SOLACE.
No star of golden influence hailed the birth Of him who, all unknown and lonely, pours, As fails the light of eve, His pensive, artless song; Yea, those who mark out honour, ease, wealth, fame, As man"s sole joys, shall find no joy in him; Yet of far n.o.bler kind His silent pleasures prove.
For not unmarked by him the ways of men; Nor yet to him the ample page unknown, Where, traced by Nature"s hand, Is many a pleasing line.
Oh! when the world"s dull children bend the knee, Meanly obsequious, to some mortal G.o.d, It yields no vulgar joy Alone to stand aloof; Or when they jostle on wealth"s crowded road, And swells the tumult on the breeze, "tis sweet, Thoughtful, at length reclined, To list the wrathful hum.
What though the weakly gay affect to scorn The loitering dreamer of life"s darkest shade, Stingless the jeer, whose voice Comes from the erroneous path.
Scorner, of all thy toils the end declare!
If pleasure, pleasure comes uncalled, to cheer The haunts of him who spends His hours in quiet thought.
And happier he who can repress desire, Than they who seldom mourn a thwarted wish; The va.s.sals they of fate-- The unbending conqueror he, And thou, blest Muse, though rudely strung thy lyre, Its tones can guile the dark and lonesome day-- Can smooth the wrinkled brow, And dry the sorrowing tear.
Thine many a bliss--oh, many a solace thine!
By thee up-held, the soul a.s.serts her throne, The chastened pa.s.sions sleep, And dove-eyed Peace prevails.
And thou, fair Hope! when other comforts fail-- When night"s thick mists descend--thy beacon flames, Till glow the dark clouds round With beams of promised bliss.
Thou failest not, when, mute the soothing lyre, Lives thy unfading solace: sweet to raise Thy eye, O quiet Hope, And greet a friend in heaven!-- A friend, a brother, one whose awful throne In holy fear heaven"s mightiest sons approach: Man"s heart to feel for man-- To save him G.o.d"s great power!
Conqueror of death, joy of the accepted soul, Oh, wonders raise no doubt when told of thee!
Thy way past finding out, Thy love, can tongue declare?
Cheered by thy smile, Peace dwells amid the storm; Held by thy hand, the floods a.s.sail in vain; With grief is blent a joy, And beams the vault of death.
Pa.s.sing, in one of my walks this autumn, the cave in which I used to spend in boyhood so many happy hours with Finlay, I found it smoking, as of old, with a huge fire, and occupied by a wilder and more careless party than even my truant schoolfellows. It had been discovered and appropriated by a band of gipsies, who, attracted by the soot-stains on its roof and sides, and concluding that it had been inhabited by the gipsies of other days, had without consulting factor or landlord, at once entered upon possession, as the proper successors of its former occupants. They were a savage party, with a good deal of the true gipsy blood in them, but not without mixture of a broken-down cla.s.s of apparently British descent; and one of their women was purely Irish.
From what I had previously heard about gipsies, I was not prepared for a mixture of this kind; but I found it pretty general, and ascertained that at least one of the ways in which it had taken place was exemplified by the case of the one Irish woman. Her gipsy husband had served as a soldier, and had married her when in the army. I have been always exceedingly curious to see man in his rude elements--to study him as the savage, whether among the degraded cla.s.ses of our own country, or, as exhibited in the writings of travellers and voyagers, in his aboriginal state; and I now did not hesitate to visit the gipsies, and to spend not unfrequently an hour or two in their company. They at first seemed jealous of me as a spy; but finding me inoffensive, and that I did not bewray counsel, they came at length to recognise me as the "quiet, sickly lad," and to chatter as freely in my presence as in that of the other pitchers with ears, which they used to fabricate out of tin by the dozen and the score, and the manufacture of which, with the making of horn spoons, formed the main branch of business carried on in the cave. I saw in these visits curious glimpses of gipsy life. I could trust only to what I actually witnessed: what was told me could on no occasion be believed; for never were there lies more gross and monstrous than those of the gipsies; but even the lying formed of itself a peculiar trait. I have never heard lying elsewhere that set all probability so utterly at defiance--a consequence, in part, of their recklessly venturing, like unskilful authors, to expatiate in walks of invention over which their experience did not extend. On one occasion an old gipsy woman, after p.r.o.nouncing my malady consumption, prescribed for me as an infallible remedy, raw parsley minced small and made up into b.a.l.l.s with fresh b.u.t.ter; but seeing, I suppose, from my manner, that I lacked the necessary belief in her specific, she went on to say, that she had derived her knowledge of such matters from her mother, one of the most "skeely women that ever lived." Her mother, she said, had once healed a lord"s son of a grievous hurt in half a minute, after all the English doctors had shown they could do nothing for him. His eye had been struck out of its socket by a blow, and hung half-way down his cheek; and though the doctors could of course return it to its place, it refused to stick, always falling out again. Her mother, however, at once understood the case; and, making a little slit at the back of the young man"s neck, she got hold of the end of a sinew, and pulling in the dislodged orb at a tug, she made all tight by running a knot on the controlling ligament, and so kept the eye in its place. And, save that the young lord continued to squint a little, he was well at once. The peculiar anatomy on which this invention was framed must have, of course, resembled that of a wax-doll with winking eyes; but it did well enough for the woman; and, having no character for truth to maintain, she did not hesitate to build on it. On asking her whether she ever attended church, she at once replied, "O yes, at one time very often. I am the daughter of a minister--a _natural_ daughter, you know: my father was the most powerful preacher in all the south, and I always went to hear him." In about an hour after, however, forgetting her extemporary sally, and the reverend character with which she had insisted her sire, she spoke of him, in another equally palpable invention, as the greatest "king of the gipsies" that the gipsies ever had. Even the children had caught this habit of monstrous mendacity.
There was one of the boys of the band, considerably under twelve, who could extemporize lying narratives by the hour, and seemed always delighted to get a listener; and a little girl, younger still, who "lisped in _fiction_, for the _fiction_ came." There were two things that used to strike me as peculiar among these gipsies--a Hindu type of head, small of size, but with a considerable fulness of forehead, especially along the medial line, in the region, as the phrenologist would perhaps say, of _individuality_ and _comparison_; and a singular posture a.s.sumed by the elderly females of the tribe in squatting before their fires, in which the elbow rested on the knees brought close together, the chin on the palms, and the entire figure (somewhat resembling in att.i.tude a Mexican mummy) a.s.sumed an outlandish appearance, that reminded me of some of the more grotesque sculptures of Egypt and Hindustan. The peculiar type of head was derived, I doubt not, from an ancestry originally different from that of the settled races of the country; nor is it impossible that the peculiar position--unlike any I have ever seen Scottish females a.s.sume--was also of foreign origin.
I have witnessed scenes among these gipsies, of which the author of the "Jolly Beggars" might have made rare use, but which formed a sort of materials that I lacked the special ability rightly to employ. It was reported on one occasion that a marriage ceremony and wedding were to take place in the cave, and I sauntered the way, in the hope of ascertaining how its inmates contrived to do for themselves what of course no clergyman could venture to do for them--seeing that, of the parties to be united, the bridegroom might have already as many wives living as "Peter Bell," and the bride as many husbands. A gipsy marriage had taken place a few years previous in a cave near Rosemarkie. An old male gipsy, possessed of the rare accomplishment of reading, had half-read, half-spelled the English marriage-service to the young couple, and the ceremony was deemed complete at its close. And I now expected to witness something similar. In an opening in the wood above, I encountered two very drunk gipsies, and saw the first-fruits of the coming merriment. One of the two was an uncouth-looking monster, sallow-skinned, flat-faced, round-shouldered, long and thinly limbed, at least six feet two inches in height, and, from his strange misproportions, he might have pa.s.sed for seven feet any day, were it not that his trousers, made for a much shorter man, and rising to the middle of his calfless leg, gave him much the appearance of a big boy walking on stilts. The boys of the place called him "Giant Grimbo;" while his companion, a tight dapper little fellow, who always showed off a compact, well-rounded leg in corduroy inexpressibles, they had learned to distinguish as "Billy Breeches." The giant, who carried a bagpipe, had broken down ere I came up with them; and now, sitting on the gra.s.s, he was droning out in fitful blasts a diabolical music, to which Billy Breeches was dancing; but, just as I pa.s.sed, Billy also gave way, after wasting an infinity of exertion in keeping erect; and, falling over the prostrate musician, I could hear the bag groaning out its soul as he pressed against it, in a lengthened melancholious squeal. I found the cave bearing an aspect of more than ordinary picturesqueness. It had its two fires, and its double portion of smoke, that went rolling out in the calm like an inverted river; for it clung close to the roof, as if by a reversed gravitation, and turned its foaming surface downwards. At the one fire an old gipsy woman was engaged in baking oaten cakes; and a great pot, that dispensed through the cave the savoury odour of unlucky poultry out short in the middle of their days, and of hapless hares destroyed without the game licence, depended over the other. An a.s.s, the common property of the tribe, stood meditating in the foreground; two urchins, of about from ten to twelve years a-piece--wretchedly supplied in the article of clothing--for the one, provided with only a pair of tattered trousers, was naked from the waist upwards, and the other, furnished with only a dilapidated jacket, was naked from the waist downwards--were engaged in picking up fuel for the fire, still further in front; a few of the ordinary inmates of the place lounged under cover of the smoke, apparently in a mood not in the least busy; and on a couch of dried fern sat evidently the central figure of the group, a young, sparkling-eyed brunette, more than ordinarily marked by the Hindu peculiarities of head and feature, and attended by a savage-looking fellow of about twenty, dark as a mulatto, and with a profusion of long flexible hair, black as jet, hanging down to his eyes, and cl.u.s.tering about his cheeks and neck. These were, I ascertained, the bride and bridegroom. The bride was engaged in sewing a cap--the bridegroom in watching the progress of the work. I observed that the party, who were less communicative than usual, seemed to regard me in the light of an intruder. An elderly tinker, the father of the bride, grey as a leafless thorn in winter, but still stalwart and strong, sat admiring a bit of spelter of about a pound weight. It was gold, he said, or, as he p.r.o.nounced the word, "guild," which had been found in an old cairn, and was of immense value, "for it was peer guild and that was the best o"
guild;" but if I pleased, he would sell it to me, a very great bargain.
I was engaged with some difficulty in declining the offer, when we were interrupted by the sounds of the bagpipe. Giant Grimbo and Billy Breeches had succeeded in regaining their feet, and were seen staggering towards the cave. "Where"s the whisky, Billy!" inquired the proprietor of the gold, addressing himself to the man of the small clothes.
"Whisky!" said Billy, "ask Grimbo." "Where"s the whisky, Grimbo?"
reiterated the tinker. "Whisky!" replied Grimbo, "Whisky!" and yet again, after a pause and a hiccup, "Whisky!" "Ye confounded blacks!"
said the tinker, springing to his feet with an agility wonderful for an age so advanced as his, "Have you drunk it all? But take that, Grimbo,"
he added, planting a blow full on the side of the giant"s head, which prostrated his vast length along the floor of the cave. "And take that, Billy," he iterated, dealing such another blow to the shorter man, which sent him right athwart his prostrate comrade. And then, turning to me, he remarked with perfect coolness, "That, master, I call smart hitting."
"Honest lad," whispered one of the women immediately after, "it will be a _reugh_ time wi" us here the nicht: you had just better be stepping your ways." I had already begun to think so without prompting; and so, taking my leave of the gipsies, I failed being, as I had proposed, one of the witnesses of the wedding.
There is a sort of grotesque humour in scenes of the kind described, that has charms for artists and authors of a particular cla.s.s--some of them men of broad sympathies and great genius; and hence, through their representations, literary and pictorial, the ludicrous point of view has come to be the conventional and ordinary one. And yet it is a sad enough merriment, after all, that has for its subject a degradation so extreme.
I never knew a gipsy that seemed to possess a moral sense--a degree of _Pariahism_ which has been reached by only one other cla.s.s in the country, and that a small one--the descendants of degraded females in our large towns. An education in Scotland, however secular in its character, always casts a certain amount of enlightenment on the conscience; a home, however humble, whose inmates win their bread by honest industry, has a similar effect; but in the peculiar walks in which for generations there has been no education of any kind, or in which bread has been the wages of infamy, the moral sense seems so wholly obliterated, that there appears to survive nothing in the mind to which the missionary or the moralist can appeal. It seems scarce possible for a man to know even a very little of these cla.s.ses, without learning, in consequence, to respect honest labour, and even secular knowledge, as at least the _second-best_ things, in their moral bearing and influence, that can exist among a people.
CHAPTER XVIII.
"For such is the flaw or the depth of the plan In the make of that wonderful creature called man, No two virtues, whatever relation they claim, Nor even two different shades of the same.
Though like as was ever twin-brother to brother.
Possessing the one shall imply you"ve the other."--BURNS.
During my period of convalescence, I amused myself in hewing for my uncles, from an original design, an ornate dial-stone; and the dial-stone still exists, to show that my skill as a stone-cutter rose somewhat above the average of the profession in those parts of the country in which it ranks highest. Gradually as I recovered health and strength, little jobs came dropping in. I executed sculptured tablets in a style not common in the north of Scotland; introduced into the churchyards of the locality a better type of tombstone than had obtained in them before, save, mayhap, at a very early period; distanced all my compet.i.tors in the art of inscription-cutting; and at length found that, without exposing my weakened lungs to the rough tear and wear to which the ordinary stone-cutter must subject himself, I could live. I deemed it an advantage, too, rather than the reverse, that my new branch of employment brought me not unfrequently for a few days into country districts sufficiently distant from home to present me with new fields of observation, and to open up new tracts of inquiry. Sometimes I spent half a week in a farm-house in the neighbourhood of some country churchyard--sometimes I lodged in a village--oftener than once I sheltered beside some gentleman"s seat, where the august shadow of lairdship lay heavy on society; and in this way I came to see and know a good deal of the Scottish people, in their many-coloured aspects, of which otherwise I might have remained ignorant. At times, too, on some dusty cottage shelf I succeeded in picking up a rare book, or, what was not less welcome, got a curious tradition from the cottager; or there lay within the reach of an evening walk some interesting piece of antiquity, or some rock-section, which I found it profitable to visit. A solitary burying-ground, too, situated, as country burying-grounds usually are, in some pleasant spot, and surrounded by its groups of ancient trees, formed a much more delightful scene of labour than a dusty work-shed, or some open area in a busy town; and altogether I found my new mode of life a quiet and happy one. Nor, with all its tranquillity, was it a sort of life in which the intellect was in any great danger of falling asleep. There was scarce a locality in which new game might not be started, that, in running down, kept the faculties in full play. Let me exemplify by describing the courses of inquiry, physical and metaphysical, which opened up to me when spending a few days, first in the burying-ground of Kirkmichael, and next in the churchyard of Nigg.
I have elsewhere somewhat fancifully described the ruinous chapel and solitary grave-yard of Kirkmichael as lying on the sweep of a gentle declivity, within a few yards of a flat sea-beach, so little exposed to the winds, that it would seem as if "ocean m.u.f.fled its waves in approaching this field of the dead." And so the two vegetations--that of the land and of the sea--undisturbed by the surf, which on opener coasts prevents the growth of either along the upper littoral line, where the waves beat heaviest, here meet and mingle, each encroaching for a little way on the province of the other. And at meal-times, and when returning homewards in the evening along the sh.o.r.e, it furnished me with amus.e.m.e.nt enough to mark the character of the several plants of both floras that thus meet and cross each other, and the appearances which they a.s.sume when inhabiting each the other"s province. On the side of the land, beds of thrift, with its gay flowers the sea-pinks, occupied great prominent cushions, that stood up like little islets amid the flowing sea, and were covered over by salt water during stream-tides to the depth of from eighteen inches to two feet. With these there occasionally mingled spikes of the sea-lavender; and now and then, though more rarely, a _sea-aster_, that might be seen raising above the calm surface its composite flowers, with their bright yellow staminal pods, and their pale purple petals. Far beyond, however, even the cushions of thrift, I could trace the fleshy, jointed stems of the gla.s.s-wort, rising out of the mud, but becoming diminutive and branchless as I followed them downwards, till at depths where they must have been frequently swum over by the young coal-fish and the flounder, they appeared as mere fleshy spikes, scarce an inch in height, and then ceased. On the side of the sea it was the various fucoids that rose highest along the beach: the serrated focus barely met the salt-wort; but the bladder-bearing fucus (_fucus nodosus_) mingled its brown fronds not unfrequently with the crimson flowers of the thrift, and the vesicular fucus (_fucus vesiculosus_) rose higher still, to enter into strange companionship with the sea-side plantains and the common scurvy-gra.s.s. Green enteromorpha of two species--_E. compressa_ and _E. intestinalis_--I also found abundant along the edges of the thrift-beds; and it struck me as curious at the time, that while most of the land-plants which had thus descended beyond the sea-level were of the high dicotyledonous division, the sea-weeds with which they mingled their leaves and seed-vessels were low in their standing--fuci and enteromorpha--plants at least not higher than their kindred cryptogamia, the lichens and mosses of the land. Far beyond, in the outer reaches of the bay, where land-plants never approached, there were meadows of a submarine vegetation, of (for the sea) a comparatively high character. Their numerous plants (_zostera marina_) had true roots, and true leaves, and true flowers; and their spikes ripened amid the salt waters towards the close of autumn, round white seeds, that, like many of the seeds of the land, had their sugar and starch. But these plants kept far aloof, in their green depths, from their cogeners the monocotyledons of the terrestrial flora. It was merely the low _Fucaceae_ and _Conferveae_ of the sea that I found meeting and mixing with the descending dicotyledons of the land. I felt a good deal of interest in marking, about this time, how certain belts of marine vegetation occurred on a vast boulder situated in the neighbourhood of Cromarty, on the extreme line of the ebb of spring-tides. I detected the various species ranged in zones, just as on lofty hills the botanist finds his agricultural, moorland, and alpine zones rising in succession the one over the other. At the base of the huge ma.s.s, at a level to which the tide rarely falls, the characteristic vegetable is the rough-stemmed tangle--_Laminaria digitata_. In the zone immediately above the lowest, the prevailing vegetable is the smooth-stemmed tangle--_Laminaria saccharina_. Higher still there occurs a zone of the serrated fucus--_F. serratus_--blent with another familiar fucus--_F. nodosus_. Then comes a yet higher zone of _Fucus vesiculosus_; and higher still, a few scattered tufts of _Fucus ca.n.a.liculatus_; and then, as on lofty mountains that rise above the line of perpetual snow, vegetation ceases, and the boulder presents a round bald head, that rises over the surface after the first few hours of ebb have pa.s.sed. But far beyond its base, where the sea never falls, green meadows of _zostera_ flourish in the depths of the water, where they unfold their colourless flowers, unfurnished with petals, and ripen their farinaceous seeds, that, wherever they rise to the surface, seem very susceptible of frost. I have seen the sh.o.r.es strewed with a line of green _zostera_, with its spikes charged with seed, after a smart October frost, that had been coincident with the ebb of a low spring-tide, had nipt its rectilinear fronds and flexible stems.
But what, it may be asked, was the bearing of all this observation? I by no means saw its entire bearing at the time: I simply observed and recorded, because I found it pleasant to observe and record. And yet one of the wild dreams of Maillet in his _Telliamed_ had given a certain degree of unity, and a certain definite direction, to my gleanings of fact on the subject, which they would not have otherwise possessed. It was held by this fanciful writer, that the vegetation of the land had been derived originally from that of the ocean. "In a word," we find him saying, "do not herbs, plants, roots, grains, and all of this kind that the earth produces and nourishes, come from the sea? Is it not at least natural to think so, since we are certain that all our habitable lands came originally from the sea? Besides, in small islands far from the Continent, which have appeared a few ages ago at most, and where it is manifest that never any men had been, we find shrubs, herbs, and roots.
Now, you must be forced to own that either those productions owed their origin to the sea, _or to a new creation, which is absurd_." And then Maillet goes on to show, after a manner which--now that algaeology has become a science--must be regarded as at least curious, that the plants of the sea, though not so well developed as those of the land, are really very much of the same nature. "The fishermen of Ma.r.s.eilles find daily," he says, "in their nets, and among their fish, plants of a hundred kinds, with their fruits still upon them; and though these fruits are not so large nor so well nourished as those of our earth, yet their species is in no other respects dubious. There they find cl.u.s.ters of white and black grapes, peach-trees, pear-trees, prune-trees, apple-trees, and all sorts of flowers." Such was the sort of wild fable invented in a tract of natural science in which I found it of interest to acquaint myself with the truth. I have since seen the extraordinary vision of Maillet revived, first by Oken, and then by the author of the "Vestiges of Creation;" and when, in grappling with some of the views and statements of the latter writer, I set myself to write the chapter of my little work which deals with this special hypothesis, I found that I had in some sort studied in the school in which the education necessary to its production was most thoroughly to be acquired. Had the ingenious author of the "Vestiges" taken lessons for but a short time at the same form, he would scarce have thought of reviving in those latter ages the dream of Oken and Maillet. A knowledge of the facts would to a certainty have protected him against the reproduction of the hypothesis.
The lesson at Nigg was of a more curious kind, though, mayhap, less certainly conclusive in its bearings. The house of the proprietor of Nigg bordered on the burying-ground. I was engaged in cutting an inscription on the tombstone of his wife, recently dead; and a poor idiot, who found his living in the kitchen, and to whom the deceased had shown kindness; used to come every day to the churchyard, to sit beside me, and jabber in broken expressions his grief. I was struck with the extremeness of his idiocy: he manifested even more than the ordinary inability of his cla.s.s to deal with figures, for he could scarce tell whether nature had furnished him with one head or with two; and no power of education could have taught him to count his fingers. He was equally defective, too, in the mechanical. Angus could not be got into trousers; and the contrivance of the b.u.t.ton remained a mystery which he was never able to comprehend. And so he wore a large blue gown, like that of a beadsman, which slipped over his head, and was bound by a belt round his middle, with a stout woollen shirt underneath. But, though unacquainted with the mystery of the b.u.t.ton, there were mysteries of another kind with which he seemed to have a most perfect acquaintance: Angus--always a faithful attendant at church--was a great critic in sermons; nor was it every preacher that satisfied him; and such was his imitative turn, that he himself could preach by the hour, in the manner--so far at least as voice and gesture went--of all the popular ministers of the district. There was, however, rather a paucity of idea in his discourses: in his more energetic pa.s.sages, when he struck the book and stamped with his foot, he usually iterated, in sonorous Gaelic--"The wicked, the wicked, O wretches the wicked!" while a pa.s.sage of a less depreciatory character served him for setting off his middle tones and his pathos. But that for which his character was chiefly remarkable was an instinctive, foxlike cunning, that seemed to lie at its very basis--a cunning which co-existed, however, with perfect honesty, and a devoted attachment to his patron the proprietor.
The town of Cromarty had its poor imbecile man of quite a different stamp. Jock Gordon had been, it was said, "like other people" till his fourteenth year, when a severe attack of illness left him bankrupt in both mind and body. He rose from his bed lame of a foot and hand, his one side shrunken and nerveless, the one lobe of his brain apparently inoperative, and with less than half his former energy and intellect; not at all an idiot, however, though somewhat more helpless--the poor mutilated fragment of a reasoning man. Among his other failings, he stuttered lamentably. He became an inmate of the kitchen of Cromarty House; and learned to run, or, I should rather say, to _limp_, errands--for he had risen from the fever that ruined him to run no more--with great fidelity and success. He was fond of church-going, of reading good little books, and, notwithstanding his sad stutter, of singing. During the day, he might be heard, as he hobbled along the streets on business, "_singing in into himself_," as the children used to say, in a low unvaried under-tone, somewhat resembling the humming of a bee; but when night fell, the whole town heard him. He was no patronizer of modern poets or composers. "There was a ship, and a ship of fame," and "Death and the fair Lady," were his especial favourites; and he could repeat the "Gosport Tragedy," and the "Babes in the Wood,"
from beginning to end. Sometimes he stuttered in the notes, and then they lengthened on and on into a never-ending quaver that our first-rate singers might have envied. Sometimes there was a sudden break--Jock had been consulting the pocket in which he stored his bread; but no sooner was his mouth half-cleared than he began again. In middle-life, however, a great calamity overtook Jock. His patron, the occupant of Cromarty House, quitted the country for France: Jock was left without occupation or aliment; and the streets heard no more of his songs. He grew lank and thin, and stuttered and limped more painfully than before, and was in the last stage of privation and distress; when the benevolent proprietor of Nigg, who resided half the year in a town-house in Cromarty, took pity upon him, and introduced him to his kitchen. And in a few days Jock was singing and limping errands with as much energy as ever. But the time at length came when his new benefactor had to quit his house in town for his seat in the country; and it behoved Jock to take temporary leave of Cromarty, and follow him. And then the poor imbecile man of the town-kitchen had, of course, to measure himself against his formidable rival, the vigorous idiot of the country one.
On Jock"s advent at Nigg--which had taken place a few weeks previous to my engagement in the burying-ground of the parish--the character of Angus seemed to dilate in energy and power. He repaired to the churchyard with spade and pickaxe, and began digging a grave. It was a grave, he said, for wicked Jock Gordon; and Jock, whether he thought it or no, had come to Nigg, he added, only to be buried. Jock, however, was not to be dislodged so; and Angus, professing sudden friendship for him, gave expression to the magnanimous resolution, that he would not only tolerate Jock, but also be very kind to him, and show him the place where he kept all his money. He had lots of money, he said, which he had hidden in a dike; but he would show the place to Jock Gordon--to poor cripple Jock Gordon: he would show him the very hole, and Jock would get it all. And so he brought Jock to the hole--a cavity in a turf-wall in the neighbouring wood--and, taking care that his own way of retreat was clear, he bade him insinuate his hand. No sooner had he done so, however, than there issued forth from between his fingers a cloud of wasps, of the variety so abundant in the north country, that build their nests in earthy banks and old mole-hills; and poor Jock, ill fitted for retreat in any sudden emergency, was stung within an inch of his life.
Angus returned in high glee, preaching about "wicked Jock Gordon, whom the very wasps wouldn"t let alone;" but though he pretended no further friendship for a few days after, he again drew to him in apparent kindness; and on the following Sat.u.r.day, on Jock being despatched to a neighbouring smithy with a sheep"s head to singe, Angus volunteered his services to show him the way.
Angus went trotting before; Jock came limping behind: the fields were open and bare; the dwellings few and far between; and after having pa.s.sed, in about an hour"s walking, half-a-dozen little hamlets, Jock began to marvel exceedingly that there should be no sign of the smith"s shop. "Poor foolish Jock Gordon!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Angus, quickening his trot into a canter; "what does he know about carrying sheep"s heads to the smithy?" Jock laboured hard to keep up with his guide; quavering and semi-quavering, as his breath served--for Jock always began to sing, when in solitary places, after nightfall, as a protection against ghosts. At length the daylight died entirely away, and he could only learn from Angus that the smithy was further off than ever; and, to add to his trouble and perplexity, the roughness of the ground showed him that they were wandering from the road. First they went toiling athwart what seemed an endless range of fields, separated from one another by deep ditches and fences of stone; then they crossed over a dreary moor, bristling with furze and sloe-thorn; then over a waste of bogs and quagmires; then across a track of newly-ploughed land; and then they entered a second wood. At length, after a miserable night"s wandering, day broke upon the two forlorn satyrs; and Jock found himself in a strange country, with a long narrow lake in front and a wood behind. He had wandered after his guide into the remote parish of Tarbet.
Tarbet abounded at that time in little muddy lakes, edged with water-flags and reeds, and swarming with frogs and eels; and it was one of the largest and deepest of these that now lay before Jock and his guide. Angus tucked up his blue gown, as if to wade across. Jock would have as soon thought of fording the German Ocean. "Oh, wicked Jock Gordon!" exclaimed the fool, when he saw him hesitate; "the colonel"s waiting, poor man, for his head, and Jock will no" take it to the smithy." He stepped into the water. Jock followed in sheer desperation; and, after clearing the belt of reeds, both sank to the middle in the mingled water and mud. Angus had at length accomplished the object of his journey. Extricating himself in a moment--for he was lithe and active--he s.n.a.t.c.hed the sheep"s head and trotters from Jock, and, leaping ash.o.r.e, left the poor man sticking fast. It was church-time ere he reached, on his way back, the old Abbey of Fearn, still employed as a Protestant place of worship; and as the sight of the gathering people awakened his church-going propensity, he went in. He was in high spirits--seemed, by the mouths he made, very much to admire the sermon, and paraded the sheep"s head and trotters through the pa.s.sages and gallery a score of times at least, like a monk of the order of St.
Francis exhibiting the relics of some favourite saint. In the evening he found his way home, but learned, to his grief and astonishment, that "wicked Jock Gordon" had got there shortly before him in a cart. The poor man had remained sticking in the mud for three long hours after Angus had left him, until at length the very frogs began to cultivate his acquaintance, as they had done that of King Log of old; and in the mud he would have been sticking still, had he not been extricated by a farmer of Fearn, who, in coming to church, had taken the lake in his way. He left Nigg, however, for Cromarty on the following day, convinced that he was no match for his rival, and dubious how the next adventure might terminate.
Such was the story which I found current in Nigg, when working in its churchyard, with the hero of the adventure often beside me. It led me to take special note of his cla.s.s, and to collect facts respecting them, on which I erected a sort of semi-metaphysical theory of human character, which, though it would not now be regarded as by any means a novel one, I had thought out for myself, and which possessed for me, in consequence, the charm of originality. In these poor creatures, I thus argued, we find, amid much general dilapidation and brokenness of mind, certain instincts and peculiarities remaining entire. Here, in Angus, for instance, there is that instinctive cunning which some of the lower animals, such as the fox, possess, existing in a wonderful degree of perfection. Pope himself, who "could not drink tea without a stratagem,"
could scarce have possessed a larger share of it. And yet how distinct must not this sort of ingenuity be from the mechanical ingenuity! Angus cannot fix a b.u.t.ton in its hole. I even see him baffled by a tall snuff-box, with a small quant.i.ty of snuff at its bottom, that lies beyond the reach of his finger. He has not ingenuity enough to lay it on its side, or to empty its snuff on his palm; but stretches and ever stretches towards it the unavailing digit, and then gets angry to find it elude his touch. There are other idiots, however, who have none of Angus"s cunning, in whom this mechanical ability is decidedly developed.
Many of the _cretins_ of the Alps are said to be remarkable for their skill as artisans; and it is told of a Scotch idiot, who lived in a cottage on the Maolbuie Common in the upper part of the Black Isle, and in whom a similar mechanical ability existed, abstracted from ability of almost every other kind, that, among other things, he fabricated, out of a piece of rude metal, a large sacking needle. Angus is attached to his patron, and mourns for the deceased lady; but he seems to have little general regard for the species--simply courting for the time those from whom he expects snuff. The Cromarty idiot, on the contrary, is obliging and kindly to all, and bears a peculiar love to children; and, though more an imbecile in some respects than even Angus, he has a turn for dress, and can attire himself very neatly. In this last respect, however, the Cromarty fool was excelled by an idiot of the last age, known to the children of many a village and hamlet as Fool Charloch, who used to go wandering about the country, adorned, somewhat in the style of an Indian chief, with half a peac.o.c.k"s tail stuck in his cap. Yet another idiot, a fierce and dangerous creature, seemed as invariably malignant in his dispositions as the Cromarty one is benevolent, and died in a prison, to which he was committed for killing a poor half-witted a.s.sociate. Yet another idiot of the north of Scotland had a strange turn for the supernatural. He was a mutterer of charms, and a watcher of omens, and possessed, it was said, the second sight. I collected not a few other facts of a similar kind, and thus reasoned regarding them:--
These idiots are imperfect men, from whose minds certain faculties have been effaced, and other faculties left to exhibit themselves, all the more prominently from the circ.u.mstances of their standing so much alone.
They resemble men who have lost their hands, but retain their feet, or who have lost their sight or smell, but retain their taste and hearing.
But as the limbs and the senses, if they did not exist as separate parts of the frame, could not be separately lost, so in the mind itself, or in at least the organization through which the mind manifests itself, there must also be separate parts, or they would not be thus found isolated by Nature in her mutilated and abortive specimens. Those metaphysicians who deal by the mind as if it were simply a general power existing in _states_, must be scarce less in error than if they were to regard the _senses_ as merely a general power existing in states, instead of recognising them as distinct, independent powers, so various often in their degree of development, that, from the full perfection of any one of them, the perfection, or even the existence, of any of the others cannot be predicated. If, for instance, it were--as some physicians hold--the same general warmth of emotive power that glows in benevolence and burns in resentment, the fierce, dangerous idiot that killed his companion, and the kindly-dispositioned Cromarty one who takes home pailfuls of water to the poor old women of the place, and parts with his own toys to its children, would, instead of thus exhibiting the opposite poles of character, at least so far resemble one another, that the vindictive fool would at times be kindly and obliging, and the benevolent one at times violent and resentful. But such is not the case: the one is never madly savage--the other never genial and kind; and so it seems legitimate to infer, that it is not a general power or energy that acts through them in different states, but two particular powers or energies, as unlike in their natures, and as capable of acting apart, as seeing and hearing. Even powers which seem to have so much in common, that the same words are sometimes made use of in reference to both, may be as distinct as smelling and tasting. We speak of the _cunning_ workman, and we speak of the _cunning_ man; and refer to a certain faculty of contrivance manifested in dealing with characters and affairs on the part of the one, and in dealing with certain modifications of matter on the part of the other; but so entirely different are the two faculties, and, further, so little dependent are they, in at least their first elements, on intellect, that we may find the cunning which manifests itself in affairs, existing, as in Angus, totally dissociated from mechanical skill; and, on the other hand, the cunning of the artisan, existing, as in the idiot of the Maolbuie, totally dissociated from that of the diplomatist. In short, regarding idiots as persons of fragmentary mind, in whom certain primary mental elements may be found standing out in a state of great entireness, and all the more striking in their relief from the isolation, I came to view them as _bits of a.n.a.lysis_, if I may so express myself, made to my hand by Nature, and from the study of which I could conceive of the structure of minds of a more complete, and therefore more complex character. As children learn the alphabet from cards, each of which contains only a letter or two a-piece, printed large, I held at this time, and, with a few modifications, hold still, that those primary sentiments and propensities which form the basis of character, may be found separately stamped in the same way on the comparatively blank minds of the imbecile; and that the student of mental philosophy might learn from them what may be regarded as the alphabet of his science, much more truthfully than from those metaphysicians who represent mind as a power not manifested in contemporaneous and separable faculties, but as existing in consecutive states.
Cromarty had been fortunate in its parish ministers. From the death of its last curate, shortly after the Revolution, and, the consequent return of its old "outed minister," who had resigned his living for conscience" sake, twenty-eight years before, and now came to spend his evening of life with his people, it had enjoyed the services of a series of devout and popular men; and so the cause of the Establishment was particularly strong in both town and parish. At the beginning of the present century Cromarty had not its single Dissenter; and though a few of what were known as "Haldane"s people" might be found in it, some eight or ten years later they failed in effecting a lodgment, and ultimately quitted it for a neighbouring town. Almost all the Dissent that has arisen in Scotland since the Revolution has been an effect of Moderatism and forced settlements; and as the place had known neither, its people continued to harbour within the Church of their fathers, nor wished to change. A vacancy had occurred in the inc.u.mbency, during my sojourn in the south, through the death of the inc.u.mbent, the respected minister of my childhood and youth; and I found, on my return, a new face in the pulpit. It was that of a remarkable man--the late Mr.
Stewart of Cromarty--one of at once the most original thinkers and profound theologians I ever knew; though he has, alas! left as little mark of his exquisite talent behind him, as those sweet singers of former ages, the memory of whose enchanting notes has died, save as a doubtful echo, with the generation that heard them. I sat, with few interruptions, for sixteen years under his ministry; and for nearly twelve of these enjoyed his confidence and friendship.
I never could press myself on the notice of superior men, however desirous of forming their acquaintance; and have, in consequence, missed opportunities innumerable of coming in friendly contact with persons whom it would be at once a pleasure and an honour to know. And so, for the first two years, or rather more, I was content to listen with profound attention to the pulpit addresses of my new minister, and to appear as a catechumen, when my turn came, at his diets of catechising.
He had been struck, however, as he afterwards told me, by my sustained attention when at church; and, on making inquiry regarding me among his friends, he was informed that I was a great reader, and, it was believed, a writer of verse. And coming unwittingly out upon him one day as he was pa.s.sing, when quitting my work-place for the street, he addressed me "Well, lad," he said, "it is your dinner hour: I hear I have a poet among my people?" "I doubt it much," I replied. "Well," he rejoined, "one may fall short of being a poet, and yet gain by exercising one"s tastes and talents in the poetic walk. The accomplishment of verse is at least not a vulgar one." The conversation went on as we pa.s.sed together along the street; and he stood for a time opposite the manse door. "I am forming," he said, "a small library for our Sabbath-school scholars and teachers: most of the books are simple enough little things; but it contains a few works of the intellectual cla.s.s. Call upon me this evening that we may look over them, and you may perhaps find among them some volumes you would wish to read." I accordingly waited upon him in the evening; and we had a long conversation together. He was, I saw, curiously sounding me, and taking my measure in all directions; or, as he himself afterwards used to express it in his characteristic way, he was like a traveller who, having come unexpectedly on a dark pool in a ford, dips down his staff, to ascertain the depth of the water and the nature of the bottom. He inquired regarding my reading, and found that in the belles-lettres, especially in English literature, it was about as extensive as his own.
He next inquired respecting my acquaintance with the metaphysicians.
"Had I read Reid?" "Yes." "Brown?" "Yes." "_Hume?_" "Yes." "Ah! ha!
Hume!! By the way, has he not something very ingenious about miracles?
Do you remember his argument?" I stated the argument. "Ah, very ingenious--most ingenious. And how would you answer that?" I said, "I thought I could give an abstract of the reply of Campbell," and sketched in outline the reverend Doctor"s argument. "And do you deem that satisfactory?" said the minister. "No, not at all," I replied. "No! no!
_that"s_ not satisfactory." "But perfectly satisfactory," I rejoined, "that such is the general partiality for the better side, that the worse argument has been received as perfectly adequate for the last sixty years." The minister"s face gleamed with the broad fun that entered so largely into his composition, and the conversation shifted into other channels.
From that night forward I enjoyed perhaps more of his confidence and conversation than any other man in his parish. Many an hour did he spend beside me in the churchyard, and many a quiet tea did I enjoy in the manse; and I learned to know how much solid worth and true wisdom lay under the somewhat eccentric exterior of a man who sacrificed scarce anything to the conventionalities. This, with the exception of Chalmers, sublimest of Scottish preachers--for, little as he was known, I will challenge for him that place--was a genial man, who, for the sake of a joke, would sacrifice anything save principle; but, though marvellously careless of maintaining intact the "gloss of the clerical enamel," never was there sincerity more genuine than his, or a more thorough honesty.
Content to be in the right, he never thought of simulating it, and sacrificed even less than he ought to appearances. I may mention, that on coming to Edinburgh, I found the peculiar taste formed under the ministrations of Mr. Stewart most thoroughly gratified under those of Dr. Guthrie; and that in looking round the congregation, I saw, with pleasure rather than surprise, that all Mr. Stewart"s people resident in Edinburgh had come to the same conclusion; for there--sitting in the Doctor"s pews--they all were. Certainly in fertility of ill.u.s.tration, in soul-stirring, evangelistic doctrine, and in a general basis of rich humour, the resemblance between the deceased and the living minister seems complete; but genius is always unique; and while in breadth of popular power Dr. Guthrie stands alone among living preachers, I have never either heard or read argument in the a.n.a.logical field that in ingenuity or originality equalled that of Mr. Stewart.
That in which he specially excelled all the men I ever knew was the power of detecting and establishing occult resemblances. He seemed able to read off, as if by intuition--not by s.n.a.t.c.hes and fragments, but as a consecutive whole--that old revelation of type and symbol which G.o.d first gave to man; and when privileged to listen to him, I have been constrained to recognise, in the evident integrity of the reading, and the profound and consistent theological system which the pictorial record conveyed, a demonstration of the divinity of its origin, not less powerful and convincing than the demonstrations of the other and more familiar departments of the Christian evidences. Compared with other theologians in this province, I have felt under his ministry as if, when admitted to the company of some party of modern _savans_ employed in deciphering a hieroglyphic covered obelisk of the desert, and here successful in discovering the meaning of an insulated sign, and there of a detached symbol, we had been suddenly joined by some sage of the olden time, to whom the mysterious inscription was but a piece of common language written in a familiar alphabet, and who could read off fluently, and as a whole, what the others could but darkly guess at in detached and broken parts. To this singular power of tracing a.n.a.logies there was added in Mr. Stewart an ability of originating the most vivid ill.u.s.trations. In some instances a sudden stroke produced a figure that at once illuminated the subject-matter of his discourse, like the light of a lanthorn flashed hastily upon a painted wall; in others he dwelt upon an ill.u.s.trative picture, finishing it with stroke after stroke, until it filled the whole imagination, and sank deep into the memory. I remember hearing him preach, on one occasion, on the return of the Jews as a people to HIM whom they had rejected, and the effect which their sudden conversion could not fail to have on the unbelieving and Gentile world. Suddenly his language, from its high level of eloquent simplicity, became that of metaphor, "When JOSEPH," he said, "shall reveal himself to his _brethren_, the _whole house of Pharaoh shall hear the weeping_." On another occasion I heard him dwell on that vast profundity, characteristic of the scriptural revelation of G.o.d, which ever deepens and broadens the longer and more thoroughly it is explored, until at length the student--struck at first by its expansiveness, but conceiving of it as if it were a mere _measured_ expansiveness--finds that it partakes of the unlimited infinity of the Divine nature itself.
Naturally and simply, as if growing out of the subject, like a berry-covered mistletoe out of the ma.s.sy trunk of an oak, there sprung up one of his more lengthened ill.u.s.trations. A child bred up in the interior of the country has been brought for the first time to the sea-sh.o.r.e, and carried out into the middle of one of the n.o.ble firths that indent so deeply our line of coast. And, on his return, he describes to his father, with all a child"s eagerness, the wonderful expansiveness of the _ocean_ which he had seen. He went out, he tells him, far amid the great waves and the rushing tides, until at length the hills seemed diminished into mere hummocks, and the wide land itself appeared along the waters but as a slim strip of blue. And then, when in mid-sea, the sailors heaved the lead; and it went down, and down, and down, and the long line slipped swiftly away, coil after coil, till, ere the plummet rested on the ooze below, all was well-nigh expended. And was it not the great sea, asks the boy, that was so vastly broad, and so profoundly deep? Ah! my child, exclaims the father, you have not seen aught of its greatness: you have sailed over merely one of its little arms. Had it been out into the wide ocean that the seamen had carried you, "you would have _seen_ no sh.o.r.e, and you would have _found_ no bottom." In one rare quality of the orator Mr. Stewart stood alone among his contemporaries. Pope refers to a strange power of creating love and admiration by "just touching the brink of all we hate." And Burke, in some of his n.o.bler pa.s.sages, happily exemplifies the thing. He intensified the effect of his burning eloquence by the employment of figures so homely--nay, almost so repulsive--that the man of lower powers who ventured on their use would find them effective in but lowering his subject, and ruining his cause. I need but refer, in ill.u.s.tration, to the well-known figure of the disembowelled bird, which occurs in the indignant denial that the character of the revolutionary French in aught resembled that of the English. "We have not," says the orator, "been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff, and rags, and paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man." Into this perilous but singularly effective department, closed against even superior men, Mr.
Stewart could enter safely and at will. One of the last sermons I heard him preach--a discourse of singular power--was on the "Sin-offering" of the Jewish economy, as minutely described in Leviticus. He drew a picture of the slaughtered animal, foul with dust and blood, and streaming, in its impurity, to the sun, as it awaited the consuming fire amid the uncleanness of ashes outside the camp--its throat gashed across--its entrails laid open; a vile and horrid thing, which no one could see without experiencing emotions of disgust, nor touch without contracting defilement. The description appeared too painfully vivid--its introduction too little in accordance with the rules of a just taste. But the master in this difficult walk knew what he was doing. And that, he said, pointing to the strongly-coloured picture he had just completed--"And THAT IS SIN." By one stroke the intended effect was produced, and the rising disgust and horror transferred from the revolting material image to the great moral evil.
How could such a man pa.s.s from earth, and leave no trace behind him?
Mainly, I believe, from two several causes. As the minister of an attached provincial congregation, a sense of duty, and the promptings of a highly intellectual nature, to which exertion was enjoyment, led him to study much and deeply; and he poured forth _viva voce_ his full-volumed and ever-sparkling tide of eloquent idea, as freely and richly as the nightingale, unconscious of a listener, pours forth her melody in the shade. But, strangely diffident of his own powers, he could not be made to believe that what so much impressed and delighted the privileged few who surrounded him, was equally suited to impress and delight the intellectual many outside; or that he was fitted to speak through the press in tones which would compel the attention, not merely of the religious, but also of the literary world. Further, practising but little the art of elaborate composition, and master of a spoken style more effective for the purposes of the pulpit than almost any written one, save that of Chalmers, he failed, in all his attempts in writing, to satisfy a fastidious taste, which he had suffered greatly to outgrow his ability of production. And so he failed to leave any adequate mark behind him. I find that for my stock of theological idea, not directly derived from Scripture, I stand more indebted to two Scotch theologians than to all other men of their profession and cla.s.s. The one of these was Thomas Chalmers--the other, Alexander Stewart: the one a name known wherever the English language is spoken; while of the other it is only remembered, and by comparatively a few, that the impression did exist at the time of his death, that
"A mighty spirit was eclipsed--a power Had pa.s.sed from day to darkness, to whose hour Of light no likeness was bequeathed--no name."