Judging from the sculptures of St. Magnus, the stone-cutter seems to have had but an indifferent command of his trade in Orkney, when there was a good deal known about it elsewhere. And yet the rudeness of his work here, much in keeping with the ponderous simplicity of the architecture, serves but to link on the pile to a more venerable antiquity, and speaks less of the inartificial than of the remote. I saw a grotesque hatchment high up among the arches, that, with the uncouth carvings below,served to throw some light on the introduction into ecclesiastical edifices of those ludicrous sculptures that seem so incongruously foreign to the proper use and character of such places. The painter had set himself, with, I doubt not, fair moral intent, to exhibit a skeleton wrapped up in a winding-sheet; but, like the unlucky artist immortalized by Gifford, who proposed painting a lion, but produced merely a dog, his skill had failed in seconding his intentions, and, instead of achieving a Death in a shroud, he had achieved but a monkey grinning in a towel. His contemporaries, however, unlike those of Gifford's artist, do not seem to have found out the mistake, and so the betowelled monkey has come to hold a conspicuous place among the solemnities of the Cathedral. It does not seem difficult to conceive how unintentional ludicrosities of this nature, introduced into ecclesiastical erections in ages too little critical to distinguish between what the workman had purposed doing and what he had done, might come to be regarded, in a less earnest but more knowing age, as precedents for the introduction of the intentionally comic and grotesque. Innocent accidental monkeys in towels may have thus served to usher into serious neighborhoods monkeys in towels that were such with maliceprepense.
I was shown an opening in the masonry, rather more than a man's height from the floor, that marked where a square narrow cell, formed in the thickness of the wall, had been laid open a few years before. And in the cell there was found depending from the middle of the roof a rusty iron chain, with a bit of barley-bread attached. What could the chain and bit of bread have meant? Had they dangled in the remote past over some northern Ugolino? or did they form in their dark narrow cell, without air-hole or outlet, merely some of the reserve terrors of theCathedral, efficient in bending to the authority of the Church the rebellious monk or refractory nun? Ere quitting the building, I scaled the great tower,—considerably less tall, it is said, than its predecessor, which was destroyed by lightning about two hundred years ago, but quite tall enough to command an extensive, and, though bare, not unimpressive prospect. Two arms of the sea, that cut so deeply into the mainland on its opposite sides as to narrow it into a flat neck little more than a mile and a half in breadth, stretch away in long vista, the one to the south, and the other to the north; and so immediately is the Cathedral perched on the isthmus between, as to be nearly equally conspicuous from both. It forms in each, to the inward-bound vessel, the terminal object in the landscape. There was not much to admire in the town immediately beneath, with its roofs of gray slate,—almost the only parts of it visible from this point of view,—and its bare treeless suburbs; nor yet in the tract of mingled hill and moor on either hand, into which the island expands from the narrow neck, like the two ends of a sand-glass; but the long withdrawing ocean-avenues between, that seemed approaching from south and north to kiss the feet of the proud Cathedral,—avenues here and there enlivened on their ground of deep blue by a sail, and fringed on the lee—for the wind blew freshly in the clear sunshine—with their border of dazzling white, were objects worth while climbing the tower to see. Ere my descent, my guide hammered out of the tower-bells, on my special behalf, somewhat, I daresay, to the astonishment of the burghers below, a set of chimes handed down entire, in all the notes, from the times of the monks, from which also the four fine bells of the Cathedral have descended as an heirloom to the burgh. The chimes would have delighted the heart of old Lisle Bowles, the poet of
"Well-tun'd bell's enchanting harmony."
I could, however, have preferred listening to their music, though it seemed really very sweet, a few hundred yards further away; and the quiet clerical poet,—the restorer of the Sonnet in England, would, I doubt not, have been of the same mind. The oft-recurring tones of those bells that ring throughout his verse, and to which Byron wickedly proposed adding acap, form but an ingredient of the poetry in which he describes them; and they are represented always as distant tones, that, while they mingle with the softer harmonies of nature, never overpower them.
"How sweet the tuneful bells responsive peal!
And, hark! with lessening cadence now they fall,And now, along the white and level tideThey fling their melancholy music wide!Bidding me many a tender thought recallOf happy hours departed, and those yearsWhen, from an antique tower, ere life's fair prime,The mournful mazes of their mingling chimeFirst wak'd my wondering childhood into tears!"
From the Cathedral I passed to the mansion of Old Earl Patrick,—a stately ruin, in the more ornate castellated style of the sixteenth century. It stands in the middle of a dense thicket of what aretryingto be trees, and have so far succeeded, that they conceal, on one of the sides, the lower story of the building, and rise over thespringof the large richly-decorated turrets. These last form so much nearer the base of the edifice than is common in our old castles, that they exhibit the appearance rather of hanging towers than of turrets,—of towers with their foundations cut away. The projecting windows, with their deep mouldings, square mullions, and cruciform shot-holes, arerich specimens of their peculiar style; and, with the double-windowed turrets with which they range, they communicate a sort ofhigh-reliefeffect to the entire erection, "the exterior proportions and ornaments of which," says Sir Walter Scott, in his Journal, "are very handsome." Though a roofless and broken ruin, with the rank grass waving on its walls, it is still a piece of very solid masonry, and must have been rather stiff working as a quarry. Some painstaking burgher had, I found, made a desperate attempt on one of the huge chimney lintels of the great hall of the erection,—an apartment which Sir Walter greatly admired, and in which he lays the scene in the "Pirate" between Cleveland and Jack Bunce, but the lintel, a curious example of what, in the exercise of a little Irish liberty, is sometimes termed arectilinear arch, defied his utmost efforts; and, after half-picking out the keystone, he had to give it up in despair. The bishop's palace, of which a handsome old tower still remains tolerably entire, also served for a quarry in its day; and I was scarce sufficiently distressed to learn, that on almost the last occasion on which it had been wrought for this purpose, one of the two men engaged in the employment suffered a stone, which he had loosed out of the wall, to drop on the head of his companion, who stood watching for it below, and killed him on the spot.
The Bishop's Palace at Orkney—Haco the Norwegian—Icelandic Chronicle respecting his Expedition to Scotland—His Death—Removal of his Remains to Norway—Why Norwegian Invasion ceased—Straw-plaiting—The Lassies of Orkney—Orkney Type of Countenance—Celtic and Scandinavian—An accomplished Antiquary—Old Manuscripts—An old Tune-book—Manuscript Letter of Mary Queen of Scots—Letters of General Monck—The fearless Covenanter—Cave of the Rebels—Why the tragedy of "Gustavus Vasa" was prohibited—Quarry of Pickoquoy—Its Fossil Shells—Journey to Stromness—Scenery—Birth-place of Malcolm, the Poet—His History—One of his Poems—His Brother a Free Church Minister—New Scenery.
The Bishop's Palace at Orkney—Haco the Norwegian—Icelandic Chronicle respecting his Expedition to Scotland—His Death—Removal of his Remains to Norway—Why Norwegian Invasion ceased—Straw-plaiting—The Lassies of Orkney—Orkney Type of Countenance—Celtic and Scandinavian—An accomplished Antiquary—Old Manuscripts—An old Tune-book—Manuscript Letter of Mary Queen of Scots—Letters of General Monck—The fearless Covenanter—Cave of the Rebels—Why the tragedy of "Gustavus Vasa" was prohibited—Quarry of Pickoquoy—Its Fossil Shells—Journey to Stromness—Scenery—Birth-place of Malcolm, the Poet—His History—One of his Poems—His Brother a Free Church Minister—New Scenery.
The"upper story" of the bishop's palace, in which grim old Haco died,—thanks to the economic burghers who converted the stately ruin into a quarry,—has wholly disappeared. Though the death of this last of the Norwegian invaders does not date more than ten years previous to the birth of the Bruce, it seems to belong, notwithstanding, to a different and greatly more ancient period of Scottish history; as if it came under the influence of a sort of aërial perspective, similar to that which makes a neighboring hill in a fog appear as remote as a distant mountain when the atmosphere is clearer. Our national wars with the English were rendered familiar to our country folk of the last age, and for centuries before by the old Scotch "Makkaris," Barbour and Blind Harry, and in our own times by the glowing narratives of Sir Walter Scott,—magicians who, unlike those ancient sorcerers that used to darken the air with their incantations, possessed the rare power of dissipatingthe mists and vapors of the historic atmosphere, and rendering it transparent. But we had no such chroniclers of the time, though only half an age further removed into the past,
"When Norse and Danish galleys pliedTheir oars within the Frith of Clyde,And floated Haco's banner trimAbove Norweyan warriors grim,Savage of heart and large of limb."
And hence the thick haze in which it is enveloped. Curiously enough, however, this period, during which the wild Scot had to contend with the still wilder wanderers of Scandinavia in fierce combats that he was too little skilful to record, and which appears so obscure and remote to his descendants, presents a phase comparatively near, and an outline proportionally sharp and well-defined to the intelligent peasantry of Iceland.TheirBarbours and Blind Harries came a few ages sooner than ours, and the fog, in consequence, rose earlier; and so, while Scotch antiquaries of no mean standing can say almost nothing about the expedition or death-bed of Haco, even the humbler Icelanders, taught from their Sagas in the long winter nights, can tell how, harassed by anxiety and fatigue, the monarch sickened, and recovered, and sickened again; and how, dying in the bishop's palace, his body was interred for a winter in the Cathedral, and then borne in spring to the burying-place of his ancestors in Norway. The only clear vista on the death of Haco which now exists is that presented by an Icelandic chronicler: to which, as it seems so little known even in Orkney that the burying-place of the monarch is still occasionally sought for in the Cathedral, I must introduce the reader. I quote from an extract containing the account of Haco's expedition against Scotland, which was translated from the original Icelandic by the Rev.James Johnstone, chaplain to his Britannic Majesty's Envoy Extraordinary at the court of Denmark, and appeared in the "Edinburgh Magazine" for 1787.
"King Haco," says the chronicler, "now in the seven and fortieth year of his reign, had spent the summer in watchfulness and anxiety. Being often called to deliberate with his captains, he had enjoyed little rest; and when he arrived at Kirkwall, he was confined to his bed by his disorder. Having lain for some nights, the illness abated, and he was on foot for three days. On the first day he walked about in his apartments; on the second he attended at the bishop's chapel to hear mass; and on the third he went to Magnus Church, and walked round the shrine of St. Magnus, Earl of Orkney. He then ordered a bath to be prepared, and got himself shaved. Some nights after, he relapsed, and took again to his bed. During his sickness he ordered the Bible and Latin authors to be read to him. But finding his spirits were too much fatigued by reflecting on what he had heard, he desired Norwegian books might be read to him night and day: first the lives of saints; and, when they were ended, he made his attendants read the Chronicles of our Kings, from Holden the Black, and so of all the Norwegian monarchs in succession, one after the other. The king still found his disorder increasing. He therefore took into consideration the pay to be given to his troops, and commanded that a merk of fine silver should be given to each courtier, and half a merk to each of the masters of the lights, chamberlain, and other attendants on his person. He ordered all the silver-plate belonging to his table to be weighed, and to be distributed if his standard silver fell short.... King Haco received extreme unction on the night before the festival of St. Lucia. Thorgisl, Bishop of Stravanger, Gilbert, Bishop of Hainar, Henry, Bishop of Orkney, Albert Thorleif andmany other learned men, were present; and, before the unction, all present bade the king farewell with a kiss.... The festival of the Virgin St. Lucia happened on a Thursday; and on the Saturday after, the king's disorder increased to such a degree, that he lost the use of his speech; and at midnight Almighty God called King Haco out of this mortal life. This was matter of great grief to all those who attended, and to most of those who heard of the event. The following barons were present at the death of the king:—Briniolf Johnson, Erling Alfson, John Drottning, Ronald Urka, and some domestics who had been near the king's person during his illness. Immediately on the decease of the king, bishops and learned men were sent for to sing mass.... On Sunday the royal corpse was carried to the upper hall, and laid on a bier. The body was clothed in a rich garb, with a garland on its head, and dressed out as became a crowned monarch. The masters of the lights stood with tapers in their hands, and the whole hall was illuminated. All the people came to see the body, which appeared beautiful and animated; and the king's countenance was as fair and ruddy as while he was alive. It was some alleviation of the deep sorrow of the beholders to see the corpse of their departed sovereign so decorated. High mass was then sung for the deceased. The nobility kept watch by the body during the night. On Monday the remains of King Haco were carried to St. Magnus Church, where they lay in state that night. On Tuesday the royal corpse was put in a coffin, and buried in the choir of St. Magnus Church, near the steps leading to the shrine of St. Magnus, Earl of Orkney. The tomb was then closed, and a canopy was spread over it. It was also determined that watch should be kept over the king's grave all winter. At Christmas the bishop and Andrew Plytt furnished entertainments, as the kinghad directed; and good presents were given to all the soldiers. King Haco had given orders that his remains should be carried east to Norway, and buried near his fathers and relatives. Towards the end of winter, therefore, that great vessel which he had in the west was launched, and soon got ready. On Ash Wednesday the corpse of King Haco was taken out of the ground: this happened the third of the nones of March. The courtiers followed the corpse to Skalpeid, where the ship lay, and which was chiefly under the direction of the Bishop Thorgisl and Andrew Plytt. They put to sea on the first Saturday in Lent; but, meeting with hard weather, they steered for Silavog. From this place they wrote letters to Prince Magnus, acquainting him with the news, and then sailed for Bergen. They arrived at Laxavog before the festival of St. Benedict. On that day Prince Magnus rowed out to meet the corpse. The ship was brought near to the king's palace, and the body was carried up to a summer-house. Next morning the corpse was removed to Christ's Church, and was attended by Prince Magnus, the two queens, the courtiers, and the town's people. The body was then interred in the choir of Christ's Church; and Prince Magnus addressed a long and gracious speech to those who attended the funeral procession. All the multitude present were much affected, and expressed great sorrow of mind."
So far the Icelandic chronicle. Each age has as certainly its own mode of telling its stories as of adjusting its dress or setting its cap; and the mode of this northern historian is somewhat prolix. I am not sure, however, whether I would not prefer the simple minuteness with which he dwells on every little circumstance, to that dissertative style of history characteristic of a more reflective age, that for series of facts substitutes bundles of theories.Cowper well describes the historians of this latter school, and shows how, on selecting some little-known personage of a remote time as their hero,
"They disentangle from the puzzled skeinIn which obscurity has wrapped them up,The threads of politic and shrewd designThat ran through all his purposes, and chargeHis mind with meanings that he never had,Or, having, kept concealed."
I have seen it elaborately argued by a writer of this class, that those wasting incursions of the Northmen which must have been such terrible plagues to the southern and western countries of Europe, ceased in consequence of their conversion to Christianity; for that, under the humanizing influence of religion, they staid at home, and cultivated the arts of peace. But the hypothesis is, I fear, not very tenable. Christianity, in even a purer form than that in which it first found its way among the ancient Scandinavians, and when at least as generally recognized nationally as it ever was by the subjects of Haco, has failed to put down the trade of aggressive war. It did not prevent honest, obstinate George the Third from warring with the Americans or the French: it only led him to enjoin a day of thanksgiving when his troops had slaughtered a great many of the enemy, and to ordain a fast when the enemy had slaughtered, in turn, a great many of his troops. And Haco, who, though he preferred the lives of the saints, and even of his ancestors, who could not have been very great saints, to the Scriptures, seems, for a king, to have been a not undevout man in his way, and yet appears to have had as few compunctions visitings on the score of his Scottish war as George the Third on that of the French or the American one. Christianity, too, ere his invasionof Scotland, had been for a considerable time established in his dominions, and ought, were the theory a true one, to have operated sooner. The Cathedral of St. Magnus, when he walked round the shrine of its patron saint, was at least a century old. The true secret of the cessation of Norwegian invasion seems to have been the consolidation, under vigorous princes, of the countries which had lain open to it,—a circumstance which, in the later attempts of the invaders, led to results similar to those which broke the heart of tough old Haco, in the bishop's palace at Kirkwall.
From the ruins I passed to the town, and spent a not uninstructive half-hour in sauntering along the streets in the quiet of the evening, acquainting myself with the general aspect of the people. I marked, as one of the peculiar features of the place, groups of tidily-dressed young women, engaged at the close-heads with their straw plait,—the prevailing manufacture of the town,—and enjoying at the same time the fresh air and an easy chat. The special contribution made by the lassies of Orkney to the dress of their female neighbors all over the empire, has led to much tasteful dressing among themselves. Orkney, on its gala, days, is a land of ladies. What seems to be the typical countenance of these islands unites an aquiline but not prominent nose to an oval face. In the ordinary Scotch and English countenance, when the nose is aquiline it is also prominent, and the face is thin and angular, as if the additional height of the central feature had been given it at the expense of the cheeks, and of lateral shavings from off the chin. The hard Duke-of-Wellington face is illustrative of this type. But in the aquiline type of Orkney the countenance is softer and fuller, and, in at least the female face, the general contour greatly more handsome. Dr. Kombst, in his ethnographic map of Britain and Ireland,gives to the coast of Caithness and the Shetland Islands a purely Scandinavian people, but to the Orkneys a mixed race, which he designates the Scandinavian-Gaelic. I would be inclined, however,—preferring rather to found on those traits of person and character that are still patent, than on the unauthenticated statements of uncertain history,—to regard the people as essentially one from the northern extremity of Shetland to the Ord Hill of Caithness. Beyond the Ord Hill, and on to the northern shores of the Frith of Cromarty, we find, though unnoted on the map, a different race,—a race strongly marked by the Celtic lineaments, and speaking the Gaelic tongue. On the southern side of the Frith, and extending on to the Bay of Munlochy, the purely Scandinavian race again occurs. The sailors of the Danish fleet which four years ago accompanied the Crown Prince in his expedition to the Faroe Islands were astonished when, on landing at Cromarty, they recognized in the people the familiar cast of countenance and feature that marked their country folk and relatives at home; and found that they were simply Scandinavians like themselves, who, having forgotten their Danish, spoke Scotch instead. Rather more than a mile to the west of the fishing village of Avoch there commences a Celtic district, which stretches on from Munlochy to the river Nairne; beyond which the Scandinavian and Teutonic-Scandinavian border that fringes the eastern coast of Scotland extends unbroken southwards through Moray, Banff, and Aberdeen, on to Forfar, Fife, the Lothians, and the Mearns. These two intercalated patches of Celtic people in the northern tract,—that extending from the Ord Hill to the Cromarty Frith, and that extending from the Bay of Munlochy to the Nairne,—still retaining, as they do, after the lapse of ages, a sharp distinctness of boundary in respect of language, character,and personal appearance, are surely great curiosities. The writer of these chapters was born on the extreme edge of one of these patches, scarce a mile distant from a Gaelic-speaking population; and yet, though his humble ancestors were located on the spot for centuries, he can find trace among them of but one Celtic name; and their language was exclusively the Lowland Scotch. For many ages the two races, like oil and water, refused to mix.
I spent the evening very agreeably with one of the Free Church elders of the place, Mr. George Petrie, an accomplished antiquary; and found that his love of the antique, joined to an official connection with the county, had cast into his keeping a number of curious old papers of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries,—not in the least connected, some of them, with the legal and civic records of the place, but which had somehow stuck around these, in their course of transmission from one age to another, as a float of brushwood in a river occasionally brings down along with it, entangled in its folds, uprooted plants and aquatic weeds, that would otherwise have disappeared in the cataracts and eddies of the upper reaches of the stream. Dead as they seemed, spotted with mildew, and fretted by the moth, I found them curiously charged with what had once been intellect and emotion, hopes and fears, stern business and light amusement. I saw, among the other manuscripts, a thin slip of a book, filled with jottings, in the antique square-headed style of notation, of old Scotch tunes, apparently the work of some musical county-clerk of Orkney in the seventeenth century; but the paper, in a miserable state of decay, was blotted crimson and yellow with the rotting damps, and the ink so faded, that the notation of scarce any single piece in the collection seemed legible throughout. Less valuable and more modern, though curious from theireccentricity, there lay, in company with the music, several pieces of verse, addressed by some Orcadian Claud Halcro of the last age, to some local patron, in a vein of compliment rich and stiff as a piece of ancient brocade. A peremptory letter, bearing the autograph signature of Mary Queen of Scots, to Torquil McLeod of Dunvegan, who had been on the eve, it would seem, of marrying a daughter of Donald of the Isles, gave the Skye chieftain, "to wit" that, as he was of the blood royal of Scotland, he could form no matrimonial alliance without the royal permission,—a permission which, in the case in point, was not to be granted. It served to show that the woman who so ill liked to be thwarted in her own amours could, in her character as the Queen, deal despotically enough with the love affairs of other people. Side by side with the letter of Mary there were several not less peremptory documents of the times of the Commonwealth, addressed to the Sheriff of Orkney and Shetland, in the name of his Highness the Lord Protector, and that bore the signature of George Monck. I found them to consist chiefly of dunning letters,—such letters as those duns write who have victorious armies at their back,—for large sums of money, the assessments laid on the Orkneys by Cromwell. Another series of letters, some ten or twelve years later in their date, form portions of the history of a worthy covenanting minister, the Rev. Alexander Smith of Colvine, banished to North Ronaldshay from the extreme south of Scotland, for the offence of preaching the gospel, and holding meetings for social worship in his own house; and, as if to demonstrate his incorrigibility, one of the series,—a letter under his own hand, addressed from his island prison to the Sheriff-Depute in Kirkwall,—showed him as determined and persevering in the offence as ever. It was written immediately after his arrival. "The poor inhabitants,"says the writer, "so many as I have yet seen, have received me with much joy.I intend, if the Lord will, to preach Christ to them next Lord's day, without the least mixture of anything that may smell of sedition or rebellion. If I be farther troubled for yt, I resolve to suffer with meekness and patience." The Galloway minister must have been an honest man. Deeming preaching his true vocation,—a vocation from the exercise of which he dared not cease, lest he should render himself obnoxious to the woe referred to by the apostle,—he yet could not steal a march on even the Sheriff, whose professional duty it was to prevent him from doinghis; and so he fairly warned him that he proposed breaking the law. The next set of papers in the collection dated after the Revolution, and were full charged with an enthusiastic Jacobitisin, which seems to have been a prevalent sentiment in Orkney from the death of Queen Anne, until the disastrous defeat at Culloden quenched in blood the hopes of the party. There is a deep cave still shown on the shores of Westray, within sight of the forlorn Patmos of the poor Covenanter, in which, when the sun got on the Whig side of the hedge, twelve gentlemen, who had been engaged in the rebellion of 1745, concealed themselves for a whole winter. So perseveringly were they sought after, that during the whole time they dared not once light a fire, nor attempt fishing from the rocks to supply themselves with food; and, though they escaped the search, they never, it is said, completely recovered the horrors of their term of dreary seclusion, but bore about with them, in broken constitutions, the effects of the hardships to which they had been subjected. They must have had full time and opportunity, during that miserable winter, for testing the justice of the policy that had sent poor Smith into exile, from his snug southern parish in the Presbytery ofDumfries, to the remotest island of the Orkneys. The great lesson taught in Providence during the seventeenth and part of the eighteenth century to our Scottish country folk seems to have been the lesson of toleration; and as they were slow, stubborn scholars, the lash was very frequently and very severely applied. One of the Jacobite papers of Mr. Petrie's collection,—a triumphal poem on the victory of Gladsmuir,—which, if less poetical than the Ode of Hamilton of Bangour on the same subject, is in no degree less curious,—serves to throw very decided light on a passage in literary history which puzzled Dr. Johnson, and which scarce any one would think of going to Orkney to settle.
Johnson states, in his Life of the poet Thomson, that the "first operation" of the act passed in 1739 "for licensing plays" was the "prohibition of 'Gustavus Vasa,' a tragedy of Mr. Brook." "Why such a work should be obstructed," he adds, "it is hard to discover." We learn elsewhere,—from the compiler of the "Modern Universal History," if I remember aright,—that "so popular did the prohibitory order of the Lord Chamberlain render the play," that, "on its publication the same year, not less than a thousand pounds were the clear produce." It was not, however, until more than sixty years after, when both Johnson and Brook were in their graves, that it was deemed safe to license it for the stage. Now, the fact that a drama, in itself as little dangerous as "Cato" or "Douglas," should have been prohibited by the Government of the day, in the first instance, and should have brought the author, on its publication, so large a sum in the second, can be accounted for only by a reference to the keen partisanship of the period, and the peculiar circumstances of parties. The Jacobites, taught by the rebellion of 1715 at once the value of the Highlands and the incompetencyof the Chevalier St. George as a leader, had begun to fix their hopes on the Chevalier's son, Charles Edward, at that time a young but promising lad; and, with the tragedy of Brook before them, neither they, nor the English Government of the day could have failed to see the foreigner George the Second typified—unintentionally, surely, on the part of Brook, who was a "Prince of Wales" Whig—in the foreigner Christiern the Second, the Scotch Highlanders in the Mountaineers of Dalecarlia, and the young Prince in Gustavus. In the Jacobite manuscript of Mr. Petrie's collection, the parallelism is broadly traced; nor is it in the least probable, as the poem is a piece of sad mediocrity throughout, that it is a parallelism which was originated by its writer. It must have been that of his party; and led, I doubt not, five years before, to the prohibition of Brook's tragedy, and to the singular success which attended its publication. The passage in the manuscript suggestive of this view takes the form of an address to the victorious prince, and runs as follows:—
"Meanwhile, unguarded youth, thou stoodst alone;The cruel Tyrant urged his Armie on;But Truth and Goodness were the Best of Arms;And, fearless Prince, Thou smil'd at Threatened harms.Thus, Glorious Vasa worked in Swedish mines,—Thus, Helpless, Saw his Enemy's Designs,—Till, roused, his Hardy Highlanders arose,And poured Destruction on their foreign foes."
I rose betimes next morning, and crossed the Peerie [little] Sea, a shallow prolongation of the Bay of Kirkwall, cut off from the main sea by an artificial mound, to the quarry of Pickoquoy, somewhat notable, only a few years ago, as the sole locality in which shells had been detected in the Old Red Sandstone of Scotland. But these have since been found in the neighborhood ofThurso, by Mr. Robert Dick, associated with bones and plates of the Asterolepis, and by Mr. William Watt on the opposite side of the Mainland of Orkney, at Marwick Head. So far as has yet been ascertained, they are all of one species, and more nearly resemble a small Cyclas than any other shell. They are, however, more deeply sulcated in concentric lines, drawn, as if by a pair of compasses, from the umbone, and somewhat resembling those of the genus Astarte, than any species of Cyclas with which I am acquainted. In all the specimens I have yet seen, it appears to be rather a thick dark epidermis that survives, than the shell which it covered; nay, it seems not impossible that to its thick epidermis, originally an essentially different substance from that which composed the calcareous case, the shell may have owed its preservation as a fossil; while other shells, its contemporaries, from the circumstance of their having been unfurnished with any such covering, may have failed to leave any trace of their existence behind them. It seems at least difficult to conceive of a sea inhabited by many genera of fishes, each divided into several species, and yet furnished with but one species of shell. I found the quarry of Pickoquoy,—a deep excavation only a few yards beyond the high-water mark, and some two or three yards under the high-water level,—deserted by the quarrymen, and filled to the brim by the overflowing of a small stream. I succeeded, however, in detecting its shellsin situ. They seem restricted chiefly to a single stratum, scarcely half an inch in thickness, and lie, not thinly scattered over the platform which they occupy, but impinging on each other, like all the gregarious shells, in thickly-set groups and clusters. There occur among them occasional scales of Dipteri; and on some of the fragments of rock long exposed around the quarry-mouth to the weather I found them assuming apale nacreous gloss,—an effect, it is not improbable, of their still retaining, attached to the epidermis, a thin film of the original shell. The world's history must be vastly more voluminous now, and greatly more varied in its contents, than when the stratum which they occupy formed the upper layer of a muddy sea-bottom, and they opened their valves by myriads, to prey on the organic atoms which formed their food, or shut them again, startled by the shadow of the Dipterus, as he descended from the upper depths of the water to prey upon them in turn. The palate of this ancient ganoid is furnished with a curious dental apparatus, formed apparenly, like that of the recent wolf-fish, for the purpose of crushing shells.
About mid-day I set out by the mail-gig for Stromness. For the first few miles the road winds through a bare solitary valley, overlooked by ungainly heath-covered hills of no great altitude, though quite tall enough to prevent the traveller from seeing anything but themselves. As he passes on, the valley opens in front on an arm of the sea, over which the range of hills on the right abruptly terminates, while that on the left deflects into a line nearly parallel to the shore, leaving a comparatively level strip of moory land, rather more than a mile in breadth, between the steeper acclivities and the beach. A tall naked house rises between the road and the sea. Two low islands immediately behind it, only a few acres in extent,—one of them bearing a small ruin on its apex,—give a little variety to the central point in the prospect which the naked house forms; but the arm of the sea, bordered, at the time I passed, by a broad brown selvage of sea-weed, is as tame and flat as a Dutch lake; the background beyond, a long monotonous ridge, is bare and treeless; and in front lies the brown moory plain, bordered by the dull line of hills and darkened by scattered stacks of peat.
The scene is not at all such a one as a poet would, for its own sake, delight to fancy; and yet, in the recollection of at least one very pleasing poet, its hills, and islands, and blue arm of the sea, its brown moory plain, and tall naked house rising in the midst, must have been surrounded by a sunlit atmosphere of love and desire, bright enough to impart to even its tamest features a glow of exquisiteness and beauty. Malcolm the poet was born, and spent his years of boyhood and early youth, in the tall naked house; and the surrounding landscape is that to which he refers in his "Tales of Flood and Field," as rising in imagination before him, bright in the red gleam of the setting sun, when, on the steep slopes of the Pyrenees, the "silent stars of night were twinkling high over his head," and the "tents of the soldiery glimmering pale through the gloom." The tall house is the manse of the parish of Frith and Stennis; and the poet was the son of the Rev. John Malcolm, its minister. Here, when yet a mere lad, dreaming, in the quiet obscurity of an Orkney parish, far removed from the seat of war and the literary circles, of poetic celebrity and military renown, he addressed a letter to the Duke of Kent, the father of our Sovereign Lady the reigning Monarch, expressing an ardent wish to obtain a commission in the army then engaged in the Peninsula. The letter was such as to excite the interest of his Royal Highness, who replied to it by return of post, requesting the writer to proceed forthwith to London; for which he immediately set out, and was received by the Duke with courtesy and kindness. He was instructed by him to take ship for Spain, in which he arrived as volunteer; and, joining the army, engaged at the time in the siege of St. Sebastian, under General Graham, he was promoted shortly after, through the influence of his generous patron, to a lieutenancy in the 42d Highlanders. He served in thatdistinguished regiment on to the closing campaign of the Pyrenees; but received at the battle of Toulouse a wound so severe as to render him ever after incapable of active bodily exertion; and so he had to retire from the army on half-pay, and a pension honorably earned. The history of his career as a soldier he has told with singular interest, in one of the earlier volumes of "Constable's Miscellany;" and his poems abound in snatches of description painfully true, drawn from his experience of the military life,—of scenes of stern misery and grim desolation, of injuries received, and of sufferings inflicted,—that must have contrasted sadly in his mind, in their character as gross realities, with the dreamy visions of conquest and glory in which he had indulged at an earlier time. The ruin of St. Sebastian, complete enough, and attended with circumstances of the horrible extreme enough, to appal men long acquainted with the trade of war, must have powerfully impressed an imaginative susceptible lad, fresh from the domesticities of a rural manse, in whose quiet neighborhood the voice of battle had not been heard for centuries, and surrounded by a simple people, remarkable for the respect which they bear to human life. In all probability, the power evinced in his description of the siege, and of the utter desolation in which it terminated, is in part owing to the fresh impressibility of his mind at the time. Such, at least, was my feeling regarding it, as I caught myself muttering some of its more graphic passages, and saw, from the degree of alarm evinced by the boy who drove the mail-gig, that the sounds were not quite lost in the rattle of that somewhat rickety vehicle, and that he had come to entertain serious doubts respecting the sanity of his passenger:—
"Sebastian, when I saw thee last,It was in Desolation's day,As through thy voiceless streets I passed,Thy piles in heaps of rubbish lay;The roofless fragments of each wallBore many a dent of shell and ball;With blood were all thy gateways red,And thou,—a city of the dead!With fire and sword thy walks were swept:Exploded mines thy streets had heapedIn hills of rubbish; they had beenTraversed by gabion and fascine,With cannon lowering in the rearIn dark array,—a deadly tier,—Whose thunder-clouds, with fiery breath,Sent far around their iron death;The bursting shell, in fragments flungAthwart the skies, at midnight sung,Or, on its airy pathway sent,Its meteors sweep the firmament.Thy castle, towering o'er the shore,Keeled on its rock amidst the roarOf thousand thunders, for it stoodIn circle of a fiery flood;And crumbling masses fiercely sentFrom its high frowning battlement,Smote by the shot and whistling shell,With groan and crash in ruin fell.Through desert streets the mourner passed,Midst-walls that spectral shadows east,Like some fair spirit wailing o'erThe failed scenes it loved of yore;No human voice was heard to blessThat place of waste and loneliness.I saw at eve the night-bird fly,And vulture dimly flitting by,To revel o'er each morsel stolenFrom the cold corse, all black and swolnThat on the shattered ramparts lay,Of him who perished yesterday,—Of him whose pestilential steamRose reeking on the morning beam,—Whose fearful fragments, nearly gone,Were blackening from the bleaching bone.The house-dog bounded o'er each sceneWhere cisterns had so lately been:Away in frantic haste he sprung,And sought to cool his burning tongue.He howled, and to his famished cryThe dreary echoes gave reply;And owlet's dirge, through shadows dim,Rolled back in sad response to him."
The father was succeeded in his parish by the brother of Malcolm,—a gentleman to whom, during my stay in Orkney, I took the liberty of introducing myself in his snug little Free Church manse at the head of the bay, and in whose possession I found the only portrait of the poet which exists. It is that of a handsome and interesting lookingyoungman, though taken not many years before his death; for, like the greater number of his class, he did not live to be an old one, dying under forty. His brother the clergyman kindly accompanied me to two quarries in the neighborhood of his new domicil, which I found, like almost all the dry-stone fences of the district, speckled with scales, occipital plates, and gill-covers, of Osteolepides and Dipteri, but containing no entire ichthyolites. He had taken his side in the Church controversy, he told me, firmly, but quietly; and when the Disruption came, and he found it necessary to quit the old manse, which had been a home to his family for well nigh two generations, and in which both he and his brother had been born, he scarce knew what his people were to do, nor in what proportion he was to have followers among them. Somewhat to his surprise, however, they came out with him almost to a man; so that his successor in the parish church had sometimes, he understood, to preach to congregations scarcely exceeding half a dozen. I had learned elsewhere how thoroughly Mr. Malcolm was loved and respected by his parishioners; and that unconsciousness on his own part of the strength of their affectionand esteem, which his statement evinced, formed, I thought, a very pleasing trait, and one that harmonized well with the finely-toned unobtrusiveness and unconscious elegance which characterized the genius of his deceased brother. A little beyond the Free Church manse the road ascends between stone walls, abounding in fragments of ichthyolites, weathered blue by exposure to the sun and wind; and the top of the eminence forms the water-shed in this part of the Mainland, and introduces the traveller to a scene entirely new. The prospect is of considerable extent; and, what seems strange in Orkney, nowhere presents the traveller,—though it contains its large inland lake,—with a glimpse of the sea.
Hills of Orkney—Their Geologic Composition—Scene of Scott's "Pirate"—Stromness—Geology of the District—"Seeking beasts"—Conglomerate in contact with Granite—A palæozoic Hudson's Bay—Thickness of Conglomerate of Orkney—Oldest Vertebrate yet discovered in Orkney—Its Size—Figure of a characteristic plate of the Asterolepis—Peculiarity of Old Red Fishes—Length of the Asterolepis—A rich Ichthyolite Bed—Arrangement of the Layers—Queries as to the Cause of it—Minerals—An abandoned Mine—A lost Vessel—Kelp for Iodine—A dangerous Coast—Incidents of Shipwreck—Hospitality—Stromness Museum—Diplopterus mistaken for Dipterus—Their Resemblances and Differences—Visit to a remarkable Stack—Paring the Soil for Fuel, and consequent Barrenness—Description of the Stack—Wave-formed Caves—Height to which the Surf rises.
Hills of Orkney—Their Geologic Composition—Scene of Scott's "Pirate"—Stromness—Geology of the District—"Seeking beasts"—Conglomerate in contact with Granite—A palæozoic Hudson's Bay—Thickness of Conglomerate of Orkney—Oldest Vertebrate yet discovered in Orkney—Its Size—Figure of a characteristic plate of the Asterolepis—Peculiarity of Old Red Fishes—Length of the Asterolepis—A rich Ichthyolite Bed—Arrangement of the Layers—Queries as to the Cause of it—Minerals—An abandoned Mine—A lost Vessel—Kelp for Iodine—A dangerous Coast—Incidents of Shipwreck—Hospitality—Stromness Museum—Diplopterus mistaken for Dipterus—Their Resemblances and Differences—Visit to a remarkable Stack—Paring the Soil for Fuel, and consequent Barrenness—Description of the Stack—Wave-formed Caves—Height to which the Surf rises.
TheOrkneys, like the mainland of Scotland, exhibit their higher hills and precipices on their western coasts: the Ward Hill of Hoy attains to an elevation of sixteen hundred feet; and there are some of the precipices which skirt the island of which it forms so conspicuous a feature, that rise sheer over the breakers from eight hundred to a thousand. Unlike, however, the arrangement on the mainland, it is the newer rocks that attain to the higher elevations; the heights of Hoy are composed of that arenaceous upper member of the Lower Old Red Sandstone,—the last formed of the Palæozoic deposits of Orkney,—which overlies the ichthyolitic flagstones and shales of Caithness at Dunnet Head, and the ichthyolitic nodular beds of Inverness, Ross, and Cromarty, at Culloden, Tarbet Ness, within the Northern Sutor, and along the bleak ridge of the Maolbuie. It is simply a tall upper story of the formation, erected along the western line of coast in the Orkneys, which the eastern line wholly wants. Its screen of hills forms a noble backgroundto the prospect which opens on the traveller as he ascends the eminence beyond the Free Church manse of Frith and Stennis. A large lake, bare and treeless, like all the other lakes and lochs of Orkney, but picturesque of outline, and divided into an upper and lower sheet of water by two low, long promontories, that jut out from opposite sides, and so nearly meet as to be connected by a threadlike line of road, half mound, half bridge, occupies the middle distance. There are moory hills and a few cottages in front; and on the promontories, conspicuous in the landscape, from the relief furnished by the blue ground of the surrounding waters, stand the tall stones of Stennis,—one group on the northern promontory, the other on the south. A gray old-fashioned house, of no very imposing appearance, rises between the road and the lake. It is the house of Stennis, or Turmister, in which Scott places some of the concluding scenes of the "Pirate," and from which he makes Cleveland and his fantastic admirer Jack Bunce witness the final engagement, in the bay of Stromness, between the Halcyon sloop of war and the savage Goffe. Nor does it matter anything that neither sea nor vessels can be seen from the house of Turmister: the fact which would be so fatal to a dishonest historian tells with no effect against the honest "maker," responsible for but the management of his tale.
I got on to Stromness; and finding, after making myself comfortable in my inn, that I had a fine bright evening still before me, longer by some three or four degrees of north latitude than the July evenings of Edinburgh, I set out, hammer in hand, to explore. Stromness is a long, narrow, irregular strip of a town, fairly thrust by a steep hill into the sea, on which it encroaches in a broken line of wharf-like bulwarks, along which, at high water, vessels of a hundred tons burden float so immediately beside the houses, thattheir pennants on gala days wave over the chimney tops. The steep hill forms part of a granitic axis, about six miles in length by a mile in breadth, which forms the backbone of the district, and against which the Great Conglomerate and lower schists of the Old Red are upturned at a rather high angle. It is wrapped round in some places by a thin caul of the stratified primary rocks. Immediately over the town, on the brow of the eminence, where the granitic axis had been laid bare in digging a foundation for the Free Church manse, I saw numerous masses of schistose-gneiss, passing in some of the beds into a coarse-grained mica-schist, and a lustrous hornblendic slate, that had been quarried from over it, and which may be still seen built up into the garden-wall of the erection. I walked out towards the west, to examine the junction of the granite and the Great Conglomerate, where it is laid bare by the sea, little more than a quarter of a mile outside the town. There was a horde of noisy urchins a little beyond the inn, who, having seen me alight from the mail-gig, had determined in their own minds that I was engaged in the political canvass going forward at the time, but had not quite ascertained my side. They now divided into two parties; and when the one, as I passed, set up a "Hurra for Dundas," the other met them from the opposite side of the street, with a counter cry of "Anderson forever." Immediately after clearing the houses, I was accosted by a man from the country. "Ye'll be seeking beasts," he said: "what price are cattle gi'en the noo?" "Yes, seekingbeasts," I replied, "but very old ones: I have come to hammer your rocks for petrified fish." "I see, I see," said the man; "I took ye by ye'er gray plaid for a drover; but I ken something about the stane fish too; there's lots o' them in the quarries at Skaill."
I found the great Conglomerate in immediate contact with the granite, which is a ternary of the usual components,somewhat intermediate in color between that of Peterhead and Aberdeen, and which at this point bears none of the caul of stratified primary rock by which it is overlaid on the brow of the hill. When the great Conglomerate, which is mainly composed of it here, was in the act of forming, this granite must have been one of the surface rocks of the locality, and in no respect a different stone from what it is now. The widely-spread Conglomerate base of the Old Red Sandstone, which presents, over an area of so many thousand square miles, such an identity of character, that specimens taken from the neighborhood of Lerwick, in Shetland, can scarce be distinguished from specimens detached from the hills which rise over the great Caledonian Valley, contains in various places, as under the Northern Sutor, for instance, and along the shores of Navity, fragments of rock which have not been detectedin situin the districts in which they occur as agglomerated pebbles. In general, however, we find it composed of the debris of those very granites and gneisses which, as in the case of the granitic axis here, were forced through it, and through the overlying deposits, by deep-seated convulsions, long posterior in date to its formation. It appears to have been formed in a vast oceanic basin of primary rock,—a Palæozoic Hudson's or Baffin's Bay,—partially surrounded, mayhap, by bare primary continents, swept by numerous streams, rapid and headlong, and charged with the broken debris of the inhospitable regions which they drained. The graptolite-bearing grauwacke of Banffshire seems to have been the only fossiliferous rock that occurred throughout the extent of this ancient northern basin. The Conglomerate of Orkney, like that of Moray and Ross, varies from fifty to a hundred yards in thickness. It is not overlaid in this section by the thick bed of coarse-grained sandstone, so well-marked a member of the formation at Cromarty,Nigg, and Gamrie, and along the northern shores of the Beauly Frith; but at once passes into those gray bituminous flagstones so immensely developed in Caithness and the Orkneys. I traced the formation upwards this evening, walking along the edges of the upheaved strata, from where the Conglomerate leans against the granite, till where it merges into the gray flagstones, and then pursued these from older and lower to newer and higher layers, anxious to ascertain at what distance over the base the more ancient organisms of the system first appear, and what their character and kind. And little more than a hundredyardsover the granite, and somewhat less than a hundredfeetover the upper stratum of the great Conglomerate, I found what I sought,—a well-marked bone, perhaps the oldest vertebrate remain yet discovered in Orkney, embedded in a light grayish-colored layer of hard flag.
What, asks the reader, was the character of the ancient denizen of the Palæozoic basin of which it had formed a part? Was it a large or small fish, or of a high or low order? Not certainly of a low order, and by no means of a small size. The organism in the rock was a specimen of that curious nail-shaped bone of the Asterolepis which occurs as a central ridge in the single plate that occupies in this genus the wide curve of the under jaw, and as it was fully five inches in length from head to point, the plate to which it belonged must have measured ten inches across, and the frontal occipital buckler with which it was associated, one foot two inches in length (not including the three accessory plates at the nape), by ten inches in breadth. And if built, as it probably was, in the same massy proportions as its brother Cœlacanths the Holoptychius or Glyptolepis, the individual to which the nail-shaped bone belonged must have been, judging from the size of the corresponding parts in these ichthyolites, at least twice as large an animalas the splendid Clashbennie Holoptychius of the Upper Old Red, now in the British Museum. The bulkiest icthyolites yet found in any of the divisions of the Old Red system are of the genus Asterolepis; and to this genus, and to evidently an individual of no inconsiderable size, this oldest of the organisms of the Orkney belonged. I was so interested in the fact, that before leaving this part of the country, I brought Dr. Garson, Stromness, and Mr. William Watt, jun., Skaill, both very intelligent palæontologists, to mark the place and character of the fossil, that they might be able to point it out to geological visitors in the future, or, if they preferred removing it to their town Museum, to indicate to them the stratum in which it had lain. For the present, I merely request the reader to mark, in the passing, that the most ancient organic remain yet found in the Old Red of this part of the country, nay, judging from its place, one of the most ancient yet found in Scotland,—so far as I know, absolutely themostancient,—belonged to a ganoid as bulky as a large porpoise, and which, as shown by its teeth and jaws, possessed that peculiar organization which characterized the reptile fish of the Upper Devonian and Carboniferous periods. As there are, however, no calculations more doubtful or more to be suspected than those on which the size and bulk of the extinct animals are determined from some surviving fragment of their remains,—plate or bone,—I must attempt laying before the scientific reader at least a portion of the data on which I found.