There was, however, no indifference to James's education in this austere simplicity: indeed it would seem that Buchanan, like other preceptors of monarchs, had some hope of forming an ideal prince out of the boy. A few years after his appointment to his office, and when James was still too young to profit by it, he began to write his famous treatise, in the form of a dialogue, upon the laws of the kingdom, the duty respectively of kings and subjects. The De Jure Regni, published when the King was about twelve, was dedicated to him in a grave and dignified letter in which Buchanan describes his work as an attempt to expound the prerogatives of the Scottish Crown, "in which," he says, "I endeavoured to explain from their very cradle, so to speak, the reciprocal rights and privileges of kings and their subjects." He goes on to say that the book was written in the midst of the public troubles with a view to enlightening the disturbers of the commonwealth as to their duties: but that peace beginning to be established he had sacrificed his argument for the sake of public tranquillity. Now, however, that it may be useful to the development of the King he brings it forth again. The direct address to James is full of that curious self-deception or defective insight which is so common among those who have the training of a pupil of great importance in the world. The boy had grown beyond the age of personal chastisement; he had reached that in which the precocious facility of comprehension, which is so strongly fostered by the circumstances of such a position as his, looks to the dazzled pedagogues and attendants like genius, and there seems no prognostic too happy or too brilliant for the new career in which at last there is about to be fulfilled all that men have dreamed of a king.

"Many circumstances tend to convince me that my present exertions will not prove fruitless, especially your age, yet uncorrupted by perverse opinions; a disposition beyond your years, spontaneously urging you to every noble pursuit; a facility in obeying not only your preceptors, but all prudent monitors; a judgment and dexterity in disquisition which prevent you from paying much regard to authority, unless it be confirmed by solid argument. I likewise perceive that by a kind of natural instinct, you so dislike flattery, the nurse of tyranny, and the most grievous pest of a legitimate monarchy, that you as heartily hate the courtly solecisms and barbarisms as they are relished and affected by those who consider themselves as the arbiters of every elegance, and who, by way of seasoning their conversation, are perpetually sprinkling it with majesties, lordships, excellencies, and, if possible, with other expressions still more nauseous. Although the bounty of nature and the instruction of your governors may at present secure you against this error, yet am I compelled to entertain some slight degree of suspicion lest evil communication, the alluring nurse of the vices, should lend an unhappy impulse to your still tender mind, especially as I am not ignorant with what facility the external senses yield to seduction. I have therefore sent you this treatise, not only as a monitor, but even as an importunate and sometimes impudent dun, who in this turn of life may convoy you beyond the rocks of adulation; and may not merely offer you advice, but confine you to the path which you have entered, and if you should chance to deviate may reprehend you and recall your steps. If you obey this monitor you will ensure tranquillity to yourself and your family, and will transmit your glory to the most distant posterity."

That James VI should be described as disliking flattery and despising authority, if not enforced by solid argument, is strange to hear; and that he should be so boldly called upon to consider a plea for national freedom and a constitutional rule, as the chief guarantee of tranquillity and honour, is still more remarkable. Certainly it was not from Buchanan that he got those high pretensions of divine right, which had never flourished in Scotland; although by a not uncommon paradox the most faithful partisans of the family which was brought to ruin by these pretensions were found in the northern kingdom. Very different were the doctrines upon which Buchanan nourished the royal child. James acknowledged afterwards not ungracefully the distinction of his instructor in letters. "All the world," he says, "knows that my master George Buchanan was a great master in that faculty." But his opinions in politics found no favour in his pupil's eyes when James emerged from his youthful subjection and began to show his native mettle. At twelve, individuality in that respect would scarcely be developed, and a reverence for his tutor's sharp tongue and ready hand would keep the King from premature opposition.

While this work was going on in the comparative quiet of Stirling, Scotland was lost in the turmoil of one of the most wild and terrible portions of her history. It is indeed rather from the glimpse we have of the little royal household in the foreground of all that strife and bloodshed, the Lady Mar in her matronly dignity, Buchanan in his furred gown among his books, and the clamour and laughter of the two boys interrupting the quiet, that we can believe in any semblance of peace or domestic life at all in the distracted country. The Regent Lennox, the King's grandfather, was killed under the very rocks of the castle where James learned his lessons. His young companion's father, the Earl of Mar, was taken from the family at Stirling and raised to a brief and agitated Regency, through all of which a civil war was raging. And till from beyond the seas there came the still more horrible news of that French massacre which convulsed the world, and made an end of Mary's party, nothing was secure from one day to another in Scotland. It was in the midst of that very tumult and endless miserable conflict, in which Mary's followers had at last set up the doctrine of her irresponsibility and divine right to retain her position as Queen whatever might be her guilt as Mary Stewart—that the scholar set himself to compose his work upon the rights of the kingdom and the duties of kings. His high temper, his strong partisanship, his stern logic, would find an incitement and inspiration in those specious arguments on the other side which were so new to Scotland, and had been contradicted over and over again in her troublous history, where no one was so certain to be brought to book for his offences as the erring or unsuccessful monarch. It must be difficult for a great classicist to be at the same time a believer in the divine right of kings; and it was a new idea for the mediaeval Scot accustomed to reverence the name, but to criticise in the sharpest practical way the acts of his sovereign. And we may imagine that the old scholar, who could not but hear from his window the shouts of the warfare between the Queen's party and the King's, would have a grim satisfaction as he sat high above them, protected more or less by the royal name, in forging at his leisure those links of remorseless argument which, though they had no effect upon the pupil to whom they were dedicated, had their share in regulating that great rebellion which had so important an effect upon the after-history of the two kingdoms.

During this period, however, Buchanan had other occupations besides his tutorship and his literary work. He was made "director of the Chancery," whatever that may mean, and in 1570 was elevated to the post of Keeper of the Privy Seal, in which capacity he served in various Parliaments: and was also a member of the Privy Council. When the conspiracy arose against the Regent Morton which ended in his temporary deprivation of the regency, Buchanan seems to have taken part against him, though on what argument we are not told: for it was Morton's power which had brought about the re-establishment of peace and order to which he refers in the dedication of his book. And it is a feasible conjecture that it was by his crafty suggestion that the Regent's fictitious plaints of being weary of his high office and desiring nothing more than that the King's Majesty should take the government into his own hand, were ingeniously twisted so as to give his dismissal the air of a gracious consent to Morton's own wishes. An old man like Buchanan, well acquainted with the wiles of logic and the pretexts of state, was more likely to use an advantage in which there is a certain grim humour, and to take the adversary in his own toils, than such an inexperienced politician as young Mar, or any of the undistinguished nobles who carried out that stratagem. Whether Buchanan supported his old pupil, Mar, in his attempt to seize the governorship of the castle and the King's person out of the hands of his uncle, or in what aspect he was regarded when Morton returned to the head of affairs, we have no means of knowing. Whatever his influence might be at the King's ear or amid the secret meetings of the malcontents, neither as Lord Privy Seal nor as King James's tutor did he come in public collision with any public authority. His action, whenever he appears publicly, is perfectly characteristic of his real position and faculties. He took part in a commission for the establishment of a system of municipal law: he was one of the Church's commissioners on two occasions in determining her policy and discipline. When the reform of the Universities of Scotland, so often taken up since then, and so slow to be accomplished, was brought under the consideration of Parliament, Buchanan was one of the chief of the commissioners appointed to consider it. He is reported to have been the author of a scheme of reconstruction to be employed in the University of St. Andrews; and it is interesting to find in this new system that special attention was enjoined to be given to Greek, and that the study of Hebrew was also recommended to the students. The latter language, we believe, still remains an established part of the studies of young men in preparation for the ministry in the Church of Scotland. Buchanan desired that the Principal of his own College, St. Leonards, should lecture on Plato. And he made a present of a number of Greek books, still carefully preserved, to Glasgow University, though why he should have chosen to send them there, instead of to his own smaller and poorer University, we have nothing to show. It is thus apparent that in his active public work Buchanan's chief attention was given to his own proper subjects. There is no evidence that he did more than was indispensable to his official character in matters more exclusively political.

His old age thus passed, in a certain learned leisure which it is very difficult to imagine as existing in so tumultuous a period and amid so many violent changes and vicissitudes. He had many learned correspondents throughout the world, almost all the great scholars of the time being numbered among his friends; and the letters which he received from all quarters implied a considerable amount of letter-writing on his side. He sent copies of his books to his friends as if he had been the most modern of novelists, and it is curious to think of the big laborious volume of solemn Latin dramas, or that thin but weighty tome, instinct with another and more living kind of interest, which set forth the rights of nations—sent by some trusty messenger, a young scholar finding in the packet entrusted to his charge the best introduction to one of the lights of learning on the Continent, or some adventurer making his way to a commission in the Scottish Archers or other service of arms more profitable for a younger son than the frays and feuds of Scotland. The learned doctors of the Sorbonne, the scholars of Geneva, and the printers of Holland, replied on their side not only with elaborate thanks and eulogies, but with responsive presents, treatises or translations of their own, some of them dedicated to the royal boy who was the pupil of their friend, and of whom he gave so wonderful a description. "I have been guilty of trifling with a sacred subject," wrote Berger with his volume of poems, "and I have dedicated my trifles to a king." Another learned correspondent sends a Plato which he has edited, one volume of which he had also inscribed to James, begging that his friend would present it to his Majesty. They would seem to have shared Buchanan's satisfaction in his princely pupil, and it is chiefly by way of reflection, through these responses, that we perceive what his opinion of the young King was, and how much proud delight, expressed no doubt in the most classical language, he took in the boy's aptitude and promise. The following letter, however, which is not classical at all, but written in choice Scots and addressed to Queen Elizabeth's envoy, Sir Thomas Randolph, gives a less dignified but very graphic description of his own circumstances and occupations. It is written from Stirling during Morton's Regency, when peace prevailed and even prosperity had returned in some measure to the distracted kingdom.

"To Maister Randolph, Squiar, Maister of Postes to the Queen's Grace of England.

"Maister, I haif rescevit diverse letters frome you, and yit I haif answerit to nane of them—of the quhilk albeit I haif mony excuses such as age, forgetfulness, business, and disease, yet I will use nane as now, except my sweirness (reluctance) and your gentleness: and gif ye think nane of them sufficient, content you with ane confession of the falt without fear of punition to follow on my onkindness. As for the present I am occupied in writyng of our historie, being assured to content few, and to displease many therethrow. As to the end of it if ye gett it not or (before) this winter bepassit lippen (trust) not for it, no nane other writyngs from me. The rest of my occupation is with the gout quhilk halds me busy both day and night. And quhair ye say ye have not lang to lyif I trust to God to go before you, albeit I be on foot, and ye ryd the post: praying you also not to dispost my hoste at Newark, Jone of Kelsterne. This I pray you partly for his awyn sake quhame I tho't ane gude fellow, and partly at request of such as I dare not refuse. And thus I take my lief shortly at you now, and my lang lief when God pleases, committing you to the protection of the Almighty. At Stirling, xxv. day of August, 1577.—Yours to command with service,

G. BUCHANAN."

The mild, aged jest about preceding his friend out of life though he must go on foot and Randolph had the advantage of commanding the Post, and his recommendation of the erring postmaster at Newark, who was a good fellow, throw a pleasant light of kindly humour into this letter. And we thus hear for the first time of the History, the greatest work of his life, which he seems to have begun in the tranquillity of the palace-castle, notwithstanding the hostile influence of gout and years—hostile above all to so great a piece of work. He was now over seventy, and the end of his career seemed near at hand, although he had but recently taken in hand so great an enterprise. Buchanan's History is not, more than other great histories which have succeeded it, an absolutely impartial work; but it is, throughout all his own stirring and momentous age, the record of a bystander with abundant means of knowledge and a keen apprehension of all the controversies and struggles of his time. If he may perhaps glorify too much the character of his patron and friend the Regent Murray, and take the darkest view of Mary, we can only say that he would have been more angel than man had he kept himself absolutely without bias in that hot and still unexhausted debate. And there was nothing angelical about the old scholar who had taken a part in so many historical events, from the siege of Wark Castle, where he was present as a boy, to the Conferences at York and Westminster, which were matters of yesterday. The science of history has so much developed since his time that it may almost be said to have made a new beginning; and much that was considered authoritative and convincing then has fallen into the limbo of uncertainty, when not rejected altogether. The many differing motives and agencies which can only be fully estimated when the period of discussion is past, have come to occupy a far greater space in the mind of the historian than had been dreamed of in Buchanan's days; and the careful examination of evidence with which we are now familiar was unknown either in the study of the writer or the courts of law during a time which has left endless questions from both to be debated and re-debated by succeeding generations. But yet Buchanan's History remains the most important and dignified record of the national existence up to his time; and no one would now venture to treat the story of ancient Scotland, the chronicles of her kings, or even the still undecided questions of Mary Stewart's life and reign, without the guidance more or less of this great authority. It was a bold step to dedicate to King James a record in which his mother's life was denounced and condemned with such unsparing freedom; but the astonishing absence of sympathy or human understanding shown in this was shared by the greater part of Buchanan's contemporaries, who evidently felt the facts of the mother's guilt to be too abundantly demonstrated and universally consented to, to demand any delicacy of statement as addressed to her son. No one, we think, can entertain any doubt of the historian's own strong conviction on this subject. Among the many fables current about Buchanan, there was one circumstantial and oft-repeated, of his repentance on his deathbed of his judgment of the Queen; but this is entirely set at rest by the affecting record which we shall quote farther on of a last visit paid to him by certain of his friends who had taken fright at the boldness of his statements, and feared that the King, now grown up and developing his own individual sentiments, might stop the issue of the book when he saw these uncompromising records.

We must add one pretty story of Buchanan's kindness to his brethren in scholarship and literature which shows the sharp and cautious scholar in a very pleasant light. A certain Thomas Jack, a schoolmaster in Glasgow, had composed in Latin verse a little book upon the ancient poets, called the Onomasticon Poeticum, and encouraged by the friendship already, as he says, shown to him by Buchanan, carried the book to him for revision.

"I found him in the royal palace of Stirling, diligently engaged in writing his History of Scotland. He was so far from being displeased by the interruption that he cheerfully took my work from my hands, and after reading two or three pages of it, collected together his own papers which were scattered on the table, and said, 'I will desist from my work till I have done what you wish.' This promise he accurately fulfilled; and within a few days gave me a paper written with his own hand, and containing such corrections as he thought necessary."

One can imagine the old scholar seated with his documents before him in the light of a broad window, perhaps arrived at some knotty point which wanted consideration, and turning from the crabbed papers, which would not fit themselves in, with that delight in a lawful interruption and temptation to idleness which only hard-working students know. Much has been said about the misery of such interruptions to the absorbed writer, but no one has pointed out the occasional relief and comfort which they bring. Buchanan must have hailed this occasion of evading for a moment his legitimate work with all the pleasure of an old critic and connoisseur suddenly appealed to with such a congenial demand. Even in our ashes live their wonted fires, and where is the scholar who does not turn with delight from his history or his sermon to criticise a copy of verses, to savourer a fine latinism or dig his pen through a false quantity as if he were cutting down an enemy? Thomas Jack has departed into oblivion along with his Onomasticon: but this record of the friendly reception he and his book met with affords a delightful gleam of light upon the historian's waning days.

It is more remarkable when we find another witness describing our somewhat irascible and sharp philosopher as growing young again in the boys who surrounded him, and adapting his mind to all ages and classes of men. Probably by the time he came to be the King's preceptor Buchanan had ceased to be so compliant, or very probably conceived it appropriate, on principle, to be less indulgent to a pupil whose danger it would be to have too many flatteries and caresses.

We have no very clear record when it was that the tutelage of James was supposed to be over, or if Buchanan was ever formally freed from his office. Informally the King would have seemed to be more or less his own master at the end of Morton's Regency, when, though subject to "raids" like that of Gowrie and the contending influence of one party after another, there was no longer any Regent thought of, and the business of the country was conducted formally in the King's name. It would seem, however, from the dedication of the History, that Buchanan had ceased for some time before its publication to take an active part in James's education. He speaks in this of "the incurable illness" which made him incapable of "discharging the office entrusted to me of cultivating the genius" of the young King; and presents the book as making up in some degree for that personal failure. The History ends with the death of the Regent Lennox, he who was killed in Stirling almost under the historian's eyes, and when Scotland was still distracted between two parties, and in a state of civil warfare. It has been made a subject of reproach to Buchanan that he stopped his chronicle before the beginning of the Regency of Morton, because of his personal hatred to that brave and able personage—a singular charge, seeing that Buchanan lived only a few months after the last Regent of Scotland; and he has expressly mentioned in one of his dedications the increased tranquillity which was the result of Morton's government.

It is in Edinburgh we find the old man of letters in the last scene of his long and laborious life. In September 1581 he was visited by three gentlemen from St. Andrews, one of whom gives us the most lifelike and interesting account of this last interview. It would have been still more interesting had they afforded some indication where they found him, whether he had some pleasant room granted to him in Holyrood, after so many years with the King, a suitable retreat for his old age; or if he had retired to some private lodging in the Canongate to end his days. His visitors make no mention of such unimportant circumstances, but they leave us a most touching and faithful picture of the end of his life. These visitors were the famous Andrew Melville, Principal of the New College at St. Andrews, a scholar almost as distinguished as himself, who had at an earlier period been Buchanan's pupil, and who had acquired his great knowledge in the same way, in the famous schools of the continent; James Melville, his nephew, minister of Kilrenny on the shores of Fife; and Thomas Buchanan, the cousin of the dying historian. James Melville relates this last visit as follows:—

"That September in time of vacans, my uncle Mr. Andrew, Mr. Thomas Buchanan and I, hearing that Mr. George Buchanan was weak, and his Historie under the press, past over to Edinbruck annes errand (expressly) to visit him and see the work. When we came to his chalmer we found him sitting in his chair, teaching his young man that servit him in his chalmer, to spell a, b, ab, and e, b, eb, etc. Efter salutation Mr. Andro says, 'I see, sir, ye are not idle.'—'Better this,' quoth he, 'nor stealing sheep—or sitting idle which is as ill.' Thereafter he shew us the Epistle Dedicatorie to the King, the which when Mr. Andro had read he told him that it was obscure in some places, and wanted certain words to perfeyt the sentence. Sayes he, 'I may do na mair for thinking on another matter.'—'What is that?' sayes Mr. Andro. 'To die,' quoth he; 'but I leave that and manie more things for you to help.'

"We went from him to the printer's workhouse, whom we found at the end of the 17 book of his Cornicle at a place which we thought verie hard for the tyme, which might be an occasion for staying the haill work, anent the burial of Davie. Therefore staying the printer from proceeding, we came to Mr. George again, and fand him bedfast by his custom, and asking him how he did, 'Ever going the way of weilfare,' says he. Mr. Thomas, his cousin, shawes him of the hardness of that part of his Storie, that the King would be offendit with it, and it might stay all the work. 'Tell me, man,' says he, 'gif I have told the truth?'—'Yes,' says Mr. Thomas, 'Sir, I think so.'—'I will bide his feud and all his kin's then;' quoth he. 'Pray, pray to God for me, and let Him direct all.' So by the printing of his Cornicle was endit, that maist learned, wyse, and godly man endit this mortal life."

He was a pedagogue, perhaps something of a pedant, a hot partisan, a special pleader; but few lives can show a more dignified and noble end. If it was the truth he had written this old man cared for nothing else, not even for that fame which is the last infirmity of noble minds. The King might keep back the great work of his life, but he could not silence the lips in which no fear of man was. Whatever might happen afterwards, Buchanan's record was clear; to have told the truth was all with which he had anything to do.

There is a touch of what for want of a better word we must call cynicism in the humorous indifference with which the old philosopher is said to have discussed his own burial. Finding, as the story goes, that there was not money enough in the house for the last expenses, he ordered what there was to be given to the poor, declaring that he was not concerned as to what was to become of his remains. If they did not choose to bury him they might let him lie, he said in grim jest. He was, however, reverently buried by the authorities of Edinburgh, in the historical churchyard of the Greyfriars, attended by "a great company of the faithful," though no stone seems ever to have been placed to indicate the spot where he was laid. Thus in some unknown corner he rests, like so many other illustrious persons—a man who never rested in his life, and carried down his labours to the very verge of the grave. It is a curious satire upon human justice that his name should have been kept green in Scotland by the rough jests of an imaginary Geordie Buchanan, commonly supposed to have been the King's fool, as extraordinary a travesty as it is possible to conceive. It is almost as strange a twist of all the facts and meaning of life that the only money of which he could be supposed to be possessed at his death should have been one hundred pounds (Scots, no doubt), arrears of the pension due to him from the Abbey of Crossraguel, given by Queen Mary to that learned pupil of the Sorbonne and lover of Lutetia with whom she read Latin at Holyrood in the early days before trouble came.



PART IV

THE MODERN CITY



CHAPTER I

A BURGHER POET

After the extraordinary climax of dramatic interest which brought the history of Edinburgh and of Scotland to the knowledge of the whole world, and which has continued ever since to form one of the most exciting chapters in general history, it was inevitable that when that fated Court dispersed, and the lady who was its charm and head disappeared also under the tragic waves which had been rising to engulf her, there should fall a sudden blank into the record, a chill of dulness and tedium, the charm departed and the story done. In fact, it was not at all so, and the metropolis of Scotland continued to seethe with contending elements, and to witness a continued struggle, emphasised by many a martyrdom and deed of blood, and many a desperate battle both hand to hand and head to head in the streets and in the council chambers, all with more or less the religious question involved, and all helping to work out the final settlement. When that final settlement came after all the tumults and blood it had cost, it is scarcely possible not to feel the downfall from those historical commotions to the dead level of a certain humdrum good attained, which was by no means the perfect state hoped for, yet which permitted peace and moderate comfort and the growth of national wellbeing. The little homely church towers of the Revolution, as they are to be seen, for instance, along the coast of Fife, are not more unlike the Gothic spires and pinnacles of the older ages, than was the limited rustical provision of the Kirk, its restricted standing and lowered pretensions, unlike the ideal of Knox, the theocracy of the Congregation and the Covenant. Denuded not only of the wealth of the old communion, but of those beautiful dwelling-places which the passion of the mob destroyed and which the policy of the Reformers did not do too much to preserve—deprived of the interest of that long struggle during which each contending presbyter had something of the halo of possible martyrdom about his head—the Church of the Revolution Settlement lost in her established safety, if not as much as she gained, yet something which it was not well to lose. And the kingdom in general dropped in something like the same way into a sort of prose of existence, with most of the picturesque and dramatic elements gone. Romance died out along with the actual or possible tragedies of public life, and Humour came in, in the development most opposed to romance, a humour full of mockery and jest, less tender than keen-sighted, picking out every false pretence with a sharp gibe and roar of laughter often rude enough, not much considerate of other people's feelings. Perhaps there was something in the sudden cessation of the tragic character which had always hitherto distinguished her history, which produced in Scotland this reign of rough wit and somewhat cynical, satirical, audacious mirth, and which in its turn helped the iconoclasts of the previous age, and originated that curious hatred of show, ceremony, and demonstration, which has become part of the Scottish character. The scathing sarcasm—unanswerable, yet false as well as true—which scorned the "little Saint Geilie," the sacred image, as a mere "painted bradd," came down to every detail of life; the rough jokes of the Parliament House at every trope as well as at every pretence of superior virtue; the grim disdain of the burgher for every rite; the rude criticism of the fields, which checked even family tendernesses and caresses as shows and pretences of a feeling which ought to be beyond the need of demonstration, were all connected one with another. Nowhere has love been more strong or devotion more absolute; but nowhere else, perhaps, has sentiment been so restrained, or the keen gleam of a neighbour's eye seeing through the possible too-much, held so strictly in check all exhibitions of feeling. Jeanie Deans, that impersonation of national character, would no more have greeted her delivered sister with a transport of kisses and rapture than she would have borne false testimony to save her. There is no evidence that this extreme self-restraint existed from the beginning of the national history, but rather everything to show that to pageants and fine sights, to dress and decoration, the Scots were as much addicted as their neighbours. But the natural pleasure in all such exhibitions would seem to have received a shock, with which the swift and summary overthrow of Mary's empire of beauty and gaiety, like the moral of a fable, had as much to do as the scornful destruction of religious image and altar. The succeeding generations indemnified themselves with a laugh and a gibe for the loss of that fair surface both of Church and Court: and the nation has never given up the keen criticism of every sham and seeming which exaggerated the absolutism of its natural character, and along with the destruction of false sentiment imposed a proud restraint and restriction upon much also that was true.



To come down from the age when Mary still reigned in Holyrood and Knox in St. Giles's—and Edinburgh saw every phase of passion and tragedy, wild love, hatred, revenge, and despair, with scarcely less impassioned devotion, zeal, and fury of Reformation, and all the clang of opposed factions, feuds, and frays in her streets—to the age when the Parliament House and its law courts were the centre of Edinburgh, when Holyrood was the debtors' sanctuary, and St. Giles's a cluster of parish churches, even its distinctive name no longer used: and when the citizens clustered about the Cross of afternoons no longer to see the heralds in their tabards and hear the royal proclamations, but to tell and spread the news from London and discuss the wars in the Low Countries, and many a witty scandal, gibes from the Bench and repartees from the Bar, the humours of the old lords and ladies in their "Lodging" in the Canongate, and the witticisms of the favourite changehouse—is as great a leap as if a whole world came between. The Court at St. Germains retained the devotion of many, but Anne Stewart was on the throne, and rebellion was not thought of, while everything was still full of hope for the old dynasty, so that Edinburgh was at full leisure to talk and jeer and gossip and make encounter of wits, with nothing more exciting in hand. In this tranquil period, his apprenticeship being finished, a certain young man from the west, by the name of Allan Ramsay, opened a shop in the High Street "opposite Niddry's Wynd" as a "weegmaker"—perhaps, if truth were known, a barber's shop, in all ages known as the centre of gossip wherever it appears. It is odd, by the way, that a place so entirely dedicated to the service of the male portion of the population, and where women have no place, should have this general reputation; but so it has always been. He had spent his early years as a shepherd on Crawford Moor in the Upper Ward of Clydesdale, and no doubt had there learned every song that floated about the country-side. "Honest Allan" was in every respect a model of the well-doing and prosperous Edinburgh shopkeeper of his time—a character not too entirely engrossed by business, always ready for a frolic, a song, a decorous bout of drinking, and known in all the haunts of the cheerful townsmen: tolerant in morals yet always respectable, fond of gossip, fond of fun, and if not fond of money yet judiciously disposed to gain as much as he could make, or as his apprentices and careful wife could make for him: and gradually progressing from a smaller to a larger shop, from a less to a more "genteel" business, and finally to a comfortable retirement.

In such a life there was plenty of room for enjoyment, for relaxation, and no want of leisure to tell a good story or compose a string of couplets where that gift existed, even when most busy. We may imagine that he did not sit much at his block, but rather in the front of the shop amusing his customers, while their periwigs were curled or fitted, with Edinburgh gossip and wit in the familiarity of common citizenship, or with anecdotes which enlightened the country gentlemen, especially those from the west, the last bon mot of the Parliament House, or the Lord Advocate's latest deliverance. And his clubs were as numerous as those of a young man of fashion. The "Easy Club" was composed of "young anti-unionists," which indicates the politics which the wigmaker mildly held in cheerful subjection to the powers that were. No doubt he would have gone to the death (in verse) for the privileges of Edinburgh: but the anti-unionism or sentimental Jacobitism of his class was not of a kind to trouble any Government. And except the question of the Union, which was settled early in his career, politics do not seem to have been of an exciting character in Edinburgh. Local matters, always the most interesting of any to the inhabitants of a town not great enough to be cosmopolitan but full of distinct and striking individuality, furnished the poetical wigmaker with his first themes. It would seem that he only learned to rhyme from the necessity of taking his part in the high jinks of the club; at least all his early productions were intended for its diversion. An "Elegy on Maggie Johnstone," mistress of a convenient "public" at Morningside, then described as "a mile and a half west from Edinburgh," a suburb on "the south side," though now a part of the town—which would lie in the way of the members when they took their walks abroad, and no doubt formed the end of many a Sabbath day's ramble—was almost the first of his known productions; and we may well believe that the jovial shopkeepers were delighted with the sensation of possessing a poet of their own, and held many a discussion upon the new verses—brimful of local allusions and circumstances which everybody knew—over their ale as they rested in the village changehouse, or among the fumes of their punch in their evening assemblies. Verses warm from the poet's brain have a certain intoxicating quality akin to the toddy, and no doubt the citizens slapped their thighs and snapped their fingers with delight when some well-known name appeared, the incidents of some story they knew by heart, or the features of some familiar character. The satisfaction of finding in what they would call poetry a host of local allusions about which there was no ambiguity, which they understood like their ABC, would rouse the first hearers to noisy enthusiasm. And thus encouraged, the cheerful bard (as he was called in those days) went on till his fame penetrated beyond the club. Another elegy of a more serious description was so highly thought of that it was printed and given to the world by the club itself. That world meant Edinburgh, its many tradesmen, the crowded inhabitants of all the lofty "lands" about that centre of busy social life where the Cross still stood, and the old Tolbooth gloomed over the street, cut in two by its big bulk and the fabric of the Luckenbooths, a sort of island of masonry which divided what is now the broad and airy High Street opposite St. Giles's into two narrow straits. The writers and the advocates, the professors and the clergy, Councillor Pleydell and his kind, were not the first to discover that Ramsay the wigmaker had something in him more than the other rough wits of the shops and markets. And by and by the goodwives in their high lodgings, floor over floor, ever glad of something new, learnt to send one of the bairns with a penny to the wigmaker's shop in the afternoon to see if Allan Ramsay had printed a new poem: and received with rapture the damp broadsheet brought in fresh from the press, with a fable or a song in "gude braid Scots," or a witty letter to some answering rhymester full of local names and things. There was no evening paper in those days, and had there been it was very unlikely it would have penetrated into all the common stairs and crowded tenements. But Allan's songs, of which Jean or Peggy would "ken the tune," and the stories that would delight the bairns, were better worth the penny than news from distant London, which was altogether foreign and unknown to that humble audience.

This no doubt was the sort of fame and widespread popular appreciation which made the statesman of that day—was it Fletcher of Saltoun or Duncan Forbes the great Lord President?—bid who would make the laws so long as he might make the songs of the people. He had in all likelihood learnt Allan's widely flying, largely read verses, which every gamin of the streets knew by heart, in his childhood. And though they might not be in general of a very ennobling quality, there are glimpses of a higher poetry to come in some of these productions, and a great deal of cheerful self-assertive content and local patriotism, as well as of rough fun and jest. If it were not for the very unnecessary introduction of Apollo as the god to whom "the bard" addresses his wishes, there would be something not unworthy of Burns in the following lines. The poet has of course introduced first, as a needful contrast, "the master o' a guid estate that can ilk thing afford," and who is much "dawted (petted) by the gods"—

"For me, I can be weel content To eat my bannock on the bent, And kitchen't wi' fresh air; O' lang-kail I can make a feast And cantily haud up my crest, And laugh at dishes rare. Nought frae Apollo I demand, But through a lengthened life, My outer fabric firm may stand, And saul clear without strife. May he then, but gi'e then, Those blessings for my share; I'll fairly, and squarely, Quit a', and seek nae mair."

It was no doubt after he had achieved this reputation of the streets—a thing more difficult than greater fame—that his imagination developed in more continuous and refined effort. Whether he himself printed his penny broadsheet as well as sold it we are not informed, but as he began after a while to combine bookselling with wigmaking we may be allowed to imagine that the press which produced these flying leaves was either in or near his shop. It is difficult to realise the swarming of life and inhabitation within the high houses of the old town in an age when comfort was little understood: and even the concentration within so small a space, of business, work, interest, idleness, and pleasure, is hard to comprehend by people who have been used to appropriate a separate centre to each of the great occupations or exercises of mankind. When London was comparatively a small town it had still its professional distinctions—the Court, the Temple, the City, the place where law was administered and where money was made, where society had its abode and poverty found a shelter. But in old Edinburgh all were piled one on the top of another—the Parliament House within sight of the shops, the great official and the poor artificer under the same roof: and round that historical spot over which St. Giles's crown rose like the standard of the city, the whole community crowded, stalls and booths of every kind encumbering the street, while special pleaders and learned judges picked their steps in their dainty buckled shoes through the mud and refuse of the most crowded noisy market-place, and all the great personages of Edinburgh paced the "plainstanes" close by at certain hours, unheeding either smell or garbage or the resounding cries of the street.



In such a crowded centre the sheets that were being read so eagerly, laughed over by the very cadgers at their booths, conned by the women at the stairheads, lying on every counter, where Allan's new verses would be pulled to pieces by brother wits who had known him to do better, or heard a livelier witticism from his lips no farther gone than yestreen, must very soon have come to the notice of the westland lads at the college, and from them to the learned professors, and still more directly to the lively groups that went and came to the Parliament House. Already the wigmaker's shop had thriven and prospered; the little man, short and fat and jovial, who had begun to lay out books in his window under the shadow of the curled and powdered periwigs, found the results of his double traffic more satisfactory than poets use. He boasts in one of his rhymed addresses that he thatches the outside and lines the inside of many a douce citizen, "and baithways gathers in the cash." He adds—

"And fain would prove to ilka Scot, That poortith's no the poet's lot."

It must have been altogether an odd little establishment—the wigs set out upon their blocks, perhaps, who knows, the barber's humbler craft being plied behind backs; the books multiplying daily on shelves and in windows, and the ragged boys with their pennies waiting to see if there was a new piece by Allan Ramsay; while perhaps in the corner, where lay the lists of the new circulating library—the first in Scotland—Miss Lydia Languish with her maid, or my lady's gentlewoman from some fine house in the Canongate, had come in to ask for the last new novel from London, the Scotch capital having not yet begun to produce that article for itself.

One may be sure that Allan, rotund and smiling, was always ready for a crack with the ladies, and to recommend the brand new Pamela, the support of virtue, or some contemporary work of lesser genius. Though the general costume was like that worn in the other parts of the island, perhaps a little behind London fashions, the fair visitors would still be veiled with the plaid, the fine woven screen of varied tartan which covered the head like a hood, and could on occasion conceal the face more effectually than Spanish lace or Indian muslin—a singular peculiarity not ancient and scarcely to be called national, since the tartan came from the still-despised Highlands, and these were Lowland ladies who wore the plaid. This fashion would seem to have begun to be shaken by Ramsay's time, for he pleads its cause with all the fervour of a poetical advocate. There is something grotesque in the arguments, and still more grotesque in the names by which he distinguishes the wearers of the plaid.

"Light as the pinions of the airy fry Of larks and linnets who traverse the sky, Is the Tartana, spun so very fine Its weight can never make the fair repine; Nor does it move beyond its proper sphere, But lets the gown in all its shape appear; Nor is the straightness of her waist denied To be by every ravished eye surveyed; For this the hoop may stand at largest bend, It comes not nigh, nor can its weight offend.

* * * * *

"If shining red Campbella's cheeks adorn, Our fancies straight conceive the blushing morn, Beneath whose dawn the sun of beauty lies, Nor need we light but from Campbella's eyes. If lined with green Stuarta's plaid we view, Or thine, Ramseia, edged around with blue, One shews the spring when nature is most kind, The other heaven whose spangles lift the mind."

The description of the manner in which this engaging garment is worn has all the more reason to be quoted that it was not only a new piece by Allan Ramsay, but affords a glimpse of the feminine figures that were to be seen in the High Street of Edinburgh going to kirk and market in the beginning of the eighteenth century. There is, too, a pleasant touch of individuality in the musical street cry that wakes the morn.

"From when the cock proclaims the rising day, And milkmaids sing around sweet curds and whey, Till grey-eyed twilight, harbinger of night, Pursues o'er silver mountains sinking light, I can unwearied from my casements view The Plaid, with something still about it new. How are we pleased when, with a handsome air, We see Hepburna walk with easy care! One arm half circles round her slender waist, The other like an ivory pillar placed, To hold her plaid around her modest face, Which saves her blushes with the gayest grace; If in white kids her slender fingers move, Or, unconfined, jet through the sable glove.

"With what a pretty action Keitha holds Her plaid, and varies oft its airy folds! How does that naked space the spirits move, Between the ruffled lawn and envious glove! We by the sample, though no more be seen, Imagine all that's fair within the screen.

"Thus belles in plaids veil and display their charms, The love-sick youth thus bright Humea warms, And with her graceful mien her rivals all alarms."

The fair Hepburna, Humea, Campbella, and the rest may tempt the reader to a smile; but the picture has its value, and is a detail of importance in the realisation of that animated and crowded scene. By this time probably Ramsay had removed his shop to the end of the Luckenbooths, which faced "east" to the unencumbered portion of the High Street, where the City Cross stood, and where all the notable persons made their daily promenade. It was here that he was visited by a kindred spirit, the poet Gay, who had been brought to Edinburgh by his patroness the Duchess of Queensberry, and soon formed acquaintance with the local poet. The two little roundabout bards used to stand together at the door of the shop to watch the crowd, in which no doubt Ramsay would be gratified by a friendly nod from the Lord President, and swell with civic and with personal pride to point out to the English visitor that distinguished Scotsman the loyal and the learned Forbes. The Cross, round which this genteel and witty crowd assembled daily, stood then, according to the plans of the period, in the centre of the High Street, where it had been removed for the advantage of greater space in the previous century. And the view from Ramsay's shop—from which by this time the wigs had entirely disappeared, and which was now a refined and cultured bookseller's, adorned outside with medallions of two poets, Scotch and English, Ben Jonson and Drummond of Hawthornden—was bounded by the gate of the Netherbow with its picturesque tower, and glimpses through the open roadway, of the Canongate beyond, and the cross lines of busy traffic leading to Leith. It was thus a wide space between the lines of high houses, more like a Place than a street, upon which the two gossips gazed, no doubt with a complacent thought that their living presence underneath carried out the symbol of the two heads above—the poets of England and of Scotland—and that in the teeming street below them were many who pointed out to each other this new and delightful combination. They were not great poets, either of these round, fat, oily men of verse. And yet the association was pleasant. Perhaps the duchess's coach-and-six, in which the English bard had been conveyed from London, might drive through the open port, as the two stood delighted, watching the pedestrians hurry out of the way and the great lawyers and officials preparing to pay their devoirs to her Grace as she drew up before the bookshop. No doubt they thought it a scene to be remembered in the history of letters. She was at Penicuik House on a visit to the Clerks, who were friends and patrons of Allan, and no doubt had supped or drunk a dish of tea at New Hall, where the Lord President (who was only the Lord Advocate in those days) often took his case in his cousin's house, where Ramsay was a familiar and frequent guest. When Allan made wigs no longer, when all his occupations were about books, and everybody in Edinburgh, gentle and simple, knew him as the poet, he would be still more free to make his jokes and his compliments to all those fine people. But at no time was the genial little poet "blate," as he would himself have said. There was no shyness in him. He "braw'd it," as he says, with no doubt the finest of periwigs, long before he had ceased to be a skull-thatcher, and swaggered through the wynds and about the Cross with the best. The Edinburgh shopkeeper has never been "blate." He has always maintained a freedom of independence which has nothing of the obsequiousness of more common traders, and which gave the greater value to the sly compliment which he would insinuate between two jests. No doubt Campbella and Hamilla would laugh at the little man's compliments, his bows and admiring glances, yet would not object to his exposition of the tartan screen, the delicate silken plaid under which they shielded their radiant complexions and golden locks.

Allan must have seen many curious sights from those windows. The riding of the Parliament, when in gallant order two by two—the commissioners of the boroughs and the counties leading the way, the peers following, through the guards on either side who lined the streets—they rode up solemnly from Holyrood to the Parliament House, with crown and sword and sceptre borne before them, the old insignia, without which the Acts of the ancient Parliaments of Scotland were not considered valid—marching for the last time to their place of meeting to give up their trust—would be one of the most remarkable. The commoners had each two lackeys to attend him, the barons three, the earls four, a blue-coated brigade, relic of the old days when no gentleman moved abroad without a following; and Lyon King-at-arms in his finery to direct the line. With lamentation and humiliation was the session closed; even wise men who upheld the Union consenting to the general pang with which the last Scots Parliament went its way. And the glare of the fire must have lighted up the poet's rooms, and angry sparks fallen, and hoarse roar of voices drowned all domestic sounds, when the Porteous Mob turned Edinburgh streets into a fierce scene of tragedy for one exciting night. It would be vain indeed to describe again what Scott has set before us in the most vivid brilliant narrative. Such a scene breaking into the burgher quietude—the decent households which had all retired into decorous darkness for the night waking up again with lights flitting from story to story, the axes crashing against the doors of the Tolbooth, the wild procession whirling down the tortuous gloom of the West Bow—was such an interruption of monotonous life as few towns in the eighteenth century could have equalled; and it is curious to remember the intense national feeling and keen patriotic understanding of how far the populace would or could endure interference, which made Duncan Forbes in his place in Parliament stand up as almost the defender of that wild outburst of lawlessness, and John of Argyle turn from the royal presence to prepare his hounds, as he said, against the Queen's threat of turning the rebellious country into a desert. These proud Scotsmen had supported the Union: they had perceived its necessity and its use: but there was a point at which all their susceptibilities took fire, and Whig lords and politicians were at one with every high-handed Tory of the early times.

Allan Ramsay must also have seen, though he says nothing of it, the brief occupation of Edinburgh by the unfortunate Prince Charles Edward, and at a distance the pathetic little Court in Holyrood, the Jacobite ladies in their brief glory, the fated captains of that wild little army, in which the old world of tradition and romance made its last outbreak upon modern prose and the possibilities of life. One would imagine that for a man who had lived through that episode in the heart of the old kingdom of the Stewarts, and whose house lay half-way between the artillery of the castle, where a hostile garrison sat grimly watching the invaders below, and the camp at Holyrood—there would have been nothing in his life so exciting, nothing of which the record would have been more distinct. But human nature, which has so many eccentricities, is in nothing so wonderful as this, that the most remarkable historical scenes make no impression upon its profound everyday calm, and are less important to memory than the smallest individual incident. The swarm of the wild Highlanders that took sudden possession of street and changehouse, the boom of the cannon overhead vainly attempting to disperse a group here and there or kill a rebel, and the consciousness which one would think must have thrilled through the very air, that under those turrets in the valley was the most interesting young adventurer of modern times, the heir of the ancient Scots kings, their undoubted representative—how could these things fail to affect the mind even of the most steady-going citizen? But they did, though we cannot comprehend it. Allan has a word for every little domestic event in town or suburbs, but there is not a syllable said either by himself or his biographers to intimate that he knew what was going on under his eyes at that brief and sudden moment, the "one crowded hour of glorious life," which cost so much blood of brave men, and which the hapless Prince paid for afterwards in the disenchanted tedium of many a dreary year.



It was before this time, however, that Ramsay reached the height of his fame and of his productions in The Gentle Shepherd. He had written some years before "A Pastoral Dialogue between Patie and Roger," published as usual in a sheet for a penny, and no doubt affording much pleasure to the great popular audience to whom the "new piece" was as the daily feuilleton, that friendly dole of fiction which sweetens existence. It was evidently so successful that after a while the poet composed a pendant—a dialogue between Jenny and Peggy. These two fragments pleased the fancy of both the learned and the simple, and no doubt called forth many a flattering inquiry after the two rustic pairs and demands for the rest of their simple history, which inspired the author to weave the lovers into the web of a continuous story, adding the rural background, so fresh and true to nature, and the rustic and humorous characters which were wanted for the perfection of the pastoral drama. Few poems ever have attained so great and so immediate a success. It went from end to end of Scotland, everywhere welcomed, read, conned over, got by heart. Such a fame would be indeed worth living for. The fat little citizen in his shop became at once the poet of his country, as he had been of the Edinburgh streets. It was nearly two centuries since Dunbar and Davie Lyndsay had celebrated their romantic town: and though the name of the latter was still a household word ("You'll no find that in Davie Lyndsay" being the popular scornful dismissal of any incredible tale), yet their works had fallen into forgetfulness. The new poet was received accordingly with acclamation. People did not talk of sales and profits in those days, and we have no information as to the numbers issued, or the time they took to find a home in every cottage, as well as to receive the distinction of illustration and critical discussion, which proved that it was not only the people who interested themselves in the new poet, but a more highly trained and difficult audience as well. We have before us two goodly octavos in which the little rustical comedy is enshrined in hundreds of pages of notes; and where the argument as to its localities, identifying every spot, occupies chapter after chapter of earnest discussion, proving exactly where every cottage is situated, and that New Hall, the home of the Forbeses, was the mansion of the poem, with its little farm-steading round. Shakspeare could not have been more closely followed, and we doubt if the localities which he has made famous were ever discussed at such length. I can remember nearly fifty years ago investigating, with the eagerness of a child to whom books were the most precious objects in existence, the little shelf high on the wall at the bedhead, where a very old woman, an old nurse in her retirement, kept her treasures, and mounted high upon a chair, finding a much-thumbed unbound copy of The Gentle Shepherd in the dim twilight, ruddy with the glimmer of the fire, of the cottage room. In such places it was never absent; it was the one book which held its ground by the side of the Bible and perhaps a volume of old-world devotion, The Crook in the Lot, or The Saint's Rest. Such a distinction is a far more true and genuine triumph than the sale of many editions. It went straight into the heart of the peasant, who understood and appreciated every scene and line. And it was discussed by all the Edinburgh clubs, and by the literati who knew their Theocritus and could write dissertations on pastoral poetry. The greatest poet could have hoped for no more.

And pastoral poetry was the fashion of the time. Ramsay himself had made various other attempts before he lighted upon this quite legitimate strain. We read with a shudder of comic horror a dialogue "On the Death of Mr. Addison," in which the interlocutors are "Richy and Sandy," to wit, Sir Richard Steele and Mr. Alexander Pope! who bewail their loss, which is far worse than misfortune to their flocks, or the scorn of their lasses, being no less than this, that "Addie, that played and sang so sweet, is dead"! The poet received, indeed, a complimentary copy of verses upon this production, in which he is thus addressed—

"Well fare thee, Allan, who in mother tongue So sweetly hath of breathless Addy sung: His endless fame thy nat'ral genius fired, And thou hast written as if he inspired. 'Richy and Sandy,' who do him survive, Long as thy rural stanzas last, shall live."

The grotesque in poetry could scarcely go farther. Mr. Burchett, who addressed good Allan in these rhymes, was the refined gentleman who put the wigmaker's poems into English. "Richy and Sandy" was contained in a volume which Ramsay published by subscription, and which brought him in, to the immense admiration of his biographer, four hundred guineas sterling, which no doubt was a very admirable recompense indeed for so many foolish verses. This volume contained, among other things, Ramsay's bold continuation of "Christ's Kirk on the Green," which the same biographer describes as "King James the First's ludicrous poem," in which the poet of the High Street skilfully turns the poet-monarch's rustic revel into a vulgar village debauch. But these pieces of presumption and non-comprehension are happily all dead and gone, and Ramsay's reputation rests upon a happier basis. It is not a small matter to have pervaded a whole country with the simple measures of a rural idyll—a poem in which there are not perhaps five lines of poetry, but which is fragrant of the moors and fields, full of rustic good sense and feeling, and as free of harm or offence as the most severe moralist could desire. This latter quality is all the more remarkable as it belongs to an age not at all squeamish in these matters, and to which the frankest assaults upon a heroine's virtue were supposed to be quite adapted for the treatment of fiction. But there is no Lovelace in The Gentle Shepherd; the rustic love-making is ardent, but simple and without guile. The swains respect as much as they admire their nymphs: the nymphs are confident in their frank innocence, and fear no evil; the old fathers sit cheerful and sagacious at their doors and indulge in their cracks, not less pleased with themselves and their share of life than are the young ones with their livelier pleasures: the cows breathe balmy breath into the wild freshness of the pastoral scenery. There is scarcely anything affected, false, or even stilted in the poetical dialogues which, with a little licence for the verse and something for the sentiment, come naturally and simply from the wholesome, genial young shepherds and their sweethearts. To say this is to say as much as the most fastidious critic could desire from such a composition.

Nor is it spoiled by classic models or similes. How Ramsay succeeded in keeping Venus and Cupid out of it, in forgetting all eclogues and pastorals, Virgil or Theocritus, and indulging in nothing that was out of place in Scotland, it is hard to tell. The Mantuan bard, the oaten reed, Philomela and her songs, Hymen, Ganymede, Bacchus, and all the Olympian band disport themselves in his other verses: but The Gentle Shepherd is void of those necessary adjuncts of the eighteenth-century muse. The wimpling burn is never called Helicon nor the heathery braes Parnassus, and nothing can be more genuine, more natural, and familiar than the simple scenery of Habbie's Howe—in which the eager critics identified every scene, and the sensible poet enhanced his art by a perfect truth to nature. The Gentle Shepherd is perhaps the only so-called Pastoral of which this can be said, and it must have required no small amount of self-denial to dispense with all those accustomed auxiliaries. Even the sentiments are not too highflown for the locality. If they are perhaps more completely purified from everything gross or fleshly than would have been the case in fact, the poet has not been afraid to temper passion with those considerations which naturally rise to the mind of the young farmer in choosing his mate. His Peggy, though she has beauty enough to make up for every deficiency, has also "with innocence the wale of sense."

"In better sense without a flaw, As in her beauty, far excels them a'."

She, on her part, anticipates not raptures and blisses in her marriage, but the hallowed usages of life.

"I'll employ with pleasure all my art To keep him cheerful, and secure his heart. At e'en, when he comes weary frae the hill, I'll have a' things made ready to his will; In winter when he toils through wind and rain, A bleezin' ingle, and a clean hearth-stane; And soon as he's flung by his plaid and staff, The seething pot's be ready to tak' aff."

Ramsay's sobriety here shines in comparison with all the fables and idylls of his age. It is entirely natural, living, and of his time. Patie plays upon a flute of "plum-tree made with ivory virls round," which he bought from the proceeds of "sax good fat lambs" sold at the West Port, instead of the rustic pipe or oaten reed, which in his heart of hearts no doubt our wigmaker thought much finer. Thus he secured his audience, who knew nothing about oaten reeds, and instead of the plaudits of the dilettanti secured the true fame of popular comprehension and knowledge. Burns was far higher and nobler in genius, and the worship awarded to him by his countrymen is one of the favourite subjects of gibe and jest among writers on the other side of the Tweed. But even Burns had not the universal acceptance, the absolute command of his audience, which belonged to honest Allan. There were politicians and there were ecclesiastics, and good people neither one nor the other, who shook their troubled heads over the ploughman who would not confine himself to the daisy of the field or the Saturday night's observances of the Cottar, but was capable of Holy Willie and the Holy Fair. But Ramsay had no gainsayer, and The Gentle Shepherd was the first of books in most Lowland homes. Its construction, its language and sentiments, are all as commonplace as could be imagined, but it is a wholesome, natural, pure, and unvarnished tale, and the mind that brought it forth (well aware of what pleased his public) and the public who relished and bought it, give us a better view of the honest tastes and morals of the period than anything else which has come to us from that time. There has always been a good deal of drinking, and other vices still less consistent with purity of heart, in Scotland. Now and then we are frightened by statistics that give us a very ill name; but it is difficult to believe that if the national heart had been corrupt The Gentle Shepherd could have afforded it such universal and wholesome delight.

It is curious to find two very ordinary and prosaic tradesmen thus in the front of popular literature in the beginning of the eighteenth century. There is no comparison between Allan Ramsay and Samuel Richardson in respect to genius. That humdrum old bookseller evoked by some miraculous art the most delicate and lovely of creations out of the midst of revolting and disgusting circumstances. Fielding was a far finer gentleman, a much more accomplished writer, even a greater genius; but there are none of his women who are fit to tie the shoes of Clarissa Harlowe, to whom indeed there exists no fit companion out of Shakspeare. Our good-humoured Allan had no such gift, but he had the art of producing one spotless and lifelike tale, absolutely true to nature and within the power of verification by any reader, which was accepted by a whole country with enthusiasm as the best rendering of its rural life. We doubt if there ever was a greater literary triumph.

Ramsay would not have been the true man he was to every tradition and inheritance of his class had he not shown a modest complacency in his own success. He was assailed, we are told, by nameless critics, who put forth "A Block for Allan Ramsay's Wigs," "Remarks on Ramsay's Writings," and so forth—and retaliated, not without dignity: "Dull foes," he says, "nought at my hand deserve."

"The blundering fellows ne'er forget, About my trade to sport their fancies, As if, forsooth, I would look blate, At what my honour most advances.

"Auld Homer sang for's daily bread; Surprising Shakspeare fin'd the wool; Great Virgil creels and baskets made; And famous Ben employed the trowel.

"Yet Dorset, Lansdown, Lauderdale, Bucks, Stirling, and the son of Angus, Even monarchs, and o' men the wale, Were proud to be enrolled amang us."

It is true that Homer and Shakspeare might be surprised to find themselves rubbing elbows with the wigmaker of the High Street. Still, he shows a fine spirit, and his very strut is respectable.



In the end of his life, when the author of The Gentle Shepherd by all his trades, both as poet and shopkeeper, had amassed a fortune, he built himself a house in the most glorious position which poet could have chosen. It is on the crest of the hill, a little way below the castle, and is still to be seen from Princes Street—a distinct feature in the picturesque and varied line of building. He is said, though on what authority we are not told, to have applied to the Crown for ground enough to build a cage for his burd, meaning his wife: which is supposed to be the reason why he built his house in an octagonal shape like a cage: his wife, however, did not live long enough to inhabit it. Additions and emendations have been made, so that there is no great peculiarity in the form of the old square house on the summit of the green slope, just clear of the rocks of the castle, as it is visible to-day. When it was built the new town of Edinburgh was not yet dreamed of, and nothing disturbed the panorama of green fields that lay between Edinburgh and the Firth. The town wall was falling into ruin, yet still existed in fragmentary towers and ramparts here and there, and low down in the depths of the descent, which was not so precipitous there as under the castle, the high houses and green braes were reflected in the quiet waters of the North Loch. From thence the fields and scattered farmhouses, the Calton Hill in unadorned greenness, a church spire and a cluster of village roofs here and there, led the eye to the shining of the Scottish Sea, the great water with its islands, the coast of Fife with its dotted line of little fishing towns, the two green Lomonds standing softly distinct against the misty line of more distant hills. It was the same view that moved Fitz-Eustace to ecstasy, still but little changed in the eighteenth century from what it had been in the sixteenth. And picturesque as Edinburgh still continues to be in spite of many modern disadvantages, it was no doubt infinitely more picturesque then, crowning the rocky ridge, with straggling lanes and wynds dropping steeply down into the valley—opening here and there a glimpse of the green country and the shimmer of the Firth—while on the edge of the hill, from all the high windows, the wide landscape softened into distance on every side, into the far-off broken ranges of mountains and cloudy rolling vapours, and the far-retiring sweep of a horizon traversed by all the lights and all the storms—a wide world of air and space and infinite variety. The life of our busy modern world had scarcely yet invaded that city on the hill. It stood isolated on the height of its rock, reigning from that domination over all the tranquil country: while within its lines still thronged and clamoured an active noisy population cooped up and packed together as if it were still unsafe to stray away out of shelter of the walls, all the faculties and trades, all the wit and the wealth, one above another, with the concentration, the picturesqueness, the universal acquaintance and familiarity of a mediaeval town. And beautiful as the prospect must have been from those high-built houses, it could scarcely have exceeded the sight of the old Edinburgh of the kings from without, standing high above the level of the soil, with the open crown of St. Giles's rising over its grey heights, its walls broken down by careless peace and wellbeing, its tall tenements standing up like a line of castles. And in the night with its glimmer of household lights at every window hanging high in mid air, repeated with a gleam in the waters beneath and in the stars above, which sparkled keen out of the northern blue, and the mist of habitation, the smoke of the fires and the lamps hanging over all—confusing outlines, yet revealing all the more brightly a higher and a higher altitude of human lights—what a wonderful sight rising sheer out of the green and silent champaign below!

Such was royal Edinburgh still, when the shopkeeper-poet, with his jokes and his quips, and his good-humoured self-esteem, and certainty of his own power, settled down in Ramsay Lodge. It would be well if all poets had as prosperous and as fair a retirement for their old age. He lived for some time in his quaint self-contained (according to the equally quaint Scotch phraseology) birdcage upon the top of the hill, and enjoyed his celebrity and his ease and the pleasant conviction that "I the best and fairest please." His only son, the second Allan Ramsay, was a painter of some reputation, and he had daughters to care for him and keep his home cheerful as long as he lived. A man more satisfied with his lot could not be. His chirrup of self-satisfaction, the flattery, yet familiarity, of his address to all the noble lords and lairds, the judges and advocates, his laugh of jovial optimism and personal content, belong perfectly to the character of the comfortable citizen, "in fair round belly with good capon lined," and the shopkeeper's rather than the poet's desire to please. One can better fancy him at the door of his shop looking down the High Street jocose and beaming, with a joke for the Lord President and for the Cadie alike, hand in glove with all the Town Council, with a compliment for every fair lady or smiling lass that tripped by under her tartan screen, delighted with himself and all around him—than retired in his garden on the Castle Hill, though with all the variations of the heavens and magnificence of the landscape before his eyes. He had no doubt the admiration of that landscape which is never wanting to an Edinburgh citizen, a part of the creed to which he is born; but the homely limits of the green glens and knowes, the wimpling burn, the washing-green, the laird's hospitable house behind, were more in Allan's way when he wanted any relaxation from the even more attractive town. The High Street and Habbie's Howe are the true centres of his soul.

It would be wrong not to note the collections of songs which made his name dear to all the pleasant singers both of drawing-room and cottage. It is a strange peculiarity in a nation possessing a characteristic and melodious popular music of its own like Scotland, to find how little place music as a science, or even in its more serious developments, has ever had in the country. Nothing can be more sweet, more touching, more tender, than the native growth of Scottish song—nothing more full of fun and spirit than the brilliant dance music which, like the song, seems to have sprung spontaneous from the soil. And no country has ever more loved both songs and strathspeys, or clung to them with greater devotion. It would be perhaps impossible for the most learned to decide between the rival claims of Scotland and Ireland in respect to the airs which seem native to both; but Ireland has always laboured under the disadvantage of being far less homogeneous than Scotland, and certainly, before the time of Moore at least, her native songs did not belong to all classes as in the sister country. And Scotland has always through all ages (previous to the present age) preferred her own songs to every other. During the eighteenth century, when Edinburgh was almost more completely the centre of society than ever before, the old tunes were sung by ladies as much as by maid-servants, and the delicate old spinets performed a soft accompaniment to ballads of the "Ewebuchting" and of the "Corn Rigs," and prolonged the pathetic notes of "Waly, waly" and the trembling wail of the "Flowers of the Forest" in the finest houses as in the humblest. Music, more properly so called, the art which has gradually made its way from being a modest handmaiden of poetry to full rivalship, if not a half-implied superiority, was already a scientific pursuit in England; and though the Italian opera aroused a violent opposition, and Tweedledum and Tweedledee called forth the gibes of the wits, there existed a vigorous English school of learned musicians, and Handel and Haydn found an audience not incapable of appreciating their best works. But while this development went on in London, Scotland still sang her ancient simple melodies, and contemned everything else with that audacious superiority which is born of ignorance. One might almost imagine that this was the penalty of a national inheritance so ample and so sweet, and that the comparative absence of traditionary music in England opened the heart of the country to strains more ambitious and classical. However it came about, there is no denying that so it was. If there was any Scottish composer at all, his productions were only imitations or modifications of the old airs. Music continued to be represented by the songs of immemorial attraction, the woodnotes wild of nameless minstrels, pure utterance of the soil. Perhaps the absence of music, except in the kindred shape of psalm tunes, which was but another form of popular song, in the Church, was one great prevailing cause of the national insensibility to all more lavish and elaborate strains. But this peculiarity and insensibility had at least one advantage—they kept in constant cultivation a distinct branch of national literature, and one that is always attractive and delightful. I do not think it is too strong an utterance of national partiality to say that the songwriters of Scotland are beyond comparison with those of either of the other united kingdoms. The simplest of the old ditties brought out of the ancient poets contain a grace of genuine poetry and real feeling far above the unmeaning jingle of verse which is the most common utterance of popular song; and the cultivation of this delightful gift has called forth the most tender and artless poems from gentle writers whom nothing but that inspiration could have made to produce what was in them. The pathetic wail of the poor lady who found to her cost that

"Love is bonnie, a little time when it is new,"

but that

"When love's auld it waxeth cauld, And fades away like morning dew";

and that touching lullaby in which the mother hushes the babe whose

"Father wrought her great annoy,"

with its tender and simple refrain—

"It grieves me sore to hear thee weep,"

breathe out of the ancient depths of human trouble with a reserve and simplicity of feeling that seem almost personal. But the kindred inspiration which called forth the two versions of the "Flowers of the Forest" and the ballad of "Auld Robin Gray," along with many more, shows how warm was the impulse to this expression of feelings, which were at once intensified and drawn out of the sphere of revelations too individual by the breath of the melody which carried them forth.

Allan Ramsay has the merit of being the first collector of Scottish song. He was remorseless, like his century, and made the wildest havoc with some of his originals, cutting and slashing as suited his fancy, and adding of his own whenever it pleased him so to do. But with the exception of a number of Strephons and Chloes, not always ungraceful, in the newer fashion, and a sprinkling of ruder verses in which there is more indecency than immorality, the first two volumes of the Tea-table Miscellany are full of merit, and include many delightful simple lyrics, songs which compare most advantageously with the insipid "words" which at this present advanced age are used as a sort of necessary evil to serve the purpose of the music. "Say that our way is only an harmonious speaking of many witty or soft thoughts after the poet has dressed them in four or five stanzas," says Ramsay, with the apology which is a veiled assertion of higher aims, "yet undoubtedly these must relish best with people who have not bestowed much of their time in acquiring a taste for that downright perfect music which requires none or very little of the poet's assistance." And he tells us in the same preface of a letter he has had from America informing him that there too his manual of song has gone, and that his

"Soft verse made to a Scottish air Is often sung by our Virginian fair."

The book is dedicated to the ladies—the Donne qui hanno intelletto d'amore, long supposed to be the final critics and judges of such productions: and is confidently recommended to these "fair singers" for whose "modest eyes and ears," according to the poet (but with notable exceptions, as has been said), they were prepared. The third volume consisted almost exclusively of English songs, among which are many classic verses. If it were but as a stepping-stone to those perfect lyrics, so full of natural truth and feeling, with which Burns afterwards brought to a climax the songs of his country, the Tea-table Miscellany would have a merit of its own.

Ramsay died in 1758, when the troubles of the country were over, the last seeds of insurrection stamped out, and the powerful revolution begun which made the clans loyal to Government and Scotch politicians faithful to the Union. He was buried in the Greyfriars Churchyard, where so many of the most notable of the citizens of Edinburgh were laid. A hundred years or so after, the enlightened community placed his statue in the gardens that lie between the old town and the new. And thus the poet's career was run; it was a prosperous one, full of the success that was most sweet to him; comfort and competence and reputation, at once that of a warm and well-to-do citizen and that of a poet. Few poets have lived to see their productions so popular. The Gentle Shepherd may be said to have been in every cottage in Scotland in its author's lifetime, and his songs were sung by everybody. Nor did this fame interfere with the citizen's well-earned and more substantial reward. The shop in which he began his prosperous career, and which was crowded so continually by eager messengers with their pennies in search of Allan Ramsay's last new piece—the most immediate and one of the most pleasant evidences of success—still exists, with its high steps and broad low windows, in the heart of the old town with which his name is so completely associated; and the quaint square house in which his later days of ease and retirement were spent still keeps its place on the east of the Castle Hill, surveying from its windows the enriched and amplified yet unalterable panorama so dear and beautiful to all Scottish eyes.



CHAPTER II

THE GUEST OF EDINBURGH

Royal Edinburgh, the city of the Scots kings and Parliament, the capital of the ancient kingdom, would seem to have become weary somewhere in the eighteenth century of dwelling alone upon her rock. There were, to be sure, reasons more prosaic for the construction of the New Town, the partner and companion of the old historical city. The population had increased, the desire for comfort and space, and many luxuries unknown to the early citizens of Edinburgh, had developed among the new. It was no longer agreeable to the lawyers and philosophers to be crowded up with the other inhabitants of a common stair, to have the din of street cries and commotion ever in their ears, and the lowest of the population always about their feet, as was inevitable when gentle and simple were piled together in the High Street and Canongate. The old houses might be noble houses when they were finally got at, through many drawbacks and abominations—though in those days there was little appreciation even of the stately beauty of old masonry and ornament—but their surroundings became daily more and more intolerable. And it was an anachronism to coop up a learned, elegant, and refined class, living under the Hanoverian Georges in peace and loyalty, within the circle of walls now broken down and useless, which had been adapted to protect the subjects of the old Scottish Jameses from continual attacks.

Happily the nature of the situation prevented any amalgamation or loss of the old boundaries and picturesque features of the ancient city, in the new. There was no question of continuation or enlargement. Another Edinburgh rose at the feet of the first, a sober, respectable, modern, and square-toed town, with wide streets and buildings solid and strong, not without pretensions to a certain stateliness of size and design, but in strong contrast with the architecture and fashion native to the soil—the high gables and turreted stairs of the past. The old town had to throw a drawbridge, permanent and massive, over the hollow at her feet before she could even reach the terraced valley on which the first lines of habitation were drawn, and which, rounding over its steep slope, descended towards another and yet another terrace before it stood complete, a new-born partner and companion in life of the former capital, lavish in space as the other was confined, leisurely and serious as the other was animated—a new town of great houses, of big churches—dull, as only the eighteenth century was capable of making them—of comfort and sober wealth and intellectual progress. The architects who adorned the Modern Athens with Roman domes and Greek temples, and placid fictitious ruins on the breezy hill which possessed a fatal likeness to the Acropolis, would have scoffed at the idea of finding models in the erections of the fourteenth century—that so-called dark age—or recognising a superior harmony and fitness in native principles of construction.

Yet though the public taste has now returned more or less intelligently to the earlier canons, it would be foolish not to recognise that there is a certain advantage even in the difference of the new town from the old. It is not the historical Edinburgh, the fierce, tumultuous, mediaeval city, the stern but not more quiet capital of the Reformers, the noisy, dirty, whimsical, mirth-loving town, full of broad jest and witty epigram, of the eighteenth century. The new town has a character of its own. It is the modern, not supplanting or effacing, but standing by the old. Those who built it considered it an extraordinary improvement upon all that Gothic antiquity had framed. They were far more proud of these broad streets and massive houses than of anything their fathers had left to them, and flung down without remorse a great deal of the antiquated building after which it is now the fashion to inquire with so much regret. Notwithstanding the change of taste since that time, the New Town of Edinburgh still regards the old with a little condescension and patronage; but there is no opposition between the two. They stand by each other in a curious peacefulness of union, each with a certain independence yet mutual reliance. London and Paris have rubbed off all their old angles and made themselves, notwithstanding the existence of Gothic corners here and there, all modern, to the extinction of most of the characteristic features of their former living. But happy peculiarities of situation have saved our northern capital from any such self-obliteration. Edinburgh has been fortunate enough to preserve both sides—the ancient picturesque grace, the modern comfort and ease. And though Mr. Ruskin has spoken very severely of the new town, we will not throw a stone at a place so well adapted to the necessities of modern life. Those bland fronts of polished stone would have been more kindly and more congenial to the soil had they cut the air with high-stepped gables and encased their stairs in the rounded turrets which give a simple distinctive character to so many Scottish houses; and a little colour, whether of the brick which Scotch builders despise or the delightful washes[6] which their forefathers loved, would be a godsend even now. But still, for a sober domestic partner, the new town is no ill companion to the ancient city on the hill.

[6] In this respect I venture to think all Scotland errs. Many houses throughout the country, built roughly with a rude and irregular but solid mason-work, were made points of light in the landscape by these washes of colour which poor dwellings retain. There is a yellow which I remember on many old houses in which the stains of time and weather produced varieties of tone almost as agreeable as the mellowing of marble under the same influences, which are now stripped into native roughness and rise in sombre grey, sometimes almost black, abstracting a much-needed warmth from the aspect of the country round.

This adjunct to the elder Edinburgh had come into being between the time when Allan Ramsay's career ended in the octagon house on the Castle Hill, and another poet, very different from Ramsay, appeared in the Scotch capital. In the meantime many persons of note had left the old town and migrated towards the new. The old gentry of whom so many stories have been told, especially those old ladies who held a little court, like Mrs. Bethune Balliol, or made their bold criticism of all things both new and old, like those who flourish in Lord Cockburn's lively pages—continued to live in the ancestral houses which still kept their old-fashioned perfection within, though they had to be approached through all the squalor and misery which had already found refuge outside in the desecrated Canongate; but society in the Scotch metropolis was now rapidly tending across the lately erected bridge towards the new great houses which contemplated old Edinburgh across the little valley, where the Nor' Loch glimmered no longer and where fields lay green where marsh and water had been. The North Bridge was a noble structure, and the newly-built Register House at the other end one of the finest buildings of modern times to the admiring chroniclers of Edinburgh. And the historians and philosophers, the great doctors, the great lawyers, the elegant critics, for whom it was more and more necessary that the ways of access between the old town and the new might be made more easy, presided over and criticised all those wonderful new buildings of classic style and unbroken regularity, and watched the progress of the Earthen Mound, a bold and picturesque expedient which filled up the hollow and made a winding walk between, with interest as warm as that which they took in the lectures and students, the books and researches, which were making their city one of the intellectual centres of the world.

This is a position to which Scotland has always aspired, and the pride of the ambitious city and country was never more fully satisfied than in the end of last and the beginning of the present century. Edinburgh had never been so rich in the literary element, and the band of young men full of genius and high spirit who were to advance her still one step farther to the climax of fame in that particular, were growing up to take the places of their fathers. A place in which Walter Scott was just emerging from his delightful childhood, in which Jeffrey was a mischievous boy and Henry Brougham a child, could not but be overflowing with hope, especially when we remember all the good company there already—Dugald Stewart, bringing so many fine young gentlemen from England to wonder at the little Scotch capital, and a crowd of Erskines, Hunters, Gregories, Monroes, and Dr. Blair and Dr. Blacklock, and the Man of Feeling—not to speak of those wild and witty old ladies in the Canongate, and the duchesses who still recognised the claims of Edinburgh in its season. To all this excellent company, whose fame and whose talk hung about both the old Edinburgh and the new like the smoke over their roofs, there arrived one spring day a wonderful visitor, in appearance like nothing so much as an honest hill farmer, travelling on foot, his robust shoulders a little bowed with the habit of the plough, his eyes shining, as no other eyes in Scotland shone, with youth and genius and hope. He knew nobody in Edinburgh save an Ayrshire lad like himself, like what everybody up to this time had supposed Robert Burns to be. The difference was that the stranger a little while before had put forth by the aid of a country printer at Kilmarnock a little volume of rustic poetry upon the most unambitious subjects, in Westland Scotch, the record of a ploughman's loves and frolics and thoughts. It is something to know that these credentials were enough to rouse the whole of that witty, learned, clever, and all-discerning community, and that this visitor from the hills and fields in a moment found every door opened to him, and Modern Athens, never unconscious of its own superiority and at this moment more deeply aware than usual that it was one of the lights of the earth, at his feet.



Burns was but a visitor, the lion of a season, and therefore we are not called upon to associate with Edinburgh the whole tragic story of his life. And yet his appearance was one of the most remarkable that has distinguished the ancient town. He arrived among all the professors, the men of letters, the cultured classes who held an almost ideal pre-eminence, more like what a young author hopes than is generally to be met with among men—his heart beating with a sense of the great venture on which he was bound, and a proud determination to quit himself like a man whatever were the magnitudes among which he should have to stand. Mere Society so called, with all its bustle of gaiety and endless occupation about nothing, might have exercised upon him something of the fascination which fine names and fine houses and the sweep and whirl of hurried life certainly possess; but he who expresses almost with bitterness his disgust to see a blockhead of rank received by one of his noble patrons with as much, nay more, consideration than is given to himself, would probably have had very little toleration for the butterflies of fashion: whereas Edinburgh society impressed him greatly, as of that ideal kind of which the young and inexperienced dream, where the best and brightest are at the head of everything, where poetry is a passport to the innermost sanctuary and conversation is like the talk of the gods. They were all distinguished for one literary gift or grace or another, philosophers golden-mouthed, poets of the most polished sort: their knowledge, their culture, their intellectual powers, were the foundation upon which their little world was built. The great people who were to be found among them were proud to know these scholars and sages—it was they, and not an occasional family of rank, or still more rare man of wealth, who gave character and meaning to Edinburgh. To be received in such society was the highest privilege which a young poet could desire; and it was worthy to receive and foster and encourage that new light that came from heaven.