Edinburgh Through the Dundas Despotism7
Will anybody give us a history of Scotland from the year 1745 onwards to the present time? It is not likely that anybody will. For it is precisely from the year 1745 that Scotland ceases to have that sort of history which, according to our ordinary ideas of history, it is easy or necessary to write.
Some forty years before that time, Scotland had parted with her independent autonomy by the Treaty of Union. There was an end of “an auld sang”; and the smaller country, though nominally only united to the larger, was virtually, for purposes of general history, incorporated with it. Scotsmen have recently been complaining that Literature has not even paid Scotland the poor compliment of remembering the fact of her union with England so far as to use the word “Britain,” then specially provided by law as the designation of the composite kingdom, but has gone on speaking of “England” and “English History,” as if the linking of the smaller country to the larger had produced no change of fact worth commemorating by a change of name. The practice is as unscholarly as it is unconstitutional, and is a recent and violent departure from the established usage of the best English writers of the eighteenth century and the earlier part of the present. But the continuity of English life was too little disturbed perhaps by the mere admission into the Parliament at Westminster of sixteen peers and forty-five members for counties and burghs from the other side of the Tweed, to make it reasonable to expect that all Englishmen would for ever thenceforth keep to the correct and legal usage, employing the words “England” and “English” only in their proper historical senses, but saying “Britain,” “British,” “Britannic,” etc., whenever the aggregate unity should be in view. It was actually proposed, in the first draft of an inscription to be engraved on a public memorial to a famous statesman recently deceased, to include among his mentioned distinctions that of his having been “twice Prime Minister of England”; and the absurdity had to be stopped by pointing out that for several ages there had been no such office or entity anywhere in the world. Even patriotic Scottish writers,—for example, Sir Archibald Alison,—have given way to the habit of using the word “England” for the conjunct community oftener than the legal word “Britain.” Apart, however, from all controversy in the matter of names, it is plain that from the date of the Union Scotsmen themselves have considered their national history, in all ordinary senses, as then concluded. Our text-books of Scottish History close at the year 1707. For about forty years after that date, indeed, Scotland contrived by vigorous exertions to make her separate existence still felt. The fierce flutter of the tartans in the two Rebellions of 1715 and 1745 drew the historians hurriedly back to her after they thought they had done with her; and so it is not uncommon in books of Scottish History to find the narrative continued, by way of appendix, as far as to 1745. But then the historian takes his final leave. With the furious Cumberland and the Government whom Cumberland served, he scatters the tartans for the last time; he breaks up the Highlands by forts and roads; he abolishes hereditary jurisdictions; he grubs up, so to speak, all the roots and relics of the old Scottish autonomy which since the Union had been left in the ground and had proved troublesome; and, when he turns his back on Scotland again, it is with an assurance that he will never be recalled, and that from that hour all on the north side of the Border will be, like cleared land, left quiet and fallow. Scotland is, then, thought of as but a part of Great Britain.
And yet, in another sense, what do we see? Why, that this very period of the historical non-existence of Scotland is the period of her most energetic, most peculiar, and most various life! What Scotland was in the world before 1745 is as nothing compared with what, even purely as Scotland, she has been in the world since 1745. Till 1745 she was cooped up within herself, a narrow nation leading a life of intense internal action; and the most thrilling facts of her history,—such as the Wars of Independence against England, and the Presbyterian Reformation under Knox,—were of a kind the contemporaneous interest of which was confined within her own bounds. Even after the Union of the Crowns in 1603, it was only indirectly and collaterally, as in the Scottish episodes of the Great Civil War and its sequel, that the influence of Scotland in general history became very notable. But since 1745 the Scottish element has visibly acquired a proportion in the general mass of things which it never had before. Not only since that period has Scotland still stood where it did, inhabited by the same race of men, living on according to their old habits, and the same in all respects, their lost autonomy excepted; not only, therefore, has there been a distinct history of Scottish society since that time, capable of being written by itself, if any one chose to take up the subject: but the circumstance that at that time Scotland burst its bounds has reacted on its history, so as vastly to increase its dimensions, and in many ways also to vary its character. Since 1745, Scotland has quadrupled her population. The commercial prosperity of Scotland, with all that this involves, dates from the same period. It is since that period that Scotland has sent forth most of that series of eminent men who have left their names memorable in the various walks of active and industrial life, at home and abroad. From that period, with some allowance for those numerous Scottish thinkers who taught philosophy in the European Universities in earlier centuries, dates the rise and development of what is known as the Scottish Philosophy. From that period, still more conspicuously, dates the manifestation of Scottish intellect, in any degree compelling attention beyond Scottish limits, in the departments of literature and art. Before 1745, if we except the poet Thomson (for only recently have English literary historians reverted with any adequate interest to the older poetry and other literature of the real Scottish vernacular), Scotland had not given birth to a single poet or other man of letters able to command distinct recognition by his English contemporaries. It was precisely about this time, however, that such men as Hume and Smollett, and Robertson and Adam Smith, and Blair and Kames,—all of them born after the Union, and most of them between the two Rebellions,—began that literary activity of the Scottish mind which, kept up by such of their immediate successors as Burns, Henry Mackenzie, and Dugald Stewart, has been continued, with ever-increasing effect, to our own time, by writers whose name is legion. In short, however we look at the matter, it is a remarkable fact that the most productive period of the History of Scotland is that which has elapsed since Cumberland tore the last relics of autonomy out of her soil, and left her, passive and Parliamentless, to the mere winds and meteors.
One reason why, despite this interesting progress of Scottish society since 1745, the Scottish history of the intervening period has not been written is that, according to our common notions, only where there is autonomy can there be proper history. It is over parliaments, monarchs, and seats of government, with an occasional excursion after embassies or in the route of armies to great battle-fields, that the Muse of History hovers; where there is no parliament, monarch, or seat of government, and no embassy or march of armies to make up for the want, she finds it unnecessary to stay, and thinks it sufficient if she leaves other and minor muses as her substitutes. Hence, as we have said, the Muse of History left Scotland in 1707, and returned only hastily and on compulsion to attend to the Highland Rebellions. Whatever claim on her attention Scotland since that time has possessed she considers herself to have amply satisfied by hovering over the Parliament of Westminster, as the centre of British interests in general, or by following those trains of military and international action, emanating from that centre, in which Scotsmen have had part side by side with Englishmen and Irishmen. The task of recording purely Scottish events in their sequence during the last hundred and fifty years,—of taking note of all the flitting social phenomena of which during that period the land north of the Tweed has been the scene,—has accordingly devolved on the muse of individual biography, aided by the muse of economical dissertation and statistics; and it seems somewhat problematical, as has been said, whether the materials which these subordinate muses have gathered, in the shape of miscellaneous lives of remarkable Scotsmen since 1745, and miscellaneous sketches of Scottish life and society since then, will ever be organised into a regular History. To a writer capable of combining the scattered elements of interest lying in such materials the thing would certainly be possible.
Of the various recent works having anything of the character of contributions to a history of Scottish society during the period in question, the richest by far, both in fact and in suggestion, are the two which bear the name of the late Lord Cockburn. Rich enough in this respect was his Life of Jeffrey published in 1852; but richer still are the Memorials of his Time, now published posthumously.
Lord Cockburn was born in 1779, and died in 1854. Consequently, it is not over the whole of the period under notice, but only over seventy years of it, that his reminiscences could in any case have extended. In fact, however, the period over which they do extend is still more limited. The Memorials begin about the year 1787, when the author was a boy at school, and they do not come farther down than 1830. We think, too, that all readers of the volume will agree with us in regarding the earlier portion of it,—that which contains Lord Cockburn’s recollections of the time of his boyhood and youth,—as by far the most interesting. Nowhere else is there such a vivid and racy account of the state of Scottish society from about 1790 to about 1806. Fixing on the latter year, and remembering that Lord Cockburn’s recollections refer chiefly to Scottish society as it was represented in Edinburgh, we have in these “Memorials,” therefore, the best text possible for our present paper.
First of all, the Memorials, taken in connection with the Life of Jeffrey, bring more distinctly before us than had ever been done previously, or, at all events, since the time of the Reform Bill agitation, the anomalous system of polity by which Scotland was governed not so very long ago. Such a system of polity, maintained so quietly and with such results, was probably never seen elsewhere under the sun. Nominally, Scotland was under a free representative government; but actually she was under the absolute rule of a single native. Ever since the Union of 1707, when the Scottish autonomy ended and Westminster became the seat of the one Imperial Government for England and Scotland together, that Government, except in a few instances when attempts were made to rule Scotland directly by English methods, and the attempts raised storm and whirlwind, had found it convenient to entrust the sole management of Scottish affairs to a single minister, who, by his Scottish birth and connections on the one hand, and his connections with the Cabinet and the Parliament at Westminster on the other, could act as a kind of responsible middleman. Knowing the character and habits of his countrymen, he could carry out the intentions of Government in Scotland far better than Government could do for itself; and, by his command of the Scottish votes in Parliament, he could serve the Cabinet in British and Imperial questions so effectively as to be able to dictate to it in all purely Scottish questions. This kind of depute-sovereignty, or rule by contract, was long exercised in Scotland by the powerful Whig family of Argyle. During the Whig and Tory alternations of the early part of the reign of George III., however, the sovereignty was shifted from the Argyle family to others, till at last, about the time of the formation of the ministry of the younger Pitt in 1783, it settled permanently in the Tory family of Dundas, whose patrimonial property as lairds, and whose professional craft as lawyers, connected them more immediately with Edinburgh.
For two centuries or more these “Dundases of Arniston,” as they were called and are still called, had been an important family in the politics and the jurisprudence of Scotland. Since the Restoration four of them in succession had been on the Scottish Bench, two of these in the supreme place on that Bench: viz. Robert Dundas, Lord President of the Court of Session from 1748 to 1753, and his eldest son, Robert Dundas, Lord President of the same from 1760 onwards. It was in a younger brother of this last that the family was to start up into its highest distinction. This was Henry Dundas, known afterwards as 1st Viscount Melville. Born in 1741, and educated at the University of Edinburgh, he had betaken himself, like so many of his ancestors, to the profession of the Law, and had already become eminent at the Scottish Bar, when, having been sent to the House of Commons as member for Edinburghshire, he began in 1774 his career of Parliament-man and party-politician. It was the time of the Tory administration of Lord North; and, having gradually fallen into rank with the supporters of that administration, he was appointed under it in 1775 to the office of Lord Advocate of Scotland. He had held this office through the remainder of Lord North’s administration, and also through the brief Rockingham and Shelburne ministries of 1782–83, latterly with the Treasurership of the Navy in addition, but had resigned office in April 1783 on the formation of the Coalition Ministry of North and Fox. He had been observing with admiration the steady conduct of the youthful Pitt through so many shiftings of the political scenery; the youthful Pitt had also been observing him; they had found an unusually strong bond of attachment to each other in their common fondness for port wine and their coequal powers of consuming it in large quantities; and so it happened that, on the break-up of the Coalition Ministry in December 1783, and the formation of a new and more lasting ministry under Pitt himself, it was to Dundas that Pitt looked chiefly for help and comradeship. Pitt was then but four and twenty years of age, while Dundas was in his forty-third year; but through all the future Premiership of the younger man, and indeed through all the rest of his life, Dundas was to be his most trusted colleague, his alter ego.
From 1783 to 1806 this Henry Dundas, the colleague of Pitt, was virtually King of Scotland. When the history of Scotland during that period shall come to be written, this will be recognised and he will be the central figure. All in all, though within a narrower field, he was as remarkable a man, as able a man, as either Pitt or Fox; and his life, from the absoluteness with which it was identified with the career of his native country during so long a period, possesses elements of biographical interest which theirs want. Both Lord Brougham and Lord Cockburn have sketched the character of this important man, of whom, in their youth, Scotsmen were continually speaking as subjects speak of their liege lord. In the House, says Lord Brougham, he could not be called an orator; he was “a plain, business-like speaker,” and “an admirable man of business.” Personally, Lord Brougham adds, he was of “engaging qualities”; “a steady and determined friend”; “an agreeable companion, from the joyous hilarity of his manners”; “void of all affectation, all pride, all pretension”; “a kind and affectionate man in the relations of private life”; “in his demeanour hearty and good-humoured to all.” 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.” Such was the Henry Dundas in whom, partly because of those personal qualifications, the entire management of Scottish affairs was vested through the seventeen closing years of last century and the first five or six years of the present. This era of Scottish history may, in fact, be remembered by the name of The Dundas Despotism.
What was the method of the despotism? It was very peculiar, and at the same time very simple and natural. Mr. Dundas, sitting in the House of Commons, first as member for the shire of Edinburgh, but from 1787 onwards as member for Edinburgh itself, was a leading power in the Pitt Administration. On joining that administration he had not resumed his old office of Lord Advocate (which was given to his friend Hay Campbell), but had been content with resuming his former post of the Treasurership of the Navy; to which were subsequently added in succession the Presidency of the Board of Control for Indian Affairs (i.e. the Ministry for India), the Home-Secretaryship, the Secretaryship for War, and the First Lordship of the Admiralty. It was perhaps as Minister for India that he most usefully distinguished himself in his capacity as a British statesman. But it was in his other capacity as sovereign minister for Scotland that he laboured most characteristically. Continually going and coming, shuttle-wise, between London and Edinburgh, he was known to carry all Scotland in his pocket. His colleagues, on the one hand, made Scotland entirely over to him; and he, on the other, contracted to keep Scotland quiet for them, and to give them the full use of the united Scottish influence in Parliament. His means, as regarded his countrymen, were very efficient. They consisted, apart from the mere power of his own tact and talent, in the uncontrolled use of patronage. The population of Scotland at that time did not exceed a million and a half,—a population in which, according to the ordinary calculation, there could not be more than about three hundred and fifty thousand adult males. This was a nice little compact body to keep in order, and not above one man’s strength, if he had offices enough at his disposal. But it was not even necessary to deal with all this little mass directly. There was no popular representation in Scotland. Fifteen out of the five-and-forty Scottish members of the House of Commons were members for burghs; and these were elected by the town-councils, who were themselves self-elected, and nearly permanent. Nay, the Edinburgh town-council alone returned a member directly; the other burgh-members were for “districts of burghs,” and were elected by delegates from the various town-councils included in the several districts. The county constituencies, on the other hand, who elected the thirty county members, did not exceed fifteen hundred or two thousand persons for all Scotland. Accordingly, Government, through Dundas, had only to deal directly with an upper two thousand or so, including the town-councils,—a body not too large, as Lord Cockburn says, to be held completely within Government’s hand. Gratitude for places conferred, fear of removal from place, and hope of places to be obtained for themselves and their relations or dependents, were the forces by which they were held. Nobody could get a place or could hold a place except through Harry Dundas; and he had places enough at his disposal to give all the necessary chance. There was, first, all the patronage of Scotland itself, including judgeships, sheriffships, professorships, clerical livings, offices of customs and excise, and a host of minor appointments, all within the control of Dundas, to be distributed by him according to his personal knowledge, or the representations of his friends. Then there were commissions in the army and navy, appointments in the India service, medical appointments, and posts in the various departments of the public service in England,—all excellent as openings for young Scotsmen who could not be provided for at home, and in the patronage of which Dundas had his full share by official right or as a member of the general Ministry. The political faith of Scotland was, therefore, simply Dundasism; and it was in a great measure the result of Dundas’s own political position that this Dundasism was equivalent to Toryism. As the colleague and friend of Pitt, the member of a government whose main feeling was hatred to the French Revolution, and to everything at home that savoured of sympathy with that Revolution, Dundas willed that his subjects should be Tories; and they were. At last Toryism became the ingrained national habit. Lord Cockburn describes feelingly the utter political abjectness of Scotland during the Dundas reign. As in England, so in Scotland, “everything rung and was connected with the Revolution in France; everything, not this or that thing, but literally everything, was soaked in this one event.” But in Scotland, more than in England, horror of the French Revolution and of every doctrine or practice that could be charged with the remotest suspicion of connection with it, became the necessary creed of personal safety. To resent every idea of innovation or of popular power,—nay, every recognition of the existence of the people politically,—as blasphemy, Jacobinism, and incipient treason, was the same thing as allegiance to Dundas; and this, again, was the same thing as having any comfort in life. Hence, three-fourths of the entire population, and almost all the wealth and rank of the country, were of the Tory party; and no names of abuse were hard enough, no persecution was harsh enough, for the daring men, consisting perhaps of about a fourth of the middle and working classes, with a sprinkling of persons of a higher grade, who formed the small Opposition. Though the opinions of these were of the most moderate shade of what would now be called “liberalism,” the slightest expression of them was attended with positive risk. Spies were employed to watch such of them as had any social position; in several cases there were trials for sedition, with sentences of transportation; and only the impossibility of finding grounds for indictment prevented more. The negative punishment of exclusion from office, and from every favour of Government and its supporters, was the least; and it was universally applied. Burns nearly lost his excisemanship for too free speaking; and a letter is extant, addressed by him to one of the commissioners of the Scottish Board of Excise, in which, without denying his Liberalism, he protests that it is within the bounds of devout attachment to the Constitution, and implores the commissioner, as “a husband and a father” himself, not to be instrumental in turning him, with his wife and his little ones, “into the world, degraded and disgraced.” Part of the poet’s crime seems to have been his having subscribed to an Edinburgh Liberal paper which had been started by one Captain Johnstone. This Johnstone was imprisoned after the publication of a few numbers; and the very printer of the paper, though himself a Tory, was nearly ruined by his connection with it. No subsequent attempt was made during the Dundas reign to establish an Opposition newspaper. From 1795 to as late as 1820, according to Lord Cockburn, not a single public meeting on the Opposition side of politics was, or could be, held in Edinburgh. Elections of members of Parliament, whether for burghs or for counties, in Scotland, were a farce: they were transacted quietly, by those whose business it was, in town-halls or in the private rooms of hotels; and the people knew of the matter only by the ringing of a bell, or by some other casual method of announcement. Abject Toryism, or submission to Dundas and the existing order of things, pervaded every department and every corner of established or official life in Scotland,—the Church, the Bench, the Bar, the Colleges and Schools; and so powerfully were any elements of possible opposition that did exist kept down by the pressure of organised self-interest, and by the fear of pains and penalties, that the appearance at last from the Solway to Caithness was that of imperturbable political stagnation.
Once, indeed, a crisis occurred which put the Scottish people nearly out in their calculations. This was in March 1801, when Pitt resigned office, and Dundas along with him, and a new ministry was formed under Pitt’s temporary substitute, Mr. Addington, afterwards Lord Sidmouth. Dundas out of power was a conception totally new to the Scottish mind,—an association, or rather a dissociation, of ideas utterly paralysing. “For a while,” says Lord Brougham, “all was uncertainty and consternation; all were seen fluttering about like birds in an eclipse or a thunderstorm; no man could tell whom he might trust; nay, worse still, no man could tell of whom he might ask anything.” Dundasism, which had hitherto meant participation in place and patronage, now seemed in danger of losing that meaning; and the bulk of the Scottish population feared that they might have to choose between the name and the thing. They were faithful to Dundas, however; and they were rewarded. The Addington ministry, which had come into power principally to conclude peace with France by the Treaty of Amiens, came to an end after that Treaty had been rendered nugatory by the recommencement of the war; and in May 1804 Pitt returned to the helm. Dundas, who had in the interim been raised to the peerage by the title of Viscount Melville, then resumed his place in his friend’s cabinet, to yield his Parliamentary service thenceforward in the Upper House, and official service mainly in the First Lordship of the Admiralty. Scotland then rolled herself up comfortably once more for her accustomed slumber,—the only difference being that her bedside guardian had to be thought of no longer as her Harry Dundas, but less familiarly now as her Lord Melville. So for another year; but then what a reawakening! It was in April 1805 that, in consequence of the report of a Committee of the House of Commons that had been appointed for the investigation of alleged abuses in the naval service, the Whigs, through Mr. Whitbread as their spokesman, opened an attack on Lord Melville on charges of malversation of office, and misappropriation of public moneys, during his former Treasurership of the Navy, either directly, or by collusion with his principal financial subordinate. The attack grew fiercer and fiercer, as well as more extensive in its scope; and, although it was evidently inspired mainly by the political vindictiveness of a party made furious by long exclusion from office, it became more formidable from the fact that some of Pitt’s own friends either abetted it fully or thought that the irregularities in account-keeping which had been disclosed ought not to pass without Parliamentary censure. Pitt reeled under such a blow at once to his private feelings and his administration; and, after doing his best to resist, he had to consent that Lord Melville should quit office, and that Lord Melville’s name should be struck off from the list of His Majesty’s Privy Council till the charges against him were formally and publicly tried. The trial was to be in the shape of an impeachment before the House of Lords. Before it could come on Pitt was dead. He died on the 23d of January 1806; and the longexcluded Whigs had then their turn of power for somewhat more than a year in what is remembered as the Fox and Grenville ministry,—a name accurate only till the 13th of September 1806, when Fox followed his great rival to the grave, and Lord Grenville became Premier singly. It was in April and May 1806, when this Fox and Grenville ministry was new in office, that the great trial of Lord Melville in Westminster Hall was begun and concluded. The charges against him had been formulated into ten articles; and he was acquitted upon all the ten,—unanimously on the only one which vitally impeached his personal integrity, by overwhelming majorities on five of the others, and by smaller but still decisive majorities on the remaining four. On the whole, it was a triumphant acquittal; and it was received as such throughout Scotland,—where, at one of the dinners held in honour of the event by the jubilant Scottish Tories, there was sung a famous song beginning with this stanza:—
“Since here we are set in array round the table,
Five hundred good fellows well met in a hall,
Come listen, brave boys, and I’ll sing as I’m able
How innocence triumphed and pride got a fall.
But push round the claret,—
Come, stewards, don’t spare it;
With rapture you’ll drink to the toast that I give:
Here, boys,
Off with it merrily:
‘Melville for ever, and long may he live!’”
Melville did live for some time longer, restored to his place in the Privy Council, and rehabilitated in honour, but never again in office, hardly caring to concern himself further with politics, and spending his last years mainly in Scotland. He died on the 27th of May 1811, in the seventieth year of his age.
That system of the government of Scotland by proconsulship of which he had been so conspicuously the representative did not by any means die with him. It was continued, with variations and modifications, through those successive ministries of the later part of the reign of George III. and the whole of the reign of George IV. which fill up the interval between the death of Pitt and the eve of the Reform Bill; nay, not only so continued, but continued with the accompanying phenomenon that it was still a Dundas that exercised, occasionally at least, what did remain of the proconsulship. Robert Dundas, 2d Viscount Melville, who died as late as 1851, was a member of most of the successive administrations mentioned, from Perceval’s of 1809–12, through Liverpool’s of 1812–27, to Canning’s and the Duke of Wellington’s of 1827–30, holding one or other of his father’s old posts in these administrations, and so or otherwise maintaining the hereditary Dundas influence in Scottish affairs while Toryism kept the field. But, while this prolongation of the Dundas influence in the second Lord Melville is not to be forgotten, it is the father, Henry Dundas, 1st Lord Melville, that has left the name of Dundas most strikingly impressed upon the history of Scotland, and it is the stretch of two-and-twenty years between 1783 and 1806, during which this greatest of the Dundases exercised the proconsulship, that has to be remembered especially and distinctively in Scottish annals as the time of the Dundas Despotism.
“The Dundas Despotism!” O phrase of fear, unpleasing to a modern ear! 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?
Incredible as it may seem, there is evidence that the Scottish people did contrive, in some way or other, to lead not only an endurable but a very substantial and jolly existence through the Dundas Despotism, and that not only a great deal of good, but much of what Scotland must now regard as her best and most characteristic produce, had its genesis in that time, though the exodus has been later. The various liberties of the human subject may be classified and arranged according to their degrees of importance; and a great many of them may exist where the liberty of voting for members of parliament and of openly talking politics is absent. So it was in Scotland through the reign of Henry Dundas and his Toryism. The million and a half of human beings who then composed Scotland, and were scattered over its surface, in their various parishes, agricultural or pastoral, and in their towns and villages, went through their daily life with a great deal of energy and enjoyment, notwithstanding that Dundas, and the lairds and the provosts and bailies as his agents, elected the members of parliament and transacted all the political business of the country; nay, out of the lairds and the bailies themselves, and all the business of electioneering, they extracted a good deal of fun. What mattered it to them that now and then some long-tongued fellow who had started a newspaper was stowed away in jail, or that an Edinburgh lawyer like Muir was transported for being incontinent in his politics? Could not people let well alone, obey the authorities, earn their oatmeal, and drink their whisky in peace? Few of Scott’s novels come down so far as to this period of Scottish life, and it has not been much described in our other literature of fiction; but till lately there were many alive who remembered it, and delighted in recalling its savageries and its humours. 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! Every considerable town then had its hangman, who was frequently a well-to-do person that sold fish or some such commodity. And then, all through society, the flirtations, the friendships, and the long winter evenings at the fireside, with the cracks between the “gudeman” and his neighbours, and the alternative of a hand at cards or a well-thumbed book for the young folks! What stalwart old fellows, both of the douce and of the humorous type, oracular and respected in their day, and whose physiognomies and maxims are still preserved in local memory, lived and died in those days and made them serve their turn! Nay, of the Scotsmen who have been eminent in the intellectual world, what a number belong by their birth to the reign of Dundas, and were nurtured amid its torpid influences! Burns closed his life in the midst of it; Dugald Stewart and James Watt lived through it; Scott, Jeffrey, Chalmers, Wilson, Hamilton, and Carlyle are all, more or less, specimens of what it could send forth. Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona: there was pith in Scotland before there was Parliamentary Reform.
Naturally it was in Edinburgh that the various elements of Scottish life at this time were seen in their closest contact and their most intimate union or antagonism. It was here that Dundas lived when he was in Scotland; and here were the central threads of that official network by which, through Dundas, Scotland was connected with the English Government. Edinburgh was then still the chief city of Scotland, even in population; for, though now Glasgow has far outstripped it in that particular, then the two cities were happy in numbering little more than 80,000 each. At least, in the census of 1801 Edinburgh stands for 82,000, or almost exactly neck to neck with Glasgow, which stands for 83,000. Dundee, which came next, reckoned but 29,000; Aberdeen, 27,000; and Leith and Paisley each about 20,000. Few other Scottish towns had a population of more than 10,000.
Was there ever another such city to live in as Edinburgh?
“And I forgot the clouded Forth,
The gloom that saddens heaven and earth,
The bitter east, the misty summer,
And gray metropolis of the North.”
One regrets that this is all that our noble Laureate’s experience of Edinburgh enabled him to say. The east winds do bite there fearfully now and then, and blow a dust of unparalleled pungency in your eyes as you cross the North Bridge; but, with that exception, what a city! Gray! why, it is gray, or gray and gold, or gray and gold and blue, or gray and gold and blue and green, or gray and gold and blue and green and purple, according as the heaven pleases, and you choose your ground! But, take it when it is most sombrely gray, where is another such gray city? 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! Then Calton Hill in the midst, confronted by the precipitous curve of the Salisbury Crags; Arthur Seat looking over all like a lion grimly keeping guard; the wooded Corstorphines lying soft away to the west, and the larger Pentlands looming quiet in the southern distance! Let the sky be as gray and heavy as the absence of the sun can make it, and where have natural situation and the hand of man combined to exhibit such a mass of the city picturesque? And only let the sun strike out, and lo! a burst of new glories in and around. The sky is then blue as sapphire overhead; the waters of the Forth are clear to the broad sea; the hills and the fields of Fife are distinctly visible from every northern street and window; still more distant peaks are discernible on either horizon; and, as day goes down, the gables and pinnacles of the old houses blaze and glance with the radiance of the sunset. It is such a city that no one, however familiar with it, can walk out in its streets for but five minutes at any hour of the day or of the night, or in any state of the weather, without a new pleasure through the eye alone. Add to this the historical associations. Remember that this is the city of ancient Scottish royalty; that there is not a close or alley in the Old Town, and hardly a street in the New, that has not memories of the great or the quaint attached to it; that the many generations of old Scottish life that have passed through it have left every stone of it, as it were, rich with legend. To an English poet all this might be indifferent; but hear the Scottish poets:—
“Edina! Scotia’s darling seat!
All hail thy palaces and towers!”
was the salutation of Burns, when first brought from his native Ayrshire to behold the Scottish capital. “Mine own romantic town,” was the outburst of Scott, in that famous passage where, after describing Edinburgh as seen from the Braids, he makes even an English stranger beside himself with rapture at the sight:—
“Fitz-Eustace’ heart felt closely pent;
As if to give his rapture vent,
The spur he to his charger lent,
And raised his bridle hand,
And, making demi-volte in air,
Cried, ‘Where’s the coward that would not dare
To fight for such a land?’”
Here, though it is an Englishman that is supposed to speak, it is a Scotsman that supplies the words; but there can be no such objection in the case of the following lines from a sonnet, entitled “Written in Edinburgh,” by Tennyson’s friend, Arthur Hallam:—
“Even thus, methinks, a city reared should be,
Yea, an imperial city, that might hold
Five times a hundred noble towns in fee...
Thus should her towers be raised; with vicinage
Of clear bold hills, that curve her very streets,
As if to indicate, ’mid choicest seats
Of Art, abiding Nature’s majesty,—
And the broad sea beyond, in calm or rage
Chainless alike, and teaching liberty.”
At the time with which we are concerned this city had the advantage of containing, as has been said, only about eighty thousand people. For comfortable social purposes, that is about the extreme size to which a city should go. The size of London is overwhelming and paralysing. There can be no intimacy, no unity of interest, in such a vast concourse. Ezekiel might be preaching in Smithfield, Camberwell might be swallowed up by an earthquake, and the people of St. John’s Wood would know nothing of either fact till they saw it announced in the newspapers next morning. Hardly since the days of the Gordon Riots has London ever been all agitated simultaneously. In Ancient Athens, on the other hand, we have an illustration of what a town of moderate size could be and produce. That such a cluster of men as Pericles, Socrates, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Phidias, Alcibiades, Xenophon, and others,—men of an order that we only expect to see now far distributed through space and time, nantes rari in gurgite vasto,—should have been swimming contemporaneously or nearly so in such a small pond as Athens was, and that this affluence in greatness should have been kept up by so small a population for several ages, seems miraculous. The peculiar fineness of the Hellenic nerve may have had something to do with the miracle; but the compactness of the place,—the aggregation of so many finely and variously endowed human beings precisely in such numbers as to keep up among them a daily sense of mutual companionship,—must also have had its effect. In “Modern Athens” the conditions of its ancient namesake are not all reproduced. To say nothing of any difference that there may be in respect of original brain-and-nerve equipment between the modern and the ancient Athenian, “Modern Athens” is, unfortunately, not a separate body-politic, with separate interests and a separate power of legislation. There are no walls now round the Edinburgh territory; nor have the Edinburgh people the privilege of making wars and concluding treaties with even the nearest portions of the rest of Great Britain. They cannot meet periodically on the Castle Esplanade to pass laws for themselves in popular assembly, and hear consummate speeches beginning “O men of Edinburgh.” But, with many such differences, there are some similarities. Everybody in Edinburgh knows, or may know, everybody else, at least by sight; everybody meets everybody else in the street at least once every day or two; the whole town is within such convenient compass that, even to go from one extremity of it to the other extremity, there is no need to take a cab unless it rains. It is a city capable of being simultaneously and similarly affected in all its parts. An idea administered to one knot of the citizens is as good as administered to the whole community; a joke made on the Mound at noon will ripple gradually to the suburbs, and into the surrounding country, before the evening. If such is the case even now, when the population is over 260,000, must it not have been still better when the population was only 80,000, and that population was more shut in within itself by the absence as yet of telegraphs and railroads?
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. In Edinburgh the standard of the highest income is much lower, and the standard of the lowest is perhaps higher, than in Glasgow; nor is wealth of so much relative importance in the social estimate. Roughly classified, the society of Edinburgh in the days to which we are now looking back consisted, as the society of Edinburgh still consists, of an upper stratum of lawyers and resident gentry, college officials, and clergy, reposing on, but by no means separated from, a community of shopkeepers and artisans sufficient for the wants of the place. Let us glance at these components of the society of Old Edinburgh in succession:—
First, The Lawyers and Resident Gentry.—These two classes may be taken together, as to a certain extent identical. From the time of the Union, such of the old nobility of Scotland as had till then remained in their native country, occupying for a part of the year the homely but picturesque residences of their ancestors in the Old Town of Edinburgh, had gradually migrated southwards, leaving but a few families of their order to keep up their memory in the ancient capital of Holyrood and St. Giles. In the room of this ancient nobility, and, indeed, absorbing such families of the old nobility as had remained, there had sprung up,—as might have been expected from the fact that Edinburgh, though it had parted with its Court and Legislature, was still the seat of the supreme Scottish law-courts,—a new aristocracy of lawyers. The lawyers,—consisting, first, of the judges as the topmost persons, with their incomes of several thousands a year, and then of the barristers, older and younger, in practice or out of practice, but including also the numerous body of the “Writers to the Signet” and other law-agents,—are now, and for the last century or two have been, the dominant class in the Edinburgh population. From the expense attending education for the legal profession, the members of it, till within a time comparatively recent, were generally scions of Scottish families of some rank and substance; and, indeed, it was not unusual for Scottish lairds or their sons to become nominally members of the Scottish bar, even when they did not intend to practise. The fact of the substitution of the legal profession for the old Scottish aristocracy in the dominant place in Edinburgh society is typified by the circumstance that the so-called “Parliament House,”—retaining that name because it enshrines the hall where the Estates of the Scottish Kingdom held their meetings during the last eighty years of the time when Scotland had no Parliaments but her own,—is now the seat of the supreme Scottish law-courts, and the daily resort of the interpreters of the laws in these courts. 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. Even now the general hour of breakfast in Edinburgh is determined by the time when the courts open in the morning; and, dispersed through their homes, or at dinner-parties, in the evening, it is the members of the legal profession that lead the social talk. In the old Dundas days it was the same, with the addition that then the lawyers were perhaps more numerous in proportion to the rest of the community than they are now, and were more closely inter-connected by birth and marriage with the Scottish nobility and lairds.
Of hardly less importance socially was the Academical Element. As Edinburgh possesses a University, as its University has long been in high repute, and as, by reason of the comparative cheapness of board and education in Edinburgh, many families, after a residence in England or the Colonies, have been attracted thither for the sake of the education of their sons, or, without going thither themselves, have sent their sons thither, the business of education has always been prominent, if not paramount, among the industries of the city. The teachers of the public and of other schools have always formed a considerable class numerically, as well as in rank; while to the University professors, partly from the higher nature of their teaching-duties, partly from the traditional dignity conferred on them by the great reputation of some of their body in past times, and partly from some superiority in their emoluments, there has alway been accorded a degree of social consideration not attached to the same function anywhere out of Scotland. The reputation of the Medical School of Edinburgh, in particular, has always invested the professors in the Medical Faculty of the University with special distinction; and, as these professors have been generally also at the head of the medical practice of the city, the Medical element, and with it the Scientific element, in Edinburgh society have from times long past been, to a considerable extent, in union with the professorial.
In all Scottish cities The Clergy have, from time immemorial, exercised an amount of social influence not willingly allowed to any other class of persons. This arises partly from the same causes which give the clergy influence in other parts of Britain, but partly from the peculiar affection of the Scottish people for the national theology with which they have been saturated through so many centuries of clerical teaching. In Edinburgh, in consequence of the perpetuation there of relics of that old Scottish aristocracy which never was completely brought into subjection to Presbytery, and in consequence of the presence in society of a distinct intellectual element in the lawyers, the clergy have not perhaps had, relatively, the same weight as in other towns. Still they were powerful even in the old Edinburgh of the Dundas rule. At the very least, a negative respect was paid to them by the preservation throughout the place of an external Presbyterian decorum and strictness; and in all houses “the minister” was treated with distinction. Add to this that there generally were among the Edinburgh clergy men possessing claims to respect in addition to those belonging to their profession. Some, even in that age of “Moderatism,” were remarkable for their eloquence and zeal as preachers and as pastors; others had literary pretensions; and others were professors in the University as well as parish clergymen. More, indeed, than now, the professorial and the clerical elements were then intermixed in Edinburgh. Perhaps, however, that which gave the greatest dignity to the clerical or ecclesiastical element in Edinburgh was the annual meeting in that city, every May, of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. In the history of Scottish society since the Union there is, perhaps, no one fact of greater importance than the regular and uninterrupted succession of those annual “General Assemblies” in Edinburgh for the discussion of the affairs of the National Church. Let an Englishman fancy that during the last two centuries there had been no Parliament in England, no meetings of the House of Lords or of the House of Commons, but that regularly during that period there had been annual convocations of representatives of the whole body of the English Clergy, together with such leading members of the laity as churchwardens or the like from all the English parishes, and that these convocations had sat ten days in every year, discussing all public matters in any way bearing on the Church, and making laws affecting the entire ecclesiastical organisation of England, and he will have an idea of the extent to which the national history of Scotland since her union with England is bound up in the records of her “General Assemblies.” The General Assembly, in fact, from the year 1707 to the Disruption of the Scottish Church in 1843, was, to some extent, a veritable Parliament, in which, though the secular Parliament had been abolished, the united people of Scotland still saw their nationality preserved and represented. All through the year the clergy individually, in the thousand parishes or so into which Scotland was divided, managed their own parochial affairs with the assistance of select laymen called elders; these clergymen, again, with some of their elders, held frequent district meetings, called “presbyteries,” in order to regulate by deliberation and voting the church affairs of their districts; there were still larger meetings, periodically held, called “provincial synods”; but the grand rendezvous of all, the supreme court of appeal and ecclesiastical legislation, was the annual General Assembly in Edinburgh. The time of its meeting was one of bustle and excitement. Black coats swarmed in the streets; the Assembly was opened with military pomp and circumstance by a Lord High Commissioner representing the Crown; this Commissioner sat on a throne during the meetings, and held levees and dinner-parties in Holyrood Palace all through the ten days; the clergy, with lay representatives, some of whom were usually noblemen or baronets, deliberated and debated during those ten days, under a president of their own choosing called the “Moderator”; the proceedings were in parliamentary form, and the decisions by a majority of votes; and in many cases,—as in trials of clergymen for moral or ecclesiastical misdemeanour,—barristers were called in to plead professionally, as they did in the secular law-courts. As was natural in a deliberative assembly almost all the members of which were of the speaking class, the speaking was of a very high order,—far higher, indeed, than has ever been heard in these later days in the British Parliament; while at the same time there was ample opportunity for the exercise of business talent and of all the tact and skill of party-leadership. Much of the general politics of Scotland took necessarily the form of church politics; and, indeed, the connections between church politics and state politics were pretty close. The vast majority of the clergy were adherents of Dundas in general politics, and bent on swaying church polity in the same direction; while the small minority of “Evangelicals” or “High-Fliers,” as they were called, corresponded to the proscribed “Liberals” in secular politics. The leading clergymen of both parties were to be found in or near Edinburgh.
Respecting the Mercantile and Artisan classes it need only be repeated that they were by no means separated by any social demarcation from the fore-mentioned classes, but were intertwined with these by family-relationships, and often also by the sympathies belonging to superior natural intelligence and superior education. Booksellers and printers were more numerous in Edinburgh proportionally than in any other British town.
In a population of such dimensions, composed as has been described, there was necessarily a good deal of leisure; and leisure leads to sociability. Edinburgh in those days was one of the most sociable towns in the world. By that time “society,” in the conventional sense, had, with a few lingering exceptions, shifted itself out of the Old Town into the New, or into the suburbs; and, with this change, there had been a considerable change of manners. Much of the formality, and at the same time much of the coarseness, of an older stage of Scottish life had been civilised away,—the absurd etiquette of the old dancing assemblies, for example, and the more monstrous excesses of hard drinking. But the convivial spirit, and many of the old convivial forms, remained. Dinner parties were frequent; and the old custom of “toasts” and “sentiments” by the hosts and the guests over their wine was still in fashion. Lord Cockburn’s description of those dinner parties of his youth is one of the best passages in his book. But it is on the supper parties that he dwells with most evident affection. There were various kinds of supper parties: the oyster supper at taverns, the bachelor supper in lodgings, and the real domestic supper, to which both sexes were invited; which last Lord Cockburn vaunts as a delightful institution of Edinburgh, which the advancing lateness of the dinner-hour had unhappily superseded. In short, in every form and way, from the set dinner party, with its immense consumption of claret, in the houses of the more wealthy, to the homely tea parties of gentlewomen of moderate means, living in the suburbs of the Old Town, or in flats in the New Town, and the roystering suppers of young men, where culinary deficiencies were compensated by good humour and the whisky punch, people were in the habit of incessantly meeting to spend the evenings together. Lord Cockburn mentions, as illustrative of the continuance of those sociable habits of the Edinburgh folks to a somewhat later period than that with which we are immediately concerned, the fact that for a great many years after his marriage, which was in 1811, he had not spent above one evening in every month, on the average, in solitude, i.e. without either being out as a guest, or having friends with him at home. Even Sydney Smith, though not native and to the manner born, and, with his English tastes, more fastidious in his ideas of conviviality, retained to the last a pleasant recollection of those Edinburgh hospitalities, as experienced by him during his stay in Edinburgh from 1797 to 1802. “When shall I see Scotland again?” he says in one of his letters: “never shall I forget the happy days passed there, amidst odious smells, barbarous sounds, bad suppers, excellent hearts, and the most enlightened and cultivated understandings.”
Sydney Smith’s allusion to “the enlightened and cultivated understandings” he encountered amid such roughish surroundings, suggests the mention of what was, all in all, the most characteristic feature of Edinburgh society at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth—its intellectualism. In a community composed in so large a measure of practitioners of the learned professions, it was inevitable that there should be more of interest in matters intellectual than is common, more of a habit of reasoning and discussion, more play and variety in the choice of topics for conversation. What mattered it that many of the most intellectual men and women gave expression to their ideas in broad Scotch? Ideas may be expressed in broad Scotch, and yet be the ideas of cultivated minds; at all events, it was so then in Edinburgh, where many excellent lawyers, University professors, and medical men kept up the broad Scotch in their ordinary conversation, though the majority had gone over to the English in all save accent, and some were sedulous in trying to Anglicise themselves even in that. But, whether the dialect was English or Scotch, there was a great deal of very pleasant and very substantial talk. True, in Sydney Smith’s recollection of the conversation of the Edinburgh people at the time he moved among them, two great faults are specified. It ran too much, he records, to that species of jocosity, perfectly torturing to an Englishman, which the Scotch themselves called wut; and it also ran too much, he records, into disputation and dialectics. “Their only idea of wit,” he says, speaking of the Scotch generally, but of the Edinburgh people in particular, “or rather of that inferior variety of the electric talent which prevails occasionally in the North, and which, under the name of wut, is so infinitely distressing to people of good taste, is laughing immoderately at stated intervals.” And again—“They are so imbued with metaphysics that they even make love metaphysically: I overheard a young lady of my acquaintance, at a dance in Edinburgh, exclaim, in a sudden pause of the music, ‘What you say, my lord, is very true of love in the abstract, but——,’ here the fiddlers began fiddling furiously, and the rest was lost.” This is somewhat unfair. Wut, in its place, is as good as wit, and may be a great deal heartier. As practised in the north, it corresponds more with what is properly humour. It consists in a general openness to the ludicrous view of things, a general disposition to call each other Tam and Sandy, a general readiness to tell and to hear Scottish stories the fun of which lies in the whole series of conceptions (often too local) that they call up, rather than in any sudden flash or quip at the close. At all events, the Scotch like their wut, and find it satisfying. As for the dialectics, there is, perhaps, too much of that. The excess in this direction is due, doubtless, in part to the omnipresence of the lawyers. But wut and dialectics make a very good mixture; and, dashed as this mixture is and always has been in Edinburgh with finer and higher ingredients, there has been no town in Britain for the last century and a half of greater deipnosophistic capabilities, all things considered.
One element which Englishmen who do not know Edinburgh always imagine as necessarily wanting in it never has been wanting. Whether from the influence of the lawyers, and of the relics of the old Scottish baronage and baronetage, acting conjointly as a counterpoise to the influence of the clergy, or from other less obvious causes, there has always been in Edinburgh a freer undercurrent of speculative opinion, a tougher traditional scepticism, a greater latitude of jest at things clerical and Presbyterian, than in other Scottish towns. From the early part of the eighteenth century, when Allan Ramsay, Dr. Archibald Pitcairn, and others, did battle with the clergy in behalf of theatrical entertainments and other forms of the festive, there has never been wanting a strong anti-clerical and even free-thinking clique in Edinburgh society; and towards the end of the century, when David Hume and Hugo Arnot were alive or remembered, no city in Britain sheltered such a quantity of cosy infidelity. Of hundreds of stories illustrative of this, take one of the mildest:—Pitcairn, going about the streets one Sunday, was obliged by a sudden pelt of rain to take refuge in a place he was not often in,—a church. The audience was scanty; and he sat down in a pew where there was only another sitter besides,—a quiet, grave-looking countryman, listening to the sermon with a face of the utmost composure. The preacher was very pathetic; so much so that at one passage he began to shed tears copiously, and to use his pocket-handkerchief. Interested in this as a physiological phenomenon for which the cause was not apparent, Pitcairn turned to the countryman, and asked in a whisper, “What the deevil gars the man greet?” “Faith,” said the man, slowly turning round, “ye wad maybe greet yoursel’ if ye was up there and had as little to say.” Pitcairn was the type of the avowed Edinburgh infidel; of which class there were not a few whose esoteric talk when they met together was of an out-and-out kind; but the countryman was the type of a still more numerous class, who kept up exterior conformity, but tested all shrewdly enough by a pretty tough interior instinct. Indeed, long after Pitcairn’s time, a kind of sturdy scepticism, quite distinct from what would be called “infidelity,” was common among the educated classes in Edinburgh. Old gentlemen who went duly to church, who kept their families in great awe, and who preserved much etiquette in their habits towards each other, were by no means strait-laced in their beliefs; and it was not till a considerably later period, when a more fervid religious spirit had taken possession of the Scottish clergy themselves, and flamed forth in more zealous expositions of peculiar Calvinistic doctrine from the pulpit than had been customary in the days of Robertson and Blair, that evangelical orthodoxy obtained in Edinburgh its visible and intimate alliance with social respectability. Moreover, even those who were then indubitably orthodox and devout by the older standard were devout after a freer fashion, and with a far greater liberty both of conduct and of rhetoric, than would now be allowable in consistency with the same reputation. There is no point on which Lord Cockburn lays more stress than on this. “There is no contrast,” he says, “between those old days and the present that strikes me so strongly as that suggested by the differences in religious observances, not so much by the world in general, as by deeply religious people. I knew the habits of the religious very well, partly through the piety of my mother and her friends, the strict religious education of her children, and our connection with some of the most distinguished of our devout clergymen. I could mention many practices of our old pious which would horrify modern zealots. The principles and feelings of the persons commonly called evangelical were the same then that they are now; the external acts by which these principles and feelings were formerly expressed were materially different.”
Among the differences, Lord Cockburn notes in particular the much laxer style, as it would now be called, in which Sunday was observed by pious people and even by the most pious among the clergy. There seems also to have been more freedom of speech, in the direction of what would now be called profane allusion, among the admittedly pious. One of the gems of Lord Cockburn’s book is his portrait of one venerable old lady, a clergyman’s widow, sitting neatly dressed in her high-backed leather chair, with her grandchildren round her, the very model of silver-haired serenity, till one of her granddaughters, in reading the newspaper to her, stumbled on a paragraph which told how the reputation of a certain fair one at the court of the Prince Regent had suffered from some indiscreet talk of his about his own relations with her, but then starting up, and exclaiming, with an indignant shake of her shrivelled fist,—“The dawmed villain! does he kiss and tell?” There were not a few old ladies of this stamp in Edinburgh in Lord Cockburn’s boyhood and youth; some of whom survived far into the present century, too old to part with their peculiarities, even to please the clergy. “Ye speak, sir, as if the Bible had just come oot,” said one such old lady, who lingered long in Edinburgh, to a young clergyman who was instructing her on some point of Christian practice on which she was disposed to differ from him. The continuation in the society of Edinburgh of a considerable sprinkling of such free-speaking gentlewomen of the old Scottish school, intermingled with as many of the other sex using a still rougher rhetoric, imparted, we are told, a flavour of originality to the convivial conversation of the place for which there is now no exact equivalent.
Presided over by such seniors, the young educated men of the time did not stint themselves in the choice or the range of their convivial topics. They discussed everything under the sun and down to the centre. Who has not heard of the Speculative Society of Edinburgh, founded in 1764 in connection with the University, and kept up from that time to this by successive generations of students; of which Lord Cockburn says that it “has trained more young men to public spirit, talent, and liberal thought, than all the other private institutions in Scotland”? Between 1780 and 1800 this society was in all its glory, discussing, week after week, as its minutes inform us, such topics as these:—“Ought any permanent support to be provided for the poor?” “Ought there to be an established religion?” “Was the execution of Charles I. justifiable?” “Should the slave trade be abolished?” “Has the belief in a future state been of advantage to mankind, or is it ever likely to be so?” “Is it for the interest of Britain to maintain what is called the balance of Europe?” Here surely was scepticism enough to keep thought alive; and that such questions, discussed not only in the Speculative Society, but also in minor associations of the same kind, and carried doubtless also, with other more scientific topics, into private assemblages, should have been ventilated in Edinburgh at that day, shows that, even under the Dundas Despotism, there was no lack of intellectual freedom.
It is but a continuation of what we have been saying to add that the old Edinburgh of those defunct decades had already an established reputation as a literary metropolis. The rise of the literary reputation of Edinburgh may date, for all purposes except such as shallow present scholarship would call merely antiquarian, from the time when Allan Ramsay set up his circulating library in the High Street, and supplied the lieges furtively with novels, plays, and song-books, including his own poems. This was about the year 1725, when his countryman, Thomson, was publishing in London the first portion of his Seasons. Thomson himself, and his contemporaries or immediate successors, Mallet, Smollett, Armstrong, Meikle, Macpherson, and Falconer, all rank in the list of literary Scots; but they were Scoti extra Scotiam agentes, and had, most of them, but an incidental connection with Edinburgh. The poets Robert Blair and James Beattie, the philosopher Reid, and the theologian and critic Dr. George Campbell, were not only literary Scots, but literary Scots whose lives were spent on their own side of the Tweed; but, with the exception of Blair, none of them were natives of Edinburgh, and even Blair did not live there. After Ramsay, in short, the early literary fame of Edinburgh is associated with the names of a cluster of men who, born in different parts of Scotland, had, from various chances, taken up their abode in Edinburgh, and who resided there, more or less permanently, during the latter half of the eighteenth century. The most prominent men of this cluster were these:—David Hume (1711–1776), known as a philosophical writer since the year 1738, and who, though he spent a good many years of his literary life in England and in France, was for the last twenty years of it, and these the most busy, a resident in Edinburgh; Hume’s senior and survivor, Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782), one of the judges of the Court of Session, still remembered for the contrast between the coarse Scottish facetiousness of his manners and the studied fineness of his writings; the learned and eccentric Burnet, Lord Monboddo (1714–1799), also a judge of Session, at whose Attic suppers in the Old Town all the talent and beauty of Edinburgh were for many years regularly assembled; the pompous but sensible Dr. Hugh Blair (1718–1799), Professor of Belles Lettres in the University, and one of the clergymen of the city; his more celebrated colleague, Dr. Robertson the historian (1722–1793), Principal of the University, and likewise one of the city clergymen; the minor historical writers and antiquarians, Tytler of Woodhouselee (1711–1792), Dr. Henry (1718–1790), Lord Hailes (1726–1792), Dr. Adam Ferguson (1724–1816), and Dr. Gilbert Stuart (1742–1786); the poet John Home, author of the tragedy of Douglas (1722–1808), once the Rev. Mr. Home, but long bereft of that title, and known since 1779 as a retired man of letters in Edinburgh; the illustrious Adam Smith (1723–1790), settled in Edinburgh during the last twenty years of his life in the post of commissioner of customs; the hardly less illustrious Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), elected Professor of Mathematics in the University as early as 1774, but thence transferred in 1785 to the chair of Moral Philosophy, where he completed his fame; and, lastly, not to overburden the list, the novelist and essayist Henry Mackenzie (1745–1831), an acknowledged literary celebrity ever since 1771, when he had published his Man of Feeling. In a class by himself, unless we choose to associate him with the Creeches, Smellies, and other “wuts” of a lower grade, whose acquaintance Burns made in his leisure hours during his first visit to Edinburgh in 1786, we may mention Burns’s immediate predecessor in the poetry of the Scottish vernacular, the unfortunate Robert Fergusson (1751–1774). He was a native of Edinburgh, and his brief life was squandered in its taverns.
It was by virtue of the residence in the Scottish capital through the latter half of the eighteenth century of this cluster of men,—a tolerably brilliant cluster, it will be admitted,—that the city first assumed that position of literary rivalry with London which the names of Scott, Jeffrey, and Wilson enabled it to maintain for thirty or forty years longer. And here we may be permitted, parenthetically, a remark on a subject of some interest to Scotsmen generally. A not unfrequent question is whether Edinburgh will continue to maintain her former activity as a literary capital, or whether in literature, as in other things, the tendency is not to absolute centralisation in London. A little fact involved in the list of names just given is of some pertinence in relation to this inquiry. Let the list be examined, and it will be found that hardly one of the men mentioned in it as having begun the literary celebrity of Edinburgh was professionally a man of letters. They were all lawyers, or clergymen, or university professors, or retired gentlemen who had posts and pensions. Even poor Fergusson the poet owed his living to his industry as copying-clerk to a lawyer. In this respect the literary society of Edinburgh at that date contrasts with that of London. Johnson, Goldsmith, and most of their set were writers by profession; and it was chiefly by such professional writers that the literary reputation of London was then supported. Nay, whenever a Scotsman of that time was led by circumstances to adopt literature as an occupation, it will be observed that, almost of course, he migrated into England, and attached himself to the skirts of the literary world of London. There was there a literary market, whereas in Edinburgh there were merely so many resident citizens who were at the same time authors. Thomson, Mallet, Smollett, Macpherson, and many other Scots of less note connected with the British literature of the last century as writers by profession, betook themselves necessarily to London as their proper field. Hence a difference between the literary society of Edinburgh and that of London, not indicated in the mere fact that the one city was the Scottish, and the other the English, capital. The literary society of Edinburgh did consist chiefly of authors of Scottish birth, but there might have been Englishmen in it without essentially changing its character; and, on the other hand, the literary society of London included Scotsmen and Irishmen as well as Englishmen. The difference, therefore, was not so much that the one society consisted of Scottish and the other of English elements. It was rather that the one consisted of men independently resident in the place as lawyers, clergymen, and what not, and employing their leisure in literature, while the other consisted, to far greater extent, of authors by profession. This difference is pointed out by one of the old Edinburgh set itself, as serving to account for what he considered the greater geniality and cordiality of the habits of that set in their intercourse with each other in comparison with the contemporary habits of London literary society under the dogmatic presidency of Johnson. “Free and cordial communication of sentiments, the natural play of good humour,” says Henry Mackenzie, in his memoir of his friend John Home, “prevailed among the circle of men whom I have described. It was very different from that display of learning, that prize-fighting of wit, which distinguished a literary circle of our sister country of which we have some authentic and curious records.” And the reason, he thinks, lay in the different constitutions of the two societies. “The literary circle of London was a sort of sect, a caste separate from the ordinary professions and habits of common life. They were traders in talent and learning, and brought, like other traders, samples of their goods into company, with a jealousy of competition which prevented their enjoying, as much as otherwise they might, any excellence in their competitors.” There is some truth in this, though it is expressed somewhat carpingly; and even at the present day the remark may be taken as describing a certain difference which the Edinburgh “wuts” think they see between themselves and the London “wits.” But may not the fact under notice have some bearing also on the centralisation question? If from the first, and at the very time when the literary reputation of Edinburgh was at its height, Edinburgh was not a centre of professional literary industry, then,—despite the subsequent establishment of important newspapers and some important periodicals in the city, and the generation in it by their means of some amount of professional literary industry,—it is hardly likely that it can long resist with visible success the tendency which threatens to centralise British literary industry of that sort mainly in London. If, indeed, in literature, as in other kinds of production, the manufacture might be carried on at a distance from the market, the tendency might be resisted; in other words, authors might live in Edinburgh and the publishing machinery might be in London. In literature, however, less than in most trades, is such an arrangement possible. But let not Edinburgh despair. Only let her still have within her, as hitherto, a sufficient number of the right kind of persons, distributed through her official appointments, or in other ways habitually resident, and it is pretty certain that books of all varieties will continue to be shot out from her at intervals, some of them the more valuable perhaps because they will not have been made to order.
To return to our more immediate subject:—It will enable us more distinctly to conceive the state of Edinburgh society ninety or ninety-five years ago if we enumerate the more important of the individuals, old and young, who then figured in it. In doing so, it will be well to fix on some one year, at which to take our census. For various reasons the year 1802 may be selected. It was the first year of the short peace, or “armed truce,” which intervened between the two wars with France; it was the first year, also, of that short and perplexing interregnum in home affairs during which Addington was prime minister and Pitt and Dundas were out of office.
Few of the intellectual chiefs of the former generation were now alive in Edinburgh. David Hume and the poet Fergusson had been dead more than a quarter of a century; Kames and Gilbert Stuart for nearly twenty years. Dr. Henry, Adam Smith, the physician Cullen, Blacklock, Lord Hailes, the elder Tytler of Woodhouselee, and Robertson the historian, had disappeared more recently, and were still remembered. Fresher still was the local recollection of Lord Monboddo, Dr. Hugh Blair, the chemist Black, whose death had occurred in 1799, and of such minor celebrities as the Rev. Dr. Macknight and Dr. Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk. Of nearly all these men Lord Cockburn could remember something, either as having known them domestically in his boyhood, or as having watched them taking their daily walk in the “Meadows”; and it was one of the gratifications of his after-life to think that, while privileged to live into the splendours of a new age, he had been born early enough to see the departing skirts of the old. Some remnants of the old age, however, did survive as connecting links between it and the new. Home, the author of “Douglas,” was alive in 1802, an infirm veteran of eighty, with flashes of his former spirit in him, and still capable of his claret. Another survivor was Dr. Adam Ferguson, two years the junior of Home and much of an invalid, but with fourteen years of life still before him. Henry Mackenzie, called “The Man of Feeling,” but as shrewd a man of the world as there was in Edinburgh, was another of the veterans,—fifty-seven years old, but destined to reach the age of eighty-six. Dugald Stewart was verging on his fiftieth year, and his philosophical reputation was still on the increase. To these survivors in the world of philosophy and letters add, as notables in the department of science, Robison, the Professor of Natural Philosophy, and Playfair, the Professor of Mathematics, and, as the ablest remaining specimens of the old Edinburgh clergy, Dr. John Erskine and Sir Henry Moncreiff. Passing into the miscellaneous society amid which those men moved, and which they linked intellectually with the past, we may distribute their Edinburgh contemporaries of the year 1802 into three categories:—(1) The Old Worthies.—This category includes a considerable number of surviving citizens, belonging, by their age, habits, and costume, to the same past generation as the notabilities above named, and many of them, indeed, older than the younger notabilities of that list. Most conspicuous among them were the old dons of the Parliament House; of some of whom Lord Cockburn gives wonderful portraits. The awful Braxfield was dead; but his successor on the bench, David Rae, Lord Eskgrove,—more familiarly known as “Esky,”—was keeping the Parliament House in a constant roar with the daily rumour of his last absurdities. What a blessing for a moderately-sized community to have at its heart such a preventive against insipidity, such a clove or cassia-bud of all-diffusive relish, as this famous Lord Justice-Clerk Esky; whom Lord Cockburn once heard sentence a tailor to death for the murder of a soldier in these terms,—“Not only did you murder him, whereby he was berea-ved of his life, but you did thrust, or push, or pierce, or project, or propell the le-thall weapon through the belly-band of his regimen-tal breeches, which were his Majes-ty’s,” and of whom Lord Cockburn further vouches that his customary formula of address to a criminal in concluding the sentence of death was,—“Whatever your religi-ous persua-shon may be, or even if, as I suppose, you be of no persua-shon at all, there are plenty of reverend gentlemen who will be most happy to show you the way to yeternal life.” Of the rest of the fifteen judges, the most remarkable for their talents and their character were the Lord President Hay Campbell, Lord Glenlee, Lord Hermand, Lord Meadowbank the first, and Lord Cullen. After Esky, Hermand was the most notorious oddity of the bench. At the bar, the witty Harry Erskine, and Charles Hay, afterwards Lord Newton, might be ranked among the older men. Coevals of these dons of the Parliament House, were Andrew Dalzel, the Professor of Greek in the University, and Dr. Finlayson, the Professor of Logic; with whom may be mentioned the simple-hearted Dr. Adam, Rector of the High School, the Rev. Dr. Struthers, a distinguished preacher of the Secession Church, and the veteran bookseller Creech. (2) The Middle-Aged Men.—Taking this class to include all who, while old enough to have obtained some standing in life, were still not past their maturity, we may enumerate in it such leading lawyers as Robert Dundas of Arniston (nephew of the great Dundas, and promoted to the office of Chief Baron of the Exchequer in 1801, after having been Lord Advocate for twelve years), and Robert Blair, Charles Hope, Adam Gillies, John Clerk of Eldin, David Cathcart, and David Boyle, all of whom subsequently rose to the Bench; Malcolm Laing, then also an advocate, but subsequently better known as an antiquarian and historian; James Gibson, Writer to the Signet, afterwards Sir James Gibson Craig; the Presbyterian clergyman, Dr. John Inglis, and the Rev. Archibald Alison of the Scottish Episcopal Church; in the medical profession, Dr. Andrew Duncan, Dr. James Gregory, and Dr. John Bell; and, among miscellaneous residents, Nasmyth, the portrait painter, and George Thomson, the correspondent of Burns. (3) Young Edinburgh.—Here also the Bar had the preponderance. Reckoning among the juniors at the bar all who had been called after 1790, one has to include these in the list,—John Macfarlan, Archibald Fletcher, Walter Scott, William Erskine, Thomas Thomson, George Cranstoun, George Joseph Bell, James Grahame, James Moncreiff, Francis Jeffrey, Francis Horner, J. A. Murray, John Richardson, Henry Cockburn, and Henry Brougham. Of this group of young advocates, all afterwards locally eminent, some had already revealed the faculties which were to make them known far beyond the precincts of the Parliament House. Brougham was about the youngest of them, being then only in his twenty-third year; but he was the recognised dare-devil of the whole group, the most vehement of the orators of the Speculative, and the terror of old Esky. “That man Broom or Broug-ham,” Esky used to say, “is the torment of my life.” Older than Brougham by a year, Horner was already a leader among his associates by the solid strength and integrity of his character. Jeffrey was in his twenty-ninth year, a married young barrister, waiting for briefs. Scott, then also married and past his thirtieth year, was more comfortably settled: he was Sheriff of Selkirkshire, had some practice at the bar, and had already some literary reputation by metrical translations from the German, a few Scottish ballads, and his edition of The Border Minstrelsy. But the bar did not include all the young talents. Among the hopes of the medical profession were John Allen, John Thomson, and Thomas Brown, the future meta-physician. Leyden, the poet and linguist, was then one of the rising stars of Edinburgh; and Thomas Campbell, whose Pleasures of Hope had been for three years before the public, was for the time a resident. Nor was a sprinkling of English residents wanting, to exchange ideas with so many fervid young Scots, and banter them about their dialect and their prejudices. Had not the philosophic Lord Webb Seymour chosen Edinburgh for his home; and was not Sydney Smith there on his memorable visit? Finally, if any one in Edinburgh wanted to have his portrait splendidly painted, to whom could he go but to Henry Raeburn? Or, if any one wanted information about books which old Creech, or Miller, or Bell and Bradfute could not give, from whom was he so likely to obtain it as from the energetic and ambitious young bookseller, Archibald Constable?
Looking down in fancy on the sea of 80,000 heads which in the year 1802 constituted the population of Edinburgh,—some gray with age, many wigged and powdered, and many more wearing the brown or light locks of natural youth,—it is on the above-named sixty or seventy that the instructed eye now rests as the most conspicuous in the crowd. But the instructed eye sees something more than the mere mass of heads, with here and there one of the conspicuous sixty. It sees the mass swaying to and fro,—here solid and restful, there discomposed and in motion, and the conspicuous heads unequally distributed amid the wavering parts. In other words, the society of Edinburgh in 1802, like every other society before or since, presented the phenomenon of division into two parties,—the party of rest and conservation, and the party of change or progress. The main fact in the history of Edinburgh at that time was that an incessant house-to-house battle was going on in it between old Scottish Toryism and a new and vigorous Scottish Whiggism. Numerically, the Tories were immensely in the majority, and the Whigs were but in small proportion. But it is not by the numerical measure in such cases that History judges or portions out her interest. The party that is largest may be the lump, and that which is smallest may be the leaven. So it was most remarkably in the Edinburgh of 1802. To any one surveying the society of Edinburgh then, with something of that knowledge which we now possess, two facts would have seemed significant: first, that, though the majority were on the Tory side, most of the conspicuous heads were on the Whig side; secondly, and still more obviously, that among the conspicuous heads the Whigs claimed nearly all the young ones. If, for example, Toryism could claim a full half of the veterans that have been named, the potent old chiefs of the Parliament House included, yet even of those veterans a few, such as Erskine, Dugald Stewart, Playfair, old Dr. Adam, and Sir Henry Moncreiff, were Whigs; if among the middle-aged Toryism was equally strong, yet here also Whiggism could count representatives in Gillies, Clerk of Eldin, Malcolm Laing, and the resolute James Gibson; and, if still, after surveying those two classes, there had been any doubt which of the two political parties had the higher pretensions intellectually, it was only necessary to descend among the young and adolescent to see that among them at least Whiggism had most recruits. 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.
We do not now associate Whiggism with any idea of the heroic. But in the year 1802 one had to judge otherwise. Whiggism all over Britain, but especially Scottish Whiggism, then required some courage, some spirit of self-sacrifice, in its adherents. The actual creed of the Scottish Whigs was moderate enough. It consisted in believing that there were a great many remediable abuses in the Scottish political and administrative system, that the people had too little power and the lairds too much, that the Revolution in France had not been unmitigated madness, that at any rate the dread of its effects on this country had been monstrously exaggerated, and that, on the whole, the policy of Fox and his associates was a policy to be supported in preference to that of his rival, Pitt. The creed, we say, was moderate; and it was, undoubtedly, in large measure, true. What made it heroism to hold to it was that the holding of it involved serious personal consequences,—exclusion from all share in the good things going, and even, to a considerable extent, from popular confidence and favour; with no prospect either (for who could tell when George III. might die, or how his son might act when he came to the throne?) that this state of things would soon end. That in such circumstances so many men in Scotland, and especially so many men of the legal profession, should have maintained the obnoxious creed, and maintained it with such tenacity and mutual fidelity in spite of all temptation, is a fact of which Scotland may well be proud. As a body, the Scottish Whigs of 1802 seem to have been as courageous and pure-minded a set of men as there were in Great Britain. Theirs, in the most literal sense, was “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Most creditable of all, perhaps, was the persevering Whiggism of so many of the younger men. Beating their heels idly in a particular corner of the Parliament House, where no agents came to them with briefs, and whiling away the rest of their time with essays and debates in the Speculative Society, ambitious dreams in secret, convivial meetings at each others’ houses, and eternal jokes about Esky, those light-hearted young Whig lawyers had not even that sense of social consequence to support them which their seniors on the same side of politics could feel as an inspiration. They formed a little band by themselves, cherishing their Whiggism for its own sake, and not even visited by much countenance from their Whig seniors. And yet upon them, to a greater extent than they or their seniors were aware, depended the future history of Scotland.
The moving force in Scottish society at that time was consciously possessed by the Whigs. Though by far the smaller party numerically over Scotland as a whole, they could not but feel that they must eventually win. The great want of the party hitherto had been some voice or organ, some public means of proclaiming collectively the views which they entertained individually, of propagating these views in new quarters, and of exhibiting them again and again in contrast with those of their opponents. No such means of utterance existed. The senior Edinburgh Whigs had been in the habit of dining together on Fox’s birthday, on which occasions constables were stationed at the doors by the authorities to take down the names of the guests as they entered; they also occasionally fought their opponents on a temporary local question. This, however, was all; and Scottish Whiggism, though working as a social ferment, had no organisation and no flag. The year 1802,—the country then, as we have seen, in the lull of the brief peace with France, and Pitt and Dundas out of office,—was a time when it began to seem possible to supply this want. “Events,” says Lord Cockburn, “were bringing people into somewhat better humour. Somewhat less was said about Jacobinism, though still too much; and sedition had gone out. Napoleon’s obvious progress towards military despotism opened the eyes of those who used to see nothing but liberty in the French Revolution. Instead of Jacobinism, Invasion became the word.” In short, though the old habits and all the old abuses still remained, the state of the public mind was such that it became more easy to establish a means for publicly attacking them and advocating reform.
Whence was the expected demonstration to come, and what form was it to take? Where in Scotland was the standard of Scottish Whiggism to be first raised, and who was to step forth as the standard-bearer?
Scotland had recently lost one man who, had he lived till 1802, might have been called on to act this part. Six or eight years before, when it was most dangerous to be a Scottish Whig,—when to be too zealous a Scottish Whig, unless one were powerfully connected, meant to run a risk of trial for sedition,—there had not been a more daring Whig in Scotland than the poet Burns. True, he was a Whig, as he was everything else, after an uncovenanted fashion of his own, which did not keep touch with any of the current definitions of Whiggism; but, for all that, he was, and he called himself, a Scottish Whig. “Go on, sir,” he wrote from Dumfries, in the end of 1792, to the Whig, or rather Whig-Radical, editor of the shortlived Edinburgh Gazetteer, to which he had become a subscriber: “Go on, and lay bare, with undaunted heart and steady hand, that horrid mass of corruption called politics and statecraft. Dare to draw in their native colours those ‘calm-thinking villains whom no faith can fire,’ whatever be the shibboleth of their pretended party.” This was Whiggism and a vast deal more; but the following song, written at the same time, or not long after, shows that, all in all, as matters then stood, it pleased Burns to be known as a Whig of the Fox school:—
“Here’s a health to them that’s awa,
Here’s a health to them that’s awa;
And wha winna wish guid luck to our cause,
May never guid luck be their fa’!
It’s guid to be merry and wise,
It’s guid to be honest and true,
It’s guid to support Caledonia’s cause
And bide by the buff and the blue.
Here’s a health to them that’s awa,
Here’s a health to them that’s awa;
Here’s a health to Charlie, the chief o’ the clan,
Although that his band be sma’!
May liberty meet wi’ success!
May prudence protect her frae evil!
May tyrants and tyranny tine in the mist,
And wander their way to the Devil!”
Had Burns lived till 1802, who knows to what his politics might have led him? He would then have been still only in his forty-fourth year; and what fate more imaginable for him, had he been still alive, than that, deprived of his gaugership, or throwing it up, he should have left Dumfries for Edinburgh, and, associating himself there with the many who would have welcomed him, and with whom, whatever their rank, there was no fear that his relations would have ever been other than those of perfect equality, he should have become the editor, mayhap, of a Whig newspaper? If so, who can doubt that prose would have become easier to him, that he would have been a power among the Scottish Whigs, and that his influence would have been felt, in his new character, by them and by the nation? Ah! and, had he lived on through all their coming struggles, would he not have been but seventy-three years of age at the time of the passing of the Reform Bill; and, in gratitude to him as a veteran Whig and ex-editor, might not his fellow-citizens at last have returned him to the House of Commons as the senior colleague of young Macaulay?—“Profanation! profanation!” is the cry that will rise to all Scottish lips on the mere muttering of such a fancy. Nature herself had been of that opinion. Burns had died in 1796, in the thirty-eighth year of his age, a broken-down exciseman, in Dumfries; and he was to be remembered to all eternity,—thank God!—simply as Robert Burns.
The required party-standard was raised by the young Whigs of Edinburgh. It was in Jeffrey’s humble domicile, in an upper storey in one of the houses of Buccleuch Place, that, on one memorable day in the year 1802, Sydney Smith first started the idea of a new periodical, combining literature with politics, to be published quarterly, and kept up by contributions from the teeming minds of the members of the Speculative Society. No sooner said than done: Constable at once undertook the publication; and on the 10th of October 1802 the first number of the Edinburgh Review saw the light. For a number or two the editorship was the joint-occupation of Sydney Smith, Jeffrey, Horner, Brougham, and a few others,—Sydney Smith officiating in chief; but, on Smith’s return to London soon afterwards, the management fell exclusively on Jeffrey.
The establishment of the Edinburgh Review, as all the world knows, was the beginning of a new era in the history of British politics. For a while, indeed, it was rather as a power in the general thought and literature of the country than as a direct force in politics that the new organ made itself felt. For its success in the latter function circumstances for the first two or three years were not very propitious. The war with France having been renewed in 1803, and the Addington ministry having resigned in May 1804, and Pitt having then resumed the Premiership with Dundas (now Lord Melville) as again his principal colleague and at the head of the Admiralty, not only were the Scottish Tories once more in a mood of placid satisfaction over this change, and over the prospect which it brought of a reassured term of the Dundas proconsulship in Scotland; but the very occasion of the recall of Pitt to power, the very nature of the business in which Pitt and Dundas had to exert themselves, tended for the time to a modification, or at least a postponement, of party differences. Napoleon was now Emperor of the French; what he threatened now was an actual invasion of Britain; how could party differences continue operative in any virulent degree in face of such a common danger?
Party differences did subside for the while. 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.
In 1806, however, the face of things was suddenly altered. The death of Pitt in the January of that year, when his second administration was already tottering under the blow inflicted upon it by the impeachment of Lord Melville, brought it to an abrupt close; and the Whigs, no less to their own surprise than to that of the country, found themselves again in power, after an interval since their last real experience of that ecstasy which could be spanned by the memory only of old people then living. The accession to office of the Whig ministry of Fox and Grenville was startling enough, even had there been no especially Whiggish acts to correspond. But, during the thirteen months of the Fox and Grenville ministry (January 1806—March 1807), there were acts to correspond, over and above the prosecution of the Melville Impeachment to its conclusion. As places fell vacant, Whigs were appointed to them; an attempt was made to open negotiations for peace with Napoleon; and various measures of domestic reform were introduced into Parliament. To the Scottish Tories it was as if chaos had come again. Could they have foreseen that the crisis was to be so short,—could they have foreseen that the new Whig ministry, after having been weakened by the death of Fox in September 1806, would be able to struggle on but for six months more, and that then the Whigs would be driven back into their accustomed place as a minority in opposition, with another quarter of a century of uninterrupted Tory administration for Britain, and of a modified Dundas rule in Scotland, to intervene before they should again rise to supremacy,—it is possible that the consternation would have been less. But this at the time could not have been foreseen. The accession of the Whigs to power, and their retention of it during a whole year, were a rude awakening to men who had been asleep; and from that moment Toryism had bad dreams.
The crisis was powerfully felt in Edinburgh; and all that remains for us in this paper is to move forward from 1802 to 1806, for a glance at the state of Edinburgh in this latter year, when the effects of the crisis there were most acute.
As was natural, the mere lapse of time, independently of the special events that had been happening, had produced some changes. Of the seniors, both of the Whig and of the Tory party, that have been noted as alive in 1802, some had been removed by death; and, by these and other deaths, those who in 1802 had occupied junior positions in their respective parties found themselves promoted to higher places, and to more active concern in party affairs. Among the Tories of the Parliament House the most active heads, besides Robert Dundas of Arniston as Chief Baron of Exchequer, were Hope, now Lord Justice-Clerk in the place of old Esky, and Blair, afterwards Lord President; but among the younger men who acted with these there was no one whose name stood higher, or whose Toryism was more enthusiastic, than Scott. During the four years that had elapsed since 1802 his literary reputation had been gradually rising; and the publication in 1805 of his Lay of the Last Minstrel had given him rank among the most popular poets of his age, and diffused among his countrymen for the first time some adequate conception of the nature and the measure of his genius. His literary celebrity had not been without its effect on his worldly circumstances; for, besides retaining his Sheriffship, he was now settled for life in the Clerkship of the Court of Session. Very similar to the position which Scott thus held among the Edinburgh Tories in 1806 was the position which Jeffrey then held among the Edinburgh Whigs. The active heads of the Whig party in the Parliament House were such seniors as Harry Erskine, John Clerk of Eldin, and Adam Gillies. On the accession of the Fox and Grenville Ministry to office, Erskine had become Lord Advocate, Clerk had been made Solicitor-General, and Hay, another of the older set of Whig lawyers, had been raised to the bench. But, under those men, Jeffrey was now a person of far more consequence than he had been in 1802. Then he was only a rising junior in that set of independent young Whigs whom their elders were disposed rather to slight than to encourage; but his rapidly increasing distinction at the Bar, not to speak of the distinction accruing to him from the fame of the Edinburgh Review, had broken down the reserve of his seniors and compelled them to yield him due respect. Had Horner and Brougham remained in Edinburgh, they and Jeffrey might have been a kind of triumvirate, dividing among them the increased consideration which was now accorded to the younger portion of the Whig bar. But Horner and Brougham, as well as Allen and others of the little band of 1802, had by this time migrated to London, whence they kept up their connection with Edinburgh chiefly by correspondence and by contributions to the Review; and, as Cockburn and Murray had not yet attained a standing at the bar equal to Jeffrey’s, there was no doubt as to his individual supremacy among the younger resident Edinburgh Whigs.
Scott and Jeffrey: these names represent, therefore, the heartiest Toryism of Scotland and its most hopeful and opinionative Whiggism, as they stood opposed to each other in Edinburgh society in the year 1806. Remembering this, and with the well-known portraits of the two men in our minds, we can read the following passage in Lockhart’s Life of Scott with a new sense of its significance:—
“Scott’s Tory feelings appear to have been kept in a very excited state during the whole of the short reign of the Whigs. He then, for the first time, mingled keenly in the details of county politics—canvassed electors—harangued meetings; and, in a word, made himself conspicuous as a leading instrument of his party. But he was, in truth, earnest and serious in his belief that the new rulers of the country were disposed to abolish many of its most valuable institutions; and he regarded with special jealousy certain schemes of innovation with respect to the courts of law and the administration of justice which were set on foot by the crown-officers for Scotland. At a debate of the Faculty of Advocates on some of these propositions he made a speech much longer than he had ever before delivered in that assembly; and several who heard it have assured me that it had a flow and energy of eloquence for which those who knew him best were quite unprepared. When the meeting broke up, he walked across the Mound, on his way to Castle Street, between Mr. Jeffrey and another of his reforming friends, who complimented him on the rhetorical powers he had been displaying, and would willingly have treated the subject-matter of the discussion playfully. But his feelings had been moved to an extent far beyond their apprehension. He exclaimed ‘No, no—’tis no laughing matter; little by little, whatever your wishes may be, you will destroy and undermine, until nothing of what makes Scotland Scotland shall remain.’ And, so saying, he turned round to conceal his agitation—but not until Mr. Jeffrey saw tears gushing down his cheek,—resting his head, until he recovered himself, on the wall of the Mound.”
Edinburgh in 1806 is painted for us in that incident. Of the two men seen standing together on the Mound, under the tall clump of old houses which still on that spot arrests the eye of the visitor, the stalwart fair-haired one, leaning his head on the wall to conceal his tears, is the genius of the Scottish past, while his less moved companion, of smaller stature, with dark keen features and piercing hazel eyes, is the confident spirit of the Scottish future. There was, indeed, one element, then in making for the Scottish future, no representation of which was discernible in Jeffrey, and which was not logically involved in any ostensible form of Scottish Political Whiggism. This was that fervour of a revived Evangelicism in Theology the effects of which on the national character and the national polity of Scotland have been so strikingly visible through the last two generations and more. But this was a manifestation of later date, which even the closest observer of 1806 could hardly have pre-imagined. The traditional germ existed in Sir Henry Moncreiff; but the full development was to come with the combative Calvinistic and Presbyterian energy of Andrew Thomson, and the grander and richer genius of Thomas Chalmers.