Class Book. i MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS [Authors Edition] BY THE SAME AUTHOR. AN INLAND VOYAGE. EDINBURGH. TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY. VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE. FAMILIAR STUDIES OF MEN AND BOOKS. NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS. TREASURE ISLAND. THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS. A CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSES. PRINCE OTTO. STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE. KIDNAPPED. THE MERRY MEN AND OTHER TALES AND FABLES. UNDERWOODS. MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS. MEMOIR OF FLEEMING JENKIN. {WITH MRS. STEVENSON.) MORE NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS : The Dynamiter. MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON ifl NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1887 [All rights reserved'] Y^6 'V <5^ ^^^A TO MY MOTHER IN THE NAME OF PAST JOY AND PRESENT SORROW 3£ 'Dztiicatt THESE MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS S.S. ' Ludgate Hiir withi?i sight of Cape Race NOTE This volume of papers, unconnected as they are, it will be better to read through from the beginning, rather than dip into at random. A certain thread of meaning binds them. Memories of childhood and youth, portraits of those who have gone before us in the battle, — taken together, they build up a face that " I have loved long since and lost awhile," the face of what was once myself This has come by acci- dent ; I had no design at first to be autobiographical ; I was but led away by the charm of beloved memories and by regret for the irrevocable dead ; and when my own young face (which is a face of the dead also) began to appear in the well as by a kind of magic, I was the first to be surprised at the occurrence. viii Note My grandfather the pious child, my father the idle eager sentimental youth, I have thus unconsciously exposed. Of their de- scendant, the person of to-day, I wish to keep the secret : not because I love him better, but because, with him, I am still in a business partnership, and cannot divide interests. Of the papers which make up the volume, some have appeared already in TJu Cornhilly Longfnari!sy Scribner, The English Illustrated^ The Magasme of Art, The Contemporary Review ; three are here in print for the first time ; and two others have enjoyed only what may be regarded as a private circula- tion. R. L. S. CONTENTS PAGE I. The Foreigner at Hoivie . . i II. Some College Memories . . 24 III. Old Mortality .... 38 IV. A College Magazine . . -57 V. An Old Scotch Gardener . . 77 VI. Pastoral ..... 90 VII. The Manse 106 VIII. Memoirs of an Islet . . .120 IX. Thomas Stevenson . . .132 X. Talk and Talkers: First Paper 144 XI. Talk AND Talkers : Second Paper 169 XII. The Character of Dogs . . 191 X Contents PAGE XIII. " A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured" . . . .213 XIV. A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas's 228 XV. A Gossip on Romance . . 247 XVI. A Humble Remonstrance . . 275 THE FOREIGNER AT HOME ** This is no my ain house ; I ken by the biggin' o't.'* npWO recent books/ one by Mr. Grant White on England, one on France by the diabolically clever Mr. Hillebrand, may well have set people thinking on the divi- sions of races and nations. Such thoughts should arise with particular congruity and force to inhabitants of that United King- dom, peopled from so many different stocks, babbling so many different dialects, and offering in its extent such singular contrasts, from the busiest over-population to the un- kindliest desert, from the Black Country to 1 i88r. B 2 Memories and Portraits the Moor of Rannoch. It is not only when we cross the seas that we go abroad ; there are foreign parts of England ; and the race that has conquered so wide an empire has not yet managed to assimilate the islands whence she sprang. Ireland, Wales, and the Scottish mountains still cling, in part, to their old Gaelic speech. It was but the other day that English triumphed in Corn- wall, and they still show in Mousehole, on St. Michael's Bay, the house of the last Cornish -speaking woman. English itself, which will now frank the traveller through the most of North America, through the greater South Sea Islands, in India, along much of the coast of Africa, and in the ports of China and Japan, is still to be heard, in its home country, in half a hun- dred varying stages of transition. You may go all over the States, and — setting aside the actual intrusion and influence of foreigners, negro, French, or Chinese — you shall scarce meet with so marked a difference of accent as in the forty miles between Edinburgh and The Foreigner at Home 3 Glasgow, or of dialect as in the hundred miles between Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Book English has gone round the world, but at home we still preserve the racy idioms of our fathers, and every county, in some parts every dale, has its own quality of speech, vocal or verbal. In like manner, local custom and prejudice, even local re- ligion and local law, linger on into the latter end of the nineteenth century — imperia in imperio, foreign things at home. In spite of these promptings to reflection, ignorance of his neighbours is the character of the typical John Bull. His is a domi- neering nature, steady in fight, imperious to command, but neither curious nor quick about the life of others. In French colonies, and still more in the Dutch, I have read that there is an immediate and lively contact between the dominant and the dominated race, that a certain sympathy is begotten, or at the least a transfusion of prejudices, making life easier for both. But the Eng- lishman sits apart, bursting with pride and 4 Memories and Portraits ignorance. He figures among his vassals in the hour of peace with the same disdain- ful air that led him on to victory. A passing enthusiasm for some foreign art or fashion may deceive the world, it cannot impose upon his intimates. He may be amused by a foreigner as by a monkey, but he will never condescend to study him with any patience. Miss Bird, an authoress with whom I profess myself in love, declares all the viands of Japan to be uneatable — a staggering pretension. So, when the Prince of Wales's marriage was celebrated at Mentone by a dinner to the Mentonese, it was proposed to give them solid English fare — roast beef and plum pudding, and no tomfoolery. Here we have either pole of the Britannic folly. We will not eat the food of any foreigner ; nor, when we have the chance, will we suffer him to eat of it himself. The same spirit inspired Miss Bird's American missionaries, who had come thousands of miles to change the faith of Japan, and openly professed their ignorance The Foreigner at Home 5 of the religions they were trying to sup- plant. I quote an American in this connection without scruple. Uncle Sam is better than John Bull, but he is tarred with the English stick. For Mr. Grant White the States are the New England States and nothing more. He wonders at the amount of drinking in London ; let him try San Francisco. He wittily reproves English ignorance as to the status of women in America ; but has he not himself forgotten Wyoming ? The name Yankee, of which he is so tenacious, is used over the most of the great Union as a term of reproach. The Yankee States, of which he is so staunch a subject, are but a drop in the bucket. And we find in his book a vast virgin ignorance of the life and prospects of America ; every view partial, parochial, not raised to the horizon ; the moral feeling proper, at the largest, to a clique of States ; and the whole scope and atmosphere not American, but merely Yankee. I will go far beyond him in re- 6 Memories and Portraits probating the assumption and the incivihty of my countryfolk to their cousins from beyond the sea ; I grill in my blood over the silly rudeness of our newspaper articles ; and I do not know where to look when I find myself in company with an American and see my countrymen unbending to him as to a performing dog. But in the case of Mr. Grant White example were better than precept. Wyoming is, after all, more readily accessible to Mr. White than Boston to the English, and the New England self-suffici- ency no better justified than the Britannic, It is so, perhaps, in all countries ; perhaps in all, men are most ignorant of the foreigners at home. John Bull is ignorant of the States ; he is probably ignorant of India ; but considering his opportunities, he is far more ignorant of countries nearer his own door. There is one country, for instance — • its frontier not so far from London, its people closely akin, its language the same in all essentials with the English — of which I will go bail he knows nothing. His The Foreigner at Home 7 ignorance of the sister kingdom cannot be described ; it can only be illustrated by anecdote. I once travelled with a man of plausible manners and good intelligence, — a University man, as the phrase goes, — a man, besides, who had taken his degree in life and knew a thing or two about the age we live in. We were deep in talk, whirling between Peterborough and London ; among other things, he began to describe some piece of legal injustice he had recently encountered, • and I observed in my innocence that things were not so in Scotland. " I beg your pardon," said he, " this is a matter of law." He had never heard of the Scots law ; nor did he choose to be informed. The law was the same for the whole country, he told me roundly ; every child knew that. At last, to settle matters, I explained to him that I was a member of a Scottish legal body, and had stood the brunt of an examination in the very law in question. Thereupon he looked me for a moment full in the face and dropped the conversation. This 8 Memories and Portraits is a monstrous instance, if you like, but it does not stand alone in the experienceof Scots. England and Scotland differ, indeed, in law, in history, in religion, in education, and in the very look of nature and men's faces, not always widely, but always trench- antly. Many particulars that struck Mr. Grant White, a Yankee, struck me, a Scot, no less forcibly ; he and I felt ourselves foreigners on many common provocations. A Scotchman may tramp the better part of Europe and the United States, and never again receive so vivid an impression of foreign travel and strange lands and man- ners as on his first excursion into England. The change from a hilly to a level country strikes him with delighted wonder. Along the flat horizon there arise the frequent venerable towers of churches. He sees at the end of airy vistas the revolution of the windmill sails. He may go where he pleases in the future ; he may see Alps, and Pyramids, and lions ; but it will be hard to beat the pleasure of that moment. There The Foreigner at Home g are, indeed, few merrier spectacles than that of many windmills bickering together in a fresh breeze over a woody country ; their halting alacrity of movement, their pleasant business, making bread all day with uncouth gesticulations, their air, gigantically human, as of a creature half alive, put a spirit ot romance into the tamest landscape. When the Scotch child sees them first he falls immedi- ately in love ; and from that time forward windmills keep turning in his dreams. And so, in their degree, with every feature of the life and landscape. The warm, habitable age of towns and hamlets, the green, settled, ancient look of the country; the lush hedge- rows, stiles, and privy pathways in the fields ; the sluggish, brimming rivers ; chalk and smock-frocks ; chimes of bells and the rapid, pertly -sounding English speech — they are all new to the curiosity ; they are all set to English airs in the child's story that he tells himself at night. The sharp edge of novelty wears off; the feeling is scotched, but I doubt whether it is ever I o Memories and Portraits killed. Rather it keeps returning, ever the more rarely and strangely, and even in scenes to which you have been long accus- tomed suddenly awakes and gives a relish to enjoyment or heightens the sense of isolation. One thing especially continues unfamiliar to the Scotchman's eye — the domestic archi- tecture, the look of streets and buildings ; the quaint, venerable age of many, and the thin walls and warm colouring of all. We have, in Scotland, far fewer ancient buildings, above all in country places ; and those that we have are all of hewn or harled masonry. Wood has been sparingly used in their con- struction ; the window-frames are sunken in the wall, not flat to the front, as in England ; the roofs are steeper- pitched ; even a hill farm will have a massy, square, cold and permanent appearance. English houses, in comparison, have the look of cardboard toys, such as a puff might shatter. And to this the Scotchman never becomes used. His eye can never rest consciously on one of these brick houses — rickles of brick, as he The Foreigner at Home 1 1 might call them — or on one of these flat- chested streets, but he is instantly reminded where he is, and instantly travels back in fancy to his home. " This is no my ain house ; I ken by the biggin' o't." And yet perhaps it is his own, bought with his own money, the key of it long polished in his pocket ; but it has not yet, and never will be, thoroughly adopted by his imagination ; nor does he cease to remember that, in the whole length and breadth of his native country, there was no building even distantly resembling it. But it is not alone in scenery and archi- tecture that we count England foreign. The constitution of society, the very pillars of the empire, surprise and even pain us. The dull, neglected peasant, sunk in matter, insolent, gross and servile, makes a startling contrast with our own long - legged, lor\g - headed, thoughtful, Bible - quoting ploughman. A week or two in such a place as Suffolk leaves the Scotchman gasping. It seems incredible that within the boundaries of his 1 2 Memories and Portraits own island a class should have been thus forgotten. Even the educated and intelli- gent, who hold our own opinions and speak in our own words, yet seem to hold them with a difference or from another reason, and to speak on all things with less interest and conviction. The first shock of English society is like a cold plunge. It is possible that the Scot comes looking for too much, and to be sure his first experiment will be in the wrong direction. Yet surely his complaint is grounded ; surely the speech of Englishmen is too often lacking in generous ardour, the better part of the man too often withheld from the social commerce, and the contact of mind with mind evaded as with terror. A Scotch peasant will talk more liberally out of his own experience. He will not put you by with conversational counters and small jests ; he will give you the best of himself, like one interested in life and man's chief end. A Scotchman is vain, interested in himself and others, eager for sympathy, setting forth his thoughts The Foreigner at Hoyne 1 3 and experience in the best light The ego- ism of the Englishman is self - contained. He does not seek to proselytise. He takes no interest in Scotland or the Scotch, and, what is the unkindest cut of all, he does not care to justify his indifference. Give him the wages of going on and being an English- man, that is all he asks ; and in the mean- time, while you continue to associate, he would rather not be reminded of your baser origin. Compared with the grand, tree-like self-sufficiency of his demeanour, the vanity and curiosity of the Scot seem uneasy, vulgar and immodest. That you should continually try to establish human and serious relations, that you should actually feel an interest in John Bull, and desire and invite a return of interest from him, may argue something more awake and lively in your mind, but it still puts you in the attitude of a suitor and a poor relation. Thus even the lowest class of the educated English towers over a Scotchman by the head and shoulders. 1 4 Memories and Porh^aits Different indeed is the atmosphere in which Scotch and English youth begin to look about them, come to themselves in life, and gather up those first apprehensions which are the material of future thought and, to a great extent, the rule of future conduct. I have been to school in both countries, and I found, in the boys of the North, something at once rougher and more tender, at once more reserve and more ex- pansion, a greater habitual distance chequered by glimpses of a nearer intimacy, and on the whole wider extremes of temperament and sensibility. The boy of the South seems more wholesome, but less thoughtful ; he gives himself to games as to a business, striving to excel, but is not readily transported by imagination ; the type remains with me as cleaner in mind and body, more active, fonder of eating, endowed with a lesser and a less romantic sense of life and of the future, and more immersed in present circumstances. And certainly, for one thing, English boys are younger for their age. Sabbath observ- The Foreigner at Ho7ne 1 5 ance makes a series of grim, and perhaps serviceable, pauses in the tenor of Scotch boyhood — days of great stillness and solitude for the rebellious mind, when in the dearth of books and play, and in the intervals of studying the Shorter Catechism, the intellect and senses prey upon and test each other. The typical English Sunday, with the huge midday dinner and the plethoric afternoon, leads perhaps to different results. About the very cradle of the Scot there goes a hum of metaphysical divinity ; and the whole of two divergent systems is summed up, not merely speciously, in the two first questions of the rival catechisms, the English tritely inquiring, "What is your name?" the Scot- tish striking at the very roots of life with, " What is the chief end of man ? " and answering nobly, if obscurely, " To glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever." I do not wish to make an idol of the Shorter Cate- chism ; but the fact of such a question being asked opens to us Scotch a great field of speculation ; and the fact that it is asked 1 6 Memories and Portraits of all of us, from the peer to the plough- boy, binds us more nearly together. No Englishman of Byron's age, character and history, would have had patience for long theological discussions on the way to fight for Greece ; but the daft Gordon blood and the Aberdonian schooldays kept their influence to the end. We have spoken of the material conditions ; nor need much more be said of these : of the land lying everywhere more exposed, of the wind always louder and bleaker, of the black, roaring winters, of the gloom of high-lying, old stone cities, imminent on the windy seaboard ; com- pared with the level streets, the warm colour- ing of the brick, the domestic quaintness of the architecture, among which English children begin to grow up and come to themselves in life. As the stage of the Uni- versity approaches, the contrast becomes more express. The English lad goes to Oxford or Cambridge ; there, in an ideal world of gardens, to lead a semi-scenic life, costumed, disciplined and drilled by proctors. Nor is The Foreigner at Home 1 7 this to be regarded merely as a stage of education ; it is a piece of privilege besides, and a step that separates him further from the bulk of his compatriots. At an earlier age the Scottish lad begins his greatly dif- ferent experience of crowded class-rooms, of a gaunt quadrangle, of a bell hourly booming over the traffic of the city to recall him from the public-house where he has been lunching, or the streets where he has been wandering fancy-free. His college life has little of re- straint, and nothing of necessary gentility. He will find no quiet clique of the exclusive, studious and cultured ; no rotten borough of the arts. All classes rub shoulders on the greasy benches. The raffish young gentle- man in gloves must measure his scholarship with the plain, clownish laddie from the parish school. They separate, at the session's end, one to smoke cigars about a watering- place, the other to resume the labours of the field beside his peasant family. The first muster of a college class in Scotland is a scene of curious and painful interest ; so C A 1 8 Memories and Portraits many lads, fresh from the heather, hang round the stove in cloddish embarrassment, ruffled by the presence of their smarter comrades, and afraid of the sound of their own rustic voices. It was in these early days, I think, that Professor Blackie won the affection of his pupils, putting these uncouth, umbrage- ous students at their ease with ready human geniality. Thus, at least, we have a healthy democratic atmosphere to breathe in while at work ; even when there is no cordiality there is always a juxtaposition of the different classes, and in the competition of study the intellectual power of each is plainly demon- strated to the other. Our tasks ended, we of the North go forth as freemen into the hum- ming, lamplit city. At five o'clock you may see the last of us hiving from the college gates, in the glare of the shop windows, under the green glimmer of the winter sunset. The frost tingles in our blood; no proctor lies in wait to intercept us ; till the bell sounds again, we are the masters of the world; and some portion The Foreigner at Home 1 9 of our lives is always Saturday, la treve de Dieu. Nor must we omit the sense of the nature of his country and his country's history gradually growing in the child's mind from story and from observation. A Scottish child hears much of shipwreck, outlying iron skerries, pitiless breakers, and great sea- lights ; much of heathery mountains, wild clans, and hunted Covenanters. Breaths come to him in song of the distant Cheviots and the ring of foraying hoofs. He glories in his hard-fisted forefathers, of the iron girdle and the handful of oatmeal, who rode so swiftly and lived so sparely on their raids. Poverty, ill-luck, enterprise, and constant resolution are the fibres of the legend of his country's history. The heroes and kings of Scotland have been tragically fated ; the most marking incidents in Scottish history — Flod- den, Darien, or the Forty-five — were still either failures or defeats ; and the fall of Wallace and the repeated reverses of the Bruce combine with the very smallness of the 20 Memories and Portraits country to teach rather a moral than a material criterion for life. Britain is alto- gether small, the mere taproot of her extended empire ; Scotland, again, which alone the Scottish boy adopts in his imagination, is but a little part of that, and avowedly cold, sterile and unpopulous. It is not so for nothing. I once seemed to have perceived in an American boy a greater readiness of sym- pathy for lands that are great, and rich, and growing, like his own. It proved to be quite otherwise: a mere dumb piece of boyish romance, that I had lacked penetration to divine. But the error serves the purpose of my argument ; for I am sure, at least, that the heart of young Scotland will be always touched more nearly by paucity of number and Spartan poverty of life. So we may argue, and yet the difference is not explained. That Shorter Catechism which I took as being so typical of Scotland, was yet composed in the city of Westminster. The division of races is more sharply marked within the borders of Scotland itself than The Foreigner at Home 2 1 between the countries. Galloway and Buchan, Lothian and Lochaber, are like foreign parts ; yet you may choose a man from any of them, and, ten to one, he shall prove to have the headmark of a Scot. A century and a half ago the Highlander wore a differ- ent costume, spoke a different language, wor- shipped in another church, held different morals, and obeyed a different social consti- tution from his fellow-countrymen either of the south or north. Even the English, it is recorded, did not loathe the Highlander and the Highland costume as they were loathed by the remainder of the Scotch. Yet the Highlander felt himself a Scot. He would willingly raid into the Scotch lowlands ; but his courage failed him at the border, and he regarded England as a perilous, unhomely land. When the Black Watch, after years of foreign service, returned to Scotland, veterans leaped out and kissed the earth at Port Patrick. They had been in Ireland, stationed among men of their own race and language, where they were well liked and treated with 22 Memories and Portraits affection ; but it was the soil of Galloway that they kissed at the extreme end of the hostile lowlands, among a people who did not understand their speech, and who had hated, harried, and hanged them since the dawn of history. Last, and perhaps most curious, the sons of chieftains were often educated on the continent of Europe. They went abroad speaking Gaelic ; they returned speaking, not English, but the broad dialect of Scotland. Now, what idea had they in their minds when they thus, in thought, iden- tified themselves with their ancestral enemies ? What was. the sense in which they were Scotch and not English, or Scotch and not Irish ? Can a bare name be thus influential on the minds and affections of men, and a political aggregation blind them to the nature of facts ? The story of the Austrian Empire would seem to answer. No; the far more galling business of Ireland clenches the nega- tive from nearer home. Is it common edu- cation, common morals, a common language or a common faith, that join men into The Foreigner at Home 2 3 nations ? There were practically none of these in the case we are considering. The fact remains : in spite of the difference of blood and language, the Lowlander feels himself the sentimental countryman of the Highlander. When they meet abroad, they fall upon each other's necks in spirit ; even at home there is a kind of clannish intimacy in their talk. But from his compatriot in the south the Lowlander stands con- sciously apart. He has had a different training ; he obeys different laws ; he makes his will in other terms, is otherwise divorced and married ; his eyes are not at home in an English landscape or with English houses; his ear continues to remark the English speech ; and even though his tongue acquire the Southern knack, he will still have a strong Scotch accent of the mind. II SOME COLLEGE MEMORIES^ T AM asked to write something (it is not specifically stated what) to the profit and glory of my Alma Mater; and the fact is I seem to be in very nearly the same case with those who addressed me, for while I am willing enough to write something, I know not what to write. Only one point I see, that if I am to write at all, it should be of the University itself and my own days under its shadow ; of the things that are still the same and of those that are already changed : such talk, in short, as would pass naturally between a student of to-day and one of yes- 1 Written for the "Book" of the Edmburgh University Union Fancy Fair. Some College Memories 25 terday, supposing them to meet and grow confidential. The generations pass away swiftly enough on the high seas of life ; more swiftly still in the little bubbling backwater of the quad- rangle ; so that we see there, on a scale startlingly diminished, the flight of time and the succession of men, I looked for my name the other day in last year's case book of the Speculative. Naturally enough I looked for it near the end ; it was not there, nor yet in the next column, so that I began to think it had been dropped at press ; and when at last I found it, mounted on the shoulders of so many successors, and looking in that posture like the name of a man of ninety, I was conscious of some of the dig- nity of years. This kind of dignity of tem- poral precession is likely, with prolonged life, to become more familiar, possibly less welcome ; but I felt it strongly then, it is strongly on me now, and I am the more embold- ened to speak with my successors in the tone of a parent and a praiser of things past 26 Me^nories and Portraits For, indeed, that which they attend is but a fallen University ; it has doubtless some remains of good, for human institutions decline by gradual stages ; but decline, in spite of all seeming embellishments, it does ; and what is perhaps more singular, began to do so when I ceased to be a student. Thus, by an odd chance, I had the very last of the very best of Alma Mater ; the same thing, I hear (which makes it the more strange), had previously happened to my father ; and if they are good and do not die, something not at all unsimilar will be found in time to have befallen my successors of to-day. Of the specific points of change, of advantage in the past, of shortcoming in the present, I must own that, on a near examination, they look wondrous cloudy. The chief and far the most lamentable change is the absence of a cer- tain lean, ugly, idle, unpopular student, whose presence was for me the gist and heart of the whole matter ; whose changing humours, fine occasional purposes of good, flinching accept- ance of evil, shiverings on wet, east-windy, Some College Memories 27 morning journeys up to class, infinite yawn- ings during lecture and unquenchable gusto in the delights of truantry, made up the sun- shine and shadow of my college life. You cannot fancy what you missed in missing him ; his virtues, I make sure, are inconceiv- able to his successors, just as they were apparently concealed from his contemporaries, for I was practically alone in the pleasure I had in his society. Poor soul, I remember how much he was cast down at times, and how life (which had not yet begun) seemed to be already at an end, and hope quite dead, and misfortune and dishonour, like physical presences, dogging him as he went. And it may be worth while to add that these clouds rolled away in their season, and that all clouds roll away at last, and the troubles of youth in particular are things but of a moment. So this student, whom I have in my eye, took his full share of these concerns, and that very largely by his own fault ; but he still clung to his fortune, and in the midst of much misconduct, kept on in his own way 2 8 Memories and Portraits learning how to work ; and at last, to his wonder, escaped out of the stage of student- ship not openly shamed ; leaving behind him the University of Edinburgh shorn of a good deal of its interest for myself But while he is (in more senses than one) the first person, he is by no means the only one whom I regret, or whom the students of to-day, if they knew what they had lost, would regret also. They have still Tait, to be sure — long may they have him ! — and they have still Tait's class-room, cupola and all ; but think of what a different place it was when this youth of mine (at least on roll days) would be present on the benches, and, at the near end of the platform, Lindsay senior-^ was airing his robust old age. It is possible my successors may have never even heard of Old Lindsay; but when he went, a link snapped with the last century. He had something of a rustic air, sturdy and fresh and plain; he spoke with a ripe east-country accent, which I used to admire ; his reminis- ^ Professor Tait's laboratory assistant. Some College Memories 29 cences were all of journeys on foot or high- ways busy with post-chaises — a Scotland before steam ; he had seen the coal fire on the Isle of May, and he regaled me with tales of my own grandfather. Thus he was for me a mirror of things perished ; it was only in his memory that I could see the huge shock of flames of the May beacon stream to leeward, and the watchers, as they fed the fire, lay hold unscorched of the windward bars of the furnace ; it was only thus that I could see my grandfather driving swiftly in a gig along the seaboard road from Pitten- weem to Crail, and for all his business hurry, drawing up to speak good-humouredly with those he met. And now, in his turn, Lind- say is gone also ; inhabits only the memories of other men, till these shall follow him ; and figures in my reminiscences as my grandfather figured in his. To - day, again, they have Professor Butcher, and I hear he has a prodigious deal of Greek ; and they have Professor Chrystal, who is a man filled with the mathematics. 30 Memories and Portraits And doubtless these are set-offs. But they cannot change the fact that Professor Blackie - has retired, and that Professor Kelland is dead. No man's education is complete or truly liberal who knew not Kelland. There were unutterable lessons in the mere sight of that frail old clerical gentleman, lively as a boy, kind like a fairy godfather, and keeping perfect order in his class by the spell of that very kindness. I have heard him drift into reminiscences in class time, though not for long, and give us glimpses of old-world life in out-of-the-way English parishes when he was young ; thus playing the same part as Lindsay — the part of the surviving memory, signalling out of the dark backward and abysm of time the images of perished things. But it was a part that scarce became him ; he somehow lacked the means : for all his silver hair and worn face, he was not truly old ; and he had too much of the unrest and petulant fire of youth, and too much invin- cible innocence of mind, to play the veteran well. The time to measure him best, to Some College Memories 3 1 taste (in the old phrase) his gracious nature, was when he received his class at home. What a pretty simplicity would he then show, trying to amuse us like children with toys ; and what an engaging nervousness of manner, as fearing that his efforts might not succeed ! Truly he made us all feel like children, and like children embarrassed, but at the same time filled with sympathy for the conscientious, troubled elder-boy who was working so hard to entertain us. A theorist has held the view that there is no feature in man so tell-tale as his spectacles ; that the mouth may be compressed and the brow smoothed artificially, but the sheen of the barnacles is diagnostic. And truly it must have been thus with Kelland ; for as I still fancy I behold him frisking actively about the platform, pointer in hand, that which I seem to see most clearly is the way his glasses glittered with affection. I never knew but one other man who had (if you will permit the phrase) so kind a spectacle; and that was Dr. Appleton. But the 3 2 Memories and Portraits light in his case was tempered and passive ; in Kelland's it danced, and changed, and flashed vivaciously among the students, Hke a perpetual challenge to goodwill. I cannot say so much about Professor Blackie, for a good reason. Kelland's class I attended, once even gained there a certifi- cate of merit, the only distinction of my University career. But although I am the holder of a certificate of attendance in the professor's own hand, I cannot remember to hcive been present in the Greek class above a dozen times. Professor Blackie was even kind enough to remark (more than once) while in the very act of writing the docu- ment above referred to, that he did not know my face. Indeed, I denied myself many opportunities ; acting upon an extensive and highly rational system of truantry, which cost me a great deal of trouble to put in exercise — perhaps as much as would have taught me Greek — and sent me forth into the world and the profession of letters with the merest shadow of an education. But they say it is Some College Memories 33 always a good thing to have taken pains, and that success is its own reward, whatever be its nature ; so that, perhaps, even upon this I should plume myself, that no one ever played the truant with more deliberate care, and none ever had more certificates for less education. One consequence, however, of my system is that I have much less to say of Professor Blackie than I had of Professor Kelland ; and as he is still alive, and will long, I hope, continue to be so, it will not surprise you very much that I have no in- tention of saying it. Meanwhile, how many others have gone — Jenkin, Hodgson, and I know not who besides ; and of that tide of students that used to throng the arch and blacken the quadrangle, how many are scattered into the remotest parts of the earth, and how many more have lain down beside their fathers in their " resting -graves "! And again, how many of these last have not found their way there, all too early, through the stress of education ! That was one thing, at least, 34 Memories and Portraits from which my truantry protected me. I am sorry indeed that I have no Greek, but I should be sorrier still if I were dead ; nor do I know the name of that branch of know- ledge which is worth acquiring at the price of a brain fever. There are many sordid tragedies in the life of the student, above all if he be poor, or drunken, or both ; but nothing more moves a wise man's pity than the case of the lad who is in too much hurry to be learned. And so, for the sake of a moral at the end, I will call up one more figure, and have done. A student, ambitious of success by that hot, intemperate manner of study that now grows so common, read night and day for an examination. As he went on, the task became more easy to him, sleep was more easily banished, his brain grew hot and clear and more capacious, the necessary knowledge daily fuller and more orderly. It came to the eve of the trial and he watched all night in his high chamber, reviewing what he knew, and already secure of success. His window looked eastward, Some College Memories 35 and being (as I said) high up, and the house itself standing on a hill, commanded a view over dwindling suburbs to a country horizon. At last my student drew up his blind, and still in quite a jocund humour, looked abroad. Day was breaking, the east was tinging with strange fires, the clouds breaking up for the coming of the sun ; and at the sight, name- less terror seized upon his mind. He was. sane, his senses were undisturbed ; he saw clearly, and knew what he was seeing, and knew that it was normal ; but he could neither bear to see it nor find the strength to look away, and fled in panic from his chamber into the enclosure of the street. In the cool air and silence, and among the sleeping houses, his strength was renewed. Nothing troubled him but the memory of what had passed, and an abject fear of its return. *• Gallo canente, spes redit, Aegris salus refunditur, Lapsis fides revertitur, " as they sang of old in Portugal in the 36 Memories and Portraits Morning Office. But to him that good hour of cockcrow, and the changes of the dawn, had brought panic, and lasting doubt, and such terror as he still shook to think of. He dared not return to his lodging ; he could not eat ; he sat down, he rose up, he wandered ; the city woke about him with its cheerful bustle, the sun climbed overhead; and still he grew but the more absorbed in the distress of his recollection and the fear of his past fear. At the appointed hour, he came to the door of the place of examina- tion; but when he was asked, he had for- gotten his name. Seeing him so disordered, they had not the heart to send him away, but gave him a paper and admitted him, still nameless, to the Hall. Vain kindness, vain efforts. He could only sit in a still growing horror, writing nothing, ignorant of all, his mind filled with a single memory of the breaking day and his own intolerable fear. And that same night he was tossing in a brain fever. People are afraid of war and wounds and Some College Me^nories 37 dentists, all with excellent reason ; but these are not to be compared with such chaotic terrors of the mind as fell on this young man, and made him cover his eyes from the innocent morning. We all have by our bedsides the box of the Merchant Abudah, thank God, securely enough shut ; but when a young man sacrifices sleep to labour, let him have a care, for he is playing with the lock. Ill OLD MORTALITY I HP HERE is a certain graveyard, looked upon on the one side by a prison, on the other by the windows of a quiet hotel ; below, under a steep cliff, it beholds the traffic of many lines of rail, and the scream of the engine and the shock of meeting buffers mount to it all day long. The aisles are lined with the inclosed sepulchres of families, door beyond door, like houses in a street ; and in the morning the shadow of the prison turrets, and of many tall memorials, fall upon the graves. There, in the hot fits of youth, I came to be unhappy. Pleasant incidents are woven with my memory of the Old Mortality 39 place. I here made friends with a certain plain old gentleman, a visitor on sunny mornings, gravely cheerful, who, with one eye upon the place that awaited him, chirped about his youth like winter sparrows ; a beautiful housemaid of the hotel once, for some days together, dumbly flirted with me from a window and kept my wild heart flying ; and once — she possibly remembers — the wise Eugenia followed me to that austere inclosure. Her hair came down, and in the shelter of the tomb my trembling fingers helped her to repair the braid. But for the most part I went there solitary and, with irrevocable emotion, pored on the names '' of the forgotten. Name after name, and to each the conventional attributions and the idle dates : a regiment of the unknown that had been the joy of mothers, and had thrilled with the illusions of youth, and at last, in the dim sick-room, wrestled with the pangs of old mortality. In that whole crew of the silenced there was but one of whom my fancy had received a picture ; and he, with his 40 Memories and Portraits comely, florid countenance, bewigged and habited in scarlet, and in his day combining fame and popularity, stood forth, like a taunt, among that company of phantom appellations. It was then possible to leave behind us something more explicit than these severe, monotonous and lying epitaphs ; and the thing left, the memory of a painted picture and what we call the immortality of a name, was hardly more desirable than mere oblivion. Even David Hume, as he lay composed be- neath that " circular idea," was fainter than a dream ; and when the housemaid, broom in hand, smiled and beckoned from the open window, the fame of that bewigged philoso- pher melted like a raindrop in the sea. And yet in soberness I cared as little for the housemaid as for David Hume. The interests of youth are rarely frank ; his passions, like Noah's dove, come home to roost. The fire, sensibility, and volume of his own nature, that is all that he has learned to recognise. The tumultuary and gray tide of life, the empire of routine, the unre- Old Mortality 41 joicing faces of his elders, fill him with con- temptuous surprise ; there also he seems to walk among the tombs of spirits ; and it is only in the course of years, and after much rubbing with his fellow-men, that he begins by glimpses to see himself from without and his fellows from within : to know his own for one among the thousand undenoted coun- tenances of the city street, and to divine in others the throb of human agony and hope. In the meantime he will avoid the hospital doors, the pale faces, the cripple, the sweet whiff of chloroform — for there, on the most thoughtless, the pains of others are burned home ; but he will continue to walk, in a divine self-pity, the aisles of the forgotten graveyard. The length of man's life, which is endless to the brave and busy, is scorned by his ambitious thought. He cannot bear] to have come for so little, and to go again so wholly. He cannot bear, above all, in that brief scene, to be still idle, and by way of cure, neglects the little that he has to do. The parable of the talent is the brief epitome 42 Memories and Portraits of youth. To believe in immortality is one thing-, but it is first needful to believe in life. Denunciatory preachers seem not to suspect that they may be taken gravely and in evil part ; that young men may come to think of time as of a moment, and with the pride of Satan wave back the inadequate gift. Yet here is a true peril ; this it is that sets them to pace the graveyard alleys and to read, with strange extremes of pity and derision, the memorials of the dead. Books were the proper remedy : books of vivid human import, forcing upon their minds the issues, pleasures, busyness, importance and immediacy of that life in which they stand ; books of smiling or heroic temper, to excite or to console ; books of a large design, shadowing the complexity of that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back not least. But the average sermon flees the point, disporting itself in that eternity of which we know, and need to know, so little ; avoiding the bright, crowded, and momentous fields of life where destiny Old Mortality 43 awaits us. Upon the average book a writer may be silent ; he may set it down to his ill- hap that when his own youth was in the acrid fermentation, he should have fallen and fed upon the cheerless fields of Obermann. Yet to Mr. Arnold, who led him to these pastures, he still bears a grudge. The day is perhaps not far off when people will begin to count Moll Flanders ^ ay, or The Country Wife, more wholesome and more pious diet than these guide-books to consistent egoism. But the most inhuman of boys soon wearies of the inhumanity of Obermann. And even while I still continued to be a haunter of the graveyard, I began insensibly to turn my attention to the grave-diggers, and was weaned out of myself to observe the conduct of visitors. This was dayspring, indeed, to a lad in such great darkness. Not that I began to see men, or to try to see them, from within, nor to learn charity and modesty and justice from the sight ; but still stared at them externally from the prison windows of my affectation. Once I remem- 44 Memories and Portraits ber to have observed two working-women with a baby halting by a grave ; there was something monumental in the grouping, one upright carrying the child, the other with bowed face crouching by her side. A wreath of immortelles under a glass dome had thus attracted them ; and, drawing near, I over- heard their judgment on that wonder. " Eh ! what extravagance ! " To a youth afflicted with the callosity of sentiment, this quaint and pregnant saying appeared merely base. My acquaintance with grave-diggers, con- sidering its length, was unremarkable. One, indeed, whom I found plying his spade in the red evening, high above Allan Water and in the shadow of Dunblane Cathedral, told me of his acquaintance with the birds that still attended on his labours ; how some would even perch about him, waiting for their prey ; and in a true Sexton's Calendar, how the species varied with the season of the year. But this was the very poetry of the profes- sion. The others whom I knew were some- what dry. A faint flavour of the gardener Old Mortality 45 hung about them, but sophisticated and disbloomed. They had engagements to keep, not alone with the deUberate series of the seasons, but with mankind's clocks and hour-long measurement of time. And thus there was no leisure for the relishing pinch, or the hour-long gossip, foot on spade. They were men wrapped up in their grim business ; they liked well to open long-closed family vaults, blowing in the key and throw- ing wide the grating ; and they carried in their minds a calendar of names and dates. It would be '*' in fifty-twa " that such a tomb was last opened for " Miss Jemimy." It was thus they spoke of their past patients — famili- arly but not without respect, like old family servants. Here is indeed a servant, whom we forget that we possess ; who does not wait at the bright table, or run at the bell's summons, but patiently smokes his pipe beside the mortuary fire, and in his faithful memory notches the burials of our race. To suspect Shakespeare in his maturity of a superficial touch savours of paradox ; yet he was surely 46 Memories and Portraits in error when he attributed insensibility to the digger of the grave. But perhaps it is on Hamlet that the charge should lie ; or perhaps the English sexton differs from the Scotch. The "goodman delver,-' reckoning up his years of office, might have at least suggested other thoughts. It is a pride common among sextons. A cabinet-maker does not count his cabinets, nor even an author his volumes, save when they stare upon him from the shelves ;, but the grave- digger numbers his graves. He would in- deed be something different from human if his solitary open-air and tragic labours left not a broad mark upon his mind. There, in his tranquil aisle, apart from city clamour, among the cats and robins and the ancient effigies and legends of the tomb, he waits the continual passage of his contemporaries, falling like minute drops into eternity. As they fall, he counts them ; and this enumeration, which was at first perhaps appalling to his soul, in the process of years and by the kindly influence of habit grows Old Mortality 47 to be his pride and pleasure. There are many common stories telling how he piques himself on crowded cemeteries. But I will rather tell of the old grave-digger of Monk- ton, to whose unsuffering bedside the minister was summoned. He dwelt in a cottage built into the wall of the churchyard ; and through a bull's-eye pane above his bed he could see, as he lay dying, the rank grasses and the upright and recumbent stones. Dr. Laurie was, I think, a Moderate : 'tis cer- tain, at least, that he took a veiy Roman view of deathbed dispositions ; for he told the old man that he had lived beyond man's natural years, that his life had been easy and reputable, that his family had all grown up and been a credit to his care, and that it now behoved him unregretfully to gird his loins and follow the majority. The grave- digger heard him out ; then he raised himself upon one elbow, and with the other hand pointed through the window to the scene of his life-long labours. " Doctor," he said, " I ha'e laid three hunner and fower-score in 48 Memories and Portraits that kirkyaird ; an it had been His wull," indicating Heaven, " I would ha'e likit weel to ha'e made out the fower hunner." But it was not to be ; this tragedian of the fifth act had now another part to play ; and the time had come when others were to gird and carry him. II I would fain strike a note that should be more heroical ; but the ground of all youth's suffering, solitude, hysteria, and haunting of the grave, is nothing else than naked, igno- rant selfishness. It is himself that he sees dead ; those are his virtues that are for- gotten ; his is the vague epitaph. Pity him but the more, if pity be your cue ; for where a man is all pride, vanity, and personal aspir- ation, he goes through fire unshielded. In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be gainer ; to forget oneself is to be happy ; and this poor, laughable and tragic fool has not yet learned the rudi- ments ; himself, giant Prometheus, is still Old Mortality 49 ironed on the peaks of Caucasus. But by and by his truant interests will leave that tortured body, slip abroad and gather flowers. Then shall death appear before him in an altered guise ; no longer as a doom peculiar to himself, whether fate's crowning injustice or his own last vengeance upon those who fail to value him ; but now as a power that wounds him far more tenderly, not without solemn compensations, taking and giving, bereaving and yet storing up. The first step for all is to learn to the dregs our own ignoble fallibility. When we have fallen through storey after storey of our vanity and aspiration, and sit rueful among the ruins, then it is that we begin to measure the stature of our friends : how they stand between us and our own contempt, believing in our best ; how, linking us with others, and still spreading wide the influential circle, they weave us in and in with the fabric of contemporary life ; and to what petty size they dwarf the virtues and the vices that appeared gigantic in our youth. So that at E so Memories and Portraits the last, when such a pin falls out — when there vanishes in the least breath of time one of those rich magazines of life on which we drew for our supply — when he who had first dawned upon us as a face among the faces of the city, and, still growing, came to bulk on our regard with those clear features of the loved and living man, falls in a breath to memory and shadow, there falls along with him a whole wing of the palace of our life. Ill One such face I now remember; one such blank some half a dozen of us labour to dissemble. In his youth he was most beautiful in person, most serene and genial by disposition ;. full of racy words and quaint thoughts. Laughter attended on his coming. He had the air of a great gentleman, jovial and royal with his equals, and to the poorest student gentle and attentive. Power seemed to reside in him exhaustless ; we saw him stoop to play with us, but held him marked Old Mortality 5 1 for higher destinies ; we loved his notice ; and I have rarely had my pride more gratified than when he sat at my father's table, my acknowledged friend. So he walked among us, both hands full of gifts, carrying with non- chalance the seeds of a most influential life. The powers and the ground of friendship is a mystery ; but, looking back, I can dis- cern that, in part, we loved the thing he was, for some shadow of what he was to be. For with all his beauty, power, breeding, urbanity and mirth, there w^as in those days some- thing soulless in our friend. He would astonish us by sallies, witty, innocent and inhumane ; and by a misapplied Johnsonian pleasantry, demolish honest sentiment. I can still see and hear him, as he went his way along the lamplit streets, La ci darem la mano on his lips, a noble figure of a youth, but following vanity and incredulous of good ; and sure enough, somewhere on the high seas of life, with his health, his hopes, his patrimony and his self-respect, miserably went down. 5 2 Memories and Portraits From this disaster, like a spent swimmer, he came desperately ashore, bankrupt of money and consideration ; creeping to the family he had deserted ; with broken wing, never more to rise. But in his face there was a light of knowledge that was new to it. Of the wounds of his body he was never healed ; died of them gradually, with clear- eyed resignation ; of his wounded pride, we knew only from his silence. He returned to that city where he had lorded it in his ambitious youth ; lived there alone, seeing few ; striving to retrieve the irretrievable ; at times still grappling with that mortal frailty that had brought him down ; still joying in his friend's successes ; his laugh still ready but with kindlier music ; and over all his thoughts the shadow of that unalterable law which he had disavowed and which had brought him low. Lastly, when his bodily evils had quite disabled him, he lay a great while dying, still without complaint, still finding interests ; to his last step gentle, urbane and with the will to smile. Old Mortality 53 The tale of this great failure is, to those who remained true to him, the tale of a success. In his youth he took thought for no one but himself; when he came ashore again, his whole armada lost, he seemed to think of none but others. Such was his tenderness for others, such his instinct of fine courtesy and pride, that of that impure passion of remorse he never breathed a syllable ; even regret was rare with him, and pointed with a jest. You would not have dreamed, if you had known him then, that this was that great failure, that beacon to young men, over whose fall a whole society had hissed and pointed fingers. Often have we gone to him, red-hot with our own hopeful sorrows, railing on the rose-leaves in our princely bed of life, and he would patiently give ear and wisely counsel ; and it was only upon some return of our own thoughts that we were reminded what manner of man this was to whom we disembosomed: a man, by his own fault, ruined ; shut out of the garden of his gifts ; his whole city of hope 5 4 Memories and Portraits both ploughed and salted ; silently awaiting the deliverer. Then something took us by the throat ; and to see him there, so gentle, patient, brave and pious, oppressed but not cast down, sorrow was so swallowed up in admiration that we could not dare to pity him. Even if the old fault flashed out again, it but awoke our wonder that, in that lost battle, he should have still the energy to fight. He had gone to ruin with a kind of kingly abandon, like one who condescended ; but once ruined, with the lights all out, he fought as for a kingdom. Most men, find- ing themselves the authors of their own disgrace, rail the louder against God or destiny. Most men, when they repent, oblige their friends to share the bitterness of that repentance. But he had held an inquest and passed sentence : me?ie, inene ; and con- demned himself to smiling silence. He had given trouble enough ; had earned misfortune amply, and foregone the right to murmur. Thus was our old comrade, like Samson, careless in his days of strength ; but on the Old Mortality 5 5 coming of adversity, and when that strength was gone that had betrayed him — " for our strength is weakness " — he began to blossom and bring forth. Well, now, he is out of the fight : the burden that he bore thrown down before the great deliverer. We •* in the vast cathedral leave him ; God accept him, Christ receive himl" IV If we go now and look on these innumer- able epitaphs, the pathos and the irony are strangely fled. They do not stand merely to the dead; these foolish monuments ; they are pillars and legends set up to glorify the difficult but not desperate life of man. This ground is hallowed by the heroes of defeat. I see the indifferent pass before my friend's last resting-place ; pause, with a shrug of pity, marvelling that so rich an argosy had sunk. A pity, now that he is done with suffeiing, a pity most uncalled for, and an 56 Memories and Portraits ignorant wonder. Before those who loved him, his memory shines like a reproach ; they honour him for silent lessons ; they cherish his example ; and in what remains before them of their toil, fear to be unworthy of the dead. For this proud man was one of those who prospered in the valley of humilia- tion ; — of whom Bunyan wrote that, " Though Christian had the hard hap to meet in the valley with Apollyon, yet I must tell you, that in former times men have met with angels here ; have found pearls here ; and have in this place found the words of life." J IV A COLLEGE MAGAZINE A LL through my boyhood and youth, I was known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with ap- propriate words ; when I sat by the roadside, I would either read, or a pencil and a penny version-book would be in my hand, to note down the features of the scene or commemo- rate some halting stanzas. Thus I lived with words. And what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use, it was written consciously 5 8 Memories and Portraits for practice. It was not so much that I wished to be an author (though I wished that too) as that I had vow^ed that I would learn to write. That was a proficiency that tempted me ; and I practised to acquire it, as men learn to whittle, in a wager with myself. Description was the principal field of my exercise ; for to any one with senses there is always something w^orth describing, and town and country are but one continu- ous subject. But I worked in other ways also; often accompanied my walks with dra- matic dialogues, in which I played many parts ; and often exercised myself in writing down conversations from memory. This was all excellent, no doubt ; so were the diaries I sometimes tried to keep, but always and very speedily discarded, finding them a school of posturing and melancholy self-deception. And yet this was not the most efficient part of my training. Good though it was, it only taught me (so far as I have learned them at all) the lower and less intellectual elements of the art, the choice of A College Magazine 59 the essential note and the right word : things that to a happier constitution had perhaps come by nature. And regarded as training, it had one grave defect ; for it set me no standard of achievement. So that there was perhaps more profit, as there was certainly more effort, in my secret labours at home. Whenever I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew it ; and tried again, and was again un- successful and always unsuccessful ; but at least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the co-ordination of parts. I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to De- foe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baude- laire and to Obermann. I remember one of these monkey tricks, which was called Co Memories and Portraits The Vanity of Morals : it was to have had a second part, TJie Vanity of Knoivledge ; and as I had neither morality nor scholar- ship, the names were apt ; but the second part was never attempted, and the first part was written (which is my reason for recalling it, ghostlike, from its ashes) no less than three times : first in the manner of Hazlitt, second in the manner of Ruskin, who had cast on me a passing spell, and third, in a laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas Browne. So with my other works : Cain, an epic, was (save the mark !) an imitation of Sordello : Robin Hood, a tale in verse, took an eclectic middle course among the fields of Keats, Chaucer and Morris: in Monmouth, a tragedy, I reclined on the bosom of Mr. Swinburne ; in my innumerable gouty-footed lyrics, I fol- lowed many masters ; in the first draft of The Kings Pardon, a tragedy, I was on the trail of no lesser man than John Webster ; in the second draft of the same piece, with stagger- ing versatility, I had shifted my allegiance to Congreve, and of course conceived my A College Magazine 6i fable In a less serious vein — for it was not Congreve's verse, it was his exquisite prose, that I admired and sought to copy. Even at the age of thirteen I had tried to do justice to the inhabitants of the famous city of Peebles in the style of the Book of Snobs. So I might go on for ever, through all my abortive novels, and down to my later plays, of which I think more tenderly, for they were not only conceived at first under the bracing influence of old Dumas, but have met with resurrections : one, strangely bet- tered by another hand, came on the stage itself and was played by bodily actors ; the other, originally know as Semirainis : a Tragedy, I have observed on bookstalls under the alias of Prince Otto. But enough has been said to show by what arts of imperson- ation, and in what purely ventriloquial efforts I first saw my words on paper. That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write ; whether I have profited or not, that is the way. It was so Keats learned, and there was never a finer temperament for literature 62 Memories and Portraits than Keats's ; it was so, if we could trace it out, that all men have learned ; and that is why a revival of letters is always accompanied or heralded by a cast back to earlier and fresher models. Perhaps I hear some one cry out : But this is not the way to be original ! It is not ; nor is there any way but to be born so. Nor yet, if you are born original, is there anything in this training that shall clip the wings of your originality. There can be none more original than Montaigne, neither could any be more unlike Cicero ; yet no craftsman can fail to see how much the one must have tried in his time to imitate the other. Burns is the very type of a prime force in letters : he was of all men the most imitative. Shakespeare himself, the imperial, proceeds directly from a school. It is only from a school that we can expect to have good writers ; it is almost invariably from a school that great writers, these lawless excep- tions, issue. Nor is there anything here that should astonish the considerate. Before he can tell what cadences he truly prefers, the A College Magazine $3 student should have tried all that are pos- sible ; before he can choose and preserve a fitting key of words, he should long have practised the literary scales ; and it is only after years of such gymnastic that he can sit down at last, legions of words swarming to his call, dozens of turns of phrase simul- taneously bidding for his choice, and he himself knowing what he wants to do and (within the narrow limit of a man's ability) able to do it. And it is the great point of these imita- tions that there still shines byond t^he student's reach his inimitable model. Let him try as he please, he is still sure of failure; and it is a very old and a very true saying that failure is the only highroad to success. I must have had some disposition to learn ; for I clear-sightedly condemned my own performances. I liked doing them indeed ; but when they were done, I could see they were rubbish. In consequence, I very rarely showed them even to my friends ; and such friends as I chose to be my confidants I must 64 Memories and Portraits have chosen well, for they had the friendliness to be quite plain with me. " Padding," said one. Another wrote : " I cannot understand why you do lyrics so badly." No more could I ! Thrice I put myself in the way of a more authoritative rebuff, by send- ing a paper to a magazine. These were returned ; and I was not surprised nor even pained. If they had not been looked at, as (like all amateurs) I suspected was the case, there was no good in repeating the experi- ment ; if they had been looked at — well, then I had not yet learned to write, and I must keep on learning and living. Lastly, I had a piece of good fortune which is the occasion of this paper, and by which I was able to see my literature in print, and to measure experimentally how far I stood from the favour of the public. A College Magazine 65 II The' Speculative Society is a body of some antiquity, and has counted among its mem* bers Scott, Brougham, Jeffrey, Horner, Ben- jamin Constant, Robert Emmet, and many a legal and local celebrity besides. By an accident, variously explained, it has its rooms in the very buildings of the Univer- sity of Edinburgh : a hall, Turkey-carpeted, hung with pictures, looking, when lighted up at night with fire and candle, like some goodly dining-room ; a passage-like library, walled with books in their wire cages ; and a corridor with a fireplace, benches, a table, many prints of famous members, and a mural tablet to the virtues of a former secretary. Here a member can warm himself and loaf and read ; here, in defiance of Senatus-con- sults, he can smoke. The Senatus looks askance at these privileges ; looks even with a somewhat vinegar aspect on the whole society ; which argues a lack of proportion in the learned mind, for the world, we may be F 66 Memories and Portraits sure, will prize far higher this haunt of dead lions than all the living dogs of the profes- sorate. ■ I sat one December morning in the library of the Speculative ; a very humble -minded youth, though it was a virtue I never had much credit for ; yet proud of my privileges as a member of the Spec. ; proud of the pipe I was smoking in the teeth of the Senatus ; and in particular, proud of being in the next room to three very distinguished students, who were then conversing beside the corridor fire. One of these has now his name on the back of several volumes, and his voice, I learn, is influential in the law courts. Of the death of the second, you have just been reading what I had to say. And the third also has escaped out of that battle of life in which he fought so hard, it may be so unwisely. They were all three, as I have said, notable students ; but this was the most conspicuous. Wealthy, handsome, am- bitious, adventurous, diplomatic, a reader of Balzac, and of all men that I have known, A College Magazine 6y the most like to one of Balzac's characters, he led a life, and was attended by on ill fortune, that could be properly set forth only in the Coniedie Hiiinaine. He had then his eye on Parliament ; and soon after the time of which I write, he made a showy speech at a political dinner, was cried up to heaven next day in the Conraiit, and the day after was dashed lower than earth with a charge of plagiarism in the Scotsman. Report would have it (I daresay, very wrongly) that he was betrayed by one in whom he particu- larly trusted, and that the author of the charge had learned its truth from his own lips. Thus, at least, he was up one day on a pinnacle, admired and envied by all ; and the next, though still but a boy, he was publicly disgraced. The blow would have broken a less finely tempered spirit ; and even him I suppose it rendered reckless ; for he took flight to London, and there, in a fast club, disposed of the bulk of his con- siderable patrimony in the space of one winter. For years thereafter he lived I 6S Memories and Port7^aits know not how ; always well dressed, always in good hotels and good society, always with empty pockets. The charm of his manner may have stood him in good stead ; but though my own manners are very agreeable, I have never found in them a source of livelihood ; and to explain the miracle of his continued existence, I must fall back upon the theory of the philosopher, that in his case, as in all of the same kind, "there was a suffering relative in the background." From this genteel eclipse he reappeared upon the scene, and presently sought me out in the character of a generous editor. It is in this part that I best remember him ; tall, slender, with a not ungraceful stoop ; looking quite like a refined gentleman, and quite like an urbane adventurer ; smiling with an engaging ambiguity ; cocking at you one peaked eyebrow with a great appearance of finesse ; speaking low and sweet and thick, with a touch of burr ; telling strange tales with singular deliberation and, to a patient listener, excellent effect. After all A College Magazine 6g these ups and downs, he seemed still, like the rich student that he was of yore, to breathe of money ; seemed still perfectly sure of himself and certain of his end. Yet he was then upon the brink of his last over- throw. He had set himself to found the strangest thing in our society : one of those periodical sheets from which men suppose themselves to learn opinions ; in which young gentlemen from the universities are encouraged, at so much a line, to garble facts, insult foreign nations and calumniate private individuals ; and which are now the source of glory, so that if a man's name be often enough printed there, he becomes a kind of demigod ; and people will pardon him when he talks back and forth, as they do for Mr. Gladstone ; and crowd him to suffocation on railway platforms, as they did the other day to General Boulanger; and buy his literary works, as I hope you have just done for me. Our fathers, when they were upon some great enterprise, would sacrifice a life ; building, it may be, a favourite slave 70 Memories and Portraits into the foundations of their palace. It was with his own hfe that my companion dis- armed the envy of the gods. He fought his paper single-handed ; trusting no one, for he was something of a cynic ; up early and down late, for he was nothing of a sluggard ; daily ear-wigging influential men, for he was a master of ingratiation. In that slender and silken fellow there must have been a rare vein of courage, that he should thus have died at his employment ; and doubtless ambition spoke loudly in his ear, and doubt- less love also, for it seems there was a marriage in his view had he succeeded. But he died, and his paper died after him ; and of all this grace, and tact, and courage, it must seem to our blind eyes as if there had come literally nothing. These three students sat, as I was saying, in the corridor, under the mural tablet that records the virtues of IMacbean, the former secretary. We would often smile at that ineloquent memorial, and thought it a poor thing to come into the world at all and leave A College Magazine 71 no more behind one than Macbean. And yet of these three, two are gone and have left less ; and this book, perhaps, when it is old and foxy, and some one picks it up in a corner of a book-shop, and glances through it, smiling at the old, graceless turns of speech, and perhaps for the love of Alma Mater (which may be still extant and flour- ishing) buys it, not without haggling, for some pence — this book may alone preserve a memory of James Walter Ferrier and Robert Glasgow Brown. Their thoughts ran very differently on that December morning ; they were all on fire with ambition ; and when they had called me in to them, and made me a sharer in their design, I too became drunken with pride and hope. We were to found a University magazine. A pair of little, active brothers — Livingstone by name, great skip- pers on the foot, great rubbers of the hands, who kept a book -shop over against the University building — had been debauched to play the part of publishers. We four ^2 Memoj^zes and Portraits were to be conjunct editors and, what was the main point of the concern, to print our own works ; while, by every rule of arith- metic — that flatterer of credulity — the ad- venture must succeed and bring great profit. Well, well : it was a bright vision. I went home that morning walking upon air. To have been chosen by these three distin- guished students was to me the most un- speakable advance ; it was my first draught of consideration ; it reconciled me to myself and to my fellow-men ; and as I steered round the railings at the Tron, I could not withhold my lips from smiling publicly. Yet, in the bottom of my heart, I knew that magazine would be a grim fiasco ; I knew it would not be worth reading ; I knew, even if it were, that nobody would read it ; and I kept wondering how I should be able, upon my compact income of twelve pounds per annum, payable monthly, to meet my share in the expense. It was a comfort- able thought to me that I had a father. The magazine appeared, in a yellow cover A College Magazine 73 which was the best part of it, for at least it was unassuming ; it ran four months in un- disturbed obscurity, and died without a gasp. The first number was edited by all four of us with prodigious bustle ; the second fell principally into the hands of Ferrier and me; the third I edited alone; and it has long been a solemn question who it was that edited the fourth. It would perhaps be still more diffi- cult to say who read it. Poor yellow sheet, that looked so hopefully in the Livingstones' w^indow ! Poor, harmless paper, that might have gone to print a Shakespeare on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with non- sense ! And, shall I say. Poor Editors ? I cannot pity myself, to whom it was all pure gain. It was no news to me, but only the wholesome confirmation of my judgment, when the magazine struggled into half-birth, and instantly sickened and subsided into night. I had sent a copy to the lady with whom my heart was at that time somewhat engaged, and who did all that in her lay to break it ; and she, with some tact, passed 74 Memories and Portraits over the gift and my cherished contributions in silence. I will not say that I was pleased at this ; but I will tell her now, if by any chance she takes up the work of her former servant, that I thought the better of her taste. I cleared the decks after this lost engagement ; had the necessary interview with my father, which passed off not amiss ; paid over my share of the expense to the two little, active brothers, who rubbed their hands as much, but methought skipped rather less than formerly, having perhaps, these two also, embarked upon the enter- prise with some graceful illusions ; and then, reviewing the whole episode, I told myself that the time was not yet ripe, nor the man ready ; and to work I went again with my penny version-books, having fallen back in one day from the printed author to the manuscript student. A College Magazine y 5 III From this defunct periodical I am going to reprint one of my own papers. The poor Httle piece is all tail-foremost. I have done my best to straighten its array, I have pruned it fearlessly, and it remains inverte- brate and wordy. No self-respecting maga- zine would print the thing ; and here you behold it in a bound volume, not for any worth of its own, but for the sake of the man whom it purports dimly to represent and some of whose sayings it preserves ; so that in this volume of Memories and Por- traits, Robert Young, the Swanston gardener, may stand alongside of John Todd, the Swanston shepherd. Not that John and Robert drew very close together in their lives; for John was rough, he smelt of the windy brae ; and Robert was gentle, and smacked of the garden in the hollow. Perhaps it is to my shame that I liked John the better of the two ; he had grit and dash, and that salt of the Old Adam that pleases men with any ^6 Memories and Portraits savage inheritance of blood ; and he was a wayfarer besides, and took my gipsy fancy. But however that may be, and however Robert's profile may be blurred in the boyish sketch that follows, he was a man of a most quaint and beautiful nature, whom, if it were possible to recast a piece of work so old, I should like well to draw again with a maturer touch. And as I think of him and of John, I wonder in what other country two such men would be found dwelling together, in a hamlet of some twenty cottages, in the woody fold of a green hill. V AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER T THINK I might almost have said the last : somewhere, indeed, in the utter- most glens of the Lammermuir or among the south-western hills there may yet linger a decrepid representative of this bygone good fellowship ; but as far as actual experience goes, I have only met one man in my life who might fitly be quoted in the same breath with Andrew Fairservice, — though without his vices. He was a man whose very pre- sence could impart a savour of quaint anti- quity to the baldest and most modern flower- plots. There was a dignity about his tall stooping form, and an earnestness in his wrinkled face that recalled Don Quixote ; yS Memories and Portraits but a Don Quixote who had come through the training of the Covenant, and been nourished in his youth on Walker's Lives and The Hind let Loose. Now, as I could not bear to let such a man pass away with no sketch preserved of his old-fashioned virtues, I hope the reader will take this as an excuse for the present paper, and judge as kindly as he can the infirmities of my description. To me, who find, it so difficult to tell the little that I know, he stands essentially as a genius loci. It is impossible to separate his spare form and old straw hat from the garden in the lap of the hill, with its rocks overgrown with clematis, its shadowy walks, and the splendid breadth of champaign that one saw from the north- west corner. The garden and gardener seem part and parcel of each other. When I take him from his right surroundings and try to make him appear for me on paper, he looks un- real and phantasmal : the best that I can say may convey some notion to those that never saw him, but to me it will be ever impotent. An Old Scotch Gardener 79 The first time that I saw him, I fancy- Robert was pretty old ah'eady : he had cer- tainly begun to use his years as a stalking horse. Latterly he was beyond all the impudencies of logic, considering a reference to the parish register worth all the reasons in the world. '' / am old and well stricken in yearsl^ he was wont to say ; and I never found any one bold enough to answer the argument. Apart from this vantage that he kept over all who were not yet octogenarian, he had some other drawbacks as a gardener. He shrank the very place he cultivated. The dignity and reduced gentility of his appear- ance made the small garden cut a sorry figure. He was full of tales of greater situations in his younger days. He spoke of castles and parks with a humbling famili- arity. He told of places where under- gardeners had trembled at his looks, where there were meres and swanneries, labyrinths of walk and wildernesses of sad shrubbery in his control, till you could not help feeling that it was condescension on his part to dress 8o Memo^Hes and Portraits your humbler garden plots. You were thrown at once into an invidious position. You felt that you were profiting by the needs of dignity, and that his poverty and not his will consented to your vulgar rule. Involuntarily you compared yourself with the swineherd that made Alfred watch his cakes, or some bloated citizen who may have given his sons and his condescension to the fallen Dionysius. Nor were the disagreeables purely fanciful and metaphysical, for the sway that he exer- cised over your feelings he extended to your garden, and, through the garden, to your diet. He would trim a hedge, throw away a favourite plant, or fill the most favoured and fertile section of the garden with a vegetable that none of us could eat, in supreme con- tempt for our opinion. If you asked him to send you in one of your own artichokes, " That I Willi, mem" he would say, " with pleasure, for it is mair blessed to give than to receiver Ay, and even when, by extra twisting of the screw, we prevailed on him to prefer our commands to his own in- An Old Scotch Gardener 8i clination, and he went away, stately and sad, professing that " our tvull was his plca- S2ire" but yet reminding us that he would do it " zvith feclhis^' — even then, I say, the triumphant master felt humbled in his triumph, felt that he ruled on sufferance only, that he was taking a mean advantage of the other's low estate, and that the whole scene had been one of those " slights that patient merit of the unworthy takes." In flowers his taste was old-fashioned and catholic ; affecting sunflowers and dahlias, wallflowers and roses, and hold- ing in supreme aversion whatsoever was fan- tastic, new-fashioned or wild. There was one exception to this sweeping ban. Fox- gloves, though undoubtedly guilty on the last count, he not only spared, but loved ; and when the shrubbery was being thinned, he stayed his hand and dexterously manipu- lated his bill in order to save every stately stem. In boyhood, as he told me once, speaking in that tone that only actors and the old-fashioned common folk can use now- G 82 Memories and Portraits adays, his heart grew ''proud'' within him- when he came on a burn-course among the braes of Manor that shone purple with their graceful trophies ; and not all his apprentice- ship and practice for so many years of precise gardening had banished these boyish recol- lections from his heart. Indeed, he was a man keenly alive to the beauty of all that was bygone. He abounded in old stories of his boyhood, and kept pious account of all his former pleasures ; and when he went (on a holiday) to visit one of the fabled great places of the earth where he had served before,hecame back full of little pre-Raphaelite reminiscences that showed real passion for the past, such as might have shaken hands with Hazlitt or Jean-Jacques. But however his sympathy with his old feelings might affect his liking for the fox- gloves, the very truth was that he scorned all flowers together. They were but garnish- ings, childish toys, trifling ornaments for ladies' chimney-shelves. It was towards his cauliflowers and peas and cabbage that his An Old Scotch Gardener Z-^^ heart grew warm. His preference for the more useful growths was such that cabbages were found invading the flower-plots, and an outpost of savoys was once discovered in the centre of the lawn. He would prelect over some thriving plant with wonderful enthu- siasm, piling reminiscence on reminiscence of former and perhaps yet finer specimens. Yet even then he did not let the credit leave himself. He had, indeed, raised '^ finer d them ; " but it seemed that no one else had been favoured with a like success. All other gardeners, in fact, were mere foils to his own superior attainments ; and he would recount, with perfect soberness of voice and visage, how so and so had wondered, and such another could scarcely give credit to his eyes. Nor was it with his rivals only that he parted praise and blame. If you re- marked how well a plant was looking, he would gravely touch his hat and thank you with solemn unction ; all credit in the matter faUing to him. If, on the other hand, you called his attention to some back - going 84 Memories and Portraits vegetable, he would quote Scripture : " Paid may plant and A polios may zvater ;'' all blame being left to Providence, on the score of deficient rain or untimely frosts. There was one thing in the garden that shared his preference with his favourite cab- baees and rhubarb, and that other was the bee-hive. Their sound, their industry, per- haps their sweet product also, had taken hold of his imagination and heart, whether by way of memory or no I cannot say, although perhaps the bees too were linked to him by some recollection of Manor braes and his country childhood. Nevertheless, he was too chary of his personal safety or (let me rather say) his personal dignity to mingle in any active office towards them. But he could stand by while one of the contemned rivals did the work for him, and protest that it was quite safe in spite of his own considerate distance and the cries of the distressed assistant. In regard to bees, he was rather a man of word than deed, and some of his most striking sentences had the An Old Scotch Gardener 85 bees for text, " They are indeed wonderfiC creatures^ mem,'' he said once. " T/iey j'lcst mind me d what the Queen of Sheba said to Solomon — and I tJdnk she said it ivV a sigh, — ' The half of it hath not beeii told nnto me! " As far as the Bible goes, he was deeply read. Like the old Covenanters, of whom he was the worthy representative, his mouth was full of sacred quotations ; it was the book that he had studied most and thought upon most deeply. To many people in his station the Bible, and perhaps Burns, are the only books of any vital literary merit that they read, feeding themselves, for the rest, on the draff of country newspapers, and the very instructive but not very palatable pabulum of some cheap educational series. This was Robert's position. All day long he had dreamed of the Hebrew stories, and his head had been full of Hebrew poetry and Gospel ethics ; until they had struck deep root into his heart, and the very ex- pressions had become a part of him ; so that he rarely spoke without some antique idiom S6 Memories and Portraits or Scripture mannerism that gave a raciness to the merest triviahties of talk. But the influence of the Bible did not stop here. There was more in Robert than quaint phrase and ready store of reference. He was imbued with a spirit of peace and love : he interposed between man and wife : he threw himself between the angry, touching his hat the while with all the cere- mony of an usher : he protected the birds from everybody but himself, seeing, I sup- pose, a great difference between official execution and wanton sport. His mistress telling him one day to put some ferns into his master's particular corner, and adding, " Though, indeed, Robert, he doesn't deserve them, for he wouldn't help me to gather them," " Ek, mem" replies Robert, " but I woiddnae say that, for I think he's just a most deservm' gentleman^ Again, two of our friends, who were on intimate terms, and accustomed to use language to each other, somewhat without the bounds of the parliamentary, happened to differ about the position of a seat in the An Old Scotch Gardener Zj garden. The discussion, as was usual when these two were at it, soon waxed tolerably insulting on both sides. Every one accus- tomed to such controversies several times a day was quietly enjoying this prize-fight of somewhat abusive wit — every one but Robert, to whom the perfect good faith of the whole quarrel seemed unquestionable, and who, after having waited till his conscience would suffer him to wait no more, and till he expected every moment that the disputants would fall to blows, cut suddenly in with tones of almost tearful entreaty : " Eh^ but, gentlemen, I wad hae nae mair words about it ! " One thing was noticeable about Robert's religion : it was neither dogmatic nor sec- tarian. He never expatiated (at least, in my hearing) on the doctrines of his creed, and he never condemned anybody else. I have no doubt that he held all Roman Catholics, Atheists, and Mahometans as con- siderably out of it ; I don't believe he had any sympathy for Prelacy; and the natural feelings of man must have made him 88 Memories and Portraits a little sore about Free-Churchism ; but at least, he never talked about these views, never grew controversially noisy, and never openly aspersed the belief or practice of any- body. Now all this is not generally charac- teristic of Scotch piety; Scotch sects being churches militant with a vengeance, and Scotch believers perpetual crusaders the one against the other, and missionaries the one to the other. Perhaps Robert's originally tender heart was what made the difference ; or, perhaps, his solitary and pleasant labour among fruits and flowers had taught him a more sunshiny creed than those whose work is among the tares of fallen humanity ; and the soft influences of the garden had entered deep into his spirit, "Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade." But I could go on for ever chronicling his golden sayings or telling of his innocent and living piety. I had meant to tell of his cot- tage, with the German pipe hung reverently An Old Scotch Gardener 89 above the fire, and the shell box that he had made for his son, and of which he would say pathetically : " He was real pleased wi it at first, but I think lies got a kind d tired d it now" — the son being then a man of about forty. But I will let all these pass. " 'Tis more significant : he's dead." The earth, that he had digged so much in his life, was dug out by another for himself; and the flowers that he had tended drew their life still from him, but in a new and nearer way. A bird flew about the open grave, as if it too wished to honour the obsequies of one who had so often quoted Scripture in favour of its kind: "Are not two sparrows sold for one farthing, and yet not one of them falleth to the ground." Yes, he is dead. But the kings did not rise in the place of death to greet him " with taunting proverbs" as they rose to greet the haughty Babylonian ; for in his life he was lowly, and a peacemaker and a servant of God. VI PASTORAL '"PO leave home in early life is to be stunned and quickened with novelties ; but when years have come, it only casts a more endearing light upon the past. As in those composite photographs of Mr. Galton's, the image of each new sitter brings out but the more clearly the central features of the race ; when once youth has flown, each new impression only deepens the sense of na- tionality and the desire of native places. So may some cadet of Royal Ecossais or the Albany Regiment, as he mounted guard about French citadels, so may some officer marching his company of the Scots-Dutch among the polders, have felt the soft rains Pastoral 9 1 of the Hebrides upon his brow, or started in the ranks at the remembered aroma of peat- smoke. And the rivers of home are dear in particular to all men. This is as old as Naaman, who was jealous for Abana and Pharpar ; it is confined to no race nor country, for I know one of Scottish blood but a child of Suffolk, whose fancy still lingers about the lilied lowland waters of that shire. But the streams of Scotland are incomparable in themselves — or I am only the more Scottish to suppose so — and their sound and colour dwell for ever in the memory. How often and willingly do I not look again in fancy on Tummel, or IManor, or the talking Airdle, or Dee swirling in its Lynn ; on the bright burn of Kinnaird, or the golden burn that pours and sulks in the den behind Kingussie ! I think shame to leave out one of these enchantresses, but the list would grow too long if I remembered all ; only I may not forget Allan Water, nor birch-wetting Rogie, nor yet Almond ; nor, for all its pollutions, that Water of Leith 92 Memories and Portraits of the many and well-named mills — Bell's Mills, and Canon Mills, and Silver Mills ; nor Redford Burn of pleasant memories ; nor yet, for all its smallness, that nameless trickle that springs in the green bosom of Allermuir, and is fed from Halkerside with a perennial teacupful, and threads the moss under the Shearer's Knowe, and makes one pool there, overhung by a rock, where I loved to sit and make bad verses, and is then kidnapped in its infancy by subter- ranean pipes for the service of the sea- beholding city in the plain. From many points in the moss you may see at one glance its whole course and that of all its tributaries ; the geographer of this Lilliput may visit all its corners without sitting down, and not yet begin to be breathed ; Shearer's Knowe and Halkerside are but names of adjacent cantons on a single shoulder of a hill, as names are squandered (it would seem to the inexpert, in superfluity) upon these upland sheepwalks ; a bucket would receive the whole discharge of the toy Pastoral 9 3 river ; it would take it an appreciable time to fill your morning bath ; for the most part, besides, it soaks unseen through the moss ; and yet for the sake of auld lang syne, and the figure of a certain genhts loci^ I am condemned to linger awhile in fancy by its shores ; and if the nymph (who cannot be above a span in stature) will but inspire my pen, I would gladly carry the reader along with me. John Todd, when I knew him, was already " the oldest herd on the Pentlands," and had been all his days faithful to that curlew- scattering, sheep-collecting life. He remem- bered the droving days, when the drove roads, that now lie green and solitary through the heather, were thronged thorough- fares. He had himself often marched flocks into England, sleeping on the hillsides with his caravan ; and by his account it was a rough business not without danger. The drove roads lay apart from habitation ; the drovers met in the wilderness, as to-day the deep-sea fishers meet off the banks in the 94 Memories and Portraits solitude of the Atlantic ; and in the one as in the other case rough habits and fist-law were the rule. Crimes were committed, sheep filched, and drovers robbed and beaten ; most of which offences had a moor- land burial and were never heard of in the courts of justice. John, in those days, was at least once attacked, — by two men after his watch, — and at least once, betrayed by his habitual anger, fell under the danger of the law and was clapped into some rustic prison-house, the doors of which he burst in the night and was no more heard of in that quarter. When I knew him, his life had fallen in quieter places, and he had no cares beyond the dulness of his dogs and the inroads of pedestrians from town. But for a man of his propensity to wrath these were enough ; he knew neither rest nor peace, except by snatches ; in the gray of the summer morning, and already from far up the hill, he would wake the " toun " with the sound of his shoutings ; and in the lambing time, his cries were not yet silenced Pastoral 95 late at night. This wrathful voice of a man unseen might be said to haunt that quarter of the Pentlands, an audible bogie ; and no doubt it added to the fear in which men stood of John a touch of something legendary. For my own part, he was at first my enemy, and I, in my character of a rambling boy, his natural abhorrence. It was long before I saw him near at hand, knowing him only by some sudden blast of bellowing from far above, bidding me " c'way oot amang the sheep." The quietest recesses of the hill harboured this ogre ; I skulked in my favourite wilderness like a Cameronian of the Killing Time, and John Todd was my Claverhouse, and his dogs my questing dragoons. Little by little we dropped into civilities ; his hail at sight of me began to have less of the ring of a war -slogan ; soon, we never met but he produced his snuff-box, which was with him, like the calumet with the Red Indian, a part of the heraldry of peace ; and at length, in the ripeness of time, we gO Memories and Portraits grew to be a pair of friends, and when I lived alone in these parts in the winter, it was a settled thing for John to " give me a cry " over the garden wall as he set forth upon his evening round, and for me to over- take and bear him company. That dread voice of his that shook the hills when he was angry, fell in ordinary talk very pleasantly upon the ear, with a kind of honied, friendly whine, not far off singing, that was eminently Scottish. He laughed not very often, and when he did, with a sudden, loud haw-haw, hearty but somehow joyless, like an echo from a rock. His face was permanently set and coloured ; ruddy and stiff with weathering ; more like a picture than a face ; yet with a certain strain and a threat of latent anger in the expres- sion, like that of a man trained too fine and harassed with perpetual vigilance. He spoke in the richest dialect of Scotch I ever heard ; the words in themselves were a pleasure and often a surprise to me, so that I often came back from one of our patrols Pastoral 97 with new acquisitions ; and this vocabulary he would handle like a master, stalking a little before me, " beard on shoulder," the plaid hanging loosely about him, the yellow staff clapped under his arm, and guiding me uphill by that devious, tactical ascent which seems peculiar to men of his trade. I might count him with the best talkers ; only that talking Scotch and talking English seem incomparable acts. He touched on nothing at least, but he adorned it ; when he narrated, the scene was before you ; when he spoke (as he did mostly) of his own antique busi- ness, the thing took on a colour of romance and curiosity that was surprising. The clans of sheep with their particular territories on the hill, and how, in the yearly killings and purchases, each must be proportionally thinned and strengthened ; the midnight busyness of animals, the signs of the weather, the cares of the snowy season, the exquisite stupidity of sheep, the exquisite cunning of dogs : all these he could present so humanly, and with so much old experience and living H 98 Me7nories and Portraits gusto, that weariness was excluded. And in the midst he would suddenly straighten his bowed back, the stick would fly abroad in demonstration, and the sharp thunder of his voice roll out a long itinerary for the dogs, so that you saw at last the use of that great wealth of names for every knowe and howe upon the hillside ; and the dogs, having hearkened with lowered tails and raised faces, would run up their flags again to the mast- head and spread themselves upon the indi- cated circuit. It used to fill me with wonder how they could follow and retain so long a story. But John denied these creatures all intelligence ; they were the constant butt of his passion and contempt ; it was just pos- sible to work with the like of them, he said, — not more than possible. And then he would expand upon the subject of the really good dogs that he had known, and the one really good dog that he had himself possessed. He had been offered forty pounds for it ; but a good collie was worth more than that, more than anything, to a " herd ; " he did the Pastoral 99 herd's work Tor him. "As for the like of them ! " he would cry, and scornfully indicate the scouring tails of his assistants. Once — I translate John's Lallan, for I cannot do it justice, being born Britamiis in moiitibus, indeed, but alas ! ineriidito scemlo — once, in the days of his good dog, he had bought some sheep in Edinburgh, and on the way out, the road being crowded, two were lost. This was a reproach to John, and a slur upon the dog ; and both were alive to their misfortune. Word came, after some days, that a farmer about Braid had found a pair of sheep ; and thither went John and the dog to ask for restitution. But the farmer was a hard man and stood upon his rights. " How were they marked ? " he asked ; and since John had bought right and left from many sellers and had no notion of the marks — "Very well," said the farmer, " then it's only right that I should keep them."— "Well," said John, " it's a fact that I cannae tell the sheep ; but if my dog can, will ye let me have them ? " The farmer I oo Memories a7id Portraits was honest as well as hard, and besides I daresay he had little fear of the ordeal ; so he had all the sheep upon his farm into one large park, and turned John's dog into their midst. That hairy man of business knew his errand well ; he knew that John and he had bought two sheep and (to their shame) lost them about Boroughmuirhead ; he knew besides (the Lord knows how, unless by listening) that they were come to Braid for their recovery ; and without pause or blunder singled out, first one and then another, the two waifs. It was that afternoon the forty pounds were offered and refused. And the shepherd and his dog — what do I say? the true shepherd and his man— set off together by Fairmilehead in jocund humour, and " smiled to ither " all the way home, with the two recovered ones before them. So far, so good ; but intelligence may be abused. The dog, as he is by little man's inferior in mind, is only by little his superior in virtue ; and John had another collie tale of quite a different complexion. At the foot of the Pastoral i o i moss behind Kirk Yetton (Caer Ketton, wise men say) there is a scrog of low wood and a pool with a dam for washing sheep. John was one day lying under a bush in the scrog, when he was aware of a collie on the far hillside skulking down through the deepest of the heather with obtrusive stealth. He knew the dog ; knew him for a clever, rising practitioner from quite a distant farm ; one whom perhaps he had coveted as he saw him masterfully steering flocks to market. But what did the practitioner so far from home ? and why this guilty and secret manoeuvring towards the pool ? — for it was towards the pool that he was heading. John lay the closer under his bush, and presently saw the dog come forth upon the margin, look all about to see if he were anywhere observed, plunge in ,and repeatedly wash himself over head and ears, and then (but now openly and with tail in air) strike homeward over the hills. That same night word was sent his master, and the rising practitioner, shaken up from where he lay, all innocence 1 02 Memories and Portraits before the fire, was had out to a dykeside and promptly shot ; for alas ! he was that foulest of criminals under trust, a sheep-eater; and it was from the maculation of sheep's blood that he had come so far to cleanse himself in the pool behind Kirk Yetton. A trade that touches nature, one that lies at the foundations of life, in which we have all had ancestors employed, so that on a hint of it ancestral memories revive, lends itself to literary use, vocal or written. The fortune of a tale lies not alone in the skill of him that writes, but as much, perhaps, in the in- herited experience of him who reads; and when I hear with a particular thrill of things that I have never done or seen, it is one of that innumerable army of my ancestors re- joicing in past deeds. Thus novels begin to touch not the fine dilettanti but the gross mass of mankind, when they leave off to speak of parlours and shades of manner and still-born niceties of motive, and begin to deal with fighting, sailoring, adventure, death or child-birth ; and thus ancient out- Pastoral 103 door crafts and occupations, whether Mr. Hardy wields the shepherd's crook or Count Tolstoi swings the scythe, lift romance into a near neighbourhood with epic. These aged things have on them the dew of man's morning ; they lie near, not so much to us, the semi-artificial flowerets, as to the trunk and aboriginal taproot of the race. A thousand interests spring up in the process of the ages, and a thousand perish ; that is now an eccentricity or a lost art which was once the fashion of an empire ; and those only are perennial matters that rouse us to- day, and that roused men in all epochs of the past. There is a certain critic, not indeed of execution but of matter, whom I dare be known to set before the best : a certain low-browed, hairy gentleman, at first a percher in the fork of trees, next (as they relate) a dweller in caves, and whom I think I see squatting in cave-mouths, of a pleasant after- noon, to munch his berries — his wife, that accomplished lady, squatting by his side : his name I never heard, but he is often 1 04 Memories and Portraits described as Probably Arboreal, which may serve for recognition. Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal; in all our 'veins there run some minims of his old, wild, tree-top blood ; our civilised nerves still tingle with his rude terrors and pleasures ; and to that which would have moved our common an- cestor, all must obediently thrill. We have not so far to climb to come to shepherds ; and it may be I had one for an ascendant who has largely moulded me. But yet I think I owe my taste for that hill- side business rather to the art and interest of John Todd. He it was that made it live for me, as the artist can make all things live. It was through him the simple strategy of massing sheep upon a snowy evening, with its attendant scampering of earnest, shaggy aides-de-camp, was an affair that I never wearied of seeing, and that I never weary of recalling to mind : the shadow of the night darkening on the hills, inscrutable black blots of snow shower moving here and there like Pastoral 105 night already come, huddles of yellow sheep and dartings of black dogs upon the snow, a bitter air that took you by the throat, un- earthly harpings of the wind along the moors ; and for centre piece to all these features and influences, John winding up the brae, keeping his captain's eye upon all sides, and breaking, ever and again, into a spasm of bellowing that seemed to make the evening bleaker. It is thus that I still see him in my mind's eye, perched on a hump of the declivity not far from Halkerside, his staff in airy flourish, his great voice taking hold upon the hills and echoing terror to the lowlands ; I, meanwhile, standing somewhat back, until the fit should be over, and, with a pinch of snuff, my friend relapse into his easy, even conversation. VII THE MANSE T HAVE named, among many rivers that make music in my memory, that dirty Water of Leith. Often and often I desire to look upon it again ; and the choice of a point of view is easy to me. It should be at a certain water-door, embowered in shrub- bery. The river is there dammed back for the service of the flour-mill just below, so that it lies deep and darkling, and the sand slopes into brown obscurity with a glint of gold ; and it has but newly been recruited by the borrowings of the snuff-mill just above, and these, tumbling merrily in, shake the pool to its black heart, fill it with drowsy eddies, and set the curded froth of many The Manse 107 other mills solemnly steering to and fro upon the surface. Or so it was when I was young ; for change, and the masons, and the pruning -knife, have been busy ; and if I could hope to repeat a cherished experience, it must be on many and impossible condi- tions. I must choose, as well as the point of view, a certain moment in my growth, so that the scale may be exaggerated, and the trees on the steep opposite side may seem to climb to heaven, and the sand by the water-door, where I am standing, seem as low as Styx. And I must choose the season also, so that the valley may be brimmed like a cup with sunshine and the songs of birds ; — and the year of grace, so that when I turn to leave the riverside I may find the old manse and its inhabitants unchanged. It was a place in that time like no other : the garden cut into provinces by a great hedge of beech, and overlooked by the church and the terrace of the churchyard, where the tombstones were thick, and after 1 08 Memories and Portraits nightfall "spunkies" might be seen to dance, at least by children ; flower-plots lying warm in sunshine ; laurels and the great yew mak- ing elsewhere a pleasing horror of shade ; the smell of water rising from all round, with an added tang of paper-mills ; the sound of water everywhere, and the sound of mills — the wheel and the dam singing their alternate strain ; the birds on every bush and from every corner of the overhanging woods peal- ing out their notes until the air throbbed with them ; and in the midst of this, the manse. I see it, by the standard of my childish stature, as a great and roomy house. In truth, it was not so large as I supposed, nor yet so convenient, and, standing where it did, it is difficult to suppose that it was healthful. Yet a large family of stalwart sons and tall daughters was housed and reared, and came to man and womanhood in that nest of little chambers ; so that the face of the earth was peppered with the children of the manse, and letters with outlandish stamps became familiar to the local postman, The Manse 109 and the walls of the little chambers bright- ened with the wonders of the East. The dullest could see this was a house that had a pair of hands in divers foreign places : a well-beloved house — its image fondly dwelt on by many travellers. Here lived an ancestor of mine, who was a herd of men. I read him, judging with older criticism the report of childish observation, as a man of singular simplicity of nature ; unemotional, and hating the dis- play of what he felt ; standing contented on the old ways ; a lover of his life and innocent habits to the end. We children admired him : partly for his beautiful face and silver hair, for none more than children are con- cerned for beauty and, above all, for beauty in the old ; partly for the solemn light in which we beheld him once a week, the observed of all observers, in the pulpit. But his strictness and distance, the effect, I now fancy, of old age, slow blood, and settled habit, oppressed us with a kind of terror. When not abroad, he sat much alone, writing 1 1 o Memories and Portraits sermons or letters to his scattered family in a dark and cold room with a library of bloodless books — or so they seemed in those days, although I have some of them now on my own shelves and like well enough to read them ; and these lonely hours wrapped him in the greater gloom for our imagina- tions. But the study had a redeeming grace in many Indian pictures, gaudily coloured and dear to young eyes. I cannot depict (for I have no such passions now) the greed with which I beheld them ; and when I was once sent in to say a psalm to my grand- father, I went, quaking indeed with fear, but at the same time glowing with hope that, if I said it well, he might reward me with an Indian picture. •' Thy foot He'll not let slide, nor will He slumber that thee keeps," it ran : a strange conglomerate of the un- pronounceable, a sad model to set in child- hood before one who was himself to be a versifier, and a task in recitation that really merited reward. And I must suppose the The Manse 1 1 1 old man thought so too, and was either touched or amused by the performance ; for he took me in his arms with most unwonted tenderness, and kissed me, and gave me a Httle kindly sermon for my psalm ; so that, for that day, we were clerk and parson. I was struck by this reception into so tender a surprise that I forgot my disappointment. And indeed the hope was one of those that childhood forges for a pastime, and with no design upon reality. Nothing was more unlikely than that my grandfather should strip himself of one of those pictures, love- gifts and reminders of his absent sons ; nothing more unlikely than that he should bestow it upon me. He had no idea of spoiling children, leaving all that to my aunt ; he had fared hard himself, and blub- bered under the rod in the last century ; and his ways were still Spartan for the young. The last word I heard upon his lips was in this Spartan key. He had over- walked in the teeth of an east wind, and was now near the end of his many days. He 1 1 2 Memories and Portraits sat by the dining-room fire, with his white hair, pale face and bloodshot eyes, a some- what awful figure ; and my aunt had given him a dose of our good old Scotch medicine, Dr. Gregory's powder. Now that remedy, as the work of a near kinsman of Rob Roy himself, may have a savour of romance for the imagination ; but it comes uncouthly to the palate. The old gentleman had taken it with a wry face ; and that being accom- plished, sat with perfect simplicity, like a child's, munching a " barley-sugar kiss." But when my aunt, having the canister open in her hands, proposed to let me share in the sweets, he interfered at once. I had had no Gregory ; then I should have no barley- sugar kiss : so he decided with a touch of irritation. And just then the phaeton coming opportunely to the kitchen door — for such was our unlordly fashion — I was taken for the last time from the presence of my grand- father. Now I often wonder what I have inherited from this old minister. I must suppose, The Manse 1 1 3 indeed, that he was fond of preaching- sermons, and so am I, though I never heard it maintained that either of us loved to hear them. He sought health in his youth in the Isle of Wight, and I have sought it in both hemispheres ; but whereas he found and kept it, I am still on the quest. He was a great lover of Shakespeare, whom he read aloud, I have been told, with taste ; well, I love my Shakespeare also, and am persuaded I can read him well, though I own I never have been told so. He made embroidery, designing his own patterns ; and in that kind of work I never made anything but a kettle- holder in Berlin wool, and an odd garter of knitting, which was as black as the chimney before I had done with it. He loved port, and nuts, and porter ; and so do I, but they agreed better with my grandfather, which seems to me a breach of contract. He had chalk-stones in his fingers ; and these, in good time, I may possibly inherit, but I would much rather have inherited his noble presence. Try as I please, I cannot join 1 1 4 Me?nories and Portraits myself on with the reverend doctor ; and all the while, no doubt, and even as I write the phrase, he moves in my blood, and whispers words to me, and sits efficient in the very knot and centre of my being. In his garden, as I played there, I learned the love of mills — or had I an ancestor a miller ? — and a kindness for the neighbourhood of graves, as homely things not without their poetry — or had I an ancestor a sexton ? But what of the garden where he played himself? — for that, too, was a scene of my education. Some part of me played there in the eighteenth century, and ran races under the green avenue at Pilrig ; some part of me trudged up Leith Walk, which was still a country place, and sat on the High School benches, and was thrashed, perhaps, by Dr. Adam. The house where I spent my youth was not yet thought upon ; but we made holiday parties among the cornfields on its site, and ate strawberries and cream near by at a gardener's. All this I had forgotten ; only my grandfather remembered and once re- The Manse 1 1 5 minded me. I have forgotten, too, how we grew up, and took orders, and went to our first Ayrshire parish, and fell in love with and married a daughter of Burns's Dr. Smith — " Smith opens out his cauld harangues." I have forgotten, but I was there all the same, and heard stories of Burns at first hand. And there is a thing stranger than all that ; for this homunadtcs or part-man of mine that walked about the eighteenth century with Dr. Balfour in his youth, was in the way of meeting other homunculos or part-men, in the persons of my other ancestors. These were of a lower order, and doubtless we looked down upon them duly. But as I went to college with Dr. Balfour, I may have seen the lamp 'and oil man taking down the shutters from his shop beside the Tron ; — we may have had a rabbit-hutch or a bookshelf made for us by a certain carpenter in I know not what wynd of the old, smoky city; or, upon some holiday excursion, we may have looked into the windows of a cottage in a 1 1 6 Memories and Portraits flower-garden and seen a certain weaver ply- ing his shuttle. And these were all kinsmen of mine upon the other side ; and from the eyes of the lamp and oil man one-half of my unborn father, and one-quarter of myself, looked out upon us as we went by to college. Nothing of all this would cross the mind of the young student, as he posted up the Bridges with trim, stockinged legs, in that city of cocked hats and good Scotch still un- adulterated. It would not cross his mind that he should have a daughter ; and the lamp and oil man, just then beginning, by a not unnatural metastasis, to bloom into a lighthouse-engineer, should have a grandson ; and that these two, in the fulness of time, should wed ; and some portion of that student himself should survive yet a year or two longer in the person of their child. But our ancestral adventures are beyond even the arithmetic of fancy; and it is the chief recommendation of long pedigrees, that we can follow backward the careers of our homunculos and be reminded of our antenatal The Manse 1 1 7 lives. Our conscious years are but a moment in the history of the elements that build us. Are you a bank-clerk, and do you live at Peckham ? It was not always so. And though to-day I am only a man of letters, either tradition errs or I was present when there landed at St. Andrews a French barber-surgeon, to tend the health and the beard of the great Cardinal Beaton ; I have shaken a spear in the Debateable Land and shouted the slogan of the Elliots ; I was present when a skipper, plying from Dundee, smuggled Jacobites to France after the '15 ; I was in a West India merchant's office, per- haps next door to Bailie Nichol Jarvie's, and managed the business of a plantation in St. Kitt's ; I was with my engineer-grandfather (the son-in-law of the lamp and oil man) when he sailed north about Scotland on the famous cruise that gave us the Pirate and the Lord of the Isles ; I was with him, too, on the Bell Rock, in the fog, when the Sineaton had drifted from her moorin2|-s, and the Aberdeen men, pick in hand, had seized 1 1 8 Memories and Portraits upon the only boats, and he must stoop and lap sea-water before his tongue could utter audible words ; and once more with him when the Bell Rock beacon took a " thrawe," and his workmen fled into the tower, then nearly finished, and he sat unmoved reading in his Bible — or affecting to read — till one after another slunk back with confusion of countenance to their engineer. Yes, parts of me have seen life, and met adventures, and sometimes met them well. And away in the still cloudier past, the threads that make me up can be traced by fancy into the bosoms of thousands and millions of ascendants : Picts who rallied round Macbeth and the old (and highly preferable) system of descent by females, fleers from before the legions of Agricola, marchers in Pannonian morasses, star-gazers on Chaldaean plateaus ; and, furthest of all, what face is this that fancy can see peering through the disparted branches ? What sleeper in green tree-tops, what muncher of nuts, concludes my pedi- gree ? Probably arboreal in his habits. . . . The Manse 1 1 9 And I know not which is the more strange, that I should carry about with me some fibres of my minister-grandfather ; or that in him, as he sat in his cool study, grave, reverend, contented gentleman, there was an aboriginal frisking of the blood that was not his ; tree- top memories, like undeveloped negatives, lay dormant in his mind ; tree-top instincts awoke and were trod down ; and Probably Arboreal (scarce to be distinguished from a monkey) gambolled and chattered in the brain of the old divine. VIII MEMOIRS OF AN ISLET 'T^HOSE who try to be artists use, time after time, the matter of their recol- lections, setting and resetting little coloured memories of men and scenes, rigging up (it may be) some especial friend in the attire of a buccaneer, and decreeing armies to manoeuvre, or murder to be done, on the playground of their youth. But the memo- ries are a fairy gift which cannot be worn out in using. After a dozen services in various tales, the little sunbright pictures of the past still shine in the mind's eye with not a lineament defaced, not a tint impaired. Gliick tuid 7tngliick zuird gesang^ if Goethe pleases ; yet only by endless avatars, the Memoirs of an Islet 121 original re-embodying after each. So that a writer, in time, begins to wonder at the perdurable life of these impressions ; begins, perhaps, to fancy that he wrongs them when he weaves them in with fiction ; and looking back on them with ever-growing kindness, puts them at last, substantive jewels, in a setting of their own. One or two of these pleasant spectres I think I have laid. I used one but the other day : a little eyot of dense, freshwater sand, where I once waded deep in butterburrs, delighting to hear the song of the river on both sides, and to tell myself that I was indeed and at last upon an island. Two of my puppets lay there a summer's day, hearkening to the shearers at work in river- side fields and to the drums of the gray old garrison upon the neighbouring hill. And this was, I think, done rightly : the place was rightly peopled — and now belongs not to me but to my puppets — for a time at least. In time, perhaps, the puppets will grow faint ; the original memory swim up instant 12 2 Memories and Portraits as ever ; and I shall once more lie in bed, and see the little sandy isle in Allan Water as it is in nature, and the child (that once was me) wading there in butterburrs ; and wonder at the instancy and virgin freshness of that memory ; and be pricked again, in season and out of season, by the desire to weave it into art. There is another isle in my collection, the memory of which besieges me. I put a whole family there, in one of my tales ; and later on, threw upon its shores, and condemned to several days of rain and shellfish on its tumbled boulders, the hero of another. The ink is not yet faded ; the sound of the sen- tences is still in my mind's ear ; and I am under a spell to write of that island again. The little isle of Earraid lies close in to the south-west corner of the Ross of Mull : the sound of lona on one side, across which you may see the isle and church of Columba ; Memoirs of an Islet 123 the open sea to the other, where you shall be able to mark, on a clear, surfy day, the breakers running white on many sunken rocks. I first saw it, or first remember see- ing it, framed in the round bull's-eye of a cabin port, the sea lying smooth along its shores like the waters of a lake, the colour- less, clear light of the early morning making plain its heathery and rocky hummocks. There stood upon it, in these days, a single rude house of uncemented stones, approached by a pier of wreckwood. It must have been very early, for it was then summer, and in summer, in that latitude, day scarcely with- draws ; but even at that hour the house was making a sweet smoke of peats which came to me over the bay, and the bare-legged daughters of the cotter were wading by the pier. The same day we visited the shores of the isle in the ship's boats ; rowed deep into Fiddler's Hole, sounding as we went ; and having taken stock of ail possible ac- commodation, pitched on the northern inlet as the scene of operations. For it was no 1 24 Memories a7id For trails accident that had brought the h'ghthouse steamer to anchor in the Bay of Earraid. Fifteen miles away to seaward, a certain black rock stood environed by the Atlantic rollers, the outpost of the Torran reefs. Here was a tower to be built, and a star lighted, for the conduct of seamen. But as the rock was small, and hard of access, and far from land, the work would be one of years ; and my father was now looking for a shore station, where the stones might be quarried and dressed, the men live, and the tender, with some degree of safety, lie at anchor. I saw Earraid next from the stern thwart of an lona lugger, Sam Bough and I sitting there cheek by jowl, with our feet upon our baggage, in a beautiful, clear, northern sum- mer eve. And behold ! there was now a pier of stone, there were rows of sheds, rail- ways, travelling-cranes, a street of cottages, an iron house for the resident engineer, wooden bothies for the men, a stage where the courses of the tower were put together experimentally, and behind the settlement a Memoirs of an Islet 1 2 5 great gash in the hillside where granite was quarried. In the bay, the steamer lay at her moorings. All day long there hung about the place the music of chinking tools ; and even in the dead of night, the watchman carried his lantern to and fro in the dark settlement, and could light the pipe of any midnight muser. It was, above all, strange to see Earraid on the Sunday, when the sound of the tools ceased and there fell a crystal quiet. All about the green compound men would be sauntering in their Sunday's best, walking with those lax joints of the reposing toiler, thoughtfully smoking, talking small, as if in honour of the stillness, or hearkening to the wailing of the gulls. And it was strange to see our Sabbath services, held, as they were, in one of the bothies, with Mr. Brebner reading at a table, and the congregation perched about in the double tier of sleeping bunks ; and to hear the singing of the psalms, " the chapters," the inevitable Spurgeon's sermon, and the old, eloquent lighthouse prayer. 1 26 Memories and Portraits In fine weather, when by the spy-glass on the hill the sea was observed to run low upon the reef, there would be a sound of preparation in the very early morning ; and before the sun had risen from behind Ben More, the tender would steam out of the bay. Over fifteen sea -miles of the great blue Atlantic rollers she ploughed her way, trail- ing at her tail a brace of wallowing stone- lighters. The open ocean widened upon either board, and the hills of the mainland began to go down on the horizon, before she came to her unhomely destination, and lay-to at last where the rock clapped its black head above the swell, with the tall iron barrack on its spider legs, and the truncated tower, and the cranes waving their arms, and the smoke of the engine-fire rising in the mid-sea. An ugly reef is this of the Dhu Heartach ; no pleasant assemblage of shelves, and pools, and creeks, about w^hich a ohild might play for a whole summer without weariness, like the Bell Rock or the Skerryvore, but one oval nodule of black -trap, sparsely bedabbled Memoirs of an Islet 1 2 7 with an inconspicuous fucus, and alive in every crevice with a dingy insect between a slater and a bug-. No other life was there but that of sea-birds, and of the sea itself, that here ran like a mill-race, and growled about the outer reef for ever, and ever and again, in the calmest weather, roared and spouted on the rock itself Times were different upon Dhu Heartach when it blew, and the night fell dark, and the neigh- bour lights of Skerryvore and Rhu-val were quenched in fog, and the men sat prisoned high up in their iron drum, that then re- sounded with the lashing of the sprays. Fear sat with them in their sea-beleaguered dwell- ing ; and the colour changed in anxious faces when some greater billow struck the barrack, and its pillars quivered and sprang under the blow. It was then that the fore- man builder, Mr. Goodwillie, whom I see before me still in his rock-habit of undecipher- able rags, would get his fiddle down and strike up human minstrelsy amid the music of the storm. But it was in sunshine only 12 8 Memo7nes and Portraits that I saw Dhu-Heartach; and it was in sun- shine, or the yet lovelier summer afterglow, that the steamer would return to Earraid, ploughing an enchanted sea ; the obedient lighters, relieved of their deck cargo, riding in her wake more quietly; and the steersman upon each, as she. rose on the long swell, standing tall and dark against the shining west. II But it was in Earraid itself that I delighted chiefly. The lighthouse settlement scarce encroached beyond its fences ; over the top of the first brae the ground was all virgin, the world all shut out, the face of things un- changed by any of man's doings. Here was no living presence, save for the limpets on the rocks, for some old, gray, rain-beaten ram that I might rouse out of a ferny den betwixt two boulders, or for the haunting and the piping of the gulls. It was older than man ; it was found so by incoming Celts, and seafaring Norsemen, and Columba's Memoirs of an Islet 129 priests. The earthy savour of the bog plants, the rude disorder of the boulders, the inimit- able seaside brightness of the air, the brine and the iodine, the lap of the billows among the weedy reefs, the sudden springing up of a great run of dashing surf along the sea- front of the isle, all that I saw and felt my predecessors must have seen and felt with scarce a difference. I steeped myself in open air and in past ages. *' Delightful would it be to me to be in Uchd Ailiun On the pinnacle of a rock, That I might often see The face of the ocean ; That I might hear the song of the wonderful birds, Source of happiness ; That I might hear the thunder of the crowding waves Upon the rocks : At times at work without compulsion — This would be delightful ; At times plucking dulse from the rocks ; At times at fishing." So, about the next island of lona, sang Columba himself twelve hundred years before. And so might I have sung of Earraid. And all the while I was aware that this K T 30 Memories and Portraits life of sea-bathing and sun-burning was for me but a holiday. In that year cannon were roar- ing for days together on French battlefields; and I would sit in my isle (I call it mine, after the use of lovers) and think upon the war, and the loudness of these far-away battles, and the pain of the men's wounds, and the weariness of their marching. And I would think too of that other war which is as old as mankind, and is indeed the life of man : the unsparing war, the grind- ing slavery of competition ; the toil of seventy years, dear-bought bread, precarious honour, the perils and pitfalls, and the poor rewards. It was a long look forward ; the future summoned me as with trumpet calls, it warned me back as with a voice of weeping and beseeching; and I thrilled and trembled on the brink of life, like a childish bather on the beach. There was another young man on Earraid in these days, and we were much together, bathing, clambering on the boulders, trying to sail a boat and spinning round instead in the Memoirs of an Islet 1 3 1 oily whirlpools of the roost. But the most part of the time we spoke of the great uncharted desert of our futures ; wondering together what should there befall us ; hearing with surprise the sound of our own voices in the empty vestibule of youth. As far, and as hard, as it seemed then to look forward to the grave, so far it seems now to look back- ward upon these emotions; so hard to recall justly that loath submission, as of the sacrificial bull, with which we stooped our necks under the yoke of destiny. I met my old companion but the other day ; I cannot tell of course what he was thinking ; but, upon my part, I was wondering to see us both so much at home, and so composed and sedentary in the world ; and how much we had gained, and how much we had lost, to attain to that composure ; and which had been upon the whole our best estate : when we sat there prating sensibly like men of some experience, or when we shared our timorous and hopeful counsels in a western islet. IX THOMAS STEVENSON CIVIL ENGINEER nPHE death of Thomas Stevenson will mean not very much to the general reader. His service to mankind took on forms of which the public knows little and understands less. He came seldom to London, and then only as a task, remaining always a stranger and a convinced pro- vincial ; putting up for years at the' same hotel where his father had gone before him ; faithful for long to the same restaurant, the same church, and the same theatre, chosen simply for propinquity ; steadfastly refusing to dine out. He had a circle of his own, indeed, at home ; few men were more be- Thomas Stevenson 133 loved in Edinburgh, where he breathed an air that pleased him ; and wherever he went, in raihvay carriages or hotel smoking-rooms, his strange, humorous vein of talk, and his transparent honesty, raised him up friends and admirers. But to the general public and the world of London, except about the parliamentary committee-rooms, he remained unknown. All the time, his lights were in every part of the world, guiding the mariner ; his firm were consulting engineers to the Indian, the New Zealand, and the Japanese Lighthouse Boards, so that Edinburgh was a world centre for that branch of applied science ; in Germany, he had been called " the Nestor of lighthouse illumination ; " even in France, where his claims were long denied, he was at last, on the occasion of the late Exposition, recognised and medalled. And to show by one instance the inverted nature of his reputation, comparatively small at home, yet filling the world, a friend of mine was this winter on a visit to the Spanish main, and was asked by a Peruvian 134 Memories and Portraits if he " knew Mr. Stevenson the author, be- cause his works were much esteemed in Peru?" My friend supposed the reference was to the writer of tales ; but the Peruvian had never heard of Dr. Jekyll ; what he had in his eye, what was esteemed in Peru, were the volumes of the engineer. Thomas Stevenson was born at Edinburgh in the year 1 8 1 8, the grandson of Thomas Smith, first engineer to the Board of Northern Lights, son of Robert Stevenson, brother of Alan and David ; so that his nephew, David Alan Stevenson, joined with him at the time of his death in the engineership, is the sixth of the family who has held, successively or conjointly, that office. The Bell Rock, his father's great triumph, was finished before he was born ; but he served under his brother Alan in the building of Skerryvore, the noblest of all extant deep-sea lights ; and, in conjunction with his brother David, he added two — the Chickens and Dhu Heartach — to that small number of man's extreme outposts in the ocean. Of shore lights, the Thomas Stevejtson 1 3 5 two brothers last named erected no fewer than twenty-seven ; of beacons/ about twenty- five. Many harbours were successfully carried out : one, the harbour of Wick, the chief disaster of my father's life, was a failure ; the sea proved too strong for man's arts ; and after expedients hitherto unthought of, and on a scale hyper-cyclopean, the work must be deserted, and now stands a ruin in that bleak, God-forsaken bay, ten miles from John-o'-Groat's. In the improvement of rivers the brothers were likewise in a large way of practice over both England and Scotland, nor had any British engineer any- thing approaching their experience. It was about this nucleus of his pro- fessional labours that all my father's scientific inquiries and inventions centred ; these pro- ceeded from, and acted back upon, his daily business. Thus it was as a harbour engineer that he became interested in the propagation 1 In Dr. Murray's admirable new dictionary, I have remarked a flaw sub voce Beacon. In its express, technical sense, a beacon may be defined as "a founded, artificial sea-mark, not lighted." 136 Memories and Portraits and reduction of waves ; a difficult subject in regard to which he has left behind him much suggestive matter and some valuable approximate results. Storms were his sworn adversaries, and it was through the study of storms that he approached that of meteor- ology at large. Many who knew him not otherwise, knew — perhaps have in their gardens — his louvre - boarded screen for instruments. But the great achievement of his life was, of course, in optics as applied to lighthouse illumination. Fresnel had done much ; Fresnel had settled the fixed light apparatus on a principle that still seems unimprovable ; and when Thomas Stevenson stepped in and brought to a comparable perfection the revolving light, a not un- natural jealousy and much painful con- troversy rose in France. It had its hour ; and, as I have told already, even in France it has blown by. Had it not, it would have mattered the less, since all through his life my father continued to justify his claim by fresh advances. New apparatus for lights in Thomas Stevenson 137 new situations was continually being designed with the same unwearied search after per- fection, the same nice ingenuity of means ; and though the holophotal revolving light perhaps still remains his most elegant con- trivance, it is difficult to give it the palm over the much later condensing system, with its thousand possible modifications. The number and the value of these improvements entitle their author to the name of one of mankind's benefactors. In all parts of the world a safer landfall awaits the mariner. Two things must be said : and, first, that Thomas Stevenson was no mathematician. Natural shrewdness, a sentiment of optical laws, and a great intensity of consideration led him to just conclusions ; but to calculate the necessary formulae for the instruments he had conceived was often beyond him, and he must fall back on the help of others, notably on that of his cousin and lifelong intimate friend, emeritus Professor Swan, of St. Andrews, and his later friend, Professor P. G. Tait. It is a curious enough circum- 1 3 8 Memories and Portraits stance, and a great encouragement to others, that a man so ill equipped should have succeeded in one of the most abstract and arduous walks of applied science. The second remark is one that applies to the whole family, and only particularly to Thomas Stevenson from the great number and im- portance of his inventions : holding as the Stevensons did a Government appointment, they regarded their original work as some- thing due already to the nation, and none of them has ever taken out a patent. It is another cause of the comparative obscurity of the name : for a patent not only brings in money, it infallibly spreads reputation ; and my father's instruments enter anonymously into a hundred light-rooms, and are passed anonymously over in a hundred reports, where the least considerable patent would stand out and tell its author's story. But the life-work of Thomas Stevenson remains ; what we have lost, what we now rather try to recall, is the friend and com- panion. He was a man of a somewhat Thomas Stevenson 139 antique strain : with a blended sternness and softness that was wholly Scottish and at first somewhat bewildering ; with a profound essential melancholy of disposition and (what often accompanies it) the most humorous geniality in company ; shrewd and childish ; passionately attached, passionately preju- diced ; a man of many extremes, many faults of temper, and no very stable foothold for himself among life's troubles. Yet he was a wise adviser ; many men, and these not inconsiderable, took counsel with him habitually. " I sat at his feet," writes one of these, " when I asked his advice, and when the broad brow was set in thought and the firm mouth said his say, I always knew that no man could add to the worth of the con- clusion." He had excellent taste, though whimsical and partial ; collected old furni- ture and delighted specially in sunflowers long before the days of Mr. Wilde ; took a lasting pleasure in prints and pictures ; was a devout admirer of Thomson of Dudding- ston at a time when few shared the taste ; 1 40 Memories and Portraits and though he read Httle, was constant to his favourite books. He had never any- Greek ; Latin he happily re-taught himself after he had left school, where he was a mere consistent idler : happily, I say, for Lactan- tius, Vossius, and Cardinal Bona were his chief authors. The first he must have read for twenty years uninterruptedly, keeping it near him in his study, and carrying it in his bag on journeys. Another old theologian, Brown of Wamphray, was often in his hands. When he was indisposed, he had two books, Guy Mannering and The Parents Assistant^ of which he never wearied. He was a strong Conservative, or, as he preferred to call himself, a Tory ; ex- cept in so far as his views were modified by a hot-headed chivalrous sentiment for women. He was actually in favour of a marriage law under which any woman might have a divorce for the asking, and no man on any ground whatever ; and the same sentiment found another expression in a Magdalen Mission in Edinburgh, founded and largely Thomas Stevenson 141 supported by himself. This was but one of the many channels of his public generosity ; his private was equally unstrained. The Church of Scotland, of which he held the doctrines (though in a sense of his own) and to which he bore a clansman's loyalty, profited often by his time and money ; and though, from a morbid sense of his own unworthi- ness, he would never consent to be an office- bearer, his advice was often sought, and he served the Church on many committees. What he perhaps valued highest in his work were his contributions to the defence of Christianity ; one of which, in particular, was praised by Hutchinson Stirling and reprinted at the request of Professor Crawford. His sense of his own unworthiness I have called morbid ; morbid, too, were his sense of the fleetingness of life and his concern for death. He had never accepted the con- ditions of man's life or his own character ; and his inmost thoughts were ever tinged with the Celtic melancholy. Cases of con- science were sometimes grievous to him, and 142- Memories and Portraits that delicate employment of a scientific wit- ness cost him many qualms. But he found respite from these troublesome humours in his work, in his lifelong study of natural science, in the society of those he loved, and in his daily walks, which now would carry him far into the country with some congenial friend, and now keep him dangling about the town from one old book-shop to another, and scraping romantic acquaintance with every dog that passed. His talk, com- pounded of so much sterling sense and so much freakish humour, and clothed in lan- guage so apt, droll, and emphatic, was a per- petual delight to all who knew him before the clouds began to settle on his mind. His use of language was both just and pictur- esque ; and when at the beginning of his ill- ness he began to feel the ebbing of this power, it was strange and painful to hear him reject one word after another as inadequate, and at length desist from the search and leave his phrase unfinished rather than finish it without propriety. It was perhaps another Thomas Steveiison 143 Celtic trait that his affections and emotions, passionate as these were, and Hable to pas- sionate ups and downs, found the most elo- quent expression both in words and gestures. Love, anger, and indignation shone through him and broke forth in imagery, like what we read of Southern races. For all these emotional extremes, and in spite of the melancholy ground of his character, he had upon the whole a happy life ; nor was he less fortunate in his death, which at the last came to him unaware. X TALK AND TALKERS Sir, we had a good talk.— Johnson. As we must account for every idle word, so we must for every idle silence. — Franklin. I 'T^HERE can be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk ; to be affable, gay, ready, clear and welcome ; to have a fact, a thought, or an illustration, pat to every subject ; and not only to cheer the flight of time among our intimates, but bear our part in that great international congress, always sitting, where public wrongs are first declared, public erorrs first corrected, and the course of public opinion shaped, day by day, a little nearer to the right. No measure comes before Talk a7id Talkers 145 Parliament but it has been long ago prepared by the grand jury of the talkers ; no book is written that has not been largely composed by their assistance. Literature in many of its branches is no other than the shadow of good talk ; but the imitation falls far short of the original in life, freedom and effect. There are always two to a talk, giving and taking, comparing experience and according conclusions. Talk is fluid, tenta- tive, continually " in further search and progress ;" while written words remain fixed, become idols even to the writer, found wooden dogmatisms, and preserve flies of obvious error in the amber of the truth. Last and chief, while literature, gagged with linsey-woolsey, can only deal with a fraction of the life of man, talk goes fancy free and may call a spade a spade. Talk has none of the freezing immunities of the pulpit. It cannot, even if it would, become merely aesthetic or merely classical like literature. A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug is dis- solved in laughter, and speech runs forth 146 Memories and Portraits out of the contemporary groove into the open fields of nature, cheery and cheering, like schoolboys but of school. And it is in talk alone that we can learn our period and our- selves. In short, the first duty of a man is to speak ; that is his chief business in this world ; and talk, which is the harmonious speech of two or more, is by far the most accessible of pleasures. It costs nothing in, money; it is all profit ; it completes our education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any state of health. The spice of life is battle ; the friendliest relations are still a kind of contest; and if we would not forego all that is valuable in our lot, vve must continually face some other person, eye to eye, and wrestle a fall whether in love or enmity. It is still by force of body, or power of character or intellect, that we attain to worthy pleasures. Men and women con- tend for each other in the lists of love, like rival mesmerists ; the active and adroit decide their challenges in the sports of the body ; Talk and Talkers 147 and the sedentary sit down to chess or con- versation. All sluggish and pacific pleasures are, to the same degree, solitary and selfish ; and every durable bond between human beings is founded in or heightened by some element of competition. Now, the relation that has the least root in matter is un- doubtedly that airy one of friendship ; and hence, I suppose, it is that good talk most commonly arises among friends. Talk is, indeed, both the scene and instrument of friendship. It is in talk alone that the friends can measure strength, and enjoy that amicable counter- assertion of personality which is the gauge of relations and the sport of life. A good talk is not to be had for the ask- ing. Humours must first be accorded in a kind of overture or prologue ; hour, company and circumstance be suited ; and then, at a fit juncture, the subject, the quarry of two heated minds, spring up like a deer out of the wood. Not that the talker has any of the hunter's pride, though he has all and 148 Memories and Portraits more than all his ardour. The genuine artist follows the stream of conversation as an angler follows the windings of a brook, not dallying where he fails to " kill." He trusts implicitly to hazard ; and he is rewarded by continual variety, continual pleasure, and those changing prospects of the truth that are the best of education. There is nothing in a subject, so called, that we should regard it as an idol, or follow it beyond the promptings of desire. Indeed, there are few subjects; and so far as they are truly talkable, more than the half of them may be reduced to three : that I am I, that you are you, and that there are other people dimly understood to be not quite the same as either. Where- ever talk may range, it still runs half the time on these eternal lines. The theme being set, each plays on himself as on an in- strument ; asserts and justifies himself; ran- sacks his brain for instances and opinions, and brings them forth new-minted, to his own surprise and the admiration of his adversary. Talk and Talkers 149 All natural talk is a festival of ostentation ; and by the laws of the game each accepts and fans the vanity of the other. It is from that reason that we venture to lay ourselves so open, that we dare to be so warmly eloquent, and that we swell in each other's eyes to such a vast proportion. For talkers, once launched, begin to overflow the limits of their ordinary selves, tower up to the height of their secret pretensions, and give themselves out for the heroes, brave, pious, musical and wise, that in their most shining moments they aspire to be. So they weave for themselves with words and for a while inhabit a palace of delights, temple at once and theatre, where they fill the round of the world's dignities, and feast with the gods, exulting in Kudos. And when the talk is over, each goes his way, still flushed with vanity and admiration, still trailing clouds of glory ; each declines from the height of his ideal orgie, not in a moment, but by slow declension. I remem- ber, in the entr'acte of an afternoon perform- ance, coming forth into the sunshine, in a 1 5 o Memories and Portraits beautiful green, gardened corner of a romantic city ; and as I sat and smoked, the music moving in my blood, I seemed to sit there and evaporate The Flying Dutchman (for it was that I had been hearing) with a wonder- ful sense of life, warmth, well-being and pride ; and the noises of the city, voices, bells and marching feet, fell together in my ears like a symphonious orchestra. In the same way, the excitement of a good talk lives for a long while after in the blood, the heart still hot within you, the brain still simmering, and the physical earth swimming around you with the colours of the sunset. Natural talk, like ploughing, should turn up a large surface of life, rather than dig mines into geological strata. Masses of experience, anecdote, incident, cross-lights, quotation, historical instances, the whole flotsam and jetsam of two minds forced in and in upon the matter in hand from every point of the compass, and from every degree of mental elevation and abasement — these are the material with which talk is fortified, Talk and Talkers 151 the food on which the talkers thrive. Such argument as is proper to tlie exercise should still be brief and seizing. Talk should pro- ceed by instances ; by the apposite, not the expository. It should keep close along the lines of humanity, near the bosoms and businesses of men, at the level where history, fiction and experience intersect and illuminate each other. I am I, and You are You, with all my heart ; but conceive how these lean propositions change and brighten when, instead of words, the actual you and I sit cheek by jowl, the spirit housed in the live body, and the very clothes utter- ing voices to corroborate the story in the face. Not less surprising is the change when we leave off to speak of generalitfes — the bad, the good, the miser, and all the characters of Theophrastus — and call up other men, by anecdote or instance, in their very trick and feature ; or trading on a common knowledge, toss each other famous names, still glowing with the hues of life. Communication is no longer by words, but 1 5 2 Memories and Portraits by the instancing of whole biographies, epics, systems of philosophy, and epochs of history, in bulk. That which is understood excels that which is spoken in quantity and quality alike ; ideas thus figured and personified, change hands, as we may say, like coin ; and the speakers imply without effort the most obscure and intricate thoughts. Strangers who have a large common ground of reading will, for this reason, come the sooner to the grapple of genuine converse. If they know Othello and Napoleon, Consuelo and Clarissa Harlowe, Vautrin and Steenie Steenson, they can leave generalities and begin at once to speak by figures. Conduct and art are the two subjects that arise most frequently and that embrace the widest range of facts. A few pleasures bear discussion for their own sake, but only those which are most social or most radically human ; and even these can only be dis- cussed among their devotees. A technicality is always welcome to the expert, whether in athletics, art or law ; I have heard the best Talk and Talkers 153 kind of talk on technicalities from such rare and happy persons as both know and love their business. No human being ever spoke of scenery for above two minutes at a time, which makes me suspect we hear too much of it in literature. The weather is regarded as the very nadir and scoff of conversational topics. And yet the weather, the dramatic element in scenery, is far more tractable in language, and far more human both in im- port and suggestion than the stable features of the landscape. Sailors and shepherds, and the people generally of coast and mountain, talk well of it; and it is often excit- ingly presented in literature. But the ten- dency of all living talk draws it back and back into the common focus of humanity. Talk is a creature of the street and market- place, feeding on gossip ; and its last resort is still in a discussion on morals. That is the heroic form of gossip ; heroic in virtue of its high pretensions ; but still gossip, because it turns on personalities. You can keep no men long, nor Scotchmen at all, off moral or 1 5 4 Memories and Porh^aits theological discussion. These are to all the world what law is to lawyers ; they are every- body's technicalities ; the medium through which all consider life, and the dialect in which they express their judgments. I knew three young men who walked together daily for some two months in a solemn and beautiful forest and in cloudless summer weather ; daily they talked with unabated zest, and yet scarce wandered that whole time beyond two subjects — theology and love. And perhaps neither a court of love nor an assembly of divines would have granted their premisses or welcomed their conclusions. Conclusions, indeed, are not often reached by talk any more than by private thinking. That is not the profit. The profit is in the exercise, and above all in the experience ; for when we reason at large on any subject, we review our state and history in life. From time to time, however, and specially, I think, in talking art, talk becomes effective, conquering like war, widening the bound- aries of knowledge like an exploration. A Talk and Talkers 1 5 5 point arises ; the question takes a problem- atical, a baffling, yet a likely air ; the talkers begin to feel lively presentiments of some conclusion near at hand ; towards this they strive with emulous ardour, each by his own path, and struggling for first utterance ; and then one leaps upon the summit of that matter with a shout, and almost at the same moment the other is beside him ; and behold they are agreed. Like enough, the progress is illusory, a mere cat's cradle having been wound and unwound out of words. But the sense of joint discovery is none the less giddy and inspiriting. And in the life of the talker such triumphs, though imaginary, are neither few nor far apart ; they are attained with speed and pleasure, in the hour of mirth ; and by the nature of the process, they are always worthily shared. There is a certain attitude, combative at once and deferential, eager to fight yet most averse to quarrel, which marks out at once the talkable man. It is not eloquence, not fairness, not obstinacy, but a 1 5 6 Me7no7des and Portraits certain proportion of all of these that I love to encounter in my amicable adversaries. They must not be pontiffs holding doctrine, but huntsmen questing after elements of truth. Neither must they be boys to be instructed, but fellow-teachers with whom I may wrangle and agree on equal terms. We must reach some solution, some shadow of consent ; for without that, eager talk becomes a torture. But we do not wish to reach it cheaply, or quickly, or without the tussle and effort wherein pleasure lies. The very best talker, with me, is one whom I shall call Spring-Heel'd Jack. I say so, because I never knew any one who mingled so largely the possible ingredients of converse. In the Spanish proverb, the fourth man necessary to compound a salad, is a madman to mix it : Jack is that mad- man. I know not which is more remark- able ; the insane lucidity of his conclusions, the humorous eloquence of his language, or his power of method, bringing the whole of life into the focus of the subject treated. Talk and Talkers 1 5 7 mixing the conversational salad like a drunken god. He doubles like the serpent, changes and flashes like the shaken kaleido- scope, transmigrates bodily into the views of others, and so, in the twinkling of an eye and with a heady rapture, turns ques- tions inside out and flings them empty before you on the ground, like a triumphant conjuror. It is my common practice when a piece of conduct puzzles me, to attack it in the presence of Jack with such grossness, such partiality and such wearing iteration, as at length shall spur him up in its defence. In a moment he transmigrates, dons the required character, and with moonstruck philosophy justifies the act in question. I can fancy nothing to compare with the vim of these impersonations, the strange scale of language, flying from Shakespeare to Kant, and from Kant to Major Dyngwell — " As fast as a musician scatters sounds Out of an instrument — " the sudden, sweeping generalisations, the absurd irrelevant particularities, the wit, 158 Memories and Portraits wisdom, folly, humour, eloquence and bathos, each startling in its kind, and yet all lumin- ous in the admired disorder of their com- bination. A talker of a different calibre, though belonging to the same school, is Burly. Burly is a man of a great presence ; he commands a larger atmosphere, gives the impression of a grosser mass of character than most men. It has been said of him that his presence could be felt in a room you entered blindfold ; and the same, I think, has been said of other powerful con- stitutions condemned to much physical in- action. There is something boisterous and piratic in Burly's manner of talk which suits well enough with this impression. He will roar you down, he will bury his face in his hands, he will undergo passions of revolt and agony ; and meanwhile his attitude of mind is really both conciliatory and recep- tive ; and after Pistol has been out-Pistol'd, and the welkin rung for hours, you begin to perceive a certain subsidence in these spring torrents, points of agreement issue, and you Talk and Talkers 1 5 9 end arm-in-arm, and in a glow of mutual admiration. The outcry only serves to make your final union the more unexpected and precious. Throughout there has been perfect sincerity, perfect intelligence, a desire to hear although not always to listen, and an unaffected eagerness to meet concessions. You have, with Burly, none of the dangers that attend debate with Spring- Heel'd Jack ; who may at any moment turn his powers of transmigration on yourself, create for you a view you never held, and then furiously fall on you for holding it. These, at least, are my two favourites, and both are loud, copious, intolerant talkers. This argues that I myself am in the same category ; for if we love talking at all, we love a bright, fierce adversary, who will hold his ground, foot by foot, in much our own manner, sell his attention dearly, and give us our full measure of the dust and exertion of battle. Both these men can be beat from a position, but it takes six hours to do it ; a high and hard adventure, worth attempting. With 1 60 Memories and Portraits both you can pass days in an enchanted country of the mind, with people, scenery and manners of its own ; Hve a Hfe apart, more arduous, active and glowing than any real existence ; and come forth again when the talk is over, as out of a theatre or a dream, to find the east wind still blowing and the chimney-pots of the old battered city still around you. Jack has the far finer mind, Burly the far more honest ; Jack gives us the animated poetry, Burly the romantic prose, of similar themes ; the one glances, high like a meteor and makes a light in darkness ; the other, with many changing hues of fire, burns at the sea-level, like a conflagration ; but both have the same humour and artistic interests, the same un- quenched ardour in pursuit, the same gusts of talk and thunderclaps of contradiction. Cockshot ^ is a different article, but vastly entertaining, and has been meat and drink to me for many a long evening. His manner is dry, brisk and pertinacious, ^ The late Fleeming Jenkin. Talk and Talkers 1 6 1 and the choice of words not much. The point about him is his extraordinary readi- ness and spirit. You can propound nothing but he has either a theory about it ready- made, or will have one instantly on the stocks, and proceed to lay its timbers and launch it in your presence. " Let me see," he will say. " Give me a moment. I should have some theory for that." A blither spec- tacle than the vigour with which he sets about the task, it were hard to fancy. He is possessed by a demoniac energy, welding the elements for his life, and bending ideas, as an athlete bends a horseshoe, with a visible and lively effort. He has, in theorising, a compass, an art ; what I would call the synthetic gusto ; something of a Herbert Spencer, who should see the fun of the thing. You are not bound, and no more is he, to place your faith in these brand-new opinions. But some of them are right enough, durable even for life ; and the poorest serve for a cock-shy — as when idle people, after picnics, float a bottle on a pond M 1 62 Memories and Portraits and have an hour's diversion ere it sinks. Whichever they are, serious opinions or humours of the moment, he still defends his ventures with indefatigable wit and spirit, hitting savagely himself, but taking punish- ment like a man. He knows and never forgets that people talk, first of all, for the sake of talking ; conducts himself in the ring, to use the old slang, like a thorough " glutton," and honestly enjoys a telling facer from his adversary. Cockshot is bottled effervescency, the sworn foe of sleep. Three-in-the-morning Cockshot, says a victim. His talk is like the driest of all imaginable dry champagnes. Sleight of hand and inimitable quickness are the qualities by which he lives. Athelred, on the other hand, presents you with the spectacle of a sincere and somewhat slow nature thinking aloud. He is the most unready man I ever knew to shine in conversation. You may see him sometimes wrestle with a refractory jest for a minute or two together, and per- haps fail to throw it in the end. And Talk and Talkers 163 there is something singularly engaging, often instructive, in the simplicity with which he thus exposes the process as well as the result, the works as well as the dial of the clock. Withal he has his hours of inspira- tion. Apt words come to him as if by accident, and, coming from deeper down, they smack the more personally, they have the more of fine old crusted humanity, rich in sediment and humour. There are sayings of his in which he has stamped himself into the very grain of the language ; you would think he must have worn the words next his skin and slept with them. Yet it is not as a sayer of particular good things that Athelred is most to be regarded, rather as the stalwart woodman of thought. I have pulled on a light cord often enough, while he has been wielding