Thomas Douglas

“ Thomas went on with his bread-and-butter, and a silence fell on the company. It was broken by a startled cry from Elizabeth.
"Have you hurt yourself, girl?" asked her father.
"No, no. It's Mrs. Veitch's scones. To think I've forgotten them! She sent them to you, Father, for your tea. Buff, run—no, I'll go myself;" and Elizabeth left the room, to return in a moment with the paper-bagful of scones.
"I had finished," said Mr. Seton meekly.
"We'll all have to begin again," said his daughter. "Thomas, you could eat a bit of treacle scone, I know." ”

“ In the vestry Elizabeth paraded the boys for inspection. "Billy, you're to sit on the seat to-day, remember, not get underneath it."
"Buff, take that sweetie out of your mouth. It's most unseemly to go into church sucking a toffee-ball."
"Thomas! What is that in the strap of your Bible?"
"It's a story I'm reading," said Thomas.
"But surely you don't mean to read it in church?"
"It passes the time," said Thomas, who was always perfectly frank.
Mr. Seton caught Arthur Townshend's eye, and they laughed aloud; while Elizabeth hastily asked the boys if they had their collection ready. ”

“ It was first of all the fault of Elizabeth, who had once climbed the Matterhorn and who had fired him with a desire to be a mountaineer; and secondly, it was the fault of Aunt Alice, who had given him on his birthday a mountaineering outfit, complete with felt hat with feather, rücksack, ice-axe, and scarlet-threaded Alpine rope. Having climbed walls and trees and out-houses until they palled, he had looked about for something more difficult, and one frosty morning, when sitting on the Kirkes' ash-pit roof, Thomas drew his attention to the snowy glimmer of a conservatory three gardens away ”

“ This army, indeed, in arms and equipment, was not equal to the English, but Bruce was at their head, one of the ablest generals of the time, and under him were his brother Edward, his nephew Sir Thomas Randolph, and The Douglas, leaders under whom the Scots had always been aceustomed to conquer. Sir Thomas Randolph and Lord Douglas had aeted together on many a well fought field, and the strictost friendship existed betwixt these two great men. ”

“ There has never been a statesman in the history of the world who has not used this method of constructive progress. There will never be a statesman who succeeds who can use any other method in dealing with masses of his fellow men.
Douglas was the coming constructive statesman of the republic and all eyes were being focused on him. His life at the moment was the fevered center of the nation's thought. That his ambitions were boundless no one who knew the man doubted. That his patriotism was as genuine and as great all knew at last.
Lee studied every feature of his fine face. ”

“ The one man, the one giant leader left in the republic, the one constructive mind, the one man of political genius who could have saved the nation from the holocaust toward which it was plunging was Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. He could have been elected President by an overwhelming majority had he been nominated by this united convention. He was entitled to the nomination. He had proven himself a statesman of the highest rank. He had proven himself impervious to sectional hatred or sectional appeal. He was a Northern man, but a friend of the South as well as the North. ”

“ Frederick Douglas was not there to tell that he abandoned Brown in the old stone quarry outside Chambersburg, precisely because he had changed the plan of carrying off slaves as in Missouri to a scheme of treason, wholesale murders and insurrection.
Cruise was in his grave and Douglas on his way to Europe. There was no one to contradict his statements. The mob mind never asks for facts. ”

“ Can't you hear the roar when I've placed these pikes in their hands?—I want you to hive them."
Douglas hesitated for only a moment. His vivid imagination had seen the flash of the hell-lit vision of the slave insurrection and his soul answered with a savage cry. But he slipped from Brown's arms, rubbed his eyes and flung off the spell.
"My good friend," he said at last, "you're walking into a steel trap.
You can't come out alive."
He turned to Shields Green, the negro guard who was now one of the old man's disciples. Green had been a friend of Douglas' in Rochester. ”

“ In reading the ‘Noctes’ we feel, as Jefferson’s Rip van Winkle must have felt, surrounded by the ghosts on the top of the Katskill mountains. We say to ourselves, ‘How comparatively comfortable we should feel if those bloodless, marrowless spectres wouldn’t pretend to be jolly—if they would not pretend to be enjoying their phantom bowls and their ghostly liquor!’
Though John Skinner and Thomas Amory have but a small endowment of the great master’s humour, their animal spirits are genuine. They do not hop, skip, and jump for effect. ”

“ At an age when most boys are still puzzling over syntax and orthography, Mr Thomas Cringle and Lieutenant Benjamin Brail had already brought stout hearts and ready hands to bear upon the work of men, and it is quite true that in the records of their experiences not only do we find foreigners talking their own languages very imperfectly, but also the authors themselves from time to time making use of faulty constructions and of novel spelling. ”

“ I have never been a reader of philosophy, but I understand that the philosophers of all countries have been preaching for ages upon ages about resignation to Death—about the final beneficence of Death—that ‘reasonable moderator and equipoise of justice,’ as Sir Thomas Browne calls him. Equipoise of justice indeed! He who can read with tolerance such words as these must have known nothing of the true passion of love for a woman as you and I understand it. ”

“ The statement—somewhat disquieting to the professed littérateur—that almost any man may if he choose write one good book in a life-time, finds something like confirmation in the case of Thomas Hamilton. Not primarily a writer, and not gifted by nature with any very remarkable talent or grace of the pen, he yet contrived to produce a book for which a few transcripts of military life in peace and war, a few pictures of travel, perhaps a portrait or two drawn from the life, have sufficed to preserve, after seventy years, a portion of the favour with which it was greeted on its first appearance. ”

“ 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!" ”

“ Things to which I have bent the whole force of my mind, and which are worth remembering—if any things that I have done are at all worth remembering—have attracted but a very doubtful share of applause from critics; whilst things dashed off like Mansie Wauch, as mere sportive freaks, and which for years and years I have hesitated to acknowledge, have been out of sight my most popular productions.' Thus wrote Moir, under date of April 12th, 1845—six years before his life's labours closed—to his friend and biographer, Thomas Aird, author of The Devil's Dream. ”

“ Douglas was a remarkable man, both in character and in person. In age he may have been about fifty, with a strong-jawed, rugged face, a grizzling moustache, peculiarly keen gray eyes, and a wiry, vigorous figure which had lost nothing of the strength and activity of youth. He was cheery and genial to all, but somewhat offhand in his manners, giving the impression that he had seen life in social strata on some far lower horizon than the county society of Sussex. ”

“ We should have no iron bridges built, or Atlantic cables laid, or financial companies started, and we certainly should not have any man-killing machines a million or half-a-million strong; whereas every well-conducted person knows that such things are now-a-days absolutely necessary. The truth is, that John Douglas, or Captain Douglas, as the neighbours called him with a kind of grudging respect, was a skulker from the battle of humanity. What he wanted was a beach of white sand, a hot day, a blue sea, a book, a pipe, and the absence of his fellow-creatures. ”

“ The author of Uncle Tom's Cabin watched him from her seat in the Senate gallery, with intense interest; and though writing for readers, who like herself hated the man for his supposed servility to the South, she said with unwonted objectivity, "This Douglas is the very ideal of vitality. Short, broad, and thick-set, every inch of him has its own alertness and motion. He has a good head and face, thick black hair, heavy black brows and a keen eye. ”

“ Every effort, therefore, must be made to keep the Douglass venture a secret; he must be removed as far as possible from his old plantation-life. If he had had a different master, nothing could have saved him from the slave-traders. The good-heartedness of Thomas Auld was the only thing that preserved our young hero for that larger life which he was to make for himself, and help to make for so many others of his race. ”

“ Douglas’s quick and proud intelligence was amazed to find his father so weak and so incompetent under misfortune. All his boyish life he had looked up to the slender, handsome man, whom he himself so much resembled, on a solider, more substantial scale, as the most indulgent of fathers, the princeliest of hosts, the best of shots and riders, chief indeed of the Falloden clan and all its glories, who, like other monarchs, could do no wrong. ”

“ Douglas is only thirty-seven; he will not fully mature his powers for ten years yet. I have talked with him many times and have known him intimately and I think I understand the man. He is distrusted in the South simply because he will not bend all law making to the slave interests. ”

“ His politics partook of this character, and I always used to think that it was a queer destiny which made him a Radical teacher. The Radical literature of England is, with few exceptions, of a prosaic character. The most famous school of radicalism is utilitarian and systematic. Douglas was, emphatically, neither. He was impulsive, epigrammatic, sentimental. He dashed gaily against an institution, like a picador at a bull. He never sat down, like the regular workers of his party, to calculate the expenses of monarchy or the extravagance of the civil list. ”

“ You see an ocean-bound republic requires imagination to get the thrill out of it, but you can catch anybody in America with a military uniform. And while Douglas may be a war man, so to speak, he is really too honest to play that game. I'll grant him that much. I think that the Whigs are outplaying him. And it looks to me that the emotions of America—what some people might call the conscience of America—are being drawn away from Douglas by this slavery matter. Just now territory and railroads are not so strong, or will not be so strong pretty soon as the cry for emancipation. ”

“ He was appointed regent of Scotland in March 1333. The leadership of Douglas was impetuous rather than skilful, and lost the Scots the battle of Halidon, 19 July 1333. Douglas was slain there with many of his companions, including the son and successor of Sir James Douglas. Douglas married Beatrice, daughter of Sir Alexander Lindsay of Crawford, who was afterwards the wife of Sir Robert Erskine of Erskine, and so ancestress of the Erskines, earls of Mar. Their eldest son, John, dying young, their second son, William, became first earl of Douglas [q. v.] ”

“ Unarmed, a gentle blitheness graced his style:
A dainty lisp engaged his auditors
With tickling pleasure; such a piquant touch
Was in the Scottish Hector, as they called him,
Tripping with helpless tongue, like rose-lipped girls.
But when he armed his body, then his soul
Was harnessed in a dress of adamant.
In council-halls, o'er ladies' lutes, in war,
Brave, courteous, wise, loyal to truth, he was:
So is he: Douglas changes but for good.
Edward I. You praise him highly. You shall answer him.
He comes. Make room.
Enter Sir James Douglas.
We know your errand, sir. ”

“ Unable to withstand the attractions of the mysterious calling, he, in 1820, made his first regular appearance on the stage as Douglas in John Home's tragedy of that name. His success was immediate. His youth, his robust and manly physique, his clear, resonant voice, his fair and handsome face, won the great audience at once. ”

“ I sink fast; but let them still cry my war-cry, and conceal my death from my followers. There was a tradition in our family that a dead Douglas should win a field, and I trust it will this day be accomplished."
The Nobles did as he had enjoined; they concealed the Earl's body, and again rushed on to the battle, shouting "Douglas! Douglas!" louder than before. The English were weakened by the loss of the brave brothers Henry and Ralph Percy, both of whom were made prisoners, fighting most gallantly; and almost no man of note amongst the English escaped death or captivity. ”

“ The steed along the drawbridge flies, Just as it trembled on the rise; Not lighter does the swallow skim Along the smooth lake’s level brim; And when Lord Marmion reached his band, He halts, and turns with clinched hand, And shout of loud defiance pours, And shook his gauntlet at the towers. “Horse! horse!” the Douglas cried, “and chase!” But soon he reigned his fury’s pace: “A royal messenger he came, Though most unworthy of the name.
St. Mary mend my fiery mood! Old age ne’er cools the Douglas blood, I thought to slay him where he stood. ”