John Buchan

“ But the earl has something of a wild cleverness, far exceeding the ponderous stupidity of the Cavaliero Jackasso." A bore is frequently a wit out of season, and when "wild cleverness" is joined with an egotism beyond Sir Willoughby Patterne's, and the whole with utter tactlessness and the persistence of the horse-leech, the result is tragic for a man's friends.
Vanity will always provide for the perpetuation of its features. Buchan's busts and portraits are scattered broadcast throughout Scotland. ”

“ He was magnificent, but with a prudent aim; a lover of letters, with little real aptitude and an uncertain taste; a radical, with the soundest Tory instincts; a Scot, but itching always to be esteemed cosmopolitan; a parochial magnate, yet with an eye on the two hemispheres. A laughingstock to his contemporaries and a bore to his friends, his egotism shielded him from pain, and he lived happily among his books and prints and stuccoed gardens.
John Buchan.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929. ”

“ For the rest of his long life Buchan was content to remain a Scots magnate, and confine his energies to his own corner of the land. At first he lived in Edinburgh, at a house in St. Andrew Square, but in 1786 he bought the estate of Dryburgh, and retired to Tweedside. His ambition was to be a Scots Mæcenas, and for this he must have his country villa. Here he filled the part of the great man in retreat, cultivating his hobbies, maintaining a huge correspondence, and issuing now and then to patronize Edinburgh society. ”

“ The Buchan family was Whig, and in this poor nobleman there was a strain of genuine radical independence, which in his greater brothers made the Lord Chancellor Erskine the friend of the Revolution and the foe of prerogative, and Harry Erskine the "advocate of the people." He did his best to reform the method of electing Scots peers, and in 1780 published a "Speech intended to be spoken at the Meeting of the Peers for Scotland for the General Election of Her Representatives, in which a plan is proposed for the better Representation of the Peerage of Scotland." ”

“ Sometimes we catch the note of a very modern sensibility which is out of place: "Wherefore my father, with a smile of amiable complacency and strict intelligence of my thought, did thus with great condescension apply himself to the train of my reflections." Among the Literary Olla he has a curious discussion of the character of a gentleman, in which he limits the application of the title to landed proprietors. He seems to have hated the young man about town with all the bitterness of a poor Scots magnate. ”

“ The same insane pride of family which produced the Pantochronoxanon finds its parallel in the Erskine pedigrees. But Buchan was less mythologically and scripturally inclined. His ambitions did not reach to King Arthur, Hercules, Hypermnestra, and Noah; sufficient for him a decent Scots descent. Both had their imagination hagridden by historic figures: Urquhart by the Admirable Crichton, Buchan by half a score of heroes. He always thinks of himself in a historic setting, cutting a fine figure after some accepted pattern: sometimes it is Helvidius Priscus, or Brutus, or Pliny, or Lord Bacon ”

“ Elsewhere Sir Walter has sketched the character of the dead. He had a Tory dislike of the Erskine politics, and in particular he could never abide the lord chancellor, so it is possible that his judgment of the Mæcenas who was so unlike the others is more tolerant than critical. "Lord Buchan is dead," he wrote, "a person whose immense vanity, bordering upon insanity, obscured, or rather eclipsed, very considerable talent. His imagination was so fertile that he seemed really to believe the extraordinary things he delighted in telling. ”

“ Is every great man's faith;
But he, the helpless, needful wretch.
Shall lose the mite he hath."
Which is perhaps scarcely fair, for in all Buchan's folly there was little of this vulgarity. The Erskines had learned the lessons of adversity too well in their own lives to be mere patrons of success. Later Burns seems to have forgotten his bitterness, for he sent a copy of "Scots wha hae," and a respectful and somewhat dithyrambic letter on the beauties of liberty,—which must indeed have charmed our gentleman's heart, for such fine sentiments were meat and drink to the dilettante radical. ”

“ There are tendencies and movements enough to please the most philosophic. There are sounding wars over the whole globe for the tactician, and there are essays in reform for the constitutionalist; and above all, there is the social life, where elegance reached its perfection, from Sir Pertinax and Lady Prue under Queen Anne to the Whig salons, the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire, and the court of Carleton House. ”

“ His manner is sensibility run mad, as witness this sketch of the young Alathea:—
"Mamma, said Alathea one day, what is the reason that my pretty crested hen has forgotten her chickens that she was so fond of long ago, and is going along, like a fool, with the ducklings? My dear, I will tell you how this happens: the hen-wife cheated her, and put the duck's eggs into her nest, and she thought the eggs were her own and hatched them; by and by the ducks will take the water, and the hen will forsake them. ”

“ Swift, Atterbury, and Hume, on the other hand, "remain in our age possessed of the chaste propriety and dignity of those who have set up the Greek historians for their models." "How glorious," he exclaims, "would it be for a band of such men to associate in Britain for chastising the meretricious innovators, who are encouraged by the tasteless people of the age to enervate our language and our manners!" But when we come to the Bacon imitations we find a really tolerable level of excellence. ”

“ The first and most earnest of the earl's hobbies was the cultivation of his own domains. He published in the Bee some curious essays on the art of idleness, in which the hero is invariably a gentleman of good family, who, after racketing in town, repents of his ways, and returns to respectability and agriculture. ”

“ To one who loves the bypaths and blind alleys of character there are some periods which have a fascination above others. A biographer's judgment of an epoch is not that of the serious historian. Certain centuries are museums of instructive tendencies and movements, where every hero is a type to be analyzed and docketed ”

“ Rise up, my fair ones, and come away; for, lo! the winter is past, the rain is over and gone the flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land." Then comes a vivid little piece of genre painting, though to be sure the style is execrable, and the essay concludes with a kind of farmer's diary, exactly in the Selborne manner. His Letters in Imitation of the Ancients have the same honest country note amid their sham classicalism. ”

“ They, then, go abroad, to take what is called the tour of Europe, with a selfish, slavish, pedantic compagnon de voyage, commonly called a leader of bears; and after having played monkey tricks at all the fashionable courts in Europe, and been plucked and fleeced by sharpers and opera girls, they come home when of age to join in recognizances with their worthy fathers; and, as a reward, are introduced into all the fashionable clubs as promising young men, tout à fait aimables et polis. ”

“ Even Scott, who hated unkindness, is betrayed into irritation. We find an entry in the Journal under September 13, 1826: "Dined at Major Scott, my cousin's, where was old Lord Buchan. He too is a prince of bores; but age has tamed him a little, and, like the giant Pope in the Pilgrim's Progress, he can only sit and grin at pilgrims as they go past, and is not able to cast a faule over them, as formerly. A few quiet puns seem his most formidable infliction nowadays." And again under December 26: "Returned to Abbotsford this morning. I heard it reported that Lord B. is very ill. ”

“ Quoth the Earl of Buchan."
It is a small output for so busy a man, but literature was his hobby for a long lifetime. While Harry Erskine was winning the reputation of the greatest advocate at the Scots bar, and Thomas was drawing nearer to the woolsack, my lord remained peacefully in his shadowed garden, cultivating the insipid Muse.
His life was happy, if to feel confidence in one's worth and greatness be happiness. ”

“ Two years after the last entry quoted from Scott, the earl was gathered to the fathers who had been the glory of his life. He was buried at Dryburgh, and Sir Walter had the satisfaction of attending the funeral of one who had hoped to outlive him. "His lordship's funeral," he writes in his diary under April 25, "took place in a chapel amongst the ruins. His body was in the grave with its feet pointing westward. My cousin Maxpopple was for taking notice of it, but I assured him that a man who had been wrong in the head all his life would scarce become right-headed after death." ”

“ But while he valued his agricultural and antiquarian achievements at their proper worth, it was as a patron of letters that my lord hoped to appeal to the admiration of posterity. His was the task to bring forth retiring merit, and to seal the fame of the great with his approbation. He appointed himself the special trumpeter of the poet Thomson, and he would fain have done the same for Burns and Scott. He erected at Dryburgh an Ionic temple, with a statue of Apollo inside and a bust of Thomson on the dome ”

“ The earl's own antiquarian studies are numerous,—a memoir of Sir James Steuart Denham, an Account of the Parish of Uphall, an Account of the Abbey of Dryburgh in Grose's Antiquities, and sketches of George Heriot, Lord Mar the son of the Regent, and Drummond of Hawthornden. He kept up a lengthy correspondence on antiquarian matters with Nichols, and sent him Some Remarks on the Progress of the Roman Arms in Scotland during the Sixth Campaign of Africanus, which were published in vol. xxxv. of the Topographia Britannica. Sometimes the poor man was sadly duped. ”

“ His classical imitations, which take up a great part of the book, have a very doubtful value. As became a liberal nobleman, he must profess an admiration for the republican bores of the early empire, especially Helvidius Priscus, whose statue, he says, stands in his hall. ”