Chapter VI: Front Matter (6)

What was the method of the despotism? It was very peculiar, and at the same time very simple and natural. Mr. Dundas, sitting in the House of Commons, first as member for the shire of Edinburgh, but from 1787 onwards as member for Edinburgh itself, was a leading power in the Pitt Administration. On joining that administration he had not resumed his old office of Lord Advocate (which was given to his friend Hay Campbell), but had been content with resuming his former post of the Treasurership of the Navy; to which were subsequently added in succession the Presidency of the Board of Control for Indian Affairs (_i.e._ the Ministry for India), the Home-Secretaryship, the Secretaryship for War, and the First Lordship of the Admiralty. It was perhaps as Minister for India that he most usefully distinguished himself in his capacity as a British statesman. But it was in his other capacity as sovereign minister for Scotland that he laboured most characteristically. Continually going and coming, shuttle-wise, between London and Edinburgh, he was known to carry all Scotland in his pocket. His colleagues, on the one hand, made Scotland entirely over to him; and he, on the other, contracted to keep Scotland quiet for them, and to give them the full use of the united Scottish influence in Parliament. His means, as regarded his countrymen, were very efficient. They consisted, apart from the mere power of his own tact and talent, in the uncontrolled use of patronage. The population of Scotland at that time did not exceed a million and a half,—a population in which, according to the ordinary calculation, there could not be more than about three hundred and fifty thousand adult males. This was a nice little compact body to keep in order, and not above one man’s strength, if he had offices enough at his disposal. But it was not even necessary to deal with all this little mass directly. There was no popular representation in Scotland. Fifteen out of the five-and-forty Scottish members of the House of Commons were members for burghs; and these were elected by the town-councils, who were themselves self-elected, and nearly permanent. Nay, the Edinburgh town-council alone returned a member directly; the other burgh-members were for “districts of burghs,” and were elected by delegates from the various town-councils included in the several districts. The county constituencies, on the other hand, who elected the thirty county members, did not exceed fifteen hundred or two thousand persons for all Scotland. Accordingly, Government, through Dundas, had only to deal directly with an upper two thousand or so, including the town-councils,—a body not too large, as Lord Cockburn says, to be held completely within Government’s hand. Gratitude for places conferred, fear of removal from place, and hope of places to be obtained for themselves and their relations or dependents, were the forces by which they _were_ held. Nobody could get a place or could hold a place except through Harry Dundas; and he had places enough at his disposal to give all the necessary chance. There was, first, all the patronage of Scotland itself, including judgeships, sheriffships, professorships, clerical livings, offices of customs and excise, and a host of minor appointments, all within the control of Dundas, to be distributed by him according to his personal knowledge, or the representations of his friends. Then there were commissions in the army and navy, appointments in the India service, medical appointments, and posts in the various departments of the public service in England,—all excellent as openings for young Scotsmen who could not be provided for at home, and in the patronage of which Dundas had his full share by official right or as a member of the general Ministry. The political faith of Scotland was, therefore, simply _Dundasism_; and it was in a great measure the result of Dundas’s own political position that this _Dundasism_ was equivalent to _Toryism_. As the colleague and friend of Pitt, the member of a government whose main feeling was hatred to the French Revolution, and to everything at home that savoured of sympathy with that Revolution, Dundas willed that his subjects should be Tories; and they were. At last Toryism became the ingrained national habit. Lord Cockburn describes feelingly the utter political abjectness of Scotland during the Dundas reign. As in England, so in Scotland, “everything rung and was connected with the Revolution in France; everything, not this or that thing, but literally everything, was soaked in this one event.” But in Scotland, more than in England, horror of the French Revolution and of every doctrine or practice that could be charged with the remotest suspicion of connection with it, became the necessary creed of personal safety. To resent every idea of innovation or of popular power,—nay, every recognition of the existence of the people politically,—as blasphemy, Jacobinism, and incipient treason, was the same thing as allegiance to Dundas; and this, again, was the same thing as having any comfort in life. Hence, three-fourths of the entire population, and almost all the wealth and rank of the country, were of the Tory party; and no names of abuse were hard enough, no persecution was harsh enough, for the daring men, consisting perhaps of about a fourth of the middle and working classes, with a sprinkling of persons of a higher grade, who formed the small Opposition. Though the opinions of these were of the most moderate shade of what would now be called “liberalism,” the slightest expression of them was attended with positive risk. Spies were employed to watch such of them as had any social position; in several cases there were trials for sedition, with sentences of transportation; and only the impossibility of finding grounds for indictment prevented more. The negative punishment of exclusion from office, and from every favour of Government and its supporters, was the least; and it was universally applied. Burns nearly lost his excisemanship for too free speaking; and a letter is extant, addressed by him to one of the commissioners of the Scottish Board of Excise, in which, without denying his Liberalism, he protests that it is within the bounds of devout attachment to the Constitution, and implores the commissioner, as “a husband and a father” himself, not to be instrumental in turning him, with his wife and his little ones, “into the world, degraded and disgraced.” Part of the poet’s crime seems to have been his having subscribed to an Edinburgh Liberal paper which had been started by one Captain Johnstone. This Johnstone was imprisoned after the publication of a few numbers; and the very printer of the paper, though himself a Tory, was nearly ruined by his connection with it. No subsequent attempt was made during the Dundas reign to establish an Opposition newspaper. From 1795 to as late as 1820, according to Lord Cockburn, not a single public meeting on the Opposition side of politics was, or could be, held in Edinburgh. Elections of members of Parliament, whether for burghs or for counties, in Scotland, were a farce: they were transacted quietly, by those whose business it was, in town-halls or in the private rooms of hotels; and the people knew of the matter only by the ringing of a bell, or by some other casual method of announcement. Abject Toryism, or submission to Dundas and the existing order of things, pervaded every department and every corner of established or official life in Scotland,—the Church, the Bench, the Bar, the Colleges and Schools; and so powerfully were any elements of possible opposition that did exist kept down by the pressure of organised self-interest, and by the fear of pains and penalties, that the appearance at last from the Solway to Caithness was that of imperturbable political stagnation.

Once, indeed, a crisis occurred which put the Scottish people nearly out in their calculations. This was in March 1801, when Pitt resigned office, and Dundas along with him, and a new ministry was formed under Pitt’s temporary substitute, Mr. Addington, afterwards Lord Sidmouth. Dundas out of power was a conception totally new to the Scottish mind,—an association, or rather a dissociation, of ideas utterly paralysing. “For a while,” says Lord Brougham, “all was uncertainty and consternation; all were seen fluttering about like birds in an eclipse or a thunderstorm; no man could tell whom he might trust; nay, worse still, no man could tell of whom he might ask anything.” Dundasism, which had hitherto meant participation in place and patronage, now seemed in danger of losing that meaning; and the bulk of the Scottish population feared that they might have to choose between the name and the thing. They were faithful to Dundas, however; and they were rewarded. The Addington ministry, which had come into power principally to conclude peace with France by the Treaty of Amiens, came to an end after that Treaty had been rendered nugatory by the recommencement of the war; and in May 1804 Pitt returned to the helm. Dundas, who had in the interim been raised to the peerage by the title of Viscount Melville, then resumed his place in his friend’s cabinet, to yield his Parliamentary service thenceforward in the Upper House, and official service mainly in the First Lordship of the Admiralty. Scotland then rolled herself up comfortably once more for her accustomed slumber,—the only difference being that her bedside guardian had to be thought of no longer as her Harry Dundas, but less familiarly now as her Lord Melville. So for another year; but then what a reawakening! It was in April 1805 that, in consequence of the report of a Committee of the House of Commons that had been appointed for the investigation of alleged abuses in the naval service, the Whigs, through Mr. Whitbread as their spokesman, opened an attack on Lord Melville on charges of malversation of office, and misappropriation of public moneys, during his former Treasurership of the Navy, either directly, or by collusion with his principal financial subordinate. The attack grew fiercer and fiercer, as well as more extensive in its scope; and, although it was evidently inspired mainly by the political vindictiveness of a party made furious by long exclusion from office, it became more formidable from the fact that some of Pitt’s own friends either abetted it fully or thought that the irregularities in account-keeping which had been disclosed ought not to pass without Parliamentary censure. Pitt reeled under such a blow at once to his private feelings and his administration; and, after doing his best to resist, he had to consent that Lord Melville should quit office, and that Lord Melville’s name should be struck off from the list of His Majesty’s Privy Council till the charges against him were formally and publicly tried. The trial was to be in the shape of an impeachment before the House of Lords. Before it could come on Pitt was dead. He died on the 23d of January 1806; and the longexcluded Whigs had then their turn of power for somewhat more than a year in what is remembered as the Fox and Grenville ministry,—a name accurate only till the 13th of September 1806, when Fox followed his great rival to the grave, and Lord Grenville became Premier singly. It was in April and May 1806, when this Fox and Grenville ministry was new in office, that the great trial of Lord Melville in Westminster Hall was begun and concluded. The charges against him had been formulated into ten articles; and he was acquitted upon all the ten,—unanimously on the only one which vitally impeached his personal integrity, by overwhelming majorities on five of the others, and by smaller but still decisive majorities on the remaining four. On the whole, it was a triumphant acquittal; and it was received as such throughout Scotland,—where, at one of the dinners held in honour of the event by the jubilant Scottish Tories, there was sung a famous song beginning with this stanza:—

“Since here we are set in array round the table,
Five hundred good fellows well met in a hall,
Come listen, brave boys, and I’ll sing as I’m able
How innocence triumphed and pride got a fall.
But push round the claret,—
Come, stewards, don’t spare it;
With rapture you’ll drink to the toast that I give:
Here, boys,
Off with it merrily:
‘Melville for ever, and long may he live!’”

Melville did live for some time longer, restored to his place in the Privy Council, and rehabilitated in honour, but never again in office, hardly caring to concern himself further with politics, and spending his last years mainly in Scotland. He died on the 27th of May 1811, in the seventieth year of his age.

That system of the government of Scotland by proconsulship of which he had been so conspicuously the representative did not by any means die with him. It was continued, with variations and modifications, through those successive ministries of the later part of the reign of George III. and the whole of the reign of George IV. which fill up the interval between the death of Pitt and the eve of the Reform Bill; nay, not only so continued, but continued with the accompanying phenomenon that it was still a Dundas that exercised, occasionally at least, what did remain of the proconsulship. Robert Dundas, 2d Viscount Melville, who died as late as 1851, was a member of most of the successive administrations mentioned, from Perceval’s of 1809–12, through Liverpool’s of 1812–27, to Canning’s and the Duke of Wellington’s of 1827–30, holding one or other of his father’s old posts in these administrations, and so or otherwise maintaining the hereditary Dundas influence in Scottish affairs while Toryism kept the field. But, while this prolongation of the Dundas influence in the second Lord Melville is not to be forgotten, it is the father, Henry Dundas, 1st Lord Melville, that has left the name of Dundas most strikingly impressed upon the history of Scotland, and it is the stretch of two-and-twenty years between 1783 and 1806, during which this greatest of the Dundases exercised the proconsulship, that has to be remembered especially and distinctively in Scottish annals as the time of the Dundas Despotism.

* * * * *

“The Dundas Despotism!” O phrase of fear, unpleasing to a modern ear! What a Scotland that must have been which this phrase describes! A country without political life, without public meetings, without newspapers, without a hustings: could any endurable existence be led in such a set of conditions,—could any good come out of it?

Incredible as it may seem, there is evidence that the Scottish people did contrive, in some way or other, to lead not only an endurable but a very substantial and jolly existence through the Dundas Despotism, and that not only a great deal of good, but much of what Scotland must now regard as her best and most characteristic produce, had its genesis in that time, though the exodus has been later. The various liberties of the human subject may be classified and arranged according to their degrees of importance; and a great many of them may exist where the liberty of voting for members of parliament and of openly talking politics is absent. So it was in Scotland through the reign of Henry Dundas and his Toryism. The million and a half of human beings who then composed Scotland, and were scattered over its surface, in their various parishes, agricultural or pastoral, and in their towns and villages, went through their daily life with a great deal of energy and enjoyment, notwithstanding that Dundas, and the lairds and the provosts and bailies as his agents, elected the members of parliament and transacted all the political business of the country; nay, out of the lairds and the bailies themselves, and all the business of electioneering, they extracted a good deal of fun. What mattered it to them that now and then some long-tongued fellow who had started a newspaper was stowed away in jail, or that an Edinburgh lawyer like Muir was transported for being incontinent in his politics? Could not people let well alone, obey the authorities, earn their oatmeal, and drink their whisky in peace? Few of Scott’s novels come down so far as to this period of Scottish life, and it has not been much described in our other literature of fiction; but till lately there were many alive who remembered it, and delighted in recalling its savageries and its humours. O the old Scottish times of the lairds, the “moderate” ministers, the provosts and the bailies!—the lairds speaking broad Scotch, farming their own lands, carousing together, seeing their daughters married, and writing to London for appointments for their sons; the “moderate” ministers making interest for _their_ sons, preaching “Blair and cauld morality” on Sundays, and jogging to christenings or to Presbytery dinners through the week; the provosts and bailies in their shops in the forenoon, or meeting in the morning at their “deid-chack” after a man was hanged! Every considerable town then had its hangman, who was frequently a well-to-do person that sold fish or some such commodity. And then, all through society, the flirtations, the friendships, and the long winter evenings at the fireside, with the cracks between the “gudeman” and his neighbours, and the alternative of a hand at cards or a well-thumbed book for the young folks! What stalwart old fellows, both of the douce and of the humorous type, oracular and respected in their day, and whose physiognomies and maxims are still preserved in local memory, lived and died in those days and made them serve their turn! Nay, of the Scotsmen who have been eminent in the intellectual world, what a number belong by their birth to the reign of Dundas, and were nurtured amid its torpid influences! Burns closed his life in the midst of it; Dugald Stewart and James Watt lived through it; Scott, Jeffrey, Chalmers, Wilson, Hamilton, and Carlyle are all, more or less, specimens of what it could send forth. _Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona_: there was pith in Scotland before there was Parliamentary Reform.

Naturally it was in Edinburgh that the various elements of Scottish life at this time were seen in their closest contact and their most intimate union or antagonism. It was here that Dundas lived when he was in Scotland; and here were the central threads of that official network by which, through Dundas, Scotland was connected with the English Government. Edinburgh was then still the chief city of Scotland, even in population; for, though now Glasgow has far outstripped it in that particular, then the two cities were happy in numbering little more than 80,000 each. At least, in the census of 1801 Edinburgh stands for 82,000, or almost exactly neck to neck with Glasgow, which stands for 83,000. Dundee, which came next, reckoned but 29,000; Aberdeen, 27,000; and Leith and Paisley each about 20,000. Few other Scottish towns had a population of more than 10,000.

Was there ever another such city to live in as Edinburgh?

“And I forgot the clouded Forth,
The gloom that saddens heaven and earth,
The bitter east, the misty summer,
And gray metropolis of the North.”

One regrets that this is all that our noble Laureate’s experience of Edinburgh enabled him to say. The east winds do bite there fearfully now and then, and blow a dust of unparalleled pungency in your eyes as you cross the North Bridge; but, with that exception, what a city! Gray! why, it is gray, or gray and gold, or gray and gold and blue, or gray and gold and blue and green, or gray and gold and blue and green and purple, according as the heaven pleases, and you choose your ground! But, take it when it is most sombrely gray, where is another such gray city? The irregular ridge of the Old Town, with its main street of lofty antique houses rising gradually from Holyrood up to the craggy Castle; the chasm between the Old Town and the New, showing grassy slopes by day, and glittering supernaturally with lamps at night; the New Town itself, like a second city spilt out of the Old, fairly built of stone, and stretching downwards over new heights and hollows, with gardens intermixed, till it reaches the flats of the Forth! Then Calton Hill in the midst, confronted by the precipitous curve of the Salisbury Crags; Arthur Seat looking over all like a lion grimly keeping guard; the wooded Corstorphines lying soft away to the west, and the larger Pentlands looming quiet in the southern distance! Let the sky be as gray and heavy as the absence of the sun can make it, and where have natural situation and the hand of man combined to exhibit such a mass of the city picturesque? And only let the sun strike out, and lo! a burst of new glories in and around. The sky is then blue as sapphire overhead; the waters of the Forth are clear to the broad sea; the hills and the fields of Fife are distinctly visible from every northern street and window; still more distant peaks are discernible on either horizon; and, as day goes down, the gables and pinnacles of the old houses blaze and glance with the radiance of the sunset. It is such a city that no one, however familiar with it, can walk out in its streets for but five minutes at any hour of the day or of the night, or in any state of the weather, without a new pleasure through the eye alone. Add to this the historical associations. Remember that this is the city of ancient Scottish royalty; that there is not a close or alley in the Old Town, and hardly a street in the New, that has not memories of the great or the quaint attached to it; that the many generations of old Scottish life that have passed through it have left every stone of it, as it were, rich with legend. To an English poet all this might be indifferent; but hear the Scottish poets:—

“Edina! Scotia’s darling seat!
All hail thy palaces and towers!”

was the salutation of Burns, when first brought from his native Ayrshire to behold the Scottish capital. “Mine own romantic town,” was the outburst of Scott, in that famous passage where, after describing Edinburgh as seen from the Braids, he makes even an English stranger beside himself with rapture at the sight:—

“Fitz-Eustace’ heart felt closely pent;
As if to give his rapture vent,
The spur he to his charger lent,
And raised his bridle hand,
And, making demi-volte in air,
Cried, ‘Where’s the coward that would not dare
To fight for such a land?’”

Here, though it is an Englishman that is supposed to speak, it is a Scotsman that supplies the words; but there can be no such objection in the case of the following lines from a sonnet, entitled “Written in Edinburgh,” by Tennyson’s friend, Arthur Hallam:—

“Even thus, methinks, a city reared should be,
Yea, an imperial city, that might hold
Five times a hundred noble towns in fee ...
Thus should her towers be raised; with vicinage
Of clear bold hills, that curve her very streets,
As if to indicate, ’mid choicest seats
Of Art, abiding Nature’s majesty,—
And the broad sea beyond, in calm or rage
Chainless alike, and teaching liberty.”

At the time with which we are concerned this city had the advantage of containing, as has been said, only about eighty thousand people. For comfortable social purposes, that is about the extreme size to which a city should go. The size of London is overwhelming and paralysing. There can be no intimacy, no unity of interest, in such a vast concourse. Ezekiel might be preaching in Smithfield, Camberwell might be swallowed up by an earthquake, and the people of St. John’s Wood would know nothing of either fact till they saw it announced in the newspapers next morning. Hardly since the days of the Gordon Riots has London ever been all agitated simultaneously. In Ancient Athens, on the other hand, we have an illustration of what a town of moderate size could be and produce. That such a cluster of men as Pericles, Socrates, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Phidias, Alcibiades, Xenophon, and others,—men of an order that we only expect to see now far distributed through space and time, _nantes rari in gurgite vasto_,—should have been swimming contemporaneously or nearly so in such a small pond as Athens was, and that this affluence in greatness should have been kept up by so small a population for several ages, seems miraculous. The peculiar fineness of the Hellenic nerve may have had something to do with the miracle; but the compactness of the place,—the aggregation of so many finely and variously endowed human beings precisely in such numbers as to keep up among them a daily sense of mutual companionship,—must also have had its effect. In “Modern Athens” the conditions of its ancient namesake are not _all_ reproduced. To say nothing of any difference that there may be in respect of original brain-and-nerve equipment between the modern and the ancient Athenian, “Modern Athens” is, unfortunately, not a separate body-politic, with separate interests and a separate power of legislation. There are no walls now round the Edinburgh territory; nor have the Edinburgh people the privilege of making wars and concluding treaties with even the nearest portions of the rest of Great Britain. They cannot meet periodically on the Castle Esplanade to pass laws for themselves in popular assembly, and hear consummate speeches beginning “O men of Edinburgh.” But, with many such differences, there are some similarities. Everybody in Edinburgh knows, or may know, everybody else, at least by sight; everybody meets everybody else in the street at least once every day or two; the whole town is within such convenient compass that, even to go from one extremity of it to the other extremity, there is no need to take a cab unless it rains. It is a city capable of being simultaneously and similarly affected in all its parts. An idea administered to one knot of the citizens is as good as administered to the whole community; a joke made on the Mound at noon will ripple gradually to the suburbs, and into the surrounding country, before the evening. If such is the case even now, when the population is over 260,000, must it not have been still better when the population was only 80,000, and that population was more shut in within itself by the absence as yet of telegraphs and railroads?

Moreover, the eighty thousand people who were in Edinburgh when Henry Dundas ruled Scotland were people of a rather peculiar, and yet rather superior, mixture of sorts. There never has been any very large amount of trade or of manufacture in Edinburgh, nor much of the wealth or bustle that arises from trade and manufacture. For the roar of mills and factories, and for a society ranging correspondingly from the great millionaire uppermost to crowds of operatives below, all toiling in the pursuit of wealth, one must go to Glasgow. In Edinburgh the standard of the highest income is much lower, and the standard of the lowest is perhaps higher, than in Glasgow; nor is wealth of so much relative importance in the social estimate. Roughly classified, the society of Edinburgh in the days to which we are now looking back consisted, as the society of Edinburgh still consists, of an upper stratum of lawyers and resident gentry, college officials, and clergy, reposing on, but by no means separated from, a community of shopkeepers and artisans sufficient for the wants of the place. Let us glance at these components of the society of Old Edinburgh in succession:—

First, _The Lawyers and Resident Gentry_.—These two classes may be taken together, as to a certain extent identical. From the time of the Union, such of the old nobility of Scotland as had till then remained in their native country, occupying for a part of the year the homely but picturesque residences of their ancestors in the Old Town of Edinburgh, had gradually migrated southwards, leaving but a few families of their order to keep up their memory in the ancient capital of Holyrood and St. Giles. In the room of this ancient nobility, and, indeed, absorbing such families of the old nobility as had remained, there had sprung up,—as might have been expected from the fact that Edinburgh, though it had parted with its Court and Legislature, was still the seat of the supreme Scottish law-courts,—a new aristocracy of lawyers. The lawyers,—consisting, first, of the judges as the topmost persons, with their incomes of several thousands a year, and then of the barristers, older and younger, in practice or out of practice, but including also the numerous body of the “Writers to the Signet” and other law-agents,—are now, and for the last century or two have been, the dominant class in the Edinburgh population. From the expense attending education for the legal profession, the members of it, till within a time comparatively recent, were generally scions of Scottish families of some rank and substance; and, indeed, it was not unusual for Scottish lairds or their sons to become nominally members of the Scottish bar, even when they did not intend to practise. The fact of the substitution of the legal profession for the old Scottish aristocracy in the dominant place in Edinburgh society is typified by the circumstance that the so-called “Parliament House,”—retaining that name because it enshrines the hall where the Estates of the Scottish Kingdom held their meetings during the last eighty years of the time when Scotland had no Parliaments but her own,—is now the seat of the supreme Scottish law-courts, and the daily resort of the interpreters of the laws in these courts. Any day yet, while the courts are in session, the Parliament House, with its long oaken ante-room, where scores of barristers in their wigs and gowns, accompanied by writers in plainer costume, are incessantly pacing up and down, and its smaller inner chambers, where the judges on the bench, in their crimson robes, are trying cases, is the most characteristic sight in Edinburgh. Even now the general hour of breakfast in Edinburgh is determined by the time when the courts open in the morning; and, dispersed through their homes, or at dinner-parties, in the evening, it is the members of the legal profession that lead the social talk. In the old Dundas days it was the same, with the addition that then the lawyers were perhaps more numerous in proportion to the rest of the community than they are now, and were more closely inter-connected by birth and marriage with the Scottish nobility and lairds.

Of hardly less importance socially was the _Academical Element_. As Edinburgh possesses a University, as its University has long been in high repute, and as, by reason of the comparative cheapness of board and education in Edinburgh, many families, after a residence in England or the Colonies, have been attracted thither for the sake of the education of their sons, or, without going thither themselves, have sent their sons thither, the business of education has always been prominent, if not paramount, among the industries of the city. The teachers of the public and of other schools have always formed a considerable class numerically, as well as in rank; while to the University professors, partly from the higher nature of their teaching-duties, partly from the traditional dignity conferred on them by the great reputation of some of their body in past times, and partly from some superiority in their emoluments, there has alway been accorded a degree of social consideration not attached to the same function anywhere out of Scotland. The reputation of the Medical School of Edinburgh, in particular, has always invested the professors in the Medical Faculty of the University with special distinction; and, as these professors have been generally also at the head of the medical practice of the city, the Medical element, and with it the Scientific element, in Edinburgh society have from times long past been, to a considerable extent, in union with the professorial.

In all Scottish cities _The Clergy_ have, from time immemorial, exercised an amount of social influence not willingly allowed to any other class of persons. This arises partly from the same causes which give the clergy influence in other parts of Britain, but partly from the peculiar affection of the Scottish people for the national theology with which they have been saturated through so many centuries of clerical teaching. In Edinburgh, in consequence of the perpetuation there of relics of that old Scottish aristocracy which never was completely brought into subjection to Presbytery, and in consequence of the presence in society of a distinct intellectual element in the lawyers, the clergy have not perhaps had, relatively, the same weight as in other towns. Still they were powerful even in the old Edinburgh of the Dundas rule. At the very least, a negative respect was paid to them by the preservation throughout the place of an external Presbyterian decorum and strictness; and in all houses “the minister” was treated with distinction. Add to this that there generally were among the Edinburgh clergy men possessing claims to respect in addition to those belonging to their profession. Some, even in that age of “Moderatism,” were remarkable for their eloquence and zeal as preachers and as pastors; others had literary pretensions; and others were professors in the University as well as parish clergymen. More, indeed, than now, the professorial and the clerical elements were then intermixed in Edinburgh. Perhaps, however, that which gave the greatest dignity to the clerical or ecclesiastical element in Edinburgh was the annual meeting in that city, every May, of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. In the history of Scottish society since the Union there is, perhaps, no one fact of greater importance than the regular and uninterrupted succession of those annual “General Assemblies” in Edinburgh for the discussion of the affairs of the National Church. Let an Englishman fancy that during the last two centuries there had been no Parliament in England, no meetings of the House of Lords or of the House of Commons, but that regularly during that period there had been annual convocations of representatives of the whole body of the English Clergy, together with such leading members of the laity as churchwardens or the like from all the English parishes, and that these convocations had sat ten days in every year, discussing all public matters in any way bearing on the Church, and making laws affecting the entire ecclesiastical organisation of England, and he will have an idea of the extent to which the national history of Scotland since her union with England is bound up in the records of her “General Assemblies.” The General Assembly, in fact, from the year 1707 to the Disruption of the Scottish Church in 1843, was, to some extent, a veritable Parliament, in which, though the secular Parliament had been abolished, the united people of Scotland still saw their nationality preserved and represented. All through the year the clergy individually, in the thousand parishes or so into which Scotland was divided, managed their own parochial affairs with the assistance of select laymen called elders; these clergymen, again, with some of their elders, held frequent district meetings, called “presbyteries,” in order to regulate by deliberation and voting the church affairs of their districts; there were still larger meetings, periodically held, called “provincial synods”; but the grand rendezvous of all, the supreme court of appeal and ecclesiastical legislation, was the annual General Assembly in Edinburgh. The time of its meeting was one of bustle and excitement. Black coats swarmed in the streets; the Assembly was opened with military pomp and circumstance by a Lord High Commissioner representing the Crown; this Commissioner sat on a throne during the meetings, and held levees and dinner-parties in Holyrood Palace all through the ten days; the clergy, with lay representatives, some of whom were usually noblemen or baronets, deliberated and debated during those ten days, under a president of their own choosing called the “Moderator”; the proceedings were in parliamentary form, and the decisions by a majority of votes; and in many cases,—as in trials of clergymen for moral or ecclesiastical misdemeanour,—barristers were called in to plead professionally, as they did in the secular law-courts. As was natural in a deliberative assembly almost all the members of which were of the speaking class, the speaking was of a very high order,—far higher, indeed, than has ever been heard in these later days in the British Parliament; while at the same time there was ample opportunity for the exercise of business talent and of all the tact and skill of party-leadership. Much of the general politics of Scotland took necessarily the form of church politics; and, indeed, the connections between church politics and state politics were pretty close. The vast majority of the clergy were adherents of Dundas in general politics, and bent on swaying church polity in the same direction; while the small minority of “Evangelicals” or “High-Fliers,” as they were called, corresponded to the proscribed “Liberals” in secular politics. The leading clergymen of both parties were to be found in or near Edinburgh.

Respecting the _Mercantile and Artisan classes_ it need only be repeated that they were by no means separated by any social demarcation from the fore-mentioned classes, but were intertwined with these by family-relationships, and often also by the sympathies belonging to superior natural intelligence and superior education. Booksellers and printers were more numerous in Edinburgh proportionally than in any other British town.

In a population of such dimensions, composed as has been described, there was necessarily a good deal of leisure; and leisure leads to sociability. Edinburgh in those days was one of the most sociable towns in the world. By that time “society,” in the conventional sense, had, with a few lingering exceptions, shifted itself out of the Old Town into the New, or into the suburbs; and, with this change, there had been a considerable change of manners. Much of the formality, and at the same time much of the coarseness, of an older stage of Scottish life had been civilised away,—the absurd etiquette of the old dancing assemblies, for example, and the more monstrous excesses of hard drinking. But the convivial spirit, and many of the old convivial forms, remained. Dinner parties were frequent; and the old custom of “toasts” and “sentiments” by the hosts and the guests over their wine was still in fashion. Lord Cockburn’s description of those dinner parties of his youth is one of the best passages in his book. But it is on the supper parties that he dwells with most evident affection. There were various kinds of supper parties: the oyster supper at taverns, the bachelor supper in lodgings, and the real domestic supper, to which both sexes were invited; which last Lord Cockburn vaunts as a delightful institution of Edinburgh, which the advancing lateness of the dinner-hour had unhappily superseded. In short, in every form and way, from the set dinner party, with its immense consumption of claret, in the houses of the more wealthy, to the homely tea parties of gentlewomen of moderate means, living in the suburbs of the Old Town, or in _flats_ in the New Town, and the roystering suppers of young men, where culinary deficiencies were compensated by good humour and the whisky punch, people were in the habit of incessantly meeting to spend the evenings together. Lord Cockburn mentions, as illustrative of the continuance of those sociable habits of the Edinburgh folks to a somewhat later period than that with which we are immediately concerned, the fact that for a great many years after his marriage, which was in 1811, he had not spent above one evening in every month, on the average, in solitude, _i.e._ without either being out as a guest, or having friends with him at home. Even Sydney Smith, though not native and to the manner born, and, with his English tastes, more fastidious in his ideas of conviviality, retained to the last a pleasant recollection of those Edinburgh hospitalities, as experienced by him during his stay in Edinburgh from 1797 to 1802. “When shall I see Scotland again?” he says in one of his letters: “never shall I forget the happy days passed there, amidst odious smells, barbarous sounds, bad suppers, excellent hearts, and the most enlightened and cultivated understandings.”

Sydney Smith’s allusion to “the enlightened and cultivated understandings” he encountered amid such roughish surroundings, suggests the mention of what was, all in all, the most characteristic feature of Edinburgh society at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth—its _intellectualism_. In a community composed in so large a measure of practitioners of the learned professions, it was inevitable that there should be more of interest in matters intellectual than is common, more of a habit of reasoning and discussion, more play and variety in the choice of topics for conversation. What mattered it that many of the most intellectual men and women gave expression to their ideas in broad Scotch? Ideas may be expressed in broad Scotch, and yet be the ideas of cultivated minds; at all events, it was so then in Edinburgh, where many excellent lawyers, University professors, and medical men kept up the broad Scotch in their ordinary conversation, though the majority had gone over to the English in all save accent, and some were sedulous in trying to Anglicise themselves even in that. But, whether the dialect was English or Scotch, there was a great deal of very pleasant and very substantial talk. True, in Sydney Smith’s recollection of the conversation of the Edinburgh people at the time he moved among them, two great faults are specified. It ran too much, he records, to that species of jocosity, perfectly torturing to an Englishman, which the Scotch themselves called _wut_; and it also ran too much, he records, into disputation and dialectics. “Their only idea of wit,” he says, speaking of the Scotch generally, but of the Edinburgh people in particular, “or rather of that inferior variety of the electric talent which prevails occasionally in the North, and which, under the name of _wut_, is so infinitely distressing to people of good taste, is laughing immoderately at stated intervals.” And again—“They are so imbued with metaphysics that they even make love metaphysically: I overheard a young lady of my acquaintance, at a dance in Edinburgh, exclaim, in a sudden pause of the music, ‘What you say, my lord, is very true of love in the _abstract_, but——,’ here the fiddlers began fiddling furiously, and the rest was lost.” This is somewhat unfair. _Wut_, in its place, is as good as _wit_, and may be a great deal heartier. As practised in the north, it corresponds more with what is properly _humour_. It consists in a general openness to the ludicrous view of things, a general disposition to call each other Tam and Sandy, a general readiness to tell and to hear Scottish stories the fun of which lies in the whole series of conceptions (often too local) that they call up, rather than in any sudden flash or quip at the close. At all events, the Scotch like their _wut_, and find it satisfying. As for the dialectics, there _is_, perhaps, too much of that. The excess in this direction is due, doubtless, in part to the omnipresence of the lawyers. But _wut_ and _dialectics_ make a very good mixture; and, dashed as this mixture is and always has been in Edinburgh with finer and higher ingredients, there has been no town in Britain for the last century and a half of greater deipnosophistic capabilities, all things considered.

One element which Englishmen who do not know Edinburgh always imagine as necessarily wanting in it never has been wanting. Whether from the influence of the lawyers, and of the relics of the old Scottish baronage and baronetage, acting conjointly as a counterpoise to the influence of the clergy, or from other less obvious causes, there has always been in Edinburgh a freer undercurrent of speculative opinion, a tougher traditional scepticism, a greater latitude of jest at things clerical and Presbyterian, than in other Scottish towns. From the early part of the eighteenth century, when Allan Ramsay, Dr. Archibald Pitcairn, and others, did battle with the clergy in behalf of theatrical entertainments and other forms of the festive, there has never been wanting a strong anti-clerical and even free-thinking clique in Edinburgh society; and towards the end of the century, when David Hume and Hugo Arnot were alive or remembered, no city in Britain sheltered such a quantity of cosy infidelity. Of hundreds of stories illustrative of this, take one of the mildest:—Pitcairn, going about the streets one Sunday, was obliged by a sudden pelt of rain to take refuge in a place he was not often in,—a church. The audience was scanty; and he sat down in a pew where there was only another sitter besides,—a quiet, grave-looking countryman, listening to the sermon with a face of the utmost composure. The preacher was very pathetic; so much so that at one passage he began to shed tears copiously, and to use his pocket-handkerchief. Interested in this as a physiological phenomenon for which the cause was not apparent, Pitcairn turned to the countryman, and asked in a whisper, “What the deevil gars the man greet?” “Faith,” said the man, slowly turning round, “ye wad maybe greet yoursel’ if ye was up there and had as little to say.” Pitcairn was the type of the avowed Edinburgh infidel; of which class there were not a few whose esoteric talk when they met together was of an out-and-out kind; but the countryman was the type of a still more numerous class, who kept up exterior conformity, but tested all shrewdly enough by a pretty tough interior instinct. Indeed, long after Pitcairn’s time, a kind of sturdy scepticism, quite distinct from what would be called “infidelity,” was common among the educated classes in Edinburgh. Old gentlemen who went duly to church, who kept their families in great awe, and who preserved much etiquette in their habits towards each other, were by no means strait-laced in their beliefs; and it was not till a considerably later period, when a more fervid religious spirit had taken possession of the Scottish clergy themselves, and flamed forth in more zealous expositions of peculiar Calvinistic doctrine from the pulpit than had been customary in the days of Robertson and Blair, that evangelical orthodoxy obtained in Edinburgh its visible and intimate alliance with social respectability. Moreover, even those who were then indubitably orthodox and devout by the older standard were devout after a freer fashion, and with a far greater liberty both of conduct and of rhetoric, than would now be allowable in consistency with the same reputation. There is no point on which Lord Cockburn lays more stress than on this. “There is no contrast,” he says, “between those old days and the present that strikes me so strongly as that suggested by the differences in religious observances, not so much by the world in general, as by deeply religious people. I knew the habits of the religious very well, partly through the piety of my mother and her friends, the strict religious education of her children, and our connection with some of the most distinguished of our devout clergymen. I could mention many practices of our old pious which would horrify modern zealots. The principles and feelings of the persons commonly called evangelical were the same then that they are now; the external acts by which these principles and feelings were formerly expressed were materially different.”

Among the differences, Lord Cockburn notes in particular the much laxer style, as it would now be called, in which Sunday was observed by pious people and even by the most pious among the clergy. There seems also to have been more freedom of speech, in the direction of what would now be called profane allusion, among the admittedly pious. One of the gems of Lord Cockburn’s book is his portrait of one venerable old lady, a clergyman’s widow, sitting neatly dressed in her high-backed leather chair, with her grandchildren round her, the very model of silver-haired serenity, till one of her granddaughters, in reading the newspaper to her, stumbled on a paragraph which told how the reputation of a certain fair one at the court of the Prince Regent had suffered from some indiscreet talk of his about his own relations with her, but then starting up, and exclaiming, with an indignant shake of her shrivelled fist,—“The dawmed villain! does he kiss and tell?” There were not a few old ladies of this stamp in Edinburgh in Lord Cockburn’s boyhood and youth; some of whom survived far into the present century, too old to part with their peculiarities, even to please the clergy. “Ye speak, sir, as if the Bible had just come oot,” said one such old lady, who lingered long in Edinburgh, to a young clergyman who was instructing her on some point of Christian practice on which she was disposed to differ from him. The continuation in the society of Edinburgh of a considerable sprinkling of such free-speaking gentlewomen of the old Scottish school, intermingled with as many of the other sex using a still rougher rhetoric, imparted, we are told, a flavour of originality to the convivial conversation of the place for which there is now no exact equivalent.

Presided over by such seniors, the young educated men of the time did not stint themselves in the choice or the range of _their_ convivial topics. They discussed everything under the sun and down to the centre. Who has not heard of the Speculative Society of Edinburgh, founded in 1764 in connection with the University, and kept up from that time to this by successive generations of students; of which Lord Cockburn says that it “has trained more young men to public spirit, talent, and liberal thought, than all the other private institutions in Scotland”? Between 1780 and 1800 this society was in all its glory, discussing, week after week, as its minutes inform us, such topics as these:—“Ought any permanent support to be provided for the poor?” “Ought there to be an established religion?” “Was the execution of Charles I. justifiable?” “Should the slave trade be abolished?” “Has the belief in a future state been of advantage to mankind, or is it ever likely to be so?” “Is it for the interest of Britain to maintain what is called the balance of Europe?” Here surely was scepticism enough to keep thought alive; and that such questions, discussed not only in the Speculative Society, but also in minor associations of the same kind, and carried doubtless also, with other more scientific topics, into private assemblages, should have been ventilated in Edinburgh at that day, shows that, even under the Dundas Despotism, there was no lack of _intellectual_ freedom.