Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 389, March 1848
by Various · English · Gutenberg #40071 · 574,951 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 389, March 1848
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 389, March 1848
Author: Various
Release date: June 26, 2012 [eBook #40071]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40071
Credits: Produced by Brendan O'Connor, Jonathan Ingram, Julia Neufeld
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Library of Early
Journals.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE, VOLUME 63, NO. 389, MARCH 1848 ***
Transcriber's note:
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
Small capital text has been replaced with all capitals.
BLACKWOOD'S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
NO. CCCLXXXIX. MARCH, 1848. VOL. LXIII.
CONTENTS.
MR COBDEN ON THE NATIONAL DEFENCES 261
ROMANISM IN ROME 281
CRIMES AND REMARKABLE TRIALS IN SCOTLAND 293
SIR SIDNEY SMITH 309
MY ROUTE INTO CANADA 328
THE INTERCEPTED LETTERS: A TALE OF THE BIVOUAC 340
GREENWICH TIME 354
A MILITARY DISCUSSION TOUCHING OUR COAST DEFENCES 362
HUDSON'S BAY 369
THE BUDGET 383
EDINBURGH:
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, 45, GEORGE STREET;
AND 37, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.
_To whom all Communications (post paid) must be addressed._
SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS; EDINBURGH.
MR COBDEN ON THE NATIONAL DEFENCES.
It is popularly averred by our Southern neighbours that the house of
every Englishman is his castle. No doubt to a certain extent this may
be true. In the modern mansion, as in the ancient fortalice, the
victualing department is always a matter of prime importance, and
Chubb's patent safety lock may be accepted as a convenient substitute
for the portcullis. Yet, after all, we suspect that the resemblance,
if the matter be closely investigated, will turn out to be rather
imaginary than real. A castle, according to the ideas which we have
imbibed from an early course of miscellaneous and feudal reading, must
have been a sort of earthly paradise, and the possessors of it wholly
exempt from that never-ending series of daily persecution to which we,
unhappy moderns, are subjected. With a good eight-foot thick wall of
solid masonry around, a moat broad enough to baffle the leap of Flying
Childers, and deep enough to have drenched the scalping-lock of
Goliath of Gath, and a few falconets and patereroes symmetrically
arranged along the parapets, a man might afford to enjoy a quiet
night's rest without dread of duns, or any fear of the visits of that
most malignant of unexecuted ruffians, the tax-gatherer. He might give
a jocular rejoinder to the summons of the pursuivant who appeared
before his gates with the intelligence of a further railway call; and
dismay any invading snip by the apparition of a scarecrow dangling
from a gallows on the summit of the donjon-keep. Nay, if currency were
absolutely indispensable for the purpose of paying the garrison,
Castle Dangerous would be more effective than the bank parlour has
shown itself in late times under the operation of Sir Robert Peel's
Act for the perpetuation of national bankruptcy. A simple announcement
in the neighbouring town of a large assortment of cast-off uniforms
and rusty armour for sale, would infallibly attract to the stronghold
a collection of Caucasians who adhere to the Jewish persuasion. Once
within the guard-room, we should deal summarily, and after the manner
of Sir Reginald Front-de-Bœuf, with these infidels. The forceps
should be produced, and no ether or chloroform, upon any pretext
whatever, allowed. We should negotiate with Moses or Mephibosheth at
the rate of units for a stump, tens for a decayed, and hundreds for an
unimpeachable grinder; and may we never shake shekel again if we do
not think we could extract a reasonable amount of ransom from the jaws
of the Princes of the Captivity! As to the advent of many enemies, we
should be utterly and entirely fearless. Cohorn and Vauban might come
with their lines, and mines, and battering-trains without disturbing
our equanimity, or causing the slightest tremor in our hand as we
filled out our post-prandial bumpers of Bordeaux. So long as powder
lasted and shot was plentiful, we should reciprocate the hostile
compliments by all manner of shell and canister; and, if the metal of
the rogues proved, in the long run, too heavy for us, they should have
our full permission to pound away until they were tired; and, on
entering the citadel, they would find us smoking our pipe in the
cartridge-room, as cool as a cucumber, or as Marius at Carthage, or
General Chassé at Antwerp, or any other warrior and hero of antiquity
whomsoever.
Now take that picture--compare it with the state of your present
domicile--and tell us whether, in effect, the fortalice is not an
Eden? What kind of existence do you lead in that Heriot Row house, for
which, last year, when shares were up, you were ass enough to pay some
two or three thousand pounds? You cannot go into your room after
breakfast to write an article for Blackwood, or to draw a
condescendence, without hearing every five minutes the dissonance of
that ceaseless bell. Not unearned are poor Grizzy's eleemosynary
Christmas shoes, for fully one-half of the day is that most weary
wight occupied in flitting from the regions beneath to answer the
summons which _may_ bring an invitation or a fee, but which, in nine
cases out of ten, is the announcement of a gaping creditor. First, in
comes a document wafered, according to that beastly practice, which,
for the credit of Tyre and Sidon, we hope is a modern invention.
_That_, of course, goes into the waste basket without more remark than
a passing objurgation. Then follow the prospectuses of three insurance
companies, you being nearly ruined already with the amount which you
are compelled to pay annually, in virtue of your marriage contract, to
the Scottish Widows' Fund. Next appears a long slip, purporting to be
the intimation of a police assessment. You swear savagely, having
ascertained the fact, by dint of a spirited correspondence in the
newspapers, that the available force of that esteemed body in the
metropolis of Scotland is not much over a dozen, and having accurate
personal corroboration of the statistics by walking the other day into
an unmolested bicker, from which you emerged with a broken hat, and a
head phrenologised by a blacking bottle. Before you have recovered
from this, you receive another missive with a charge for cleaning the
streets--an operation which you know, to your cost, has been performed
throughout the last thaw exclusively by the petticoats of the females;
and upon the back of this appear mulctures touching gas and water. A
huge oblong missive, the envelope whereof bears on a corner the
letters O. H. M. S., and which is sealed with a most imposing and
royal escutcheon, deludes you for a moment into the belief that Lord
John Russell has at last exhibited a gleam of common-sense, and has
recommended you to her Majesty either for a commissionership or for a
reasonable place on the pension list, in consequence of your balaamite
contributions to the unsaleable Edinburgh Review. You open it, and
behold, it contains nothing but a warning that you have not paid the
last quarter of your compounded and thrice confounded income-tax! A
gentleman next requests the honour of a moment's interview. In the
hope that he may prove a Writer to the Signet, you weakly yield; and
incontinently an individual with a strong Israelitish countenance, a
fetid breath, and an odour of stale tobacco floating around his
person, solicits the honour of your custom for a packet of
sealing-wax, a gross of steel pens, or a new edition of the
Pentateuch. You eject him in a tornado of wrath; but the cup of your
misery is not full. Aaron is succeeded by Mendizabel--an expatriated
Spanish grandee, who bears a strong recommendation from an individual
whose handwriting seems to be attached to every begging petition in
the country. This fellow won't choose to understand you, however
frantic you may appear; so that, for the sake of peace, you violate
your conscience and get rid of him at the expenditure of a shilling.
Grizzy is called up, and severely reprimanded for her want of
discrimination in admitting the illustrious stranger; and the
consequence is that, on the very next summons, she peremptorily denies
you to a Glasgow agent who has come through by special train for a
consultation on a case of emergency. Last of all, just as you are
settling steadily to your work, and turning over the third sheet of
foolscap, in walks your friend THE HAVERIL, on no earthly errand
whatever, except to inquire how you are getting on. Of all social
pests, this kind of animal is undoubtedly the worst. In intellect he
is singularly weak: in disposition curious and prying. He hops about
your study like a magpie, eying every letter, as though he longed to
make himself master of its contents; and, notwithstanding that you
believe the creature to be strictly honest, you would on no account
leave him for a couple of minutes in undisturbed possession of the
sanctum. He peeps into every book, indulges you with a quantity of
small literary swipes, and finally fastening upon a volume of prints,
entreats you to go on with your occupation, as he, the Haveril, is
perfectly competent to the task of entertaining himself. Culpable
homicide, say our law-books, ranges from a crime of great enormity to
the smallest possible fraction of imputed guilt; and if, under such
aggravating circumstances, you were to toss your acquaintance out of
the window, it is not likely that your subsequent sentence would be
severe. But you have at the bottom of your heart a sort of attachment
to the nincompoop, whom you know to be utterly harmless, and who,
moreover, to do him justice, invariably stands up for you, whenever
you are assailed in your absence. Therefore you abstain from violence,
and the penance which you heroically undergo is but one degree short
of martyrdom. Under the visitation of these Egyptian plagues, the
morning wears insensibly away; and the imp of darkness, when he calls
for copy about dinner-time, is summarily exorcised, and dispatched,
empty-handed, to the solitudes of his awful den! Is there, then, any
feasible case of resemblance between the fortress and the modern
mansion?
We have been led into this train of thought by a perusal of the
speeches lately delivered at Manchester on the subject of our national
defences. The question is one of undoubted interest to us all, and it
is well that it should be brought forward and thoroughly discussed in
time. If there is danger, either immediate or impending, let us know
it, and then, to a certain extent, we shall be forwarned if not
forearmed. The Duke of Wellington--a tolerable military authority, as
times go--has already given us his opinion on the point, and that
opinion has been immediately met and contradicted by the sapient Mr
Richard Cobden. We have yet to learn the exact amount of Mr Cobden's
attainments in the arts of strategy and fortification; but as he is
undoubtedly a "myriad-minded" gentleman, of fair average conceit, and
more than average effrontery, and as we have hitherto abstained from
making special mention of him in our columns, it may, perhaps, be
worth while to see how he has acquitted himself in the lists against
the veteran conqueror of Napoleon. Our old friend Tomkins--he of the
Ten Tumblers--used to be, if we recollect aright, rather eloquent upon
this weighty topic. Tomkins, in early life, had sustained an amatory
disappointment, in competition with a thwacking drum-major; and
therefore always looked upon the army with somewhat of a jaundiced
eye. The sound of the fife, clarion, and trumpet was ever after
distasteful to his ear; and he never trotted his mare past a marching
regiment of these scarlet locusts, without a spasm of righteous
indignation. "They eat our bread, sir!" he would say, "and drink of
our cup, and do absolutely nothing in return. The sooner we get rid of
them the better. An Englishman, sir, needs no hired supernumeraries to
protect his home. When was our soil ever invaded? Let the French come,
and we will give them graves!" And having delivered himself of this
sublime sentiment, Tomkins would incontinently ring for another
tumbler. It always struck us, however, as a singular proof of the
eccentricities or rather inconsistencies of genius, that our
distinguished friend, when in his cups, and towards the close of the
evening, invariably began to glorify himself upon his length of
lineage and descent. In support of these heraldic claims, he was wont
to cite the case of his great progenitor, "the founder of the family,"
who just about a century ago had the condescension to hold the stirrup
of Lord George Murray, as he alighted from his horse when the clans
marched into Derby. Tomkins, on the strength of this anecdote, had
rather a kindly feeling towards the Jacobites, and would never allow
that the enterprise had at any time the character of an invasion. "We
were ready, sir," he would exclaim, "to have marched up, in the Reform
year, from Birmingham to London; and who can doubt that, had we done
so, we should have driven the household troops before us as the chaff
flies out from the fanners?"
We have often deeply regretted that Tomkins did not survive to witness
the consummation of the triumphs of free-trade--a cause which he
contributed materially by his efforts and his writings to advance. The
leading feature of his character was the total absence of every kind
of prejudice or bigotry. He held it to be a fundamental principle, as
old as Magna Charta, that England was to be governed mainly through
the influence of cotton: that all other interests were immeasurably
inferior to this, and that the settlement and maintenance of our
colonies was a gross instance of reckless and frantic extravagance.
"Let us thrive," he would say, "through the arts of universal peace.
Let us set a bright example to the world by opening our ports to the
free admission of all foreign produce, without any kind of reciprocity
whatever. If our artisans and workmen cannot maintain their ground,
let them go to the comfortable Unions we have provided, and pick oakum
in return for their rations of wholesome bone-soup! Let us hear no
more nonsense about humanity or short-time! Cram the children into the
factories so soon as they can walk. Early habits are the surest means
of promoting and fostering industry. Let us look to our imports, and
the exports will look after themselves. Disband the army. Reduce the
navy. Do away with Church establishments. Contract the currency.
Flabbergast the colonies; and Great Britain must go ahead!" Such were
the expressed opinions of that great and good man, who now sleeps in a
premature sepulchre at Staley Bridge: and we need hardly add, that in
matters of revenue, he was an uncompromising advocate of the sponge.
Had his valuable existence been prolonged for a few years, he would
doubtless have been at the head of the onward movement, and might have
shared in the rewards which are gratefully accorded to the patriots of
this latter age. Andrew Marvell, sitting incorruptible in his garret
with a shoulder-blade of mutton, has ceased to be a favourite example
with the new democratic school. They affect ovations and banquets,
perform continental reforming tours, and demean themselves after the
manner of our able correspondent, Mr Dunshunner, who, we are glad to
observe, has been lately invited to a free-trade demonstration on the
banks of the Bosphorus, by several of the leading Muftis of
Constantinople. Dunshunner writes in great spirits, and has promised
us an early paper, on the advantage of our establishing free-trade
relations with the domestic Circassian market.
Failing Tomkins, we have every reason to be proud of his disciple and
successor, Mr Cobden. In fact, the mantle of our lamented friend has
fallen most gracefully upon his shoulders; and in nothing is the
genuine likeness more displayed, than in the contempt which both of
them have exhibited for the standing army of Great Britain. Yet,
perhaps, in this we may be doing Mr Cobden some little wrong. Tomkins,
we know, had just and natural reason for abhorring the sight of a
red-coat; Cobden, so far as we are aware, has no such motive for
dislike. Of the two, he is the calmer and the cooler man, and very
naturally looks sedulously about him for the means of substantiating
his theories. After all the fine words which Sir Robert Peel bestowed
upon him, to no visible improvement of his parsnips, Mr Cobden very
naturally felt a little uneasy at the non-fulfilment of several of his
prophecies. It is a pity that a man cannot vaticinate in this country
without undergoing a certain risk of subsequent stultification; and
yet, if he does not affect the gift of prophecy, your patriot is
usually at a discount. Our memory is not a very good one, and yet we
have hardly forgotten certain flourishes by Mr Cobden, regarding the
immense amount of employment which was to accrue to this country,
immediately after the passing of his favourite measures. Bread was to
be as cheap as dirt, common luxuries within the reach of every one,
and the whole British nation, through its length and breadth, was to
hold a perpetual jubilee and jollification, to the music of the
engine and the shuttle.
"Wild dreams! but such
As Plato loved; such as, with holy zeal,
Our Milton worship'd. Blessed hopes! awhile
From man withheld, even to the latter days!"
and, were we to add, in the words of Mr Canning's imitation of the
above passage, the concluding line,
"Till France shall come, and all laws be repeal'd,"
it would not, we apprehend, be entirely foreign to the subject. The
result, however, so far as we have yet seen, has by no means justified
the experiment. Trade, instead of improving under the stimulus of
free-trade, has fallen off, and a year of commercial panic and misery
has been the result of the liberal nostrum. This, no doubt, is very
galling to our friends of the billy-roller. Old stagers like us, who
are sometimes represented as prosy, because we reverence time-honoured
principles, love the constitution of our country, and defend the
memory of those who were the true founders of its greatness, are
supposed to feel some triumph at the aspect of the present depression,
and to exult over the slough of despond in which the Whigs are left to
flounder. If there be any who, judging from their own mean nature, so
think of us, it is hardly worth our while to undeceive them. Bitterly
indeed have we mourned over the spectacle of fraud and imbecility
which the last two years have disclosed in the higher places of the
land, and most earnestly do we hope that, ere long, the true-hearted
people of this country will awake to a full sense of their present
perilous and by no means creditable position. All the difficulties
which are just now pressing upon ministers, and which, for a longer
period than we can venture to calculate, must continue to environ
them, are of their own creating, and are the natural effects of that
unconstitutional policy which would sacrifice every thing for the mere
possession of power. Do we speak truth or not? Let the Chancellor of
the Exchequer answer us. What but free-trade and its concomitant
schemes has lessened the revenue and increased the pauperism of the
country? What but the vicious and yet invincible desire of change,
consequent on a contest for popularity, has struck a blow at the
prosperity, and even the existence, of our colonies, which has already
reacted with fearful effect within the centre of the mother-country?
Mr Cobden, on being twitted with the failure, or, at all events, the
non-realisation of his unqualified prophecies, very naturally, but not
very wisely, flies into a passion. He fixes, of course, upon the
failure of the harvest of 1846 as the prime element of justification.
Can I control the elements?--says he--can I regulate the seasons?
Certainly not, Mr Cobden. We presume that no one, not even the
stupidest operative that used to bellow in your congregation, and who
believed every one of the golden promises which you were hardy enough
to enunciate, ever dreamed that you were in possession of that power.
Several of us, moreover, are of opinion that, upon the whole, you have
been rather overrated as a conjurer, and that, having failed in your
endeavours to get into an empty quart bottle, you are not a whit more
likely to succeed when you come to experiment upon a pint. But let us
whisper in your ear that this excuse will hardly serve your turn, and
that it is wholly irreconcilable with the arguments which you used to
advance. A copious supply of foreign grain was the very thing for
which you and your associates primarily clamoured. You wanted an
import to a prodigious extent, and you flattered yourselves that, for
each quarter of American wheat, you would be able to send in exchange
so many yards of that calico which you fondly maintain to be the
principal fabric of the world. You were content, and you have said it
over and over again, to take your chance of the home market, provided
the other ones were opened to you. Now that you have them open, and
now that wheat has come in such abundance as even your most sanguine
anticipations could not have conceived, you have the coolness and
effrontery to turn round and throw the blame upon Providence, for
having speedily brought about the very thing which every charlatan in
Great Britain has been shouting for since the anti-corn-law league
began! Do you really think that this will go down with any portion of
the community? that such deplorable wriggling will not insure you,
throughout the country, the contempt of every man of average and
common understanding? or that the labourer on short time, and the
artisan whom you have deprived of his employment, will put up with
such miserable excuses? The plain state of the fact is,--and you know
it,--that your theories are crumbling beneath your feet. You cannot
expect that your gross and egregious error will escape a speedy
detection. You, without any previous qualification for the task, save
your natural talent, which is not much, have thrust yourself forward
to a prominence which you never were entitled to occupy. You may fancy
yourself, if you choose, the people's man; but so were Jack Cade, and
Wat Tyler, and several others, who, mistaking energy for knowledge,
and ill-regulated enthusiasm for calm deliberate judgment, took upon
themselves the task of misleading the English people, and either
perished amidst the ruin they had caused, or sank back into their
pristine obscurity. There is a favourite cant phrase very current just
now, to the effect that "we are living in new times." The same thing
might have been said by our common progenitor Adam, the day after his
expulsion from Paradise. It is the most trite truth of the world.
Every new day brings its change, but every new day does not obliterate
the memory of those which have gone before. All the "new times" which
this universe has seen, have not sufficed to alter in the slightest
iota the original character of mankind. Human nature still remains the
same; and the man who does not acknowledge and adopt this as a
principle, is a crazed and dangerous visionary. Never, under any
circumstances, ought such a one to gain ascendancy in the state, or to
be allowed to reduce his unsound theories to practice. If he does so,
woe be to the country which countenances him in the rash attempt!
History and its philosophy are the true studies for a statesman in
every age. In that educational point of view, we strongly suspect that
the present ministerial cabinet is sorely deficient. The Whigs, as a
body, are conversant with a very small space of history indeed. They
are constantly jabbering about the fundamental principles of the
constitution, which they date back no further than the advent of
William of Orange. Their pet historian, and the ablest man among them,
cannot make a single speech without dragging in, neck and heels, some
vapidity about the Revolution Settlement of 1688; and they try to be
profound in their criticisms upon the policy of Walpole and of Bute.
Charles James Fox, of course, still continues to be their principal
fetish, and they cling to antiquated party toasts with a superstition
that would disgrace a Mussulman. But of the freer and bolder regions
of history--of all that is great and elevating--of the numerous
lessons to be gleaned, and the examples to be gathered from the grand
old records of kingly and loyal England, or of the fall and fate of
nations through the imbecility of their rulers, or the ambition of
ignorant demagogues, they either know nothing practically, or they
fail to acknowledge their importance. Whiggery is a small machine
which works according to conventional rules of its own, and will not
make allowance for the great springs of human action. A cabinet of
Whigs is admirably adapted for the control and legislation of the
sovereign state of Pumpfernickel, or some analogous German
principality; but they never can assume their place at the helm of
affairs in a great empire such as that of Britain, without landing the
whole of us in dangerous difficulties, and sneaking off at the last
hour under a humiliating sense of their own impotence and presumption.
The case is still worse when men like Mr Cobden come forward to try
their hand either as pilots or as coadjutors. We presume that Mr
Cobden, if the question were put to him, would candidly admit the
narrowness of the range of his peculiar historical studies. We
understand that he does not pretend to be a scholar, and that the
amount, of the information which he possesses, however great that may
be, is limited to modern facts and premises, upon which he usually
reasons. A worse kind of education for a statesman, or for the leader
of a popular movement, cannot be found than this. It was this kind of
partial knowledge, unilluminated by the clear lucid light which bygone
history alone can shed authoritatively upon passing events, which, in
the recollection of many still alive, led to the dark catastrophe and
horrors of the French Revolution. There is hardly one social change,
hardly one political experiment now making, for which a prototype
cannot be furnished from the pages of history. And of what possible
use, it may be well asked, is history, if we are not to recur to it
for a solution of the difficulties which may arise in our onward
progress? Are we to gain no confidence, nor take any warning from the
rise and decline of nations, not much less powerful than our own,
whose checkered career and the causes of it are open to our view? Is
the world behind us a blank, that we should go stumbling on at the
instigation of every reckless adventurer, more culpable in his
attempts to guide us, than the ship-captain who should presume to
thread the coral reefs of the Indian Ocean without consulting the
authoritative chart? Are we always to derive our information, not from
what has been done and acted in the globe before--not from an
attentive examination of men and their motives, and the countless
springs of action which stir them, but from statistical tables and
long columns of figures, compiled by rusty officials in their dens,
and brought forth for the first time to be cited as overwhelming
testimony by some premier who is meditating apostasy, or seeking some
palliative to cover his shameful abandonment of a party? The features
of the so-called statesmanship of the present day are essentially
those of bureaucracy. A drudging arithmetical clerk, with whom a unit
is every thing, and who would be nearly driven to despair by the
discovery of a misquoted fraction, is a leading authority with our
statesmen; and his vamped-up tables of export and import are
considered sounder expositions of the destinies of the human race,
than all the accumulated wisdom, learning, and experience which the
annals of the world can afford.
The "tables," however, are now turned, and therefore we shall not say
any more for the present about the blue-book and ledger system. Let us
go back to Mr Cobden, whom we still find rather uselessly employed in
protesting his total inability to command the clemency of the seasons.
We have already shown, by papers published in this Magazine in
December last and January of the present year, that our exports have
lamentably fallen off, and that the balance of trade is against us.
Such, we maintained, and we continue still to maintain, must be the
effect of the new theories, especially under the restricted operation
of the currency. We are glad to see that upon this latter point, at
all events, we are supported by a large majority of the press. Mr
Cobden, however, denies the evils of the currency; so that he must
fall back upon something else to account for the unexpected
defalcation.
Such is our position at home and abroad; and if we have been guilty of
a digression, which we cannot altogether deny, we shall plead our
motive in justification. When Mr Cobden comes forward with his views
of foreign policy, with his ideas of the social progress of the
universe, and with his notions as to the policy which hereafter may be
adopted by great and ambitious foreign states,--when, after delivering
his opinion upon these very weighty matters, he arrives at the
inference, not only that we require no addition to our national
defences, but that our present establishment of a standing army and
navy is absurd, extravagant, and superfluous, we are entitled to
inquire into the success with which his first experiment in
legislative agitation has been crowned. Of the abundance of good
things which he promised, how many have been realised, how many are
like to emerge from the dark experimental gulf? If writhing colonies,
diminished exports, want of employment, distress at home, enormous
failures, monetary restriction, and vast depreciation of property,
have followed in the wake of free-trade--if ministry are at present
racking such brains as they possess to discover some means of keeping
up the revenue to its ordinary level, and if they are forced to lay on
a direct additional war-tax in times of the profoundest peace,--surely
we shall not incur a charge of fickleness or ingratitude, if we should
receive this new oracle of the free-trading Mokanna with some symptoms
of dubiety and distrust.
The whole question arose thus. It appears that the Duke of Wellington,
whose illustrious reputation and great services entitle him to be
heard with the deepest and most reverential respect, has long
entertained great uneasiness on account of the undefended state of
this country in the case of a hostile invasion. That such an event is
likely to take place, no one supposes or has said--that it possibly
might take place, very few will venture to deny. The idea is not a new
one; for within the range of the present century, preparations have
been actually made for that purpose, and that whilst the wonderful
power and facilities of steam-navigation were unknown. Fulton--we have
seen men who knew him when he was a humble artisan in the West of
Scotland--had, despairing of success at home, submitted his models to
the French government, who, fortunately for us, did not then
appreciate the merits of the invention. Three years afterwards, he
started his first steamer on the Hudson in America. The power which
our French neighbours had once so nearly within their grasp, at a time
when it might have been used to the exceeding detriment of England,
became generally known and adopted, and we need not speak of its
progress. It has altogether changed the tactics of naval warfare. It
can conquer the old difficulties of wind and tide, and it has
immensely shortened the period of transit from the continental coast
to our own. The security, therefore, of our insular barriers has been
materially weakened, and thus far the possibility of an invasion from
abroad has been increased. We are not now speaking of the
_probability_, which is matter for subsequent consideration.
This open and admitted fact is the foundation of the whole argument of
the Duke of Wellington. In the evening of a glorious life, the greater
part of which has been spent in the active service of his country, the
veteran soldier has thought it his duty to remind us, for our own
guidance and that of our children, of the actual existing state of our
national defences, which he deems to be insufficient. It is one of the
last, but not, we think, the least important of the services which the
venerable Duke has rendered to the nation, with whose proudest history
his name will be eternally associated. We take it--or at least we
ought to take it--from his lips, as a solemn warning; as the
disinterested testimony of a man alike pre-eminent in war and in
council; as the deliberate opinion of the GREAT PACIFICATOR OF EUROPE.
For notwithstanding the irreverent, mean, and scurrilous taunts of the
Manchester gang of demagogues, it is undeniable that the Great Duke
has been the chief instrument in procuring for us the blessing of that
peace which for two and thirty years we have enjoyed. It was his
conquest at Waterloo which hushed the world. The tranquillity of
Europe was the stake for which he fought, and he nobly won it. And
now, when, at the last hour, this illustrious man comes forward to
offer us his advice, and to warn us against the folly of trusting too
implicitly to the continuance of that tranquillity, is it wise that we
should scorn his counsel?
And what is the proposal which has excited such wrath, and so sorely
roused the choler of the bilious Cobden? Simply this--that the British
nation should at all times maintain at home a military force
sufficient to repel an invasion, should such be attempted, from our
shores. The Duke believes and maintains that we cannot now, as
formerly, rely solely and implicitly upon our navy for defence, but
that, in the event of a war, we must provide against the contingency
of an enemy's landing. Our arsenals, he thinks, and our dockyards,
should be supported by a military force, and at least we ought to
exhibit such a front as will hold out no temptation to a hostile
attempt. These are not aggressive, but precautionary measures; and
without them, according to the Duke, we cannot consider ourselves
secure.
Such are the proposals which Cobden and his clique--we are sorry to
observe a gentleman like Sir William Molesworth among them--are
prepared to resist to the last. They want no defences at all. They are
opposed to any augmentation of the army. They would rather do without
it, or reduce the establishment so as to make the national saving
equivalent to the diminished amount of revenue consequent upon their
commercial experiments. They look upon free-trade as a universal
panacea which is to cure all national and social ailments, and to
remedy every grievance. War is to be no more--territorial aggressions
unknown--and the advent of the millennium is to be typified by an
unbounded exportation of calico!
These are the views which have been lately propounded at Manchester,
and the parties are therefore at issue. Cobden has matched himself
against Wellington, and Quaker Bright has volunteered to be his
bottle-holder. We really wish that it had been permitted us to
approach the argument without mingling with it any asperity. But this
is now totally out of the question. The disgusting and vulgar language
which Mr Cobden has thought fit to use towards the greatest historical
character of the age--the low-minded scurrility which pervades the
whole of his egotistical discourse,--put him beyond the pale of
conventional courtesy, or even of dignified rebuke. The man who could
stand up in his place--no matter what audience was before
him--stigmatise the Duke of Wellington as being in his old age a
whetter and fomenter of discord, and finally insinuate _dotage_ as the
only intelligible excuse, deserves, if there is a spark of national
feeling left, to be publicly pilloried throughout Britain. "Would it
not," says this disloyal prater, "have been a better employment for
him to have been _preaching forgiveness for_, and oblivion of the
past, than in reviving the recollection of Toulon, Paris, and
Waterloo?" Forgiveness! and for what? For having vindicated the rights
of the nations, terminated the insatiable career of Napoleon's rapine,
and restored to us that peace which he is still desirous to preserve
by maintaining Britain invulnerable, secure, and free!
But let us pass from a matter so deeply discreditable both to the
speaker, and to the audience that applauded his sentiments. Meanly as
we think of the latter, we are yet to believe that the next morning
brought to many some feelings of compunction and of shame. Not so the
former, who, wrapped up in the panoply of his own ridiculous conceit,
a would-be Gracchus, must remain a Thersites for ever.
Irrespective of the purse argument, which, as a matter of course, is
the chief motive of these gentry, the free-traders attempt to brand
the Duke of Wellington with a charge of attempting to raise a hostile
feeling between this country and the continental states. The
accusation is as false as it is frivolous. The attitude of Britain is
not, and never will be, aggressive. She is at this moment in the proud
position of the mighty mediator of Europe; and it is to her strong
right arm, and not to her powers of producing calico, that she owes
that ascendency. Our interest clearly and incontestibly is to maintain
peace, but that we cannot hope to maintain, if we abandon the power to
enforce it. Among nations as among individuals, the weak cannot hope
to prosper in active competition with the strong--nay, they are even
in a worse position, because the law will protect individuals, whilst
to nations there exists no common Court of Appeal. If we are content
to renounce our position, and to give up our foreign possessions--a
consummation which the free-trade theorists appear abundantly to
desire--if we are to confine ourselves simply to our insular
boundaries, and advertise as the workshop of the world--then, indeed,
we shall surrender our supremacy, and with it the hope of maintaining
peace. Can these men read no lessons from history? Does the sight of
what is daily acting around them justify their anticipations of a
millennium? What is the real state of the fact? Russia, having
absorbed Poland, is now engaged in a territorial war with the
Circassians, upon which she has already expended an enormous amount of
treasure and of men; and she is prepared for a double sacrifice, if by
such means she can gain possession of the passes which are the keys
to southern Asia. Austria is hanging upon the skirts of Italy,
concentrating her forces upon the frontier, and menacing an immediate
invasion. Very lamb-like and pacific has been the conduct of America
to Mexico. As for the French, whom Cobden eulogises as the most
"affectionate and domesticated race on the face of the earth"--did the
man ever hear of the Revolution?--they are notoriously the most
aggressive of all the European nations. Did domestic feelings excite
them to the conquest of Algeria? Did affection lead them to Tahiti?
Was it a mania for free-trade that brought about the Montpensier
marriage? Really it is difficult to know for which palm, that of
ignorance or effrontery, this Manchester manufacturer is contending.
Has he forgot the Joinville letter, which was hailed with such rapture
on the other side of the Channel? Was Paris fortified without a
purpose? Is he blind to the fact that the peace of Europe at this
moment depends upon the life of a man now in his seventy-fifth year?
We maintain that there never was a period, at least within our
recollection, when the maintenance of general tranquillity throughout
Europe was more precarious. And yet, this is the very moment which Mr
Cobden selects for a crusade, or rather a tirade, against our military
establishments!
Our feelings are any thing but those of dislike towards the
"affectionate and domesticated" French. We admire their genius, and
read their novels,--and we have a peculiar affection for their wine.
In one point alone we agree with Mr Cobden. We still retain the
ancient Caledonian predilection for claret in competition with port,
and we should be sorry to be deprived of champagne. Still sorrier
should we be to lose our annual spring trip to Paris; to be banished
from the Boulevards and the Palais Royal, and to enjoy only in memory
those delicious dinners at the Rocher de Cancale. We have no wish to
run the risk of a compulsory detention at Verdun. Nay, we shall go
further, and apprise Mr Cobden, that had our lot been cast a few
centuries back, we should in all probability have been fervent
maintainers of the ancient bond of alliance between King Achaius of
Scotland and the Emperor Charlemagne; and nothing would have given us
greater pleasure than to have visited Manchester along with a few
thousand lads who swore by Saint Andrew, whilst the partisans of Denis
were amusing themselves in the neighbourhood of Portsmouth. But times
have changed. We have contracted an alliance with the nation of which
Mr Cobden is so creditable a representative; and upon the whole, we
are not altogether dissatisfied with the arrangement. We can now look
upon the French with an eye undimmed by affection; and we must confess
that we have very little, if any, faith in that marvellous change of
their character which is sworn to by the Manchester spouters. They may
be very excellent fellows, but we would rather not trust them with our
keys. The tone and temper of a nation do not alter quite so rapidly as
Mr Cobden seems to suppose. The history of Algeria is a very
significant hint that the old ideas of the French on the score of
conquest are not yet wholly obliterated; and we should rather imagine
that they have not quite forgotten their pristine appetite for
plunder. They deserve, however, considerable credit for the dexterous
manner in which they have thrown dust into the eyes of Mr Cobden. You
would think, to hear the man, that he is an inoculated Frenchman.
Presume to criticise their character, and his scream is like that of a
railway engine. Just hint that you consider them unscrupulous, and our
calico-printer overboils "with horror and shame and indignation." We
have no doubt that he considers it a great pity that history cannot be
annihilated--that is, supposing he has ever condescended to notice any
thing so trivial as history. Will he not favour the world with a new
version of the French Revolution? We are anxious to hear his grounds
for supposing the French to be an "affectionate and domestic people;"
and since we are, to fraternise with them altogether, it would be
comfortable to know our brethren as they really are. We want to have a
true account of the Noyades. Were these really wholesale drownings, or
a mere ebullition of national fun? Doubtless, there is much
humour--though we have not yet been able to see it--in the clanking of
the guillotine; and the expeditions to Moscow and Madrid, with their
accompanying tales of rapine and butchery, may possibly be
demonstrated by Mr Cobden as instances of a practical joke. Davoust,
as the Hamburgians know, was a fine fellow; and so, upon examination,
may prove Robespierre and Marat. Perhaps, too, he will come down a
little later, and tell us the particulars of the gallant and
gentleman-like behaviour of M. Dupetit-Thouars towards Queen Pomare.
Or will he undertake to prove that Abd-el-Kader is an infamous
scoundrel, utterly beyond the pale or security of national faith and
of plighted honour?
It is plain, either that Mr Cobden has been egregiously humbugged by
the acute foreigners, or that he has subsided into a state of calm,
settled, and imperturbable idiocy. It is too cruel in Bright to parade
in such a way his former friend and master, and to quote from his
private correspondence. We wonder what is Sir Robert Peel's present
opinion of the man whom he chose to bespatter with his praise, and for
whose sake he was content to forfeit the elaborate reputation of a
life-time. But bad as Cobden may be, he is fairly surpassed in Gallic
enthusiasm by the notorious George Thompson, whose patriotism may be
gathered from the tone of the following paragraph:--"Why, what were
the toasts given at the sixty reform banquets of France? This has been
one of their toasts at least, 'Fraternity, liberty, equality.' Let us
echo from these shores the shouts that have been raised there, and I
am sorry to say, stifled, so far as Paris is concerned, for the
banquet did not come off there. Let us send back the echo, fraternity,
liberty, equality!" And this pestilential raving has been applauded to
the echo in Manchester.
Let us have peace with the French by all means, and with all the world
beside; but let us not fall into the despicable and stupid blunder of
supposing that human passion and human prejudice, the lust for power,
and the cravings of ambition, can ever be eradicated by any system of
commercial arrangement. Britain is naturally an object of envy to all
the continental states. It is her strength and position which have
hitherto maintained the balance of power--and of that the European
states are fully and painfully aware. Every step which can tend to
weaken the fidelity of her colonies, is regarded with intense interest
abroad, and more especially in France. The people of that country envy
us for our wealth, and dislike us for our power; and war with Britain,
could the French afford it, would at any time find a host of
advocates. We are not believers in the probability of such an event,
if we keep ourselves reasonably prepared; but the very first
relaxation upon our part would inevitably tend to accelerate it. It is
quite possible that France may yet have to undergo another dynastic
convulsion. The death of Louis Philippe may be the signal for
intestine disorder. The Count of Paris is a mere boy, and popularity
is not on the side of his uncle and guardian. A powerful party still
exists, acknowledging no king save the rightful heir of St Louis; and
the fanatical republican section is still strong and virulent. These
are things which it would be imprudent to disregard, and of which no
man living can venture to predict the result. The death of the Queen
of Spain would, according to all appearances, give rise to a rupture
with France, and possibly test, within a shorter period than we could
have believed, the sufficiency of our national defences. There is at
this moment every reason why our real strength and power should be
made apparent to the world, and our weakness, where it does exist,
immediately remedied and repaired.
Had the Duke of Wellington proposed, like Friar Bacon in Greene's old
play,
"To girt fair England with a wall of brass,"
the outcry could not have been greater. An iron wall might perhaps
have been rather popular in the mining districts. But his Grace
proposes no such thing. He only suggests the propriety of a small
augmentation of the regular forces at home, the strengthening of our
neglected fortifications, and the gradual reimbodiment of the militia.
It is for the British nation, or rather its representatives, to adopt
or reject the proposal. Now, it is worth while that we should keep in
mind what is our actual disposable force at present.
According to the most recent authorities, the armies of the principal
European powers would rank as follows:
Russia, 568,000
Austria, 414,000
France, 340,000
Prussia, Bavaria,
and other German States, 268,128
Britain, 138,895
The disproportion of force exhibited by this list is sufficiently
obvious; but when we descend to particulars, it will in reality be
found much greater. Abroad, the majority of the male population are
trained to the use of arms: with us it is notoriously the reverse.
France, in the course of one week, could materially increase the
amount of her regular army; whilst here that would be obviously
impossible. Beyond Algeria, France has almost no colonies as stations
for her standing force. We have to provide for the East and West
Indies, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Cape, Ceylon, Hong Kong,
the Mauritius, Gibraltar, Malta, the Ionian Islands, and others. The
profession of the British soldier is any thing but a sinecure. A great
portion of his life must be spent abroad; he may be called upon to
undergo the most rapid vicissitudes of climate, to pass from one
hemisphere to another in the discharge of his anxious duty. There is
no service in the world more trying or severe; and it very ill becomes
Mr Cobden, or any of his class, to sneer at that establishment, which
is kept up for the direct promotion of our commerce. So large a
portion of the territorial surface of the world is nowhere defended at
so little cost either of money or of men. Indeed, as recent events
have shown, we are but too apt to save the one at the expense of the
other. No doubt, if the free-trade policy is carried out to the
uttermost--if our colonies are to be thrown away as useless, and our
foreign stations dismantled, we might submit to a still further
reduction. France will be too happy to receive Gibraltar or Malta from
our hands, and will cheerfully free us from the expense of maintaining
garrisons there. Let us but make over to that affectionate and
domesticated people the keys of the Mediterranean, and we shall soon
see with what eagerness they will co-operate in the dissemination of
Mr Cobden's free-trade dogmas.
Apart from the colonies, we have a serious difficulty at home.
Ireland--that most wretched and ungrateful country, which no
experience can improve--is as far from tranquillity as ever. The
hard-working population of Britain submitted last year without a
murmur to an exorbitant taxation, for the purpose of relieving the
distress occasioned by the failure of the potato crop. The return is a
howl of defiance from the brutal demagogue, and an immediate increase
of murder and of crime. Notwithstanding every kind of remedial
measure--notwithstanding their exemption, which is an injustice to us,
from many of the heaviest burdens of the state--notwithstanding the
mistaken policy which fostered their institutions and their schools,
the Roman Catholics of Ireland stand out in bad pre-eminence, as the
most cold-blooded, unthankful, and cowardly assassins of the world. In
order to repress that outrage, which is so villanously rife among
them, and which nothing but physical force can restrain from breaking
out into open rebellion, we are compelled at all times to keep the
largest portion of our remanent disposable force quartered in Ireland.
The consequence is, that a mere handful of our standing army is left
in Great Britain.
If Mr Cobden should like to see a little terrestrial paradise, in
which few birds, with that gaudy plumage which is so offensive to his
eyes, can be found, he had better come down to Scotland, and pay us
another visit. He is kind enough, we observe, to make himself the
mouthpiece of our sentiments upon this matter of the defences; and,
certainly, if there be any truth in the adage that we are entitled at
least to see what we are paying for, Scotland has no reason to be
peculiarly warlike in her sentiments. Mr Cobden will find us quite as
affectionate and domesticated a people as the French; and he may rely
upon it, that he will not be shocked by any over-blaze of scarlet.
From a turbulent, we have gradually settled down to be a quiet race;
and as a natural consequence, we share in none of those benefits which
are heaped so liberally upon the "persecuted Irish." Our only
excitements are a Church squabble, which does not require the
interference of the military, but exhausts itself in the public
prints; or a bread row, which is always over, long before a detachment
can be brought from the nearest station, it may be at the distance of
some hundred miles. We are never noticed in Parliament, except to be
praised for our good behaviour, or to have some remaining fragment of
our national establishments reduced. We pay for an army and a navy
which we never see; indeed, of late years the French and Danish flags
have been far more frequently displayed upon our coasts than the broad
pendant of Great Britain. In many of our counties a soldier is an
unknown rarity; and the only drum that has been heard for the last
thirty years, is in the peaceable possession of the town-crier.
England, we apprehend, except in the immediate neighbourhood of the
metropolis and of Manchester, is not much better supplied: in short,
so far as Britain is concerned, we have a remarkably insufficient
force, and one which has been declared by the highest military
authority alive, wholly incompetent for our protection in the case of
an attempted invasion. Cobden, who has no veneration for successful
warriors, having feathered his nest very pleasantly otherwise, admits
that he has not the slightest practical knowledge of the trade of war.
We therefore demur to his position that this is a question for
civilians to determine, and that military and naval men have nothing
to do with it. His previous admission involves an inconsistency. He
might as well say, that, having no acquaintance whatever with
engineering, he is entitled to deliver his opinions in opposition to
Walker or Stephenson, on the construction of a skew bridge, or the
practicability of boring a tunnel. If one of those vessels in the
Tagus, which, according to Cobden, are kept there for the sole purpose
of instructing our seamen in the culture of the geranium, was to
spring a leak, we should assuredly apply to Jack Chips, the carpenter,
to stop it, before invoking the aid of the peripatetic apostle of
free-trade. And just so is it with the state of our national defences.
Manchester must excuse us, if we prefer the testimony of the Duke of
Wellington upon this point to the more dubious experiences of Cobden.
It is, of course, quite another question, whether the leak shall be
stopped, or the vessel permitted to founder peaceably. Mr Cobden may
be heard upon that point, under special reference to the magnitude of
the stake which he hazards, but we decline receiving his opinion on
the subject of military fortifications. He can no more pronounce a
judgement on the adequate state of our defences, than he can parse a
paragraph of Xenophon; and therefore, by approaching the subject, he
has been guilty of presumption and impertinence.
Mr Cobden proposes that we should rely upon the maintenance of peace
by removing all obstacles to invasion. He admits, indeed, that for the
present he is in a minority, but he hopes very soon to change it to a
majority, and until that time comes he is content to remain in the
following position:--"I say this, I am for acting justly and fairly,
and holding out the olive branch to the whole world; and I will then
take upon myself, _so far as my share goes_, all the risk of any thing
happening to ME, without paying for another soldier or another
sailor." This is good! What a glorious insurance is here offered to
the nation against the risk of foreign aggression! If every man,
woman, and child in this mighty empire will remain satisfied without
the means of repelling foreign invasion, the magnanimous Cobden will
take his risk, _so far as his share goes_, of all that may happen to
HIM! Why, who the deuce cares what happens to him or his? Are we all
engrossed in Cobden's weal or woe? Would it matter one straw to us, or
to the universe, if he and his calico print-works were wrapped in
universal conflagration to-morrow? This is, without exception, the
most impudent offer of guarantee which we ever remember to have heard
of; and it justifies us in remarking that, if all accounts be true,
Mr Cobden would be no very great loser by the immediate advent of the
French. If any thing happens to him, he may be assured of this, that
notwithstanding his cautious salvo, he will have no claim for damage
and loss, and little commiseration from any quarter whatsoever. Is the
man insane enough to suppose, that he, armed with his olive branch,
stands forth as prominently in the eyes of the world as if he were a
sign of the Zodiac? Curtius, who leaped into the gulf in the Forum,
which would not close until the most precious thing of Rome was thrown
into it, shrinks into insignificance, and becomes absolutely bashful,
when compared with the emulous Cobden. According to the
Man-in-the-Moon, Curtius was pronounced by the Flamen to be the most
precious fool of his day, but in point of conceit he is fairly trumped
by the honourable member for the West Riding of Yorkshire. In his
opinion there is nothing worth protecting save an inland mill, and he
does not care what becomes of our arsenals so long as there is an
immunity for calico!
If there are no armaments, thinks Mr Cobden, there can be no wars; and
for once he is tolerably right. If iron did not exist there could be
no swords; and without gunpowder, or its modern substitute cotton, a
discharge of musketry is impossible. But unfortunately there are other
armaments besides ours, and no symptom whatever of their reduction.
Here the reciprocity theory is once more brought into play. Let
Britain be the first to set the example, and every other nation will
follow in her wake. Cannons, by unanimous consent, will be spiked,
banners handed over to the respectable fraternity of Odd Fellows, and
the soldier condemned to the stiffing walls of the factory, never more
to stand at ease. Such are the dreams of Cobden; and if he really
believes in them, and in the actual regeneration of human nature by
means of free-trade instead of religion, we should like to see him try
the experiment on a minor scale. Let him, after having collected
within his premises as much plate as he can conveniently acquire, and
as much cash as he is worth, dispense with the unnecessary precautions
of lock and key; let him dismiss the watchmen from his works, and put
up an advertisement that the whole public are welcome to enter at any
hour they please, and that not the slightest attempt at resistance
will be offered. We presume that the Manchester operatives are at
least as affectionate and domesticated as the French; but,
notwithstanding that, we should entertain some apprehension as to the
fate of Mr Cobden's spoons. The temptation would really be too great.
The seeming solidity of the albata plate or purified nickel-silver
would infallibly tempt the cupidity of some affectionate artisan. A
midnight visit would be paid, and on the morrow there would be wail
for the missing tureen! To be consistent, we should begin with
municipal reforms. Let us proclaim honesty as a universal principle,
do away with the police, abolish Chubb, and keep our doors wide open
for ingress as well as for ventilation. If our greatcoats disappear
not, if umbrellas are not less, and if the tale of our forks is
complete after a reasonable lease of the experiment, we shall then
have acquired some data for making a further trial, and intrusting the
wealth of Great Britain to the forbearance of our foreign neighbours.
When Blucher, on his visit to this country after the war, rode through
the streets of London, he was observed, amidst all the shouts of
acclamation, to be peering curiously at the windows of the shops,
which then, as now, exhibited a tempting and valuable display. When
asked what he thought of the metropolis, the worthy veteran replied
with a deep sigh, whilst a tear rolled down his venerable cheek--"Mein
Gott! What a city for to sack!" Such were the first impressions of old
Marshal Forwards; and, with all deference to Cobden's sagacity, we
suspect that the amiable French, if they had it in their power, would
not be slow to realise the sentiments. Indeed, his Royal Highness the
Prince of Joinville, being of an open and candid nature, does not
hesitate to acknowledge it in as many words. We do not think a whit
the worse of Joinville for saying so: on the contrary, we are obliged
to him, and, if wise, we shall treasure the hint. He merely speaks the
sentiments of a large portion of his countrymen, who very probably
have no abstract wish for war, and would rather let things rest as
they are. Of all nations in the world, the French have the best
possible excuse for reducing their armaments, since France is
inundated with troops, and they have few foreign territorial
possessions. As compared with Britain proper, France could afford to
shake off nearly three-fourths of her establishment, and yet remain
upon an equality; but although Algeria may now be considered as safe
and tranquil, there are no demonstrations of the kind. The French army
is organised and ready to act upon any emergency: ours is too small,
is dispersed, and we have not an adequate reserve at home.
Whilst, therefore, the possibility of an invasion remains, we are
bound on every consideration of prudence and of policy, to act as if
the probability were likewise at hand. The youngest of us has seen too
many changes and revolutions--too many political disagreements and
jarrings among the European family, to prophesy with confidence that
these shall never be renewed. Even in commerce we have not got
reciprocity, and we cannot expect to get it in the more abstract point
of armaments. Woodburne House was better fortified by Dominie
Sampson's folios, than Britain possibly could be by bales of Cobden's
cotton. Our sincere belief is, that the surest method of accelerating
a war is to take the advice of the Manchester demagogues, repudiate
the ideas of the Duke of Wellington, and remain in stupid inactivity.
It was necessary for public safety that this matter should be laid
before the country; and the Duke for doing so may yet deserve a debt
of gratitude, which will amply recompense him for the vulgar contumely
of a host of disloyal bagmen. But it would be preposterous to suppose
that the discussion which has arisen at home has not attracted deep
observation abroad. The eyes of Europe are upon us, watching what
course we are to adopt; and France in particular is waiting, with
indrawn breath and tremulous anxiety, the result of the coming
discussion. Our weakness at home is now apparent to the world; we
cannot conceal it; the sole question is, whether we shall apply the
remedy.
Admit the possibility, and the question is a serious one indeed! Let
us suppose that, from some unforeseen accident, some stoppage in the
wheels of diplomacy, or some untoward casualty, war was declared
between Great Britain and France, or even any other continental power.
Such an event could not happen without dividing the nations of Europe.
We could not afford to withdraw our forces from the colonies, because
these would probably be made the earliest points of attack,--nor from
Ireland, except at the immediate and imminent risk of a rebellion.
Even should it be thought prudent to leave the colonies to their fate,
the transport of the garrisons would involve a considerable period of
time--a fact of which our enemy must be aware, and of which he would
be foolish not to take advantage. We should be compelled to recruit
immediately, and upon a large scale; and it would take some time to
metamorphose Mr Cobden's operatives, or even that respectable senator
himself, into any thing like the semblance of soldiers. If fifty
thousand armed men were to be landed on the southern coast--and no one
seems to doubt the possibility of such an occurrence--we should like
to know what are our means of resistance? We have read a good many
letters upon the subject, in the daily prints--some of them apparently
by ex-military men, and some by politicians of the school of Tomkins
and Cobden--but not one of them has been able to make out a decent
case of opposition. The best, and, indeed, the only rational letters,
proceed upon the supposition that there would be a general rising _en
masse_ of the English population--that every hawbuck would turn out
with a musket to repel the invaders, and that the railways from London
would vomit forth a cloud of intrepid musketeers. Every hedge, they
think, would be manned, and every farm-house a sort of minor fortress.
Now, with all submission, this is downright deplorable drivel. Ever
since the English people--and that is now a very old story--have given
up the use and exercise of arms, and agreed to be mulcted in purse,
rather than undergo the personal fatigue and annoyance of exercise,
there has been no martial spirit at all exhibited by the bulk of the
population. No doubt, when an invasion was actually threatened by
Napoleon, and three hundred thousand men were assembled at Boulogne,
there were large demonstrations of volunteer activity; but then, it
must be remembered that we were in the very height and fever of a
war--the belligerent spirit and strong antipathy to France had
prepared us for such a crisis, and we had not been besotted and
enfeebled by more than thirty years of peace, and almost as many of
gradual but sure demoralisation. We had not then adopted such men as
the Manchester Jacobins for our teachers; we were then content to be
national and not cosmopolitan in our ideas. We were fighting for our
faith and our freedom--not truckling for calico or for yarn. The same
crisis is not likely to occur again, and we cannot--dare not venture
to calculate upon a similar demonstration of energy. Free-trade and
liberal measures have put that utterly beyond our power. We have no
more doubt than we have of our own existence, that a body of men of Mr
Cobden's way of thinking could be found in this country, ready to
contract with the French government for conveying over to Britain an
invading army at the rate of eight shillings a-head, victuals
included; and, if the weather was stormy, they would unquestionably
clear a handsome profit by the speculation. Morals have nothing
earthly to do with free-trade--patriotism is opposed to it--and why
make any distinction between the freightage of Frenchmen and of
bullocks? The contractors, of course, would take care that their own
premises were sufficiently far removed from the scene of immediate
action; and we cannot pitch upon a fitter locality than that which is
exhibited in Manchester.
We would ask any or all of those gentlemen who depend upon a general
rising, to take the trouble, for some half hour or so, to revert to
history. If they do so, and seriously think over the matter, they will
speedily be convinced that an invasion is by no means a difficult
matter, and that no reliance whatever can be placed upon the
co-operation of the undisciplined people, either of the country or the
metropolis, in the event of an actual invasion. In fact, judging from
history, Paris is literally impregnable compared with London, and yet
it has been occupied by the Allies. In 1688, William of Orange, a
foreign prince, having no claim to the crown, and against the will of
the people of England, whatever may be said of the aristocracy, landed
in Britain, advanced to London, and took the throne, without the
slightest demonstration of hostility. The population were perfectly
quiescent. It was not their business to fight: they paid for an army;
and accordingly they allowed the Orangeman to march on, just as they
would do to Joinville, provided he desired his troops to be reasonably
accommodating and civil. Sack and rapine might undoubtedly provoke
resistance; but if ordinary courtesy were used, and more especially if
the French proclaimed that they came upon a free-trade errand, and a
friendly visit to Mr Cobden, there would be far fewer shots fired,
than at the present moment are resounding from the peaceful hedgerows
of Tipperary.
The next instance we select--omitting minor efforts--is the enterprise
of 1745, which peculiarly concerns Scotland, and of which we are by no
means ashamed. The heir of the Stuarts landed in the North, supported
by no force at all. The clans, to their immortal honour, and a portion
of the best Lowland blood of Scotland, maintaining those principles of
loyalty which free-trade cannot comprehend, assumed the white cockade,
and after thrashing the English army effectually at Prestonpans,
marched south, on the desperate errand of displacing the reigning
dynasty. And how were they received? It is important to note the idea
which the English people had, at that time, of the Highlanders. They
considered them a race of cannibals who ate children; so that it was
no uncommon matter, when a Highland officer entered a house, to find
the mistress on her knees, praying for a Lenten diet, whilst the
terrified urchins were all the while concealed beneath the bed. Such
is the positive fact; and yet we will venture to say, that there
never was, in the history of the world, an instance of a more
blameless or more humane invasion. Donald, though quite ready to
cleave a bearded Hanoverian to the chin, had an extreme weakness for
children, and would not, on any provocation, have insulted a
defenceless woman. Had Mr Cobden fallen into his hands, the
Highlander, after a due estimate of his physical capabilities, would
probably have put him to ransom for a quarter of a pound of tobacco.
The feeling in England was not in favour of the exiled family, the
antipathy to the Highlanders was extreme, and yet an irregular and
ill-disciplined host of about six thousand men, with no artillery, no
commissariat, and a mere handful of cavalry, penetrated into the heart
of England without any show of popular opposition, and reached Derby
without the loss of a single man. It is not difficult to understand
why Manchester is so uproarious against the military, when we recall
to mind the splendid instance of poltroonery exhibited by the
manufacturing capital on that memorable occasion. The town of
Manchester was captured by a Scots sergeant of the name of Walter
Dickson, who, supported by a drummer and a wench, took possession of
it in name of Prince Charles, four-and-twenty hours before the clans
came up! Not a magistrate was to be found bold enough to issue his
warrant against the intruder, nor a constable to execute it, nor a
single operative to support it. There was no talk then about finding
graves for the invaders: the invaded were quite content with finding
cellars for their own particular shelter. Gentlemen who had talked big
enough when the danger was at a distance, recoiled at the idea of
personal peril, whenever the danger drew nigh; and, being unsupported
by a regular force, very prudently abstained from opposing their
persons to the terrible sweep of the claymore. But for internal
dissensions and some infirmity of purpose, it is now beyond a doubt
that the clans might have penetrated, without any opposition, to
London. So little martial spirit was exhibited in the capital, that
parties were actually made and carriages engaged for Caxton, to see
the Highlanders march by; and George the Second was in full
preparation for removing, and had stowed away his valuables in his
yachts. As it was, the invaders returned back to their own country
almost as scaithless as they came, without any experience of that
fiery and patriotic spirit which the correspondents of the newspapers
profess to discover blazing within the bosom of every Briton at the
mere idea of an invasion.
In fact, it is mere trash to maintain that raw levies or extempore
guerilla resistance can be of the slightest use in opposition to a
disciplined force. For ourselves, we do not believe that such
resistance would be attempted. Men require to be brought together and
trained before their individual stanchness can be relied on; and we
know perfectly well that a mob has no chance, at any time, against an
immeasurably smaller body, if properly organised and directed. Let the
people of this country be disciplined and accustomed to the use of
arms, and you may search the world in vain for braver or better
soldiers. But the power is still latent, and, according to Cobden, it
never must be called forth. This is mischievous and stupid folly. If
any thing is to be done at all, it must be done regularly and
effectively. Let us have the knowledge, the certainty that, at a few
hours' notice, a formidable body of troops, well disciplined and
prepared, can be concentrated at any given point of the island,--let
this fact be made known to the world, and we have a far better
security for the maintenance of peace than if we were to adopt the
stupid and pragmatical notions of Mr Cobden. Mr Disraeli took a sound
view of the case, when he reminded the honourable member, "that
although the profound peace which he had announced might come within
the time of those who heard him, still there was something in the
catastrophes of nations _sœvior armis_,--catastrophes from other
causes leading to their decay. Happily in those causes the limited
experience of the Roman empire had not included the rapacity of rival
industry, and the quackery of economic science." We are afraid that
the lesson which Mr Disraeli attempted to inculcate--one which, of
late years, we have repeatedly insisted on in these pages--was
somewhat thrown away upon his pupil. Gentlemen of the Cobden school
set little store upon the philosophy of history, and prefer to reason
within the limits of their own experience. They can as little explain
the causes of the decline of ancient empires, as they can account for
the palpable falling off in the amount of our exports; and it is idle
to remind men of things which they have never heard. It is not to
them, but to the intelligent classes of the community, that we would
fain address our argument. There is a remarkable and striking analogy
between the present state of the country, and the position of England
at the time of the Highland descent in 1745. The nation had become
accustomed to peace at home, and was therefore proportionally
enervated. The use of arms, and the training of the militia had been
abandoned; a false economy had reduced the numbers of the regular
forces; and the greater proportion of those which remained were
abroad. Under those circumstances the expedition took place: the
weakness of the front exhibited by England was the temptation, and we
have already seen the consequences. It is now seriously proposed that
we shall remain liable to a similar assault, when the stake at issue
is incomparably greater. What would be the result of a swoop upon
London according to the published Joinville plan? and yet there is
hardly another capital in Europe, which has not during the last fifty
years been occupied by a hostile force.
We have all an interest in this question, for a descent may be made
any where. We have not even the benefit of ships to protect us here in
the North; and three or four French frigates would, we apprehend, find
little difficulty in effecting a landing in the Forth. Will Mr Cobden
be good enough to favour us with his opinion as to the course we
should pursue, supposing such a calamity to happen? A simultaneous
attack may be made on the south of England, and the Castle and
Piershill barracks emptied for the purpose of reinforcing Portsmouth,
too weak to maintain itself without their aid. Would he advise us to
resist or succumb? Shall we throw ourselves under the protection of
our friend George M'Whirter, W.S., and the Edinburgh squadron of the
Royal Mid-Lothian Yeomanry? Shall we sound the tocsin of war, and call
out Captain Haining with his reserved band of twenty police, all
fierce and furious for battle? Shall we persuade the Archers to string
their bows, and compete for the Goose medal with a fire-eating
Frenchman as the butt? Shall we barricade Leith Walk, block up the
Granton Railway in the teeth of a suspension and interdict, and
contest, to the last drop of our blood, the possession of every house
in Inverleith Row? May we calculate upon any support from the middle
districts of England in the event of such a calamity? Will Mr Bright
array himself in drab armour, and come to our rescue, with Welford the
flower of chivalry, who has a special objection to guns? Can we depend
upon Cobden himself? Will he pledge himself to back us at our need
with an overpowering army from the factories, clad in calico, and
armed with the tremendous and invincible billy-roller? Will George
Thompson, chief of a thousand wordy fights, be there,--or Wilson,
ex-monarch of the league? Shall we send them the beacon blaze,
or--faster still--the telegraphic signal to the south imploring
immediate succour? Or shall we trust to their own noble impulses, and
hold--
Ye need not warn the Cobden clan,
That ever are stout and true;
And when they see the blazing bale,
The Brights and Thompsons never fail!
Indeed, if we are to believe the last mentioned gentleman, we have
that assurance already, for he has spoken as follows:--"I may venture
to foretell that the Free-Trade Hall, of Manchester will be more than
a match for Apsley House and the Horse Guards put together;"--a highly
satisfactory account of the town which was whilom captured by a
sergeant!
Upon the whole, unless we can come to a serious understanding with
Manchester, we have grave doubts as to the propriety of offering any
very obstinate resistance. If we are to do it, we must send off all
the women to the Trosachs by the Scottish Central Railway, and
perhaps it would be as well for all of us to join the Celtic Society,
and fight the battles of our country in the pass of Roderick Dhu. An
honourable capitulation, on the understanding that the French were to
behave themselves, would probably be the wisest course we could pursue
under the circumstances. We love George M'Whirter, and have every
confidence in his valour, but we could not bear to see him gasping in
his gore; and therefore, unless the regulars are forthcoming, or the
Manchester legion on their way, he had better fall back with his
comrades upon the western warriors of Dalmahoy. The number of our
guardians of the night is at present so small, that we positively
cannot afford to spare even one of them as food for powder. It would,
we fear, be imprudent to risk the fate of the Scottish capital upon
the issue of a combat between our dashing Toxophilites and a body of
French artillery, and we are reluctantly compelled to admit that there
was some truth in Major Dalgetty's sarcasm against bows and arrows.
And now, having gone over the catalogue of our available native
forces, which is not quite so long as the Homeric muster-roll of the
ships, will any body tell us what we are to do? It would be a sore
humiliation were we compelled to illuminate Holyrood, and give a grand
ball in honour of the Duc D'Aumale, and our other ancient and now
redintegrated allies. But if you abolish the British uniform, and
allow the French to supersede it, what else can you expect? We want to
be loyal if you will only tell us how--if not, we see nothing for it
but the illumination and the ball.
Mr Cobden is pleased to be especially bitter upon the "horrid trade"
of soldiering. He characterises it as barbarous and damnable, and
would be rid of it at all risks. Now, setting aside the idiocy of his
remarks, there is a monstrous deal of ingratitude in this language of
the free-trade apostle. Had it not been for our arms, where would our
market have been? If we had succumbed to France instead of humbling
her at Waterloo--and we presume that Mr Cobden would have preferred
the former alternative, since he thinks that the Duke should now be
preaching forgiveness for the past--where would have been our trade,
and where our exportations of calico? Hindostan is an acquired
country, and British arms have opened up the markets of China; and are
these commercial evils? Really it is throwing away language to attempt
enforcing a point so clear as this. Commerce owes every thing to the
exertions and protection of that military power which these purblind
theorists complain of; and were our armaments abolished to-morrow, we
should look round us in vain for a customer.
And pray what does the arrogant upstart mean by characterising the
honourable profession of a soldier as a damnable trade? Does he intend
to disgorge his contempt and contumely upon the graves of those who
fell on the field of battle fighting nobly for their king and country?
Are we now to be told that the names which we have written in our
annals, and embalmed in our memories, are detestable and odious as
those of homicides and of robbers? If it has come to this, and if
public scorn is not roused to overwhelm the man who can conceive and
utter such ignoble sentiments, then indeed we may believe that
demoralisation has partially done its work, and that the mean ethics
of Manchester are henceforward to influence the nation. Not damnable
nor horrid, unless justice and freedom be so, is the profession of
those who have drawn the sword in the service of Britain, and died for
the maintenance of order, liberty, and religion. Other trades there
are far more liable to such epithets, but with these, thank heaven! we
have but little practical acquaintance. The trade of the greedy
taskmaster, who rears infants for his mills, and grinds them to their
task until the sinews shrivel up and the limbs are warped into early
decrepitude--of him who will not recognise the existence of an
imperishable soul within the tender framework of the children whom he
makes the victims of his avarice--of the advocate of long hours,
because thereby he may keep his human machinery under the complete
control of exhaustion,--the trade of that man, we say, though it may
be tolerated in a Christian land, is but one shade less horrid, and
not a whit less damnable, than that of the slave-trader, who is now
chuckling over his living cargoes on the African coast--cargoes for
which he is indebted to the enlightened legislation of Mr Cobden and
his liberal confederates! Are these the men who are to revile and
traduce our army? Faugh! The leprosy of mammon is upon them, and our
nature recoils from their breath.
In conclusion, let us express a fervent hope that we have heard the
last of this dull and deplorable drivelling. It is to the credit of
the Whigs, that, far as they have been led astray by adopting the
newfangled political doctrines, rather, as we believe, for the sake of
maintaining power than from any belief in their efficacy, they have
declined all participation with the Manchester crew in their recent
attempt to lower the position and diminish the influence of Great
Britain. The chiefs of that party know full well how much we have at
stake, and what a responsibility would rest upon their heads, were
they to reject the advice of the great captain who has already saved
his country, and who again comes forward at the close of life to warn
that country of its danger. Mr Cobden likewise is furious with the
public press, and charges a large portion of it for refusing to be
dragged through the Manchester mire, with having abrogated their
duties on this question. We apprehend that the editors of the journals
to which he alludes are perfectly competent to the discharge of their
duties, without submitting to the dictatorial interference of this
very much over-rated and extremely shallow personage. As for the Duke
of Wellington, he is not likely to suffer in health or reputation from
any want of respect or veneration on the part of Mr Cobden. His fame
is too bright to be polluted by such dirty missiles; and the veriest
vagabond who broke the windows of Apsley House would shrink from
repeating the insults which fell from the lips of the calico-printer.
In short, our impression in rising from the perusal of this notable
speech, is deep surprise that such a man should ever have been made
the leader of a popular party, or the representative of a fixed
opinion. That it should have been so, is a reflection that cannot be
flattering to many of his followers, and least of all to those who
threw aside their opinions to undertake the advocacy of his. But the
spell is now broken, the mask removed, and we behold the egotist, the
railer, and the fanatic. Let us sum up in a few words, for the benefit
of posterity, the great free-trader's opinion of the Duke of
Wellington, and then take leave of the most discreditable subject
which for a long time we have been called upon to notice.
MR COBDEN DOES NOT SHARE IN THE GENERAL VENERATION FOR THE DUKE. MR
COBDEN THINKS THAT THE DUKE OUGHT TO PREACH FORGIVENESS FOR WATERLOO.
MR COBDEN THINKS THAT EVERY MAN, POSSESSING THE ORDINARY FEELINGS OF
HUMANITY, MUST CONDEMN THE DUKE FOR HAVING STATED THAT, IN HIS
OPINION, THE DEFENCES OF THE COUNTRY ARE INSUFFICIENT. MR COBDEN
THINKS IT A LAMENTABLE SPECTACLE THAT THE DUKE SHOULD HAVE WRITTEN
SUCH A LETTER. MR COBDEN HINTS THAT THE DUKE IS A DOTARD, BECAUSE HE
HAS VENTURED TO EXPRESS, ON A MILITARY SUBJECT, AN OPINION CONTRARY TO
THAT OF COBDEN. AND COBDEN FURTHER MAINTAINS, THAT THERE IS NOT A MORE
AFFECTIONATE NOR DOMESTICATED RACE ON THE FACE OF THE EARTH THAN THE
FRENCH.
After this we need add nothing more. Our opinion of Mr Cobden could be
thoroughly expressed in a much shorter sentence.
ROMANISM IN ROME.
CATECHISM IN THE MINERVA.
"Occidit miseros crambe repetita magistros."--JUVENAL.
"Et qui parlant beaucoup ne disent jamais rien."--BOILEAU.
Visitors to Rome are ofttimes puzzled and surprised at hearing the
very unusual affix, _della Minerva_, applied to one of the Christian
churches of that city; more especially when they find it also
familiarly known to the common people, not so well read as their
priests in the calendar of the saints, as LA STA. MINERVA; but the
apparent misnomer originates in an ellipsis of the full title, which
runs thus, _Sta. Maria sopra Minerva_--the church in question having
supplanted a temple formerly dedicated to Pallas, upon the ruins of
which it has been reared. But though the goddess of wisdom still
retains a _nominal_ interest in the edifice, certainly, to judge from
the catechetical exercises of which we are about to give a specimen,
her reign is past, and there remains but the _nominis umbra_ in lieu
of it. Exorcised the church, she has been fain to accept such a
humiliating asylum in the library adjoining, as inquisitorial
Dominicans would be likely to afford a heathen goddess, whose
proceedings they must narrowly watch. There she has the mortification
of hearing, from year to year, some new relay of "gray-hair'd synods
damning books unread," and, club-fashion, blackballing all _her_
friends in order to make way for their own; just as old Pope Gregory
is said to have burned a whole library of Pagan literature, that the
Christian Fathers and Roman Catholic Saints might have more
elbow-room; and also that, in the absence of rivals, their authority
might not be disputed. "_Fertur beatus Gregorius bibliothecam
combussisse gentilum, quo divinæ paginæ gratior esset locus et major
auctoritas et diligentia studiosior._"[A]
[A] _Vide_ Notes to Pope's _Dunciad_, book iii.
At Easter-tide, those who have any curiosity on the subject may hear
Bellarmine's Catechism, as it is squealed, bawled, or otherwise
intonated by the young children of the different _Riones_, and
commented on and explained for their edification by the pedagogue
priest of the district. He is generally surrounded at such times by a
bevy of from forty to fifty scholars, _gamins_ or _gamines_ as the
case may be; and to work they set with such earnestness of
vociferation that all Bedlam and Parnassus, raving and reciting
together, could not well surpass the discord: the shrill diapason,
peeling through nave and aisle, shakes the floating _Baldaquino_, and
makes the trembling walls bellow again, furnishing an apt and lively
illustration of the "_convulsaque marmora clamant_" of the poet.
Though we had often frequented the churches at this season, and had
scores of times heard questions both asked and answered therein, yet,
generally intent on the marbles or monuments of the edifice, we had
not hitherto given ear to the proceedings of these obstreperous young
bull-calves: but, before leaving Rome definitely, it seemed fair to
give them an hour's attention on some convenient opportunity, in order
to form an unbiassed judgment of how their early religious education
was carried on. One soon presented itself in the above-named church of
the Minerva; for, chancing to be there at the right hour on an
examination-day, in crossing in front of the black-columned chapel of
St Dominick, we came suddenly upon a covey of little girls nestling in
one of its corners, under the sumptuous tomb of the thirteenth
Benedict, and waiting, all primed, for their instructor. Some,
absorbed in the contemplation of the silver crown and faded finery of
St Philomel--we trust, at so tender an age, without infringement of
the tenth commandment--were delighting themselves in anticipating the
day when they too might become saints, and wear similar decorations;
others, too young for such speculations, were staring with intense
vacancy at the flickering of a tiny lamp, in front of a very
dingy-looking madonna, to which one or two, in baby simplicity, were
repeating _Latin_ creeds, paternosters, and aves. Not knowing exactly
how long the preceptor of these small folk might keep them waiting, we
left them, and proceeded to the body of the building, where a
detachment of boys was already drawn up for action, with their _padre_
in the midst. Approaching as softly as might be, we stood against a
neighbouring pilaster to hear what might be required of such young
pupils, and how they were prepared to acquit themselves. Their
incessant movements did not promise a very sustained attention,
whatever might be the business in hand: many of them were evidently
plagued with fleas--all with fidgets; some shrugged up their
shoulders, others swung themselves by their hands on the form; these
were buttoning, those unbuttoning their dress; and not a few warmed
their feet by kicking the sounding pavement, and then listening to the
echoes from the vaults. Every boy carried a book in his hand; but on
these no wandering eye ever looked, not even for an instant, in its
numerous glancings round. As soon as the additional commotion,
occasioned by the approach of a stranger, had subsided, the priest,
harking back to what he had just been saying, and not quite sure of
his whereabouts, asks his class touching the last question. "You asked
that boy," said one, pointing to a comrade near him, "how he supposed
he ought to come to church." "Well," said the priest, resuming his
cue, and reverting to the last examinee; "and how did you tell me you
were to come?" "_Colle mani giunte così_," said the boy, locking his
hands, and standing up as he did so. "_Niente avanti?_" said the
priest, glancing at two very dirty paws. "Oh yes! I was to wash them."
"_Poi?_" "I was to cross myself as I came out of my room, and to cast
down my eyes, like the _Mater Indolorata_ yonder." "And then?" "As I
came to church, besides looking grave, I was to walk, not _così_"--and
he walked a few paces as he ought _not_ to walk,--"but _così_"--changing
the rhythm of his march--"as if I were following my brother's funeral.
_E poi finalmente_," (as he resumed his place with a jerk,) "I was to
be seated _so_, and hold my tongue till the _padre_ should address
me." "Well, my little man," (to another of the motley class,) "were we
not talking about the sacrament?" "Oh yes! no one may receive _that_
who has been guilty of any mortal sin." "_Bene_, that's quite right;
but _why_ not?" The following gabble, to which it was quite obvious
that none were of an age to attach _any_ meaning, served for a reply,
and was received as perfectly satisfactory by the priest:--"_Siccome
il pane naturale non può dare vita ad un corpo morto; così il pane
della Santissima, Eucaristia non può dare vita ad un anima morta._"
"And what may mortal sins be?" turning to the next scholar. "_Eh! chi
lo sa_; who is to tell you that?" said a young butcher's boy, turning
off the question, and freely offering it to any one who would take it
up. Upon this the boys made much noise, and laughed out lustily, not
encountering any reprimand from the _padre_, or so gentle a one as to
prove no check to their mirth. At length, quiet being partially
restored, he resumed his task, and asked a child of _six_ years old to
give him an example of mortal sin! Not receiving an answer, this
question travelled nearly to the end of the first line before any one
would take upon himself to venture even a random response; then, at
last, by dint of prompting, one boy suggested, that the tasting food
before receiving the sacrament was of such a kind; and having been
first much commended for his erudition, was next subjected to a long
list of _suppositions_ from the examiner; such as, "Suppose I were to
drink a little water merely?" "_Niente!_ no, you mus'nt." "Well; but
suppose I only took a small piece of consecrated wafer?" "_Ne anchè_;
not that neither." "What! would even these small indulgences be
infringing the rule?" But as the boy had received an approving
"_bene_" for his first negative, he had no difficulty in keeping to
his text; and at last the whole class, enjoying the joke of punishing
their _padre_ by cutting him off from all supplies at every fresh
demand, roared out _in chorus_, "_Niente, niente_--you mus'nt touch a
bit;" till, tired of the shouting, the good man proceeded to the next
interrogatory. We were tiring too; but being really desirous of
hearing, if possible, something more to the purpose, remained,
notwithstanding, yet another half hour at our post--indeed quite long
enough to be sure that "_niente_" was all we were likely to get for
our pains. Some of the questions were simply frivolous, many
jesuitical, others deeply profound; and whatever their character, all
were answered in the same careless and irreverent tone; _à tort et à
travers_, according to the fancy of the young respondent. In a word, a
more complete waste of time for both teacher and taught could not have
been easily devised. The instruction of this and similar classes--for
we have no reason to suppose that others differ from it--seems about
as intellectual and useful (and no more so) than that of an aviary of
parrots in the town of Havre, where the young French _psittaci_
chiefly learn their χαιρης, and their "_petits dejeuners_."
Alike in quality, it is not very dissimilar neither in the mode of its
administration. The shopman proposes the first word of a sentence to
the whole community, and the greater or less accuracy with which it is
taken up and completed, evinces the relative aptitudes of his tyros;
and though great allowance is always made, in the case of both boy and
bird, for transpositions or leavings out, yet the priest, like the
parrot-merchant, keeps an eye on the pupil who promises to do most
credit to his training, and brings him forward on every public
occasion. "In all labour," says Solomon, "there is profit, but the
_talk of the lips_ tendeth only to poverty." It requires no Solomon to
see how completely this is the case here; but there is one particular
in which the _padre_ really deserves praise, and we cheerfully accord
it. The forbearance, the patience, meekness, and _bonhomie_ which he
exercises in proposing the dull routine of questions, and in listening
while the pupils "ring round the same unvaried chimes" in reply,
cannot be too much admired. Like the patient schoolmaster in Juvenal,
he puts up with all their idleness and inattention--in the very
doubtful proficiency of many of his scholars, gives them the favour of
the doubt--and, above all, never loses his temper! This drilling and
preparation of the district classes has for ulterior object a general
field-day,[B] which occurs once a-year; when the congregated schools,
in the presence of the canons and other dignitaries of the church,
being now supposed fully supplied
"With stores of spiritual provision,
And magazines of ammunition,"
for the warfare, are expected
"To rise and start the ready wherefore,
To all that sceptic may inquire for;
Then raise their scruples dark and nice,
And solve them after in a trice;
As if divinity had catch'd,
The itch, on purpose to be scratch'd!"
[B] _Italian Sketches_, No. V., August 1843.
In short, these living _fantoccini_ are taught to expose heresies, and
expound the dogmas of their faith, in words found for them by their
priests; and he who best retains the lesson, and proves himself most
loud and overbearing in the exercise, receives, for reward, a crown
and royal robe, and is metamorphosed out of the _imp_, which he was an
hour before, into the _imperator_; more fortunate by half, in the
undisputed tenure of his title for a twelvemonth, than many of his
Roman predecessors in the laurel. The little girls have an exhibition
somewhat similar, but still more theatric in its character. At
Christmas they assemble in the churches, dressed out by their parents
(who delight in making them as fine as possible) very much, it must be
admitted, like ballet-dancers; but supposed to represent, in their
habiliments, youthful Christian virgins and martyrs. Thus apparelled,
they hold forth on a platform in front of some favourite _Præsepe_,
and sustain, with Pagan rivals, long dialogues on the Nativity,
syllogising, in the shrill thin voice of childhood, upon all the
sublime mysteries of our faith, till the Pagans abandon the scornful
air with which they are taught to commence the discussion, and
confess themselves vanquished by the arguments brought against them.
The chief spokeswoman is then rewarded, like the head-boy, with robe
and crown, and retains her regal dignity for the same period. Of all
such education, what shall we say? Why, truly, in Hudibrastic
plainness of speech, that it is
"More fitted for the cloudy night
Of Popery, than Gospel light."
Are our British _infant_ schools quite free from participation in the
defects just noticed? By no means; and though the subject is far too
important to be dismissed with a few words at the end of a slight
sketch like the present, (especially since we hope to return to it
later,) yet, even here, we must glance at one or two blemishes, that
lie so immediately on the surface as to strike even the most casual
observer, when once his attention is called to them. In such
seminaries, it is known, the ages of the children usually vary from
eighteen months to six years, at which tender period of life it is
almost impossible to exercise too much discretion not to over-burden
the memory, or to obscure the dawning reason; but alas! in the always
well-meant, but certainly not always judicious, zeal for beginning
education betimes, how often is it begun too early and pushed too far!
In an over-anxiety to prevent, by pre-occupation of the ground, the
arch-enemy of mankind from sowing his tares, how often is the good
seed thrown in before it can have a chance of quickening! _Festinare
lente_ should be the motto, in moral and religious, as it is in all
other branches of education; since neither in religion nor morals can
we hope to arrive at the full stature of perfection, but by slow
degrees and long training. The Bible, to be sure, (the only true
source of either,) is _the_ Book for all mankind; but as it contains
"strong meat for men," as well as "milk for babes," great judgment is
necessary, in separating these diets, to give to each age the food
particularly adapted for it. We have the apostolic injunction for such
discrimination,--"Every one that uses milk is unskilful in the word of
righteousness: for he is a babe. But _strong meat_ belongeth to them
that are _of full age_; even those who _by reason of use have their
senses exercised_ to discern both good and evil."[C] It is further
obvious, from St Paul's catalogue of the armour which is to resist
_all_ the attacks of the world, the flesh, and the devil, that it
comprises many pieces of which young children can neither be made to
comprehend the design, nor, at their time of life, to require the use.
How unskilful, then, and abortive must be the attempt to put into the
hands of _instinct_ the weapons of mature _reason_; to seek to explain
the "beauty of holiness" to a child who does not "know his right hand
from his left," and to invest an unbreeched urchin in the whole
Christian panoply at once! With all due respect, too, to the
pains-taking compilers of some of the _manuals_ used in these classes,
we cannot help thinking that their labour has been at times worse than
thrown away; and it has excited our surprise to hear really
judicious[D] persons speak of these lesson-books as "perfectly suited"
to the purpose of infant education, and as requiring no amendment.
Surely they cannot have read them; or they must have forgotten, when
doing so, the _age_ and _condition_ of those for whom they are
intended. Not to be thought captious for nothing, we will let that
"_farrago libelli_"--that sausage of all the sciences--that "Teacher's
Assistant," speak for itself. It has gone through we know not how many
editions, and continues to perpetuate in each succeeding one all the
blunders of its predecessors. To begin at the beginning,--The scholars
have to learn therefrom as many alphabets as there are letters; a
historical, a geographical, a profane, and a biblical alphabet, &c.,
&c., not to attempt an enumeration of the whole. In the biblical, each
letter is put opposite to some proper or _improper_ person mentioned
in Scripture, for whom it is said to stand representative--(leaving it
to be supposed that it has been called into existence for no other
purpose.) By this means the _written_ character of course becomes
associated in the child's mind with the _moral_ character of the
individual whose initial it is; and thus a certain prejudice is apt to
arise against certain letters. For instance, the letter _H_ is
rendered fearfully significant,--
"_H_ stands for Herod, who spilt _infants'_ blood!"
[C] Epistle to the Hebrews, v. 13, 14.
[D] In an otherwise admirable lecture on schools, which was lately
delivered by Professor Blount, at Cambridge, we were surprised to hear
a general commendation passed on these books. We feel persuaded, that
neither the gravity of the class nor the approval of the Professor
would have held out long against the recital of a few extracts.
A theorist might, perhaps, trace the absence of the aspirate in the
speech of maturer years to the awe created by that dread tetrarch's
name in infancy, when it is first feebly articulated, then dropped,
and not recovered afterwards.[E] But we are not theatrical; in proof
whereof, we observe that a child's natural aspirations are for tarts,
dolls, or marbles; while, to counteract such propensities, these
little hypocrites, before their time, are taught to sing out, among
other _Scripture wishes_, the following formulary, which must, of
course, act as a specific:--
"May Isaiah's _hallow'd_ fire,
_All_ my _fervent_ heart inspire;
Joseph's _purity_ impart!
Isaac's _meditative_ heart!!!"
A rhythmical dispute between two children, entitled a "Sabbath
Dialogue," brings to our mind a similar farce at Ferrara, which we
have formerly described. In this lively piece of absurdity, the
naughty boy invites the good one to play instead of going to church,
and, waxing warm as the other proves intractable, at length becomes
absolutely abusive on finding he is not to prevail.
Once again. Behold a class of children with the picture of a sheep
before them--to be taught, one would have supposed, the natural
history of that animal, and to learn something about the material of
which their little flannel petticoats and worsted stockings are made;
when lo! in place of this, they are informed that "though their sins
are red as crimson, they shall be as _wool_!!" If it were necessary to
use any interjection here, surely a loud ovine _bah!_ would be the
most appropriate and natural. But _revenons à nos moutons_, for
presently afterwards occurs this question--"What does the Bible tell
us about wool?" Answer: "Gideon wrung a fleece!" Bah! again, for what
other _commentary_ can be made on such _instruction_ as this? Why,
Jason filched one; and the Lord Chancellor sits upon a woolsack; and
either of these answers would convey as much useful knowledge to a
child's mind, though they are not to be met with in the Bible.
[E] Notwithstanding their number, we would suggest one more, the
"corrective alphabet," in which all the symbols should stand
representative for objects agreeable to babes, and, _ex._ _gr._, after
their innocent lips have been made to falter out Herod's formidable
name, we would point to ours, where--
_H_ stands for honey, so sweet and so good.
These unfortunate babes are to know a little of every thing: so, after
going through _versified_ weights and measures--arithmetic, including
the higher branches--geometry--we hardly know what is _omitted_ in
this most comprehensive miscellany--they arrive at philosophy, and
learn a great deal to the tune of "Miss Bailley." We give one stanza
out of many, as an example:--
"The wondrous globe on which we live,
Is close surrounded every where
By something quite invisible,
And callèd _atmospheric air_!
This air is fluid, light and thin,
And formed of _gases_ well _combined_!
It carries sound and odour well,
But put in motion it is _wind_!"
At the end of each verse, the infant chorus repeats with enthusiasm,
not "Poor Miss Bailley! unfortunate Miss Bailley!" &c., but--
"Oh how curious,--wonderfully curious,
The _laws of nature_ are indeed
Most wonderfully curious!"
The geography is as good as the physics:--
"A _channel_ is a passage wide
That flows from sea to sea;
When narrow it is call'd a _strait_,--
_Thanks to Geography_!"
. . . . .
"When wise and older I am grown,
I'll try and tell you more,
But Teacher says _enough is known_
An infant's mind to _store_!"
No doubt of it! enough and to spare! This is a fine specimen of the
class of truths called _unquestionable_. There is, moreover, a
pleasing _enjouement_ about this last line, which recommends it to our
regard. The teacher seems to be expostulating with her young charge,
and saying, "My dear little four-year-old, eager for instruction
beyond your years, but fearful of _learning up_ every thing at
school,--don't be frightened; the world will always find science
sufficient to employ all good little boys like you." But though this
_truth_ be unquestionable, we doubt whether the line which conveys it
be genuine; and rather fancy, should the original manuscript turn up,
it would be found to run--
"_Enough's enough_ an infant's mind to store!"
which, though somewhat harsh to the ear, conveys an excellent meaning.
Should this be thought to make the verse too rugged, we have yet a
second various reading to propose, and that is simply to change the
last word into _bore_, by which means the easy flow of the verse is
preserved, and the _significatio prœgnans_ of the original, though
somewhat modified, is maintained.
Notwithstanding these blemishes--which, after our strictures on
foreign classes, we felt bound to point out--our English schools are
very far superior to the Italian for the same rank. With us, the
attention of government and of the public is roused, and directed to
their improvement; laymen join with the clergy in forwarding the same
scheme; great part of the tuition devolves upon females--and who so
fitted as woman to form the mind at an early age? It is no small
advantage, too, that authoresses of talent and judgment should have
devoted their time to the composition of exclusively moral and
religious tales and histories for the young. Lastly, with us, there is
none of that masquerading and display, which we reprobate as forming
so prominent a part in all Italian tuition. In these schools, women
are excluded from their natural office of teaching; there are no books
adapted to infant minds; the whole business is vested in the hands of
the priests; and they, in strict compliance with the spirit of their
Church, train the pupils in passive obedience to authority, and teach
them very little besides. We fear it will be long before any
revolution can reach these seminaries. The sense of personal
importance attaching--not only to the children themselves, but to
their parents--from these contemptible yearly exhibitions, added to
the interested motives which induce the Church to foster such vanity,
would render any considerable alteration for the better extremely
difficult, even were the evil more generally _felt_ than we fear it is
likely to be under the present system of things. We state this opinion
with regret; for what is the tendency of such education? Can it
inculcate that real humility, not abasement of mind, which should
characterise the true disciples of our blessed Saviour? Nay, must it
not rather, by holding out, as it does, a premium to natural quickness
and a superficial acquaintance with the dogmas of theology, tend to
foster pride and selfishness--those monster evils which it is the
prime object of religion to eradicate--whilst the heart remains
untouched and the moral sense unexercised? and will not the poor
children, who are its victims, learn to prize a few dry leaves from
the Tree of Knowledge, beyond the fair fruit of the Tree of Life?
LA CARA VITA.
"Mais où sont les vertus qui dementent les tiennes?
Pour éclipser ton jour quel nouveau jour parait?
Toi qui les remplaças,[F] qui te remplacerait?"
[F] (Les faux dieux.)
DE LAMARTINE, _Harmonies, Hymne au Christ_.
The Cara Vita is a small church situated in the Corso, and not
possessing within itself any thing to attract the stranger's
particular attention. It is interesting, however, from the solemn
services which take place there every Friday in Lent. On these
occasions, after an exciting harangue from the officiating priest, the
lights are extinguished, knotted scourges are handed round by the
sacristan, and each individual of the congregation takes one and
begins to flagellate himself. We have been told--for we were never
present at these exhibitions--that the noise and excitement are
terrible--every penitent seeking to ease his inner at the expense of
his outer man, and proportioning the amount of his physical suffering
to that of the moral evil which it is intended to counteract. But all
the ceremonies in the Cara Vita are not of this character; and the
same friend who described the above, informed us that the preaching
there was often eloquent, and the music always fine; so, when we read
in the _Diario di Roma_, that at twelve o'clock on Good Friday there
was to be a solemn _funzione_, or Service in commemoration of our
Saviour's Passion, and that in all probability the church would be
crowded, we repaired thither on that day an hour before the time
mentioned in the paper, in order to secure a place. Doubtful of the
propriety of witnessing, as a pageant, a representation of the most
awful and affecting scene that the mind of man can contemplate, yet
fearing, from some experience in Roman ceremonies, that our visit
might issue merely in _that_, we lingered some time about the porch;
then, pushing aside the heavy curtain, irresolutely entered; and what
a contrast presented itself between the two sides of that matted door!
It seemed the portal between life and death: light, noise, confusion,
reigned without; within, all was dark, solemn, still. The ear that had
been stunned by the babel of the streets, was startled at the unwonted
calm; and the eye, dazzled by the splendour of the meridian sun upon
the pavement, experienced a temporary blindness, and required some
time before it could accommodate its powers to the obscurity of the
interior. By degrees, however, it was, apparent that the church,
notwithstanding the voiceless quiet which prevailed, was full. The
whole assembly sat as if spell-bound; not a whisper was to be heard;
an awful curiosity tied every tongue. The business and pleasures of
life were forgotten; the sexes exchanged no furtive glances; men and
women, alike unobservant of their neighbours, counted their beads and
bent their eyes upon the ground; while each new comer, awed by the
deep silence, entered with cautious tread, and took his seat
noiselessly. When our eyes had become somewhat familiarised with the
artificial light, they were attracted to two elevated extempore
side-boxes, brilliantly illuminated with wax, and filled with
choristers in full costume. Between them was stretched a voluminous
curtain, not so opaque but that a number of tapers might be seen
faintly glimmering through it; and before this curtain a dark
temporary stage was erected. The, religious calm that prevailed around
was at length gently broken by some soft and plaintive notes,
proceeding from the white-robed choir. In a few minutes these died
away again upon the ear, and a figure, suddenly rising from the stage,
exclaimed in a voice of strenuous emotion--"Once again, ye faithful
ones! ye are assembled here to accompany me to Calvary! Yes! another
Good Friday has come round, another anniversary of the day announced
by God himself for man's deliverance from the wages of his sin; this
is the great day when typical sacrifice was done away with, and our
blessed Lord made of 'himself a full and sufficient sacrifice for the
sins of the' _faithful_. But in order to triumph, my brethren, we must
conquer--to conquer we must contend; there is no warfare without
wounds, and our Saviour, while in the flesh, must partake of our
infirmities: he must be 'the man of sorrows and acquainted with
grief,' before he can 'lead captivity captive, and receive gifts' _for
his holy Church_; the ransom of his faithful followers must be at the
expense of his own blood. He bled, as you know, on Good Friday; and
accordingly, we are met here--not to celebrate a triumph, but to learn
humility, patience, and forgiveness of injuries at the foot of the
cross, in order that _we_, like our great Head, may become perfect
_through suffering_. Permit me, then, to ask you, with the Psalmist,
'Are your hearts set upon righteousness, O ye congregation?' and are
your minds prepared to follow the Lord to Calvary? Have you, for
instance, been studying lately his sufferings at _the different
stations of the cross_? have you been thinking at all upon his
passion? thinking what it must have been to be hooted at, spit upon,
reviled, buffeted, and friendless upon earth? If not, ponder well
these things now; _now_, at _this moment_; for are we not arrived at
the most sacred _hour_ of this most sacred but sad and solemn day?
About this hour was the Saviour condemned by his unjust judge,
delivered up to the rabble to be crucified. Go back in your minds to
that moment; see him crowned with thorns, and bearing the cross upon
his shoulder, till, lo! he faints under its weight, and his
persecutors compel a stranger to carry it to the fatal spot. Then see
him toiling onward, surrounded by his deadly enemies; his chosen
friends have forsaken him and fled! a few women follow him afar off,
bewailing his fate; he turns and speaks; listen to his words--'Daughters
of Jerusalem! weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and _for your
children_!' Well might the merciful Saviour speak thus, when he had
just heard the mad shout of the multitude, 'his blood be upon us and
_upon our children_.' The crowd approaches Golgotha! they halt to rear
the fatal tree; methinks I hear the exulting outcries of his
vindictive murderers as they fix it in the ground!" Here the curtain
drawn between the preacher and the back of the stage fell, revealing
three wooden crucifixes lit up by a lurid red light from above. The
effect was startling, and produced a shudder of horror throughout the
whole auditory. After a breathless pause, the preacher, turning
towards the cross, exclaimed, "What! are we too late for the beginning
of this tragedy! Is the Redeemer of mankind already nailed to the
cross? Oh, cruel and fiendlike man, is this your triumph! surely he
who came to save will reject you now! Such might be our feelings, but
they were not Christ's. No, my brethren, far from it. Oh, let us
contemplate, for our own future guidance, the behaviour of Jesus to
his murderers, not _after_ but at the _moment_ of his extreme torture;
and may the Holy Spirit give us grace to profit by the exercise. Look
on your crucified Redeemer writhing and maddened with suffering; and
listen to the first words uttered in the depth of his agony: he
imprecates no curse upon these guilty men, but exclaims, 'Father,
forgive them; they know not what they do!' _Caro Jesu!_" Here there
was much emotion both in the preacher and in the congregation; when it
had subsided, he added persuasively, "You have heard Christ pray that
his _murderers_ may be forgiven, and shall you hesitate to forgive one
another?" Then, taking the words of our Saviour for a text, he
delivered a short animated sermon upon the forgiveness of injuries;
after which came a prayer for grace to perform this duty; the pause
which succeeded being filled with music and chanting. Then again the
dark form of the preacher rose up. "What, my brethren! did not Christ
pass _three hours_ in his agony, and shall we leave him in the midst?
He has still more gracious words in store. My dear brethren and fellow
sinners, now hear his dying address to the penitent thief, 'Verily I
say unto thee, to-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise!' _Ladro
felice!_ but was _he_ then _predestinated_ to salvation, and his
companion to be the victim of God's wrath? _Niente, niente_; believe,
not a word of this false and heretical creed." Then followed a second
discourse, with a diatribe against Calvin (who deserved it!) and
_all_ heretics (who might not deserve it), with an anathema against
heresy in general, and a prayer for the pardon and acceptance of the
true Catholic, _id est_ ROMAN, Church. In like manner the preacher
continued to set before his hearers all the circumstances of our
Saviour's passion; pronouncing a short discourse upon every sentence
uttered by him in his agony. Each sermonette was succeeded by prayer;
and that by an interlude of music and chanting, which enabled him to
recover himself, and proceed with undiminished energy during a three
hours' service. We had listened attentively, not always agreeing with
his doctrine, but without any great shock to our Protestant
principles, when, in conclusion, he exclaimed, "Now, brethren, before
we disperse, let us do homage to the blessed Virgin, and sympathise
with the afflicted and inconsolable Mother of our Lord. Think of her
sufferings to-day; think and weep over them; and forget not the
worship due to her holy name; whom Christ honoured, shall not we
honour too? Sons of the blessed Virgin! is not your brother Christ her
son also? make her then your friend; propitiate her, in order to
obtain pardon from him! Let us all, then, fall down upon our knees
before the _Indolorata_." A long prayer to the Madonna followed, then
a hymn in her honour; and after a last glorious outburst of the organ,
accompanying the ardent and sustained Hallelujahs of both choir and
congregation, the curtain falls, the doors are thrown open, daylight
rushes in through the no longer darkened windows; and presently the
thronged and noisy Corso has absorbed the last member of the much
moved, slowly dispersing crowd.
A heartfelt and affecting ceremony was that we had just witnessed;
every body had shed tears, and there had been evidently great
_at_trition, and probably some _con_trition also. The strong appeals
of the priest had _told_, though they were not legitimate; for what
could be less so than, in the end, his misdirecting the thoughts from
the _true_ object of worship, to _her_, who was, after all, but a mere
mortal like ourselves?
Yet devotional feelings had been called forth, and in this it was
unlike, and surely better than, the ordinary cold, formal, glittering,
shifting pantomimic service of Te-Deums, and high masses, which,
instead of "filling the hungry with good things," send all "empty
away;" or worse, _satisfied_ with "that which is not bread." Could
piety really be appealed to through the senses, then might the
ceremonies of the Romish Church hope to reach it, captivating as they
are to most of them. The ear is pleased with exquisite music; the eye
is dazzled with pictures, processions, scenic representations,
glittering colours, gorgeous robes, rich laces, and embroidery; and
even the nostril is propitiated by the grateful odour of frankincense;
but the only address to the heart and intellect is a barbarous Latin
prayer, unintelligible (were it to be heard) to most of the
congregation, and rendered so to all by the mode in which it is gone
through. On returning from such exhibitions as these, we feel more
forcibly than ever, how much reason we have to thank those pious
compilers of our expurgated English prayer-book, who, renouncing an
_unknown tongue_, and rejecting all unscriptural interpolations, drew
from the rich stores of Rome herself, and from the primitive Church,
an almost faultless Liturgy,[G] where every desire of the human heart
is anticipated, and every expression so carefully weighed, that not an
unbecoming phrase can be found in it.
[G] "We were not" (says Jeremy Taylor) "like women and children when
they are affrighted with fire in their clothes; we shook off the coal,
indeed, but not our garments; lest we should expose our Church to that
nakedness which the excellent men of our sister Churches complained to
be among themselves."
It is impossible for any one who has been much in Roman Catholic
countries, to avoid drawing comparisons between the two services; and
especially at this time, when many of our countrymen are halting
between two opinions, and almost persuading themselves that there was
no need of a Reformation, it behoves those not under the influence of
"That dark lanthorn of the Spirit
Which none see by but those that bear it;"
nor yet led away
"By crosses, relics, crucifixes,
Beads, pictures, rosaries, and pyxes;
Those tools for working out salvation
By mere _mechanic_ operation,"
to protest against the return of Popery to this land, to the surrender
of our consciences and our Bibles again into the hands of a fellow
sinner.[H] "Quis custodet custodem?"--who shall watch our
watcher?--was a question that men had been asking themselves for many
years in England, but hitherto without result; till our pious
Reformers, addressing themselves to the study of the Scriptures,
received the sword of the Spirit, with which they were enabled to wage
successful war against that wily serpent, coiled now for centuries
round the Church of Christ, and waiting but a little further
_development_ to crush her in his inextricable folds. Alike unallured
by concessions and unterrified by threats, they boldly denounced the
_heretical_ usurpation of Rome; opposing an honest conscience, and
Christ the only mediator, to the caprice of councils, and the false
unity of a pseudo-infallible head;[I] refusing to purchase their lives
by rendering homage to any Phalaris of the Triple Crown.
[H] Bellarmine asserts (and who but a heretic shall dispute it with
him?) that men are bound so far to submit their consciences to the
Pope, as even to believe _virtue_ to be _bad_ and _vice_ to be _good_,
if it shall please his Holiness to say so. (BELLAR. _de Rom. Pontif_,
lib. iv. cap. v.) When things came to this pass, were we not justified
in the insertion of that rough deprecatory clause that stood in our
Litany--"From the tyranny of the Bishop of Rome, and all his
detestable enormities, Good Lord deliver us!"
[I] "We must seek to enter into the real divine unity; if not, the
_pseudo_ unity to which Mr Newman would bring us back will be
attempted once more among us; only to be followed, when its
hollowness, its nothingness, its implicit infidelity, is laid bare, by
an explicit infidelity, an anarchical unity, without a centre, without
a God." (MAURICE'S _Lectures on the Epistle to the Hebrews_, p. 111.)
Their perjured faith, though zealot Popes command,
Point to _their_ Bull, and raise the threatening hand:
They deem'd those souls consummate guilt incurr'd,
At conscience' fearful price, who life preferr'd:
No length of days for bartered peace can pay,
And what were life, take life's great end away?[J]
[J] Imitated from JUVENAL, _Satire_ viii.
THE BEATIFICATION.
"_Sanctis_ Roma, suis jam tollere gestit ad astra,
Et cupit ad _superos_ evehere usque deos."
MILTON'S _Sonnets_.
To receive Beatification, which is the first step towards
Canonisation, and may in time lead to a fellowship with the
saints,--to be pronounced "blessed" by him who arrogates to himself
the title of _Holy_, and must therefore know the full value of the
dignity he confers--_sic laudari a laudato_, and that too in the
finest church in Christendom, before the eyes of a countless assembly
of all the nations of Europe,--is an honour indeed! No wonder, then,
that every promotion should be jealously canvassed, and that sometimes
the rumour of "unfairness," or "favouritism," should be heard among
the people, when each fresh brevet comes out. For example--"Who's this
third St Anthony? Are not two enough in the Calendar? The great St
Antonio, and he of the pig!--(_del porco_,)--another will only create
confusion;" or else, "Surely the _Beata_ _Ernestina_ has not been
long enough dead to have attained to such an 'odour of sanctity;'" or,
"Though the good Pasquale might deserve the title, the pious Teodoro's
miracles are as well attested, and much more numerous, and should
therefore have been first recognised." Of such sort are the comments
of the crowd. All this grumbling, however, is at an end, when once the
_Festa_ comes round; the Church, by the brilliancy of her exhibitions,
wins over her discontented children, and the installation is sure to
be well attended. Sometimes the saint expectant stops short of true
canonisation; and, having gained one step, finds himself like a yellow
admiral, placed on the shelf without chance of further promotion.
(This by the way.) No one can say precisely what entitles the dead to
these honours. Large bequests alone are not always sufficient; witness
the rejection of a certain distinguished Begum, who left much of her
enormous wealth to the Pope, with a well-known view to this
distinction. Some imagine that eminent piety is a necessary condition;
but no! there is very little talk of religion. It seems chiefly to be
the attestation of a sufficient number of miracles at a tomb, which
confers the title of Beatus on its tenant, and converts it into a
shrine, sure ever after to be profusely hung with glass eyes, wax
fœtuses, silver hearts, discarded crutches, votive shipwrecks, &c.,
&c.,[K] in token of cures and deliverances which have emanated from
it. Next to miracles, perhaps, we may reckon _dates_--_seniores
priores_--first buried, first beatified, and no superannuation here:
on the contrary, holiness, like many other good things, requires time
to ripen its virtues and to bring it to perfection; and it is a rule
of the Church that chemistry must disintegrate the mortal before she
can build up the saint. Thus it happens of two candidates of equal
merit; he whose dissolution took place half a century or so before his
rival, obtains the preference. The first steps are taken by the
lawyers; one being retained to advance the merits of the aspirant
saint, another to asperse them if possible. Should the election be
contested, much special pleading is then resorted to. Both sides are
paid by the Church, but he who opposes the nomination is termed the
_devil's_ counsel. This title, however, is a legal or rather a
theological fiction; the miracles alleged to have been performed by
the defunct being only more triumphantly established and set off by
the apparent disposition of the rival pleader to deny their reality;
who, after a proper show of resistance and incredulity, allows himself
to be foiled. This is indeed beating Satan with his own weapons; but
the advocates of saints belong to that party who
"E'en to the Devil himself will go,
If they have motive thereunto;
And think, as there is war between
The Devil and them, it is no sin
If they by subtle stratagem
Make use of him as he does them."
[K] It is singular to observe how the "_votiva paries_," in the
churches of Papal Rome, are hung with similar offerings to those which
formerly ornamented her temples in Pagan times. We possess several of
these ancient offerings; _inter alia_--a _uterus_ and a _mamma_, in
_terra cotta_, from the Temple of _Elvina Ceres_ at Aquinum, and an
_abortion_, in lead, from the same source.
We had never witnessed a Beatification: so, when the Pope, in his
character of umpire, had pronounced his fiat in favour of "good sister
Frances," and all that remained to be done was the church ceremonial
necessary to admit her to piety's peerage, we procured one of the many
thousand tickets printed for the occasion, and followed the crowd to
St Peter's. Here all was prepared to give due effect to the scene: the
interior was studiously darkened, that the rich upholstery might be
set off by a grove of countless wax lights, thick and tall as young
pine trees. The workmen, after a whole fortnight of bustle and
activity, had done their part well. Curtains had been hung and carpets
spread; organs wheeled up towards the throne of St Peter; and a whole
gallery of villanously painted historical pictures, blasphemous and
absurd, were suspended round, representing the miracles for which the
new "beatified" was to receive her first degree towards sainthood;
and showing amongst other wonders, how in one case her blood, in
another her image, restored a blind man to sight, and so completely
cured the palsy of one Salvator di Sales, that he is dancing a
hornpipe on his recovery, while a priest is looking on approvingly. We
were too early for the ceremony; and after curiously scanning these
preparations, our attention was attracted to a group near, eagerly
listening to the recital of a bare-footed Capuchin. On approaching, we
found that he was discoursing on the virtues of a picture of the
Virgin, known by the name of _Sta Maria del Pianto_, a fresco daub,
painted in a very dirty back street. He was affirming that it had
lately taken to _winking_, and had also been seen to shed tears over
the body of a man recently found murdered under the lamp. "Who saw her
weep?" inquired one of his hearers. "Do you doubt the miracle, my
son?" said the friar. "No indeed, father," returned he; "but why did
she not call out to the assassin; and what is the use of weeping over
a dead man?" "It was owing to the gentleness of her sex," said
another, who appeared interested in proclaiming the notoriety of the
shrine: he proceeded, therefore, to inform the attentive listeners,
that he had the face newly painted some months back, since which
operation there was no end to the miracles performed by it. Several
persons round hereon testified to having heard repeatedly of these
wonders. "Ah!" said a sceptical craftsman, "I dare say you live in
another quarter of the city, for it is well known that those at a
distance see these things more clearly than the neighbours, unless,
like our friend here," nodding to the restorer of the shrine, "they
hope to attract customers to the shop by drawing votaries to the
shrine." "I don't believe a word of it," said we, taking part in the
colloquy. "_Caro lei_--who can help that? we can only pity your
unbelief," said the good-humoured Capuchin, offering us, however, a
pinch out of his snuff-box. "_You_," continued he, "should call to
mind '_in dubiis fides_;' and _we_, in compassion to your being a
heretic, will remember '_in omnibus caritas_.'" We accepted the good
man's courtesy, albeit no snuff-taker; and he was resuming the
interrupted narrative, when a stir among the crowd outside announced
the near approach of the procession, and every one hastened to secure
a good seat. Presently the Swiss guards enter, the choristers take
their places, in come priests, bishops, cardinals, all sumptuously
arrayed; at length the Pope himself arrives and assumes his throne.
Mass commences.
And here the reader doubtless expects, if not a full description of
the ceremony of canonisation, at least an accurate detail of the
various steps of the process by which it was effected; but, as we have
stated above, the incubation had been completed six weeks before in a
private Eccaleiobion, and the pageant to-day was merely to give
publicity to the metamorphosis--to read in, and to enrol among the
saints the Beata Francesca. As we cannot give a particular account of
the _funzione_, we give a general one of all masses:--
High mass! The stall'd and banner'd quire--
White canons--priests in quaint attire--
The unfamiliar prayer:
The fumes that practised hands dispense,
The tinkling bells, the jingling pence,
The tax'd but welcome chair:
The beams from ruby panes that glow,
Of rhythmal chant the ebb and flow:
The organ, that from boundless stores
Its trembling inspiration pours
O'er all the sons of care;
Now joyous as the festal lyre,
When torch and song and wine inspire;
Now tender as Cremona's shell,
When hush'd orchestras own the spell
And watch the ductile bow--
Now rolling from its thunder-cloud,
Dark peals o'er that retiring crowd,
And now has ceased to blow.
CRIMES AND REMARKABLE TRIALS IN SCOTLAND.
INCIDENTS OF THE EARLIER REIGNS--AN INQUIRY INTO THE CHARACTER OF
MACBETH.
The sunshine and the green leaves embrace not all that we should know
of physical nature. Storm and darkness have their signs, which we do
well to study; and in the tempests of the tropics, or the long winter
darkness of the poles, we have types of the character of different
sections of the globe, more marked than the varying warmth of the sun,
or the character of the vegetation--but not perhaps so pleasing. Even
so, the storm and darkness of the human soul--the criminal nature of
man, provide their peculiar food for the thinker and inquirer. The
annals of virtue have their own elevations and delights; but those of
vice are no more to be passed over than the dark and stormy hours in
the history of each revolution round the sun. "While some affect the
sun, and some the shade," there may even be those whose most deeply
cherished associations are with these unlit hours--who prefer the
night thoughts to the day dreams. But to all, the crimes peculiar to
different nations are a large part of the knowledge which man may
profitably have of his race. In the history of its great criminals, a
nation's character is drawn, as it were, colossally, with the broadest
brush, and in the deepest shadows. National virtues have delicate and
subtle tints, and exquisitely minute shadings, inviting to a nearer
view--like Carlo Dolci's Madonnas, or Constable's forest landscapes:
the crimes of a nation present the character of its people, as they
rise from the dead in Michael Angelo's Last Judgment. The _ordinary_
vices of men have a certain vulgar air of uniformity; but each great
crime is a broad dash of the national character of the people among
whom it was committed. The Cenci, and Joanna of Naples were of Italy.
It was in Holland that two great and virtuous statesmen were torn to
pieces by the mob. The dirk, long buried beyond the Grampians, has
re-appeared across the Atlantic in the shape of the bowie-knife. The
country of Woldemar and the sorrows of Werther produced that most
amiable and sentimental of murderesses, Madame Zwanziger, who loved
and was beloved wherever she went; so sensitive, so sympathising, so
sedulous, so studious of the wants of those by whom she was
surrounded, so disinterestedly patient; she had but one peculiarity to
distinguish her from an angel of light--it was an unfortunate
propensity to poison people! We read in the _Causes Célèbres_, of a
Bluebeard who slew a succession of wives by tickling them till they
died in convulsions; and at once we are reminded of that populace who
are said to partake of the natures of the ape and the tiger. The
people who, for more centuries than are included in the events of
European history, have been resolved into the mysterious
classification of castes, produced those equally mysterious criminals
the Thugs, for whose deeds our so utterly different habits and ideas
are quite incapable of finding or conceiving a motive. Our own country
produced the assassinations of Rizzio, Regent Murray, and Archbishop
Sharpe--all pregnant with marked national characteristics;
aristocratic pride, revenge of wrong, and fanatical fury. We propose
to offer for the amusement or instruction--which he pleases--of our
reader, a few more records of Scottish crimes, not probably all so
conspicuously known to the general reader as the three we have just
alluded to, yet not, we trust, without something to commend them to
notice, as characteristic of the country and the age in which they
were respectively enacted.
The raw materials from which we propose to work out our little groups,
are the records of our criminal trials; and yet we feel an insuperable
inclination to begin with a name not certainly unknown, yet not to be
found in the proceedings of the Court of Justiciary--Macbeth, King of
Scotland. Perhaps we might consider it a sufficient reason for holding
his case equivalent to a trial, that before a tribunal called the
Public Opinion, he has been tried, and that at the instance of such a
public prosecutor as never opened his lips in any court of law--one
whose accusation has carried a conviction deep into the very heart of
literature, whence no archæological evidence, and no critical pleading
will ever eradicate it. Nor would we desire to touch it: let Macbeth
the murderer remain to all time the most powerful picture of
temptation, leading its victim through crime into the hideous shadows
of remorse, that human pen has ever drawn. But there was an actual
prose Macbeth, as different from the ideal as the canvass bought by
Raphael of some respectable dealer in the soft line, was from the
Transfiguration which he afterwards painted on it. With _him_, being
but a simple historical king, we may take liberties; and the liberty
we propose to take on the present occasion is that of vindicating his
character. Vindications are fashionable; and since Catiline and
Machiavelli, Richard III., and Philip II. have been vindicated, why
not Macbeth? We shall say 'tis our humour to whiten him, and no man
can say it is a criminal or mischievous one.
The main question is, did Macbeth murder Duncan? It was an older story
in Shakspeare's time than the murder of Darnley is now, and he may
have taken a false view of it. We shall approach the question by an
inquiry who Duncan and Macbeth were, and in what relation they stood
to each other. About the end of the eleventh century, there reigned in
Scotland a king called Kenneth III. Like all the other Scottish
monarchs of the period, the chroniclers have given him his own
peculiar tragic history, in this wise: he was induced to poison the
young prince Malcolm Duff, who might possibly show a title to the
throne enabling him to compete with Kenneth's own offspring. This
troubled his conscience. He "ever dreaded in his mind," in the
expressive words of old Bellenden, that it "should come some time to
light: and was so full of suspicion, that he believed when any man
rounded to his fellow, that they spake evil of him; for it is given by
nature to ilk creature, when he is guilty of any horrible crime, by
impulsion of his conscience, to interpret every thing that he sees to
some terror of himself." He was one night appalled by a terrific
vision, and next morning making his confession, he was sentenced to a
pilgrimage to the tomb of St Palladius at Fordun. When the pilgrimage
was over, he was invited to partake of the hospitalities of a lady
named Fenella--a very neat name for a romance--at her fortalice of
Fettercairn. In the civil conflicts or the administration of justice
during his reign, some of the relations of this lady had been slain;
among the rest her son. Having got the king into her toils, she
resolved to put him to death; and the method which the chroniclers
make her adopt, shows a superfluous ingenuity ridiculous enough to
strip a murder of all its horrors. Kenneth was taken to see a tower of
the castle "quhilk was theeket with copper, and hewn with maist subtle
mouldry of sundry flowers and imageries, the werk so curious, that it
exceeded all the stuff thereof." In the middle of this tower stood an
image of Kenneth himself, in brass, holding in his hand a golden apple
studded with costly gems. "That image," said the lady, "is set up in
honour of thee, to show the world how much I honour my king; the
precious apple is intended for a gift for the king, who will honour
his poor subject by taking it from the hand of the image." Now matters
were so arranged, that the removal of the apple caused certain springs
to touch the triggers of a series of bent cross-bows pointed to the
spot, and so, when the unsuspecting monarch went to take the gift, a
whole sheaf of arrows penetrated to his heart. On the death of this
king, though he left a son called Malcolm, the succession went to a
rival line. His immediate successor was Constantine, who was killed by
another Kenneth, called IV., who in his turn was killed by Malcolm,
who thus regained the throne his father had filled. "The gracious
Duncan" was the son of a daughter of this Malcolm. His father,
strangely enough, appears to have been a priest; he is called in the
old dry chronicles, which are the only ones to be depended on, Duncan
the son of Trini, or Trivi, abbot of Dunkeld. Now the Kenneth IV. of
the rival line, who had been slain by Duncan's grandfather, left
behind him a son, and that son left a daughter, whose name was Gruach,
and in whom the reader, though certainly in an unusual shape, must
welcome Lady Macbeth herself. There being thus two rival races,
alternately seizing the throne: while Duncan was the son of a daughter
of one king, _she_ was the daughter of the son of another. This gave
her no contemptible title to the throne, and when she married Macbeth,
or Machaboedth, as he is called by the chroniclers, she had a husband
who, possessing the almost independent principality of Ross, might be
able to fight her battles. It is somewhat remarkable that, in an
ecclesiastical record still preserved, in which a royal grant is made
to a religious house, dedicated to St Servanus, Macbeth's wife appears
along with himself, as granter of the deed; and they are called,
"Machabet filius Finlach, et Gruach filia Bodhae--Rex et Regina
Scotorum;"[L] an equal juxtaposition, only to be accounted for by the
supposition that Macbeth was king in right of his wife. As to Macbeth
himself, his origin, save in the supernatural legend we shall
hereafter notice, appears not to have been known; but Fordun seems to
intimate, that he was a descendant of that same Fenella who had so
curiously murdered Duncan's great-grandfather. If we were disposed,
indeed, to take a proper antiquarian partisanship of the one dynasty
against the other, we might speak of Duncan as a treacherous usurper,
and Lady Macbeth as an injured and insulted queen, whose cause is
heroically adopted and vindicated by a true knight, who, while
redressing her wrongs, wins her heart and hand.
[L] _Registrum Prioratus Sancti Andreæ_, 114.
Let us now look to the manner in which the death of Duncan is spoken
of by the most ancient authorities. Old Andrew Wyntoun, Prior of St
Serfs on Lochleven, who has never yet, to our great wonder, been
upheld as one of the greatest poets of his own or any other
age,--perhaps we may undertake the task some day, let our readers
judge by the extracts on the present occasion with what prospect of
success:--Wyntoun narrates the event with the true simplicity of
genius, in these two lines:--
"He murthrified him in Elgyne,
His Kynrik he usurped syne."
This is distinct enough, in all truth: there is no ambiguity, or room
for critical doubt; nor is his fellow annalist, Fordun, less distinct,
for he speaks of the slain monarch as _occisus scelere_. But these
chroniclers wrote between three and four centuries after the event
they commemorate, standing chronologically almost as near our own day
as Macbeth's; and when we look into those far older, if not
contemporary, annals, which narrate successive events in the briefest
possible shape, we find that they contain nothing to indicate that
Duncan's death took place in any more atrocious manner than the
multitudinous slaughters of kings, with which their narratives are
often as crowded as a Peninsular campaign gazette with killed
officers. Thus, the register of the Priory of St Andrews simply
states, that Duncan _interfectus est_. It is true that the Latin
language is deficient in any word to express murder as distinguished
from other kinds of slaughter. _Trucido_ is the verb we have been
accustomed to associate most nearly with the idea of assassination;
but in one of the most circumspect and prosaic of the old annals, that
of Tighernac, this very word is applied to the death of Macbeth
himself. Blackstone notices the circumstance that the English lawyers
had to coin, for their own special use, the substantive _murdrum_ and
the verb _murdrare_; equally creditable to their good taste in
Latinity and to the social condition of their country. In fact, the
Romans looked upon death, in any form, as so bad a business, that they
cared little for making nice distinctions about the motive that had
occasioned it, or the manner in which it was effected; and it was a
condition so generally disliked, that, if any man was absurd enough
voluntarily to place himself in it, neither the law nor public opinion
troubled itself to express disapproval, either by driving a stake
through the body or in any other way. Undoubtedly there were
justifiable slaughters and unjustifiable; but the practice of single
combat had not arisen to draw a strong and distinct line between death
in a fair tournament or duel, and secret assassination. A recollection
that this was also the social state of Scotland in the days of
Macbeth, will help us far better towards the truth than a criticism on
the ambiguous Latin words. It was between that age and the period of
Wyntoun and Fordun that single-combat chivalry and the laws of honour
had grown up; so, while the older chroniclers had simply to say that
the man was killed, without troubling themselves about the manner,
those of later date were moved to divide the deaths into two
departments--the killed in combat and the murdered. More, probably, by
chance than design, the fate of Duncan was put into the latter
category; and then a super-structure of particulars was raised upon
it--for it must be observed, that the romantic incidents of the
slaughter were added at a still later period than that of Fordun or
Wyntoun--by Boece and Hollinshed. Here, then, is our case, as lawyers
say: Macbeth, in right of his wife, was a claimant of the crown. He
kills the existing holder; but there is nothing in the older accounts
of the affair to show that he did so otherwise than in the fair course
of war. It was what the old civilians would have called a _casus
belli_,--an expression which, by the way, we find some accomplished
editors using as the Latin for a justification of war. The murder is
found only in the later chronicles, which, in all parts of their
narrative, have covered their more sober predecessors with a coating
of fabulous details like the stalactites of a dripping cave. However
the real fact may have stood, we have no _statement_ of Macbeth having
murdered Duncan until between three and four centuries after the
event. Why,--the case looks vastly better than we thought it did when
we began with it; we have some thoughts of believing our own theory,
which is more than ever we knew a historical critic do, within the
range of our personal observation.
Having so disposed of this question, we are inclined to amuse our
readers with some further notices--real and unreal--about Macbeth.
Wyntoun gives us a strange wild legend of his supernatural parentage,
beginning
"Bot, as we fynd be some stories,
Gotten he was in fairly wys;
His modyr to woods made oft repaire,
For the delyte of halesome air;
Swa sho passed upon a day
'Til a wood her for to play,
Scho met of cas with a fair man
(Never nane so fair as sho thought than
Before than had sho seen with sight)
Of beauty pleasand, and of hycht
Proportioned wele in all measure,
Of limb and lyth a fair figure."
Such is the description of the putative father of Macbeth. In the
sententious explanation of Wyntoun, who scorned expletives, "he the
devil was;" and so he told the wandering damsel--
"And bade her nought fleyed to be of that,
But said that her son should be
A man of great state and bounty;
And na man sould be born of wife
Of power to reve him of his life.
And of that deed in taknyng,
He gave his leman then a ring,
And bade her that sho sould keep that wele,
And hald for his love that jewel."
Wyntoun's melodious verses were lying in a dusty parchment manuscript
when Shakspeare wrote; we know not if he had access to the volume, nor
have we any strong reason for presuming that he would have perused it
if he had. It would be too adventurous to predict whether, knowing the
legend, he would have considered any reference to it as consistent
with the character of his drama; but it is curious to observe, that
the tale appears to have been in the eye of Sir Walter Scott, when he
wrote the history of Brian the Hermit, in the _Lady of the Lake_,
beginning--
"Of Brian's birth strange tales were told:
His mother watch'd a midnight fold."
We shall now indulge our readers with a glance at a totally different
feature in the career of Macbeth. It appears that he was a very able
financier. We presume that he was his own First Lord of the Treasury
and Chancellor of the Exchequer: yet in his days there was no pressure
on the money-market; there was no drain of gold; there was no
restriction of issue; no great houses suspended payment; there were
no rumours of turns-out and distress in the manufacturing districts;
there was no Highland destitution. Our proof of this position lies in
two lines of our illustrious poet Wyntoun, which contain as much as a
smaller genius could have crowded into a volume on "The state and
progress of Scotland during the reign of Macbeth; with an account of
the arts, industry, and manufactures of the country; returns of the
exports and imports, and of the goods entered for home consumption,
with the annual gross and net revenue from customs and excise,
post-office, assessed taxes, hereditary revenue, and other
miscellaneous sources, during that reign: dedicated, by permission, to
the Statistical Society." Wyntoun's simple statement is--
"All his time was great plenté,
Abundant both by land and sea."
What more is necessary? It is true, that on another occasion we have
repudiated Wyntoun as an authority; but it is the privilege of the
antiquarian speculator to found on an author when he is right, and
repudiate him when he is wrong.
We now come to a subject on which really, jocularity apart, we stand
upon firm and secure ground--the spot where Macbeth fell. All the
chroniclers with one voice state that it was at a place called
Lunfanan. Even Raphael Hollinshed, whose version, it is universally
admitted, was the one perused by Shakspeare,--after he tells how the
beleaguered fugitive beheld the miraculous forest with which his doom
was involved approaching him, continues to say--"Nevertheless, he
brought his men in order of battle, and exhorted them to do valiantly:
howbeit, his enemies had scarcely cast from them their boughs, when
Macbeth, perceiving their numbers, betook him straight to flight, whom
Macduff pursued with great hatred, even till he came to Lunfannane."
Perhaps Shakspeare, not knowing precisely where Lunfanan lay, supposed
that it was some spot close to Dunsinane, and did not wish to burden
his action with the particularity of an unimportant movement. Lunfanan
is, however, north of the Dee, and distant full fifty miles in a
straight line from Dunsinane, the rough mountains of the Braes of
Angus lying between the two places; so that the two parties must have
had a pretty long running fight, and Macbeth stood out even harder
game than he has generally credit for. Our favourite poet describes
the chase across the broad valley of Strathmore, through the rocky
glens of Clova, over the Isla and the Esk, down through the hoary
forest of Glentanner, across the raging Dee, and up again through
mountain and forest, in this sententious and emphatic couplet,
"And our the Month they chaised him than
'Till the wood of Lunfanan."
When the victory was completed, we are told that they cut off his
head, and bore it to King Malcolm at Kincardine--a pleasant village on
the banks of the Dee, about ten miles from Lunfanan.
This same Lunfanan is a spot which it requires particular taste to
love, and yet we have perambulated it not without interest. The
Chroniclers speak of it as a forest, but the highest elevations are
now generally bare of trees, save where in a few sheltered hollows the
birches cling to the rocks. The hills are of considerable height, but
round and bare, with few precipices, and little character of outline;
but the glens between the hills are sheltered and well cultivated,
each is enlivened by a small stream, and still more enlivened by the
scanty population seeking the shelter of the recesses of the glen, and
making it populous amid the waste. But we shall afford a better
description than our own, in a few lines from "The Fortunate
Shepherdess," by a poet who lived in a glen not far distant--Alexander
Ross. It will be admitted, by the way, that our poetical quotations
to-day are not of a hackneyed kind, whatever other censure they may
incur.
"The water keely on a level sleed,
Wi' little din, but couthy what it made:
On ilka side the trees grew thick and strang,
And wi' the birds they a' were in a sang;
On ev'ry side, a full bow-shot and mair,
The green was even, gowany, and fair;
With easy sklent, on ev'ry hand, the braes,
To right well up, wi' scattered busses raise,
Wi' goats and sheep aboon, and ky below,
The bonny braes a' in a swarm did go."
Occasionally, when the new earth is turned up, strange uncouth warlike
instruments are found in this district--remnants of ancient strife, so
unlike any weapons recorded in the genuine history of the military
art, that it were hard to say whether they belong to the age of
Macbeth, or to unknown anterior centuries. Flint arrow-heads, stone
hammers and axes,--such is their general character, though we have
also seen among these mysterious discoveries, such a thing as a long
flat mass of decomposed iron, which may have once been the blade of a
dagger, or short sword. Here the knowing reader, who has been induced,
on the field of Waterloo, to purchase a ball-perforated cuirass and
helmet, which he afterwards discovers to have been made at a
manufactory of Waterloo relics, will curl his lip in scorn; but he is
wrong. Lunfanan is no relic-collecting district. We question if the
inhabitants ever made a shilling of any one, the present company
excepted, by the military stores discovered by them when ploughing
their tough peat soil. We did not require there to practise the method
of self-defence which we adopted on a visit to the field of Waterloo;
and by the way--as we are inclined to recommend it strongly to our
friends, as an effectual preservative from the main annoyance to which
the hero-worshipper is subjected--we may here describe our method. On
hiring our guide, we desired him to procure for us a fragment of an
old kettle. Carrying this conspicuously in our hard, to each band of
relic-sellers who came up, we stated that we were in the trade
ourselves, that we had just acquired a very valuable article, and were
willing to part with it at a moderate price. The cuirassiers did not
look more ridiculous, when they attempted to storm the squares, than
our assailants, when we fortified ourselves behind this piece of
defensive armour. But to return to Lunfanan.
In one of the narrow glens, near the old parish-church, there is an
oblong solid turf bank, or mound, of considerable height, and regular
construction, as clean and sharp in its outline as the glacis of a
modern fortification. A neighbouring stream has been diverted round
it, or rather the waters have been divided and distributed on either
side, so as to surround it with a fosse. This curious antiquity is
called "the Peel Bog," or Castle Bog. "The course," says the author of
the statistical account of the parish, "by which the water was
conveyed from the burn of Lunphanan may still be traced; the measure
of the circumvallation by which the water was confined may still be
made; the situation of the drawbridge is still discernible; the path
leading from the fosse to the top of the mound may still be trodden;
and the sluice by which the water issued from the moat, was laid bare
by the flood of 1829."[M] Even the sceptical Lord Hailes ventured to
associate Macbeth's name with the spot; "as no remains of buildings,"
he says, "are to be seen, it is probable that the fortress was
composed of timber and sod. In this solitary place, we may conjecture
that Macbeth sought an asylum." At some distance from the Peel Bog, a
low thin rampart of earth and stone encircles the summit of a conical
hill; it is an inferior specimen of the old British hill-fort, well
known both in Scotland and the north of England. But on the brow of
one of the hills, there is a still more emphatic memorial of the
monarch's fate. There a heap of gray stones, considerably larger than
many others surrounding it, is still called, and is represented in the
county maps as _Cairn Beth_. We must admit that, were it in a
tourist's district, or were it the spot which popular literature, of
any kind had marked as the grave of Macbeth, this would be suspicious.
But no tourist's footstep seeks the quiet uninviting wilds of
Lunfanan. There is no railway line, not even a stage-coach
communication, between it and the world. You have but to see the
rough, primitive, granitic air of the Lunfananers assembled at the
parish church, to know that they are incapable of any imposition.
Legends we always distrust, especially when they are connected with
any spot sanctified by poetry. At Dunsinane, we believe, some
vestiges are shown as marking the spot of the usurper's death, the
"genuine" spot, "all others being spurious imitations;" but we suspect
this legend is not even so old as Shakspeare's day, that it is no
older than the revival of Shakspearean literature, and the rise of a
general public interest in the spots illuminated by his genius.[N] For
more than one castle, Cawdor included, has the merit been claimed of
being the identical edifice in which Duncan was slain, and undoubted
four-posted bedsteads have been shown in actual existence to put
scepticism to scorn. But any popular association of the actual events
of Macbeth's career with quiet remote Lunfanan has been barred by the
silence of Shakspeare, and the unwillingness of topographical critics
to break the spell of the accepted localities. Though legends spring
up like rumours, with a breath, the _names_ of places which they have
received from historical incidents are generally of long standing,
and, indeed, a large proportion of the lowlands of Scotland is full of
places which to this day bear Celtic names, given them by tribes who
cannot have inhabited the districts for a thousand years at least. The
old chroniclers, without exception, lay Macbeth's death in Lunfanan;
the people of the spot, who never read these chronicles, and never,
perhaps, heard of Macbeth, or if they did, heard the popular account
of his death in Dunsinane, call a certain monumental tumulus Cairn
Beth--this, we think, is very nearly conclusive.[O] And yet, sitting
on that Cairn, with the fresh breeze blowing round one, and the blue
heavens above, and the blooming heather-bells around, or reclining on
the smooth green turf of the Peel Bog, on a summer day, with the sun
shining hot upon the hills, and the babbling brook singing its "quiet
tune," it is not easy to associate the spot with that history of blood
and horror, or to feel that its features are ancient, or that they
ever were connected with warfare. In the gloomy, galleries of Glammis
or Cawdor, with their grim old portraits, their armour, their secret
staircases, their mysterious hidden chambers, and iron hooks in the
wall--the idea of the haggard murderer, and all the associations of
his deeds and his remorse creep more vividly on that imaginative
conscience, which more or less makes cowards of us all in such places.
Yet the history of the arts tells us that not one stone of these
edifices, ancient though they be, can have stood upon another till the
history of Macbeth was as old as that of Queen Mary is now. Why, then,
should they retain their hold on us? They are contemporary with
Shakspeare's Macbeth, though not with the historians', and are the
style of edifice in which he cast his tragedy. It must be a feudal
stronghold, heavily arched, buttressed, fortified, and gloomy,--where
the lady in a vaulted half-lighted chamber may say:
"The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements."
[M] New Statistical Account, Aberdeenshire, 1089.
[N] Of the many spots traditionally connected with Ossian, we have no
doubt that the association is no older than the days of James
Macpherson. Yet, to show how fearlessly we adopt our theory, we shall
here state a circumstance appearing to establish a genuine Ossianic
tradition of no common interest, which we wonder never to have seen
introduced in the controversy. The wild glen running from the
neighbourhood of Crieff towards Loch Tay, called Glen Almond or Glen
Almain, is the traditional resting-place of the bones of Ossian. The
reader will remember it from Wordsworth's lines:--
"In this still place remote from men
Sleeps Ossian in the narrow glen,
In this still place where wanders on
But one lone streamlet, only one," &c.
Early in last century, a military road was carried through this glen,
by a set of men brought up in the stiff formal engineering of the
period, who went straight to their end, caring neither for scenery,
nor for legends, for the graves of bards, nor for big stones, as one
of their number--Captain Burt, a very matter-of-fact but clear
narrator, who was present--shows.
"A small part of the way through the glen had been marked out by two
rows of camp colours, placed at a good distance one from another,
whereby to describe the line of the intended breadth and regularity of
the road by the eye. There happened to lie directly in the way, an
exceedingly large stone, and, as it had been made a rule from the
beginning, to carry on the roads in straight lines, as far as the way
would permit, not only to give them a better air, but to shorten the
passengers' journey, it was resolved the stone should be removed, if
possible, though, otherwise, the work might have been carried along on
either side of it.
"The soldiers by vast labour, with their levers and picks, or
hand-screws, tumbled it over and over till they got it quite out of
the way, although it was of such enormous size, that it might be
matter of great wonder how it could ever be removed by human strength
and art, especially to such who had never seen an operation of that
kind; and upon their digging a little way into that part of the
ground, where the centre of the base had stood, there was found a
small cavity about two feet square, which was guarded from the outward
earth, at the bottom, tops, and sides, by square flat stones. This
hollow contained some ashes, scraps of bones, and half burned ends of
stalks of heath; which last we concluded to be a small remnant of a
funeral pile."
Burt, returning to the spot after a short absence, asked the officer
in charge "what had become of the sarcophagus." "He answered that he
had intended to preserve it in the condition I left it, till the
commander-in-chief had seen it, as a curiosity, but that it was not in
his power so to do; for soon after the discovery was known to the
Highlanders, they assembled from distant parts, and, having formed
themselves into a body, they carefully gathered up the relics, and
marched with them in solemn procession to a new place of burial, and
there discharged their fire-arms over the grave, as supposing the
deceased had been a military officer."--BURT'S _Letters_, ii. 188. The
engineer officer, desirous to account for so unaccountable a
proceeding naturally drew on the etiquette of his own profession. We
make the supporters of Ossian a free gift of this anecdote, not
doubting that they will appreciate our liberality.
[O] Alas! it is a world of change. While correcting the press, we have
just heard that some learned antiquary has enlightened the
Lunfananers, and that they have set up a tavern called "The Macbeth
Arms!"
The timber edifice on such an eminence as the Peel Bog--probably, as
the sagacious Lord Hailes imagines, the true character of the edifices
possessed by Macbeth--would no more fill up the true architectural
wants of the drama, than a marble Grecian temple, or a Canadian
settler's log-house.
Crimes briefly told without details have no interest, unless they can
be put in the shape of statistics--some people will be inclined to
deny that the exception is the reverse of the rule. We are not writing
history, and if we were, the historical details which go no further
than that A stabbed B, and C poisoned D, and E mutilated F, are not
such as we are inclined to believe our readers would thank us for. It
is very clear that the death of Duncan, if we had no more than
authentic annals to deal with--if it had been a question merely of
history, and not in some measure incidentally connected with the
highest rank of human intellectual effort--would have formed a very
meagre object of comment. The society of antiquaries might have
endured a paper on it--for such endurance is the martyrdom they have
chosen--but no other person would. In looking, then, down through
Scottish history from the accession of Macbeth's successor, we find
little that can be noticed with any applicability to our particular
purpose, until we reach the time when the records provide us with some
of the details.
Yet there is one very early tragic incident, which appears to us to
have considerable interest, as one of the first striking instances
where the fierce spirit of clan animosity--the burning desire to
avenge the wrongs of the chief--was exhibited by the Highlanders. It
occurred about the year 1242. A tournament was held on the English
Border, at which two young knights, Patrick Earl of Athole, and Walter
de Bysset, a cadet of the family who were lords of the great northern
districts, subsequently the patrimony of Lord Lovat, encountered each
other. Bysset was unhorsed. Not long afterwards, the building in which
the Earl of Athole lived, in Haddington, was burned to the ground, and
he, with several of his followers, died in the flames. By some
accounts the Earl was previously murdered, and the house was burned to
conceal the deed. Let us here have recourse to the distinct and
considerate account of the incident in our favourite poet:--
"Whether it was of recklessness,
Or it of forethought felony was,
Into the Inns, lang ere day,
Quhare that the Earl of Athole lay
A fell fire him to coals brynt,
Thus suddenly was that Earl tynt.
And with him mony ma
There houses and men were brunt alswa."
Some Highland gillies from Bysset's country had been seen in the
neighbourhood, and suspicion immediately fell upon the head of that
house. He tried to prove an alibi--that he was, at the time of the
tragedy, in Forfar, some eighty miles distant from Haddington, doing
the honours of hospitality to the Queen. As our historical poet says:
"But this Sir William at Forfar
That night was late at the supper
With the Queen, and her to chamber led,
And in his own chamber yhed till his bed,"
like a good old country gentleman. But an alibi went for little in a
Highland feud.
"To purge him for this the Queen
Profered her to swear bodily,
But that assythed not the party,
That was stout and of great might,
They said--Wherever he was that night
Bathe his armouries and his men
Intil Haddington were seen then,
When this earl was brynt with fire:
They said the Byssets in their ire
Of auld feud and great discord
That was between them and that lord,
Did that in forethought felony."
It was still the age of ordeals. The hot ploughshares were, perhaps,
obsolete, but single combat was in full practice; and even jury trial
was considered a species of ordeal rather than a deliberate judgment
upon evidence. The accused party in the one case appealed to the
chances of war--or, taking the reference in its more solemn aspect, he
left his cause to be vindicated by the God of battles: in the other,
he threw himself upon the suffrages of his peers. Both ordeals were
considered about equally reasonable and fair; and if the man who
preferred the ordeal of battle were a gigantic warrior, unconquered,
and terrible in the lists, he was, to the true believer in ordeals,
not more formidable than the feeblest of his contemporaries, for a
just Deity might wither his uplifted arm; and if he retained the
physical superiority he had previously indicated, it was because the
All-seeing Eye knew of the justice of his cause. Now Bysset, who seems
to have been somewhat of a sceptic in ordeals, had no objection to
trust the issue to single combat, and challenged whomsoever would dare
to stand forth against him. But he would not submit to an assize or
jury, for he said the whole country had prejudged him. His opponents
had, somehow or other, greater faith in the ordeal of an assize than
that of battle, and would not accept his challenge. In the meantime,
to show his sincerity, he requested the northern clergy to curse and
excommunicate the perpetrators of the deed.
"Sir William Bysset gert for thi,
His chaplain in his chapel,
Denounce cursed with book and bell,
All they that had part
Of that brynnin, or any art.
The Bishop of Aberdeen alswa,
He gart cursed denounce all tha
That either by art or part, or swike,
Gart burn this time that Earl Patricke,
In all the kirks halely
Of Aberdeen's diocesy.
Sir William Bysset this process
Gart be done."
Wild justice began to be enforced in the country of the Byssets, which
was overrun by their enemies: in the pathetic language of our poet--
"His landis quite,
Was for that burning all herryet,
Bathe of nowt, and sheap, and kye,
And all other goods halely."
At length, the Byssets agreed "to come into the king's will," or abide
by his arbitration. They came under an obligation to depart to the
Holy Land, and there for the remainder of their days pray for the soul
of the murdered man. Their broad estates were forfeited, and a portion
of them coming into the hands of a family named Frezelier or Frazer,
they planted the roof-tree of the great chiefship of that name in the
northern Highlands.
There is little doubt that the murder of Athole was a piece of
clannish vengeance over which the chief had no control. His wild
Highland followers saw him unhorsed: it was enough. Into such puerile
refinements as the law of chivalry, which bound him to take the
unhorsing with the meekness of those who turn the left cheek when the
right is smitten, they could not enter. The more they believed in the
high spirit of their chief, the more they would be confident, that he
would exult in a signal vengeance for the insult. Of course, when the
vengeance was accomplished, it would rouse an unquenchable desire of
retaliation in the men of Athole; and indeed it may be conjectured
from the circumstances of the whole proceeding, that the king believed
the Byssets personally innocent, but dared not, for the peace of the
country, allow them to remain in Scotland. And yet, what is on the
whole the most remarkable feature of the Highland feuds of the
day,--neither the Athole nor the Bysset family were old hereditary
patriarchs of the people. They were foreign adventurers, but recently
rooted in the country. The Celtic races seem to have at once rallied
round such intruders, in the strongest and fiercest spirit of
devotion. When a chief had descendants, his race held, of course,
generally a position which a stranger could not shake. But if the
people had quarrelled with their chief, or if from other circumstances
the headship were vacant, they clung with instantaneous tenacity to
the first Norman adventurer to whom the monarch assigned their
territory; and the descendants of these refined sons of chivalry by
degrees assimilated themselves to the people among whom they were
cast; becoming ostensibly of the same race as that over which they
held rule.
The banishment of Bysset was connected with important historical
results. Instead of going to Palestine, per agreement, to pray for the
soul of the slaughtered Earl of Athole, he went, according to Matthew
Paris, to a nearer and more agreeable place, the court of England.
There he fostered in Henry III., those notions of the feudal vassalage
of the Scottish kings to England, which produced the invasion of his
successor, Edward I. Bysset had a considerable personal interest in
this question; for, if the king of England had a paramount superiority
over Scotland, his banishment and forfeiture might be reversed. Such
conduct shocks all historical notions of patriotism; but what better
claim had Scottish nationality on the Norman adventurer, than the
respectability of Juggernaut has on a member of the supreme council of
Calcutta? The ancestors of the house probably came over with William,
a century and a half earlier; the banished lord was perhaps brought
over from England with his father or grandfather, to accept the
chiefship of a portion of the Highland wastes, over which the King of
Scots professed to hold sovereignty. Aggrandisement was the sole
object among the barbarians of the north; and when they ceased to
derive a territorial revenue within Scotland, their connexion with the
country where they lived was as completely closed, as that of the
governor of a colony when he is recalled.
The subsequent history of this race was as strange and eventful as
their first appearance in the Scottish annals. They became great lords
in Ulster; and early in the fifteenth century they were again
represented by a Scotsman, Donald Balloch, the hero of the battle of
Inverlochy, whose mother was the heiress of the Byssets. For some time
after this, we might trace their descent, like the track of a wild
beast, by the marks of rapine and disorder; and at a later period we
finally lose sight of the pedigree of the Byssets, in Montrose's
celebrated ally, Kilkittoch.
Few of the incidental notices connected with those minor offences
which mark the general character of the people, can be found anterior
to the commencement of the criminal records. Hector Boece and our
friend the poet occasionally tell wondrous incidents; but they are not
to be depended on, and few of them have enough of dramatic spirit to
be interesting as fables. We are inclined, however, to mention, in
passing, the judicial feats of stout old Regent Randolph, whom the
poet maintains to have been the greatest of law reformers; in
testimony whereof, he adduces a case in point, far beyond the nicety
of modern juridical philosophy. The regent hanged a man for stealing
his own property. There was a law, that the community should make good
every theft, the perpetrator of which could not be discovered.
Founding on this law, a husbandman secreted his plough-irons, and
received compensation.
"A gready earl soon after was,
Burnin' in sik greediness,
That his plough irons himself stall,
And hid them in a peet pot all.
He playned to the sheriff sare,
That stolen his plough irons were;
The sheriff than paid him shillings twa,
And after that he done had sa,
Soon a great court he gart set,
Wytting of that stelth to get."
The fraud was discovered, and the perpetrator of it hanged.
The murder of James I. is one of the few crimes anterior to the
commencement of the records, of which a contemporary account,
circumstantial and truthlike, has been preserved.[P] Few historical
tragedies bear comparison with this, either in the audacity with which
the assassination was planned, or the relentless atrocity with which
it was perpetrated. Nothing can afford so lively an illustration of
the perilous tenure of the Scottish crown in the fifteenth century. We
would fain have had the telling of this story, and of that part,
especially, where, after the household traitor had removed the great
iron bolt, a young damsel, a daughter of the house of Douglas, thrust
her arm in the socket. "She was but young," says Hector Boece, "and
her bones not solid, and therefore her arm was soon broken in sunder,
and the door dung open by force." Poor child! few have been the acts
of loyal devotion so heroic as hers; but the whole narrative has been
so fully and minutely incorporated with history, as to afford us no
excuse for here repeating it.[Q]
[P] It may be found at the end of vol. i. of Pinkerton's _History of
Scotland_, and in vol. ii. of the collection of reprints called
_Miscellanea Scotica_.
[Q] See Tytler's History, iii. 307, _et seq._
There are, on the other hand, among the early criminal records, two
instances of conspiracy against the life of the monarch, of which the
particulars are not sufficiently ample to give them the interest of
mystery. To excite curiosity, we must see a certain way, while we are
unable to see so far as we desire: but in these cases we have little
more than the accusation and the condemnation. One of the sufferers
was Janet Lady Glammis, condemned to be burned on the 17th of July
1537; we find her name in the criminal record five years earlier,
charged with "art and part of the intoxication of John Lord Glammis
her husband." The charge has not a very formidable sound, but it
doubtless meant either poisoning or sorcery or both; for they were
then held to be one concern, as the Romans showed that they deemed
them by the title they conferred on the witch, "venefica." This trial
is remarkable from the circumstance of a number of gentlemen having
preferred paying a penalty to acting on the jury. Perhaps they were
inclined, as a later bulwark of our constitution is said to have done,
to find a verdict of 'sarved him right.' It was through the
instrumentality of poison that the unfortunate lady was charged with
intending to effect her design against the life of the king; but of
her motive, or ultimate object there is no indication, beyond her
relationship to the Douglas family, and probable connexion with their
intrigues. The other charge of treason occurred so closely at the same
juncture, that for this reason alone historians have supposed that
they had both some untraced connexion with a common plot. The culprit
in this instance was John Master of Forbes, who was charged with a
design to shoot the king as he passed through the town of Aberdeen. It
was a service which he was likely to have performed as successfully as
Bothwellhaugh, for he had already shown his abilities in the murder of
his neighbour, Seton of Meldrum. In those days, the people who took
upon them to fire at kings--very different from the maudlin wretches
whose diseased brains conceive such horrid projects in a civilised
age--knew what they were about, and were generally successful. They
were well accustomed to "break into the bloody house of life;" and the
attempt on a crowned monarch was merely a higher range of practice,
tasking their best abilities. The simple truth is this: that in the
present age we are not accustomed to shooting people, and therefore,
when any wretch takes into his frenzied brain a design to fire at a
Louis Philippe, he gets confused and makes a bungle of it. It is not a
practice suited to the age, and no man of any sense would adopt it.
The earliest of the Scottish criminal records that have been preserved
begin in the reign of James IV., about the year 1488. Mr Pitcairn, who
has generously laid these early records before the public, not at the
expense of the record commission but at his own, says of them,--"The
books of adjournal and minute books of the supreme criminal tribunal
of Scotland, as well as the records of the Justice Aires, &c. at these
remote periods, were kept in an obscure forensic Latin. This
circumstance, added to the well-known difficulty of deciphering the
ordinary MSS. of these centuries, and the fact of the books now
preserved being generally mere scrolls and memoranda, written with
many contractions and evidently during the hurry of the court
proceedings, have hitherto rendered the task of examining them, and
presenting the public with the more important cases, a labour of a
peculiarly irksome and repulsive kind." We do not doubt it, and hence
our gratitude to Mr Pitcairn, for not only deciphering these
discouraging manuscripts, but translating the Latin into English.
Those indeed who, like ourselves, have perused his volumes--if any
other person _has_ perused them--owe a double debt of gratitude to Mr
Pitcairn; for he has enabled us to read, in excellent type, what we
would otherwise have had to decipher in distressing MS., and he has
given us the means of pursuing the task of research by our own
fireside, instead of in the interior of the Register House; while we
have the satisfaction to feel, in perusing his quartos, that the
number of people to whom, in common with ourselves, they have laid the
field open, is a very limited one indeed--so limited, that we shall
consider every quotation we make from his volumes as select and
valuable as if we were able to subjoin MS. _penes auct._ to it.
The earliest of these translations from the old Latin records contain
the minutes of circuit courts on the Borders. The entries are as like
each other as those of a police charge book. Plunder of cattle is the
perpetual theme, and the quantity of business done by individuals is
sometimes startling. Here is an ordinary specimen:--
"Walter Scott of Howpaslot, allowed to compound for treasonably
bringing in William Scott, called _Gyde_, John his brother, and other
traitors of Levyn, to the Hereship of Harehede. Item, for theftuously
and treasonably resetting of Henry Scott and other traitors of Levyn:
item, for the treasonable stouthrief of forty oxen and cows, and two
hundred sheep, from the tenants of Harehede, at the same time. Robert
Scott of Quhitchester became surety for his entry at the next Justice
Aire."
Such were the gentry who, in the words of the namesake of Howpaslot,
"Drove the beeves that made their broth,
From England and from Scotland both."
Another entry like the former, containing more names that will sound
not unfamiliar, may be given as a further specimen. The two, from
their similarity, will satisfy the reader that it would tend little to
edification to make a more extensive selection.
"John Scott of Dalloraine, allowed to compound for art and part of the
resetting of John Rede and John Scott in Tushielaw in his theftuous
deeds; and especially the time that the said John Scott stole a
'drift' of sheep from Thomas Johnson forth of Quhithop. _Item_, for
treasonably resetting Hector Armstrong, a traitor of Levyn, in his
theftuous deeds and treasons, &c. &c. _Item_, for common oppression of
the lieges, in taking and plundering them of their horses and goods by
his own authority. _Item_, for intercommuning with the English in
treasonable manner. _Item_, for common reset of the thieves of
Liddesdaile, Eskdale, and Ewesdale. _Item_, for slaughter of one
called Colthride, &c. &c. Robert Scott of Quhitchester became surety
to satisfy the parties."
The reader of Scottish history knows that, in the year 1530, James V.,
finding that by Circuit Courts of Justiciary he produced little more
effect upon these Border depredators than if he had made a gratuitous
distribution of _Cicero de Officiis_ among them, made war on them, by
leading an army through their country, and destroyed their
strong-holds, as the German free cities destroyed the castles of their
professional brethren on the Rhine. It was on this occasion that
Johnny Armstrong visited him with twenty-four armed "gentlemen,"
according to Pitscottie, "very richly apparelled," and that the king,
turning haughtily round from the freebooter's proffered courtesy said,
"What wants yon knave that a king should have?" There is something sad
in Armstrong's fate. He appears almost to have considered the king one
of his own class,--a leader of men, but a greater leader. Somewhat
pompous and conceited he appears to have been;--somewhat too trustful
in the effect of his hearty hail-fellow-well-met way of approaching
the royal presence. In fact, Johnny Armstrong "did not know his
place," and treated the king too much like a brother freebooter, of a
higher standing than himself. But, in his apprehension and execution,
there is something that makes the nearest possible approach to
treachery; and we can imagine a blush rising in the royal cheek, when
the robber captain turned haughtily round and said, "I am but a fool
to seek grace at a graceless face." The entry regarding the redoubted
leader, in these records, is as brief as it is humiliating, for the
lion had not the telling of the tale;--"John Armstrong, alias BlakJok,
and Thomas his brother, convicted of common theft, and reset of theft,
&c., hanged."
During the same reign, outbreaks in the Highlands assumed a somewhat
similar character to those of the Border rievers; but the Celts
conducted their operations on a much larger scale, and we intend to
devote to them a separate paper.
The disturbances connected with the Reformation are essentially a part
of the history of the kingdom, and in that shape too well known to
have a place here: but a considerable time before these great
convulsions, some smaller offences occasionally connected themselves
with the priesthood, and their relation to the rest of the community.
Even in the days when the church of Rome was so far Catholic as to be
almost co-extensive with Christianity, Scotland was not without
occasional ebullitions, in which the savage nature burst the spiritual
bonds that, in its ordinary moments, held it in subjection. Boece
relates an affair of this sort, and its consequences, with a rapidity
almost unmatched, when we consider the quantity and the serious
character of the business transacted. It was in the reign of Alexander
III. that, according to his translator, "The men of Caithness burnt
Adam, their bishop, after that he had cursed them for non-payment of
their teinds. King Alexander hearing sic terrible cruelty done to this
noble prelate, ceased not till four hundred of the principal doers
thereof were hanged." "King Alexander," continues the chronicler, "for
this punition was gretumly beloved by the Pope." No wonder! Nearly
contemporary with the crusade of James V. against the Border rievers,
was the murder of James Inglis, abbot of Culross, by Blacater baron of
Tullyallan, and William Lothian, a priest, both of whom were found
guilty and beheaded, while others were acquitted. The trial seems to
have excited much interest, for Bishop Leslie tells us that the
ceremony of the degradation of the priest, previously to his being
handed over to the civil power, took place upon "ane public scaffold
in the toun of Edinburgh," "the King, the Queen, and a great multitude
of people being present." A year or two afterwards we find the
somewhat singular circumstance of a whole list of priests charged with
an act of violence;--"John Roull, prior of Pittenweem; Patrick and
Bartholomew Forman, and six other canons; Mr Alexander Ramsay, rector
of Muckart; Sir John Ramsay, and three other chaplains, and John
Blackadder, parish clerk of Sawling." They were re-pledged to be tried
by their own ecclesiastical court. It appears that, in the course of a
dispute regarding the right to the produce of the land of Pittenweem,
an officer of the court was appointed to reap the crop. When he
repaired to the spot, the sub-prior and an assemblage of followers
threatened him with violence. He found himself placed in a very
curious position, and made an equally curious request. When a
messenger is deforced, those who have used violence are liable to
damages. The messenger on this occasion, being a shrewd and
calculating man, surveyed the forces of his opponents before making a
"return of deforcement." To his mortification he perceived that, to
use an expression of modern origin, "they were not worth powder and
shot." There were none among them "but religious men and priests,
hinds' wives and bairns, which were not responsal to our sovereign
lord gif he had taken deforce." He made a request that they should
"send for Andrew Wood in Pittenweem, John Brown of Anstruther, the
laird of Balcasky, or some other responsal persons, to stop him, so
that he might indorse his deforcement and depart, which they plainly
refused." The request was about as reasonable as if a gentleman,
knocked down by a ragged ruffian, were to ask him to get some
capitalist, able to pay respectable damages, to come and aid in the
operation. The prior, meanwhile, came to the assistance of his
subordinates, and put himself at the head of a truly formidable array:
three hundred men, who "with hagbuts, culverings, cross-bows,
hand-bows, spears, halberts, axes, and swords, came in arrayed battle,
with convocation and ringing of their common bell," and, falling on
the messenger's party, "shot divers pieces of artillery at them." The
ecclesiastical people were removed to their own court, so that we lose
trace of the proceedings against them. Some of the laymen were charged
with the slaughter of the messenger's followers, and others outlawed
for failing to appear.
The same Spartan brevity that characterises the early portions of the
criminal records, sometimes reduces the history of bloody family
feuds, the particulars of which might fill volumes of romance, to the
most tantalising dimensions. They are rather inventoried or enumerated
by head-mark, than even recorded, and generally present no more
satisfactory detail than the following:--
"1554, Oct. 26.--Robert Henry, alias _Deill amang us_,
convicted of art and part of the cruel slaughter of Thomas
Bissate, young laird of Querrel. Beheaded."
"1532, July 3.--Rolland Lindesay, Alan Lokhart of Lee, and
William Mosman, convicted of art and part of the cruel
slaughter of Ralph Weir. Beheaded."
That one of the parties might be a magistrate administering the law,
was no impediment to the prosecution of a feud, but rather served to
give solemnity and importance to the perpetration of some act of
vengeance: thus--
"1527, October 8.--George Ramsay of Clatty, John Betoune of
Balfour, James Betoune Of Melgum, John Grahame of
Claverhouse, and others, found caution to underly the law at
the first Justice Aire of Fife, for convocation of the
lieges, to the number of 80 persons, and in warlike manner
invading John Lord Lindesay, Sheriff of Fife, in the
execution of his office, in a fenced court within the
Tolbooth of Cowper, the doors being shut, and the assize
inclosed; and for breaking up the said doors."
The meagreness of these entries whets one's appetite for some detail
of the stirring and tragical events of which they form the bare
indexes. With the exception of the great Highland feuds, which burned
on so large a scale as to be in a manner historical, the earliest
detailed account of a crime arising in family animosity is connected
with the feud between the Drummonds and the Blairs in the year 1554.
The crime which brought the feud within the notice of the law, was the
murder of George Drummond of Leadcrieff and William his son. The
perpetrators, besides a long list of Blairs, include several other
names still known in the Braes of Perthshire--such as Chalmers,
Butter, Smyth, and Robertson. They were charged with assembling to the
number of eighty, "with jacks, coats of mail, steel bonnets,
lance-staffs, long culverings with lighted lints, and other weapons
invasive." The day on which this tumultuous assembly proceeded to
their work of vengeance was a Sunday, and the place chosen for the
perpetration was the church of Blair. Being apparently afraid of the
number of friends and retainers by whom their victims happened to be
surrounded during the performance of divine worship, it is stated that
they were obliged to postpone their purpose, and that "they passed to
the Laird of Gormok's place, and their dyned with him:" a pretty large
dinner-party, certainly. Leaving spies to watch the enemy's motions,
they were soon afterwards summoned to their task, and their victims
became an easy prey. The occupation of Drummond and his son--when we
remember that it was a Sabbath afternoon--might, perhaps, be scarcely
considered so characteristic of Scottish habits as their
assassination. They were "alane, at their pastime-play, at the
row-bowles, in the high market-gate, beside the kirk of Blair, in
sober manner, trusting na trouble nor harm to have been done to them,
but to have lived under God's peace."
The retribution on the offenders is certainly not the least curious
part of the affair. That eighty armed men should seize, and put to
death, two individuals, either in or out of a church, appears to have
been a matter with which the law and the public were under no
obligation to interfere, if the parties immediately interested could
come to terms. Accordingly, we find on the record some fragments of a
negotiation between the head of the Drummonds and the murderers. Some
of them, among other more substantial offers, agree "to gang, or cause
to gang," the four head pilgrimages of Scotland; to do penance for the
souls of the dead for any reasonable number of years; and, thirdly,
"to do honour to the kin and friends" by kneeling and offering the
handle of a naked sword held by the point. These offers are treated
with some disdain, as too "general and simple" to require an answer. A
further offer of a thousand merks is treated with more attention; but
the kin declare that it is far too small a fine "for the committing of
so high, cruell, and abominable slaughters and mutilations of set
purpose." To heighten the picture, the deed of the murderers is set in
contrast with the peaceable and inoffensive conduct of the deceased,
whose great merit was his "never offending them, neither by drawing of
blood, taking kirks, tacks, steadings, or rooms, over any of their
heads, or their friends'." Thus the murder would have been considered
less unjustifiable, if the victim had ever been concerned in ejecting
his assailants from their holdings, or offering to take them "over
their head:" a doctrine of the sixteenth century in Scotland, which
events of the nineteenth, in other parts of the empire, have made only
too intelligible. The negotiation was not quite successful, for some
of the parties were beheaded. One of them, Chalmers of Drumlochie,
along with an offer to let his son marry Drummond's daughter, and his
cousin marry his sister, "without any tocher,"--an arrangement which
he seems to have thought might be equivalent to "lands, goods, or
money," of none of which was he possessed,--proclaimed himself "ready
to do any other thing quhilk is possible to him, as please my lord and
friends to lay to his charge, except his life and heritage." He bound
himself to Lord Drummond as a personal vassal and follower, by a "band
of man-rent:" an instrument well-known in old Scottish jurisprudence,
and perpetually cropping out in connexion with any historical
events--such as the murder of Rizzio,--in which many persons united
themselves together for the perpetration of a great crime. It was a
curious feature of national character,--the form of law running down
through every thing, even to the very document framed for setting law
at defiance. Chalmers' bond was merely one of general partisanship and
following, and he bound himself to the Drummonds, and their heirs, to
"take their true and one-fold part, in all and sundry their actions
and causes, and ride and gang with them therein upon their expenses,
when they require me or my heirs thereto, against all and sundry
persons, our sovereign lady and the authority of this realm alanerly
excepted. And hereto I bind and oblige me and my heirs to the said
noble and mighty lord and his heirs in the straitest form and sicker
stile of band of manrent that can be devised, no remeid nor exception
of law to be proponed nor alleged in the contrair." It might be no
small consolation to the chief who had lost a vassal to get a slave in
his stead; but the public peace would not be much benefited by this
method of settlement.
Some of the precautions against turbulent offences are not less
curious tha
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/40071