Chapter SIX: Men of Letters. Part I

George Buchanan is the first in time as he is one of the first in eminence of Scots men of letters. Many wrote before him; among the kings, James I. certainly, James V. possibly, and even yet they are worth reading by others than students. There is Gawin Douglas, the Bishop, there is Buchanan’s contemporary, Knox, the Reformer, whose work is classic, but they are not men of letters in the modern sense of the term. Buchanan is. Literature was his aim in life, and he lived by it indirectly if not directly. He is always to me a perplexing figure. How deep was his reforming zeal, how deep his beliefs, I cannot tell. I have read, I trust not without profit, Mr. Hume Brown’s two careful volumes upon this great Scot, but he has not solved my doubts. The old scholar was too learned, too travelled, too cultured to be in harmony with the Scotland of his day; a certain aloofness marks him, a stern and heroic rather than a human and sympathetic figure. You remember how consistently the British Solomon hated his sometime schoolmaster. Certain quaint anecdotes remain of their relations, but they have not to do with Edinburgh; yet he died in the capital, and in one or two memories that linger round those last hours you seem just at the end to get in real touch with the man, with the human figure under the cloak. In 1581 James Melville, the diarist, with certain friends, visited him in Edinburgh. They found him teaching the young man that served him: A, b, ab, and so forth. “I see you are not idle,” said one of the visitors in ironical astonishment, but he said it was better than idleness. They mentioned his _magnum opus_, his History of Scotland, the literary sensation of the day, if that day had literary sensations. He stopped them. “I may da nae mair for thinking on another matter.” “What is that?” says Mr. Andro. “To die,” quoth he.

They went to the printer’s to have a peep at the last sheets, just passing through the press, where they presently spied some plain-spoken words like to be highly unpalatable at Court. Again they sought the old scholar and spoke to him about them. “Tell me, man,” says he, “giff I have tould the truth.” His visitors were of the same views as himself, and they could not shirk so plain an issue. “Yes, sir,” says one of them, “I think sae.” Then says the old man sternly: “Let it remain, I will byde it, whatever happen. Pray, pray to God for me and let Him direct all.” A “Stoick” philosopher, says Melville, and so he proved to the end, which came on the 28th of September 1582, in Kennedy’s Close, the second close to the west of the Tron Kirk, and long since vanished. The day before he died he found that he had not enough money to pay for his funeral, but even this, he said, must be given to the poor, his body could fare for itself. Wisely provident for its own renown Edinburgh gave him a public funeral in the Greyfriars Churchyard. Tradition marked the spot for some time, and then a blacksmith put up a tablet at his own cost, but that too vanished, and one is not certain that the learned Dr. David Laing succeeded in fixing the true place. As we have seen, the University of Edinburgh possesses what is believed to be his skull. When Deacon Brodie stole the mace, this trophy did not come under his hand, or it had surely gone too.

No one could be less like George Buchanan than William Drummond of Hawthornden, born three years after the death of the other, save that he also was a man of letters, and that he also had intimate connection with Edinburgh. Hawthornden is one of the beauty spots near the capital. Here Ben Jonson paid him, in 1618-19, one of the most famous visits in all the history of letters. The story is that Drummond was seated under a huge sycamore tree when Jonson’s huge form hove in sight. The meeting of two poets needs must call forth a spark of poetry.

“Welcome! Welcome! royal Ben!
Thank ye kindly, Hawthornden!”

A little suspicious, you may think! Where did Ben Jonson learn to address a Scots laird in this peculiarly Scots fashion? After all, Ben’s forbears came from Annandale, and who that has seen Hawthornden will doubt here was the ideal spot for such an encounter? Drummond was a devoted cavalier; his death was caused or hastened by that of Charles I. He was buried by his favourite river in the neighbouring churchyard of Lasswade. He has written his own epitaph:

“Here Damon lies whose songs did sometime grace
The wandering Esk—may roses shade the place.”

The town of Edinburgh honoured itself and the two poets by a banquet, and in the next century Allan Ramsay honoured the pair in a more appropriate fashion. There was once a huge pile of buildings called the Luckenbooths, between St. Giles’ Church and the north side of the High Street. The building at the east end, afterwards known as Creech’s Land, from the bookseller who did business there, and who was locally famous as the Provost and is still remembered as Burns’s publisher, was occupied by Ramsay, and here, in 1725, he established the first circulating library ever known in Scotland. It would have been the last if godly Mr. Robert Wodrow and his fellows could have had their way, on account of “the villainous, profane, and obscene books of plays” it contained. You see they neither weighed nor minced words at the time. As sign Allan stuck over the door the heads of Drummond of Hawthornden and Ben Jonson.

Scots literature was altogether on the side of the Crown, or one should rather say of the Stuarts. Who so stout a Jacobite as Allan, in words, at any rate? In deeds it was quite otherwise: you never hear of him in the ’45. His copious muse that could throw off a popular ballad on the instant was silent during that romantic occupation of Edinburgh by the young Ascanius. It was prudence that saved him. He was a Jacobite and so against the powers that were, but he took no hurt; he was given to theatrical speculation and he did burn his fingers over an abortive business in that Carrubber’s Close which has now a reputation far other, yet he came to no harm in the end, even if it be true that his prosperous painter son had finally to discharge some old debts. We have seen the view of the godly anent the books he sold or lent, and yet he dodged their wrath; but I wonder most of all how he escaped a drunkard’s death. Who knew better that grimy, witty, sordidly attractive, vanished Edinburgh underworld of tavern and oyster-cellar—and worse? _The Gentle Shepherd_ is all very well, and the _Tea-Table Miscellany_, with its sentimental faking up of old Scots songs, is often very ill, though you cannot deny its service to Scots literature; but not there is the real Allan to be found. He minces and quibbles no longer when he sings the praises of umquhile Maggie Johnson, who kept that famous “howf” on Bruntsfield links.

“There we got fou wi’ little cost
And muckle speed.
Now wae worth Death! our sport’s a’ lost
Since Maggy’s dead!”

Nor is his elegy on Luckie Wood of the Canongate less hearty.

“She ne’er gae in a lawin fause,
Nor stoups a’ froath aboon the hause,
Nor kept dow’d tip within her waws,
But reaming swats.
She ne’er ran sour jute, because
It gees the batts.”

Unfortunately I cannot follow him in his lamentation over John Cowper or Luckie Spence, or dwell on the part those worthies played in old Edinburgh life. An’ you be curious you must consult the original—unexpurgated. Let us quote our Allan on at least a quotable topic.

“Then fling on coals and ripe the ribs,
And beek the house baith but and ben,
That mutchkin stoup it hauds but dribs,
Then let’s get in the tappit hen.

Good claret best keeps out the cauld,
And drives away the winter sune;
It makes a man baith gash and bauld,
And heaves his saul beyond the mune.”

Among drinking-songs it would be hard to beat these lines for vigour. Did he quaff as heartily as he sang? I think not, probably his comrades shouted “pike yer bane” to no purpose (he would have translated it to an English admirer as “no heel taps”) to this little “black-a-vised” man with his nightcap for head-dress, and his humorous, contented, appreciative smile. The learned Thomas Ruddiman, his fellow-townsman and fellow-Jacobite, used to say “The liquor will not go down” when urged to yet deeper potations; perhaps Allan escaped with some such quip, at least there is no touch of dissipation about his life, nay, a well-founded reputation for honest, continuous, and prosperous industry. In the end he built that famous house on the Castle Hill, called, from its quaint shape, the “Goose Pie.” “Indeed, Allan, now that I see you in it I think the term is very properly applied,” said Lord Elibank. The joke was obvious and inevitable, but for all that rather pointless, unless it be that Ramsay affected a little folly now and then to escape envy or a too pressing hospitality. However, he lived reputably, died a prosperous citizen, and his is one of the statues you see to-day in the Princes Street Gardens.

Although Buchanan was one of the greatest scholars of his time in Europe, he was not the founder of a race in minute points of classical scholarship, especially in correct quantities of Latin syllables. Scotland was long lacking, perhaps the reason was the want of rich endowments, but Dr. Archibald Pitcairne (1652-1713), the physician, the Jacobite, and the scholar, had another reason: “If it had not been for the stupid Presbyterianism we should have been as good as the English at longs and shorts.” Oddly enough, the same complaint was echoed within the national Zion itself. Dalzel, Professor of Greek and Clerk to the General Assembly, was, according to Sydney Smith, heard to declare, “If it had not been for that Solemn League and Covenant we should have made as good longs and shorts as they.” Before I pass from Pitcairne I quote a ludicrous story of which he is the hero. His sceptical proclivities were well known in Edinburgh, and he was rarely seen inside a church. He was driven there, however, on one occasion by a shower of rain. The audience was thin, the sermon commonplace, but the preacher wept copiously and, as it seemed to Pitcairne, irrelevantly. He turned to the only other occupant of the pew, a stolid-visaged countryman, and whispered, “What the deevil gars the man greet?” “You would maybe greet yoursel’,” was the solemn answer, “if ye was up there and had as little to say.”

I pass from one sceptic to another—one might say from one age to another. Edinburgh, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, according to Smollett’s famous phrase, was a “hotbed of genius.” When Amyot, the King’s dentist, was in Edinburgh he said, as he stood at the Cross, that he could any minute take fifty men of genius by the hand. Of this distinguished company David Hume was the chief. To what extent this historian, philosopher, sceptic, is now read, we need not inquire; he profoundly influenced European thought, and gave a system of religious philosophy the deadliest blow it ever received. He was a prominent and interesting figure, and many and various are the legends about him. What were his real religious beliefs, if he had any, remains uncertain. He was hand in glove with “Jupiter” Carlyle, Principal Robertson, Dr. Hugh Blair, and other leading moderates. They thought his scepticism was largely pretence, mere intellectual bounce, so to speak; they girded at his unreasonable departure from the normal, and indeed Carlyle takes every opportunity of thrusting at him on this account. The Edinburgh folk regarded him with solemn horror. The mother of Adam, the architect, who was also aunt to Principal Robertson, had much to say against the ‘atheist,’ whom she had never seen. Her son played her a trick. Hume was asked to the house and set down beside her. She declared “the large jolly man who sat next me was the most agreeable of them all.” “He was the very atheist, mother,” said the son, “that you were so much afraid of.” “Oh,” replied the lady, “bring him here as much as you please, for he is the most innocent, agreeable, facetious man I ever met with.” His scepticism was subject for his friends’ wit and his own. He heard Carlyle preach in Athelstaneford Church. “I did not think that such heathen morality would have passed in East Lothian.” One day when he sat in the Poker Club it was mentioned that a clerk of Sir William Forbes, the banker, had bolted with £900. When he was taken, there was found in one pocket Hume’s _Treatise on Human Nature_ and in the other Boston’s _Fourfold State of Man_, this latter being a work of evangelical theology. His moderate friends presently suggested that no man’s morality could hold out against the combination. Dr. Jardine of the Tron Kirk vigorously argued with him on various points of theology, suggested by Hume’s _Natural History of Religion_. His friend, like most folk in Edinburgh, lived in a flat off a steep turnpike stair, down which Hume fell one night in the darkness. Jardine got a candle and helped the panting philosopher to his feet. Your old Edinburgh citizen never could resist the chance of a cutting remark. The divine was no exception. “Davy, I have often tell’t ye that ‘natural licht’ is no’ sufficient.” Like Socrates, he hid his wit under an appearance of simplicity. His own mother’s opinion of him was: “Davy’s a fine, good-natured crater, but uncommon wake-minded.” He had his weaknesses, undoubtedly. Lord Saltoun said to him, referring to his credulity, “David, man, you’ll believe onything except the Bible,” but like other Scotsmen of his time he did not believe overmuch in Shakespeare. In 1757 he thus addresses the author of _Douglas_: “You possess the true theatrical genius of Shakespeare and Otway, refined from the barbarisms of the one, and the licentiousness of the other.” Put beside this Burns’s famous and fatuous line: “Here Douglas forms wild Shakespeare into plan,” and what can you do but shudder? When young, he had paid his court to a lady of fashion, and had met with scant courtesy. He was told afterwards that she had changed her mind. “So have I,” said the philosopher. On another occasion he was more gallant. Crossing the Firth in a gale he said to Lady Wallace, who was in the boat, that they would soon be food for the fishes. “Will they eat you or me?” said the lady. “Ah,” was the answer, “those that are gluttons will undoubtedly fall foul of me, but the epicure will attack your ladyship.” David, like the fishes he described, was a bit of an epicure of the simplest kind. He would sup with his moderate friends in Johnny Dowie’s tavern in Libberton’s Wynd. On the table lay his huge door-key, wherewith his servant, Peggy, had been careful to provide him that she might not have to rise to let him in. After all, the friends did not sit very late, and the supper was some simple Scots dish—haddock, or tripe, or fluke, or pies, or it might be trout from the Nor’ Loch, for Dowie’s was famous for these little dainties. But the talk! Would you match it in modern Edinburgh with all its pomp and wealth? I trow not—perhaps not even in mightier London.

The story is threadbare of how he was stuck in a bog under the Castle rock, and was only helped out by a passing Edinburgh dame on condition that he would say the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed. More witty and more probable, though perhaps as well known, is the following: In the last years of his life he deserted the Old Town for the New. He had a house at the corner of St. Andrew Square, in a street as yet anonymous. “St. David Street” chalked up a witty young lady, Miss Nancy Ord, daughter of Chief Baron Ord, and St. David Street it is to this day. His servant, in a state of indignation, brought him the news. “Never mind, lassie, many a better man has been made a saint without knowing it,” said the placid philosopher. A female member of a narrow sect called upon him near the end with an alleged message from Heaven. “This is an important matter. Madam, we must take it with deliberation. Perhaps you had better get a little temporal refreshment before you begin.—Lassie, bring this young lady a glass of wine.” As she drank, he in his turn questioned, and found that the husband was a tallow-chandler. How fortunate, for he was out of candles! He gave an order, the woman forgot the message, and rushed off to fulfil it. Hume, you fancy, had a quiet chuckle at his happy release. He was a great friend of Mrs. Mure, wife of Baron Mure, and was a frequent visitor at their house at Abbeyhill, near Holyrood. On his death-bed he sent to bid her good-bye. He gave her his _History of England_. “O, Dauvid, that’s a book ye may weel be proud o’! but before ye dee ye should burn a’ yer wee bookies,” to which the philosopher, with difficulty raising himself on his arms, was only able to reply with some little show of vehemence, “_What for_ should I burn a’ my wee bookies?” But he was too weak to argue such points; he pressed the hand of his old friend as she rose to depart. When his time came he went quietly, contentedly, even gladly, regretted by saint and sceptic alike. If Carlyle girded at him, his intimate friend, Adam Smith, who might almost dispute his claim to mental eminence, pictured him forth in those days as the perfectly wise man, so far as human imperfections allowed. The piety or caution of his friends made them watch the grave for some eight nights after the burial. The vigil began at eight o’clock, when a pistol was fired, and candles in a lanthorn were placed on the grave and tended from time to time. Some violation was feared, for a wild legend of Satanic agency had flashed on the instant through the town. Hume has no monument in Edinburgh, crowded as she is with statues of lesser folk; but the accident of position and architecture has in this, as in other cases, produced a striking if undesigned result. From one cause or another the valley is deeper than of yore, and the simple round tower that marks Hume’s grave in the Calton burying-ground crowns a half-natural, half-artificial precipice. It is seen with effect from various points: thus you cannot miss it as you cross the North Bridge. Some memory of this great thinker still projects itself into the trivial events of the modern Edinburgh day.

Of Hume’s friend and companion, Adam Smith, there are various anecdotes, more or less pointed, bearing on his oblivious or maybe contemptuous indifference to the ordinary things of life. The best and best known tells how, as he went with shuffling gait and vacant look, a Musselburgh fishwife stared at him in amazement. “Hech, and he is weel put on tae.” It seemed to her a pity that so well-dressed a simpleton was not better looked after. No amount of learning helps you in a crowded street. The wisdom of the ancients reports that Thales, wrapt in contemplation of the stars, walked into a well and thus ended. Adam Smith’s grave is in a dark corner of the Canongate Churchyard; it is by no means so prominent as Hume’s, nay, it takes some searching to discover. When I saw it last I found it neglected and unvisited alike by economic friends and foes.

Among Hume’s intimate cronies was Dr. Carlyle of Inveresk, whose _Autobiography_ preserves for us the best record of the men of his time. “The grandest demigod I ever saw,” says Sir Walter Scott, “commonly called Jupiter Carlyle, from having sat more than once for the King of gods and men to Gavin Hamilton, and a shrewd, clever old carle he was, no doubt, but no more a poet than his precentor.” This last is apropos of some rhyming of Carlyle’s as bad as rhymes can possibly be. In 1758 Carlyle and Principal Robertson and John Home were together in London; they went down to Portsmouth and aboard the _Ramilies_, the warship in the harbour, where was Lieut. Nelson, a cousin of Robertson’s. The honest sailor expressed his astonishment in deliciously comical terms: “God preserve us! what has brought the Presbytery of Edinburgh here? for damme me if there is not Willy Robertson, Sandie Carlyle, and John Home come on board.” He soon had them down in the cabin, however, and treated them to white wine and salt beef. A jolly meal, you believe, for divines or sceptics, philosophers or men of letters or business, those old Edinburgh folk had a common and keen enjoyment of life. Certainly Carlyle had. Dr. Lindsay Alexander of Augustine Church, Edinburgh, remembered as a child hearing one of the servants say of this divine, “There he gaed, dacent man, as steady as a wa’ after his ain share o’ five bottles o’ port.” Home by this time was no longer a minister of the Church. He had thrown up his living in the previous year on account of the famous row about the once famous tragedy of _Douglas_. He still had a hankering after the General Assembly, where, if he could no longer sit as teaching elder, he might as ruling elder, because he was Conservator of Scots privileges at Campvere, but he was something else; he was lieutenant in the Duke of Buccleuch’s Fencibles, and as such had a right to attire himself in a gorgeous uniform, and it was so incongruously adorned that he took his seat in that reverend house. The country ministers stared with all their eyes, and one of them exclaimed, “Sure, that is John Home the poet! What is the meaning of that dress?” “Oh,” said Mr. Robert Walker of Edinburgh, “it is only the farce after the play.”

Eminent lawyers who are also industrious, and even eminent writers, were a feature of the time, but of them I have already spoken and there is little here to add. Monboddo had a remarkable experience in his youth; the very day, in 1736, he returned to Edinburgh from studying abroad he heard at nightfall a commotion in the street. In nightdress and slippers he stepped from the door and was borne along by a wild mob, not a few of whom were attired as strangely as himself. It was that famous affair of Captain Porteous, and, _nolens volens_, he needs must witness that sordid yet picturesque tragedy whose incidents, you are convinced, he never forgot, and often, as an old man, retailed to a newer generation.

Like many another Scots lawyer, Lord Kames had a keen love for the land, keener in his case because it had come to him from his forbears; but his zeal was not always according to knowledge. One of the “fads” of the time was a wonderful fertilising powder. He told one of his tenants that he would be able to carry the manure of an acre of land in his coat pocket, “And be able to bring back the crop in yer waistcoat pouch?” was the crushing reply. He would have his joke, cruel and wicked, at any cost. To him belongs the well-nigh incredible story of a murder trial at Ayr in 1780. He knew the accused and had played chess with him. “That’s checkmate for you, Matthie,” he chuckled in ungodly glee when the verdict was recorded. This story, by the way, used to be told of Braxfield, to whom it clearly does not belong, and one wished it did not belong to Kames either. He spared himself as little as he did others. He lived in New Street, an early old-time improvement on the north side of the Canongate, and from there he went to the Parliament House in a sedan chair. One morning, near the end, he was being helped into it, for he was old and infirm, when James Boswell crossed his path. Jamie was always in one scrape or the other, but this time you fancy he had done something specially notorious. “I shall shortly be seeing your father,” said Kames (old Auchinleck had died that year (1782), as on the 27th of December did Kames himself); “have you any message for him? Shall I tell him how you are getting on?” You imagine his diabolical grin and Bozzy’s confused answer.

Beside these quaint figures Lord Hailes, with his ponderous learning, is a mere Dry-as-dust antiquary—the dust lies ever deeper over his many folios; of his finical exactness there still linger traditions in the Parliament House. It is said he dismissed a case because a word was wrongly spelt in one of the numbers of process. Thus he earned himself a couplet in the once famous _Court of Session Garland_.

“To judge of this matter I cannot pretend,
For justice, my Lords, wants an ‘e’ at the end.”

So wrote Boswell, himself, though he only partly belongs to Edinburgh, not the least interesting figure of our period. There is more than one story of him and Kames. The judge had playfully suggested that Boswell should write his biography! How devoutly you wish he had. What an entertaining and famous book it had been! but perhaps he had only it in him to do one biography, and we know how splendid _that_ was. Poor Bozzy once complained to the old judge that even he, Bozzy himself, was occasionally dull. “Homer sometimes nods,” said Kames in a reassuring tone, but with a grin that promised mischief. The other looked as pleased as possible till the old cynic went on: “Indeed, sir, it is the only chance you have of resembling him.” Old Auchinleck, his father, was horrified at his son’s devotion to Johnson. “Jamie has gaen clean gyte. What do you think, man? He’s done wi’ Paoli—he’s aff wi’ the land-loupin’ scoondrel o’ a Corsican. Whae’s tail do ye think he has preened himsel’ tae noo? A dominie man—an auld dominie who keepit a schule and caa’ed it an Acaademy!” In fact, the great Samuel pleased none of the Boswell clan except Boswell and Boswell’s baby daughter. Auchinleck had many caustic remarks even after he had seen the sage: “He was only a dominie, and the worst-mannered dominie I ever met.” So much for the father. The wife was not more favourable: “She had often seen a bear led by a man, but never till now had she seen a man led by a bear.” Afterwards, when the famous biography was published, the sons were horribly ashamed both of it and of him. Bozzy has given us so much amusement—we recognise his inimitable literary touch—that we are rather proud of and grateful to him; but then, we don’t look at the matter with the eyes of his relatives.

Johnson was himself in Edinburgh. You remember how he arrived in February 1773 at Boyd’s Whitehorse Inn off St. Mary’s Wynd, not the more famous Inn of that name in the Whitehorse Close down the Canongate; how angry he was with the waiter for lifting with his dirty paw the sugar to put in his lemonade; how, in the malodorous High Street, he pleasantly remarked to Boswell, “I smell you in the dark”; how, as he listened at Holyrood to the story of the Rizzio murder, he muttered a line of the old ballad _Johnnie Armstrong’s last good-night_—“And ran him through the fair bodie.” They took him to the Royal Infirmary, and he noted the inscription “Clean your feet.” “Ah,” said he, “there is no occasion for putting this at the doors of your churches.” The gibe was justified; he had just looked in at St. Giles’, then used for every strange civic purpose, and plastered and twisted about to every strange shape. Most interesting to me is that Sunday morning, 15th August 1773, when Bozzy and Principal Robertson toiled with him up the College Wynd to see the University, and passed by Scott’s birthplace. The Wizard of the North was then two years old, and who could guess that his fame in after years would be greater than that of those three eminent men of letters put together? In this strange remote way do epochs touch one another. No wonder Bozzy’s relatives got tired of his last hobby, his very subject himself got tired. “Sir,” said the sage, “you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both.” Yet Bozzy knew what he was about when he stuck to his one topic. After his idol was gone, what was there for him but the bottle? It was one of the earliest recollections of Lord Jeffrey that he had assisted as a boy in putting the biographer to bed in a state of absolute unconsciousness. Next morning Boswell was told of the service rendered: he clapped the lad on the head, and complacently congratulated him. “If you go on as you’ve begun, you may live to be a Bozzy yourself yet.” And so much bemused the greatest of biographers vanishes from our sight.