Chapter II: Part 2

Being himself a physician, Peter Belon enlarges upon the maladies of birds; but he tells us that, with the exception of falcons, which are more especially under the care of man, they are their own doctors. “The pelican, which builds its nest on the ground, finding its young stung by a serpent, weeps bitterly, and piercing its own breast, gives its own blood to cure them.” (This is a new reading of the old story). “Quails, when they are indisposed, swallow the seeds of hellebore; and starlings take hemlock. The herb chélidoine (celandine, from the Greek kelidon, a swallow) derives its name from the fact that the swallow administers the juice of the plant to her young. The stork physics himself with marjoram. Wood pigeons, ravens, blackbirds, jays and partridges take laurel; while turtle-doves, pigeons, and cocks prescribe bird-weed. Ducks and geese eat sage.” (Sage enters largely into the affair, in combination with onions, when ducks and geese are eaten). “Cranes and herons employ marsh rushes. Thrushes and many smaller birds swallow the seeds of the ivy--which would be hurtful diet for man (qui seroit viande mauvaise à l’homme).” Not much worse, however, than hellebore or hemlock! But it would seem that the eagle family are exempt from the ordinary ailments of birds; for, in speaking of the Chrysaëtos, or great royal eagle, Belon tells us: “Eagles never change their place of abode, but always return to the same nest. It has thus been observed that they are long-lived. But becoming old, the beak grows so long that it becomes bent, and prevents the bird from eating, so that it dies, not of any malady, or extreme old age, but simply because it cannot make use of its beak.” I fear this is not one of the facts derived from Belon’s own observation.

Our fashionable ladies have passion for eider-down; but did they ever hear that the vulture can supply them with an article quite as soft? “Their skin,” says our author, “is almost as thick as that of a kid, and under the throat is a spot about the breadth of a palm, where the feathers are reddish, like the hair of a calf; and these feathers have no quills, any more than those on both sides of the neck and under the wings, where the down is so white that it shines like silk. The furriers, after removing the large feathers, leave the down, and curry the skins for mantles, which are worth a sum of money. In France they use them chiefly to place on the stomach (what we call bosom-friends). It would scarcely be believed that the vulture’s skin is so stout, if one had not seen it. Being in Egypt and on the plains of Arabia Deserta, we have noticed that the vultures are large and numerous, and the down from a couple of dozen of these would quite suffice for a large robe. At Cairo, on the Bezestein, where merchandise is exposed for sale, the traveller may obtain silken dresses lined with the skins of vultures, both black and white.”

Belon was a great observer of all the birds of prey, and appears to have taken many notes of their habits while living near the Monts d’Or, in Auvergne, under the protection of M. Duprat, the Bishop of Clermont. It was there he learnt the fact about the peasantry eating the goivan, called also the boudrée, which he thus describes: “There is not a peasant in the Limagne (a great plain) of Auvergne who does not know the goivan, and how to capture him with traps baited with frogs, or with lime, but more commonly with snares. He is taken principally in the winter, when he is very good to eat, for he is so fat that no other bird comes near him in that respect. The peasants lard or boil him, and find his flesh quite as good as that of a hen. This eagle eats rats, mice, frogs, lizards, snails, caterpillars, and sometimes serpents.”

That there may be no doubt about the last-named viand being food for eagles, one of Peter Belon’s lively portraitures follows the statement, in which a goivan is depicted in the act of dining on a serpent, twisted into a figure of eight (as, well he might be), and a number of astonished frogs and fishes scurrying away for dear life,--all save one philosophical member of the tadpole family, who, sitting on the tumultuous waves of an adjacent ditch, calmly contemplates the scene. It is observable throughout the plates in Belon’s work that the smaller quadrupeds endure the infliction of being devoured alive with far greater resignation than the Reptilia. I have before me at this moment the portrait of a rabbit, on whose back a buzzard is standing as if in the act of going to sing, while the long-eared animal on which he has pounced seems to apprehend his fate no more than if he were a music-stand. A mouse in the claws of a speckled magpie, puts on, in another plate, an air of equal indifference.

Amongst the birds of prey known to the French villagers--and to their cost--is one called by the singular name of White John (Jan le Blanc), or The Bird of St. Martin,--but why the latter name was bestowed on it, Belon is at a loss to discover. The first is obvious enough, for its belly and part of its tail are of spotless white. This fellow is very daring, and carries off fowls and rabbits from under the eyes of the owners; he feeds largely, too, upon partridges and all the smaller birds, so that he is not a Cheap John, at all events. But Belon has one comfort: White John has a natural antagonist in the Hobby-hawk, and the way they fight in the air till they tumble entangled to the ground and are taken, is quite a pleasant thing to see (moult plaisant à voir). This combat is not depicted; but on the next page there is a striking delineation of the manner in which a falconer lures a bird of prey. He does it in this wise: a hawk having caught a partridge, stands on its back in the air, quietly devouring it, and the cunning fowler takes this opportunity of approaching with the leg of another bird in his hand, which he offers on his knees to the hawk, in the expectation, apparently, that the greedy bird of prey will give up the whole for a part. Of the share which the falconer’s dog has in the transaction, I say nothing; because, though in the foreground of the picture, he is not a quarter the size of the victim partridge. It must be confessed that Belon’s descriptions are more satisfactory than the artist’s illustrations. This remark, however, does not apply to the actual portraits of the birds, which are in most instances very accurate. Nothing, for instance, can be better done than the Royal Kite, which some in France call Huo, and others Escoufle. This bird, being a lover of carrion, is protected; so much so, that “in England a fine is imposed on those who kill him.” Belon records a pleasant piece of pastime which this kite affords the infidels:

“The Turks who live at Constantinople take pleasure in throwing lumps of raw meat into the air, which the kites pounce upon so rapidly that they seize and carry it off before it can fall to the ground.”

The Venetian nobles amuse themselves differently--not with kites, but cormorants. When the weather is calm, they go out on the lagoons in light boots, two or three dozen in company, each boat being rowed by six men, and pulled very swiftly. Having surrounded the cormorant (like French huntsmen with a fox, to prevent him from getting away and giving them a run), he cannot rise in the air (why not?), but dives under the water, and every time he shows his head above the surface, the noblemen let fly at him with their cross-bows, till at last he is thoroughly done up, is half-suffocated, and gives in. “It is a fine sight to behold this sport (c’est un beau spectacle de voir un tel deduit), and also is to see a cormorant having caught a tolerably-sized eel, which he tries to swallow, but has to fight a long time with it before he can get it down.” The cormorants themselves are, oddly enough, not thought good eating by the common people, who say of them that they are “a dish for the devil” (qui voudroit jestoyer le diable, il luy faudroit doñer de tels oyseaux); but Belon does not think them so bad as they say (toute fois ne sont si mauvais qu’on crië).

The stork, unfortunately, did not, when Belon flourished, enjoy the same immunity; for though he admits that the Romans despised them at table, he says, “now they are looked upon as a royal dish.” He moreover tells us that the gizzard of a stork is an antidote to poison, and a remedy against squinting (le gesier de la cigogne est bon contre les venins et qui en aura mangé ne sera lousche en sa vie)! It appears also that even the ostrich, which can digest iron, is itself digested by Libyan gastronomers, who eat the flesh and sell the feathers.

This tendency to discover what birds are most eatable, is manifested throughout the volume of Peter Belon. Arriving at the noble Alectrion or Rooster of the United States, he cites the following recipe, from Dioscorides, for the concoction of cock-broth. “Take a fine strong old bird, and having properly trussed him, stuff him well with roots of fern, the seed of chartamus (whatever that may be), salt of mercury, and soldanella (a purgative sea-weed), and, having sewn him up, boil him well down.” A potage this, which bears some resemblance to “the sillakickaby of the ancients,” described in Peregrine Pickle, and, I should think, nearly as agreeable.

The majority of the birds in Belon’s book are accurately described and too well-known to afford much opportunity for quoting from what he says of their forms and habits, but now and then we meet with a rara avis. Such, for instance is the “Gellinote de bois” (Gelinotte) which, though still found in the Ardennes, and occasionally a visitor to Monsieurs Chevet’s shop in the Palais Royal, is rare enough to merit description at second-hand. What their price may be I know not, but three hundred years ago they cost two crowns a-piece, and were only seen at the banquets of princes and the wedding-feasts of great lords. “The feathers on the back are like those of the woodcock; the breast and belly white, spotted with black; the neck is like that of a pheasant; the head and beak resemble a partridge; the tail feathers are black with white tips, the large wing-feathers variegated like the owl; down to the feet the legs are feathered like the grouse.” If the gelinotte combines the flavour as well as the plumage of the birds just mentioned (omitting the owl) I should say it is worth the price which Monsieur Chevet puts upon it before he stuffs it with the truffles.

The Vanneau is another bird which, common enough in the marshy districts of France (particularly in Bourbon Vendée) is, I believe, unknown in England. It is a wading-bird, and bears some resemblance to the peacock: hence, its name, corrupted from paonneau to vanneau; but the peasants call it dinhuit, on account of its cry. It is crested with five or six long black feathers, and is of changeable hue: in size it is not much larger than a plover, and is perched on very high red legs. There is no question about the estimation as a delicacy in which the vanneau is still held.

Belon has a good deal to say about quails, and the various modes of catching them. One way is by means of an instrument made of leather and bone, which, set in motion, utters a sound like the voice of the female bird, and is called courcaillet, on hearing which the males run rapidly and are caught in the fowler’s net; but this device is only effectual during the season of courting. Every one has noticed how low the quail’s cages are made. Belon says, it is because they are so given to jumping and excitement that they would destroy themselves were the cages higher. Of the crested lark (in French, cochevis), he tells us, on the authority of several writers of antiquity, that when made into a broth or roasted--like punch--they cure the colic; we all know what capital pâtés are made of the lark uncrested. We learn that the woodcock--how admirable is he, too, in a pâté--though called bécasse, in French, on account of the length of his bill, ought to be designated “vvitcoc,” that being an English word, which signifies “cock of the wood,” and corresponds with the Greek term, “xilomita.” Some people, Belon says, call him Avis cœca (blind bird), because he suffers himself to be so easily caught, and he gives a sufficiently lively description of one mode of effecting his capture. It is as follows:--“He who desires to take the woodcock must put on a cloak and gloves, the colour of the dead leaves, and conceal his head and shoulders beneath a (brown) hat, leaving only two small holes to see through. He must carry in his hands two sticks covered with cloth of the same colour, about an inch of the ends of which must be of red cloth, and leaning upon crutches (rather a lame way of proceeding) must advance leisurely towards the woodcock, stopping when the bird becomes aware of his approach. When the woodcock moves on he must follow until the bird stops again without raising its head. The fowler must then strike the sticks together very quickly (moult bellement) which will so amuse and absorb the woodcock that its pursuer may take from his girdle a rod, to which a horsehair noose is attached, and throw the latter round its neck, for it is one of the stupidest and most foolish birds that are known.” I should think so, if it allowed itself to be caught by this tom-foolery.

Of birds which are not stupid, but knavish rather, even to much theft, Belon relates that the magpie is called Margot (the diminutive of Margaret, as Charles the First called his beautiful sister, the wife of Henry of Navarre); and the jay (Richard), each on account of their cry. Being somewhat skinny, the jay is thought rather a tough morsel by those who desire to dine upon him; but he himself eats everything that comes in his way, and is particularly fond of peas--green peas perhaps--at a guinea a pound. The common people think that the jay is subject to the falling sickness, nevertheless they eat him when they find him on the ground. It is, perhaps, a weakness in human nature which cannot be remedied, the tendency to make a meal of everything that has animal life. But for this, how severely might we not animadvert on the gluttony of those who, not remembering their song in spring, devour thrushes in the autumn: yet, that is the best time to eat them, for they are then perfectly delicious as you would say, with me, if you had made a diligence supper on thrushes travelling through the Ardennes.

But, I fear, if I read any more of Peter Belon’s volume, I shall write an article on Gastronomy, a thing I had no notion of when I began. Let me conclude with something more serious than eating--if anything be more serious: let me lament, with all the world, that so useful a man as Peter Belon should have been cut off sadly in the prime of his life and full vigour of his intellect. He was only forty-five years of age when he was murdered one night as he traversed the Bois de Boulogne on his way to Paris; whether for the sake of plunder or revenge is not known.

RHINE-LAND.

We lean’d beneath the purple vine,
In Andernach, the hoary;
And at our elbows ran the Rhine
In rosy twilight glory.

Athwart the Seven-hills far seen
The sun had fail’d to broaden;
Above us stream’d in fading sheen
The highway he had trodden.

His farewell crimson kiss he left
On clouds suffused with blushes:
One star beam’d down the dewberry-cleft
Across the mirror’d flashes.

From cliffs of slate the vintage call’d
In muffled leafage dusky:
And down the river grandly wall’d,
The grape reel’d ripe and husky.

We reach’d entwining hands to seize
The clusters round us glowing:
Our locks were fondled by the breeze
From southern sandhills blowing.

The long-neck’d flask was not unbent,
The globed green glass unemptied;
The god of honest pleasure lent
Young Love his powers, untempted.

Home-friends we pledged; our bridal-maids;
Sweet wishes gaily squander’d:
We wander’d far in faëry glades,
Up golden heights we wander’d.

Like King and Queen in royal bliss,
We paced a realm enchanted,
A realm rose-vista’d, rich from this,
Tho’ not from this transplanted.

For this Rome’s frontier foot endear’d,
Her armèd heel made holy;
And Ages grey as Time’s own beard,
Wreathed it with melancholy.

Old days it has that live in gleams
Of suns for ever setting:
A moth-wing’d splendour, faint as dreams,
That keeps the fancy fretting.

A gorgeous tracing dash’d with gloom,
And delicately dusted:
To grasp it is to spoil its bloom;
’Twas ours because we trusted.

No longer severing our embrace
Was Night a sword between us;
But richest mystery robed in grace
To lock us close, and screen us.

She droopt in stars; she whisper’d fair;
The wooded crags grew dimmer;
The arrow in the lassie’s hair
Glanced by a silver glimmer.

The ruin-rock renew’d its frown,
With terror less transparent,
Tho’ all its ghosts are hunted down,
And all its knights are errant.

The island in the gray expanse,
We watch’d with colour’d longing:
The mighty river’s old romance
Thro’ many channels thronging.

Ah, then, what voice was that which shed
A breathless scene before us:
We heard it, knowing not we heard;
It rose around and o’er us.

It rose around, it thrill’d with life,
And did infuse a spirit
To misty shapes of ancient strife:
Again I seem to hear it!

The voice is clear, the song is wild,
And has a quaint transition;
The voice is of a careless child
Who sings an old tradition.

He sings it witless of his power;
Beside the rushing eddies,
His singing plants the tall white tower
Mid shades of knights and ladies.

Against the glooming of the west
The grey hawk-ruins darken,
And hand in hand, half breast to breast,
Two lovers gaze and hearken.

MILVERSTON WORTHIES.

From his sixth year, my brother Davie manifested undeniable symptoms of the divine afflatus, but it was not until fifteen that he commenced his immortal poem, “The Vengeance of Bernardo Caspiato.” He was a delicate, pretty, fair boy, with a spiritual countenance, a noble brow, and abundance of silky brown hair; quite the poet to look at, and very like my dear mother, as we all daily observed. It was expected that he would cover the name of Cleverboots with a halo of glory: unlike some families, we were the first to believe in our hero, and the most constant in our faith in his splendid future. At the epoch referred to, Davie began to tie his collar with a black ribbon, to wear his white throat exposed, and his beautiful hair very long; his appetite did not fail him in private, but at our little réunions he always partook of dry toast and strong green tea; was very silent, abstracted, and averse to men’s society: the women petted him, and called him “all soul.” He was very kind-hearted and sweet-tempered, and rather vain, which was nothing more than natural, considering how he was flattered.

He had a little room at the top of the house which looked over the town to Milverston mere, where the immortal poem was commenced. I remember he began it on a wet evening, and it opened dismally, with a storm; he had me up there with my plain sewing to listen to the first stanzas; and he consulted me about one or two difficult rhymes: he was not sure whether “horror” and “morrow” were correct. I thought not; and, his birthday falling three days after, I presented him with a rhyming dictionary. Subsequently, the poem made rapid progress.

Cousin John had just gone up to London to study law, and my father wished Davie to be articled to Mr. Briggs, the solicitor at Milverston. This did not chime in with his taste at all; he stated that it was his wish to follow the profession of letters. We did not quite understand this at the time. Cousin Jack said it meant that he wanted to be the idle gentleman. I had my doubts on the matter. Davie brought my mother over to his way of thinking. “I shall be very poor, but very happy, mother,” he used to say; “if you put me to anything else, I shall be miserable and do no good.” So Davie got his own way; and, as a preparation for his profession of letters, he stayed at home and finished “Bernardo Caspiato.” It was a splendid work. I have wept over it often. The heroine having been executed for witchcraft, her lover, Bernardo, devotes his life to avenge her; and, after committing a catalogue of murders, ends by disappearing mysteriously in a flash of blue lightning to rejoin her in heaven. My mother objected to the morality of the conclusion; but she acknowledged herself, at the same time, ignorant of the laws and licence of poetry.

With this great work, and some minor pieces of equal if not superior merit, my brother Davie went up to London on foot, with ten pounds in his pocket, and seventeen years of experience on his head. Cousin Jack had taken comfortable lodgings for him at a small baker’s shop, kept by a widow woman with a daughter named Lucy. The dear lad wrote us word that he was quite suited, and that, after a few days to look about him, he should carry his immortal poem to a publisher. His hopes were sanguine; his visions of fame magnificent.

To our surprise and grief, Bernardo Caspiato was declined with thanks. Nobody was inclined to publish it unless the author would bear all the expenses. Davie would not suffer my father to do this--he would earn money for himself. We wondered how he could do it; but Cousin Jack lent him a hand, and somebody who had something to do with a newspaper bought his minor pieces. He lived, at all events, by his own exertions. At this time, Lucy began to figure in letters to me marked “private.” It would be impossible to give the whole story as therein developed, but I will epitomise it as afterwards heard from his own lips.

He fell enthusiastically in love with Lucy, whose beauty he raved about as ethereal, heavenly, unsophisticated: before I heard of her at all he was evidently far gone in the tender passion; and Lucy had listened so often, and with such a graceful interest, to his literary struggles, that he fancied he had every reason to believe that his affection was returned. One morning, however, all these sunny hopes were rudely dispelled. He had seen once or twice a young man of rustic appearance in the shop, he had also known him to take tea in the back parlour with Mrs. Lawley and her daughter, without attaching any significance to his visits. As Davie sat at breakfast on this particular day, this individual drove to the door in a gig, and was pleasantly received by the landlady. He wore quite a festal appearance, and for the first time a suspicion entered Davie’s mind which changed quickly to a certainty. After speaking to Mrs. Lawley for a minute or two, the young man ran out to stop the driver of a waggon loaded with sacks of grain, and, while holding him in talk, the poor poet from the up-stairs window took an inventory, as it were, of his rival’s personal graces. He was of a very tall, straight, and robust figure, with a broad, comely face, ruddy complexion, and curly brown hair. His voice was like the roll of an organ, and his laugh the very heartiest of guffaws--altogether, a very proper man, as Davie, but for his jealousy, must have acknowledged. The stranger’s rollicking air of gaiety added present insult to previous injury; and to get out of the hearing of his rich “ha ha,” which seemed to pervade the whole neighbourhood, Davie snatched up his hat, intending to walk off his spleen: he pushed halfway down the stairs, but there paused--just below, in the passage by the back-parlour door, was the obnoxious rustic, with his arm round bonny Lucy’s waist, and his lips seeking a kiss; while the damsel’s hand was put up to shield her cheek, and her tongue was saying, in that pretty accent which lovers never take as truth, “Don’t, Tom; please don’t!” Tom caught the uplifted fingers, and held them fast till he had taken a dozen kisses to indemnify himself for the delay. Davie, greatly discomfited, retreated to his room, and made cautious surveys before venturing to leave it again. He quite hated Tom, who was a fine, single-minded young fellow, guilty of no greater sin against him than having won blue-eyed Lucy’s heart.

When Mrs. Lawley came up-stairs to remove her lodger’s breakfast-things, she looked glowing with importance, and, after a short hesitation, confided to him the great family secret--Mr. Tom Burton, of Ravenscroft Farm, had offered for Lucy, and they were to be married that day week. “You’ll have seen him, sir, maybe?” said the proud mother; “he’s been here as often as twice a-week; and, when I told him it behoved him to stop at home and attend to his farm, he’d tell me that corn would grow without watching; and I soon saw what he meant. So, as Lucy was noways unwilling, I bade ’em have done with all this courting and courting, and get wed out of hand. Perhaps, Mr. David, you’ll be so good as go out for the day, and let us have your room for breakfast--or we should be proud of your company, sir.”

The poor poet almost choked over his congratulations, but he got them out in a way. Soon after, he saw the lovers cross the street, arm-in-arm, spruced up for the occasion, and looking as stiff as Sunday clothes worn on a week-day always make rustic lovers look--everybody who met them might know what they were. Tom had a rather bashful and surprised expression; as if he were astonished to find himself part owner of such a fresh, modest, little daisy of a sweetheart, and were not quite sure that it was her cottage bonnet just below his great shoulder, for so long as Davie had them in sight he kept looking down into it to make sure Lucy was there. Davie’s feelings were almost too much for him, but he made a magnanimous resolve that as Lucy had been so good and attentive to him, he would make her a present, and, that he might endure the deepest pangs, that present should be the wedding dress and bonnet. He went off accordingly, post haste, to a great millinery establishment, and purchased a dove-coloured silk dress, and the most sweetly pretty white bonnet, with orange blossoms, that could be had for money. When Lucy and Tom returned from their walk, he called her up-stairs and presented them to her. She contemplated them with surprised delight, blushing and clasping her hands over them: never was there anything so beautiful.

Davie bade her try the bonnet on, to see how it would fit, and, without an atom of coquetry, she put it on, tied the strings under her chin, and rose on tip-toe to peep at herself in the glass over the chimney-piece.

“I must let” (Lucy was going to say “Tom,” but she substituted “mother” instead); “I must let mother see it!” and she ran out of the room, leaving the door open, with that intent. But somebody met her on the stairs, and stopped her for examination. Davie tried to shut his ears, but he could not help hearing that ominous “Don’t, Tom; please don’t;” though, as balm to his wounded feelings, he also caught the echo of a--what shall I say?--a slap? a box?--what do you call it when a pretty maiden brings her hand sharply in contact with her lover’s cheek? Well, no matter--it is a something which always is or ought to be avenged by six kisses on the spot; it was condignly punished in this instance, for Tom lacked modesty even more than French polish. Davie instantly slammed the door, and sat down to compose his feelings by inditing a sonnet on “Disappointed Love.” When it was finished--the lines being flowing and the rhymes musical--he felt more placid and easy in his mind; but, before the wedding, he withdrew himself from the house, and went into country lodgings to hide his griefs. In process of time he rhymed himself into a belief that he was the victim of a disappointed passion, the prey of a devouring sorrow; that his heart was a wreck, a ruin, dust, ashes, a stone, dwelling alone; that life was stale, an unfinished tale, a hopeless, joyless pageant: all because blue-eyed Lucy had married Tom Burton of Ravenscroft.

This was the early love-romance which furnished my brother Davie with his cynicism, his similes of darts, flames, and wounds that are scattered everywhere through his verses. Some of the productions of his troubled muse, after he fled to Highgate, shall be quoted. What would have been Lucy’s astonishment could she have heard herself apostrophised in such burning numbers! her orbs of sunny blue would have dilated until she would have looked, indeed, a round-eyed Juno. Here is one of Davie’s effusions from a little manuscript-book, bound in white vellum, the confidante of his poetical woes at this mournful era:--

Thou hast come like a mist o’er my glorious dreaming,
Thy image stands up ’twixt my soul and the sun!
Oh! why, when youth’s noontide of gladness was beaming,
Hast thou darken’d all that it shone upon?

To see thee, to love thee, ay, love thee to madness,
To know that thou ne’er couldst be aught to me!
To leave thee! and read in my spirit’s lone sadness,
That the love was all hopeless I centred in thee!

The muse appears at this junction to have been quite troublesome with her declarations. The following was written one evening instead of going to dinner like a Christian gentleman to Uncle Sampson’s on Christmas Day. It stands entitled, I Love Thee! and is written with a neatness that says little for its spontaneity:--

I love thee! O, never did summer sea
Greet sunshine more gladly than I greet thee!
Like dew to spring flowers, like stars to dusk night
Art thou with thy glances of liquid light!

I love thee, as only those hearts can love
Whose burning devotion is hard to move!
Life, beauty, and hope, thou art all to me,--
A voice and an echo of melody!

It seems rather as if sense were made subordinate to sound in some of these lucubrations, but they are not so bad for seventeen. Davie came back to Milverston for a little while at this season, and cultivated his grief, to the great disorder of our regular household. One night he stayed out so late that my father went in search of him and found him by the mere, seeking inspiration from the stars. On this occasion he produced eight more lines, which seem to have been the utmost his muse could bring for that one time. It is called, in the vellum book into which it is carefully transcribed, Tell me, my Heart:--

Tell me, my heart, the reason of thy sadness,
Why peoplest thou thy solitude with dreams?
Why dost thou shun the scenes of mirth and gladness
To find thy echo in the lonely streams?

Alas! my heart, that thy poor love should wander,
Where it can meet with nought but cold disdain!
Sad that its treasures thus my soul should squander
Where it can reap but tears and griefs again!

Good little Lucy would have been sorry, indeed, if she could have known into what a limbo of anguish Davie was thrown by her marriage; but let us hope, as she might have done, that the best half of the tortures were only fancy. I know he had at the worst an excellent appetite for lamb and asparagus, to which he was very partial. Dear Davie, to read these effusions, tender imaginations may think of him as fine porcelain fractured with the world’s hard usage, whereas he is stout and bald, and wears green spectacles. The law does not undertake to deal with poetry composed under false pretences, or many would be the sighing Strephons and doleful Delias brought up for judgment.

Last summer we had Davie at home for a month, and during that time occurred the grand incremation of Bernardo Caspiato. I shall ever regard it as a most cruel sacrifice, and Cousin Jack, who instigated it, as an illiterate character. Davie brought it forth one evening when we three were together, and read parts of it aloud: Jack unfeelingly remarked that it was not like good wine, it did not improve with keeping; that, like fruit plucked immaturely, it was green and tasteless; it had not acquired mellowness and flavor, and if stored up for another twenty years it would not taste better. Davie half coincided with him; but I did not; so grandly majestic as was the march of the lines, so delicate and true the rhymes, so thrilling the noble catastrophe. It exasperated me to see Jack, first yawn to the full extent of his jaws, then snatch the manuscript from Davie, and toss it up to the ceiling, retreating afterwards in feigned fear lest he should be crushed by its leaden fall. An ignoble fate was thine,--immortal Bernardo! Convicted of the respectable sin of dulness--which none pardon--thou wert condemned to be burnt! Davie did not act with undue precipitation; Jack urged an immediate execution, but the poet took a week to consider of it, and many a pang it cost him. Those who have written immortal poems and destroyed them will appreciate his feelings; none else can. Let anybody of experience call to mind the last time he has read through the letters from his first love, just before she was married to somebody else; or the letters from that particular old friend, which it is of no use to keep because he is dead, or you have quarrelled beyond hope of reconciliation, and then some faint idea will be conceived of the poet’s sensations at this immolation of his first love, his particular friend, and his pet child--all in one.

It was the summer-season, and warm,--I found it very warm; there was no fire in the grate, and the match-box on the writing-table was empty. Jack supplied the want eagerly from his smoking apparatus, and Bernardo Caspiato shrank into a pinch of tinder. I wept.

“There!” said poor Davie, with a profound sigh, “it took two years to write and two seconds to destroy--just like an eternal friendship, an undying affection, or anything of that kind which half a dozen indiscreet words are at any time enough to annihilate!”

“Have a cigar, old boy; never mind moralising,” said Jack, to whom a cigar would be consolation for the death of his grandmother; “have a cigar; the business can’t be helped.”

“Poor Bernardo!” said Davie, as feelingly as if he spoke of a brother, “poor Bernardo! He gave me many an hour’s delightful occupation. I feel as if I had lost a friend to whom I had been in the habit of confiding my sentimental vagaries. I’m not sure that it was right to burn him.”

“Have a cigar,” reiterated Cousin Jack. Davie accepted the offer with a pensive sigh, put on his green spectacles, and went out for a walk in mournful mood. It is a serious thing burning immortal poems. Nobody can tell what losses the world has had in that way--nobody!

SCOTCH COAST FOLK.

FOOTDEE IN THE LAST CENTURY.

The aged lady whose recollections I condense, and combine with my own observations, says:

Remote, but still distinct, the view appears,
Thro’ the long vista of departed years;

although, towards the conclusion of the American War, the fish town of Footdee was not one of those “green spots on which memory delights to dwell.” The town consisted of several rows of low-thatched cottages running from east to west, between the high-road and the harbour, or, as it is called, the tide. During the high spring-tides, the furthest waves came up to the bank of sand on which the ends of the houses were built. Exteriorly, these cottages appeared comfortless enough, as each dwelling fronted the back of its opposite neighbour, and, as in the narrow space between there was a line of dunghills crossed over with spars, upon which were hung lines, bladders, and buoys, intermixed with dried dog-fish and skate. Their interior was not more alluring to a stranger. The earthen-floor was uneven, and sometimes dirty, although generally sanded over of an evening, or at least every Saturday, in preparation for the Sabbath. Upon the wood or rafters which stretched across horizontally from the tops of the walls, was a ceiling of old oars and bits of drift-wood. The bare rough walls were not whitewashed. Roof, walls, and rafters were all blackened by smoke from a fire at one end of the cottage, placed upon the floor, and made of turf and sea-weed. Soot-drops--curious black glossy accumulations, formed by a similar process, doubtless, to that which produces stalactites and stalagmites--hung here and there upon the walls, rafters, and roof. These collections of pendulous carbon might have been deemed ornaments, if they had not been signs of defective cleanliness. There was a small window at each side of the door. Under each window was a clumsy black bedstead. There was but one small deal table. There were only two or three chairs, and as many sunkies, or low fixed seats resting upon stakes driven into the floor, to sit upon. Beside the wall opposite the door were seen the requisites of the fishing occupation--lines, creels, murlains, &c. Such were the principal property and furniture visible. There was no press or cupboard; and the only depository for keeping things in was a chest or locker, in which lay the precious stores and the Sunday clothes. The salt-backet, or box, was suspended in the chimney.

Such were the cottages in the eighteenth century. In the first quarter of the nineteenth, the cottages were arranged upon the four sides of squares, with a large open space in the centre; and outside every cottage, upon the walls, hung fish-hakes or wooden triangles for drying haddock. Inside the cottages the walls were occasionally whitewashed; and there was fixed against the wall a series of wooden shelves for the preservation and display of delft and earthenware crockery. There were tea-cups in the cupboard in the corner. The little round table was of pine-deal, but scrubbed into a whiteness by a truly Dutch cleanliness, which made it rival tables covered with a fair white linen cloth. The cruisie, an iron lamp of simple structure, consisting of one cup or ladle, with a narrow lip for the whale-oil and wick, and another cup of broader and larger dimensions, to receive the droppings, hangs in the nineteenth, as in many centuries previously, near the chimney, and produces, Rembrandt-like, lights and shades well worthy of the study of an artist who should wish to rival the Dutch painters of the present day, in the pictures they paint to show the effects of a lamp.

The costumes of the fishers were, and continue to be, peculiar. The elderly men wore broad blue woollen bonnets, coarse blue jackets, and canvass kilts or short trousers. The younger men were rather good-looking, had good-humoured faces, and were smarter in their dress. The women wore caps, the original patterns of which still abound upon the Continent, which did not prevent their features being injured by the weather, and their skins being tanned by the sun. The middle-aged women wore stuff gowns, with large flowered calico wrappers or short gowns, over them. The young girls wore stuff wrappers and petticoats, with their hair either drawn back with a large comb, which reached from ear to ear, or fastened up in a very slovenly and unbecoming manner with a head-dress of red worsted tape. The boys under fifteen were the worst clad. They ran about in tattered old garments of their fathers’, a world too wide, and remained in this condition until they were able to earn a more decent covering for themselves. The little children of both sexes were comfortably clad in a simple dress of white plaiding, called a walliecoat, which, with their fair curly heads and rosy cheeks, made them look very pretty, as they paddled in the pools of water, and played with their tiny boats.

In the last century, the fishermen were mostly ignorant of everything unconnected with their own business. Few of them could read, and none of the grown-up people could write. Some of the lads could read and write a little; but as they went to sea in the night, and took their repose in the day, they were not placed in favourable circumstances for the development of the social faculties. No instance of intellectual talent--no single person displaying a tendency towards any art or science--occurred among them. Music and song, no doubt, contributed to the enjoyment of their merry meetings; but the music was confined to a fiddle, and their collection of songs scarcely extended beyond The Praise of Paul Jones, The Waefu’ Ballad of Captain Glen, and the Christmas carol of By Southend. As for the women--toiling, as they were, incessantly--they had no time for mental improvement. But as they grew old they gained practical knowledge and experience. Many of them had a knowledge of simple remedies for curing diseases, which obtained for their prescriptions a preference to those of medical men. Some of them were supposed to be invested with supernatural powers, which made it dangerous to offend them.

I may interpose here a general remark. The superstitions which were sweepingly condemned by the philosophy of the eighteenth century as falsehood and imposture, the philosophy of the nineteenth finds to be true in a sense. Instead of rejecting it in a heap, the student of the present day shakes and washes the rubbish, and separates the grains of truth from it. What, I may be asked, was it true that old fish-crones possessed the powers of witchcraft? I have not a doubt of it. The word witchcraft comes from wiccian, whence witchery, wickedness. It means evil influence. Gifted with the power of reading characters and actions, of seeing consequences and calculating results, and capable of imparting a bias, laying a snare, adapting a temptation, planning a vengeance, or instilling a physical or moral poison; and years give all these powers to malignant intelligence.

Anything may be twisted into stupid or incredible shapes. When affairs did not prosper among the Footdee folk, it was attributed to an evil foot, an “ill fit.” Prior to setting out upon any expedition or enterprise, they were careful and particular about the first “fit” they met in the morning. The Scum of the Well was an object of rivalry every New Year’s Day morning, Old Style. As the midnight hour approached, and the last moments of the year came on, the women assembled in a solemn group, around the large old draw-well, and scolded and scuffled to decide whose pan or bucket should carry off the first fraught (or first freight). The superstition of the first foot may afford some explanation of the phrase Putting his foot into it. Prior to commencing anything, is it not well to note carefully who may be taking the initiative for evil in it? Is not the first evil foot astir in it a serious thing for any enterprise? As for the scum of the well, is not the energetic housewife who obtains the first supply of the first necessary of life,--water--likely to surpass all rivals in providing for her household? I opine it is only a sort of piety due to our forefathers to guess they were shrewder fellows than we might suppose from our views of their superstition, witchcraft, and sorcery.

Indeed there is something small in the minds which study superstitions only to find in them occasions for indulging the sudden elation of self-glory which Hobbes says is the cause of laughter. Our forefathers inherited a spirit-world of personifications; and we have inherited a mass of philosophical abstractions. Our forefathers inherited a poetical and popular nomenclature, and we express our scientific generalisations in crack-jaw words of Greek and Latin derivation. Ghosts, wraiths, witches, fairies, mermaids and water-kelpies, are personifications which have been covered with ridicule, and undoubtedly there have been an abundance of ridiculous stories told respecting them; but I suspect there is philosophy in them after all. The minds of Coast Folk are peopled from early childhood with spectres belonging to the land, sea, and sky; and no wonder, since, during long centuries, catastrophes have desolated the homes of Coast Folk which have issued mysteriously and terribly from land, sea, and sky. Seven miles from Aberdeen there is a fishing-village which was buried in a sand-storm in one night. Almost every soul of the inhabitants was smothered in the sand-drift, and for many years the spire of the village church alone marked the spot in the hollow treacherous sand-hills. When a boy I was warned by words and looks of horror from approaching the fatal locality where it was thought the wrath of the Almighty had displayed itself so awfully. Several instances have occurred in which all the men of a village have gone to sea, and perished in one night. A boat or a corpse heard of as having been cast ashore on a distant beach, was sometimes the only tidings ever heard of them. Mermaids have frightened many a brave man; and, in several of the monthly magazines published in the last century their existence was as seriously discussed as apparitions of sea-serpents have been in our own day. Andrew Brands saw one. “I recollect Andrew perfectly well. He was a stout man, with a broad good-humoured face, and dark hair, who wore his bonnet upon the back of his head.” Occasionally employed as a boatman or pilot, he looked more like a jolly sailor than a sleepy fisherman. One summer day Andrew was found lying insensible on the hill of Torry which faces the sea upon the side of the river Dee, opposite to Footdee. When roused, he spoke confusedly and incoherently. He was thought to be deranged. He was carried to the ferry and rowed home. After several weeks of delirious fever he became low and melancholy, and declined to give any account of his illness. Under medical treatment he recovered, although reduced to a skeleton. The fearful belief spread through the village that Andrew Brands had seen something. When questioned after his recovery, he said in substance: “I was upon the outlook lying upon my breast, and looking over the top of the rocks, when I saw a creature like a woman sitting upon a stone. She seemed to have something like a white sheet, or grave-clothes wrapped around her. Sometimes she combed her hair, and sometimes she tossed her arms in the air. All her ways were fearsome, and at last she rushed into the sea, and vanished beneath the waves. My heart lap (leapt), I grew blind, and I remember nothing more until I awoke with all my bones sore, and the men lifting me up.” The medical theory of his illness, as expounded by his doctor, was, that he had gone out with incipient fever upon him, had fallen asleep in an exposed situation, and the hallucinations of delirium had done all the rest. My informant who remembered him well, maintained he had been unwittingly the Actæon of a bathing Diana at a time when ladies rarely bathed in Scotland, and had been punished by the vengeance of the goddess. Probably, however, an accumulation of foam among the stones of the beach had taken the flickering form of a woman. The white scum would seem to rise up amidst the black stones, and Andrew Brands was frightened by a mermaid because he had never been taught the effects of perspective. Was it in some such way as this that Cytherea herself was seen by the poetic eyes of a fisherman of Cyprus, issuing from the froth of the sea until she was wafted in a shell to the shore by Zephyrus, where the Graces received and adorned her for presentation to the celestials of Olympus?

Extraordinary physical phenomena generally precede extraordinary catastrophes. Everybody has heard of the warning blue lights. During the night which preceded a storm, in which seven men of a seaside village were lost, an aged man, I have been assured, saw seven blue lights passing in solemn procession from the roofs of their cottages towards their grave-yard. He entreated the men to stay at home, and not to go to sea. But they were obstinate, and went. He told some old and some young people, who would listen to him, what he had seen, and had scarcely finished his vaticination when the lightning leaped high into the sky, the thunder pealed, and a hurricane lashed the sea into furious madness. The boats were not far from the shore, but before they could reach it a boat capsized, and seven men were lost within sight of their families. A week afterwards, at the very hour of the day corresponding to the hour of the night of the procession of the blue lights, the funeral procession of the seven fishermen was seen going from their cottages by the very way the lights had gone; and beneath the very spots where the lights stood in the churchyard the corpses rested for evermore. The law of the elders in these villages is, that no boats ought to go to sea when the old men say they have seen the blue lights. The blue lights are possibly electrical facts. The traditions respecting their direction are as variable as the winds. The guess is not a very hazardous one, that science would agree with the old men in warning the fishers against going to sea when the air was charged with electricity after midnight, in the coldest hours of the twenty-four.

When the Footdee fishers were found in the last century to be no more scrupulous than other people respecting custom-house oaths, an oath was framed for them, founded upon their superstitious fears, which proved to be far more effectual than the ordinary one. It concluded with these words: “If I do not speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, may my boat be a bonnet to me.”

Of course the fishers leaned to the side of the smugglers against the excise and customs officers. Almost everybody did, in the last century except the lawyers, something of a legal education being necessary to see the propriety of establishing what Adam Smith, while himself a Commissioner of the Board of Customs, denounced as the outposts of Pandemonium. When examined before the courts in smuggling cases, the fishermen contrived occasionally, under an appearance of simplicity, to baffle with considerable cunning the cross-examinations of the counsel for the Crown. Public sympathy was, in those days on the side of the smugglers, who called themselves free-traders, a designation which has since attained universal honour. The principle of obedience to law, the sine quâ non of civilisation, is less easily enthroned upon uneducated consciences than the principle of buying cheap and selling dear. Lairds, merchants, and workmen, therefore, all admired the cool duplicity with which the fishers sometimes evaded the truth when under cross-examinations. Some of them were once witnesses in a case of deforcement. The counsel for the prosecution asked a fisherman,--“While the men were struggling in the water, did you not hear the prisoner call out, ‘Drown the dogs?’”

“We saw nae dogs there, sir,” was the demure and composed reply.

“I do not ask you what you saw; but, on your oath, did you not hear him call out, ‘Drown the dogs?’”

“There was nae ony dogs there, sir,” was again the obstinate answer.

Although no man of distinction in science or letters has ever arisen in any of these villages, it cannot be doubted they have produced many men whom Poodle or Doodle might have safely trusted upon his legs on the floor of the House of Commons to answer the questions of honourable and independent members.