been written. But it is from other data we conclude that, during his period of obscurity and distress, he wrote prefaces for theGentleman’s Magazine, for some six or seven years together,––data derived exclusively from a discriminating criticism; and his claim to the authorship ofTaylor’s Sermonsrests solely on the vigorous character of the thinking displayed in these compositions, and the marked peculiarities of their style. Now, in exactly the same way in which we know that Johnson wrote the speeches and the Dictionary, do we know that the Rev. John Cumming drew up an introductory essay to the liturgy of a Church that never knew of a liturgy, and that he occasionally contributes tales to morocco annuals, wonderful enough to excite the astonishment of ordinary readers. To these compositions he affixes his name,––a thing very few men would have the courage to do; and thus are we assured152of their authorship. But there are other compositions to which he does not affix his name, and it is from internal evidence alone that these can be adjudged to him: it is from internal evidence alone, for instance, that we can conclude him to be the author of the article on the Scottish Church question which has appeared inFraser’s Magazinefor the present month.

May we crave leave to direct the attention of the reader for a very few minutes to the grounds on which we decide? It is of importance, as Johnson says of Pope, that no part of so great a writer should be suffered to be lost, and a little harmless criticism may have the effect of sharpening the faculties.

There is a class of Scottish ministers in the present day, who, though they detest show and coxcombry, have yet a very decided leaning to the picturesque ceremonies of the Episcopal Church. They never weary of apologizing to our southern neighbours for what they term the baldness of our Presbyterian ritual, or in complaining of it to ourselves. It was no later than last Sunday that Dr. Muir sorrowed in his lecture over the ‘stinted arrangement in the Presbyterian service, that admits of no audible response from the people;’ and all his genteeler hearers, sympathizing with the worthy man, felt how pleasant a thing it would be were the congregation permitted to do for him in the church what the Rev. Mr. Macfarlane, erst of Stockbridge, does for him in the presbytery. Corporal Trim began one of his stories on one occasion, by declaring ‘that there was once an unfortunate king of Bohemia;’ and when Uncle Toby, interrupting him with a sigh, exclaimed, ‘Ah, Corporal Trim, and was he unfortunate?’ ‘Yes, your honour,’ readily replied Trim; ‘he had a great love of ships and seaports, and yet, as your honour knows, there was ne’er a ship nor a seaport in all his dominions.’ Now this semi-Episcopalian class are unfortunate after the manner of the153king of Bohemia. The objects of their desire lie far beyond the Presbyterian territories. They are restricted to one pulpit, they are limited to one dress; they have actually to read and preach from the same footboard; they are prohibited the glories of white muslin; liturgy have they none. No audible responses arise from the congregation; the precentor is silent, save when he sings; their churches are organless; and though they set themselves painfully to establish their claim to the succession apostolical, the Hon. Mr. Percevals of the Church which they love and admire see no proof in their evidence, and look down upon them as the mere preaching laymen of a sectarian corporation.

Thrice unfortunate men! What were the unhappinesses of the king of Bohemia, compared with the sorrows of these humble but rejected followers of Episcopacy!

Now, among this highly respectable but unhappy class, the Rev. John Cumming, of the Scotch Church, London, stands pre-eminent. So grieved was Queen Mary of England by the loss of Calais, that she alleged the very name of the place would be found written on her heart after her death. The words that have the best chance of being found inscribed on the heart of the Rev. Mr. Cumming are, bishop, liturgy, apostolical succession, burial service, organ, and surplice. The ideas attached to these vocables pervade his whole style, and form from their continual recurrence a characteristic portion of it. They tumble up and down in his mind like the pieces of painted glass in a kaleidoscope, and present themselves in new combinations at every turn. His last acknowledged composition was a wonderful tale which appeared in theProtestant Annualfor the present year, and––strange subject for such a writer––it purported to be aTale of the Covenant. Honest Peter Walker had told the same story, that of John Brown of Priesthill, about a century and a half ago; but there had been much left for Mr. Cumming to discover in it of which154the poor pedlar does not seem to have had the most distant conception.

Little did Peter know that John Brown’s favourite minister ‘held the sacred and apostolical succession of the Scottish priesthood.’ Little would he have thought of apologizing to the English reader for ‘the antique and ballad verses’ of our metrical version of the Psalms. Indeed, so devoid was he of learning, that he could scarce have valued at a sufficiently high rate the doctrines of Oxford; and so little gifted with taste, that he would have probably failed to appreciate the sublimities of Brady and Tate. Nor could Peter have known that the ‘liturgy of the heart’ was in the Covenanter’s cottage, and that the ‘litany’ of the spirit breathed from his evening devotions. But it is all known to the Rev. Mr. Cumming. He knows, too, that there were sufferings and privations endured by the persecuted Presbyterians of those days, of which writers of less ingenuity have no adequate conception; that they were forced to the wild hill-sides, where they could have no ‘organs,’ and compelled to bury their dead without the solemnities of the funeral service. Unhappy Covenanters! It is only now that your descendants are beginning to learn the extent of your miseries. Would that it had been your lot to live in the days of the Rev. John Cumming of the Scottish Church, London!

He would assuredly have procured for you the music-box of some wandering Italian, and gone away with you to the wilds to mingle exquisite melody with your devotions, qualifying with the sweetness of his tones the ‘antique and ballad’ rudeness of your psalms; nor would he have failed to furnish you with a liturgy, by means of which you could have interred your dead in decency. Had such been the arrangement, no after writer could have remarked, as the Rev. Mr. Cumming does now, that no ‘pealing organ’ mingled ‘its harmony of bass, tenor, treble, and soprano’155when you sung, or have recorded the atrocious fact, that not only was John Brown of Priesthill shot by Claverhouse, but actually buried by his friends without the funeral service. And how striking and affecting an incident would it not form in the history of the persecution, could it now be told, that when surprised by the dragoons, the good Mr. Cumming fled over hill and hollow with the box on his back, turning the handle as he went, and urging his limbs to their utmost speed, lest the Episcopalian soldiery should bring him back and make him a bishop!

It is partly from the more than semi-Episcopalian character of this gentleman’s opinions, partly from the inimitable felicities of his style, and partly from one or two peculiar incidents in his history which lead to a particular tone of remark, that we infer him to be the writer of the article inFraser.

We may be of course mistaken, but the internal evidence seems wonderfully strong. The Rev. Mr. Cumming, though emphatically powerful in declamation, has never practised argument,––a mean and undignified art, which he leaves to men such as Mr. Cunningham, just as the genteel leave the art of boxing to the commonalty; and in grappling lately with a strong-boned Irish Presbyterian, skilful of fence, he caught, as gentlemen sometimes do, a severe fall, and began straightway to characterize Irish Presbyterians as a set of men very inferior indeed. Now the writer inFraserhas a flingà la Cummingat the Irish Presbyterians. Popular election has, it seems, done marvellously little for them; with very few exceptions, their ‘ministry’ is neither ‘erudite, influential, nor accomplished,’ and their Church ‘exhibits the symptoms of heart disease.’ Depend on it, some stout Irish Presbyterian has entailed the shame of defeat on the writer inFraser. Mr. Cumming, in his tale, adverts to the majority of the Scottish Church as ‘radical subverters of Church and State, who claim the Covenanters as precedents156for a course of conduct from which the dignified Henderson, the renowned Gillespie, the learned Binning, the laborious Denham, the heavenly-minded Rutherford, the religious Wellwood, the zealous Cameron, and the prayerful Peden, would have revolted in horror.’ The writer of the article brings out exactly the same sentiment, though not quite so decidedly, in what Meg Dodds would have termed a grand style of language. At no time, he asserts, did non-intrusion exist in the sense now contended for in Scotland; at no time might not qualified ministers be thrust upon reclaiming parishes by the presbytery: and as for the vetoists, they are but wild radicals, who are to be ‘classified by the good sense of England with those luminaries of the age, Dan O’Connell, John Frost, and others of that ilk.’ In the article there is a complaint that our majority are miserably unacquainted with Scottish ecclesiastical history; and there is special mention made of Mr. Cunningham as an individual not only ignorant of facts, but as even incapable of being made to feel their force. In theAnnual, as if Mr. Cumming wished to exemplify, there is a passage in Scottish ecclesiastical history, of which we are certain Mr. Cunningham not only knows nothing, but which we are sure he will prove too obstinate to credit or comprehend. ‘The celebrated Mr. Cameron,’ says the minister of the Scottish Church, London, ‘was left on Drumclog a mangled corpse.’ Fine thing to be minutely acquainted with ecclesiastical history! We illiterate non-intrusionists hold, and we are afraid Mr. Cunningham among the rest, that the celebrated Cameron was killed, not at the skirmish of Drumclog, but at the skirmish of Airdmoss, which did not take place until about a twelvemonth after; but this must result surely from our ignorance. Has the Rev. Mr. Cumming no intention of settling our disputes, by giving us a new history of the Church?

That portion of the internal evidence in the article before us which depends on style and manner, seems very conclusive157indeed. Take some of the avowed sublimities of the Rev. Mr. Cumming. No man stands more beautifully on tiptoe when he sets himself to catch a fine thought. In describing an attached congregation, ‘The hearer’s prayers rose to heaven,’ he says, ‘and returned in the shape of broad impenetrable bucklers around the venerable man. A thousand broadswords leapt in a thousand scabbards, as if the electric eloquence of the minister found in them conductors and depositories.’

Poetry such as this is still somewhat rare; but mark the kindred beauties of the writer inFraser. Around such men as Mr. Tait, Dr. M’Leod, and Dr. Muir, ‘must crystallize the piety and the hopes of the Scottish Church.’ What a superb figure! Only think of the Rev. Dr. Muir as of a thread in a piece of sugar candy, and the piety of the Dean of Faculty and Mr. Penney, joined to that of some four or five hundred respectable ladies of both sexes besides, all sticking out around him in cubes, hexagons, and prisms, like cleft almonds in a bishop-cake. Hardly inferior in the figurative is the passage which follows: ‘The Doctor (Dr. Chalmers) rides on at a rickety trot,––Messrs. Cunningham, Begg, and Candlish by turns whipping up the wornout Rosenante, and making the rider believe that windmills are Church principles, and the echoes of their thunder solid argument. A ditch will come; and when the first effects of the fall are over, the dumbfounded Professor will awake to the deception, and smite the minnows of vetoism hip and thigh.’ The writer of this passage is unquestionably an ingenious man, but he could surely have made a little more of the last figure. A dissertation on the hips and thighs of minnows might be made to reflect new honour on even the genius of the Rev. Mr. Cumming.

It is mainly, however, from the Episcopalian tone of the article that we derive our evidence. The writer seems to hold, with Charles II., that Presbyterianism is no fit religion158for a gentleman. True, the Moderates were genteel men, of polish and propriety, such as Mr. Jaffray of Dunbar, who never at synod or presbytery did or said anything that was not strictly polite; but then the Moderates had but little of Presbyterianism in their religion, and perhaps, notwithstanding their ‘quiet, amiable, and courteous demeanour,’ little of religion itself. It is to quite a different class that the hope of the writer turns. He states that ‘melancholy facts and strong arguments against the practical working of Presbytery is at this moment impressing itself in Scotland on every unprejudiced spectator;’ that there is a party, however, ‘with whom the ministerial office is a sacred investiture, transmitted by succession through pastor to pastor, and from age to age,––men inducted to their respective parishes, not because their flocks like or dislike them, but because the superintending authorities, after the exercise of solemn, minute, and patient investigation, have determined that this or that pastor is the fittest and best for this or that parish;’ that there exist in this noble party ‘the germs of a possible unity with the southern Church;’ and that there is doubtless a time coming when the body of our Establishment, ‘sick of slavery under the name of freedom, and of sheer Popery under Presbyterian colours, shall send up three of their best men to London for consecration, and Episcopacy shall again become the adoption of Scotland.’ Rarely has the imagination of the poet conjured up a vision of greater splendour. The minister of the Scotch Church, London, may die Archbishop of St. Andrews. And such an archbishop! We are told in the article that ‘the channel along which ministerial orders are to be transmitted is the pastors of the Church, whether they meet together in the presbytery, or are compressed and consolidated in the bishop.’ But is not this understating the case on the Episcopal side? What would not Scotland gain if she could compress and consolidate a simple presbytery, such as that159of Edinburgh––its Chalmers and its Gordon, its Candlish and its Cunningham, its Guthrie, its Brown, its Bennie, its Begg––in short, all its numerous members––into one great Bishop John Cumming, late of the Scotch Church, London! The man who converts twenty-one shillings into a gold guinea gains nothing by the process; but the case would be essentially different here, for not only would there be a great good accomplished, but also a great evil removed. As for Dr. Chalmers, it is ‘painfully evident,’ says the writer of the article, ‘that he regards only three things additional to a “supernal influence” as requisite to constitute any one a minister––a knowledge of Christianity, and endowment, and a parish;’ and as for the rest of the gentlemen named, they are just preparing to do, in an ‘ecclesiastical way in Edinburgh, what Robespierre, Marat, and others did in a corporal way in the Convention of 1793.’

Hogarth quarrelled with Churchill, and drew him as a bear in canonicals. Had he lived to quarrel with the Rev. John Cumming, he would in all probability have drawn him as a puppy in gown and band; and no one who knows aught of the painter can doubt that he would have strikingly preserved the likeness. As for ourselves, we merely indulge in a piece of conjectural criticism. The other parts of the article are cast very much into the ordinary type of that side of the controversy to which it belongs: there is rather more than the usual amount of misrepresentation, inconsistency, and abuse, with here and there a peculiarity of statement. Patrons are described as the ‘trustees of the supreme magistrate, beautifully and devoutly appointed to submit the presentee to the presbytery.’ Lord Aberdeen’s bill is eulogized as suited to ‘confer a greater boon on the laity of Scotland than was ever conferred on them by the General Assembly.’ The seven clergymen of Strathbogie are praised for ‘having rendered unto God the things that are God’s,’ ‘their enemies being judges.’160

The minority of the Church contains, it is stated, its best men, and its most diligent ministers. As for the majority, they have been possessed by a spirit of ‘deep delusion;’ their only idea of a ‘clergyman is a preaching machine, that makes a prodigious vociferation, and pleases the herd.’ They are destined to become’ contemptible and base;’ their attitude is an ‘unrighteous attitude;’ they are aiming, ‘like Popish priests,’ at ‘supremacy’ and a deadly despotism, through the sides of the people; they are ‘suicidally divesting themselves of their power as clergymen, by surrendering to the people essentially Episcopal functions;’ they are ‘wild men,’ and offenders against the ‘divine headship;’ and the writer holds, therefore, that if the Establishment is to be maintained in Scotland, they must be crushed, and that soon, by the strong arm of the law. We need make no further remarks on the subject. To employ one of the writer’s own illustrations, the history of Robespierre powerfully demonstrates that great vanity, great weakness, and great cruelty, may all find room together in one little mind.

March 10, 1841.

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