David Masson

“ If there ever was a soul of sunshine and cheerfulness, of universal blandness and good fellowship, it was that with which Walter Scott came into the world. When Carlyle was born, twenty-four years afterwards, it was as if the Genius of Literature in Scotland, knowing that vein to have been amply provided for, and abhorring duplicates, had tried almost the opposite variety, and sent into the world a soul no less richly endowed, and stronger in the speculative part, but whose cardinal peculiarity should be despondency, discontentedness, and sense of pain. ”

“ Looked back upon now through the dense radiance of the subsequent history of the University of Edinburgh, expanded as that University has been in the course of centuries into its present four-facultied completeness, each faculty of larger dimensions than Rollock could ever have dreamt of, and each with its memories of scores or hundreds of more or less shining celebrities that have belonged to it in past generations, Rollock himself, it must be admitted, dwindles into a mere telescopic star. ”

“ Not the less it is depressing to Scottish patriotism nowadays to remember how long the turmoil lasted, how all-engrossing it was, and how much of native faculty and aspiration of the finer, deeper, and quieter sorts it must have stifled and extinguished. For the first twenty years after the Reformation there is the compensation, indeed, of the oratory and pre-eminent prose energy of Knox, and of the great literary fame and exquisite Latinity of Buchanan; but from the year 1580 onwards till 1725, or thereabouts, what a long tract of sterility in the literary annals of Scotland! ”

“ One of the most interesting men in Edinburgh during Carlyle’s eighteen months at Comely Bank was Sir William Hamilton. The name of Sir William, and his reputation for universal erudition and for devotion to philosophy and metaphysics, had been known to Carlyle from the later days of his studentship in Edinburgh University. In then passing the house where Sir William lived, and seeing the light burning in Sir William’s room late at nights, he would think to himself: “Ay, there is a real scholar, a man of the right sort, busy with his books and speculations!” ”

“ It may now without arrogance be asserted that German Literature has effected much for humanity in this respect,—that a moral-psychological tendency pervades it, introducing not ascetic timidity, but free culture in accordance with nature, and a cheerful obedience to law; and therefore I have observed with pleasure Mr. Carlyle’s admirably profound study of this Literature, and I have noticed with sympathy how he has not only been able to discover the beautiful and human, the good and great, in us, but has also contributed what was his own, and has endowed us with the treasures of his genius. ”

“ What was there anywhere over the rest of Scotland in the shape of new literary product that could then compete with the novelties that came from that cluster of “makars” and men of genius,—Dunbar, Gavin Douglas, and Sir David Lindsay the three best remembered of them,—whose habitual residence was in Edinburgh, and whose figures were to be seen daily in the picturesque long slope of the High Street and the Canongate which connects the ancient Castle with the venerable Holyrood? ”

“ All in all, then, need we wonder at the rumour that there are some persons in Edinburgh now so peculiarly tempered, or so ill-satisfied with their present mercies, that they would be willing to exchange any three or four of those whom they are pleased to characterise as the more insipid present celebrities of the town for the re-apparition among us of that crabbed old gentleman who was to be seen forty years ago in the Edinburgh streets, with his light-brown wig, faded blue surtout, ribbon-tied pumps, and green silk umbrella? ”

“ Of the younger men of Edinburgh then entering life who afterwards rose to be something in the world’s eye, Scott alone, remarks Lord Cockburn, was unmistakably a Tory. The exception is certainly a weighty one; and there are some,—myself among them,—who would willingly take one Walter Scott at any time as a sufficient offset against a Jeffrey, a Horner, a Sydney Smith, a Brougham, an Allen, a Thomas Brown, and a Tom Campbell, all put together. If the standard of judgment, however, is to be that of the right and the wrong in politics, this will hardly be now the general opinion. ”

“ What we may call the Scotticism of Scott,—that special passion for all that appertained to the land of brown heath and shaggy wood, that affection for Scottish themes and legends in preference to all others, which he had impressed upon Scottish Literature so strongly that its perpetuation threatens to become a restriction and a narrowness, was the chief inspiration of many of those Scottish writers who came after him, in Edinburgh or elsewhere. ”

“ Frequently, even in sunny weather, when the sky is blue above, a haze overspreads the Firth, concealing the Fifeshire shore, or blurring it into a vague cloud-like bank. Sometimes, on the other hand, when there is little sunshine, and the day seems rather sombre in the Edinburgh streets, the view of the Firth and of the other surroundings of the city from any of the higher spots is amazingly distinct to the utmost possible distance, though with the distinctness of a drawing in pen and ink. ”

“ Many of the younger Edinburgh generation, however, that knew nothing of him personally in his prime, must have a vivid recollection of casual glimpses of him in those still recent years, when his stooping, eccentric figure, very untidily dressed, and with the most battered and back-hanging of hats, would be seen pushing rapidly along Princes Street, or some other thoroughfare, with a look that seemed to convey the decided intimation: “Don’t stop me; I care for none of you.” ”

“ All over the island Whigs and Tories alike were in a ferment of volunteering and drilling for resistance to the French when they should land; and was it not a Whig admiral that, having won for all Britain the glory, willingly bequeathed to a Tory Government the usufruct, of the great battle of Trafalgar? People were at no leisure to listen with sufficient attention at such a time to expositions of the superiority of Whig principles, even from such an organ as the Edinburgh Review. ”

“ A better class of persons, too, are to be found here and there,—a sober, discreet, logic-loving, moderately well-informed class: with these I can talk and enjoy myself; but only talk as from an upper window to people in the street; into the house (of my spirit) I cannot admit them; and the unwise wonderment they exhibit when I do but show them the lobby warns me to lose no time in again slamming-to the door. But what of society? Round our own hearth is society enough, with a blessing. I read books, or, like the Roman poet and so many British ones, ‘disport on paper’ ”

“ How laughingly it opens; with what fun and rollick we follow the two boys in their scamper through the Edinburgh streets sixty years ago after the hullabaloo of the dog-fight near the Tron Kirk! What a sensation on our first introduction, in the Cowgate, under the South Bridge, to the great Rab, the carrier’s dog, rambling about idly “as if with his hands in his pockets,” till the little bull-terrier that has been baulked of his victory in the former fight insanely attacks him and finds the consequence! ”

“ Hence those glances from heaven to earth and to the underworld which earth conceals, those shafts of reasoned insight into the roots of all things, those lightning gleams of speculation to its last extreme, that wealth of maxims of worldly prudence outrivalling and double-distilling the essence of all that is in Bacon’s Essays, those hints and reaches towards an ultimate philosophy both of nature and of human life, which have made Shakespeare’s writings till now, and will make them henceforth, a perennial amazement. ”

“ The irregular ridge of the Old Town, with its main street of lofty antique houses rising gradually from Holyrood up to the craggy Castle; the chasm between the Old Town and the New, showing grassy slopes by day, and glittering supernaturally with lamps at night; the New Town itself, like a second city spilt out of the Old, fairly built of stone, and stretching downwards over new heights and hollows, with gardens intermixed, till it reaches the flats of the Forth! ”

“ A zealot in Scottish antiquities and editor of some Scottish historical books, an occasional scribbler also in other and semi-private ways on his own account, a dilettante in art and collector of pictures and engravings, a facile master of the pencil in portrait and whimsical caricature, a Tory of the most pronounced old type and hater of everything Whiggish in the past or the present, he was notorious above all as a Sir Mungo Malagrowther redivivus, delighting in scandalous anecdote and reminiscence, and in a habit of cynical sarcasm on all sorts of persons, living or dead. ”

“ Lord Cockburn, as became a nephew speaking of an uncle, is even more enthusiastic in his descriptions. “Handsome, gentlemanlike, frank, cheerful, and social,” says Lord Cockburn, “he was a favourite with most men, and with all women”; “too much a man of the world not to live well with his opponents when they would let him, and totally incapable of personal harshness or unkindness.” “He was,” continues Lord Cockburn, “the very man for Scotland at that time, and is a Scotchman of whom his country may be proud.” ”

“ Whether in one of the piazzas or in both, one has but to imagine the litter that would be left on market days, and to add that to the litter disgorged into the street upwards from the closes, or flung down into the street from the fore-stairs, to see that a good deal of Dunbar’s earlier description must be allowed to descend through Lindsay’s intermediate and more gorgeous one, as still true of the ordinary Edinburgh of the date of Queen Mary’s return.
No one really knows a city who does not know it by night as well as by day. ”

“ O the old Scottish times of the lairds, the “moderate” ministers, the provosts and the bailies!—the lairds speaking broad Scotch, farming their own lands, carousing together, seeing their daughters married, and writing to London for appointments for their sons; the “moderate” ministers making interest for their sons, preaching “Blair and cauld morality” on Sundays, and jogging to christenings or to Presbytery dinners through the week; the provosts and bailies in their shops in the forenoon, or meeting in the morning at their “deid-chack” after a man was hanged! ”

“ No chance then, from any height near Edinburgh, of seeing the ships and steamers in any part of their course from the mouth of the Firth to the port of Leith. If any there be, they are down in the vast abysm of mist, at anchor for safety, or piloting their Leithward course slowly and cautiously through the opaque element, with bells ringing, horns blowing, and now and then a boom from the cannon on the deck to warn off other vessels or ascertain their own whereabouts. ”

“ No such poetry of artist-like delight in beauty of scenery, the soft and luscious in colour, form, language, and sound, pervaded at the same time by such a fine and high vein of pensive reflectiveness, had appeared in Scotland for many a day. ”

“ A belated traveller passing through the hamlets that once straggled on the grounds of the present New Town, and arriving at the edge of the North Loch, in what is now the valley of Princes Street Gardens, must have looked up across the Loch to much the same twinkling embankment of the High Street and its closes, and to much the same serrated sky-line, lowering itself eastward from the shadowy mass of the Castle Rock. ”

“ John Brown, however, are hardly criticisms in the ordinary sense. No canons of Art are expounded or applied in them. All that the critic does is to stand, as it were, before the particular picture he is criticising,—a Wilkie, a Raeburn, a Turner, a Landseer, a Delaroche, a Holman Hunt, or, as it might happen, some new performance by one of his Edinburgh artist-friends, Duncan, Sir George Harvey, or Sir Noel Paton,—exclaiming “How good this is, how true, how powerful, how pathetic!” ”

“ Moreover, the eighty thousand people who were in Edinburgh when Henry Dundas ruled Scotland were people of a rather peculiar, and yet rather superior, mixture of sorts. There never has been any very large amount of trade or of manufacture in Edinburgh, nor much of the wealth or bustle that arises from trade and manufacture. For the roar of mills and factories, and for a society ranging correspondingly from the great millionaire uppermost to crowds of operatives below, all toiling in the pursuit of wealth, one must go to Glasgow. ”

“ Any day yet, while the courts are in session, the Parliament House, with its long oaken ante-room, where scores of barristers in their wigs and gowns, accompanied by writers in plainer costume, are incessantly pacing up and down, and its smaller inner chambers, where the judges on the bench, in their crimson robes, are trying cases, is the most characteristic sight in Edinburgh. ”

“ We need to remind ourselves constantly that this kind of knowledge puffeth up, and that it is something quite else that buildeth up. It has been finely said that Nature is the Art of God, and we may as truly say that all Art,—in the widest sense, as practical and productive,—is His Science. He knows all that goes to the making of everything; for He is Himself, in the strictest sense, the only maker. He knows what made Shakespeare and Newton, Julius Cæsar and Plato, what we know them to have been ”

“ With all his studies, all the development of his great intellect, all his strength in humour and in the wit and insight which a lively sense of the ludicrous confers, he had not outgrown this stubborn gloominess of character, but had brought it into those comparatively mature years of his Edinburgh life with which we are now concerned. His despondency, indeed, seems then to have been at its very worst. ”

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