Chapter XIII: Conclusion: Of the War in Affghanistan (4)

They retreated from the Establishment, and gave up all its advantages when the post had become so untenable that these could be no longer retained with honour--or we should perhaps rather say, retained compatibly with right principle; but they did not in wholesale desperation give up other posts which could still be conscientiously maintained.

The educational establishment of the country, for instance, was not abandoned, though the ecclesiastical one was.

The Principal of the United College of Saint Salvador and Saint Leonard's signed the Deed of Demission in his capacity as an elder of the Church, but in his capacity of Principal he returned to his College, and in that post fought what was virtually the battle of his country, and fought it so bravely and well that he is Principal of the College still. And the parish schoolmasters who adhered to the Free Church fought an exactly similar battle, though unfortunately with a less happy issue; but that issue gives at least prominence to the fact that they did not resign their charges, but were thrust from them. The other functionaries of the Assembly, uninfluenced by any wild Cameronian notion, held by their various secular offices, civil and military. Soldiers retained their commissions--magistrates their seats on the bench--members of Parliament their representative status. Nor did a single member of the Protesting Church possessed of the franchise resign, in consequence of the Disruption, a single political right or privilege. The entire transaction bore, we repeat, the stamp of perfect sobriety. It was in all its details the act of men in their right minds.

Now the principles held by the Church at the Disruption, and none other, whether Voluntary or Cameronian, are the principles of the Free Church. A powerful majority in a Presbyterian body, or in a country possessed of a representative government, are vested in at least the _power_ of making whatever laws they will to make, for not only themselves, but for the minority also. But _power_ is not _right_; and we would at once question the _right_ of even a preponderating majority in a Church such as ours to introduce new principles into her framework, and to impose them on the minority. We question, on this principle, the _right_ of that act of discipline which was exercised in the present century by a preponderating majority of the Antiburgher body in Scotland, when they deposed and excommunicated the late Dr. M'Crie for the ecclesiastical offence of holding in every particular by the original tenets of the fathers of the Secession.

The overt act in the case manifested their _power_, but the various attempts made to manifest their _right_ we regard as mere abortions. They had no _right_ to do what they did. The questions on which the majority differed from their fathers ought in justice, instead of being made a subject of legislation, to be left an open question. And we hold, on a similar principle, that whatever questions of conduct or polity may arise in the Free Church, which, though new to it, yet come to be adopted by a majority, should be left open questions also. Of course, of novelties in doctrine we do not speak,--we trust that within the Free Church none such will ever arise; we refer rather to those semi-metaphysical points of casuistry, and nice questions of conduct, in which the differences that perplex non-established Churches are most liable to originate,--matters in which one man sees after one way, and another man after another,--and which, until heaped up into importance, wave-like, as if by the wind, pertain not to the province of solid demonstrable truth, but to the province of loose fluctuating opinion. And be it remarked, that non-established Churches are very apt to be disturbed by such questions.

They are in circumstances in which the ripple passes into the wavelet, and the wavelet into the billow. On this head, as on all others, there is great value in the teachings of history; and the Free Church might be worse employed than in occasionally conning the lesson. Each fifty years of the last century and half has been marked by its own special questions of the kind among the non-established Churches of Scotland.

The question of the last fifty years has been that Voluntary one which virtually led to the striking off the roll of the Antiburgher Secession Church, those protesting ministers who formed the nucleus of the Original Secession, and to the excommunication and deposition of Dr. M'Crie. The question of the preceding fifty years was that connected with the burghal oath, which had the effect of splitting into two antagonist sections the religious body of which the Burgher Secession formed but one of the fragments,--a body fast rising at the time into a position of importance, which the split prevented it from ever fully realizing. The question of the fifty years with which the period began was that which fixed the Cameronian body, not merely in a condition of unsocial seclusion in its relation with all other churches, but even detached it from its allegiance to the State, and placed it in circumstances of positive rebellion. Perhaps the history of this latter body, as embodied in its older testimony, and the controversial writings of its Fairlys and Thorburns, is that from the study of which the Free Church might derive most profit at the present time. We live in so late an age of the world, that we have little chance of finding much which is positively new in the writings or speeches of our casuists. When we detect, in consequence, some of our ministers or office-bearers sporting principles that do not distinctively belong to the Church of the Disruption, we may be pretty sure, if we but search well, of discovering these principles existing as the distinctive tenets of some other Church; and the present tendency of a most small but most respectable minority in our body is decidedly Cameronian.

The passages of Scripture on which the Cameronians chiefly dwelt in their testimony and controversial writings, were those discussed by the Free Presbytery of Edinburgh on Wednesday last. As condemnatory of what is designated the great national sin of the Union, for instance, the testimony adduces, among other texts, Isa. viii. 12, 'Say ye not, A confederacy, to all them to whom this people shall say, A confederacy;' Hos. vii. 8, 9, 'Ephraim hath mixed himself among the people; Ephraim is a cake not turned. Strangers have devoured his strength, and he knoweth it not; yea, grey hairs are here and there upon him, and he knoweth it not;' and above all, 2 Cor. vi. 14, 15, 'Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers; for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness, and what communion hath light with darkness, and what concord hath Christ with Belial, or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel?' And let the reader mark how logically these Scriptures are applied. 'All associations and confederacies with the enemies of true religion and godliness,' says the Testimony, 'are thus expressly condemned in Scripture, and represented as dangerous to the true Israel of God. And if simple confederacies with malignants and enemies to the cause of Christ are condemned, much more is an incorporation with them, which is an embodying of two into one, and therefore a straiter conjunction. And, taking the definition of malignants given by the declarations of both kingdoms, joined in arms _anno_ 1643, to be just, which says, "Such as would not take the Covenant were to be declared to be public enemies to religion and their country, and that they are to be censured and punished as professed adversaries and malignants," it cannot be refused but that the prelatic party in England now joined with are such. Further, by this incorporating union this nation is obliged to support the _idolatrous_ Church of England.' And thus the argument runs on irrefragable in its logic, if we but grant the premises. But to what, we ask, did it lead, assisted, of course, by other arguments of a similar character, in the body with whom it originated? To their withdrawal, from the times of the Revolution till now, from every national movement in the cause of Christ and His gospel; nay, most consistently, we must add--for we have ever failed to see the sense or logic of acting a public and political part in our own or our neighbour's behalf, and declining on principle to act it in behalf of Christianity or its institutions--not only have they withdrawn themselves from all political exertion in behalf of religion, but in behalf of their country also. A Cameronian holding firm by his principles of non-incorporation with _idolaters_, cannot be a magistrate nor a member of Parliament; he cannot vote in an election, nor serve in the army.

It is one of the grand evils of questions of casuistry of this kind, that men, instead of looking at things and estimating them as they really exist, are contented to play games at logic--chopping with but the imperfect signs of things--mere verbal counters, twisted from their original meanings by the influence of delusive metaphors and false associations.

Let us just see, in reference not to mere words, but to things, what can be truly meant by the terms 'apostate or apostatizing Government,' as applied to the Government of Great Britain. The words can have of course no just application, in a personal bearing, to present members of Government, as distinguished from the members of previous Governments, seeing that the functionaries now in office are just as much, or rather as little religious, as any other functionaries in office since the times of the Revolution or before. In a _personal_ sense, England's last religious government was that of Cromwell. The term apostate, or apostatizing, can have only an _official_ meaning. What, then, in its official meaning, does it in reality express? The government of the United Kingdom is representative; and it is one of the great blessings which we enjoy as citizens that it is so,--one of those blessings for which we may now, as when we were younger, express ourselves thankful in the words of honest Isaac Watts, 'that we were born on British ground.' At any rate, this fact of representation _is_ a _fact_--a _thing_, not a mere _word_. There is another fact in the case equally solid and certain. This representation of the empire is based on a population of about twenty-six millions of people; twelve millions of whom are Episcopalian, eight millions Roman Catholic, three millions Presbyterian, and three millions more divided among the various other Protestant sects of the country. And this also is a _fact_--a _thing_, not a mere _word_.

In the good providence of God we were born the citizens of an empire thus representative in its government, and thus ecclesiastically constituted in its population.

And it would be a further fact consequent on the other two, that the aggregate character of the Government would represent the aggregate moral and ecclesiastical character of the people, were every distinct portion into which the people are parcelled to exert itself in proportion to its share of political influence. But from the yet further fact, that the portions have _not_ always exerted themselves in equal ratios, and from other causes, political and providential, the character of the Government has considerably fluctuated--now representing one portion more in proportion to its amount than its mere bulk warranted, anon another. Thus, in the days of the Commonwealth, what are now the six million Presbyterians and Independents, etc., had a British Government wholly representative of themselves; while what are now the twelve million Episcopalians and the eight million Papists had none.

England at the time produced one of those men, of a type surpassingly great, that the world fails to see once in centuries; and, like Brennus of old, he flung his sword into the lighter scale, and it straightway outweighed the other. There then ensued a period of twenty-eight years, in which Government represented only the Episcopalians and Papists: and then a period of a hundred and forty years more, in which it represented only the Episcopalians and Presbyterians. And now--for Popery, growing strong in the interval, had been using all appliances in its own behalf, and had not been met in the proper spiritual field--it represents Episcopacy, Roman Catholicism, and a minute, uninfluential portion of the Presbyterian and other evangelistic bodies. But how, it may be asked, has this result taken place?

How is it only a moiety of these bodies that is represented? Mainly, we unhesitatingly reply, through the influence exerted by certain crotchets entertained by the bodies themselves on their political standing. When Government at the Revolution, instead of being as formerly representative of Episcopacy and Popery, became representative of Episcopacy and Presbytery, Cameronianism broke off, on the plea that the governing power ought to be representative of Presbytery only, and that it was apostate because it was not; and the political influence of the body has been ever since lost to the Protestant cause. Voluntaryism, on the other hand, neutralized _its_ influence, by holding that, though quite at freedom to exert itself in the political walk in attaining secular objects, religious objects are in that walk unattainable, or at least not to be attained; and so _it_ also has been virtually lost to the Protestant cause. And now a cloud like a man's hand arises in our own Church, to threaten a further secession from the ranks of the remaining class, who strive to stamp upon the Government, through the operation of the representative principle, at least a modicum of the evangelistic character. And all this is taking place in an age in which the battle for the integrity of the Sabbath as a national institute, and other similar battles, shall soon have to be decided on political ground. If 'apostate' or 'apostatizing' be at all proper words in reference to the _things_ which we have here described, what, we ask, save the want either of weight or of exertion on the part of the _represented_ bodies who complain of it, can be properly regarded as the _cause_ of that apostasy? A representative Government, if the represented be Episcopalian, will itself be officially Episcopalian; if the represented be Papist, it will itself be officially Papist; if the represented be Presbyterian, it will itself be officially Presbyterian; if composed of all three together, the Government will bear an aggregate average character; but if, on some crotchet, the Presbyterians withdraw from the political field, while the others exert themselves in that field to the utmost, it will be Popish and Episcopalian exclusively. But for a result so undesirable--a result which, if Presbytery had been formerly in the ascendant, might of course be called official apostasy--it would be the Presbyterian constituency that would be to blame, not the Government.

It will be seen that this view of the real state of _things_ was that of Knox and Chalmers, and that they acted in due accordance with it. We are told by the younger M'Crie, in his admirable _Sketches of Scottish Church History_, 'that Knox and his brethren, perceiving that the whole ecclesiastical property of the kingdom bade fair to be soon swallowed up by the rapacity of the nobles, insisted that a considerable portion of it should be reserved for the support of the poor, the founding of universities and schools, and the maintenance of an efficient ministry throughout the country. At last,' continues the historian, 'after great difficulty, the Privy Council came to the determination that the ecclesiastical revenues should be divided into three parts,--that two of them should be given to the ejected prelates during their lives, which afterwards reverted to the nobility, and that the third part should be divided between the Court and the Protestant ministry.'

'Well,' exclaimed Knox on hearing of this arrangement, 'if the end of this order be happy, my judgment fails me. I see two parts freely given to the devil, and the third must be divided between God and the devil.' Strong words these. Here is a Government, according to Knox's own statement of the case, giving five-sixths to the devil, and but a remaining sixth to God. But does Knox on that account refuse God's moiety? Does he set himself to reason metaphysically regarding _his_ degree of responsibility for either what the devil got, or what the Government gave the devil. Not he. He received God's part, and in applying it wisely and honestly to God's service, wished it more; but as for the rest, like a man of broad strong sense as he assuredly was, he left the devil and the Privy Council to divide the responsibility between them. And the large-minded Chalmers entertained exactly the same views,--views which, if not in thorough harmony with the idle fictions which dialecticians employ when they treat of Governments, at least entirely accord with the real condition of things. The official character of a representative Legislature must, as we have shown, resemble that of the constituency which it represents. In order to alter it permanently for the better, it is essentially necessary, as a first step in the process, that the worse parts of the constituencies on which it rests be so altered.

Now, for altering constituencies for the better, schools and churches were the machinery of Knox and of Chalmers; and if the funds for the support of either came honestly to them, unclogged with conditions unworthy of the object, they at once received them as given on God's behalf, however idolatrously the givers--whether individuals or Governments--might be employing money drawn from the same purse in other directions. 'Ought I,' said Chalmers in reference to the Educational question, 'ought I not to use, on teetotal principles, the water of the public pump, because another man mixes it with his toddy?' It was not because Popery was established in the colonies, or seemed in danger of being established in Ireland, that the Free Church resigned its hold of the temporalities of the Scottish Establishment. Such endowment, instead of forming an argument for resignation, would form, on the contrary, an argument for keeping faster hold, in behalf of Protestantism, of the fortalice of the Establishment; just as if an invading army had possessed itself of the Castle of Dumbarton, with the strongholds of Fort-Augustus and Fort-William, the argument would be all the stronger for the national forces defending with renewed determination the Castles of Stirling and of Edinburgh, and the magnificent defences of Fort-George.

_February 9, 1848._

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CRIMEAN WAR.

The war now happily concluded was characterized by some very remarkable features. It was on the part of Britain the war of a highly civilised country, in a pre-eminently mechanical, and, with all its faults, singularly humane age,--in an age, too, remarkable for the diffusion of its literature; and hence certain conspicuous traits which belonged to none of the other wars in which our country had been previously engaged. Never before did such completely equipped fleets and armies quit our shores. The navies with which we covered the Black Sea and the Baltic were not at all what they would have been had the war lasted for one other campaign, but they mightily exceeded anything of the kind that Britain or the world had ever seen before. The fleets of Copenhagen, Trafalgar, and the Nile would have cut but a sorry figure beside them, and there was more of the _materiel_ of war concentrated on that one siege of Sebastopol than on any half-dozen other sieges recorded in British history. In all that mechanical art could accomplish, the late war with Russia was by far the most considerable in which our country was ever engaged. It was, in respect of _materiel_, a war of the world's pre-eminently mechanical people in the world's pre-eminently mechanical age. With this strong leading feature, however, there mingled another, equally marked, in which the element was weakness, not strength. The men who beat all the world in heading pins are unable often to do anything else; for usually, in proportion as mechanical skill becomes intense, does it also become narrow; and the history of the two campaigns before Sebastopol brought out very strikingly a certain helplessness on the part of the British army, part of which at least must be attributed to this cause. It is surely a remarkable fact, that in an army never more than seven miles removed from the base line of its operations, the distress suffered was so great, that nearly _five_ times the number of men sank under it that perished in battle. There was no want among them of pinheading and pinheaded martinets. The errors of officers such as Lucan and Cardigan are understood to be all on the side of severity; but in heading their pin, they wholly exhaust their art; and under their surveillance and direction a great army became a small one, with the sea covered by a British fleet only a few miles away. So far as the statistics of the British portion of this greatest of sieges have yet been ascertained, rather more than _three_ thousand men perished in battle by the shot or steel of the enemy, or afterwards of their wounds, and rather more than _fifteen_ thousand men of privation and disease. As for the poor soldiers themselves, they could do but little in even more favourable circumstances under the pinheading martinets; and yet at least such of them as were drawn from the more thoroughly artificial districts of the country must, we suspect, have fared all the worse in consequence of that subdivision of labour which has so mightily improved the mechanical standing of Britain in the aggregate, and so restricted and lowered the general ability in individuals. We cannot help thinking that an army of backwoodsmen of the present day, or of Scotch Highlanders marked by the prevailing traits of the last century, would have fared better and suffered less.

Another remarkable feature of the war arose out of the singularly ready and wonderfully diffused literature of the day. Like those self-registering machines that keep a strict account of their own workings, it seemed to be engaged, as it went on, in writing, stage after stage, its own history. The acting never got a single day ahead of the writing, and never a single week ahead of the publishing; and, in consequence, the whole civilised world became the interested witnesses of what was going on. The war became a great game at chess, with a critical public looking over the shoulders of the players. It was a peculiar feature, too, that the public _should_ have been so critical. As the literature of a people becomes old, it weakens in the power of originating, and strengthens in the power of criticising. Reviews and critiques become the master efforts of a learned and ingenious people, whose literature has passed its full blow; and the criticism extends always, in countries in which the press is free from the productions of men who write in their closets, to the actings of men who conduct the political business of the country, or who direct its fleets and armies. And with regard to them also it may be safely affirmed, that the critical ability overshoots and excels the originating ability. There seems to have been no remarkably good generalship manifested by Britain in the Crimea: all the leading generalship appears, on the contrary, to have been very mediocre generalship indeed. The common men and subordinate officers did their duty nobly; and there have been such splendid examples of skilful generalship in fourth and fifth-rate commands--commands such as that of Sir Colin Campbell and Sir George Brown--that it has been not unfrequently asked, whether we had in reality the 'right men in the right places,' and whether there might not, after all, have been generalship enough in the Crimea had it been but rightly arranged. But the leading generalship was certainly _not_ brilliant. The criticism upon it, on the other hand, has been singularly so. The ages of Marlborough and Wellington did not produce a tithe of the brilliant military criticism which has appeared in England in newspapers, magazines, and reviews during the last two years. And yet it is possible that, had the very cleverest of these critics been appointed to the chief command, he would have got on as ill as any of his predecessors. In truth, the power of originating and the power of criticising are essentially different powers in the worlds both of thought and of action. Talent accumulates the materials of criticism from the experience of the past; and thus, as the world gets older, the critical ability grows, and becomes at length formidably complete;--whereas the power of originating, or, what is the same thing, of acting wisely, and on the spur of the moment, in new and untried circumstances, is an incommunicable faculty, which genius, and genius only, can possess. And genius is as rare now as it ever was. Any man of talent can be converted, by dint of study and painstaking, into a good military critic; but a Wellington or a Napoleon had as certainly to be born what they were, as a Dante or a Milton.

But by far the most pleasing feature of the war--of at least the part taken in it by Britain--is to be found in that humanity, the best evidence of a civilisation truly Christian, which has characterized it in all its stages. Generous regard for the safety and respect for the feelings of a brave enemy, when conquered, have marked our countrymen for centuries. But we owe it to the peculiar philanthropy of the time, that, in the midst of much official neglect, our own sick and wounded soldiers have been cared for after a fashion in which British soldiers were never cared for before. The 'lady nurses,' with Miss Nightingale at their head, imparted its most distinctive character to the war. We have now before us a deeply interesting volume,{1} the production of one of these devoted females, a native of the north country, or, as she was introduced by an old French officer to some Zouaves, her fellow-passengers to the East, whom she had wished to see, a true '_Montagnarde de Ecossaise_.' The name of the authoress is not given; but it will, we daresay, be recognised in the neighbourhood of the 'capital of the Highlands' as that of a delicately nurtured lady, the daughter of a late distinguished physician, well known to the north of the Grampians as an able and upright man, who, had he not so sedulously devoted himself to the profession which he adorned, might have excelled in almost any department of science. And in strong sound sense and genial feeling, we find the daughter worthy of such a father. Some of our more zealous Protestants professed at one time not a little alarm lest the lady nurses might be Papists in disguise; and certainly their 'regulation dresses,' all cut after one fashion, and of one sombre hue, did seem a little nun-like, and perhaps rather alarming. But the following passage--which, from the amusing mixture which it exhibits of strong good sense and half-indignant womanly feeling, our readers will, we are sure, relish--may serve to show that some of the ladies who wore the questionable dress, liked it quite as ill as the most zealous member of the Reformation Society could have done, and were very excellent Protestants under its cover. The authoress of the volume before us is a Presbyterian; and the occasion of the following remarks was the meeting of the British Consul at Marseilles, and the necessity that herself and her companions felt of getting head-dresses for themselves, that could be looked at ere entertaining him at dinner. 'Perhaps it may be thought,' says our authoress, 'that all this solicitude about our caps was unsuitable in persons going out as what is called "Sisters of Mercy;" but I must once for all say that, as far as I was concerned, I neither professed to be a "Sister of Charity," a "Sister of Mercy," nor anything of the kind. I was, as I told a _poissarde_ of Boulogne, a British woman who had little to do at home, and wished to help our poor soldiers, if I could, abroad. The reason given to me for the peculiarity and uniformity of our dress was, that the soldiers might know and respect their nurses. It seems a sensible reason, and one which I could not object to, even disliking, as I did, all peculiarity of attire that seemed to advertise the nurses only as serving God, or serving Him pre-eminently, and thus conveying a tacit reproach to the rest of the world; for the obligation lies on all the same. I did not feel then, nor do I now, that we were doing anything better or more praiseworthy than is done in a quiet, unostentatious way at home every day. On the contrary, to many temperaments, my own among the number, it is far less difficult to engage in a new and exciting work like the one we were then entering on there, than to pursue the uneventful monotony of daily doing good at home. As for the dress itself, I have nothing to say against it. Although not perhaps of the material or texture I should have preferred, still the colour, grey, was one I generally wore from choice. But I must confess, that when I found myself restricted to it, without what seemed a good reason, an intense desire for blue, green, red, and yellow, with all their combinations, took possession of me; though, now that I may wear what I please, I find my former favour for grey has returned in full force. However, allowing that it was desirable we should have had some uniform costume, it certainly was unnecessary that ladies, nurses, and washerwomen should have been dressed alike, as we were. That was part of the mistake I have already adverted to, and was productive of confusion and bad feeling.'

Despite of the uniform dresses, however, the sick and wounded soldiers soon learned to distinguish between the paid nurses and the ladies who had left their comfortable British homes to lavish upon them their gratuitous, priceless labours.

* * * * *

There is no assumption in this volume. Its authoress writes as if she had done only her duty, and as if the task had not been an exceedingly hard or difficult one; but the simple facts related show how very much was accomplished and endured. Every chapter justifies the judgment pronounced by the tall Irish sergeant. This lady nurse is a 'real fine woman,'--a noble specimen of the class whose disinterested and self-sacrificing exertions gave to the late war its most distinctive and brilliant feature. The bravery of British men had been long established; the superadded trait is the heroism of British women. In what circumstances of peril and suffering that heroism was exerted, the following extract, with which we conclude, may serve to show. It is the funeral of one of the lady nurses, who sank under an attack of malignant fever, that the following striking passage records:--

'The Protestant burial-ground is a dismal-looking, neglected spot. It was chosen from an idea that Drusilla's friends at home might prefer it to the open hill where the soldiers lay; but if there had been time for consideration and inspection, it would have been otherwise arranged: for the appearance of the place struck a chill to our hearts--it looked so dark and dreary, with the grass more than a foot high, and the weeds towering above it; and from its being close to the bay, and the porous nature of the soil, the grave which had been dug on the forenoon was almost filled by water; and on the words, "Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God," we heard the coffin splash into the half-full grave. There was a general regret afterwards that this burial-ground had been chosen, but poor Drusilla will not sleep the less soundly; and we all agreed, on leaving her grave, that whoever of us was next called to die, should be buried on the hill, in the spot allotted to the poor soldiers, open and unprotected as it was. Death seemed very near to us then; we had already lost two orderlies, and many of the nurses were lying at the gates of death. Miss A---- had made an almost miraculous escape, and was not yet out of danger from relapse. The first gap had been made in our immediate party, and who of us could tell whether she herself was not to be the next?

'The evening was fast closing as we returned, some in caiques, and others walking solemnly and sadly; for, besides the feelings naturally attending such a scene, we all regretted poor Drusilla, who, although she had not been long among us, was so obliging and anxious to be of use. She was a good-looking young woman, and immediately on her arrival had become the object of attraction to one of the clerks, whose attentions, however, she most steadily declined. He still persisted in showing the most extraordinary attachment to her, and during her illness was in such a state of excitement and distress as to be utterly incapacitated for attending to his duties properly. He used to sit on the stairs leading to her room, in the hopes of seeing some one who could tell him how she was, and went perpetually to the passage outside her room, entreating of the Misses Le M----, who generally sat up with her, to let him in to see her. This they refused till the night of her death, when she was quite insensible, and past all hope of recovery; so that his visit could do her no harm. He stayed a few minutes, and looked his last on her; for in the morning at seven o'clock she died. I shall never forget his face when he came to my store-room, in accordance with his duty, to correct some inaccuracy in the diet-roll. He seemed utterly bewildered with sorrow; and Miss S----, who had also occasion to speak to him, said she never saw grief so strongly marked in a human face. He insisted on following her remains to the grave as chief mourner, and wearied himself with carrying the coffin. No one interfered with him; for all seemed to think he had acquired the right, by his unmistakeable affection, to perform these sad offices; and the lady superintendent, moved by his sorrow, allowed him to retain a ring of some small value which the deceased had been accustomed to wear.'

_June 14, 1856._

-----

{1} _Ismeer, or Smyrna and its British Hospital in 1855._ By a
Lady. London: James Madder, 8, Leadenhall Street.

THE POETS OF THE CHURCH.

It is not uninteresting to mark the rise and progress of certain branches of poetry and the _belles lettres_ in their connection with sects and Churches. They form tests by which at least the taste and literary standing of these bodies can be determined; and the degree of success with which they are cultivated within the same Church, in different ages, throws at times very striking lights on its condition and history. One wholly unacquainted with the recorded annals of the Church of Scotland might safely infer, from its literature alone, that it fared much more hardly in the seventeenth century, during which the literature of England rose to its highest pitch of grandeur, than in the previous sixteenth, in which its Knoxes, Buchanans, and Andrew Melvilles flourished; and further, that its eighteenth century was, on the whole, a quiet and tranquil time, in which even mediocrity had leisure afforded it to develope itself in its full proportions. Literature is not the proper business of Churches; but it is a means, though not an end. And it will be found that all the better Churches have been as literary as they could; and that, if at any time the literature has been defective, it has been rather their circumstances that were unpropitious, than themselves that were in fault. Their enemies have delighted to represent the case differently. Our readers must remember the famous instance in _Old Mortality_, so happily exposed by the elder M'Crie, in which Sir Walter, when he makes his Sergeant Bothwell a writer of verses, introduces Burley as peculiarly a verse-hater, and 'puts into his mouth that condemnation of elegant pursuits which he imputes to the whole party;' 'overlooking or suppressing the fact,' says the Doctor, 'that there was at that very time in the camp of the Covenanters a man who, besides his other accomplishments, was a poet superior to any on the opposite side.' It is equally a fact, however, and shows how thoroughly the mind of even a highly intellectual people may be prostrated by a long course of tyranny and persecution, that Scotland had properly no literature after the extinction of its old classical school in the person of Drummond of Hawthornden, until the rise of Thomson. The age in England of Milton and of Cowley, of Otway, of Waller, of Butler, of Dryden, and of Denham, was in Scotland an age without a poet vigorous enough to survive in his writings his own generation. For even the greater part of the popular version of its Psalms, our Church was indebted to the English lawyer Rous. Here and there we may find in it the remains of an earlier and more classical time: its version of the hundredth Psalm, for instance, with its quaintly-turned but stately octo-syllabic stanzas, was written nearly a hundred years earlier than most of the others, by William Keith, a Scottish contemporary of Beza and Buchanan, and one of the translators of the Geneva Bible. But we find little else that is Scotch in it; the Church to which, in the previous age, the author of the most elegant version of the Psalms ever given to the world had belonged, had now--notwithstanding the exertions of its Zachary Boyds--to import its poetry. In the following century, the Church shared in the general literature of the time. She missed, and but barely missed, having one of its greatest poets to herself--the poet Thomson--who at least carried on his studies so far with a view to her ministry, as to commence delivering his probationary discourses. We fear, however, he would have made but an indolent minister; and that, though his occasional sermons, judging from the hymn which concludes the _Seasons_, might have been singularly fine ones, they would have been marvellously few, and very often repeated. The greatest poet that did actually arise within the Church during the century was Thomson's contemporary, Robert Blair,--a man who was not an idle minister, and who, unlike his cousin Hugh, belonged to the evangelical side. The author of the _Grave_ was one of the bosom friends of Colonel Gardiner, and a valued correspondent of Doddridge and Watts. Curiously enough, though the great merit of his piece has been acknowledged by critics such as Southey, it has been regarded as an imitation of the _Night Thoughts_ of Young. 'Blair's _Grave_,' says Southey in his _Life of Cowper_, 'is the only poem I can call to mind which has been composed in imitation of the _Night Thoughts_;' and though Campbell himself steered clear of the error, we find it introduced in a note, as supplementary to the information regarding Blair given in his _Essay on English Poetry_ by his editor, Mr. Cunningham. It is demonstrable, however, that the Scotchman could not have been the imitator. As shown by a letter in the Doddridge collection, which bears date more than a twelvemonth previous to that of the publication of even the first book of the _Night Thoughts_, Blair, after stating that his poem, then in the hands of Isaac Watts, had been offered without success to two London publishers, states further, that the greater part of it had been written previous to the year 1731, ere he had yet entered the ministry; whereas the first book of Young's poem was not published until the year 1744. Poetry such as that of Blair is never the result of imitation: its verbal happinesses are at least as great as those of the _Night Thoughts_ themselves, and its power and earnestness considerably greater. 'The eighteenth century,' says Thomas Campbell, 'has produced few specimens of blank verse of so powerful and simple a character as that of the _Grave_. It is a popular poem, not merely because it is religious, but because its language and imagery are free, natural, and picturesque. The latest editor of the poets has, with singularly bad taste, noted some of the author's most nervous and expressive phrases as vulgarisms, among which he reckons that of friendship, the "solder of society." Blair may be a homely, and even a gloomy poet, in the eye of fastidious criticism; but there is a masculine and pronounced character even in his gloom and homeliness, that keeps it most distinctly apart from either dulness or vulgarity. His style pleases us like the powerful expression of a countenance without regular beauty.' Such is the judgment on Blair--destined, in all appearance, to be a final one--of a writer who was at once the most catholic of critics and the most polished of poets. There succeeded to the author of the _Grave_, a group of poets of the Church, of whom the Church has not been greatly in the habit of boasting. Of Home, by a curious chance the successor of Blair in his parish, little need be said. He produced one good play and five enormously bad ones; and his connection with the Church was very much an accident, and soon dissolved. Blacklock, too, was as much a curiosity as a poet; and, save for his blindness, would scarce have been very celebrated in even his own day. Nor was Ogilvie, though more favourably regarded by Johnson than most of his Scottish contemporaries, other than a mediocre poet. He is the author, however, of a very respectable paraphrase--the sixty-second--of all his works the one that promises to live longest; and we find the productions of several other poets of the Church similarly preserved, whose other writings have died. And yet the group of Scottish _literati_ that produced our paraphrases, if looking simply to literary accomplishment--we do not demand genius--must be regarded as a very remarkable one, when we consider that the greater number of the individuals which composed it were all at one time the ministers of a single Church, and that one of the smallest. We know of no Church, either in Britain or elsewhere, that could now command such a committee as that which sat, at the bidding of the General Assembly, considerably more than sixty years ago, to prepare the 'Translations and Paraphrases.' Of the sixty-eight pieces of which the collection is composed, thirty are the work of Scottish ministers; and the groundwork of most of the others, furnished in large part by the previously existing writings of Watts and Doddridge, has been greatly improved, in at least the composition, by the emendations of Morrison and Logan. With all its faults, we know of no other collection equal to it as a whole. The meretricious stanzas of Brady and Tate are inanity itself in comparison. True, the later Blair, though always sensible, was ofttimes quite heavy enough in the pieces given to him to render--more so than in his prose; though, even when first introduced to that, Cowper could exclaim, not a little to the chagrin of those who regarded it as perfection of writing: 'Oh, the sterility of that man's fancy! if, indeed, he has any such faculty belonging to him. Dr. Blair has such a brain as Shakespeare somewhere describes, "dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage.'" But the fancy that Blair wanted, poor Logan had; and the man who too severely criticises his flowing and elegant paraphrases would do well to beware of the memories of his children. A poet whose pieces cannot be forgotten may laugh at the critics. Altogether, our 'Translations and Paraphrases' are highly creditable to the literary taste and ability of the Church during the latter half of the last century; and it serves to show how very much matters changed in this respect in about forty years, that while in the earlier period the men fitted for such work were all to be found within the pale of the Church's ministry, at a later time, when the late Principal Baird set himself, with the sanction of the General Assembly, to devise means for adding to the collection, and for revising our metrical version of the Psalms, he had to look for assistance almost exclusively to poets outside the precincts of even its membership.

And yet, even at this later time, the Church had its true poets--poets who, though, according to Wordsworth, they 'wanted the accomplishment of verse,' were of larger calibre and greater depth than their predecessors. Chalmers had already produced his _Astronomical Discourses_, and poor Edward Irving had begun to electrify his London audiences with the richly antique imagination and fiery fervour of his singularly vigorous orations. Stewart of Cromarty, too, though but comparatively little known, was rising, in his quiet parish church, into flights of genuine though unmeasured poetry, of an altitude to which minor poets, in their nicely rounded stanzas, never attain. Nor is the race yet extinct. Jeffrey used to remark, that he found more true feeling in the prose of Jeremy Taylor than in the works of all the second-class British poets put together; and those who would now wish to acquaint themselves with the higher and more spirit-rousing poetry of our Church, would have to seek it within earshot of the pulpits of Bruce, of Guthrie, and of James Hamilton. Still, however, it ever affords us pleasure to find it in the more conventional form of classic and harmonious verse. A Church that possesses her poets gives at least earnest in the fact that she is not falling beneath the literature of her age; and much on this account, but more, we think, from their great intrinsic merit, have we been gratified by the perusal of a volume of poems which has just issued from the press under the name of one of our younger Free Church ministers, the Rev. James D. Burns. We are greatly mistaken if Mr. Burns be not a genuine poet, skilled, as becomes a scholar and a student of classic lore, in giving to his verse the true artistic form, but not the less born to inherit the 'vision and the faculty' which cannot be acquired. Most men of great talent have their poetic age: it is very much restricted, however, to the first five years of full bodily development, also particularly then a sterner and more prosaic mood follows. But recollections of the time survive; and it is mainly through the medium of these recollections that in the colder periods the feelings and visions of the poets continue to be appreciated and felt. It was said of Thomson the poet by Samuel Johnson, that he could not look at two candles burning other than poetically. The phrase was employed in conversation by _old_ Johnson; but it must have been the experience of _young_ Johnson, derived from a time long gone by, that suggested it. It is characteristic of the poetic age, that objects which in later life become commonplace in the mind, are then surrounded as if by a halo of poetic feeling. The candles were, no doubt, an extreme illustration; but there is scarce any object in nature, and there are very few in art, especially if etherealized by the adjuncts of antiquity or association, that are not capable of being thus, as it were, embathed in sentiment. With the true poet, the ability of investing every object with a poetic atmosphere remains undiminished throughout life; and we find it strikingly manifested in the volume before us. In almost every line in some of the pieces we find a distinct bit of picture steeped in poetic feeling. The following piece, peculiarly appropriate to the present time, we adduce as an illustration of our meaning:--

DISCOVERY OF THE NORTH-WEST PASSAGE.

'Strait of Ill Hope! thy frozen lips at last
Unclose, to teach our seamen how to sift
A passage where blue icebergs clash and drift,
And the shore loosely rattles in the blast.
We hold the secret thou hast clench'd so fast
For ages,--our best blood has earned the gift.--
Blood spilt, or hoarded up in patient thrift,
Through sunless months in ceaseless peril passed.
But what of daring Franklin? who may know
The pangs that wrung that heart so proud and brave,
In secret wrestling with its deadly woe,
And no kind voice to reach him o'er the wave?
Now he sleeps fast beneath his shroud of snow,
And the cold pole-star only knows his grave.

'Alone, on some sharp cliff, I see him strain,
O'er the white waste, his keen, sagacious eye,
Or scan the signs of the snow-muffled sky,
In hope of quick deliverance--but in vain;
Then, faring to his icy tent again,
To cheer his mates with a familiar smile,
And talk of home and kinsfolk to beguile
Slow hours which freeze the blood and numb the brain.
Long let our hero's memory be enshrined
In all true British hearts! He calmly stood
In danger's foremost rank, nor looked behind.
He did his work, not with the fever'd blood
Of battle, but with hard-tried fortitude;
In peril dauntless, and in death resigned.

'Despond not, Britain! Should this sacred hold
Of freedom, still inviolate, be assailed,
The high, unblenching spirit which prevailed
In ancient days, is neither dead nor cold.
Men are still in thee of heroic mould--
Men whom thy grand old sea-kings would have hailed
As worthy peers, invulnerably mailed,
Because by Duty's sternest law controlled.
Thou yet wilt rise and send abroad thy voice
Among the nations battling for the right,
In the unrusted armour of thy youth;
And the oppressed shall hear it and rejoice:
For on thy side is the resistless might
Of Freedom, Justice, and Eternal Truth!'

This is surely genuine poetry both in form and matter; as just in its thinking as it is vivid in its imagery and classic in its language. The vein of strong sense which runs through all the poetry of Mr. Burns, and imparts to it solidity and coherency, is, we think, not less admirable than the poetry itself, and is, we are sure, quite as little common. Let the reader mark how freely the thoughts arise in the following very exquisite little piece, written in Madeira, and suggested by the distant view of the neighbouring island of Porto Santo, one of the first colonized by the Portuguese adventurers of the fifteenth century. Columbus married a daughter of Bartolomeo Perestrillo, the first governor of the island, and after his marriage lived in it for some time with his father-in-law. And on this foundation Mr. Burns founds his poem:--

PORTO SANTO, AS SEEN FROM THE NORTH OF MADEIRA.

'Glance northward through the haze, and mark
That shadowy island floating dark
Amidst the seas serene:
It seems some fair enchanted isle,
Like that which saw Miranda's smile
When Ariel sang unseen.

'Oh happy, after all their fears,
Were those old Lusian mariners
Who hailed that land the first,
Upon whose seared and aching eyes,
With an enrapturing surprise,
Its bloom of verdure burst.

'Their anchor in a creek, shell-paven,
They dropped,--and hence "The Holy Haven"
They named the welcome land:
The breezes strained their masts no more,
And all around the sunny shore
Was summer, laughing bland.

'They wandered on through green arcade
Where fruits were hanging in the shades,
And blossoms clustering fair;
Strange gorgeous insects shimmered
And from the brakes sweet minstrelsy
Entranced the woodland air.

'Years passed, and to the island came
A mariner of unknown name,
And grave Castilian speech:
The spirit of a great emprise
Aroused him, and with flashing eyes
He paced the pebbled beach.

'What time the sun was sinking slow,
And twilight spread a rosy glow
Around its single star,
His eye the western sea's expanse
Would search, creating by its glance
Some cloudy land afar.

'He saw it when translucent even
Shed mystic light o'er earth and heaven,
Dim shadowed on the deep;
His fancy tinged each passing cloud
With the fine phantom, and he bowed
Before it in his sleep.

'He hears grey-bearded sailors tell
How the discoveries befell
That glorify their time;
"And forth I go, my friends," he cries,
"To a severer enterprise
Than tasked your glorious prime.

'"Time was when these green isles that stud
The expanse of this familiar flood,
Lived but in fancy fond.
Earth's limits--think you here they are?
Here has the Almighty fixed His bar,
Forbidding glance beyond?

'"Each shell is murmuring on the shore,
And wild sea-voices evermore
Are sounding in my ear:
I long to meet the eastern gale,
And with a free and stretching sail
Through virgin seas to steer.

'"Two galleys trim, some comrades stanch,
And I with hopeful heart would launch
Upon this shoreless sea.
Till I have searched it through and through.
And seen some far land looming blue,
My heart will not play free."

'Forth fared he through the deep to rove:
For months with angry winds he strove,
And passions fiercer still;
Until he found the long-sought land,
And leaped upon the savage strand
With an exulting thrill.