SPIRIT
OF
CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL.

SPIRIT
OF
CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL:

ORIGINAL TALES, ESSAYS, AND SKETCHES,
SELECTED FROM THAT WORK.
BY
WILLIAM AND ROBERT CHAMBERS.
EDINBURGH:
W. & R. CHAMBERS, WATERLOO PLACE; AND
ORR & SMITH, LONDON.
1834.

PRINTED BY W. & R. CHAMBERS, 19, WATERLOO PLACE, EDINBURGH.

NOTICE.

By the recommendation of a number of their friends and agents, Messrs Chambers have been induced to reprint a selection of the principal original articles of their Journal; in order that such individuals as might desire to possess those articles in a portable shape, distinct from the mass of compilations and extracts with which they were accompanied in the numbers, might be gratified in their wish; and in order that this new series of Essays, in which an attempt has been made, almost for the first time, to delineate the maxims and manners of the middle ranks of society, might have an opportunity, in the shape of a book, of attracting the attention of those by whom it might be overlooked in its original form and progressive mode of publication.

The articles embodied in the present volume are chiefly selected from the forty earliest numbers of the Journal. Should it be favourably received, the authors will probably, from time to time, throw further selections into the same form.

Edinburgh, February 12, 1834.

CONTENTS.

SPIRIT

OF

CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL.

LADY JEAN.—A Tale.

The Yerl o’ Wigton had three dauchters,

Oh, braw walie! they were bonnie!

The youngest o’ them, and the bonniest too,

Has fallen in love wi’ Richie Storie.

Old Ballad.

The Earl of Wigton, whose name figures in Scottish annals of the reign of Charles the Second, had three daughters, named Lady Frances, Lady Grizel, and Lady Jean—the last being by several years the youngest, and by many degrees the most beautiful. All the three usually resided with their mother at the chief seat of the family, Cumbernauld House, in Stirlingshire; but the two eldest were occasionally permitted to attend their father at Edinburgh, in order that they might have some chance of obtaining lovers at the court held there by the Duke of Lauderdale, while Lady Jean was kept constantly at home, and debarred from the society of the capital, lest her superior beauty might interfere with, and foil, the attractions of her sisters, who, according to the notion of that age, had a sort of right of primogeniture in matrimony, as well as in what was called heirship.

It may be easily imagined that while the two marriageable ladies were enjoying all the delights of a third flat in one of the closes of the Canongate, spending their days in seeing beaux, and their nights in dreaming of them, Lady Jean led no pleasant life amidst the remote and solitary splendours of Cumbernauld, where her chief employment was the disagreeable one of attending her mother, a very infirm and querulous old dame, much given (it was said) to strong waters. At the period when our tale opens, Lady Jean’s charms, though never seen in the capital, had begun to make some noise there; and the curiosity excited respecting them amongst the juvenile party of the vice-regal court, had induced Lord Wigton to confine her ladyship even more strictly than heretofore, lest, perchance, some gallant might make a pilgrimage to his country-seat in order to behold her, and, from less to more, induce her to quit her retirement, in such a way as would effectually discomfit his schemes for the pre-advancement of his elder daughters. He had been at pains to send an express to Cumbernauld, ordering Lady Jean to be confined to the precincts of the house and the terrace-garden, and to be closely attended in all her movements by a trusty domestic. The consequence was, that the young lady complained most piteously to her deaf old lady-mother of the tedium and listlessness of her life, and wished with all her heart that she were as ugly, old, and happy as her sisters.

Lord Wigton was not insensible to the cruelty of his policy, however well he might be convinced of its advantage and necessity; he loved his youngest daughter more than the rest; and it was only in obedience to what he conceived to be the commands of duty, that he subjected her to this restraint. His lordship, therefore, felt anxious to alleviate in some measure the desagremens of her solitary confinement; and knowing her to be fond of music, he had sent to her by the last messenger a theorbo lute, with which he thought she would be able to amuse herself in a way very much to her mind—not considering that, as she could not play upon the instrument, it would be little better to her than an unmeaning toy. By the return of his messenger, he received a letter from Lady Jean, thanking him for the theorbo, but making him aware of his oversight, and begging him to send some person who could teach her to play.

The earl, whose acquirements in the philosophy of politics had never been questioned, felt ashamed of having committed such a solecism in so trivial a matter; and, like all men anxious to repair or conceal an error in judgment, immediately ran into another of ten times greater consequence and magnitude: he gratified his daughter in her wish.

The gentry of Scotland were at that time in the custom of occasionally employing a species of servants, whose accomplishments and duties would now appear of a very anomalous character, though at that time naturally arising from the peculiar situation of this country, in respect to its southern neighbour. They were, in general, humble men who had travelled a good deal, and acquired many foreign accomplishments; who, returning to their native country after an absence of a few years, usually entered into the service of the higher class of families, partly as ordinary livery-men, and partly with the purpose of instructing the youth of both sexes, as they grew up and required such exercises, in dancing, music, writing, &c., besides a vast variety of other arts, comprehended in the general phrase of breeding. Though these men received much higher wages, and were a thousand times more unmanageable than common serving-men, they served a good purpose in those days, when young people had scarcely any other opportunities of acquiring the ornamental branches of education, except by going abroad. It so happened, that not many days after Lord Wigton received his daughter’s letter, he was applied to for employment by one of these useful personages, a tall and handsome youth, apparently five-and-twenty, with dark Italian-looking features, a slight moustache, and as much foreign peculiarity in his dress as indicated that he was just returned from his travels. After putting a few questions, his lordship discovered that the youth was possessed of many agreeable accomplishments; was, in particular, perfectly well qualified to teach the theorbo, and had no objection to entering the service of a young lady of quality—only, with the proviso that he was to be spared the disgrace of a livery. Lord Wigton then made no scruple in engaging him for a certain period; and next day saw the youth on the way to Cumbernauld, with a letter from his lordship to Lady Jean, setting forth all his good qualities, and containing among other endearing expressions, a hope that she would both benefit by his instructions, and be in the meantime content on their account with her present residence.

Any occurrence at Cumbernauld, of higher import than the breaking of a needle in embroidering, or the miscarriage of a brewing of currant wine, would have been quite an incident in the eyes of Lady Jean; and even to have given alms at the castle-gate to an extraordinary beggar, or to see so much as a stranger in the candle, might have supplied her with amusement infinite, and speculation boundless. What, then, must have been her delight, when the goodly and youthful figure of Richard Storie alighted one dull summer afternoon at the gate, and when the credentials he presented disclosed to her the agreeable purpose of his mission! Her joy knew no bounds; nor did she know in what terms to welcome the stranger: she ran from one end of the house to the other, up stairs and down stairs, in search of she knew not what; and finally, in her transports, she shook her mother out of a drunken slumber, which the old lady was enjoying as usual in her large chair in the parlour.

Master Richard, as he was commonly designated, soon found himself comfortably established in the good graces of the whole household of Cumbernauld, and not less so in the particular favour of his young mistress. Even the sour old lady of the large chair was pleased with his handsome appearance, and was occasionally seen to give a preternatural nod and smile at some of his musical exhibitions, as much as to say she knew when he performed well, and was willing to encourage humble merit. As for Lady Jean, whose disposition was equally lively and generous, she could not express in sufficiently warm terms her admiration of his performances, or the delight she experienced from them. Nor was she ever content without having Master Richard in her presence, either to play himself, or to teach her the enchanting art. She was a most apt scholar—so apt, that in a few days she was able to accompany him with the theorbo and voice, while he played upon an ancient harpsichord belonging to the old lady, which he had rescued from a lumber room, and been at some pains to repair. The exclusive preference thus given to music, for the time, threw his other accomplishments into the shade, while it, moreover, occasioned his more constant presence in the apartments of the ladies than he would have been otherwise entitled to. The consequence was, that in a short time he almost ceased to be looked upon as a servant, and began gradually to assume the more interesting character of a friend and equal.

It was Lady Jean’s practice to take a walk prescribed by her father, every day in the garden, on which occasions the countess conceived herself as acting up to the letter of her husband’s commands, when she ordered Master Richard to attend his pupil. This arrangement was exceedingly agreeable to Lady Jean, as they sometimes took out the theorbo, and added music to the other pleasures of the walk. Another out-of-doors amusement, in which music formed a chief part, was suggested to them by the appropriate frontispiece of a book of instruction for the theorbo, which Master Richard had brought with him from Edinburgh. This engraving represented a beautiful young shepherdess, dressed in the fashionable costume of that period—a stupendous tower of hair hung round with diamonds, and a voluminous silk gown with a jewel-adorned stomacher, a theorbo in her arms and a crook by her side—sitting on a flowery bank under a tree, with sheep planted at regular distances around her. At a little distance appeared a shepherd with dressed hair, long-skirted coat, and silk stockings, who seemed to survey his mistress with a languishing air of admiration, that appeared singularly ridiculous, as contrasted with the coquettish and contemptuous aspect of the lady. The plate referred to a particular song in a book, entitled “A Dialogue betwixt Strephon and Lydia, or the Proud Shepherdess’s Courtship,” the music of which was exceedingly beautiful, while the verses were the tamest and most affected trash imaginable. It occurred to Lady Jean’s lively fancy, that if she and her teacher were to personify the shepherdess and shepherd, and thus, as it were, to transform the song to a sort of opera, making the terrace-garden the scene, not a little amusement might be added to the pleasure she experienced from the mere music alone. This fancy was easily reduced to execution; for, by seating herself under a tree, in her ordinary dress, with the horticultural implement called a rake by her side, she looked the very Lydia of the copper-plate; while Richard, standing at his customary respectful distance, with his handsome person, and somewhat foreign apparel, was a sufficiently good representation of Strephon. After arranging themselves thus, Master Richard opened the drama by addressing Lady Jean in the first verse of the song, which contained, besides some description of sunrise, a comparison between the beauties of nature at that delightful period, and the charms of Lydia, the superiority being of course awarded to the latter. Lady Jean, with the help of the theorbo, replied to this in a very disdainful style, affecting to hold the compliments of lovers very cheap, and asseverating that she had no regard for any being on earth besides her father and mother, and no care but for these dear innocent sheep (here she looked kindly aside upon a neighbouring bed of cabbages), which they had entrusted to her charge. Other verses of similar nonsense succeeded, during which the representative of the fair Lydia could not help feeling rather more emotion at hearing the ardent addresses of Strephon than was strictly consistent with her part. At the last it was her duty to rise and walk softly away from her swain, declaring herself utterly insensible to both his praises and his passion, and her resolution never again to see or speak to him. This she did in admirable style, though, perhaps, rather with the dignified gait and sweeping majesty of tragedy-queen, than with any thing like the pettish or sullen strut of a disdainful rustic; meanwhile Strephon was supposed to be left inconsolable. Her ladyship continued to support her assumed character for a few yards, till a turn of the walk concealed her from Master Richard; when, resuming her natural manner, she turned back, with sparkling eyes, in order to ask his opinion of her performances; and it was with some confusion, and no little surprise, that on bursting again into his sight, she discovered that Richard had not yet thrown off his character. He was standing still, as she had left him, fixed immovably upon the spot, in an attitude expressive of sorrow for her departure, and bending forwards as if imploring her return. It was the expression of his face that astonished her most; for it was not at all an expression appropriate to either his own character or to that which he had assumed. It was an expression of earnest and impassioned admiration; his whole soul seemed thrown into his face, which was directed towards her, or rather the place where she had disappeared; and his eyes were projected in the same direction, with such a look as that perhaps of an enraptured saint of old at the moment when a divinity parted from his presence. This lasted, however, but for a moment; for scarcely had that minute space of time elapsed, before Richard, startled from his reverie by Lady Jean’s sudden return, dismissed from his face all trace of any extraordinary expression, and stood before her (endeavouring to appear) just what he was, her ladyship’s respectful servant and teacher. Nevertheless, this transformation did not take place so quickly as to prevent her ladyship from observing the present expression, nor was it accomplished with such address as to leave her room for passing it over as unobserved. She was surprised—she hesitated—she seemed, in spite of herself, conscious of something awkward—and finally she blushed slightly. Richard caught the contagion of her confusion in a double degree; and Lady Jean, again, became more confused on observing that he was aware of her confusion. Richard was the first to recover himself and speak. He made some remarks upon her singing and her acting—not, however, upon her admirable performance of the latter part of the drama; this encouraged her also to speak, and both soon became somewhat composed. Shortly afterwards they returned to the house; but from that moment a chain of the most delicate yet indissoluble sympathies began to connect the hearts of these youthful beings, so alike in all natural qualities, and so dissimilar in every extraneous thing which the world is accustomed to value.

After this interview there took place a slight estrangement between Master Richard and Lady Jean, that lasted a few days, during which they had much less of both conversation and music than for some time before. Both observed this circumstance; but each ascribed it to accident, while it was in reality occasioned by mutual reserve. Master Richard was afraid that Lady Jean might be offended were he to propose any thing like a repetition of the garden drama; and Lady Jean, on her part, could not, consistently with the rules of maidenly modesty, utter even a hint at such a thing, however she might secretly wish or long for it. The very consciousness, reciprocally felt, of having something on their minds, of which neither durst speak, was sufficient to produce the said reserve, though the emotions of “the tender passion” had not come in, as they did, for a large share of the cause.

At length, however, this reserve was so far softened down, that they began to resume their former practice of walking together in the garden; but though the theorbo continued to make one of the party, no more operatic performances took place. Nevertheless, the mutual affection which had taken root in their hearts experienced on this account no abatement, but, on the contrary, continued to increase. As for Master Richard, it was no wonder that he should be deeply smitten with the charms of his mistress; for ever as he stole a long, furtive glance at her graceful form, he thought he had never seen, in Spain or in Italy, any such specimens of female loveliness; and (if we may let the reader as far into the secret) he had indeed come to Cumbernauld with the very purpose of falling in love. Different causes had operated upon Lady Jean. Richard being the first love-worthy object she had seen since the period when the female heart becomes most susceptible—the admiration with which she knew he beheld her—his musical accomplishments, which had tended so much to her gratification—all conspired to render him precious in her sight. In the words of a beautiful modern ballad, “all impulses of soul and sense had thrilled” her gentle and guileless heart—

——hopes, and fears that kindled hope,

An undistinguishable throng,

And gentle wishes, long subdued,

Subdued and cherished long,

had exercised their tender and delightful influence over her; like a flower thrown upon one of the streams of her own native land, whose course was through the beauties, the splendours, and the terrors of nature, she was borne away in a dream, the magic scenery of which was alternately pleasing, fearful, and glorious, and from which she could no more wake than could the flower restrain its course on the gliding waters. The habit of contemplating her lover every day, and that in the dignified character of an instructor, gradually blinded her in a great measure to his humbler quality, and to the probable sentiments of her father and the world upon the subject of her passion. If by any chance such a consideration was forced upon her notice, and she found occasion to tremble lest the sentiments in which she was so luxuriously indulging should end in disgrace and disaster, she soon quieted her fears, by reverting to an idea which had lately occurred to her—namely, that Richard was not what he seemed. She had heard and read of love assuming strange disguises. A Lord Belhaven, in the immediately preceding period of the civil war, had taken refuge from the fury of Cromwell in the service of an English nobleman, whose daughter’s heart he won under the humble disguise of a gardener, and whom, on the recurrence of better times, he carried home to Scotland as his lady. This story was then quite popular, and at least one of the parties still survived to attest its truth. But even in nursery tales Lady Jean could find examples which justified her own passion. The vilest animals, she knew, on finding some beautiful dame, who was so disinterested as to fall in love with them, usually turned out to be the most beautiful princes that ever were seen, and invariably married and made happy the ladies whose affection had restored them to their natural form and just inheritance. Who knows, she thought, but Richard may some day, in a transport of passion, throw open his coat, exhibit the star of nobility glittering on his breast, and ask me to become a countess?

Such are the excuses which love suggests to reason, and which the reason of lovers easily accepts; while those who are neither youthful nor in love wonder at the hallucination of their impassioned juniors. Experience soon teaches us that this world is not one of romance, and that few incidents in life ever occur out of the ordinary way. But before we acquire this experience by actual observation, we all of us regard things in a very different light. The truth seems to be, that, in the eyes of youth, “the days of chivalry” do not appear to be “gone;” our ideas are then contemporary, or upon a par with the early romantic ages of the world; and it is only by mingling with mature men, and looking at things as they are, that we at length advance towards, and ultimately settle down in, the real era of our existence. Was there ever yet youth who did not feel some chivalrous impulses—some thirst for more glorious scenes than those around him—some aspirations after lofty passion and supreme excellence—or who did not cherish some pure first-love, that could not prudentially be gratified?

The greater part of the rest of the summer passed away before the lovers came to an eclaircissement; and such, indeed, was their mutual reserve upon the subject, that, had it not been for the occurrence of a singular and deciding circumstance, there appeared little probability of this ever otherwise taking place. The Earl of Home, a gay and somewhat foolish young nobleman, one morning after attending a convivial party where the charms of Lady Jean Fleming formed the principal topic of discourse, left Edinburgh and took the way to Cumbernauld, on the very pilgrimage, and with the very purpose which Lord Wigton had before anticipated. Resolved first to see, then to love, and lastly to run away with the young lady, his lordship skulked about for a few days, and at last had the pleasure of seeing the hidden beauty over the garden wall, as she was walking with Master Richard. He thought he had never seen any lady who could be at all compared to Lady Jean, and, as a matter of course, resolved to make her his own, and surprise all his companions at Edinburgh with his success and her beauty. He watched again next day, and happening to meet Master Richard out of the bounds of Cumbernauld policy, accosted him, with the intention of securing his services in making his way towards Lady Jean. After a few words of course, he proposed the subject to Richard, and offered a considerable bribe, to induce him to work for his interest. Richard at first rejected the offer, but immediately after, on bethinking himself, saw fit to accept it. He was to mention his lordship’s purpose to Lady Jean, and to prepare the way for a private interview with her. On the afternoon of the succeeding day, he was to meet Lord Home at the same place, and tell him how Lady Jean had received his proposals. With this they parted—Richard to muse on this unexpected circumstance, which he saw might blast all his hopes unless he should resolve upon prompt and active measures, and the Earl of Home to enjoy himself at the humble inn of the village of Cumbernauld, where he had for the last few days enacted the character of “the daft lad frae Edinburch, that seemed to ha’e mair siller than sense.”

On the morning of the tenth day after Master Richard’s first interview with Lord Home, that faithful serving-man found himself jogging swiftly along the road to Edinburgh, mounted on a stout nag, with the fair Lady Jean seated comfortably on a pillion behind him. It was a fine morning in autumn, and the road had a peculiarly gay appearance from the multitude of country-people, mounted and dismounted, who seemed also hastening towards the capital. Master Richard, upon inquiry, discovered that it was the market-day, a circumstance which seemed favourable to his design, by the additional assurance it gave him of not being recognised among the extraordinary number of strangers who might be expected to crowd the city on such an occasion. The lovers approached the city by the west, and the first street they entered was the suburban one called Portsburgh, which leads towards the great market-place of Edinburgh. Here Richard, impatient as he was, found himself obliged, like many other rustic cavaliers, to reduce the pace of his horse to a walk, on account of the narrowness and crowded state of the street. This he felt the more disagreeable, as it subjected him and his interesting companion to the close and leisurely scrutiny of the inhabitants. Both had endeavoured to disguise every thing remarkable in their appearance, so far as dress and demeanour could be disguised; yet, as Lady Jean could not conceal her extraordinary beauty, and Richard had not found it possible to part with a slight and dearly-beloved moustache, it naturally followed that they were honoured with a good deal of staring. Many an urchin upon the street threw up his arms as they passed along, exclaiming “Oh! the black-bearded man!” or, “Oh! the bonnie leddie!”—the men all admired Lady Jean, the women Master Richard—and many an old shoemaker ogled them earnestly over his half-door, with his spectacles pushed up above his dingy cowl. The lovers, who had thus to run a sort of gauntlet of admiration and remark, were glad when they reached an inn, which Richard, who was slightly acquainted with the town, knew to be a proper place for the performance of a half-merk marriage. They alighted, and were civilly received by an obsequious landlady, who conducted them into an apartment at the back of the house. There Lady Jean was for a short time left to make some arrangements about her dress, while Richard disclosed to the landlady in another room the purpose upon which he was come to her house, and consulted her about procuring a clergyman. The dame of the house, to whom a clandestine marriage was the merest matter of course, showed the utmost willingness to facilitate the design of her guests, and said that she believed a clerical official might be procured in a few minutes, provided that neither had any scruples of conscience, as “most part of fouk frae the west had,” in accepting the services of an Episcopal clergyman. The lover assured her that, so far from having any objection to “a government minister,” for so they were sometimes termed, he would prefer such to any other, as both he and his bride belonged to that persuasion. The landlady heard this declaration with complacency, which showed that she loved her guests the better for it; and told Richard that, if he pleased, she would immediately introduce to him the Dean of St Giles, who, honest man, was just now taking his meridian in the little back garret parlour, along with his friend and gossip, Bowed Andrew, the waiter of the West Port. To this Richard joyfully assented, and speedily he and Lady Jean were joined in their room by the said dean, a squat little gentleman, with a drunken but important-looking face, and an air of consequentiality even in his stagger, that was partly imposing and partly ridiculous. He addressed his clients with a patronising simper, of which the effect was grievously disconcerted by an unlucky hiccup, and in a speech which might have had the intended tone of paternal and reverend authority, had it not been smattered and degraded into shreds by the crapulous insufficiency of his tongue. Richard cut short his ill-sustained attempts at dignity, by requesting him to partake of some liquor. His reverence almost leaped at the proffered jug, which contained ale. He first took a tasting, then a sip—shaking his head between—next a small draught, with a still more convulsion-like shake of the head; and lastly, he took a hearty and persevering swill, from the effects of which his lungs did not recover for at least twenty respirations. The impatient lover then begged him to proceed with the ceremony, which he forthwith commenced in presence of the landlady and the above-mentioned Bowed Andrew; and in a few minutes, Richard and Lady Jean were united in the holy bands of matrimony.

When the ceremony was concluded, and both the clergyman and the witnesses had been satisfied and dismissed, the lovers left the house, with the design of walking forwards into the city. In conformity to a previous arrangement, Lady Jean walked first, like a lady of quality, and Richard followed closely behind, with the dress and deportment of her servant. Her ladyship was dressed in her finest suit, and adorned with her finest jewels, all which she had brought from Cumbernauld on purpose, in a mail or leathern trunk—for such was the name then given to the convenience now entitled a portmanteau. Her step was light, and her bearing gay, as she moved along—not on account of the success which had attended her expedition, or her satisfaction in being now united to the man of her choice, but because she anticipated the highest pleasure in the sight of a place whereof she had heard such wonderful stories, and from a participation in whose delights she had been so long withheld. Like all persons educated in the country, she had been regaled in her infancy with magnificent descriptions of the capital—of its buildings, that seemed to mingle with the clouds—its shops, which apparently contained more wealth than all the world beside—of its paved streets (for paved streets were then wonders in Scotland)—and, above all, of the grand folks who thronged its Highgates, its Canongates, and its Cowgates—people whose lives seemed a perpetual holiday, whose attire was ever new, and who all lived in their several palaces. Though, of course, Edinburgh had then little to boast of, the country people who occasionally visited it did not regard it with less admiration than that with which the peasantry of our own day may be supposed to view it now that it is something so very different. It was then, as well as now, the capital of the country, and, as such, bore the same disproportion in point of magnificence to inferior towns, and to the country in general. In one respect, it was superior to what it is at the present day—namely, in being the seat of government and of a court. Lady Jean had often heard all its glorious peculiarities described by her sisters, who, moreover, sometimes took occasion to colour the picture too highly, in order to raise her envy, and make themselves appear great in their alliance and association with so much greatness. She was, therefore, prepared to see a scene of the utmost splendour—a scene in which nothing horrible or paltry mingled, but which was altogether calculated to awe or to delight the senses.

Her ladyship was destined to be disappointed at the commencement, at least, of her acquaintance with the city. The first remarkable object which struck her eye, after leaving the inn, was the high bow, or arch, of the gate called the West Port. In this itself there was nothing worthy of particular attention, and she rather directed her eyes through the opening beneath, which half disclosed a wide space beyond, apparently crowded with people. But when she came close up to the gate, and cast, before passing, a last glance at the arch, she shuddered at the sight then presented to her eyes. On the very pinnacle of the arch were stuck the ghastly and weatherworn remains of a human head, the features of which, half flesh half bone, were shaded, and rendered still more indistinctly horrible by the long dark hair, which hung in meagre tresses around them. “Oh, Richard, Richard!” she exclaimed, stopping, and turning round, “what is that dreadful looking thing?” “That, madam,” said Richard, without any emotion, “is the broken remnant of a west country preacher, spiked up there to warn his countrymen who may approach this port, against doing any thing to incur the fate which has overtaken himself. Methinks he has preached to small purpose, for yonder stands the gallows, ready, I suppose, to bring him some brother in affliction.” “Horrible!” exclaimed Lady Jean; “and is this really the fine town of Edinburgh, where I was taught to expect so many grand sights? I thought it was just one universal palace, and it turns out to be a great charnel-house!” “It is indeed more like that than any thing else at times,” said Richard; “but, my dear Lady Jean, you are not going to start at this bugbear, which the very children, you see, do not heed in passing.” “Indeed I think, Richard,” answered her ladyship, “if Edinburgh is to be all like this, it would be just as good to turn back at once, and postpone our visit till better times.” “But it is not all like this,” replied Richard; “I assure you it is not. For heaven’s sake, my lady, move on. The people are beginning to stare at us. You shall soon see grand sights enough, if we were once fairly out of this place. Make for the opposite corner of the Grassmarket, and ascend the street to the left of that horrible gibbet. We may yet get past it before the criminals are produced.”

Thus admonished, Lady Jean passed, not without a shudder, under the dreadful arch, and entered the spacious oblong square called the Grassmarket. This place was crowded at the west end with rustics engaged in all the bustle of a grain and cattle market, and at the eastern and most distant extremity with a mob of idlers who had gathered around the gibbet, in order to witness the awful ceremony that was about to take place. The crowd, which was scarcely so dense as that which attends the rarer scene of a modern execution, made way on both sides for Lady Jean as she moved along; and wherever she went, she left behind her a wake, as it were, of admiration and confusion. So exquisite and so new a beauty, so splendid a suit of female attire, and such a stout and handsome attendant—these were all alike calculated to inspire reverence in the minds of the beholders. Her carriage at the same time was so steady and so graceful, that no one could be so rude as to interrupt or disturb it. The people, therefore, parted when she approached, and left a free passage for her on all sides, as if she had been an angel or a spirit come to walk amidst a mortal crowd, and whose person could not be touched, and might scarcely be beheld—whose motions were not to be interfered with by those among whom she chose to walk—but who was to be received with prostration of spirit, and permitted to depart as she had come, unquestioned and unapproached. In traversing the Grassmarket, two or three young coxcombs, with voluminous wigs, short cloaks, rapiers, and rose-knots at their knees and shoes, who, on observing her at a distance, had prepared to treat her with a condescending stare, fell back, awed and confounded, at her near approach, and spent the gaze, perhaps, upon the humbler mark of her follower, or upon vacancy.

Having at length passed the gibbet, Lady Jean began to ascend the steep and tortuous street denominated the West Bow. She had hitherto been unable to direct any attention to what she was most anxious to behold—the scenic wonders of the capital. But having now got clear of the crowd, and no longer fearing to see the gallows, she ventured to lift up her eyes and look around. The tallness and massiveness of the buildings, some of which bore the cross of the Knights Templars on their pinnacles, while others seemed to be surmounted or overtopped by still taller edifices beyond, impressed her imagination; and the effect was rendered still more striking by the countless human figures which crowded the windows, and even the roofs of the houses, all alike bending their attention, as she thought, towards herself. The scene before her looked like an amphitheatre filled with spectators, while she and Richard seemed as the objects upon the arena. The thought caused her to hurry on, and she soon found herself in a great measure screened from observation by the overhanging projections of the narrower part of the West Bow, which she now entered. With slow and difficult, but stately and graceful steps, she then proceeded, till she reached the upper angle of the street, where a novel and unexpected scene awaited her. A sound like that of rushing waters seemed first to proceed from the part of the street still concealed from her view, and presently appeared round the angle the first rank of an impetuous crowd, who, rushing downward with prodigious force, would certainly have overwhelmed her delicate form, had she not dexterously avoided them, by stepping aside upon a projecting stair, to which Richard also sprung, just in time to save himself from a similar fate. From this place of safety, which was not without its own crowd of children, women, and sage-looking elderly mechanics, with Kilmarnock cowls, both in the next moment saw the massive mob rush past, like the first wave of a flood, bearing either along or down every thing that came in their way. Immediately after, but at a more deliberate pace, followed a procession of figures, which struck the heart of Lady Jean with as heavy a sense of sorrow as the crowd had just impressed with terror and surprise. First came a small company of the veterans of the city-guard, some of whom had perhaps figured in the campaigns of Middleton and Montrose, and whose bronzed inflexible faces bore on this melancholy occasion precisely the same expression which they ordinarily exhibited on the joyful one of attending the magistrates at the drinking of the king’s health on the 29th of May. Behind these, and encircled by some other soldiers of the same band, appeared two figures of a different sort. One of them was a young-looking, but pale and woe-worn man, the impressive wretchedness of whose appearance was strikingly increased by the ghastly dress which he wore. He was attired from head to foot in a white shroud, such as was sometimes worn in Scotland by criminals at the gallows, but which was, in the present instance, partly assumed as a badge of innocence. The excessive whiteness and emaciation of his countenance suited well with this dismal apparel, and, with the wild enthusiasm that kindled in his eyes, gave an almost supernatural effect to the whole scene, which rather resembled a pageant of the dead than a procession of earthly men. He was the only criminal; the person who walked by his side, and occasionally supported his steps, being—as the crowd whispered around, with many a varied expression of sympathy—his father. The old man had the air of a devout Presbyterian, with harsh, intelligent features, and a dress which bespoke his being a countryman of the lower rank. According to the report of the bystanders, he had educated this his only son for the unfortunate Church of Scotland, and now attended him to the fate which his talents and violent temperament had conspired to draw down upon his head. If he ever felt any pride in the popular admiration with which his son was honoured, no traces of such a sentiment now appeared. On the contrary, he seemed humbled to the very earth with sorrow; and though he had perhaps contemplated the issue now about to take place, with no small portion of satisfaction, so long as it was at a distance and uncertain, the feelings of a father had evidently proved too much for his fortitude when the event approached in all its dreadful reality. The emotions perceptible in that rough and rigid countenance were the more striking, as being so much at variance with its natural and characteristic expression; and the tear which gathered in his eye excited the greater commiseration, in so far as it seemed a stranger there. But the hero and heroine of our tale had little time to make observations on this piteous scene, for the train passed quickly on, and was soon beyond their sight. When it was gone, the people of the Bow, who seemed accustomed to such sights, uttered various expressions of pity, indignation, and horror, according to their respective feelings, and then slowly retired to their dens in the stairs and booths which lined the whole of this ancient and singular street.

Lady Jean, whose beautiful eyes were suffused with tears at beholding so melancholy a spectacle, was then admonished by her attendant to proceed. With a heart hardened to all sensations of wonder and delight, she moved forward, and was soon ushered into the place called the Lawnmarket, then perhaps the most fashionable district in Edinburgh, but the grandeur and spaciousness of which she beheld almost without admiration. The scene here was however much gayer, and approached more nearly to her splendid preconceptions of the capital than any she had yet seen. The shops were, in her estimation, very fine, and some of the people on the street were of that noble description of which she had believed all inhabitants of cities to be. There was no crowd on the street, which, therefore, afforded room for a better display of her stately and beautiful person; and as she walked steadily onwards, still ushed (for such was then the phrase) by her handsome and noble-looking attendant, a greater degree of admiration was excited amongst the gay idlers whom she passed, than even that which marked her progress through the humbler crowd of the Grassmarket. Various noblemen, in passing towards their homes in the Castle Hill, lifted their feathered hats and bowed profoundly to the lovely vision; and one or two magnificent dames, sweeping along with their long silk trains, borne up by livery-men, stared at or eyed askance the charms which threw their own so completely into shade. By the time Lady Jean arrived at the bottom of the Lawnmarket, that is to say, where it was partially closed up by the Tolbooth, she had in a great measure recovered her spirits, and found herself prepared to enjoy the sight of the public buildings, which were so thickly clustered together at this central part of the city. She was directed by Richard to pass along the narrow road which then led between the houses and the Tolbooth on the south, and which, being continued by a still narrower passage skirting the west end of St Giles’s church, formed the western approach to the Parliament Close. Obeying his guidance in this tortuous passage, she soon found herself at the opening or the square space, so styled on account of its being closed on more than one side by the meeting-place of the legislative assembly of Scotland. Here a splendid scene awaited her. The whole square was filled with the members of the Scottish Parliament, barons and commons, who had just left the house in which they sat together—with ladies, who on days of unusual ceremony were allowed to attend the house—and with horses richly caparisoned, and covered with gold-embroidered foot-cloths, some of which were mounted by their owners, while others were held in readiness by footmen. All was bustle and magnificence. Noblemen and gentlemen in splendid attire threaded the crowd in search of their horses; ladies tripped after them with timid and careful steps, endeavouring, by all in their power, to avoid contact with such objects as were calculated to injure their fineries; grooms strode heavily about, and more nimble lacqueys jumped every where, here and there, some of them as drunk as the Parliament Close claret could make them, but all intent on doing the duties of attendance and respect to their masters. Some smart and well-dressed young gentlemen were arranging their cloaks and swords, and preparing to leave the square on foot by the passage which had given entry to Master Richard and Lady Jean.

At sight of our heroine, most of these gallants stood still in admiration, and one of them, with the trained assurance of a rake, observing her to be beautiful, a stranger, and not too well protected, accosted her in a strain of language which caused her at once to blush and tremble. Richard’s brow reddened with anger, as he hesitated not a moment in stepping up and telling the offender to leave the lady alone, on pain of certain consequences which might not prove agreeable. “And who are you, my brave fellow?” said the youth, with bold assurance. “Sirrah!” exclaimed Richard, so indignant as to forget himself, “I am that lady’s husband—her servant, I mean;” and here he stopped short in some confusion. “Admirable!” exclaimed the other. “Ha! ha! ha! ha! Here, Sirs, is a lady lacquey, who does not know whether he is his mistress’s servant or her husband. Let us give him up to the town-guard to see whether the black-hole will make him remember the real state of the case.” So saying, he attempted to push Richard aside, and take hold of the lady. But he had not time to touch her garments with so much as a finger, before her protector had a rapier flourishing in his eyes, and threatened him with instant death, unless he desisted from his profane purpose. At sight of the bright steel, he stepped back one or two paces, drew his own sword, and was preparing to fight, when one of his more grave associates called out, “For shame, Rollo!—with a lady’s lacquey, too, and in the presence of the duke and duchess! I see their royal highnesses, already alarmed, are inquiring the cause of the disturbance.” It was even as this gentleman said, and presently came up to the scene of contention some of the most distinguished personages in the crowd, one of whom demanded from the parties an explanation of so disgraceful an occurrence. “Why, here is a fellow, my lord,” answered Rollo, “who says he is the husband of a lady whom he attends as a livery-man, and a lady, too, the bonniest, I dare say, that has been seen in Scotland since the days of Queen Magdalen!” “And what matters it to you,” said the inquirer, who seemed to be a Judge of the Session, “in what relation this man stands to his lady? Let the parties both come forward, and tell their ain tale. May it please your royal highness,” he continued, addressing a very grave dignitary who sat on horseback behind him, as stiff and formal as a sign-post, “to hear the declaratur of thir twa strange incomers. But see—see—what is the matter with Lord Wigton?” he added, pointing to an aged personage on horseback, who had just pushed forward, and seemed about to faint, and fall from his horse. The person alluded to, at sight of his daughter in this unexpected place, was in reality confounded, and it was some time before he mastered voice enough to ejaculate, “O, Jean, Jean! what’s this ye’ve been about? or what has brocht you to Edinburgh?” “And Lord have a care o’ us!” exclaimed at this juncture another venerable peer, who had just come up, “what has brocht my sonsie son, Ritchie Livingstone, to Edinburgh, when he should have been fechtin’ the Dutch by this time in Pennsylvania?” The two lovers, thus recognised by their respective parents, stood with downcast looks, and perfectly silent, while all was buzz and confusion in the brilliant circle around them; for the parties concerned were not more surprised at the aspect of their affairs, than were all the rest at the beauty of the far-famed but hitherto unseen Lady Jean Fleming. The Earl of Linlithgow, Richard’s father, was the first to speak aloud, after the general astonishment had for some time subsided; and this he did in a laconic though important query, which he couched in the simple words, “Are you married, bairns?” “Yes, dearest father,” said his son, gathering courage, and coming close up to his saddle-bow; “and I beseech you to extricate Lady Jean and me from this crowd, and I shall tell you all when we are alone.” “A pretty man ye are, truly,” said the old man, who never took any thing very seriously to heart, “to be staying at hame, and getting yourself married, all the time you should have been abroad, winning honour and wealth, as your gallant grand-uncle did wi’ Gustavus i’ the thretties! Hooever, since better mayna be, I maun try and console my Lord Wigton, who, I doot, has the worst o’ the bargain, ye ne’er-do-weel!” He then went up to Lady Jean’s father, shook him by the hand, and said, “that though they had been made relations against their wills, he hoped they would continue good friends. The young people,” he observed, “are no that ill matched; and it is not the first time that the Flemings and the Livingstones have melled together, as witness the blithe marriage of the Queen’s Marie to Lord Fleming, in the feifteen saxty-five. At any rate, my lord, let us put a good face on the matter, afore they glowering gentles and whipper-snapper duchesses. I’ll get horses for the two, and they’ll join the ridin’ down the street; and deil hae me if Lady Jean disna outshine them, the hale o’ them!” “My Lord Linlithgow,” responded the graver and more implacable Earl of Wigton, “it may set you to take this matter blithely; but, let me tell you, it’s a muckle mair serious affair for me. What think ye am I to do wi’ Kate and Grizzy noo?” “Hoot, toot, my lord,” said Linlithgow, with a sly smile, “their chance is as gude as ever it was, I assure you, and sae will every body think that kens them. I maun ca’ horses though, or the young folk will be ridden ower, afore ever they do mair gude, by thae rampaugin’ young men.” So saying, and taking Lord Wigton’s moody silence for assent, he proceeded to cry to his servants for the best pair of horses they could get; and these being speedily procured, Lord Richard and his bride were requested to mount; after which, they were formally introduced to the gracious notice of the Duke and Duchess of York, and the Princess Anne, who happened to attend Parliament on this the last day of its session, when it was customary for all the members to ride both to and from the house in an orderly cavalcade. The order was now given to proceed, and the lovers were soon relieved, in a great measure, from the embarrassing notice of the crowd, by assuming a particular place in the procession, and finding themselves confounded with more than three hundred equally splendid figures. As the pageant, however, moved down the High Street, in a continuous and open line, it was impossible not to distinguish the singular loveliness of Lady Jean, and the gallant carriage of her husband, from all the rest. Accordingly, the very trained bands and city-guard, who lined the street, and who were, in general, quite as insensible to the splendours of the Riding, as are the musicians in a modern orchestra to the wonders of a melo-drama in its fortieth night—even they perceived and admired the graces of the young couple, whom they could not help gazing after with a stupid and lingering delight. From the windows, too, and the stair-heads, their beauty was well observed, and amply conjectured and commented on; while many a young cavalier endeavoured, by all sorts of pretences, to find occasion to break the order of the cavalcade, and get himself haply placed nearer to the exquisite figure of which he had got just one killing glance in the square. Slowly and majestically the brilliant train paced down the great street of Edinburgh, the acclamations of the multitude ceaselessly expressing the delight which the people of Scotland felt in this sensible type and emblem of their ancient independence. At length they reached the court-yard of Holyrood-house, where the duke and duchess invited the whole assemblage to a ball, which they designed to give that evening in the hall of the palace; after which, all departed to their respective residences throughout the town, Lords Wigton and Linlithgow taking their young friends under their immediate protection, and seeking the residence of the former nobleman, a little way up the Canongate. In riding thither, the lovers had leisure to explain to their parents the singular circumstances of their union, and address enough to obtain unqualified forgiveness for their imprudence. On alighting at Lord Wigton’s house, Lady Jean found her sisters confined to their rooms with headaches, or some such serious indisposition, and in the utmost dejection on account of having been thereby withheld from the riding of the Parliament. Their spirits, as may be supposed, were not much elevated, when, on coming forth in dishabille to welcome their sister, they found she had had the good fortune to be married before them. Their ill luck was, however, irremediable; and so, making a merit of submitting to it, they condescended to be rather agreeable during the dinner and the afternoon. It was not long before all parties were perfectly reconciled to what had taken place; and by the time it was necessary to dress for the ball, the elder young ladies declared themselves so much recovered as to be able to accompany their happy sister. The Earl of Linlithgow and his son then sent a servant for proper dresses, and prepared themselves for the occasion without leaving the house. When all were ready, a number of chairs were called to transport their dainty persons down the street. The news of Lady Jean’s arrival, and of her marriage, having now spread abroad, the court in front of the house, the alley, and even the open street, were crowded with people of all ranks, anxious to catch a passing glimpse of the heroine of so strange a tale. As her chair was carried along, a buzz of admiration from all who were so happy as to be near it, marked its progress. Happy, too, was the gentleman who had the good luck to be near her chair as it was set down at the palace gate, and assist her in stepping from it upon the lighted pavement. From the outer gate, along the piazza of the inner court, and all the way up the broad staircase to the illuminated hall, two rows of noblemen and gentlemen formed a brilliant avenue as she passed along, while a hundred plumed caps were doffed in honour of so much beauty, and as many youthful eyes glanced bright with satisfaction at beholding it. The object of all this attention tripped modestly along in the hand of the Earl of Linlithgow, acknowledging, with many a graceful flexure and undulation of person, the compliments of the spectators. At length the company entered the spacious and splendid room in which the ball was to be held. At the extremity opposite to the entry, upon an elevated platform, sat the three royal personages, all of whom, on Lady Jean’s introduction, rose and came forward to welcome her and her husband to the entertainments of Holyrood, and to hope that her ladyship would often adorn their circle. In a short time the dancing commenced; and amidst all the ladies who exhibited their charms and their magnificent attire in that captivating exercise, who was, either in person or dress, half so brilliant as Lady Jean?

FALLACIES OF THE YOUNG.
“FATHERS HAVE FLINTY HEARTS.”

I only quote this popular expression from a very popular play, in order to warn my juvenile friends against being too much impressed by it. It is a fatal error running through nearly the whole mass of our fictitious literature, that parents are represented as invariably adverse, through their own cruel and selfish views, to the inclinations of their children: either the glowing ambition and high spirit of the boy is repressed by the cold calculations of his father, who wishes him to become a mere creature of the counting-room and shop like himself; or the romantic attachment of the girl to some elegant Orlando, procures her a confinement to her chamber, with no other alternative than that of marrying a detestable suitor, whom her father prefers to all others on account of his wealth. Then, the boy always runs away from his father’s house, and, by following his own inclinations, acquires fortune and fame; while the girl as invariably leaps a three-pair-of-stairs window, and is happy for life with the man of her choice. The same dangerous system pervades the stage, where, I am sorry to remark, every vicious habit of society, and every impropriety in manners and speech, is always sure to be latest abandoned.

I warn my juvenile readers most emphatically against the fallacy and delusion which prevails upon this subject. Fathers, as a class, have not flinty hearts, nor is it their wish or interest, in general, to impose a cruel restraint upon their children. Young people would do well to examine the circumstances in which they stand in regard to their parents and guardians, before believing in the reality of that schism which popular literature would represent as invariably existing between their own class and that of their natural protectors. The greater part, I am sure, of my young friends, must have observed, that, so long as they can remember, they have been indebted for every comfort, and for a thousand acts of kindness and marks of affection, to those endeared beings—their father and mother. The very dawning light of existence must have found them in the enjoyment of many blessings procured to them solely by those two individuals. From them must have been derived the food they ate, the bed they lay on, the learning at school which enabled their minds to appreciate all the transactions and all the wisdom of past times, and, greatest blessing of all, the habits of devotional exercise which admitted them to commune with their almighty Creator. Surely it is not to be supposed that, at a certain time, the kindness and friendship of these two amiable persons is all at once converted into a malignant contrariety to the interests of their children. Is it not far more likely, my dear young friends, that they continue, as ever, to be your well-wishers and benefactors: and that the opposition which they seem to set up so ungraciously against your inclinations, is only caused by their sense of the dangers which threaten you in the event of your being indulged? It may appear to you that no such danger exists: that your parents are actuated by narrower and meaner views than your own, or that they do not allow for the feelings of youth. But they are in reality deeply concerned for the difference of your feelings from theirs; they sympathise with them in secret, from a recollection of what were their own at your period of life; but know, from that very experience of your feelings, and of their result, that it is not good for you that they should be indulged. You are, then, called upon—and I do so now in the name of your best feelings, and as you would wish for present or future happiness—to trust in the reality of that parental tenderness which has never, heretofore, known interruption, and in the superiority of that wisdom with which years and acquaintance with the world have invested your parents.

Perhaps, my young friends, you may have perceived, even in the midst of your childish frolics and careless happiness, that your parents were obliged to deny themselves many indulgences, and toil hard in their respective duties, in order to obtain for you the comforts which you enjoy. You may have perceived that your father, after he had returned home from his daily employment, could hardly be prevailed upon to enter, as you wished, into your sports, or to assist you with your lessons, but would sit, in silent and abstracted reflection, with a deep shade of care upon his brow. On these occasions, perhaps, your amiable and kind protector is considering how difficult it is, even with all his industry, and all his denial of indulgences to himself, to procure for you an exemption from that wretchedness in which you see thousands of other children every day involved. But though many are the cares which your parents experience, in the duty of rearing you to manhood, there is none so severe or so acute as that which comes upon them at the period of your entering into life. Heretofore, you were simple little children, with hardly a thought beyond the family scene in which you have enjoyed so many comforts. Heretofore, with the exception of occasional rebukes from your parents, and trifling quarrels with your brothers and sisters, you have all been one family of love, eating at the same board, kneeling in one common prayer, loving one another, as the dearest of all friends. But now the scene becomes very different. You begin to feel, within yourselves, separate interests, and each thinks himself best qualified to judge for himself. At that moment, my young friends, the anxiety of your parents is a thousand times greater than it ever was before. Your father, probably, is a man of formed habits and character; he occupies a certain respectable station in the world; he has all his life been governed by certain principles, which he found to be conducive to his comfort and dignity. But though he has been able to conduct himself through the world in this satisfactory manner, he is sensible, from the various and perhaps altogether opposite characters which nature has implanted in you, that you may go far wide of what have been his favourite objects, and perhaps be the means of impairing that respectability which he, as a single individual, has hitherto maintained. It is often observed in life, that children who have been reared by poor but virtuous parents, as if their minds had received in youth a horror for every attribute of poverty, exert themselves with such vigorous and consistent fortitude, as to end with fortune and dignity; while the children, perhaps, of these individuals, being brought up without the same acquaintance with want and hardship, are slothful through life, and soon bring back the family to its original condition. If you then have been reared in easy circumstances, you may believe what I now tell you, that your approach to manhood or womanhood will produce a degree of anxiety in the breasts of your parents, such as would, if you knew it, make your very heart bleed for their distress, and cause you to appear as monsters to yourselves if you were to act in any great degree differently from what they wished.

How much, then, is it your duty, my young friends, to treat the advices and wishes of your parents, at this period of life, with respect, knowing, as you do, that the future happiness of those dear and kind beings depends almost solely upon your conducting yourselves properly in your first steps into life! Should you be so unfortunate as to be beguiled into bad company, or to contract a disposition to indulgences which are the very bane of existence, and the ruin of reputation, what must be the agony of those individuals who have hitherto loved and cherished you, and indulged, perhaps, in very different anticipations! On the contrary, should you yield respect, as far as it is in your nature, to the maxims which your father has endeavoured to impress, with what delight does he look forward to your future success—with what happy confidence does he rely upon your virtuous principles! And may there be no happiness to you, in contemplating the happiness which you have given to him? Yes, much, I am sure, and of a purer kind than almost any which earthly things can confer upon you here below.

I have one word to add, and it is addressed to the female part of my juvenile readers. Exactly as parents feel a concern for the first appearance of their sons in the business of life, so do they experience many anxious and fearful thoughts respecting the disposal of their daughters in matrimony. Wedded life, I may inform them, is not the simple matter which it appears prospectively in early and single life. As it involves many serious duties and responsibilities, it must be entered upon with a due regard to the means—above all things, the pecuniary means—of discharging these in a style of respectability, such as may be sufficient to support the dignity of the various connexions of the parties. It is, therefore, necessary that no person of tender years (this is most frequently the lot of the female) should contract the obligations of matrimony, without, if possible, the entire sanction of parents or other protectors. The people of this country happen to entertain, upon this subject, notions of not so strict a kind as are prevalent in most other nations. In almost all continental and all eastern countries, the female is reared by her friends as the destined bride of a particular individual, and till her marriage she is allowed no opportunity of bestowing her affections upon any other. The custom is so ancient and so invariable, that it is submitted to without any feeling of hardship; and as prudence is the governing principle of the relations, the matches are generally as happy as if they were more free. Perhaps such a custom is inapplicable to this country, on account of our different system of domestic life; but I may instance it, to prove to my fair young readers, that the control of parents over their choice of a husband ought to be looked upon as a more tolerable and advantageous thing, than their inclinations might be disposed to allow, or our popular literature represents it to be.

BRUNTFIELD,
A TALE OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

The war carried on in Scotland, by the friends and enemies of Queen Mary, after her departure into England, was productive of an almost complete dissolution of order, and laid the foundation of many feuds which were kept up by private families and individuals long after all political cause of hostility had ceased. Among the most remarkable quarrels which history or tradition has recorded as arising out of that civil broil, I know of none so deeply cherished, or accompanied by so many romantic and peculiar circumstances, as one which took place between two old families of gentry in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh. Stephen Bruntfield, laird of Craighouse, had been a zealous and disinterested partisan of the queen. Robert Moubray of Barnbougle was the friend successively of Murray and Morton, and distinguished himself very highly in their cause. During the year 1572, when Edinburgh castle was maintained by Kirkaldy of Grange in behalf of the queen, Stephen Bruntfield held out Craighouse in the same interest, and suffered a siege from a detachment of the forces of the regent, commanded by the laird of Barnbougle. This latter baron, a man of fierce and brutal nature, entered life as a younger brother, and at an early period chose to cast his fate among the Protestant leaders, with a view of improving his fortunes. The death of his elder brother in rebellion at Langside, enabled the Regent Murray to reward his services with a grant of the patrimonial estate, of which he did not scruple to take possession by the strong hand, to the exclusion of his infant niece, the daughter of the late proprietor. Some incidents which occurred in the course of the war had inspired a mutual hatred of the most intense character into the breasts of Bruntfield and Moubray; and it was therefore with a feeling of strong personal animosity, as well as of political rancour, that the latter undertook the task of watching the motions of Bruntfield at Craighouse. Bruntfield, after holding out for many months, was obliged, along with his friends in Edinburgh castle, to yield to the party of the regent. Like Kirkaldy and Maitland of Lethington, he surrendered upon a promise of life and estate; but while his two friends perished, one by the hand of the executioner, the other by his own hand, he fell a victim to the sateless spite of his personal enemy, who, in conducting him to Edinburgh as a prisoner, took fire at some bitter expression on the part of the captive, and smote him dead upon the spot.

Bruntfield left a widow and three infant sons. The lady of Craighouse had been an intimate of the unfortunate Mary from her early years; was educated with her in France, in the Catholic faith; and had left her court to become the wife of Bruntfield. It was a time calculated to change the natures of women, as well as of men. The severity with which her religion was treated in Scotland, the wrongs of her royal mistress, and finally the sufferings and death of her husband, acting upon a mind naturally enthusiastic, all conspired to alter the character of Marie Carmichael, and substitute for the rosy hues of her early years, the gloom of the sepulchre and the penitentiary. She continued, after the restoration of peace, to reside in the house of her late husband; but though it was within two miles of the city, she did not for many years re-appear in public. With no society but that of her children, and the persons necessary to attend upon them, she mourned in secret over past events, seldom stirring from a particular apartment, which, in accordance with a fashion by no means uncommon, she had caused to be hung with black, and which was solely illuminated by a lamp. In the most rigorous observances of her faith, she was assisted by a priest, whose occasional visits formed almost the only intercourse which she maintained with the external world. One strong passion gradually acquired a complete sway over her mind—Revenge—a passion which the practice of the age had invested with a conventional respectability, and which no kind of religious feeling, then known, was able either to check or soften. So entirely was she absorbed by this fatal passion, that her very children, at length, ceased to have interest or merit in her eyes, except in so far as they appeared likely to be the means of gratifying it. One after another, as they reached the age of fourteen, she sent them to France, in order to be educated; but the accomplishment to which they were enjoined to direct their principal attention was that of martial exercises. The eldest, Stephen, returned, at eighteen, a strong and active youth, with a mind of little polish or literary information, but considered a perfect adept at sword-play. As his mother surveyed his noble form, a smile stole into the desert of her wan and widowed face, as a winter sunbeam wanders over a waste of snows. But it was a smile of more than motherly pride: she was estimating the power which that frame would have in contending with the murderous Moubray. She was not alone pleased with the handsome figure of her first-born child; but she thought with a fiercer and faster joy upon the appearance which it would make in the single combat against the slayer of his father. Young Bruntfield, who, having been from his earliest years trained to the purpose now contemplated by his mother, rejoiced in the prospect, now lost no time in preferring before the king a charge of murder against the laird of Barnbougle, whom he at the same time challenged, according to a custom then not altogether abrogated, to prove his innocence in single combat. The king having granted the necessary licence, the fight took place in the royal park, near the palace; and, to the surprise of all assembled, young Bruntfield fell under the powerful sword of his adversary. The intelligence was communicated to his mother at Craighouse, where she was found in her darkened chamber, prostrate before an image of the Virgin. The priest who had been commissioned to break the news, opened his discourse in a tone intended to prepare her for the worst; but she cut him short at the very beginning with a frantic exclamation—“I know what you would tell—the murderer’s sword has prevailed, and there are now but two instead of three, to redress their father’s wrongs!” The melancholy incident, after the first burst of feeling, seemed only to have concentrated and increased that passion by which she had been engrossed for so many years. She appeared to feel that the death of her eldest son only formed an addition to that debt which it was the sole object of her existence to see discharged. “Roger,” she said, “will have the death of his brother, as well as that of his father, to avenge. Animated by such a double object, his arm can hardly fail to be successful.”

Roger returned about two years after, a still handsomer, more athletic, and more accomplished youth than his brother. Instead of being daunted by the fate of Stephen, he burned but the more eagerly to wipe out the injuries of his house with the blood of Moubray. On his application for a licence being presented to the court, it was objected by the crown lawyers, that the case had been already closed by mal fortune of the former challenger. But while this was the subject of their deliberation, the applicant caused so much annoyance and fear in the court circle, by the threats which he gave out against the enemy of his house, that the king, whose inability to procure respect either for himself or for the law is well known, thought it best to decide in favour of his claim. Roger Bruntfield, therefore, was permitted to fight in barras with Moubray; but the same fortune attended him as that which had already deprived the widow of her first child. Slipping his foot in the midst of the combat, he reeled to the ground, embarrassed by his cumbrous armour. Moubray, according to the barbarous practice of the age, immediately sprang upon and despatched him. “Heaven’s will be done!” said the widow, when she heard of the fatal incident; “but gratias Deo! there still remains another chance.”

Henry Bruntfield, the third and last surviving son, had all along been the favourite of his mother. Though apparently cast in a softer mould than his two elder brothers, and bearing all the marks of a gentler and more amiable disposition, he in reality cherished the hope of avenging his father’s death more deeply in the recesses of his heart, and longed more ardently to accomplish that deed than any of his brothers. His mind, naturally susceptible of the softest and tenderest impressions, had contracted the enthusiasm of his mother’s wish in its strongest shape; as the fairest garments are capable of the deepest stain. The intelligence, which reached him in France, of the death of his brothers, instead of bringing to his heart the alarm and horror which might have been expected, only braced him to the adventure which he now knew to be before him. From this period, he forsook the elegant learning which he had heretofore delighted to cultivate. His nights were spent in poring over the memoirs of distinguished knights—his days were consumed in the tilt-yard of the sword-player. In due time he entered the French army, in order to add to mere science that practical hardihood, the want of which he conceived to be the cause of the death of his brothers. Though the sun of chivalry was now declining far in the occident, it was not yet altogether set: Montmorency was but just dead; Bayard was still alive—Bayard, the knight of all others who has merited the motto, “sans peur et sans reproche.” Of the lives and actions of such men, Henry Bruntfield was a devout admirer and imitator. No young knight kept a firmer seat upon his horse—none complained less of the severities of campaigning—none cherished lady’s love with a fonder, purer, or more devout sensation. On first being introduced at the court of Henry the Third, he had signalised, as a matter of course, Catherine Moubray, the disinherited niece of his father’s murderer, who had been educated in a French convent by her other relatives, and was now provided for in the household of the queen. The connection of this young lady with the tale of his own family, and the circumstance of her being a sufferer in common with himself by the wickedness of one individual, would have been enough to create a deep interest respecting her in his breast. But when, in addition to these circumstances, we consider that she was beautiful, was highly accomplished, and, in many other respects, qualified to engage his affections, we can scarcely be surprised that that was the result of their acquaintance. Upon one point alone did these two interesting persons ever think differently. Catherine, though inspired by her friends from infancy with an entire hatred of her cruel relative, contemplated, with fear and aversion, the prospect of her lover being placed against him in deadly combat, and did all in her power to dissuade him from his purpose. Love, however, was of little avail against the still more deeply-rooted passion which had previously occupied his breast. Flowers thrown upon a river might have been as effectual in staying its course towards the cataract, as the gentle entreaties of Catherine Moubray in withholding Henry Bruntfield from the enterprise for which his mother had reared him—for which his brothers had died—for which he had all along moved and breathed.

At length, accomplished with all the skill which could then be acquired in arms, glowing with all the earnest feelings of youth, Henry returned to Scotland. On reaching his mother’s dwelling, she clasped him, in a transport of varied feeling, to her breast, and for a long time could only gaze upon his elegant person. “My last and dearest,” she at length said, “and thou too are to be adventured upon this perilous course! Much have I bethought me of the purpose which now remains to be accomplished. I have not been without a sense of dread lest I be only doing that which is to sink my soul in flames at the day of reckoning; but yet there has been that which comforts me also. Only yesternight I dreamed that your father appeared before me. In his hand he held a bow and three goodly shafts—at a distance appeared the fierce and sanguinary Moubray. He desired me to shoot the arrows at that arch traitor, and I gladly obeyed. A first and a second he caught in his hand, broke, and trampled on with contempt. But the third shaft, which was the fairest and goodliest of all, pierced his guilty bosom, and he immediately expired. The revered shade at this gave me an encouraging smile, and withdrew. My Henry, thou art that third arrow, which is at length to avail against the shedder of our blood. The dream seems a revelation, given especially that I may have comfort in this enterprise, otherwise so revolting to a mother’s feelings.”

Young Bruntfield saw that his mother’s wishes had only imposed upon her reason; but he made no attempt to break the charm by which she was actuated, being glad, upon any terms, to obtain her sanction for that adventure to which he was himself impelled by feelings considerably different. He therefore began, in the most deliberate manner, to take measures for bringing on the combat with Moubray. The same legal objections which had stood against the second duel were maintained against the third; but public feeling was too favourable to the object to be easily withstood. The laird of Barnbougle, though somewhat past the bloom of life, was still a powerful and active man, and, instead of expressing any fear to meet this third and more redoubted warrior, rather longed for a combat which promised, if successful, to make him one of the most renowned swordsmen of his time. He had also heard of the attachment which subsisted between Bruntfield and his niece; and, in the contemplation of an alliance which might give some force to the claims of that lady upon his estate, found a deeper and more selfish reason for accepting the challenge of his youthful enemy. King James himself protested against stretching the law of the per duellum so far; but, sensible that there would be no peace between either the parties or their adherents till it should be decided in a fair combat, he was fain to grant the required licence.

The fight was appointed to take place on Cramond Inch, a low grassy island in the Frith of Forth, near the castle of Barnbougle. All the preparations were made in the most approved manner by the young Duke of Lennox, who had been the friend of Bruntfield in France. On a level spot, close to the northern beach of the islet, a space was marked off and strongly secured by a paling. The spectators, who were almost exclusively gentlemen (the rabble not being permitted to approach), sat upon a rising ground beside the enclosure, while the space towards the sea was quite clear. At one end, surrounded by his friends, stood the laird of Barnbougle, a huge and ungainly figure, whose features displayed a mixture of ferocity and hypocrisy, in the highest degree unpleasing. At the other, also attended by a host of family allies and friends, stood the gallant Henry Bruntfield, who, if divested of his armour, might have realised the idea of a winged Mercury. A seat was erected close beside the barras for the Duke of Lennox and other courtiers, who were to act as judges; and at a little distance upon the sea lay a small decked vessel, with a single male figure on board. After all the proper ceremonies which attended this strange legal custom had been gone through, the combatants advanced into the centre, and, planting foot to foot, each with his heavy sword in his hand, awaited the command which should let them loose against each other, in a combat which both knew would only be closed with the death of one or other. The word being given, the fight commenced. Moubray, almost at the first pass, gave his adversary a cut in the right limb, from which the blood was seen to flow profusely. But Bruntfield was enabled, by this mishap, to perceive the trick upon which his adversary chiefly depended, and, by taking care to avoid it, put Moubray nearly hors de combat. The fight then proceeded for a few minutes, without either gaining the least advantage over the other. Moubray was able to defend himself pretty successfully from the cuts and thrusts of his antagonist, but he could make no impression in return. The question then became one of time. It was evident that, if no lucky stroke should take effect beforehand, he who first became fatigued with the exertion would be the victim. Moubray felt his disadvantage as the elder and bulkier man, and began to fight most desperately, and with less caution. One tremendous blow, for which he seemed to have gathered his last strength, took effect upon Bruntfield, and brought him upon his knee, in a half-stupified state; but the elder combatant had no strength to follow up the effort. He reeled towards his youthful and sinking enemy, and stood for a few moments over him, vainly endeavouring to raise his weapon for another and final blow. Ere he could accomplish his wish, Bruntfield recovered sufficient strength to draw his dagger, and thrust it up to the hilt beneath the breastplate of his exhausted foe. The murderer of his race instantly lay dead beside him, and a shout of joy from the spectators hailed him as the victor. At the same instant, a scream of more than earthly note arose from the vessel anchored near the island: a lady descended from its side into a boat, and, rowing to the land, rushed up to the bloody scene, where she fell upon the neck of the conqueror, and pressed him, with the most frantic eagerness, to her bosom. The widow of Stephen Bruntfield at length found the yearnings of twenty years fulfilled—she saw the murderer of her husband, the slayer of her two sons, dead on the sward before her, while there still survived to her as noble a child as ever blessed a mother’s arms. But the revulsion of feeling produced by the event was too much for her strength; or, rather, Providence, in its righteous judgment, had resolved that so unholy a feeling as that of revenge should not be too signally gratified. She expired in the arms of her son, murmuring “Nunc dimittis, Domine,” with her latest breath.

The remainder of the tale of Bruntfield may be easily told. After a decent interval, the young laird of Craighouse married Catherine Moubray; and as the king saw it right to restore that young lady to a property originally forfeited for service to his mother, the happiness of the parties might be considered as complete. A long life of prosperity and peace was granted to them by the kindness of Heaven; and at their death, they had the satisfaction of enjoying that greatest of all earthly blessings, the love and respect of a numerous and virtuous family.

THE PASSING CROWD.

“The Passing Crowd” is a phrase coined in the spirit of indifference. Yet, to a man of what Plato calls “universal sympathies,” and even to the plain ordinary denizens of this world, what can be more interesting than “the passing crowd?” Does not this tide of human beings, which we daily see passing along the ways of this world, consist of persons animated by the same spark of the divine essence, and partaking of the same high destinies with ourselves? Let us stand still but for a moment in the midst of this busy and seemingly careless scene, and consider what they are or may be whom we see around us. In the hurry of the passing show, and of our own sensations, we see but a series of unknown faces; but this is no reason why we should regard them with indifference. Many of these persons, if we knew their histories, would rivet our admiration by the ability, worth, benevolence, or piety, which they have displayed in their various paths through life. Many would excite our warmest interest by their sufferings—sufferings, perhaps, borne meekly and well, and more for the sake of others than themselves. How many tales of human weal and woe, of glory and of humiliation, could be told by those beings, whom, in passing, we regard not! Unvalued as they are by us, how many as good as ourselves repose upon them the affections of bounteous hearts, and would not want them for any earthly compensation! Every one of these persons, in all probability, retains in his bosom the cherished recollections of early happy days, spent in some scene which “they ne’er forget, though there they are forgot,” with friends and fellows who, though now far removed in distance and in fortune, are never to be given up by the heart. Every one of these individuals, in all probability, nurses still deeper in the recesses of feeling, the remembrance of that chapter of romance in the life of every man, an early earnest attachment, conceived in the fervour of youth, unstained by the slightest thought of self, and for a time purifying and elevating the character far above its ordinary standard. Beneath all this gloss of the world—this cold conventional aspect, which all more or less present, and which the business of life renders necessary—there resides for certain a fountain of goodness, pure in its inner depths as the lymph rock-distilled, and ready on every proper occasion to well out in the exercise of the noblest duties. Though all may seem but a hunt after worldly objects, the great majority of these individuals can, at the proper time, cast aside all earthly thoughts, and communicate directly with the Being whom their fathers have taught them to worship, and whose will and attributes have been taught to man immediately by Himself. Perhaps many of these persons are of loftier aspect than ourselves, and belong to a sphere removed above our own. But, nevertheless, if the barrier of mere worldly form were taken out of the way, it is probable that we could interchange sympathies with these persons as freely and cordially as with any of our own class. Perhaps they are of an inferior order; but they are only inferior in certain circumstances, which should never interpose to prevent the flow of feeling for our kind. The great common features of human nature remain; and let us never forget how much respect is due to the very impress of humanity—the type of the divine nature itself! Even where our fellow creatures are degraded by vice and poverty, let us still be gentle in our judging. The various fortunes which we every day see befalling the members of a single family, after they part off in their several paths through life, teach us that it is not to every one that success in the career of existence is destined. Besides, do not the arrangements of society at once necessitate the subjection of an immense multitude to humble toil, and give rise to temptations, before which the weak and uninstructed can scarcely escape falling? But even beneath the soiled face of the poor artizan, there may be aspirations after some vague excellence, which hard fate has denied him the means of attaining, though the very wish to obtain it is itself ennobling. The very mendicant was not always so; he, too, has had his undegraded and happier days, upon the recollection of which, some remnant of better feeling may still repose.

These, I humbly think, are reasons why we should not look with coldness upon any masses of men with whom it may be our lot to mingle. It is the nature of a good man to conclude that others are like himself; and if we take the crowd promiscuously, we can never be far wrong in thinking that there are worthy and well-directed feelings in it as well as in our own bosoms.

A TALE OF THE FORTY-FIVE.

Never, perhaps, did any city, upon the approach of a foreign enemy, betray such symptoms of consternation and disorder, as did Edinburgh, on the 16th of September 1745, when it was understood that Prince Charles Edward, with his army of Highlanders, had reached a village three miles to the westward, unresisted by the civic corps in which the hapless city had placed its last hopes of defence. A regiment of dragoons, which had retreated on the previous day from Stirling, and another which happened to be encamped near Edinburgh, having joined their strengths to that of the town-guard and volunteers, had that forenoon marched boldly out of town, with the determined purpose of opposing the rebels, and saving the town; but after standing very bravely for a few hours at Corstorphine, the spectacle of a single Highlander, who rode up towards them and fired off his pistol, caused the whole of these gallant cavaliers to turn and fly; nor did they stop till they had left Edinburgh itself twenty miles behind. The precipitate flight of regular troops was the worst possible example for a body of raw, undisciplined citizens, who were too much accustomed to the secure comforts of their firesides, to have any relish for the horrors of an out-of-doors war with the unscrupulous mountaineers. The consequence was, that all retreated in confusion back to the city, where their pusillanimity was the subject of triumphant ridicule to the Jacobite party, and of shame and fear to the rest of the inhabitants.

In this dilemma, as band after band poured through the West Port, and filled the ample area of the Grassmarket, the magistrates assembled in their council chamber, for the purpose of “wondering what was to be done.” The result of their deliberations was, that a full meeting of the inhabitants should be held, in order that they might be enabled to shape their course according to the general opinion. Orders were immediately given to this effect, and in the course of an hour, they found a respectable assemblage of citizens, prepared, in one of the churches of St Giles’s, to consider the important question of the defensibility of the town.

The appearance of the city, on this dreadful afternoon, was very remarkable, and such as we hope it will never again exhibit. All the streets to the west of St Giles’s were crowded with citizen volunteers, apparently irresolute whether to lay down their arms or to retain them, and whose anxious and crest-fallen looks communicated only despair to the trembling citizens. The sound of hammers was heard at the opening of every lane, and at the bottoms of all important turnpike stairs, where workmen were busied in mounting strong doors, studded thickly with nails, moving on immense hinges, and bearing bolts and bars of no ordinary strength—the well-known rapacious character of the Highlanders, not less than their present hostile purpose, having suggested this feeble attempt at security. The principal street was encumbered with the large, tall, pavilion-roofed family carriages of people of distinction, judges, and officers of the crown, which, after being hastily crammed with their proper burdens of live stock, and laden atop with as much baggage as they could carry, one after another wheeled off down the High Street, through the Netherbow, and so out of town. A few scattered groups of women, children, and inferior citizens, stood near that old-accustomed meeting place, the Cross, round the tall form of which they seemed to gather, like a Catholic population clinging to a sacred fabric, which they suppose to be endowed with some protecting virtue.

At the ordinary dinner hour, when the streets were as usual in a great measure deserted, and while the assemblage of citizens were still deliberating in the New Church aisle, the people of the High Street were thrown into a state of dreadful agitation, by a circumstance which they witnessed from their windows. The accustomed silence of “the hollow hungry hour” was suddenly broken by the clatter of a horse’s feet upon the pavement; and on running to their windows, they were prodigiously alarmed at the sight of one of their anticipated foes riding boldly up the street. Yet this alarm subsided considerably, when they observed that his purpose seemed pacific, and that he was not followed by any companions. The horseman was a youth apparently about twenty years of age, with a remarkably handsome figure and gallant carriage, which did not fail in their effect upon at least the female part of the beholders. The most robust Highland health was indicated in his fair countenance and athletic form: and, in addition to this, his appearance expressed just enough of polish not to destroy the romantic effect produced by his wild habiliments and striking situation. The tight tartan trews showed well upon a limb, of which the symmetry was never equalled by David Allan, the national painter, so remarkable for his handsome Highland limbs, and of which the effect, instead of being impaired by the clumsy boot, was improved by the neat brogue, fastened as it was to the foot by sparkling silver buckles. He wore a smart round bonnet, adorned with his family cognisance—a bunch of ivy—and from beneath which, a profusion of light brown tresses, tied with dark ribbons, flowed, according to the fashion of the time, about half way down his back. He carried a small white flag in his hand, and bore about his person the full set of Highland arms—broadsword, dirk, and two silver-mounted pistols. Many a warm Jacobite heart, male and female, palpitated at sight of his graceful figure, and a considerable crowd of idle admirers, or wonderers, followed him up the broad noble expanse of the High Street.

By this crowd, who soon discovered that his purpose was the delivery of a letter from the chevalier to the magistrates, he was ushered forward to the opening of a narrow passage, which in those days led through a pile of buildings called the Luckenbooths, towards the door of Haddo’s Hole Church, a passage called in the old Scottish language a stile, which, moreover, was traversed in 1628 by King Charles the First, when he went to open the Scottish Parliament in the High Tolbooth. Here the Highlander dismounted, and after throwing his bridle over the hook at a saddler’s door close to the corner of the stile, was led forward into the lobby of the church, from which the hum of active discussion was heard to proceed. On requesting to be introduced to the magistrates, he was informed, by an official wearing their livery, that the church was so very much crowded, that “there would be nae possibility of either getting him in to see the magistrates, or the magistrates out to see him,” but that his letter might be handed into them over the heads of the crowd. To this expedient the messenger consented, and accordingly it was immediately put in execution. In a few moments after it had left the keeper’s hands, a dead silence seemed to fall upon the company, and, after a renewed tumult and a second silence, those who stood in the lobby heard a voice reading a few words aloud, apparently those of the letter. The voice was, however, interrupted in a few seconds by the clamour of the whole assembled people, who presently rose in confusion, and made a tumultuous rush towards the door. On hearing and observing these alarming symptoms, the city officer, with inconsiderate rashness, thought it his duty to seize the author of so much supposed mischief, and accordingly made a dash at the stranger’s collar, calling upon the town-guardsmen present to close in upon him, and intercept his retreat. But the prompt and energetic Highlander was not to be so betrayed. With a bound like the first movement of the startled deer, he cleared the lobby, and made for his horse. Two dragoons standing without, and who, observing the rush from the door, threw themselves in the stranger’s way, were in the same instant felled to the ground; and before any other person could lay hands upon him, the maltreated messenger threw himself upon his horse, drew his sword, and in a transport of rage shouted defiance to all around. Whirling his weapon round his head, he stopped a few seconds amidst the terrified crowd; and then, striking spurs into his horse’s sides, rode along the street, still vociferating loud defiances to all the detached military parties which he met. No attempt, however, was made to prevent his escape, or to offer him farther violence. One symptom of offensive warfare alone occurred, and that originated in an accident; for an old guardsman, who was overturned on the causeway by the brush of the passing steed, could not help discharging his redoubted piece; the shot, however, doing no other harm than winging a golden peacock, which overhung the window of a fashionable milliner in the fourth flat of the Luckenbooths. After clearing the narrow defile of the Luckenbooths, and getting into the full open street, the Highland cavalier for once turned round, and, with a voice broken by excess of indignation, uttered a thundering malediction against all Edinburgh for its breach of the articles of war, and a challenge to the prettiest man in it who would meet him upon honourable terms. He then galloped briskly down the High Street, still brandishing his broadsword, the people making way for him on all sides, by running down the numerous alleys leading from the street, and terminated his daring exploit, unscathed and undaunted, by passing out at the Netherbow Port, of which the enormous folding doors, like the turnpikes in John Gilpin, flew open at his approach.

It is irrelevant to our purpose to describe the consternation under which the inhabitants of Edinburgh passed the whole of that evening and night, or the real terror which next morning seized them, when they understood that the insurgents were in possession of the town. Moreover, as it would not be proper to encumber our narrative with well-known historical details, we shall also pass over the circumstances in this remarkable civil war which followed upon the capture of the city, and content ourselves with relating the simple events of a love tale, in which the hero just introduced to the notice of our readers acted a conspicuous part.

About a month after the rebels had entered Edinburgh, and while Prince Charles Edward was still fondly lingering in the palace which had sheltered so many of his ancestors, a young gentlewoman, named Helen Lindsay, the daughter of a whig writer to the signet in Edinburgh, was one fine October evening taking a solitary walk in the King’s Park. The sun had gone down over the castle, like the fire-shell dropping into a devoted fortress, and the lofty edifices of the city presented, on the eastern side, nothing but dark irregular masses of shade. The park, which a little before had been crowded with idle and well-dressed people, waiting perhaps for a sight of the prince, was now deserted by all except a few Highland soldiers, hurrying to or from the camp at Duddingston, and by the young lady above mentioned, who continued, in spite of the deepening twilight, to saunter about, seeming to await the hour of some assignation. As each single Highland officer or group passed this lady, she contrived to elude their observation by an adroit management of her plaid; and it was not till the gathering darkness rendered her appearance at such a time and place absolutely suspicious, that at length one gallant mountaineer made bold to accost her. “Ah, Helen!” he exclaimed, “how delighted am I to find you here; for I expected you to be waiting at the bottom of the Walk—and thus I see you five minutes sooner than I otherwise would have done!” “I would rather wait near the palace than at that fearsome place, at this time o’ nicht, William,” said the young lady; “for, let me tell you, you have been a great deal later o’ comin’ than you should have been.” “Pardon me, my angel!” answered the youth; “I have been detained by the prince till this instant. His royal highness has communicated to me no very pleasant intelligence—he is decisive as to our march commencing on the morning after to-morrow, and I am distracted to think of parting with you. How shall I—how can I part with you?” “Oh! never mind that, Willie,” cried the lady, in a tone quite different from his, which was highly expressive of a lover’s misery; “if your enterprise prove successful, and you do not get your head broken, or beauty spoilt, you shall perhaps be made an earl, and marry some grand English countess; and I shall then content myself with young Claver the advocate, who has been already so warmly recommended to me by my father, and who would instate me to-morrow, if I chose, as his wedded wife, in the fine house he has just bought in Forrester’s Wynd.” “To the devil with that beast!” cried the jealous lover in Gaelic. “Do you think, Helen, that I could ever marry any one but you, even though it were the queen on the throne? But perhaps you are not so very resolute in your love matters, and could transfer your affections from one object to another as easily and as quickly as you could your thoughts, or the glance of your eyes!” “Ah, Willie, Willie,” said the lady, still in a jocular tone, “I see you are a complete Hielanter—fiery and irritable. I might have kenned that the first moment I ever saw ye, when ye bravadoed a’ Edinburgh, because a silly toon-officer tried to touch ye. Wad ye flee up, man, on your ain true love, when she merely jokes ye a wee?” “Oh! if that be all, Helen,” said the youth humbly, “I beg your grace. Yet, methinks, this is no time for merriment, when we are about to part, perhaps for ever. How, dearest Helen, do you contrive to keep up your spirits under such circumstances?” “Because,” said the young lady, “I know that there is no necessity for us parting, at least for some time to come; for I am willing to accompany you, if you will take me, to the very world’s end. There’s sincerity and true love for you!” Surprised and delighted with this frank offer, the lover strained his mistress passionately to his bosom, and swore to protect her as his lawful wife till the latest moment of his existence. “You shall travel,” he said, “in my sister Lady Ogilvie’s carriage, and be one of the first British ladies to attend the prince’s levee in St James’s at Christmas. Our marriage shall be solemnized at the end of the first stage.” The project was less than rational; but when was reason any thing to love? Many avowals of mutual attachment passed between the parties; and, after projecting a mode of elopement, they parted—William Douglas taking the road for the camp at Duddingston, and Helen Lindsay hastily returning to the town.

The morning of the 1st of November broke drearily upon Edinburgh, showing a dull frosty atmosphere, and the ground covered with a thin layer of snow. It was the morning of the march; and here and there throughout the streets stood a few bagpipers, playing a reveillé before the lodgings of the great officers of the clans. One or two chiefs were already marching down the street, preceded by their pipers, and followed by their men, in order to join the army, which was beginning to move from Duddingston. The Highland guard, which had been stationed, ever since the chevalier’s arrival, at the Weigh-house, was now leaving its station, and moving down the Lawnmarket to the merry sound of the bagpipe, when a strange circumstance occurred.

Just as the word of command had been given to the Weigh-house guard, the sash of the window in the third floor of an adjacent house was pushed up, and immediately after, a female figure was observed to issue therefrom, and to descend rapidly along a rope towards the pavement below. The commander of the guard no sooner perceived this, than he sprang forwards to the place where the figure was to alight, as if to receive her in his arms; but he did not reach it before the lady, finding the rope too short by several yards, dropped with a slight scream upon the ground, where she lay apparently lifeless. The officer was instantly beside her—and words cannot describe the consternation and sorrow depicted in his face, as he stooped, and with gentle promptitude lifted the unfortunate lady from the ground. She had fainted with the pain of what soon turned out to be a broken limb; and as she lay over the Highlander’s arm, her travelling hood, falling back from her head, disclosed a face which, though exquisitely beautiful, was as pale and expressionless as death. A slight murmur at length broke from her lips, and a tinge of red returned to her cheeks, as she half articulated the word “William.” William Douglas, for it was he, hung over her in silent despair for a few moments, and was only recalled to recollection when his men gathered eagerly and officiously around him, each loudly inquiring of the other the meaning of this strange scene. The noise thus occasioned soon had the effect of bringing all to an understanding; for the father of the lady, in a nightcap and morning gown, was first observed to cast a hurried glance over the still open window above, and was soon after in the midst of the group, calling loudly and distractedly for his daughter, and exclaiming vehemently against the person in whose arms he found her, for having attempted to rob him of his natural property. Douglas bethought himself for a moment, and, calling upon his men to close all round him and the lady, began to move away with his beloved burden, while the old gentleman loaded the air with his cries, and struggled forward with the vain intention of rescuing his daughter. The lover might soon have succeeded in his wishes, by ordering the remonstrant to be withheld, and taken home by his men; but he speedily found that to take away his mistress in her present condition, and without the means of immediately relieving her, would be the height of cruelty; and he therefore felt himself reluctantly compelled to resign her to the charge of her parent, even at the risk of losing her for ever. Old Mr Lindsay, overjoyed at this resolution, offered to take his daughter into his own arms, and transport her back to the house; but Douglas, heeding not his proposal, and apparently anxious to retain his mistress as long as he could, saved him this trouble, by slowly and mournfully retracing his steps, and carrying her up stairs to her bedchamber—his company meanwhile remaining below. He there discovered that Helen had been locked up by her father, who had found reason to suspect her intention of eloping, and that this was what occasioned her departure from the mode of escape previously agreed upon. After depositing her still inanimate person carefully on a bed, he turned for a moment towards her father, told him fiercely that if he exercised any cruelty upon her in consequence of what had taken place, he should dearly rue it; and then, alter taking another silent, lingering, farewell look of his mistress, left the house in order to continue his march.

After this, another and longer interval occurs between the incidents of our tale; and this may perhaps be profitably employed in illustrating a few of the circumstances already laid partially before the reader. William Douglas was a younger son of Sir Robert Douglas of Glenbervie, the celebrated antiquary, and had been bred to the profession of a writer, or attorney, under the auspices of a master of good practice in Aberdeen. Being, however, a youth of sanguine temperament and romantic spirit, he did not hesitate a moment, on hearing of the landing of the chevalier, to break his apprenticeship, just on the point of expiring, and set off to rank himself under the banners of him whom he conceived entitled to the duty and assistance of all true Scotsmen. In consideration of his birth, and his connection with some of the very highest leaders in the enterprise, he was appointed aide-de-camp to the prince, in which capacity he had been employed to communicate with the city in the manner already described. As he rode up the High Street, and, more than that, as he rode down again, he had been seen and admired by Helen Lindsay, who happened to be then in the house of a friend near the scene of his exploit. Soon after the Highland army had taken possession of the city, they had met at the house of a Jacobite aunt of the young lady, and a passion of the tenderest nature then took place between them. To her father, who was her only surviving parent, this was quite unknown till the day before the departure of the Highlanders, when some circumstances having roused his suspicions, he thought it necessary to lock her up in her own room, without, however, securing the window—that part of a house, so useful and so interesting above all others to youthful lovers, the chink of Pyramus and Thisbe not excepted. It only remains to be stated, that though the young lady recovered from the effects of her fall in a few weeks, she did not so soon recover from her disappointment, and she was doomed to experience a still greater affliction in the strange look with which she was afterwards regarded by her father and all her own acquaintance.

William Douglas performed an active part in all the scenes of the rebellion, and finally escaped the perils of Culloden almost without a wound. He fled to his father’s house, where he was received joyfully, and concealed for upwards of a twelvemonth, till the search of the royal troops was no longer dangerous. His father frequently entreated him to go abroad, but he would not consent to such a measure; and at last, it being understood that government had passed an “act of oblivion” in regard of the surviving rebels, he ventured gradually and cautiously to appear again in society. All this time he had never communicated with Helen Lindsay, but his thoughts had often, in the solitude of his place of hiding, turned anxiously and fondly towards her. At length, to the surprise of his father, he one day expressed his desire of going to Edinburgh, and setting up there as a writer—the profession to which he had been educated, and for which he could easily complete his qualifications. Sir Robert was by no means averse to his commencing business, but expressed his fears for the safety of his son’s person in so conspicuous a situation in the capital, where the eyes of justice were constantly wide open, and where he would certainly meet with the most disagreeable recognitions. The lover overruled all these obstructions, by asking the old gentleman whether he would wish to see his son perish in the West Indies, or become a respectable and pacific member of society in his own country; and it was speedily arranged that both should set out for Edinburgh, in order to put the youth’s purpose in execution, so soon as he should procure his indenture from his late master. In this no difficulty was experienced; and in a few weeks the aged baronet set forth, accompanied by his son, on horseback, towards the city, which contained all the latter held dear on earth.

On arriving at an inn in the Canongate, the first thing Sir Robert did, was to send a card to his cousin, the Earl of ——, informing his lordship of his arrival, and begging his company that evening at his hotel. The earl soon made his appearance, heartily welcomed the old gentleman to Edinburgh, and was introduced to young William. His lordship was sorry, however, that he could not stay long with them, as Lady —— was to have a ball that evening, where his presence was, of course, indispensable. He begged, however, to have the pleasure of their company at his house so soon as they could dress, when he would endeavour to entertain them, and, moreover, introduce his young kinsman to the chief beauties of Edinburgh. When he was gone, Sir Robert, alarmed at the idea of his son entering at once into an assemblage where many would remember his face, attempted to dissuade him from attending the ball, and offered to remain all the evening with him in the inn. But William insisted upon going, holding all danger light, and representing to his father, that, even though he were recognised, no one, even an enemy, would think of discovering him, that being generally held as a sin of the deepest dye. The truth was, that the earl’s mention of beauties put him in mind of Miss Lindsay, and inspired him with a notion that she would be of the party, and that he might have an opportunity of renewing his acquaintance with her, which he could not easily procure otherwise. Both, therefore, prepared themselves for the ball, and, in a short time, set off in two chairs for Gray’s Close, in which the earl’s house was situated.

That fine old spacious alley was found to be, on the present occasion, as splendid as it was possible for any close in Auld Reekie to be, under the double advantages of fashion and festivity. Two livery-men stood at the head with torches, and served as a beacon to mark to the gathering company the entrance of the strait into which they had to steer their way. Between the head of the lane and the vestibule of his lordship’s house, other servants were planted with torches, so as to form an avenue of lights, along which the guests were ushered. All the guests, as they successively arrived, were announced at the head of the stair by a servant—a custom recently adopted from London, and of little service in Edinburgh, where all people knew each other by sight. It served, however, on the present occasion, to procure for Sir Robert and his son, immediately on their entering the room, a general and instantaneous attention, which they would rather have dispensed with, and upon which they had not calculated. Both gentlemen were personally presented by their kinsman, the earl, to many persons of distinction of both sexes, among whom Sir Robert (though he had been for twenty years estranged in a great measure from society, in the prosecution of his studies, and the management of his gout) soon recognised and entered into conversation with some old friends, while his son set himself to observe if Miss Lindsay was in the room. She was not present; but, as company continued still to arrive, he entertained hopes that she would yet make her appearance. Disengaging himself, therefore, from his father, he withdrew to a corner of the room, where he might see, without being easily perceived by any person entering; and there, in silence and abstraction, he awaited her probable arrival. Some minutes had elapsed after the last announcement; and, in the idea that all were assembled, the earl had stood up at the head of a long double line of powdered beaux, and ladies with enormous hoops and high head-dresses, in order to lead off the first dance, when William Douglas heard the name of Mr and Miss Lindsay proclaimed at the head of the stair, and presently after saw an old precise-looking gentleman lead into the room the elegant figure of his long-lost mistress. He saw no more for some time; for, while his blood rushed upwards to the heart in tumultuous tide, a dimness came over his eyes, and obscured even the brilliant chandeliers that hung over the company. On recovering his powers of observation, the dance was done, and the floor cleared of its revellers, who now sat all round in full view. Some of the ladies were fanning themselves vehemently with their large Indian fans; others were listening, with head awry, to the compliments of their partners; not a few were talking and coquetting with the gentlemen near them, and a great portion were sitting demurely and stiffly in groups, like hedgerow elms, under the awful patronage of their mothers or protectresses: all were companionable and looked happy, except one—a silent and solitary one—who, less attractively dressed than any of the rest, yet more beautiful than them all, sat pensively apart from the throng, apparently taking little interest in what was going on. Douglas needed no one to inform him that this was Helen Lindsay, though she was very different from the vivacious, sparkling girl she had been eighteen months before. He was shocked at the change he observed, and hastened to discover the cause, by inquiring of a silly-looking young man near him who she was. “Oh! that is Miss Lindsay,” quoth the youth, who was no other than her ancient admirer, Claver, “said to be the prettiest girl in Edinburgh, though Miss Pringle for my money—her you see with a flame-coloured sack, sitting next to the Lord Justice Clerk. To be sure, Miss Lindsay is not what she has been. I was once thought in love with her (here he simpered), but she was one morning found on the tramp with a rebel officer, who is said to have been hanged, and she has never since then held up her head as she used to do; for, indeed, let me tell you, some of our great dames here affect to hold up their noses at her adventures; so that, what with a lippit character and a hanged sweetheart, you see she looks somewhat dismal on it.” Douglas durst make no farther inquiries, but shrunk back in the seclusion and concealment afforded by a corner of the room, from whence he continued, for some time longer, to watch his unhappy mistress—his father, in the meantime, completely taken off his hands by a spectacled old maiden of quality, who had engaged him in a genealogical disquisition. By watching his opportunities, he contrived to place himself almost close beside his mistress, without being observed, and, gradually making still nearer approaches, he had at last the happiness of finding himself upon the very next seat to her’s. Whatever change disappointment and woe had wrought in her, it did not amount to a fourth of that which William had achieved in himself by a change of clothes, and taming down, to the expression of domestic life, a visage which had showed somewhat fierce and soldierly in the days of his acquaintance with Miss Lindsay. Instead of his former gallant and robust air, he was now pale and elegant; and though his eye still retained some of its fire, and his lip its wonted curve, the general change was such, and, moreover, the circumstances under which he was now seen were so different from those which surrounded and characterised him, that before any but a lover’s eye, he might have passed without recognition. As the case was, Miss Lindsay discovered him at the first glance, and with difficulty suppressing a scream, had nearly fainted with excessive emotion. In the words of Scotland’s national poet—

She gazed, she redden’d like a rose,

Syne pale as ony lily.

But she expressed no farther emotion. With presence of mind which was not singular in those times of danger, she instantly recovered her tranquillity, though her eyes could not but express that she half-believed herself to be in the presence of a being out of this world. One affectionate look from William sufficed to put her alarm on that score to rest; but she continued to feel the utmost apprehension respecting his safety, as well as a multitude of other confused emotions, which fast awakened in her heart, as from his imaginary grave, where they had long been buried, and thronged tumultuously through her breast. A few words, heard by no ears but hers, stealing under cover of the noise made by the music and the dancers, like the rill under a load of snow, conveyed to her the delightful intelligence that he was still alive and her lover, and that he was come thus late, when the days of peril seemed past, and under happier auspices than before, to claim her affections. When the dancers next arose upon the floor, he respectfully presented his hand, and led her, nothing loath, into the midst of the splendid assemblage, where Lord ——, bustling about as master of the ceremonies, assigned them an honourable place, in spite of the surprised looks and reprobatory winks of not a few matrons as well as young ladies. The handsome and well-matched pair acquitted themselves to the admiration of the whole assemblage, except the censorious and the envious; and when they sat down together upon the same seats from which they had risen, the speculation excited among the whole throng by the unexpected appearance of such a pair, was beyond all precedent in the annals of gossip.

Not long after, supper was announced, and the company left the dancing-room in order to go down stairs to the apartment where that meal was laid out. A ludicrous circumstance now occurred, which we shall relate, rather because it formed a part of the story, as told by our informant, than from any connection it has with the main incident.

Sir Robert had all this time been so earnestly engaged in the genealogical discussion alluded to, that, interesting as the word supper always is on such occasions to those not given to dancing alone, he did not hear it. It was not till all were gone that he and the old spectacled lady discovered at what stage of the proceedings they were arrived. Recollecting his old-fashioned politeness, however, in proper time, the venerable antiquary made his congé, and offered his hand to the tall, stiff, and rigid-looking dame, in order to escort her, more majorum, down stairs. Sir Robert was a man somewhat of the shortest, and, moreover, of the fattest, while a gouty foot, carefully swaddled, gave an infirm and tottering air to his whole person. As they moved along, the two antiques would have reminded one of Sancho Panza leading the distressed old spectacled duenna through the dark labyrinths of the duke’s castle. Thus they went along the room, down the earl’s narrow spiral stair, and through an ill-lighted passage, he cringing and limping, as gouty men are wont, and she sailing along, erect and dignified, after the manner of an old maid of 1750, who had seen good company at the Hunters’ Balls in Holyrood House. Now, it so happened that a servant, or, as some editions have it, a baker, had set down a small fruit pasty, contained in an oval dish, in a dark corner of the passage, intending immediately to return from the supper-room, to which he had carried some other dishes, in order to rescue it from that dangerous situation—to which, indeed, he had been compelled to consign it, on finding that his hands were already over-engaged. Before he returned, as ill luck would have it, Sir Robert’s gouty and clouty foot alighted full in the middle of the pasty, and stuck in it up to the ancle—perfectly unconscious, however, in its swaddlings, of having so shod itself, so that the good baronet walked on with it into the room. What was his surprise, and what the mirth of the company, and what the indignation of the old duenna, on finding that she shared in the ridicule of her esquire, may perhaps be imagined, but cannot be adequately described. Suffice it to say, that the whole assemblage were so delighted with the amusing incident, that not one face exhibited any thing of gloom during the subsequent part of the evening; and even the young ladies were tempted to forget and forgive the good fortune of Miss Lindsay, in having, to all appearance, so completely secured a first-rate lover.

Our tale now draws to a conclusion, and may be summed up in a few words. William Douglas soon settled in business as a writer to the signet, and found no obstacle on the part of either his parent or his mistress in uniting himself to that amiable young lady. It was known to a few, and suspected by more, that under the decent habit he now wore was concealed the very person who knocked down two of Gardener’s dragoons in the Luckenbooths, and braved all Edinburgh to single combat. But he was never molested on this account; and he therefore continued to practise in the Court of Session for upwards of half a century, with the success and with the credit of a respectable citizen.

REMOVALS.

“Three removes are as bad as a fire.”

“A rolling stone gathers no fog.”

Poor Richard.

There is an allegory in the Spectator, called, if I recollect rightly, “The Mountain of Miseries.” It narrates how the human race were once summoned by a good Genius to a particular spot, and each permitted to cast down the misery which most afflicted him, taking up some one which had belonged to a fellow-creature, and which he thought he should be more able to endure. Some cast down diseased limbs, some bad wives, and so forth; but the end of the story is, that after the exchange had been made, all felt themselves a great deal more uneasy under their adopted evils than they had ever felt under their natural ones, and, accordingly, had to petition the Genius for permission to take back each his own proper original misery. I have often thought that the practice of removing from one house to another, in the hope of finding better ease and accommodation, was not much unlike this grand general interchange of personal distresses; and often on a Whitsunday in Scotland, when I have seen people flying in all directions with old tables and beds, that would have looked a great deal better in their native homes than on the street, I have mentally compared the scene to that which is so graphically described by Addison.

The English, it seems, are not much of a removing people. When a Southron once settles himself down in a house, he only quits it with the greatest reluctance. No matter for an increasing family—no matter for bettered circumstances—no matter for the ambition of wife or daughters to get into a genteeler neighbourhood. An Englishman has naturally a strong feeling about his house: it is his castle, and he never will abandon the fort so long as he can possibly retain it. Give him but a few years’ associations to hallow the dwelling—let him have been married in it, and there spent the years of the youth of his children; and sooner than part from the dear little parlour where he has enjoyed so many delightful evening scenes, with his young spouse and his happy infants around him, he would almost part with life itself. An Englishman gets accommodated to all the inconveniences of his house, however great, as naturally as the fish with its shell, however tortuous. Some strange angularity in his vestibule, which nearly throws you down every time you visit him, may appear to you a most disagreeable crook in his lot, and one that ought to make the house intolerable to him; but, ten to one, he looks upon it as only an amiable eccentricity in the plan of the mansion, and, so far from taking ill with it, would feel like a fish out of water if it were otherwise.

The Scotch, on the contrary, are an eminently migratory people. They never are three months in any house till they wish that the annual term were once more at hand, when they might remove to another. There is no day in the year so important in their eyes as Whitsunday, when almost the whole population of every considerable town is found to be on the move, exchanging houses with each other. This is a curious feature in the people, and seems as if it only could be accounted for by supposing that the nation is totally deficient in the phrenological organ called inhabitiveness. It is all to no use that experience is constantly showing how vain are their expectations of better lodging. Every disappointment seems to give them but a keener relish for a new attempt.

The fact is this: A family always enters upon a new house in a state of high hope as to its accommodations. So long as the recollection of their deserted abode is still fresh, the new house appears a paradise; for, mark, it has been selected on the express account of its not being characterised by any one of the inconveniences alleged against the old. By and bye, however, its own peculiar evils are felt; and, long before Candlemas day, it has been found as disagreeable as the other. Then a new one is selected, which, in its turn, is declared as bad as any. So far as my observation has extended, the itch for removing more generally prevails among the female than the male department of the population. Husbands in general are too little in the house ever to fall out of conceit with it; but the wife, as the more domestic creature, has full opportunity to observe and feel its defects; and she it is who most frequently urges and achieves the removal. There are various things about a house in which the husband can never see any importance, or feel any interest, but which appear to the wife as each the most cardinal of all cardinal points. One of these, for instance, is a back-green. “A back-green!” let the words be pronounced with a solemnity befitting their awful import. Often, when a house has seemed to the husband all that could be desired, he has been thrust out of it, whether he would or not, all on account of a thing which was as inexplicable to him as the mysteries of the Chinese faith—a back-green. Perhaps you hear some day that your back-green lies totally out of the sun, or that the right use to it is shared by some disagreeable neighbours, or is naught for some other equally intelligible reason. But you learn no more, and next Whitsunday you find yourself in the horrors and agonies of a removal to some distant part of the town, all on account of a little space of ground, of which you never yet could guess the use or purpose. Very often you are removed from a comfortable and every way excellent house, because it wants a back-green, and taken to one every way inferior, and, indeed, utterly wretched, but which, in the eyes of your sweet spouse, is rendered equal to a palace—because it has a back-green. I would advise all husbands to keep a sharp look-out after the back-greens, as well as several other things, which I shall point out to them.

Let us suppose a case of proposed removal in the middle walks of life. You are, say, the father of a rather numerous family, living very contentedly in a flat in not the least dense part of the town. For a long time there have been grumblings, like distant thunder among the mountains; but you have never yet heard any very strong reason urged why you should remove. At length, about the New Year, these mutterings begin to get voice; and your wife, some quiet evening, after all the young people are gone to bed, opens a sudden and most tremendous attack upon you, respecting the necessity of no longer keeping the children pent up in this small dwelling, so far from any play-ground or fresh air. And, really, she does not think it is good for her own health that you should live any longer here. She has plenty of exercise, she acknowledges, but no air. It is so far from public walks, that it makes a toil of a pleasure before they can be reached. And then, no place whatsoever to dry the clothes. Your own shirts are never properly seen to, being only hung in an open garret, where they are exposed to all the smoke of the town; at least, all that chooses to come in at the skylights. And there is no such thing as a servant’s bed-room in this house. The girl, I assure you, has her own complaints as to the hardship of being obliged to sleep in that den above the kitchen door. And as for the stair, is it not a thoroughfare to all the scum of the town? Some of the neighbours, I assure you, are no better than they should be, if all tales be true. There is even an old man in the garret who is supposed to live by Burking. The fact is, we would now require an additional bed-room for the boys—&c. &c.

Lectured up to removing point, you consent, unhappy man! to leave your shop some forenoon, in order to take a walk with your wife about the outskirts of the town, in search of a more airy, more spacious, and more genteel abode. You are dragged “by the lug and the horn,” as shepherds say, through multitudes of those “delightful small self-contained houses,” which offer, “within twenty minutes’ walk of the college,” all the elegancies of Heriot Row and Great King Street, at a tithe of the rent. You find them all as like each other in the interior as if they had been made on the principle of chip-boxes; but yet, to your wife, each seems to have its own peculiar merits. One excels in the matter of a lobby; another has an extra closet; a third affords a superior view from the drawing-room windows; and a fourth—O merit above all merits!—transcends its fellows in the article of a back-green. Every thing, however, is inspected—every thing is taken into the general account; and the result of the whole is, that though the rent is ten pounds higher, and the dining-room a thought less than in your present abode, you must remove. The carpets, with a very little eeking and clipping, will all suit. Your sideboard, of which your spouse has a measure in her reticule, will exactly answer the recess devoted to it. The jack in the kitchen answers to a tee; and even the scraper at the door has something about it that is singularly appropriate, as if the builder at the very first had designed to take the measure of your foot. All things appear, in the showing of your good dame, to be so remarkably answerable and proper, that you half believe it to be a matter of destiny, and, in completing your arrangements, hardly bargain so much with the landlord as with Fate.

During the spring months which elapse before the day of removal, you live in a state of dreamy bliss respecting your new house. Almost every fine morning you rise about seven for a walk, and, by a strange chance, you invariably take the house of promise in your way, and enjoy a survey of its external excellencies. When you observe, from the closed shutters, that its present occupants, so far from being agog about it like yourself, are snugly snoozing in their beds, you wonder at their indifference. If you were they, you would have been up hours ago, enjoying the air in the back-green, or playing the king of the Vandals in the front-plot. What a pity to see that splendid ruin of a rhododendron drooping in that fashion! What a shame to pay so little attention to the boxwood! At length, the 25th of May arrives. You transfer yourself to the now vacated tenement, pitying with all your heart the stupid people who have left it. For a time, a kind of honeymoon delirium pervades the household. You certainly do find some pleasure in contemplating from your drawing-room windows the cattle in the neighbouring grass-park, even though sensible all the time that they are only kept there in petto by the exterminating butcher at the end of “the Row.” Your wife, too, reposes upon the joys of her back-green with a gratulation of spirit that seems as if it could never know an end. And while the servant girl rejoices in a chamber to herself, your boys have sport unceasing in pasting over the kitchen door with pictures and excellent new songs. But all this only holds good while summer lasts—summer, during which no house ever appears inconvenient or disadvantageous. By and bye comes the winter of your discontent. The views from the window are no longer fair; the back-green, which already in autumn had begun to lose its character as a play-ground, in consequence of the swarms of creeping things, which covered the walls in such a way as if they had a design to form a living entomological museum, and so fairly frightened the children into the house, is now a sink of mud and melting snow; the serving-wench finds that it was better to sleep in “that den above the kitchen door”—in so far as the said den was very “cosey”—than to lie in a chamber under the slates, exposed to the malevolence of the elements in all its shapes. You find, too, that in the short days it is not very agreeable to walk several times to and from town in the dark, through a district which, in the language of house-proprietors, “has the advantage of being out of the bounds of police.” The phrase, “within twenty minutes’ walk of the College,” appears to you as only calculated for the faculties of some itinerating prodigy, in as much as it never takes you less than twice the time. The worthy housewife herself, after long suffering in secret, and great reluctance to confess her counsel wrong, has to complain at last of “the distance from the market,” which obliges her to buy every thing from small dealers in the neighbourhood, who necessarily must make up for uncertain custom by “two prices.” No getting so much as a pennyworth of vegetables without sending for it nearly a mile; and then “that creature Jenny,” there is no sending her out, you know, even upon the shortest errand, but she stays an hour. When we want even so much as change for a shilling, there is no getting it nearer than Port Hopetoun, which is half a mile away. Then we are such a distance from the kirk. It is only in fine weather we are able to get that length, and at most only once in the day. I declare, if we stay here much longer, we shall become absolute heathens. Although, to be sure, we pay less taxes in this out-of-the-way place than we did before, have we not lost a washing-tub, from there being no police? And then, is there not a toll-bar betwixt us and the town, at which we must pay one shilling every time we have to go out or come home in a coach? And, above all things, we are cut off here from all our friends and acquaintances. We do not know a soul nearer hand than the Duncans, who live at the back of the Meadows. And there is no dropping in here, in an easy way, upon a forenoon call, but the people, when they reach us, are so much fatigued with the distance, that they must be asked to stay to dinner: and the case ends, perhaps, with the good man being obliged to walk three miles home with a young lady at twelve o’clock at night! Only think of that! No, no, this cold, outlandish, genteel place, will never do. Give me a good front door in the New Town, “with all the conveniences,” and I’ll leave such places as this to them that like them better.

When once a resolution is formed to leave a house, it is amazing how many holes are picked in its character, many of them literal. The wind gets in at a hundred places; we can see daylight through stone walls and double-deafened ceilings. Then, there is such a draught up the staircase, and into the best bed-room, that positively there is no enduring it. I think another six months of this house would fairly make an end of me. It’s not a house for tender folk. You might sometimes as well sit in the open street, as by the fireside. You burn your shins, and all the time your back is freezing. Upon my word, I think we should save all the difference between this and a front door in doctors’ bills!

A front door is then determined upon; and you think you have at length, by a little stretch of your purse, reached the very perfection of comfort. But alas! “fronti nulla fides,” which is as much as to say, there is no reliance to be placed on a front door. It is true, you escape all the evils of your former habitation, and that nothing can match your back kitchen as a convenience to the servants. But then the family living above you has twice your number of children; and these imps seem to do nothing whatever the whole day long, from six in the morning till seven at night, but run pat, pat, pat, along the floors overhead, till they almost drive you mad, non vi sed sæpe cadendo. Even the charms of a back-green, or a superior scullery, will not stand against this; and so you determine at last to go to an upper flat in the same neighbourhood, where you may have the pleasure of tormenting some person below with your children, without the risk of being at the same time tormented yourself. The last selection is made upon moderate and prudent principles; but yet hope is also even here upon the wing. The house has no pretensions to style or external gentility, but yet “Edwin was no vulgar boy.” The stair is remarkably spacious and well lighted, and has, further, the advantage of a door at the bottom, which can be opened by any inhabitant, by means of a pulley, without the necessity of descending to the bottom. In fact, it is what I would call a genteel stair. “The Stevensons” live in the first flat. The kitchen door has a nice hole at the lower corner for the cat; and what a delightful place there is by the side of the fire for the lamp, or where we could keep our salt dry in a pig! The request of the Regent Earl of Mar, as inscribed on the front of his house at Stirling,

“I pray all lukaris on this ludging

With gentil ee to gif their judging,”

comes powerfully into force in all cases where the tenant is just entering upon his house. As in the other case every fault is exaggerated, and made the subject of congratulatory disgust, so in this, every fault is extenuated. “The ceilings are a little contracted, I see, by the roof.” “Oh! a wee thought coomceyled—a very small matter; these rooms are only intended for the children. We have some capital public rooms at the back, looking into the Queen Street gardens, and have a little peep of the sea in the distance.” “Upper flats,” observes your Malagrowther friend, “are very apt to smoke.” “Oh! not at all, I assure you. But I have been assured that Dr Bonnyman cured this house entirely some years ago, and since then there has never been a single puff of smoke.” “Your nursery is in the garret; don’t you think the children will feel it rather cold?” “Oh, the most comfortable nursery in the world; and see, only see, what a nice door there is at the top of the garret stair to prevent the bairns from tumbling down!” “I am sorry, however, to see a green-wife established so close beneath the door, at the bottom of your common stair.” “Oh, Sir, but consider the convenience of the greens.” In fact, there is no peculiarity about the house, however trifling, but, in the eyes of a new tenant, it will seem a beauty, as in those of a departing one it will constitute a disgrace. And this is just the philosophy of the question, and the real cause why there is so much useless tossing and tumbling of old furniture on each 25th of May.

VICTIMS.

The industrious classes of the middle rank are, on the one hand, attracted onwards to wealth and respectability, by contemplating men, formerly of their own order, who having, as the saying is, feathered their nests, now lie at ease, a kind of conscripti patres; while they are, on the other hand, repelled from the regions of poverty and disgrace by the sight of a great many wretched persons, who having, under the influence of some unhappy star, permitted their good resolutions of industry and honour to give way, are sunk from their former estate, and now live—if living it can be called—in a state of misery and ignominy almost too painful to be thought of. There may be a use in this—as there is a use for beacons and buoys at sea. But oh, the desolation of such a fate! As different as the condition of a vessel which ever bends its course freely and gallantly over the seas, on some joyous expedition of profit or adventure, compared with one which has been deprived of all the means of locomotion, and chained down upon some reef of rocks, merely to tell its happier companions that it is to be avoided; so different is the condition of a man still engaged in the hopeful pursuits of life, and one who has lost all its prospects.

The progress of men who live by their daily industry, through this world, may be likened, in some respects, to the march of an army through an enemy’s country. He who, from fatigue, from disease, from inebriety, from severe wounds, or whatever cause, falls out of the line of march, and lays him down by the wayside, is sure, as a matter of course, to be destroyed by the peasantry; once let the column he belongs to pass on a little way ahead, and death is his sure portion. It is a dreadful thing to fall behind the onward march of the world.

Victims—the word placed at the head of this article—is a designation for those woe-begone mortals who have had the misfortune to drop out of the ranks of society. Every body must know more or less of victims, for every body must have had to pay a smaller or greater number of half-crowns in his time to keep them from starvation. It happens, however, that the present writer has had a great deal to do with victims; and he therefore conceives himself qualified to afford his neighbours a little information upon the subject. It is a subject not without its moral.

A victim may become so from many causes. Some men are wrong placed in the world by their friends, and ruin themselves. Some are ill married, and lose heart. Others have tastes unsuited to the dull course of a man of business, as for music, social pleasures, the company of men out of their own order, and so forth. Other men have natural imperfections of character, and sink down, from pure inability to compete with rivals of more athletic constitution. But the grand cause of declension in life is inability to accommodate circumstances and conduct.

Suppose a man to have broken credit with the world, and made that treaty of perpetual hostility with it, which, quasi lucus a non lucendo, is called a cessio bonorum—what is he to do next? One thing is dead clear: he no more appears on Prince’s Street or the bridges. They are to him as a native and once familiar land, from which he is exiled for ever. His migrations from one side of the town to the other are now accomplished by by-channels, which, however well known to our ancestors, are in the present day dreamt of by nobody, except, perhaps, the author of the Traditions of Edinburgh. I once came full upon a victim in Croftangry, a wretched alley near the Palace of Holyrood House; he looked the very Genius of the place! But the ways of victims are in general very occult. Sometimes I have altogether lost sight of one for several years, and given him up for dead. But at length he would re-appear amidst the crowd at a midnight fire, as salmon come from the deepest pools towards the lighted sheaf of the fisherman, or as some old revolutionary names that had disappeared from French history for a quarter of a century, came again above board on the occasion of the late revolution at Paris. At one particular conflagration, which happened some years ago, I observed several victims, who had long vanished from the open daylight streets, come out to glare with their bleared eyes upon the awful scene—perhaps unroosted from their dens by the progress of the “devouring element.” But—what is a victim like?

The progress of a victim’s gradual deterioration depends very much upon the question, whether he has, according to the old joke, failed with a waistcoat or a full suit. Suppose the latter contingency: he keeps up a decent appearance for some months after the fatal event, perhaps even making several attempts to keep up a few of his old acquaintance. It won’t do, however; the clothes get worn—threadbare—slit—torn—patched—darned; let ink, thread, and judicious arrangement of person, do their best. The hat, the shoes, and the gloves, fail first; he then begins to wear a suspicious deal of whitey-brown linen in the way of cravat. Collars fail. Frills retire. The vest is buttoned to the uppermost button, or even, perhaps, with a supplementary pin (a pin is the most squalid object in nature or art) at top. Still at this period he tries to carry a jaunty, genteel air; he has not yet all forgot himself to rags. But, see, the buttons begin to show something like new moons at one side; these moons become full; they change; and then the button is only a little wisp of thread and rags, deprived of all power of retention over the button-hole. His watch has long been gone to supply the current wants of the day. The vest by and bye retires from business, and the coat is buttoned up to the chin. About this period, he perhaps appears in a pair of nankeen trousers, which, notwithstanding the coldness of the weather, he tries to sport in an easy, genteel fashion, as if it were his taste. If you meet him at this time, and inquire how he is getting on in the world, he speaks very confidently of some excellent situation he has a prospect of, which will make him better than ever; it is perhaps to superintend a large new blacking manufactory which is to be set up at Portobello, and for which two acres of stone bottles, ten feet deep, have already been collected from all the lumber-cellars in the country; quite a nice easy business; nothing to do but collect the orders and see them executed; good salary, free house, coal, candle, and blacking; save a pound a-year on the article of blacking alone. Or it is some other concern equally absurd, but which the disordered mind of the poor unfortunate is evidently rioting over with as much enjoyment as if it were to make him once more what he had been in his better days. At length—but not perhaps till two or three years have elapsed—he becomes that lamentable picture of wretchedness which is his ultimate destiny; a mere pile of clothes without pile—a deplorable—a victim.

As a picture of an individual victim, take the following:—My earliest recollections of Mr Kier refer to his keeping a seed-shop in the New Town of Edinburgh. He was a remarkably smart active man, and could tie up little parcels of seeds with an almost magical degree of dispatch. When engaged in that duty, your eye lost sight of his fingers altogether, as you cease to individualise the spokes of a wheel when it is turned with great rapidity. He was the inventor of a curious tall engine, with a peculiar pair of scissors at top, for cutting fruit off trees. This he sent through Prince’s Street every day with one of his boys, who was instructed every now and then to draw the string, so as to make the scissors close as sharply as possible. The boy would watch his men—broad-skirted men with top-boots—and, gliding in before them, would make the thing play clip. “Boy, boy,” the country gentleman would cry, “what’s that?” The boy would explain; the gentleman would be delighted with the idea of cutting down any particular apple he chose out of a thickly laden and unapproachable tree; and, after that, nothing more was required than to give him the card of the shop. Mr Kier, however, was not a man of correct or temperate conduct. He used to indulge even in forenoon potations. Opposite to his shop there was a tavern, to which he was in the habit of sending a boy every day for a tumbler of spirits and water, which the wretch was carefully enjoined to carry under his apron. One day the boy forgot the precaution, and carried the infamous crystal quite exposed in his hand across the open and crowded street. Mr Kier was surveying his progress both in going and returning; and when he observed him coming towards the shop, with so damnatory a proof of his malpractices holden forth to the gaze of the world, he leaped and danced within his shop window like a supplejack in a glass case. The poor boy came in quite innocently, little woting of the crime he had committed, or the reception he was to meet with, when, just as he had deposited the glass upon the counter, a blow from the hand of his master stretched him insensibly in a remote corner of the shop, among a parcel of seed-bags. As no qualities will succeed in business unless perfectly good conduct be among the number, and, above all things, an absence from tippling, Kier soon became a victim. After he first took to the bent, to use Rob Roy’s phrase, I lost sight of him for two or three years. At length I one day met him on a road a little way out of town. He wore a coat buttoned to the chin, and which, being also very long in the breast, according to a fashion which obtained about the year 1813, seemed to enclose his whole trunk from neck to groin. With the usual cataract of cravat, he wore a hat the most woe-begone, the most dejected, the most melancholy I had ever seen. His face was inflamed and agitated, and as he walked, he swung out his arms with a strange emphatic expression, as if he were saying, “I am an ill-used man, but I’ll tell it to the world.” Misery had evidently given him a slight craze, as it almost always does when it overtakes a man accustomed in early life to better things. Some time afterwards I saw him a little revivified through the influence of a new second-hand coat, and he seemed, from a small leathern parcel which he bore under his arm, to be engaged in some small agency. But this was a mere flash before utter expiration. He relapsed to the Cowgate—to rags—to wretchedness—to madness—immediately after. When I next saw him, it was in that street, the time midnight. He lay in the bottom of a stair, more like a heap of mud than a man. A maniac curse, uttered as I stumbled over him, was the means of my recognising it to be Kier.

The system of life pursued by victims in general, is worthy of being inquired into. Victims hang much about taverns in the outskirts of the town. Perhaps a decent man from Pennycuik, with the honest rustic name of Walter Brown, or James Gowans, migrates to the Candlemaker Row, or the Grassmarket, and sets up a small public house. You may know the man by his corduroy spatterdashes, and the latchets of his shoes drawn through them by two pye-holes. He is an honest man, believing every body to be as honest as himself. Perhaps he has some antiquated and prescribed right to the stance of a hay-stack at Pennycuik, and is not without his wishes to try his fortune in the Parliament House. Well, the victims soon scent out his house by the glare of his new sign—the novitas regni—and upon him they fall tooth and nail. Partly through simplicity, partly by having his feelings excited regarding the stance of the hay-stack, he gives these gentlemen some credit. For a while you may observe a flocking of victims toward his doorway, like the gathering of clean and unclean things to Noah’s ark. But it is not altogether a case of deception. Victims, somehow or other, occasionally have money. True, it is seldom in greater sums than sixpence. But then, consider the importance of sixpence to a flock of victims. Such a sum, judiciously managed, may get the whole set meat and drink for a day. At length, when Walter begins to find his barrels run dry, with little return of money wherewithal to replenish them, and when the joint influence of occasional apparitions of sixpence, and the stance of the hay-stack at Pennycuik, has no longer any effect upon him, why, what is to be done but fly to some other individual, equally able and willing to bleed?

One thing is always very remarkable in victims, namely, their extraordinary frankness and politeness. A victim might have been an absolute bear in his better days; but hunger, it is said, will tame a lion, and it seems to have the same effect in subduing the asperities of a victim. Meet a victim where you will—that is, before he has become altogether deplorable—and you are amazed at the bland, confidential air which he has assumed; so different, perhaps, from what he sported in better days. His manner, in fact, is most insinuating—into your pocket; and if you do not get alarmed at the symptoms, and break off in time, you are brought down for half a crown as sure as you live. Victims keep up a kind of constant civil war with shops. They mark those which have been recently opened, and where they see only young men behind the counter. They try to establish a kind of credit of face, by now and then dropping in and asking, in a genteel manner, for a sight of a Directory, or for a bit of twine, or for “the least slip of paper,” occasionally even spending a halfpenny or a penny in a candid, honourable way, with all the air of a person wishing to befriend the shop. In the course of these “transactions,” they endeavour to excite a little conversation, beginning with the weather, gradually expanding to a remark upon the state of business; and, perhaps, ending with a sympathising inquiry as to the prospects which the worthy shopkeeper himself may have of succeeding in his present situation. At length, having laid down what painters call a priming, they come in some day, in a hurried fiddle-faddle kind of way, and hastily and confidentially ask across the counter, “Mr——[victims are always particular in saying Master], have you got such a thing as fourpence in ha’pence? I just want to pay a porter, and happen to have no change.” The specification of “fourpence in ha’pence,” though in reality nonsense, carries the day; it gives a plausibility and credit-worthiness to the demand that could not otherwise be obtained. The unfortunate shopkeeper, carried away by the contagious bustle of the victim, plunges his hand, quick as thought, into the till, and before he knows where he is, he is minus a groat, and the victim has vanished from before him—and the whole transaction, reflected upon three minutes afterwards, seems as if it had been a dream.

The existence of a victim is the most precarious thing, perhaps, in the world. He is a man with no continuing dinner-place. He dines, as the poor old Earl of Findlater used to say, at the sign of the Mouth. It is a very strange thing, and what no one could suppose a priori, that the necessitous are greatly indebted to the necessitous. People of this sort form a kind of community by themselves, and are more kind to each other mutually than is any other particular branch of the public to them as a class. Thus, the little that any one has, is apt to be shared by a great many companions, and all have a mouthful. The necessitous are also very much the dupes of the necessitous: they are all, as it were, creatures of prey, the stronger constantly eating up the weaker. Thus, a victim in the last stage preys upon men who are entering the set; and all prey more or less upon poor tradesmen, such as the above Walter Brown or James Gowans, who are only liable to such a spoliation because they are poor, and anxious for business. We have known a victim, for instance, who had long passed the condition of being jail-worthy, live in a great measure upon a man who had just begun a career of victimization by being thrown into jail. This creature was content to be a kind of voluntary prisoner for the sake of sharing the victuals and bed of his patron. It would astonish any man, accustomed, day after day, to go home to a spread table at a regular hour, to know the strange shifts which victims have to make in order to satisfy hunger—how much is done by raising small hard-wrung subsidies from former acquaintance—how much by duping—how much by what the Scotch people very expressively call skeching—how much by subdivision of mites among the wretches themselves. Your victim is often witty, can sing one good comic song, has a turn for mimicry, or at least an amusing smack of worldly knowledge; and he is sometimes so lucky as to fall in with patrons little above himself in fortune, but still having something to give, who afford him their protection on account of such qualifications.

By way of illustrating these points, take the following instances of what may be called the fag-victim.

Nisbet of ——, in Lanarkshire, originally a landed gentleman and an advocate at the Scottish bar, was a blood of the first water in the dissolute decade 1780-90, when, if we are to believe Provost Creech, it was a gentleman’s highest ambition, in his street dress and manner of walking, to give an exact personation of the character of Filch in the Beggars’ Opera. Nisbet at that period dressed a good deal above Filch, however he might resemble him in gait. He had a coat edged all round with gold lace, wore a gold watch on each side (an extravagant fashion then prevalent), and with his cane, bag-wig, and gold-buckled shoes, was really a fine figure of the pre-revolutionary era. His house was in the Canongate—a good flat in Chessels’s Court—garrisoned only by a female servant called Nanny. Nisbet at length squandered away the whole of his estate, and became a victim. All the world fell away from him; but Nanny still remained. From the entailed family flat in Chessels’s Court, he had to remove to a den somewhere about the Netherbow: Nanny went with him. Then came the period of wretchedness: Nanny, however, still stuck fast. The unfortunate gentleman could not himself appear in his woe-begone attire upon those streets where he had formerly shone a resplendent sun; neither could he bring his well-born face to solicit his former friends for subsidies. Nanny did all that was necessary. Foul day and fair day, she was to be seen gliding about the streets, either petitioning tradesmen for goods to her master on credit, or collecting food and money from the houses of his acquaintance. If a liquid alms was offered, she had a white tankard, streaked with smoky-looking cracks, for its reception; if the proffered article was a mass of flesh, she had a plate or a towel. There never was such a forager. Nisbet himself used to call her “true and trusty,” by way of a compliment to her collective powers; and he finally found so much reason to appreciate her disinterested attachment, that, on reaching the usual fatal period of fifty, he made her his wife! What was the catastrophe of their story, I never heard.

The second, and only other instance of the fag-victim which can be given here, is of a still more touching character than the above, and seems to make it necessary for the writer of this trifling essay to protest, beforehand, against being thought a scoffer at the misery of his fellow creatures. He begs it to be understood, that, however light be the language in which he speaks, he hopes that he can look with no other than respectful feelings upon human nature, in a suffering, and, more especially, a self-denying form.

Some years ago, there flourished, in one of the principal thoroughfares of Edinburgh, a fashionable perfumer, the inheritor of an old business, and a man of respectable connections, who, falling into dissolute habits, became of course very much embarrassed, and, finally, “unfortunate.” In his shop,

“From youth to age a reverend ’prentice grew;”

a man, at the time of his master’s failure, advanced to nearly middle life, but who, having never been any where else since he was ten or twelve years of age, than behind Finlay’s counter—Sundays and meal-hours alone excepted—was still looked upon by his master as “the boy of the shop,” and so styled accordingly. This worthy creature had, in the course of time, become as a mere piece of furniture in the shop; his soul had fraternized (to use a modern French phrase) with his situation. The drawers and shottles, the combs, brushes, and bottles, had entered into and become part of his own existence; he took them all under the wide-spreading boughs of his affections; they were to him, as the infant to the mother, part of himself. He was on the best terms with every thing about the shop; the handles of all things were fitted to his hand; every thing came to him, to use a proverbial expression of Scotland, like the bowl of a pint-stoup. In fact, like a piece of wood placed in a petrifying spring, this man might be said to have been transfigured out of his original flesh and blood altogether, and changed into a creature participating in the existence and qualities of certain essences, perfumes, wigs, pomades, drawers, wig-blocks, glass cases, and counters forming the materiel of Mr Finlay’s establishment. Such a being was, as may be supposed, a useful servant. He knew all the customers; he knew his master’s whole form of practice, all his habits, and every peculiarity of his temper. And then the fidelity of the creature; but that was chiefly shown in the latter evil days of the shop, and during the victimhood of his master. As misfortune came on, the friendship of master and man became more intensely familiar and intimate than it had ever been before. As the proudest man, met by a lion in the desert, makes no scruple to coalesce with his servant in resisting it, so was Finlay induced, by the devouring monster Poverty, to descend to the level, and make a companion, of his faithful “boy.” They would at last go to the same tavern together, take the same Sunday walks—were, in reality, boon companions. In all Finlay’s distresses, the “boy” partook; if any thing “occurred about a bill,” as Crabbe says, it was the “boy” who had the chief dolour of its accommodation; he would scour the North and South Bridges, with his hat off, borrowing small silver a l’improviste, as if to make up change to a customer, till he had the necessary sum amassed. The “boy” at length became very much demoralised: he grew vicious towards the world, to be the more splendidly virtuous to his master: one grand redeeming quality, after the manner of Moses’ serpent, had eaten up all the rest. It were needless to pursue the history of the shop through all its stages of declension. Through them all the “boy” survived, unshaken in his attachment. The shop might fade, grow dim, and die, but the “boy” never. The goods might be diminished, the Duke of Wellington might be sold for whisky, and his lady companions pawn their wigs for mutton pies; but the “boy” was a fixture. There was no pledging away his devoted, inextinguishable friendship. The master at last went to the Canongate jail—I say went to, in order to inform the sentimental part of mankind that imprisonment is seldom done in the active voice, people generally incarcerating themselves with the most philosophical deliberation, and not the least air of compulsion in the matter. The shop was still kept open, and the “boy” attended it. But every evening did he repair to the dreary mansion, to solace his master with the news of the day, see after his comforts, and yield up the prey which, jackall-like, he had collected during the preceding four-and-twenty hours. This prey, be it remarked, was not raised from the sale of any thing in the shop. Every saleable article had by this time been sold. The only furniture was now a pair of scissors and a comb, together with the announcement, “Hair-cutting rooms,” in the window. By means of these three things, however, the “boy” contrived generally to fleece the public of a few sixpences in the day; and all these sixpences, with the exception of a small commission for his own meagre subsistence, went to his master at the Canongate jail. Often, in the hour between eight and nine in the evening, have they sat in that small dingy back-room behind the large hall, enjoying a bottle of strong ale, drunk out of stoneware tumblers—talking over all their embarrassments, and speculating how to get clear of them. Other prisoners had their wives or their brothers to see after them; but we question if any one had, even in these relations of kindred, a friend so attached as the “boy.” At length, after a certain period, this unfortunate tradesman was one evening permitted to walk away, arm in arm, with his faithful “young man,” and the world was all before them where to choose.

For a considerable period all trace of the attached pair is lost. No doubt their course was through many scenes of poignant misery; for at the only part of their career upon which I have happened to obtain any light, the “boy” was wandering through the streets of Carlisle, in the dress and appearance of a very old beggar, and singing the songs wherewith he had formerly delighted the citizens of Edinburgh in Mrs Manson’s or Johnnie Dowie’s, for the subsistence of his master, who, as ascertained by my informant, was deposited in a state of sickness and wretchedness transcending all description, in a low lodging-house in a back street. Such is the fag-victim, following his master

“To the last gasp, with truth and loyalty;”

and such, I may add, are the virtues which sometimes adorn the most vicious and degraded walks of life, where, to the eyes of ordinary observers, there appears no redeeming feature whatsoever.

FALLACIES OF THE YOUNG.
“ACQUAINTANCES.”

One of the most important concerns of young people is, the management of themselves in respect of what are called “acquaintances.” To have many friends is desirable, in a world where men are generally thrown so much upon their own resources. But there is a distinction between the friendship of a certain number of respectable persons, who are only ready to exert themselves for us when called upon, and the acquaintance of a circle of contemporaries, who are perpetually forcing themselves upon our company for the mere purpose of mutual amusement. Taking the words in their usual signification, a young man ought to wish for many friends, but few acquaintances. There is something in the countenance of a companion that cheers and supports the frailty of human nature. One can speak and act more boldly with a friend by his side, than when alone. But it is the good fortune of men of strong character, and it ought to be the object of every one, to act well and boldly by himself. One thing young people may be assured of, almost all the great services which enlightened men have done for their race, were performed alone. There was but one man, not two, at the discovery of the Compass, of the Copernican System, of the Logarithms, and of the principle of Vaccination. To descend to lesser things, ask any man who has risen in worldly fortune, from small beginnings to great wealth and honour, how he contrived to do so, and you will find that he carved it all out for himself with his own hand. He will in all probability inform you that he has reached the honourable station in society which he now maintains, chiefly by narrowing the circle of his “private acquaintances,” and extending that of his “public relations,” most likely adding, that had he on all occasions “consulted” the persons with whom he happened to be acquainted, as to his designs, he would, by every calculation, have been still in the same obscure insignificant situation he once was. The truth is, it is only when alone that we have the ability to concentrate our minds upon any object; and it is only when things are done with the full force of one mind qualified for the purpose, that they are done well.

It is the misfortune of young people, before they become fully engaged in the relations of life and business, that they look too much to “acquaintances” for encouragement, and make the amusement which “acquaintances” can furnish too indispensable. The tender mind of youth is reluctant, or unable, to stand alone; it needs to be one of a class. Hence, the hours which ought to be spent in the acquisition of that general knowledge which is so useful in after life, and which can only be acquired in the vacant days of youth, are thrown away in the most inglorious pursuits; for “acquaintances” are seldom the companions of study, or the auxiliaries of business, but most generally the associates of a debauch, the fellow-flutterers upon the Mall, the companion-hounds in the chase of empty pleasure. It is amazing how much a youth can endure of the company of his principal “acquaintance.” Virgil’s expression, “tecum consumerer ævo,” is realised in his case; for he veritably appears as if he could spend his whole life in the society of the treasured individual. At the approach of that person, every other matter is cast aside; the most important business seems nothing in contrast with the interchange of a smile or a jest with this duplicate of himself. The injunctions of the most valued relations—even of father and mother—are scattered to the winds, if they are at variance with the counsels or conduct of this precious person, whom, after all, he perhaps met only last week at a club. The power of an “acquaintance” of this kind, for good or evil, over the mind of his friend, is so very great, that it may well give some concern to those who are really interested in the prospects of youth. But every effort to redeem a victim from the fascination, will be in vain, unless his natural or habitual goodness be shocked by the further exposure of the “acquaintance’s” character. The only safeguard, therefore, against this mighty evil, is, previously to accustom youth to depend much upon themselves, and to endeavour to infuse into them a sufficient degree of moral excellence, to be a protection to them against the worst vices which “acquaintances” may attempt to impart to them.

There is a possibility, however, that the “acquaintance” may be no worse than his fellow, and yet the two will do that together which they could not do singly. Virtue is, upon the whole, a thing of solitude: vice is a thing of the crowd. The individual will not dare to be wicked, for the responsibility which he knows must be concentrated upon himself; while the company, feeling that a divided responsibility is hardly any responsibility at all, is under no such constraint. There is much edification to the heart of the thoughtless and wicked in the participation of companions; and even in large associations of honourable men for honourable purposes, there is often wanting that fine tone of feeling which governs the conduct of perhaps each individual in the fraternity. Thus, an excessive indulgence in the company of “acquaintances” is to be avoided, even where these “acquaintances” are not inferior in moral worth to ourselves. There is an easy kind of morality much in vogue among a great body of people, that “what others do we may do,” as if higher standards had not been handed down by God himself from heaven, or constructed in the course of time by the wise and pure among men. This morality comes strongly into play among youth in their intercourse with contemporaries; and as it is always on rather a declining than an advancing scale, it soon leads them a great way down the paths of vice.

It will be found, in general, that a considerable degree of abstinence from this indulgence is required, even to secure the most ordinary degree of success in life. But if great things be aimed at, if we wish to surpass our fellows by many degrees, and to render ourselves honourably conspicuous among men, we must abjure “acquaintances” almost entirely. We must, for that purpose, withdraw ourselves from all temptation to idle and futile amusement—we must, in the words of a great poet, “shun delights, and live laborious days.”

SUBJECTS OF CONVERSATION.

Subjects of conversation are sometimes exceedingly difficult to be had. I have known many a company of well-dressed men and women feel themselves most awkwardly situated for want of something to talk about. The weather, which is said to be a never-failing subject, cannot hold out above a few minutes at a time. It will stand a round or two rounds, but not more. It is then knocked up for the evening, and cannot with decency be again brought forward. Being thus disposed of, the subject of “news” is introduced; but, as a matter of course, there being no “news stirring,” “not a word,” “nothing in the papers,” that subject is soon also dispatched. If there happen to be any very remarkable occurrence worth talking of, what a blessing it is on such occasions! It is food for the company a whole night, and may be again and again brought above board for their amusement. But it much more frequently happens that there is no exciting event to talk about, and then the condition of the company is truly miserable. There being ladies present, or there being two factions in the room, politics are proscribed. Every attempt at getting up a topic failing, the company look into the fire, or in each other’s faces, or begin to examine with much interest the pattern of the carpet; and the silence which ensues is truly terrific. A slight whisper is the only sound in the apartment, and is caught at or watched by the company, for it may chance to be the commencement of a conversation in which they may join, without exciting particular attention. But it, too, dies away. It was only a passing under-current of remark between the two married ladies in the blue and white turbans, on the dearth of coals, the difficulty of getting good servants, or the utility of keeping children muffled in flannel nightgowns from October till March. At length some good soul makes an effort to brush away his diffidence. He projects a remark across the room towards the little man with the smirking countenance, about Mr This or Miss That, or Signor Such-a-thing, who are at present enlivening the town with their exhibitions. The remark is in itself a very ordinary remark, but it has its use: it quickens the intellects of those who hear it, and the tongues of a number of individuals are set a-going upon the subject of theatrical amusements, singing in the Assembly Rooms, Pasta, Paganini, and private parties, so that the original remark is lost sight of, and the company go on pretty well with what it has produced for perhaps half an hour. All these topics being exhausted, another horrible silence ensues. The company again look into the fire, or in one another’s faces, and once more examine the carpet. What is to be said next? All think upon saying something, yet nobody speaks. The national mauvaise honte is now displayed to the height of its perfection. The agony of the company, however, approaches its crisis. The awful stillness is broken, and in a most natural and unexpected manner. The young man in the starched cravat sitting in a corner of the room, near the end of the piano, who has been thinking what he should say or do for the last half hour, takes heart of grace; he rises and snuffs the candles, going through the self-imposed duty in as neat and elegant a style as he can possibly affect. The snuffing of the candles is an operation which every member of the company has seen performed ten thousand times; but it affords interest for even the ten thousandth and first time. It may not intrinsically be worth heeding, yet, in a case of this nature, it is of very great importance. It suggests a new theme, and that is exactly what was wanted, for one subject invariably leads to the discussion of half a dozen others. The operation of snuffing the candles, therefore, induces some one to remark, how beautiful gas-light is. Then this brings on a disquisition on the danger of introducing it into private houses; its cost in comparison with oil is next touched upon; then follows an observation about the last illumination; which leads to reminiscences of similar displays on the occasions of the great naval victories—the victories lead to Nelson—Nelson to his biographer, Southey—Southey to poetry—poetry to Byron—and Byron to Greece. This whirl of conversation, however, also runs out; an accident jars it, and it is all over. Suddenly the speakers pause, as if they had received a galvanic shock; one small voice is alone left prominent above the silence; but finding itself unsupported, it is immediately lowered to a whisper, and the whisper subsides to a dead silence.

I have often pitied the host or hostess on occasions of this nature, but I could not help blaming them for not providing against such dismal pauses in the conversation of their parties. To guard against these occurrences, I would recommend them to bring forward what I have remarked to be never-failing sources of conversational entertainment, namely, a tolerably good-looking cat, a lapdog, or a child. The last is the best. It ought to be about two years of age, and be able to walk. If adroitly played off, or permitted to play, it will amuse the party for an hour at least. It must be placed on the hearth-rug, so as to attract all eyes; and while in the room, no other subject will be thought of. Any endeavour to draw off attention, by the relation of some entertaining anecdote, will be deemed sedition against the majesty of the household. If a cat, a dog, or an interesting child, cannot be conveniently had, I would advise the invitation of some one who has a loud voice, and the happy effrontery of speaking incessantly, however ridiculously, on all subjects,—a person who can speak nonsense to any extent, and has the reputation of being a most agreeable companion. This man is of vast use in introducing subjects; for he has no diffidence or modesty, and has a knack of turning every observation to account. His voice also serves as a cover to much by conversation; there being hundreds who would speak fluently enough, provided a bagpipe were kept playing beside them, or who could have their voices drowned by some other species of noise. The loud and voluble talker is therefore an excellent shelter for those of weaker nerves, and will be found a useful ingredient in all mixed companies.

The difficulty of starting subjects of conversation, as well as the difficulty of sustaining them, is often as observable when two acquaintances meet on the street, as when a roomful of company is collected. The unhappy pair exhaust all that they can remember they ought to say to each other in the space of a minute and a half, and another minute may be consumed in going through the process of taking a pinch of snuff; the next half minute is spent in mutual agony. Neither knows how to separate. As the only chance of release, one of the parties at last brings in a joke, or what is meant to be such, to his aid. The other, of course, feels bound to laugh, and both seizing the opportunity, escape in different directions under cover of the witticism.

SECURE ONES.

“I mak Sicker.”—Motto of the Family of Kirkpatrick.

“Oh, he’s a sicker ane!” is a phrase used in Scotland in reference to that class of people who make excessively sure about every thing, and are in no manner of means to be imposed upon. I style such persons Secure Ones, in order to be intelligible to southern as well as northern readers. Every body must know a certain class of secure ones by the timid cautiousness and exactness of their behaviour; by the trim, unostentatious propriety of their external aspect. There is a lambs’-woollery comfort and a broad-cloth completeness about this sort of secure one, that nobody can mistake; he even seems to have made the number of buttons in his vest, and the height to which that garment is buttoned up, a matter of accurate calculation. He could not go abroad under less than a certain press of flannel and great-coat for the world; and you might almost as soon expect to meet him without his left arm as minus the silk umbrella under it. (He carries the latter part of himself, or fifth limb, at an angle of about sixty degrees to the horizon, the handle down behind, and the point forked up in front.) When he observes any part of the pavement railed off, in order to save the passengers all danger from an occasional pelleting of stones and bits of plaster which the slaters or chimney-doctors are producing from above, he deploys into the street a good way before coming up to the actual rail or rope, and, in passing, takes care to sweep several good yards beyond the utmost range of shot. “Don’t like these things coming peppering down that way; might almost dislocate one’s shoulder if they were to fall upon it; perhaps we had better go over to the other side of the street altogether. No need, you know, for running into unnecessary danger.” When a secure one ascends a stair, he goes step after step monotonously on, performing every move of his feet with a sound, conscientious deliberation, and seems determined upon doing full justice to every landing-place. He holds firmly, however unnecessarily, by the baluster, since the baluster is there, and he has an obvious satisfaction in the slight pant which he thinks himself entitled to get up on the occasion. The secure one always shuts a door carefully behind him. He takes off his hat softly, with a regard at once to the smooth economy of his hair, and the pile of his chapeau. He has a maxim that the hat should be first raised and loosened from behind, where it slides up along the glossy hair, not from the front, where it encounters a comparative obstruction from the fleshy brow. He lays down his gloves neatly on the top of each other, and hangs up his hat with an air of carefulness truly exemplary. The secure one is a bit of an epicure. When out in the forenoon, he would not for any consideration take lunch or wine. “Madam, would you have me spoil my appetite for dinner?” This appetite he nurses and cherishes in the course of his saunterings between two and five, as carefully as a miser doting over his heap. He holds a telegraphic communion with his inner man that passeth show; he coquets and dallies with his stomach; every indescribable symptom is taken into account, and forms the subject of unexpressed congratulation. “Dear tender flowers of appetite, it would be sacrilege, or worse, to nip ye in the bud, by powdering over you the baneful dew of a glass of Bucellas, or the still more odious blight of a basin of mulligatawny. No, I will coax you, and protect you, and travel for you, in faithful love and kindness, even until ye shall be fully fattened up for slaughter at five o’clock.” When the secure one sits down to table, he painsfully and not unostentatiously (to himself) relieves the one lowest button of his vest from the thrall of button-hole, and with equally deliberate care arranges a napkin over the front of his person. Dinner is a sacred ceremony, and requires its canonicals. Being fully acquainted with the whole planisphere of the table, he takes an exactly proportioned quantity of each article, so as ultimately to have enjoyed each in its exact proportion of merit, and to have precisely enough out of the whole. A secure one is frequently an old respectable unmarried gentleman, residing with a single servant—Jenny—in a “self-contained” house about Stockbridge or Newington. Knowing the distance at which he lives from the mercantile parts of the town, he takes care never to want what he calls a pound of change, as well as a small stock of copper—at least the value of a shilling—observing also that the change is not unmixed with sixpences, so that when any shopkeeper’s boy calls for payment of an account, or to take back the purchase-money of any article he has bought that day in town, he may not have to trouble [i. e. trust] the messenger with the duty of obtaining change for a bank note, which would tend to occasion a more than necessary answering of the bells at the door, besides keeping him in an agony of fiddle-faddle till the little affair was settled. Jenny, who has been so long in his service as to have become almost as secure as himself, never opens the door o’ nights without putting on the chain; and she has a standing order against all parleying with beggars, or poor women who sell tapes and such things out of baskets. The secure one regards few creatures in this world with a more jealous or malignant eye than these personages. “Why, Sir, they want nothing but to make an opportunity of stripping the lobby or the kitchen!” And such a story he can tell of a missing hat-brush! “A woman seen that morning going about—sold a pair of garters to the maid-servant three doors off at ten—front door had been left open for a minute, not more, while Jenny ran after me with something I had forgot—and in that time—it could have been at no other—the deed was done. A hat-brush I had just got with my last hat at Grieve and Scott’s; had a thing that screwed in at the one end, so that it was a stretcher also; cost four and sixpence, even taking the hat along with it.” And the secure one, without any premeditated hard-heartedness, thinks nothing of making such an incident apologize to himself for an habitual shutting of his door and his heart against the poor for the next twelvemonth. There is never any imperfection in the externe of the secure one. He bears about him a certain integrality of look that fills and satisfies the eye. From his good well-brushed waterproof beaver, all along down by his roomy blue coat, drab well-fledged, amply-trousered limbs, and so down to his double shoes, not omitting such points as his voluminous white neckcloth without collar, his large Cairngorm brooch, which looks as if a dish of jelly had been inverted into his bosom, and his heavy, pursy bunch of seals dangling, clearly defined and well relieved, from the precipice of belly—every thing betokens the secure one. Clothes are not so much clothes with him as they are a kind of defensive armour! The truth is, the secure one lives in a state of constant warfare with the skiey influences. The chief campaign is in winter. Instead of entering the field, like Captain Bobadil, about the tenth of March, he opens the trenches towards the twenty-fourth of October. He then invests himself with a cuirass of wool almost thick enough to obstruct the passage of a cannon-ball. For months after, he remains in arms, prepared to stand out against the most violent attacks of the enemy, and, in reality, there is hardly any advantage to be got of the secure one by fair open storms or frosts. He bears a charmed life against all such candid modes of warfare. He cannot be overthrown in a pitched battle. It is only ambuscade draughts through open windows, and other kinds of bush-fighting, that ever are of any effect against him. Like Hector in the armour of Patroclus, he is invulnerable over almost all his whole person; but an arrowy rheumatism, like the spear of Achilles, will sometimes reach him through a very small chink. Like the mighty Achilles himself, he is literally proof, perhaps, against every thing but what assails him through the very lowest part of his person—he can stand every thing but wet feet. There is an instance on record of his having once been laid by the heels for three months, in consequence of sitting one night in the pit of the Theatre with a slightly damp umbrella between his knees. He was just about to get entirely better of this disorder, when all at once he was thrown back for six weeks more, by reason, as he himself related, of his having changed the wear (in his sick-chamber) of a silk watch-riband for a chain! “All from the imprudence of that rash girl Jenny, who thought the riband a little shabby, and put on the chain instead. Why, Sir! a thick double riband, more than an inch broad; only conceive what a material addition it must have been to my ordinary clothing!” The chain, he might have added, was apt to be worse than nothing, for it was of irregular application, tattooing his person, as it were, with a minutely decussated exposure, so that the cold was likely to have struck him as with the teeth of a comb! The secure one has an anxiety peculiar to himself on the subject of easy-chairs, nightgowns, and slippers. The easy-chair must be exact in angle to a single minute of a degree; the nightgown must be properly seen to in respect of fur and flannel; the slippers must every night be placed for him at the proper place; and if Jenny has been so inattentive as to place the left one on the right of the other, he feels himself not a little discomposed. The secure one is most pestilently and piquantly accurate about all things. He loves to arrange, and arrange, and arrange, and over again arrange and settle all the preliminaries and pertinents of any little matter which cannot reasonably be done but one way. If he wishes, for instance, to confer with an upholsterer respecting some alteration in the above easy-chair, he first calls one forenoon, and inflicts an hour’s explanation upon the unhappy man of wood—who is not all a man of wood, otherwise he would, in such a case, be happy. It does not in the least matter at what hour the tradesman should come to see this chair, for the secure one is to be at home the whole day. Yet the very liberty at which he stands produces a difficulty. It would be charity in Providence, by any interference, “to give him not to choose.” “Say eleven; I shall then be quite disengaged—will that hour suit you? Or make it any other hour—say twelve—or say half-past eleven—half-past would do very well.” [He recollects that he seldom gets the whole fiddle-faddle of feeding the canaries over by half-past.] “Suppose it were a quarter to twelve; that would answer me better still. I may, perhaps, take a walk out at mid-day; would a quarter to twelve do? Or I might hurry the canaries, and then the half-past might do. I dare say half-past will do best after all; mind half-past eleven,” &c. &c. The man comes, and the business of the chair is entered into. The whole affair is most amply canvassed. The secure one sits down in it, and gives a lecture in a very ex-cathedra style upon all its properties and defects. He complains of the back reclining a little too much back, or the bottom showing too little bottom, or some other fault equally inappreciable; and the upholsterer sees at once that the secure one only complains of this, as he is apt to do of other things, for the very uneasiness arising from its over-easiness.

“Lulled on the rack of a too-easy chair.”

The fact is, the secure one has brought every appliance of life to such an absolute exactitude and perfection, that, having no longer any thing to give him pain, he becomes quite wretched. Secureness, it is evident, may go too far. We may become actually frightened in this world at our own caution. We may be shocked by the very unimpeachability of our own virtue. We may become miserable through the extremity of our happiness. In the same manner the secure one, when he has “got all things right,” as he would say, finds himself, to his great disappointment, just at the threshold of woe and evil. He has exactly got time to set his house in order, before the proper consequence of such an event befalls him; and he expires at the very moment when he has just completed his preparations to live.

There is another order of secure ones, whose carefulness refers rather to their wealth than their health. There is an awful inviolability of pocket about such men—a provoking guardedness against all the possible appeals of friendship, and all the impulses of benevolence. Such men look as if they were all stanchioned over. La Pucelle itself was not more perfectly fortified than their breeches. A poorer man is apt to feel in their presence as if he were under an indictment for an intention either to beg or borrow, or, perhaps, to steal from them. He sees something criminative against himself in every impregnable-looking button. Secure ones of this class, perhaps, are bachelors under forty—careful, circumspect men, that have passed through the ordeal of a thousand evening parties without ever being in the least danger. They abstain from marrying, from very fear lest any advantage should be got of them. They cannot enter into the slightest intercourse with a young lady, without letting it appear that they are perfectly on their guard. The most undesigning girl, like the above poor man, feels in their presence as if she were liable to be construed into an absolute “drapery miss.” He is always quite civil, but that is from his very secureness: he knows he is in no danger. An experienced woman gives up a man of this kind at first sight. She sees he is cook’s meat, i. e. that he is to marry a middle-aged kitchen woman at fifty, upon the ground of her proficiency in preparing a beef-steak. The general feeling of the sex regarding this sort of secure one is, “Confound the fellow! does he think that any one cares for him, or would take him though he were willing?”

“Nobody wants you, Sir, she said.”

The secure one, however, does not appear ever to suppose that the ladies have a veto in proposals of marriage. He looks upon them all as a class so eager on capturing and entrapping men, that it never enters into his head that there is such a thing as a rejected offer. The man he considers to be the passive and accepting party; the lady is the besieging enemy, and he is the fortress; the marriage takes place only if he chooses. It may be supposed, then, what would be the state of a secure one’s mind, if he were to relent some fine day in a fit of generosity (a thing only to be supposed in the event of his becoming fey), and in a liberal, candid, honourable manner, offer his hand to a young lady of little fortune, whom he was disposed to think suitable on the score of personal merit alone, but who having some prior attachment to a man one-half as old, and twice as generous, was under the necessity of only thanking him for the honour. The cook or any thing after that! And how the whole sex would rejoice in his calamity!! “A fellow, forsooth, that has been a living insult to the tribe of womankind all his days. He is well served.”

There is another kind of secure one, considerably different in circumstances from the above—a married man about sixty, with a large family, in which there are several grown daughters. These girls are constantly under his eye. At church he puts them into a pew, and sits down at the door himself, as if he were a kind of serpent guarding the Hesperian fruit. To the eyes of hundreds of young men under twenty, who are not yet considered to be sufficiently settled in the world to marry, these young ladies seem unapproachable as the top of the steeple. They look as if they were absolutely walled round with jealous and secure paternity. One after another they are taken off by middle-aged cousins and other distant relations, about whose “respectability” there can be no doubt; and the young men in the back pew sigh to see that the family is determined upon being self-contained. For it is one of those families, perhaps, who enjoy the credit of a great deal of vague, and not very strictly apportioned wealth, under the clause, “There’s plenty o’ siller amang them;” and who seem as if they would consider the admission of a stranger into the circle as a thing of some danger, however “respectable” he might appear.

TO SCOTLAND.

Scotland! the land of all I love,

The land of all that love me;

Land, whose green sod my youth has trod,

Whose sod shall lie above me!

Hail! country of the brave and good,

Hail! land of song and story;

Land of the uncorrupted heart,

Of ancient faith and glory!

Like mother’s bosom o’er her child,

Thy sky is glowing o’er me;

Like mother’s ever-smiling face,

Thy land lies bright before me.

Land of my home, my father’s land,

Land where my soul was nourished;

Land of anticipated joy,

And all by memory cherish’d!

Oh, Scotland, through thy wide domain,

What hill, or vale, or river,

But in this fond enthusiast heart

Has found a place for ever?

Nay, hast thou but a glen or shaw,

To shelter farm or shieling,

That is not garner’d fondly up

Within its depths of feeling?

Adown thy hills run countless rills,

With noisy, ceaseless motion;

Their waters join the rivers broad,

Those rivers join the ocean:

And many a sunny, flowery brae,

Where childhood plays and ponders,

Is freshen’d by the lightsome flood,

As wimpling on it wanders.

Within thy long-descending vales,

And on the lonely mountain,

How many wild spontaneous flowers

Hang o’er each flood and fountain!

The glowing furze—the “bonny broom,

The thistle and the heather;

The bluebell, and the gowan fair,

Which childhood loves to gather.

Oh, for that pipe of silver sound,

On which the shepherd lover,

In ancient days, breathed out his soul,

Beneath the mountain’s cover!

Oh, for that Great Lost Power of Song,

So soft and melancholy,

To make thy every hill and dale

Poetically holy!

And not alone each hill and dale,

Fair as they are by nature,

But every town and tower of thine,

And every lesser feature;

For where is there the spot of earth,

Within my contemplation,

But from some noble deed or thing

Has taken consecration?

First, I could sing how brave thy sons,

How pious and true-hearted,

Who saved a bloody heritage

For us in times departed;

Who, through a thousand years of wrong,

Oppress’d and disrespected,

Ever the generous, righteous cause

Religiously protected.

I’d sing of that old early time,

When came the victor Roman,

And, for the first time, found in them

Uncompromising foemen;

When that proud bird, which never stoop’d

To foe, however fiery,

Met eagles of a sterner brood

In this our northern eyry.

Next, of that better glorious time,

When thy own patriot Wallace

Repell’d and smote the myriad foe

Which storm’d thy mountain palace;

When on the sward of Bannockburn

De Bruce his standard planted,

And drove the proud Plantagenet

Before him, pale and daunted.

Next, how, through ages of despair,

Thou brav’dst the English banner,

Fighting like one who hopes to save

No valued thing but honour.

How thy own young and knightly kings,

And their fair hapless daughter,

Left but a tale of broken hearts

To vary that of slaughter.

How, in a later, darker time,

When wicked men were reigning,

Thy sons went to the wilderness,

All but their God disdaining;

There, hopeful only of the grave,

To stand through morn and even,

Where all on earth was black despair,

And nothing bright but heaven.

And, later still, when times were changed,

And tend’rer thoughts came o’er thee,

When abject, suppliant, and poor,

Thy injurer came before thee.

How thou did’st freely all forgive,

Thy heart and sword presented,

Although thou knew’st the deed must be

In tears of blood repented.

Scotland! the land of all I love,

The land of all that love me;

Land, whose green sod my youth has trod,

Whose sod shall lie above me!

Hail! country of the brave and good,

Hail! land of song and story;

Land of the uncorrupted heart,

Of ancient faith and glory!

R. C.

STORY OF MRS MACFARLANE.

——“Let them say I am romantic—so is every one said to be, that either admires a fine thing or does one. On my conscience, as the world goes, ’tis hardly worth any body’s while to do one for the honour of it. Glory, the only pay of generous actions, is now as ill paid as other great debts; and neither Mrs Macfarlane, for immolating her lover, nor you for constancy to your lord, must ever hope to be compared to Lucretia or Portia.”—Pope, to Lady M. W. Montague.

It was formerly the fashion in Scotland for every father of a family to take all the people under his care along with him to church, leaving the house locked up till his return. No servant was left to cook the dinner, for it was then judged improper to take a dinner which required cooking. Neither, except in the case of a mere suckling, was it considered necessary to leave any of the children; every brat about the house was taken to church also; if they did not understand what was said by the minister, they at least did not prevent the attendance of those who did; and moreover—and this was always a great consideration—they were out of harm’s way. One Sunday, in autumn 1719, Sir John Swinton of Swinton, in Berwickshire, was obliged to omit his little daughter Margaret from the flock which usually followed him to church. The child was indisposed with some trifling ailment, which, however, only rendered it necessary that she should keep her room. It was not considered requisite that a servant should be left behind to take charge of her, for she was too sagacious a child to require any such guardianship; and Sir John and Lady Swinton naturally grudged, with the scruples of the age, that the devotions of any adult member of their household should be prevented on such an account. The child, then, was left by herself in one of the upper bed-rooms of the old baronial mansion of Swinton, no other measure being taken for her protection than that of locking the outer door.

For a girl of ten years of age, Margaret Swinton was possessed of much good sense and solidity of character. She heard herself doomed to a solitary confinement of six hours without shrinking; or thought, at least, that she would have no difficulty in beguiling the time by means of her new book—the Pilgrim’s Progress. So long as the steps and voices of her kindred were heard about the house, she felt quite at her ease. But, in reality, the trial was too severe for the nerves of a child of her tender age. When she heard the outer door locked by the last person that left the house, she felt the sound as a knell. The shot of the bolt echoed through the long passages of the empty house with a supernatural loudness; and, next moment after, succeeded that perceptible audible quiet, the breath-like voice of an untenanted mansion, which, like the hum of the vacant shell, seems still as if it were charged with sounds of life. There was no serious occasion for fear, seeing that nothing like real danger could be apprehended; nor was this the proper time for the appearance of supernatural beings: yet the very loneliness of her situation, and the speaking stillness of all around her, insensibly overspread her mind with that vague negative sensation which is described by the native word eeriness. From her window nothing was visible but the cold blue sky, which was not enlivened by even the occasional transit of a cloud. By and by the desolating wind of autumn began to break upon the moody silence of the hour. It rose in low melancholy gusts, and, whistling monotonously through every chink, spoke to the mind of this little child, of withering woods, and the lengthened excursions of hosts of leaves, hurried on from the scene of their summer pride into the dens and hollows where they were to decay. The sound gradually became more fitful and impetuous, and at last appeared to her imagination as if it were the voice of an enemy who was running round and round the house, in quest of admission—now and then going away as if disappointed and foiled, and anon returning to the attack, and breathing his rage and vexation in at every aperture. She soon found her mind possessed by a numerous train of fantastic fancies and fearful associations, drawn from the store of nursery legends and ballads which she was in the habit of hearing night after night, at the fireside in the hall, and which were infinitely more dreadful than the refined superstitions of modern children. She thought of the black bull of Norway, which went about the world destroying whatever of human life came within its reach; of the weary well at the World’s End, which formed the entrance into new regions, from whence no traveller ever returned; and of the fairies or good neighbours, a small green-coated race of supernatural creatures, who often came to the dwellings of mortals, and did them many good and evil turns. She had been told of persons yet alive, who in their childhood had been led away by these fays into the woods, and fed for weeks with wild berries and the milk of nuts, till at length, by the po’orfu’ preaching of some great country divine, they were reclaimed to their parents, being in such cases generally found sitting under a tree near their own homes. She had heard of a queen of these people—the Queen of Elfinland—who occasionally took a fancy for fair young maidens, and endeavoured to wile them into her service; and the thought occurred to her, that, as the fairies could enter through the smallest aperture, the house might be full of them at this moment.

For several hours the poor child suffered under these varied apprehensions, till at last she became in some measure desperate, and resolved at least to remove to another part of the house. The parlour below stairs commanded from its window a view of the avenue by which the house was approached; and she conceived that, by planting herself in the embrasure of one of those windows, she would be at the very border of the eerie region within doors, and as near as possible to the scene without, the familiarity of which was in itself calculated to dispel her fears. From that point, also, she would catch the first glimpse of the family returning from church, after which she would no longer be in solitude. Trying, therefore, to think of a merry border tune, she opened her own door, walked along the passage—making as much noise as she could—and tramped sturdily and distinctly down stairs. The room of which she intended to take possession was at the end of a long passage leading from the back to the front of the house. This she traversed slowly—not without fear of being caught from behind by some unimaginable creature of horror; an idea which, on her reaching the chamber door, so far operated upon her, that, yielding to her imaginary terrors, and yet relying for safety upon getting into the parlour, she in the same moment uttered a slight scream and burst half joyfully into the room. Both of these actions scarcely took up more than the space of a single moment, and in another instant she had the door closed and bolted behind her. But what was her astonishment, her terror, and her awe, when, on glancing round the room, she saw distinctly before her, and relieved against the light of the window, the figure of a lady, in splendid apparel, supernaturally tall, and upon whose countenance was depicted a surprise not less than her own! The girl stood fixed to the spot, her breath suspended, and her eyes wide open, surveying the glorious apparition, whose beauty and fine attire, unlike aught earthly she had ever seen, made her believe it to be an enchanted queen—an imaginary being, of which the idea was suggested to her by one of the nursery tales already alluded to. Fortunately, the associations connected with this personage were rather of a pathetic than an alarming character; and though she still trembled at the idea of being in the presence of a supernatural object, yet as it was essentially beautiful and pleasing, and supposed to be rather in a condition of suffering than in the capacity of an injurer, Margaret Swinton did not experience the extremity of terror, but stood for a few seconds in innocent surprise, till at length the vision completely assured her of its gentle and pacific character, by smiling upon her, and, in a tone of the most winning sweetness, bidding her approach. She then went forward, with timid and slow steps; and becoming convinced that her enchanted queen was neither more nor less than a real lady of this world, soon ceased to regard her with any other sentiment than that of admiration. The lady took her hand, and addressed her by name—at first asking a few unimportant questions, and concluding by telling her that she might speak to her mother of what she had seen, but by no means to say a word upon the subject to any other person, and that under pain of her mother’s certain and severe displeasure. Margaret promised to obey this injunction, and was then desired by the lady to go to the window, to see if the family were yet returning from church. She did so, and found that they were not as yet in sight; when, turning round to give that information to the stranger, she found the room empty, and the lady gone. Her fears then returned in full force, and she would certainly have fainted, if she had not been all at once relieved by the appearance of the family at the head of the avenue, along which the dogs—as regular church-goers as their master—ran barking towards the house, gratifying her with what she afterwards declared to have been the most welcome sounds that ever saluted her ear.

Miss Swinton, being found out of her own room, was sharply reprimanded by her mother, and taken up stairs to be again confined to the sick-chamber. But before being left there, she found an opportunity of whispering into her mother’s ear, that she had seen a lady in the low parlour. Lady Swinton was arrested by the words, and, immediately dismissing the servant, asked Margaret, in a kindly and confidential tone, what she meant. The child repeated, that in the low parlour she had seen a beautiful lady—an enchanted queen—who had afterwards vanished, but not before having exacted from her a promise that she would say nothing of what she had seen, except to her mother. “Margaret,” said Lady Swinton, “I see you have been a very good girl; and since you are so prudent, I will let you know a little more about this enchanted queen, though her whole story cannot properly be disclosed to you at present.” She then conducted Margaret back to the parlour, pushed aside a sliding panel, and entered a secret chamber, in which the child again saw the tall and beautiful woman, who was now sitting at a table with a large prayer-book open before her. Lady Swinton informed the stranger, that, as Margaret had kept her secret so far according to her desire, she now brought her to learn more of it. “My dear,” said her ladyship, “this lady is unfortunate—her life is sought by certain men; and if you were to tell any of your companions that you have seen her, it might perhaps be the cause of bringing her to a violent death. You could not wish that the enchanted queen should suffer from so silly an error on your part.” Margaret protested, with tears, that she would speak to none of what she had seen; and after some farther conversation, she and her mother retired.

Margaret Swinton never again saw this apparition; but some years afterwards, when she had grown up, and all fears respecting the unfortunate lady were at an end, she learned the particulars of her story. She was the Mrs Macfarlane alluded to in the motto to this paper; a person whose fatal history made a noise at the time over all Britain, and interested alike the intelligent and the ignorant, the noble and the mean.

Mrs Macfarlane was the only daughter of a gentleman of Roxburghshire, who had perished in the insurrection of 1715. An attempt was made by his surviving friends to save the estate from forfeiture, so that it might have been enjoyed by his orphan daughter, then just emerged into womanhood. But almost all hope of that consummation was soon closed, and, in the meantime, the unfortunate young lady remained in a destitute situation. The only arrangement that could be devised by the generosity of her friends, was to permit her to reside periodically for a certain time in each of their houses—a mode of subsistence from which her spirit recoiled, but to which, for a little while, she was obliged to submit. It was while experiencing all the bitter pangs of a dependent situation, encountered for the first time, and altogether unexpectedly, that Mr Macfarlane, a respectable and elderly law agent, who had been employed by her father, came forward and made an offer of his hand. Glad to escape from the immediate pain of dependency, even at the hazard of permanent unhappiness, she accepted the proposal, although her relations did every thing they could to dissuade her from a match so much beneath her rank. The proud spirit of Elizabeth Ker swelled almost to bursting, when she entered the dwelling of her low-born husband; and the humble marriage-feast which was there placed before her, seemed in her eyes as the first wages of her degradation. But her own reflections might have been endured, and in time subdued, if they had not been kept awake by the ungenerous treatment which she received from all her former friends. The pride of caste was at this period unbroken in Scotland, and it rigorously demanded the exclusion of “the doer’s wife” from all the circles in which she had previously moved. The stars made a conspiracy to banish the sun. If Mrs Macfarlane had been educated properly, she would have been able to repel scorn with scorn, and, in these tergiversations of the narrow-spirited great, would have only seen their degradation, not her own. But under her deceased mother, a scion of a better house than even her father’s, she had grown up in the full participation of all the ridiculous notions as to caste, and of course was herself deeply sensible of the advantages she had forfeited. Rendered irritable in the highest degree by consciousness of her own loss, she received every slight thrown upon her by society into her innermost heart, where it festered and fed upon her very vitals. She found that she had fallen, that the step was irretrievable; and as factitious degradation, imposed by the forms of society, always in a short time becomes real, her character suffered a material deterioration. She took refuge from offended self-love in a spirit of hatred and contempt for her fellow-matrons, and began to entertain feelings from which, in earlier and happier years, she would have shrunk as from actual crime.

There was at least one branch of the better sort of Edinburgh society which never manifested any disinclination to her acquaintance. This was the class of loose young men of good birth, who daily paraded at the Cross with flowing periwigs and glancing canes, and nightly drowned their senses in a vulgar debauch, from which they occasionally awoke in the morning with the duty of settling scores by a rencontre in St Ann’s Yards, or at St Leonard’s Crags. This set of brawlers, the proper successors of those drunken cavaliers who disgraced a preceding age, subsisted in a state of pure antagonism to the stayed and decorous habits of the general community; many of them were literally the children of cavaliers, and indebted in a great measure for their idle way of life to the circumstances of the government, which dictated an exclusive distribution of its patronage among its own adherents, and of course left the poor Jacobites exposed to all the temptations of idleness. Dicing and golfing were the employments of their forenoons; in the evening they would stagger from table into Heriot’s Green, or Lady Murray’s garden in the Canongate, where they would make a point of staring out of countenance such sober citizens and their daughters as ventured to frequent those fashionable promenades. According to a Presbyterian writer of the day, they sent to London regularly for the last fashions and the newest oaths; but perhaps the latter part of the report is only a scandal. If such personages were to revive now-a-days, and appear some forenoon among the modern beaux esprits of Prince’s Street, they would be looked upon, with their long wide-skirted coats, and buckles, and cravats, as a set of the most solemn looking gentlemen; but in their own time, there were no ideas associated with them but those of reckless, hot-headed youth, and daily habits the most opposite to those of decency and virtue.

Mrs Macfarlane, while she sunk from the society of gentlewomen of her own rank, still retained such acquaintance as she had ever happened to possess, of their wild sons and brothers. With them, she was in her turn an object of great interest, on account of her transcendant beauty, or rather its fame—for the fame with such persons is of far more importance than the reality. It was not disagreeable to Mrs Macfarlane, when she walked with her husband on the Castle Hill, and found herself passed with dry recognition by persons of her own sex, to be made up to by some long-waisted Sir Harry Wildair, who, in language borrowed from Congreve or Farquhar, protested that the sun was much aided in his efforts to illuminate the world by the light of her eyes. A rattle of the fan was the least favour that could be dispensed in reward for such a compliment; and then would ensue a conversation, perhaps only interrupted by a declaration from Mr Macfarlane, that he felt the air getting rather cold, and was afraid to stay out any longer on account of his rheumatism. The society of these fops was never farther encouraged by Mrs Macfarlane; indeed, it was only agreeable to her in public places, where it consoled her a little for the ungenerous slights of more respectable persons. Yet it had some effect upon her reputation, and was partly the cause of all her misfortunes.

About two years after the insurrection of 1715, the host of Edinburgh fops received an important accession in Mr George Cayley, a young English gentleman, who was sent down as one of the commissioners upon the forfeited estates. Cayley brought with him a considerable stock of cash, an oath of recent coinage, said to be very fashionable in Pall Mall, and a vest of peculiar cut, which he had lately got copied at Paris from an original belonging to the Regent Orleans. As he also brought a full complement of the most dissolute personal habits, he might be considered as recommended in the strongest manner to the friendship of the native beaux; if, indeed, his accomplishments were not apt rather to produce displeasure from their superiority. Some days after his arrival, he was introduced to Mrs Macfarlane, to whom he was an object of some interest on account of his concern in the disposal of her father’s estate. If she felt an interest in him on this account, he was not the less struck by her surpassing beauty and elegant manners, which appeared to him alike thrown away upon her husband, and the city in which she dwelt. He rushed home from the first interview in a state of mind scarcely to be imagined. That such a glorious creature should squander her light upon the humble house of an attorney, when she seemed equally fit to illuminate the halls of a palace, was in his eyes a perversion of the designs of nature. He wished that it was in his power to fly with her away—away from all the scenes where either was known, to some place far over this world’s wilderness, where every consciousness might be lost, except that of mutual love. Over and over again he deplored the artificial bonds imposed by human laws, and protected by the virtuous part of the human race, by which hearts the most devoted to each other were often condemned to eternal separation. His heart, he found, was possessed by sensations such as had never before moved it. It worshipped its object as a kind of idol, instead of, as formerly, regarding it as a toy. He flung himself in idea before the shrine of her splendour, in breathless, boundless, despairing passion.

It is probable that if Cayley had been fortunate enough to meet Mrs Macfarlane before she was married, he might have been inspired with an attachment equally devoted, and which, being indulged innocently, might have had the effect of purifying him from all his degrading vices, and raising him into a worthy member of society. As it was, the passion which, in proper circumstances, is apt to refine and humanise, only lent a frantic earnestness to his usual folly. He made it his endeavour to obtain as much of her society as possible—an object in which he was greatly favoured by his official character, which caused him to be treated with much less coolness by Mr Macfarlane than was otherwise to have been expected. That individual had not altogether lost hope of regaining the property to which his wife was entitled, and he therefore met Mr Cayley’s advances with more than corresponding warmth, every other sentiment being for the time subordinate to this important object. The young Englishman, in order to cultivate this delightful intimacy with the greater convenience, removed from his former lodgings to a house directly opposite to Mrs Macfarlane’s, in the High Street, where, at such times as a visit was out of the question, he would sit for hours watching patiently for the slightest glimpse of her through the windows, and judging even a momentary gleam of her figure within the dim glass as an ample compensation for his pains. He now became much less lively than before—forsook, in some measure, the company of his gay contemporaries—and seemed, in short, the complete beau ideal of the melancholy, abstracted lover. It was his custom to spend most of his evenings in Mrs Macfarlane’s house; and, except during those too quickly flying hours, time was to him the greatest misery. Existence was only existence in that loved presence; the rest was a state of dormancy or watchfulness only to be spent in pain. If he applied at all to the business for which he was commissioned by the government, it was only to that part of it which related to the inheritance of Mrs Macfarlane, in order that he might every night have an excuse for calling upon that lady, to inform her of the progress he was making in her cause. His attachment in that quarter was soon whispered abroad in society; and while it served as a grateful theme for the tongues of Mrs Macfarlane’s former compeers, the favour with which he seemed to be received was equally the subject of envy to the young men, few of whom had ever found much countenance in her house, for want of something to recommend them equally to her husband.

Scarcely any thing is calculated to have so deteriorating an effect upon the mind as the constant fret of an unlawful passion. In every one of the clandestine and stealthy operations by which it is sought to be gratified, a step is gained in the downward descent towards destruction. Cayley, who was not naturally a man of wicked dispositions, and who might have been reclaimed by this passion, had it been virtuous, from all his trivial follies, gradually became prepared, by the emotions which convulsed his bosom, for an attempt involving the honour of his adored mistress, and, consequently, her whole happiness in life, as well as that of many innocent individuals with whom she was connected. This he now only waited for an opportunity of carrying into effect, and it was not long ere it was afforded.

Called by the urgent request of a Highland client, Mr Macfarlane had left town somewhat suddenly, and was not expected to return for upwards of a week. During his absence, Mrs Macfarlane endeavoured to repress the attentions of Mr Cayley as much as possible, from a sense of propriety, and contented herself with a kind of society—dumb, yet eloquent—which she felt to be much more fit for her situation—the society of her infant child. One evening, however, as she sat with her tender charge hushed to sleep upon her bosom, Mr Cayley was unexpectedly ushered in, notwithstanding that she had given directions for his exclusion after a certain hour, now past. To add to her distress, he appeared a little excited, as she thought, by liquor, but, in reality, by nothing but the burning and madly imprudent passion which had taken possession of him. He sat down, and gazed at her for a few moments without speaking, while she remonstrated against this unseasonable intrusion. She then rung her bell, in order to chide her servant for disobedience of her orders; but Mr Cayley tranquilly told her, that he had taken the liberty of sending the girl away upon an errand.

“In the name of heaven,” said the lady, “what do you mean?”

“I mean, my dear Madam,” answered he, “to have a little conversation with you upon a subject of great importance to us both, and which I should like to discuss without the possibility of interruption. Know, Madam, that, ever since I first saw you, I have fondly, madly loved you. You are become indispensable to my existence; and it depends upon you whether I shall hereafter be the most happy or the most miserable of men.”

“Mr Cayley,” cried the lady, “what foolery is this? You are not in your senses—you have indulged too much in liquor. For heaven’s sake, go home; and to-morrow you will have forgot that such ideas ever possessed your brain.”

“No, never, my angel!” cried he, “can I forget that I have seen and loved you. I might sleep for ages; and, if I awakened at all, it would be with your image imprinted as strongly as ever upon my heart. You now see a man prepared for the most desperate courses in order to obtain you. Listen for a moment. In the neighbourhood, a coach stands ready to carry us far from every scene where you have hitherto been known. Consent, and I procure for you (which is now within my power) a reversal of your father’s attainder. You shall again possess the domains where your fathers for ages back have been held in almost regal veneration, and where you spent the pleasant years of your own youth. Deny me, and to-morrow your reputation is blasted for ever. The least plausible tale, you well know, would be received and believed by society, if told respecting Mrs Macfarlane.”

“Profligate wretch!” exclaimed the unfortunate lady; “can I believe my ears when they tell me that such wickedness exists in a human bosom? Look, Sir, at this infant—were there no principles of virtue within me to dictate a contemptuous rejection of your proposals, do you think that I could leave this innocent to pine and die under the cold neglect of strangers, or to survive to a less blessed life with the stigma of a disgraced mother fixed for ever upon her? Were I the basest woman that ever lived, as you seem to think me, would nature permit so awful a violation of her laws? Could I leave my child, and not next moment be struck dead by fire from heaven for my crime? The alternative, indeed, is awful. Well you know the point upon which I am most easily affected. Base, however, as you avow yourself, I cannot yet suppose that you could be guilty of a trick so worthy of the devil himself, as to blast the reputation, where you could not fix the real cause of infamy.”

“Do not flatter yourself too much on that score,” rejoined Cayley; “you do not now see a man actuated by ordinary principles. I am tortured and confounded by an impetuous passion, which you have excited. If you take from me all hope of a consent to my first proposal, I must endeavour to bring you into my power by the second. To-morrow, did I say? Nay, I will go this night, and tell every man I know that you are the slave of my passion. Not a lady in Edinburgh but will know of it to-morrow before she has left her pillow. You will then, I think, see the necessity of consenting to the scheme of flight which I now put into your power.”

He pronounced these words in such a disordered and violent manner, that the unhappy lady sat for some time unable to reply. She hardly recovered her senses till she heard the outer door clang behind him, as he went upon the demoniac purpose which he had threatened.

The first place that Mr Cayley went to was John’s Coffeehouse, a fashionable tavern in the Parliament Square, where he found a large group of his dissolute young friends, drinking claret out of silver stoups. The company was in an advanced stage of intoxication and riot, very much to the annoyance, apparently, of a few smaller knots of decent citizens, who were indulging in some more moderate potations after the fatigues of the day, and endeavouring to understand as much as they could of the London Intelligencer, the Flying Post, and other little sheets of news which lay upon the various tables. “Well, Cayley,” cried one of the young roisterers, “come and tell us how you are getting on now with the fair lady over the way—husband not at home—must be making great advances, I suppose?” “Make yourself quite at ease on that subject; I am so, I assure you.” This he said in so significant a tone, that it was at once understood. A flood of raillery, however, was immediately opened upon him; no one would believe what he said, or rather implied; and thus, as they designed, he was drawn to make much more explicit declarations of his supposed triumph. No attempt was made by himself or others to conceal the subject of their conversation from the rest of the individuals present. It was understood distinctly by the sober citizens above mentioned, some of whom shrugged their shoulders, knocked their cocked hats firmly down upon their heads, took staff in hand, and strode consequentially and indignantly out of the room. As Cayley had predicted, the whole affair was blazoned abroad before next morning.

Mrs Macfarlane, as might be supposed, enjoyed little sleep after the agitations of the preceding evening. She could hardly believe that anything so wicked as what had been threatened by Mr Cayley could be perpetrated by a being in human shape; but yet, recollecting the extraordinary state in which he seemed to be, she could not altogether assure herself of the contrary. In the forenoon she went to pay a visit in a distant part of the town; and she could not help remarking, that while she seemed to have become an object of additional interest to the male sex, the ladies, even those with whom she had formerly been on terms of civil recognition, averted their eyes from her, with an expression, as she thought, of contempt.

The lady upon whom she called received her in the coldest manner, and, on an explanation being asked, did not hesitate to mention what she had heard as the town’s talk that morning, namely, that Mr Cayley professed himself to be her favoured lover. The unfortunate lady burst into a passion of tears and lamentations at this intelligence, protested her innocence a thousand times, and declared herself to be only the victim of a profligate; but still she saw that she did not produce an entirely exculpatory effect upon the mind of her friend. She went home in a state of distress bordering on despair. Her early misfortunes through the severity of the government; her dependent situation in the houses of her kinsfolk; her unhappy marriage to a man she could never love; and, finally, the cruel coldness with which she had been treated by her former friends in the days of her depression, all recurred upon her mind, and united with the more awful grief which had now overtaken her, prepared her mind for the most desperate resolutions.

Early in the afternoon she sent a note to Mr Cayley, requesting, in the usual terms, the favour of his company. The receipt of her billet threw him into transports of joy, for he believed that his scheme had already taken effect, and that she was now prepared to accede to his proposals. He therefore dressed himself in his best style, and at the proper hour (he felt too secure of his prey to go sooner) walked across the street to his appointment. He was shown into a room at the back of the house, where he had never before been, and where there was little furniture besides a picture of Mrs Macfarlane, painted by Sir John Medina, an Italian artist who long practised his trade at the Scottish capital. This portrait, which he began to gaze upon with all the enthusiasm of a lover, represented his mistress in a style and manner strikingly beautiful. The utmost serenity, united with the utmost innocence, shone in those sweetly noble features. The fair open brow glowed like the summer sky, calmly and cloudlessly beautiful. The eyes shone with the lustre of gladness and intelligence, and the whole expression was resolved into an exquisite and killing smile. The lover stood in a sort of transport before this image of all he held dear on earth, as if he were yielding to an idolatrous contemplation of its extraordinary loveliness, when the door was opened—and behold the original! Instead of the voluptuous smile which shone on the canvass of Medina, a Beautiful Fury stood before him—a Hecate not yet grown old. He started with horror; for not only did she bear in her countenance the most threatening ensigns of passion, but she carried in her hand two large pistols, one of which she held extended to him, while with the other hand she locked the door behind her, at the same time keeping a watchful and glaring eye upon her victim.

“Wretch,” she said, “you have ruined one who never did you wrong. You have destroyed me as completely as if you had stretched me lifeless beneath your hand. More than this, you have rendered others who are dear to me unhappy for ever. My child—you have deprived her of the nurture of a mother; you have fixed upon her name a stain which will never be washed out. And yet for all this, society, cruel as it is to the victims, provides no punishment—hardly even any censure—to the criminal. Were it now my will to permit you, you might walk away scatheless from the fair scene you have ravaged, with nothing to disturb your triumph, but the lamentations of so many broken hearts. You shall not, however, enjoy this triumph—for here you shall die!”

Cayley had stood for a few moments, gazing alternately at her face and at the weapon she held extended towards him. He heard her address as if he had heard it not. But at the last word, he recovered a little of his presence of mind, and made an effort to approach her. She at that moment fired, but without effect. The effort of drawing the trigger had depressed the muzzle of the weapon, and the ball entered the floor at his feet. She lost not an instant to present and fire the other, the shot of which penetrated his breast, and he fell next moment before her, with but one indistinct murmur of agony—and then all was still.

One brief embrace to her child—a moment at the toilet to arrange her travelling dress, which she had previously prepared, and the beautiful murderess was ready to fly. She instantly left town for the south, and, as already mentioned, received shelter and concealment in the house of her distant kinsman, Sir John Swinton. How long she was there protected, is not known, but it was probably as long as the search of justice continued to be in the least eager. It was always understood, by those aged persons who knew her story, and from whom the preceding facts have chiefly been derived, that she ultimately escaped to some remote continental state, where she was supported by contributions from her relations. So closes one of the most tragical tales that stain the domestic annals of Scotland during the last century.

THE DOWNDRAUGHT.

Side by side with victims, might be placed the kindred species downdraughts, who are only different from the accident of their having friends who will rather be weighed down by them to the very earth—to the grave itself—than permit them to sink by themselves. The downdraught is in reality a victim, and one of the darkest shade, being generally a person totally worthless in character, and abandoned in habits; but then he has not altogether cut the cables which bound him to his native grade in society—he has not all forgot himself to disgrace—he is still domesticated with his friends—he has a mother, or a wife, or a brother, or a sister, or perhaps an old aunt, who will try to keep him in food and clean linen, and, having lost all hope of his ever being actively good, will do anything for him, if he will only preserve a neutrality, and not be positively evil. He is a victim in appearance (always excepting the clean shirt), but he enjoys the happy superiority over that class, of having an open door to fly to when he pleases, and either a kind relation, who considers him “only a little wild in the meantime,” or else one who, for the sake of decent appearances, will endeavour to patch up all his peccadiloes, and even be tyrannised over by him, rather than shock society by an open rupture. The personal tendencies of a downdraught to victimization are strong as the currents of the great deep, but he is withheld from it by others. He has always some anchorage or other upon decent life, to keep him back from the gulf to which he would otherwise hurry on. In many cases, the very kindness and indulgence of friends was the original cause of his becoming a downdraught. He had every thing held to his head. He was encouraged in his pretences of headaches as an excuse for staying away from school. When afterwards an apprentice, he was permitted to break off, on the score of being compelled to put on fires and sweep out the shop. Or, perhaps, it was from none of those causes. Possibly, he was just one of those persons who seem to be totally destitute of all perception of the terms upon which men are permitted to exist in this world; that is, that they are either to be so fortunate as to have “their fathers born before them,” so that they may accede to wealth without exertion, or must else do something to induce their fellow-creatures to accord them the means of livelihood without beggary. That many persons are really born without this great leading faculty, is unfortunately but too indisputable; and, assuredly, they are as proper inmates for a lunatic asylum as more frantic madmen; for what is the use of reason, or even of talent, without the desire of exerting it, either in one’s own behalf, or in behalf of mankind? The terms of existence we allude to are expressed in the text of Scripture, “By the sweat of thy brow thou shalt earn thy bread;” so that the man must be considered a kind of heretic, as well as a fool, who will not, or can not, understand them. Yet the fact is so, that many men arrive at maturity with either a sense of these conditions of life, more or less imperfect, or no sense of them at all. They perhaps conceive themselves to be born to keep down the pavement of Prince’s Street with boots one inch and a half deep in the heel, or to fumigate the air of that elegant street with cigars at three shillings per dozen; but that is the utmost extent to which their notions of the purposes of life ever extend. These men, of course, are predestined downdraughts. We see them already with our mind’s eye, exhausting the kindness and patience of a brother, or a wife, yea almost of a mother, with their idle and dissolute habits—dragging those relations slowly but surely down into misery and disgrace—and only in the meantime saved from being kicked out of doors, as they deserve, not by any regard for merits of their own, for they have none, but by the tenderness of those relations for their own reputation.

A decent citizen, of the name of Farney, retired about five-and-twenty years ago from active life, and, planting himself in a neat villa a little way beyond the southern suburbs of Edinburgh, resolved to do nothing all the rest of his life but enjoy the ten or twelve thousand pounds which he had made by business. He was a placid, inoffensive old man, only somewhat easy in his disposition, and, therefore, too much under the control of his wife, who unfortunately was a person of a vulgarly ambitious character. The pair had but one child—a daughter, Eliza Farney—the toast of all the apprentices in the South Bridge, and really an elegant, and not unaccomplished young lady. The only object which Mr and Mrs Farney now had in life, besides that of enjoying all its comforts, was the disposal of this young lady in marriage. Whenever there is such a thing as ten thousand pounds connected with the name of a young lady, there is generally a great deal more fuss made about it than when the sum is said to exist in any other shape or circumstances. It is important in the eyes of all the young men who think themselves within shot of it. It is important in the eyes of all the young women who have to lament that they do not possess similar advantages. It is important in the eyes of all the fathers and mothers of sons, who think themselves within range of it. And, lastly, it is important, immensely important indeed, in the eyes of parties, young lady, mother and father, sister or brother, who have anything to say in the disposal of it. Money in this shape, one would almost think, is of a different value from money in any other: the exchange it bears against cash in business, or cash in the prospect of him who knows he can win it, is prodigious. At the very lowest computation, a thousand pounds in the purse of a young lady is worth ten thousand in the stock of a man of trade. Nay, it is astonishing what airs we have known a few hundred pounds of this kind put on in respect, or rather disrespect, of decent people, who were almost winning as much in the year. In fact, the fiddle-faddle about the disposal of an heiress is a great farce, and never fails to put either the parties concerned in the disposal, or else the candidates for the acquisition, into a thousand shabby and selfish attitudes. It is hard to say if the young lady herself is the better for it all. The only certain effect of her possessing a fortune, is, that it deprives her of ever having the pleasing assurance, given to most other women, that she is married for her own sake alone. Sincere love is apt to retire from such a competition, through the pure force of modesty, its natural accompaniment; and the man most apt to be successful is he who, looking upon the affair as only a mercantile adventure, pursues it as such, and only hopes to be able to fall in love after marriage.

It happened that Eliza Farney was loved, truly and tenderly loved, by a young man of the name of Russell, whose parents had been acquainted with the Farneys in their earlier and less prosperous days, but were now left a little behind them. Young Russell had been the playmate of Eliza in their days of childhood; he had read books with her, and taught her to draw, in their riper youth; and all the neighbours said, that, but for the brilliant prospects of Miss Farney, she could not have found a more eligible match. Russell, however, was still but the son of a poor man. He was himself struggling in the commencement of a business, which he had begun with slender means, in order to sustain the declining fortunes of his parents. His walk in life was much beneath the scope of his abilities, much beneath his moral deserts; but, under a strong impulse of duty, he had narrowed his mind to the path allotted to him, instead of attempting to do justice to his talents by entering upon any higher and more perilous pursuit. Thus, as often happens, an intellect and character, which might have brightened the highest destinies, were doomed to a sphere all unmeet for them, where they were in a manner worse than lost, as they only led to a suspicion which was apt to be unfavourable to the prospects of their possessor, namely, that he was likely to be led, by his superior tastes, into pursuits to which his fortune was inadequate, or into habits which would shipwreck it altogether. Russell looked upon Eliza Farney, and despaired. He saw her, as she advanced into womanhood, recede gradually from his sphere in society, and enter into one more suitable to her father’s improving fortunes, into which it was not for him to intrude. Eliza had, perhaps, entertained at one time a girlish fondness for him; but it was not of so strong a character as to resist the ambitious maxims of her mother, and the sense of her own importance and prospects, which began to act upon her in her riper years.

“Amongst the rest young Edwin sighed,

But never talked of love.”

Some appearance of coldness, which he saw, or fancied he saw, in her conduct towards him, caused his proud and pure nature to shrink back from the vulgar competition which he saw going forward for the hand of “the heiress.” It was not that the fondest wishes of his heart were met with disappointment—perhaps he could have endured that—but he writhed under the reflection, that external circumstances should separate hearts that once were allied, and that no conscious purity of feeling, no hope of hereafter distinguishing himself by his abilities, was of avail against the selfish and worldly philosophy which dictated his rejection. It was only left for him to retire into the chambers of his own thoughts, and there form such solemn resolutions for improving his circumstances and distinguishing his character, as might hereafter, perhaps, enable him to prove to the cold being who now despised him, how worthy, how more than worthy, perhaps, he was of having enjoyed her affections, even upon the mean calculations by which he was now measured and found wanting.

The mother, to whom this rupture was chiefly owing, now applied herself heartily to the grand task of getting her daughter “properly disposed of.” Every month or so, her house was turned topsy-turvy, for the purpose of showing off the young lady in gay assemblies. Care was taken that no one should be invited to these assemblies who was merely of their own rank. Unless some capture could be made in a loftier, or what appeared a loftier circle, it was all as nothing. The human race hang all in a concatenation at each other’s skirts, those before kicking with all their might to drive off those behind them, at the same time that they are struggling might and main, despite of corresponding kicks, to hold fast, and pull themselves up by means of their own predecessors. This is particularly the case where a mother has a daughter to dispose of with the reversion of a few thousands. Money under these circumstances, as already explained, would be absolutely thrown away if given only to a person who estimated it at its ordinary value; it must be given to one who will appreciate it as it ought to be, and sell pounds of free-will and honourable manhood for shillings of the vile dross. At length, at a ball held in the Archers’ Hall—a kind of Almack’s in the east—the very man was met with—a genteel young spark, said to be grand-nephew to a baronet in the north, and who was hand in glove with the Greigsons, a family of quis quis gentility in the New Town, but who loomed very large in the eyes of a person dwelling in the south side. This fellow, a mere loose adventurer, whose highest destiny seemed to be to carry a pair of colours if he could get them, and who positively had no claims upon consideration whatsoever, except that he kept a decent suit of clothes upon his back, and was on terms of intimacy with a family supposed to belong to the haut ton—this poor unanealed wretch, recommended by impudence and a moustache, which he amiably swore he would take off when married, gained the prize from which the modest merit of Russell was repelled. In a perfect fluster of delight with the attentions he paid to her daughter, terrified lest he should change his mind, or any unforeseen event prevent the consummation so devoutly to be wished, the managing mother presented no obstruction to the courtship. “Such a genteel young man!” she would say to her husband. “He is greatly taken out in good company. Just the night before last, he was at the Honourable Mrs ——’s party in Oman’s Rooms. He danced with Miss Forster, the great heiress, who, they say, is distractedly in love with him. But he says she has naething like the elegant carriage o’ our ’Liza. Indeed, between you and me, says he, jokingly, to me the other day, she’s splay-footed. He could make his fortune at once, you see, however, and I’m sure it’s really extraordinary o’ him to particulareese the like o’ us in the way he’s doing”—and so forth. The old man sat twirling his thumbs and saying nothing, but having his own fears all the time that all was not really gold that glittered. He was, however, one of those people who, upon habit and principle, never say a single word about any speculative thing that is proposed to them, till the result has been decided, and then they can tell that they all along thought it would turn out so. It was untelling the prescience and wisdom that old Farney believed himself to be thus possessed of. Suffice it to say, the managing mother, within the month, made out a mittimus of destruction in favour of her daughter, Eliza Farney, spinster, consigning her to the custody of William Dempster, Esq., blackguard by commission, and downdraught by destiny.

The fortune of Miss Farney was not exactly of the kind that suited Mr Dempster’s views. It was only payable after the death of her father. Mr Dempster, therefore, saw it to be necessary to take expedients for obtaining the use of it by anticipation. He commenced a large concern in some mercantile line, obtaining money in advance from the old gentleman, in order to set the establishment on foot. He also procured his signature to innumerable bills, to enable him to carry it on. The business, in reality, was a mere mask for obtaining the means of supporting his own depraved tastes and appetites. There was hardly any kind of extravagance, any kind of vice, which he did not indulge in at the expense of old Farney. The result was what might be expected from such premises. Exactly a twelvemonth after the marriage, Dempster stopped payment, and absconded without so much as even taking leave of his wife. His folly and profligacy together had already absorbed the whole fortune with which Mr Farney had retired from business, besides a good deal more for which the unfortunate old man was security. He was in consequence totally ruined, left destitute in old age, without the least resource; while the young elegant female, who a short year before was the admiration and envy of glittering circles, had just become a mother, upon the bed which only waited for her convalescence to be sold for behoof of her husband’s creditors.

Farney found refuge—and considered himself most fortunate in finding it—in a beneficiary institution for decayed citizens, of which he had himself, in better days, been one of the managers, but which he did not live long to enjoy. His wife, about the same time, died of one of those numberless and varied diseases which can only be traced to what is called a broken heart. The daughter—the unhappy, and, in a great measure, guiltless victim of her wretched ambition—had no eventual resource, for the support of herself and her infant, but to open a small school, in which she taught female children the elements of reading, writing, and sewing. The striking infelicity of her fate, joined to her own well-known taste and industrious habits, in time obtained for her considerable patronage in this humble occupation; and she would eventually have been restored to something like comfort, but for the unhallowed wretch whose fate had become identified with her own. Where this fellow went, or how he subsisted, for the three years during which he was absent, no one ever knew. He was heard to talk of the smugglers in the Isle of Man, but it can only be surmised that he joined that respectable corps. One day, as Mrs Dempster sat in the midst of her little flock of pupils, the door was opened, and in crawled her prodigal husband, emaciated, travel-worn, and beggar-like, with a large black spot upon one of his cheeks, the result of some unimaginably low and scoundrelly brawl. The moment she recognised him, she fainted in her chair; the children dispersed and fled from the house, like a flock of chickens at sight of the impending hawk; and when the unfortunate woman recovered, she found herself alone with this transcendant wretch, the breaker of the peace of her family, the murderer of her mother. He accosted her in the coolest manner possible, said he was glad to see her so comfortably situated, and expressed an anxiety for food and liquor. She went with tottering steps to purvey what he wanted; and while she was busied in her little kitchen, he sat down by her parlour fire, and commenced smoking from a nasty black pipe, after the manner of the lowest mendicants. When food and drink were set before him, he partook of both with voracious appetite. Mrs Dempster sat looking on in despair, for she saw that the presence of this being must entirely blight the pleasant scene which her industry had created around her. She afterwards said, however, that she could have perhaps overlooked all, and even again loved this deplorable wretch, if he had inquired for his child, or expressed a desire to see him. He did neither—he seemed altogether bent on satisfying his own gross appetites. After spending a few hours in sulky unintermitted smoking and drinking, he was conveyed to a pallet in the garret, there to sleep off his debauch.

It were needless to go through all the distressing details of what ensued. Dempster henceforth became a downdraught on his wife. This forlorn woman often confessed to her friends that she was perfectly willing to support her husband, provided he would be but content with the plain fare she could offer him, and just walk about and do nothing. But he was not of a temper to endure this listlessness. He required excitement. Instead of quietly spending his forenoons in the arbour, called the Cage, in the Meadows, among decayed military pensioners, and other harmless old men, he prowled about the crowded mean thoroughfares, drinking where he could get liquor for nothing, and roistering in companies of the most debased description. He incurred debts in all directions on the strength of his wife’s character, and she was necessarily compelled to liquidate them. The struggles which she at this time made were very great. Like the mother of Gray the poet, she endured all kinds of ill usage, and persevered under every difficulty to give her son a respectable education, in order that he might have an opportunity of wiping away the stains of his father’s vices, and be a comfort to his mother in the decline of life. To do this, and at the same time continue paying the vile debts of her profligate husband, was altogether impossible. She exhausted the beneficence, and even tired the pity of her friends. It need hardly be mentioned, that the creditors of a husband have an undeniable claim upon the effects of his wife. It unfortunately happened that the wretches with whom Dempster contracted his debts, were as worthless as himself. After draining every resource which his wife could command, he summed up his villainy by giving a promissory note for fifteen pounds to one of his lowest associates. It is supposed that he struck the bargain for a couple of guineas, for with this sum he again absconded from Edinburgh, and, taking his way to Greenock, shipped himself on board of a vessel for America. At first, his wife was thankful for the relief; she again breathed freely; but her joy was soon turned into mourning. The promissory note made its appearance; she had just scraped up and paid her rent; she had not therefore a farthing in the world. In a fortnight, the whole of her effects were sold upon distraint. She was turned to the street a second time, almost bent to the dust with the burden of her miseries. The first night she received shelter in the house of a respectable “much-tried” widow, who was the only person she could freely speak to about her destitute condition. Next day, by the advice of this good woman, she took a room in the neighbourhood, and endeavoured to gather together her pupils, who, it seems, did not desert her, but took a deep interest in her misfortunes. She had also the good fortune to get her boy into one of the educational hospitals, and she therefore expressed herself thankful for the mercies she still received.

An interval of many years now occurs in the story of Mrs Dempster, during which she heard nothing of her husband, except a rumour that he was drowned on a lumbering excursion in the rapids of the St Lawrence. Through the influence of her pitiable tale and real merit, she obtained the situation of superintendant of a large public seminary for young ladies in a country town. Here she lived in peace, comfort, and honour, for some years, till she had almost forgot that ever such a wretch as Dempster existed. What was her horror one day, when, as she was entertaining a large party of respectable people at tea, the demon of her fate stood once more before her, not the mere squalid beggar which he formerly appeared, but a concentration of blackguardism and shabbiness, of utterly ruined and broken-down humanity, such as was never perhaps surpassed, even in the sinks of London and Parisian vice. There was now more than mendicancy in his aspect—there was robbery, murder, and every kind of desperate deed. The wan face, blackened and battered with bruises and wounds—the troubled eye, bespeaking the troubled spirit—the ropy, sooty attire, through which peeped the hardly whiter skin—the feet bare, and ulcerated with walking—every thing told but one tale of unutterable sin and misery. The guests shrunk aghast from this hideous spectre, and the hostess shrieked outright. Little regarding the alarm which he had occasioned, he exclaimed, in a hollow and scarcely earthly voice, “Give me meat—give me drink—give me clothing—I am destitute of all; there you sit in enjoyment of every luxury, while your husband, who is flesh of your flesh, has not known what it is to eat heartily, or to be covered from the piercing wind, for weeks and months. Shrink not from me. Wretched as I seem, I am still your husband. Nothing on earth can break that tie. Meat, I say—drink—I am in my own house, and will be obeyed. For you, gentles, get you gone; your company is not now agreeable.” The company dispersed without farther ceremony, leaving the unhappy woman alone with her husband.

Next day, the stranger appeared abroad in a decent suit of clothes, and Mrs Dempster seemed to have recovered a little of her equanimity. Every sacrifice, however, which she could make for this wretch, was in vain, or only encouraged him to demand greater indulgences. An unlimited supply of liquor in his own house would not satisfy him. He required large sums wherewith to treat all the canaille of the town. Entreaties, indulgences, every thing that could be devised to gratify him, were unavailing to impress him with a sense of his wife’s situation. He intruded his unhallowed front into her school, and insulted her before her pupils. Those who laughed at his antics he would seize by the shoulders, and turn out of doors. He had also a most perverse desire of pushing himself into her presence, whenever he thought she was conversing with any of her employers, before whom an observance of propriety and decorum was most particularly necessary. Indeed, he just delighted to do exactly what his wife wished him not to do, the grand object of his low mind being to show how much he had her comfort and welfare in his power. At length, with every feeling of respect for Mrs Dempster, her employers, the magistrates, found it necessary to inform her, that they could not permit her to retain the school any longer under such circumstances, as it was threatened with utter annihilation by the gradual diminution of the number of pupils. She proposed to her husband to allow him regularly the full half of her earnings, if he would only stay in some other place, and never again intrude upon her. But he scorned to be bought off, as he said. He insisted rather upon her giving up the school, and accompanying him to Edinburgh, where, with the little sum she had saved, and what besides they could raise by the sale of her superfluous furniture, he would enter into business on his own account, and she should never again be obliged to work for either herself or for him. The poor woman had no alternative. She was compelled to abandon the scene, where for so many years she had enjoyed the comforts of life and the respect of society, in order to be dragged at the chariot wheels, or rather at the cart’s tail, of her husband’s vices and fortunes, through scenes to which she shuddered to look forward.

In the capital, Dempster’s design of entering into business, if he ever seriously entertained it, was no more talked of. Fleshed once again with a taste of his former indulgences, he rushed headlong into that infamous career, which already had twice ended in voluntary banishment. His wife’s finances were soon exhausted; but, with the barbarity of a demon taskmaster, he would every day leave her with a threat, which she but too well knew he would execute, of beating her, if she should not be able to produce next morning a sum necessary for the gratification of his wretched appetites. It was now in vain to attempt that mode of subsistence by which she had hitherto supported herself. So long as she was haunted by this evil genius, that was impracticable. By the interest, however, of some of her former friends, she obtained a scanty and precarious employment for her needle, by which she endeavoured to supply the cravings of her husband, and her own simpler wants. From morning early, through the whole day, and till long after midnight, this modest and virtuous woman would sit in her humble lodging, painfully exerting herself at a tedious and monotonous task, that she might be able to give to her husband in the morning that sum, without which she feared he would only rush into greater mischief, if not into absolute crime. No vigils were grudged, if she only had the gratification at last of seeing him return. Though he often staid away the whole night, she never could permit herself to suppose that he would do so again, but she would sit bending over her work, or, if she could work no more from positive fatigue, gazing into the dying embers of her fire, watching and watching for the late and solitary foot, which, by a strange exertion of the sense, she could hear and distinguish long ere any sound would have been perceptible to another person. Alas, for the sleepless nights which woman so often endures for the sake of her cruel helpmate! Alas, for the generous and enduring affection which woman cherishes so often for the selfish heart by which it is enslaved!

A time at length arrived when the supplies purveyed by Mrs Dempster from her own earnings were quite incompetent to satisfy this living vampire. She saw him daily rush from her presence, threatening that he would bring her to the extremity of disgrace by the methods he would take to obtain money. She lived for weeks in the agonising fear that the next moment would bring her news of some awful crime committed by his hand, and for which he was likely to suffer the last penalty of the law. She hardly knew who or what were his associates; but occasionally she learned, from mutterings in his sleep, that his practices were of the most flagitious and debased kind. He seemed to be the leader or director of a set of wretches who made a livelihood by midnight burglary. At length, one day he came home at an unusual hour, accompanied by three strangers, with whom he entered into conversation in the next room. Between that apartment and the room in which he was sitting, there was a door, which, being never used, was locked up. Through the thin panels, she overheard a scheme laid for entering the house of ——, a villa in the neighbourhood, in order to rob the tenant, whom they described as a gentleman just returned from the East Indies, with a great quantity of plate and other valuables. One of the persons in conference had visited the house, through the kindness of a servant, to whom he had made up as a sweetheart; and he therefore was able to lead the attack through such a channel as rendered success almost certain. “The nabob,” said this person, “sleeps in a part of the house distant from the room in which his boxes are for the present deposited. But should he attempt to give us any disturbance, we have a remedy for that, you know.” And here the listener’s blood ran cold at hearing a pistol cocked. From all that she could gather, her husband was only to keep watch at the outside of the house, while the rest should enter in search of the booty. It is impossible to describe the horror with which she heard the details of the plot. Her mind was at first in such a whirl of distracted feeling, that she hardly knew where she stood; but as the scheme was to be executed that very evening, she saw it necessary to exert herself quickly and decisively, and, therefore, she immediately went to the house of a friend, and wrote an anonymous note to the person most concerned, warning him of a design (she could use no more specific language) which she knew was entertained against a certain part of his property, and recommending him to have it removed to some more secure part of his house. To make quite sure of this note being delivered in time, she took it herself to the gate, and left it with the porter, whom she strictly enjoined to give it immediately into the hands of his master. She then went home, and spent an evening of misery more bitter than the cup of death itself. She had formerly passed many a lonely night at her cheerless fireside, while waiting for the return of her wretched husband; but she never spent one like this. When she reflected upon the happiness of her early days, and the splendid prospects which were then said to lie before her, and contrasted them with the misery into which she had been so suddenly plunged, not by any fault of her own, but, as it appeared, by the mere course of destiny, she could have almost questioned the justice of that supreme power, by which she piously believed the concerns of this lower world to be adjusted. What dire calamities had sprung to her from one unfortunate step! What persecutions she had innocently endured! How hopeless was her every virtuous exertion against the perverse counteraction of a being from whom society could not permit her to be disjoined! And, finally, what an awful outburst of wretchedness was at this moment, to appearance, impending over her! Then she recalled one gentle recollection, which occasionally would steal into her mind, even in her darkest hours, and fill it with an agreeable but still painful light—the thought of Russell—Russell, the kind and good, whom, in a moment of girlish vanity, she had treated harshly, so that he vanished from her presence for ever, and even from the place where he had suffered her scorn. Had fate decreed that she should have been united to that endeared mate of her childhood, how different might have been her lot!—how different, also, perhaps, might have been his course of life!—for she feared that her ungenerous cruelty had also made shipwreck of his noble nature. These meditations were suddenly disturbed by the entrance of Dempster, who rushed into her room, holding a handkerchief upon his side, and, pale, gory, and breathless, fell upon the ground before her. Almost ere she had time to ascertain the reality of this horrid vision, quick footsteps were heard upon the stair. The open door gave free admission, and in a moment the room was half filled with watchmen, at the head of whom appeared a middle-aged gentleman, of a prepossessing though somewhat disordered exterior. “This,” he exclaimed, “is the villain; secure him, if he be yet alive, but I fear he has already met the punishment which is his due.” The watchmen raised Dempster from the ground, and, holding his face to the light, found that the glaze of death was just taking effect upon his eyes. The unhappy woman shrieked as she beheld the dreadful spectacle, and would have fallen upon the ground if she had not been prevented by the stranger, who caught her in his arms. Her eyes, when they first re-opened, were met by those of Russell.

It would be difficult to describe the feelings with which these long-severed hearts again recognised each other, the wretchedness into which she was plunged, by learning that her well-intended efforts had unexpectedly led to the death of her husband, or the returning tide of grateful and affectionate emotion which possessed his bosom, on being informed that those efforts had saved his life, not to speak of the deep sensation of pity with which he listened to the tale of her life. A tenderer feeling than friendship was now impossible, and, if it could have existed, would have hardly been in good taste; but Russell, now endowed with that wealth which, when he had it not, would have been of so much avail, contented himself to use it in the pious task of rendering the declining years of Eliza Farney as happy as her past life had been miserable.

TALE OF THE SILVER HEART.

In the course of a ramble through the western part of Fife, I descended one evening upon the ancient burgh of Culross, which is situated on a low stripe of land beside the sea-shore, with a line of high grounds rising behind it, upon which are situated the old abbey church and the ruins of a very fine mansion-house, once the residence of the lords of the manor. On stepping forth next morning from the little inn, I found that the night had been stormy, and that the waves of the Forth were still rolling with considerable violence, so as to delay the usual passage of the ferry-boat to Borrowstouness. Having resolved to cross to that part of the opposite shore, I found that I should have ample time, before the boat could proceed, to inspect those remains of antiquity, which now give the burgh almost its only importance in the eyes of a traveller. The state of the atmosphere was in the highest degree calculated to increase the interest of these objects. It was a day of gloom, scarcely different from night. The sky displayed that fixed dulness which so often succeeds a nocturnal tempest; the sea was one sheet of turbid darkness, save where chequered by the breaking wave. The streets and paths of the little village-burgh showed, each by its deep and pebbly seam, how much rain had fallen during the night; and all the foliage of the gardens and woods around, as well as the walls of the houses, were still drenched with wet. Having secured the services of the official called the bedral, I was conducted to the abbey church, which is a very old Gothic structure, but recently repaired and fitted up as a parochial place of worship. It was fitting, in such a gloomy day, to inspect the outlines of abbots and crusaders which still deck the pavement of this ancient temple; and there was matter, perhaps, for still more solemn reflection in the view of the adjacent mansion-house. Culross Abbey, as this structure is called, was finished so lately as the reign of Charles the Second, and by the same architect with Holyrood House, which it far exceeded in magnificence. Yet, as the premature ruin of youthful health is a more affecting object than the ripe decline of age, so did this roofless modern palace, with the wallflower waving from its elegant Grecian windows, present a more dismal aspect than could have been expected from any ruin of more hoary antiquity. The tale which it told of the extinction of modern grandeur, and the decline of recently flourishing families, appealed more immediately and more powerfully to the sympathies than that of remote and more barbarous greatness, which is to be read in the sterner battlements of a border tower, or an ancient national fortress. The site had been chosen upon a lofty terrace overlooking the sea, in order that the inmates might be enlivened by the ever-changing aspect of that element, and the constant transit of its ships; but now all useless was this peculiarity of situation, except to serve to the mariner as a kind of landmark, or to supply the more contemplative voyager with the subject of a sigh. With a mind attuned by this object to the most melancholy reflections, I was conducted to what is called an aisle or burial vault, projecting from the north side of the church, and which contains the remains of the former lords of Culross. There images are shown, cut in beautiful Italian marble, of Sir —— Bruce, his lady, and several children, all of which must have been procured from the Continent at a great expense; for this honourable knight and his family flourished in the early part of the seventeenth century, when no such art was practised in Scotland. The images, however, and the whole sepulchre, had a neglected and desolate appearance, as may be expected by the greatest of personages, when their race has become unknown at the scene of their repose. In this gloomy chamber of the heirless dead, I was shown a projection from one of the side-walls, much like an altar, over which was painted on the wall the mournfully appropriate and expressive word “Fuimus.” Below was an inscription on a brass plate, importing that this was the resting place of the heart of Edward Lord Bruce of Kinloss, formerly proprietor of the princely estate of Culross; and that the story connected with it was to be found related in the Guardian, and alluded to in Clarendon’s History of the Great Rebellion. It was stated that the heart was enclosed in a silver case of its own shape, which had reposed here ever since it ceased to beat with the tide of mortal life in the year 1613, except that it was raised from its cell for a brief space in 1808, in the course of some repairs upon the sepulchre. As I had a perfect recollection of the story told by Steele, which indeed had made a deep impression upon me in boyhood, it was with no small interest that I beheld the final abode of an object so immediately connected with it. It seemed as if time had been betrayed, and two centuries annihilated, when I thus found myself in presence of the actual membrane, in bodily substance entire, which had, by its proud passions, brought about the catastrophe of that piteous tale. What! thought I, and does the heart of Edward Bruce, which beat so long ago with emotions now hardly known among men, still exist at this spot, as if the friends of its owner had resolved that so noble a thing should never find decay? The idea had in it something so truly captivating, that it was long ere I could quit the place, or return to the feelings of immediate existence. The whole scene around, and the little neglected burgh itself, had now become invested with a fascinating power over me; and I did not depart till I had gathered, from the traditions of the inhabitants, the principal materials of the following story, aiding them, after I had reached home, by reference to more authentic documents:—

Edward Lord Bruce of Kinloss, the second who bore the title, was the son of the first lord, who is so memorable in history as a serviceable minister to King James the Sixth during the latter years of his Scottish reign, having been chiefly instrumental, along with the Earl of Mar, in smoothing the way for his majesty’s succession to Queen Elizabeth. After the death of his father, the young Lord Bruce continued, along with his mother, to enjoy high consideration in the English court. He was a contemporary and playmate of Henry Prince of Wales, whom he almost equalled in the performance of all noble sports and exercises, while, from his less cold character, he was perhaps a greater favourite among those who were not prepossessed in favour of youthful royalty. There was not, perhaps, in the whole of the English court, any young person of greater promise, or more endearing qualities, than Lord Bruce, though, in respect of mere external accomplishments, he was certainly rivalled by his friend Sir George Sackville, a younger son of the Earl of Dorset. This young gentleman, who was the grandson of one poet,[1] and destined to be the grandsire of another,[2] was one of those free and dashing spirits, who, according to the accounts of contemporary writers, kept the streets of London in an almost perpetual brawl, by night and by day, with their extravagant frolics, or, more generally, the feuds arising out of them. His heart and genius were naturally good, but the influence of less innocent companions gradually betrayed him into evil habits; and thus many generous faculties, which might have adorned the highest profession, were in him perverted to the basest uses. It was often a subject of wonder that the pure and elevated nature of young Lord Bruce should tolerate the reckless profligacy of Sackville; but those who were surprised did not take a very extended view of human nature. The truth is, that real goodness is often imposed upon by vice, and sees in it more to attract and delight than it does in goodness similar to itself. The gentle character of Bruce clung to the fierce and turbulent nature of Sackville, as if it found in that nature a protection and comfort which it needed. Perhaps there was something, also, in the early date of their intimacy, which might tend to fix the friendship of these dissimilar minds. From their earliest boyhood they had been thrown together as pages in the household of the prince, where their education proceeded, step by step, in union, and every action and every duty was the same. It was further remarked, that, while the character of Bruce appeared always to be bolder in the presence of Sackville than on other occasions, that of Sackville was invariably softened by juxtaposition with Bruce; so that they had something more like a common ground to meet upon than could previously have been suspected.

When the two young men were about fourteen, and as yet displayed little more than the common features of innocent boyhood, Sackville was permitted by his parents to accompany Bruce on a summer visit to the paternal estates of the young nobleman in Scotland. There they enjoyed together, for some weeks, all the sports of the season and place, which seemed to be as untiring as their own mutual friendship. One day, as they were preparing to go out a-hunting, an aged woman, who exercised the trade of spaewife, or fortune-teller, came up to the gate. The horses upon which they had just mounted were startled by the uncouth appearance of the stranger, and that ridden by Sackville was so very restive as nearly to throw him off. This caused the young Englishman to address her in language of not the most respectful kind; nor could all the efforts of Lord Bruce, who was actuated by different feelings, prevent him from aiming at her once or twice with his whip.