Algernon Moncrieff

“ It may be owned he had no more religion than became a Cavalier; even the romance of superstition did not take much hold on him, and that rhyming “White Lady” has not even a ghostly life on his page. His favourite heroes are the like of Montrose and Claverhouse, yet he can do justice to the stern virtues of the Covenanters. In the sober historian mood he duly warns his grandchild how life was galled and fettered in the good old days, which he was too willing to see couleur de rose when their picturesque incidents offered themselves to the romancer. ”

“ On his death-bed, a visit being announced from one of those hereditary enemies, the Maclarens, “Throw my plaid round me,” he desired, “and bring me my claymore, dirk, and pistols—it shall never be said that a foeman saw Rob Roy Macgregor defenceless and unarmed!” To this story is tacked on the somewhat hackneyed incident of a priest labouring to extract from the dying man some expression of forgiveness, to which he consented, with a plain hint for{172} his son standing by: “I forgive my enemies ”

“ While less practically-minded stocks stood “agin the government,” the Campbells usually proved ready to recognise de facto authority, to catch the flowing tide of fortune, and to turn even godliness to gain in a manner supposed to be more characteristic of the Lowland Scot. But the canniest of clans had better success in earning fear than love from their neighbours. The wilder chiefs looked on Argyll as an obnoxious good boy who pulled out plums for himself from their seething confusion. ”

“ Inglis offered to go on holding the place against any odds, if left with six hundred men and due supplies; but Sir Colin, while admiring his spirit, was in no mind for sentiment, aware that not a man could be spared to idle defiance. ”

“ About this time Rob Roy’s refuge appears to have been in the Breadalbane country. Now, at all events, he made up a feud with the Campbells, that had been chronic or intermittent in earlier days, when he ducked one laird of that name in the pool of Strath Fillan. His quarrel with Montrose drove him into a new alliance, and he is presently found attaching himself to the Duke of Argyll, for the sake of a clandestine protection extended to clients of the rival magnates. ”

“ Yet a candid spirit might well ask whether no critical commentator have shown cause to suspect that the enemy of mankind made his first creagh against our happiness arrayed in the Gordon tartan, its livid stripes on a green background readily suggesting that allegory of a serpent form. The white lines of my tartan are rather to be taken for traces of primitive innocence, as even a Gordon must admit; and the dourest Forbes may agree that all offence of the hostile colours has long been washed in brave blood. ”

“ Such fancies may seem childish, but it was a fact that Algernon had indulged in them. With all his tact, he had a considerable strain of his mother's Ancramism in his blood. And the contrast between those former day-dreams and the present reality was so terrible, so mortifying, so ridiculous (direst and most soul-chilling word of all to Algernon!) that he was unable to face it. Some way out must be found. It was impossible, on any tenable theory of society, that he should be permanently consigned to oblivion and the daily round of inglorious duties. ”

“ The ladies of Jacobite families seem to have been especially active in sticking white cockades “into the bonnets of such as would allow them.” It was easy for the minstrel of Gask to make Charlie a darling in retrospect; but he may well have seemed a nuisance to tenants whom the Lady Nairne of the ’45 is described as ordering to turn out on pain of eviction and seizure of their cattle; and the Duchess of Perth abused the Whiggish Crieff folk as “d—d Judases to their master, the Duke.” At farm towns, as well as kirk towns, men were now beginning to question hereditary masterships. ”

“ When Montrose set the heather on fire he was followed by part of the proscribed clan, coming boldly forth from the islands and the wild nooks in which they had taken sanctuary; and we may be sure their tartans were made welcome for the nonce. That blaze extinguished, again they rallied to Charles II.’s standard set up by Glencairn at Killin, which soon went down before Cromwell’s soldiery; then when their Argyll enemies were out of favour, the King’s gratitude for fruitless loyalty availed them in the repeal of the act of proscription. ”

“ A man of many interests, genial and sociable, he went to South Africa and Canada in search of sport, and exhibited at the Scottish Academy as an amateur artist. He was captain of the Wimbledon Golf Club in 1894. In later life he was a director of two banks, acquired wealth, and bought the estate of Bandirran in Perthshire. He claimed to be head of his family as the heir male of William Moncrieff, who died in 1570 ”

“ Arrested as a rebel after Culloden, from the Dunkeld tolbooth he pitifully makes affidavit, that may or may not be the whole truth, but represents the straits to which many Atholl men would be put in times to try men’s souls, and also their speculating judgment. He declares that, as a peaceable subject and a faithful tenant, he raised a force of his neighbours to join Cope’s army, with which he marched north for several days, “each living on his own pocket,” till the deponent for one was reduced to a sixpence, and no more pay being forthcoming, “the men withdrew and dispersed themselves.” ”

“ The very virtues that winged a prosperous career—thrift, industry, enterprise, force of character—become suspected for vices in the interest of the common herd. It is a bad lookout for Scotsmen in that golden age of mediocrity so glibly promised by certain social reformers, who might begin by doing away with prizes and punishments in schools, if they cannot altogether level down Nature’s distinctions.
My own first experience of school life was near Crieff, where I spent a year in the family of an English clergyman, whom I dimly remember as a model for the head of the Fairchild family. ”

“ But now the Macgregors committed themselves not only to a crime but to a blunder, in forgetting how times had changed.
The third brother, known from his stature as James Mhor, who seems to have been the most active spirit of the family, was the ringleader in this enterprise. Robin, who went to the gallows for it, reading a book, may have been acquainted with Allan Ramsay’s song—
The widow can bake, and the widow can brew,
The widow can shape and the widow can sew,
And mony braw things the widow can do ”

“ There entered a tall, elegant woman, leaning on the arm of a short, stout, benevolent-looking man in spectacles. To these personages Algernon was duly presented, being introduced, much to his gratification, by Lady Seely, as "A young cousin of mine, Mr. Ancram Errington, who has just come to town." Then, having made his bow to General Dormer, who smiled and shook hands with him, Algernon stood opposite to the graceful Lady Harriet, and was talked to very kindly and pleasantly, and felt extremely content with himself and his surroundings. ”

“ Naturally such a personage did not thrive in his quarrel with the age; and when he died in 1816, what was left of the Macnab property passed into the hands of his kinsman and creditor, Lord Breadalbane, to whom the laird had stooped his pride to become a sort of humoured hanger-on. His nephew, heir to a load of debt, was fain to emigrate to Canada with a following of the broken clan. ”

“ It was not till George III.’s reign, when the tamed Macgregors had amply proved their loyalty in arms as well as their ability in other walks of life, that their proscription was finally annulled, the scattered clan free to take their own name, for which they recognised Sir John Murray as chief, in a deed signed by over 800 Macgregors. Rob Roy had represented the junior branch of Glengyle, claiming descent from that ruffian on whom was laid the blood of the Dumbarton scholars. Rob appears to have died a Catholic ”

“ The gallows have now been well replaced by an endowed public school on the Scottish pattern; and perhaps the most important institution of modern Crieff is the Hydropathic, which, under the shelter of the Knock Woods, gathers Saxon and Celt together in sober amity. There are other such hostelries about the Highland line; but that of Crieff, one of the earliest, is still one of the most popular.
“Hydropathics” in Scotland—nobody thinks of calling them Establishments—do not much depend on hydropathy, which, in summer at least, falls to the background of their sociable life. ”

“ Keen controversies were agitating the church of Scotland. The Marrow controversy, in which Thomas Boston [q. v.] of Ettrick was a conspicuous leader, began shortly after Moncrieff 's ordination, and he joined the little band who were contending for purity of doctrine in the church. The agitation regarding patronage, or the power of patrons to present to vacant churches, apart from the co-operation or even against the wish of the people, followed. Moncrieff joined the Erskines in denouncing attempts to invade the people's rights. ”

“ He was a living, a strenuous protest in perpetual kilt against the civilisation, the taming, the softening of mankind. He was essentially wild. His virtues were those of human nature in the rough and unreclaimed, open and unsubdued as the Moor of Rannoch. He was a true autochthon, terrigena,—a son of the soil,—as rich in local colour, as rough in the legs, and as hot at the heart, as prompt and hardy, as heathery as a gorcock. Courage, endurance, staunchness, fidelity and warmth of heart, simplicity, and downrightness were his staples ”

“ Many of us are astonishingly uncritical as to the coherence and cogency of words if they be but set to a good tune.
Algernon himself was rather hopeful since that interview with Rhoda. It could not be, after all, that Jonathan Maxfield would actually cause him, Algernon Errington, any personal inconvenience for the sake of a sum which was really a mere trifle to Maxfield, and which appeared very trifling to Algernon under every aspect except that of being called upon to pay it. ”

“ The lad rose in great dread of a beating, at least, when it should be found how luxuriously he had been accommodated at the expense of a principal person of the party. Good Mr. Lieutenant, however, got up and shook himself, rubbing off the hoar frost with his plaid, and muttering something of a cauld neight.
After Culloden, for a time, Menteith farmers might sit in a worse plight than before. ”

“ A rebel leader appeared in one “General” Bowles, who, originally a private soldier, in the course of many dubious adventures more than once played the pretender among the Creeks. A civil war raged in the Confederacy; MacGillivray at one time was driven to flight; but, still backed up by Milfort, he succeeded in partly restoring his power, though not with the same firmness. In the middle of his tortuous policies, he died at the age of fifty, leaving a son, who was sent home to Scotland, where old Lachlan is said to have been still alive in Inverness-shire. ”

“ I addressed myself to buy a plaid, Forbes tartan of course, but not finding one thick enough in the shop, I humbled my ancestral pride to put up with the Gordon pattern. This I did on two considerations: first, that the objectionable yellow should in time bleach itself to lamblikeness; second, that the ignorant natives of the country in which I mainly live would not know the difference. But after exposure to wind and rain for a generation, the hateful hue is as bright as ever ”

“ Sir Henry Moncrieff in 1827 he was made senior minister, a position he held till his death. In 1808 he married Janet, daughter of James Jobson of Dundee, by whom he had a family of three sons and three daughters, and in 1824 the university of Edinburgh conferred on him the degree of D.D. He had some reputation as a Hebrew scholar; his sermons were plain and sound; in private life he was genial and benevolent, and he avoided mixing in the doctrinal disputes which culminated in the disruption of the Scotch church. ”

“ The Eton boys of that day, for whom the summum supplicium, according to Henry Angelo’s Memoirs, was not over six cuts of a birch, would appear to have been handled in less Spartan fashion than were the King’s sons in their private schoolroom. The Princess Sophia told Miss Amelia Murray that she had seen her eldest brothers, at thirteen and fourteen, held by the arms to be flogged with a long whip. But once [39] the naughty boys are said to have turned against one of their severe masters, using upon him the rod he proposed for them. ”

“ Sir Harry's complimentary remarks hardly made up for Algernon's indifference; but when she ended, I forgot his offences in pity for one whose only companions were a tutor and Lady Mountfort, whose stiff figure and severe expression of countenance had filled me with awe and dislike the moment I saw her. "How dreadful!" I exclaimed. "What should Oliver and I do if we had to live like that?"
'"Hush!" said Agnes; "don't speak so loud, or my aunt will hear you. She says children ought never to speak when they are in the same room as their elders, unless they are spoken to." ”

“ There are two feelings common to all high or affectionate natures,— that of extreme susceptibility to opinion and that of extreme bitterness at its injustice. These feelings were Mordaunt's: but the keen edge which one blow injures, the repetition blunts; and by little and little, Algernon became not only accustomed, but, as he persuaded himself, indifferent, to his want of popularity; his step grew more lofty, and his address more collected, and that which was once diffidence gradually hardened into pride.
His residence at the University was neither without honour nor profit. ”