George Douglas

“ Then some gunshots were heard, and a voice crying that George Douglas had just thrown himself into the lake.
"And has he then escaped?" cried William.
Mary Stuart breathed again; the old lady raised her hands to Heaven.
"Yes, yes," murmured William,—"yes, thank Heaven for your son's flight; for his flight covers our entire house with shame; counting from this hour, we shall be looked upon as the accomplices of his treason."
"Have pity on me, William!" cried Lady Lochleven, wringing her hands. "Have compassion o your old mother! See you not that I am dying?" ”

“ While the armies lay thus opposed to each other, Douglas resolved to give the young king of England a lesson in the art of war. At the dead of night, he left the Scottish camp with a small body of chosen horse, not above two hundred, well armed. He crossed the river in deep silence, and came to the English camp, which was but carelessly guarded. Seeing this, Douglas rode past the English sentinels as if he had been an officer of the English army, saying,—"Ha, Saint George! you keep bad watch here!" ”

“ On rising, the queen found herself surrounded by her most faithful servants—Hamilton, Herries, and Seyton, Mary's father. Light-headed with joy, the queen extended her hands to them, thanking them with broken words, which expressed her intoxication and her gratitude better than the choicest phrases could have done, when suddenly, turning round, she perceived George Douglas, alone and melancholy. ”

“ She is betrothed to the elderly Duke of{116} L——, but at the last moment throws him over and elopes to Scotland. The companion of her flight is Douglas, a handsome young officer in the army, the child of Scotch parents, but brought up in England by a wealthy adoptive father. The honeymoon is scarce over when the young people find themselves, not only partially disabused of their illusions, but in actual pecuniary straits. Juliana's elopement has hopelessly alienated the Earl ”

“ The independence of Scotland was to be guaranteed, and a special clause provided for the restoration of the English estates of the Douglas family. On the accession of Robert II. he was nevertheless reconciled, becoming justiciar of southern Scotland, and the last years of his life were spent in making and repelling border raids. He died at Douglas in May 1384, and was succeeded by his son James. By his wife’s sister-in-law, Margaret Stewart, countess of Angus in her own right, and widow of the 13th earl of Mar, he had a son George, afterwards 1st earl of Angus. ”

“ Douglas was a genuinely popular leader. He had the power to inspire a pure personal enthusiasm. He had aroused such hero-worship as may be possible in modern times and in American polities. Beyond this, however, the Lecompton controversy, and his open persecution by the Buchanan Administration, made his leadership and his candidacy a necessity to the Northern Democrats. ”

“ Then, as the royal standard waved once more aloft, he burst with his followers into the thick of the fight, his unyielding valor giving new strength to all.
And now the end is near. An archer's arrow, with unerring aim, pierces the valiant Hotspur, and he falls dead upon the field.
"Harry Percy is dead! Victory, victory! St. George and victory!" rings the cry from thousands of the loyal troops, and, like a whirlwind, a panic of fear seizes the rebel ranks. Douglas is a prisoner; the Earl of Worcester surrenders; the rout is general. ”

“ Douglas good-humouredly submitted to be hugged by three long-chinned spinsters whom he recognised as his aunts, and warmly saluted five awkward purple girls he guessed to be his sisters:{117} while Lady Juliana stood the image of despair, and, scarcely conscious, admitted in silence the civilities of her new relations.'
The three elderly spinsters are the Laird's sisters—Miss Jacky, who is esteemed the most sensible woman as well as the greatest orator in the parish, Miss Grizzy the platitudinous, and Miss Nicky, who is not wanting in sense either ”

“ Quick lightning stabbed the world in vicious and repeated hate. A blue-black moistness lay heavy on the cowering earth. The rain came—a few drops at first, sullen, as if loath to come, that splashed on the pavement wide as a crown piece ”

“ In the whole field of American politics no man has equaled Douglas in the expedients and strategy of debate. Lacking originality and constructive logic, he had great facility in appropriating by ingenious restatement the thoughts and formulas of others. ”

“ A house that challenges regard in that way should have a gallant bravery in its look; if its aspect be mean, its assertive position but directs the eye to its infirmities. There is something pathetic about a tall, cold, barn-like house set high upon a brae; it cannot hide its naked shame; it thrusts its ugliness dumbly on your notice, a manifest blotch upon the world, a place for the winds to whistle round. But Gourlay's house was worthy its commanding station. A little dour and blunt in the outlines like Gourlay himself, it drew and satisfied your eye as he did. ”

“ In that body Douglas's adherents will press his doctrines to a decision. If the States-Rights men keep out of that convention, that decision must inevitably be against the South, and that either in direct favor of the Douglas doctrine, or by the indorsement of the Cincinnati platform, under which Douglas claims shelter for his principles." "The States-Rights men should present in that convention their demands for a decision, and they will obtain an indorsement of their demands, or a denial of these demands. If indorsed, we shall have greater hope of triumph within the Union. ”

“ Now, what is Judge Douglas's popular sovereignty? It is as a principle no other than that, if one man chooses to make a slave of another man, neither that other man nor anybody else has a right to object....
If you will read the copyright essay, you will discover that Judge Douglas himself says, a controversy between the American Colonies and the Government of Great Britain began on the slavery question in 1699, and continued from that time until the Revolution; and, while he did not say so, we all know that it has continued with more or less violence ever since the Revolution.... ”

“ When she buttoned her dress above the cloth, she gazed sadly at the dying embers—the look of one who has gained short respite from a task of painful tendance on the body, yet is conscious that the task and the pain are endless, and will have to be endured, to-morrow and to-morrow, till she dies. ”

“ She still swims swift, and strong, and deep—and the line goes steady, boys, steady—stiff and steady as a Tory in the roar of Opposition. There is yet an hour's play in her dorsal fin—danger in the flap of her tail—and yet may her silver shoulder shatter the gut against a rock. ”

“ Gourlay was hard up for money. Every day of his life taught him that he was nowhere in the stress of modern competition. The grand days—only a few years back, but seeming half a century away, so much had happened in between—the grand days when he was the only big man in the locality, and carried everything with a high hand, had disappeared for ever. Now all was bustle, hurry, and confusion, the getting and sending of telegrams, quick dispatches by railway, the watching of markets at a distance, rapid combinations that bewildered Gourlay's duller mind. ”

“ But Gourlay, though he could not understand, felt the fortitude of whisky was somehow akin to the fortitude described. In the increased vitality it gave he was able to tread down the world. If he walked on a wretched day in a wretched street, when he happened to be sober, his mind was hither and yon in a thousand perceptions and a thousand fears, fastening to (and fastened to) each squalid thing around. But with whisky humming in his blood he paced onward in a happy dream. ”

“ All men are suffused with that quiet pride in looking at the houses and lands which they have won by their endeavours—in looking at the houses more than at the lands, for the house which a man has built seems to express his character and stand for him before the world, as a sign of his success. It is more personal than cold acres, stamped with an individuality. All men know that soothing pride in the contemplation of their own property. But in Gourlay's sense of property there was another element—an element peculiar to itself, which endowed it with its warmest glow. ”

“ Douglas, as author of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, as a formidable Presidential aspirant, and now again as leader of the anti-Lecompton Democrats, could, of course, have no rival in his party for his own Senatorial seat. Lincoln, who had in 1854 gracefully yielded his justly won Senatorial honors to Trumbull, and who alone bearded Douglas in his own State throughout the whole anti-Nebraska struggle, with anything like a show of equal political courage and intellectual strength, was as inevitably the leader and choice of the Republicans. ”

“ That would of itself have seemed to be a little wonderful, but that wonder is heightened when we see that Wise, of Virginia, a man exactly opposed to them, a man who believes in the divine right of slavery, was also expressing his desire that Douglas should be reëlected; that another man that may be said to be kindred to Wise, Mr. Breckinridge, the Vice-President, and of your own State, was also agreeing with the anti-slavery men in the North, that Douglas ought to be reëlected. ”

“ Lincoln's mental equipment was of an entirely different order. His principal weapon was direct, unswerving logic. His fairness of statement and generosity of admission had long been proverbial. For these intellectual duels with Douglas, he possessed a power of analysis that easily outran and circumvented the "Little Giant's" most extraordinary gymnastics of argument. But, disdaining mere quibbles, he pursued lines of concise reasoning to maxims of constitutional law and political morals. Douglas was always forcible in statement and bold in assertion ”

“ It was the Douglas doctrine, squatter sovereignty, and "unfriendly legislation," rather than the _man_, which they had come to oppose, and were determined to put down. Any other individual holding these heresies would have been equally obnoxious. They had no candidate of their own; they worshiped no single leader; but they followed a principle with unfaltering devotion. They clung unswervingly not only to the property theory, but advanced boldly to its logical sequence--Congressional protection to slavery in the Territories. ”

“ But a man is what he is at home, and within his own sphere Wilson's sympathies were of the widest and deepest. He was adored by every member of his large family, whilst his own large-hearted affection embraced all, down to—or, as perhaps I should say, remembering his special love for young children, up to the youngest babe in the household. ”

“ Gourlay screamed and tried to rise from her chair, her eyes goggling in terror. As Gourlay leapt, John brought the huge poker with a crash on the descending brow. The fiercest joy of his life was the dirl that went up his arm as the steel thrilled to its own hard impact on the bone. Gourlay thudded on the fender, his brow crashing on the rim. ”

“ Gourlay's face appeared at the jagged rent, his eyes narrowed to fiercely gleaming points, a hard, triumphant devilry playing round his black lips. "You damned treacherous rat!" he cried, "that's the game John Gourlay can play wi' a thing like you."
Gibson rose from the ruin on the table and came bleeding to the window, his grin a rictus of wrath, his green teeth wolfish with anger. ”

“ In the endeavour to improve upon her first achievement, Miss Ferrier was triumphantly successful. 'The new book,' wrote one of Mr Blackwood's correspondents at the time of its publication, 'is a hundred miles above Marriage.' Nor does this assertion overshoot the mark; for if the one is at most a bit of brilliant promise, the other is a superb performance. Foremost among its advantages must be counted, in place of the slip-slop of Marriage, an interesting and admirably-compacted plot, and a vigorous literary style—the latter marked indeed, yet not marred, by a mannerism of literary quotation. ”

“ But Gourlay eyed her with disgust. Why, by Heaven, even now her petticoat was gaping behind, worse than the sloven's at the Red Lion. She was a pr-r-retty wife for John Gourlay! The sight of her feebleness would have roused pity in some: Gourlay it moved to a steady and seething rage. As she stood helpless before him he stung her with crude, brief irony.
Yet he was not wilfully cruel; only a stupid man with a strong character, in which he took a dogged pride. Stupidity and pride provoked the brute in him. ”

“ There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people at the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races; and Judge Douglas evidently is basing his chief hope upon the chances of his being able to appropriate the benefit of this disgust to himself. If he can by much drumming and repeating fasten the odium of that idea upon his adversaries, he thinks he can struggle through the storm. He therefore clings to this hope as a drowning man to the last plank. He makes an occasion for lugging it in, from the opposition to the Dred Scott decision. ”

“ To a personal friend in Quincy, Illinois, who had watched the campaign with unusual attention, Lincoln wrote that same day: "Yours of the 13th was received some days ago. The fight must go on. The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one or even one hundred defeats. Douglas had the ingenuity to be supported in the late contest, both as the best means to break down and to uphold the slave interest. No ingenuity can keep these antagonistic elements in harmony long. ”