Even the _Encyclopaedia_ itself, regarded in a literary point of view, is strikingly ill.u.s.trative of a change which has taken place chiefly within the present century in the republic of letters.
We enjoyed a very ample opportunity of acquainting ourselves with it in its infancy. More years have pa.s.sed away than we at present feel quite inclined to specify, since our attention was attracted at a very early age to an _Encyclopaedia_, the first we had ever seen, that formed one work of a dozen or so stored on the upper shelf of a press to which we were permitted access. It consisted of three quarto volumes sprinkled over with what seventy years ago must have been deemed very respectable copperplates, and remarkable, chiefly in the arrangement of its contents, for the inequality of the portions, if we may so speak, into which the knowledge it contained was broken up. As might be antic.i.p.ated from its comparatively small size, most of the articles were exceedingly meagre. There were pages after pages in which some eight or ten lines, sometimes a single line, comprised all that the writers had deemed it necessary to communicate on the subjects on which they touched. And yet, set full in the middle of these brief sentences--these mere skeletons of information--there were complete and elaborate treatises,--whales among the minnows. Some of these extended over ten, twenty, thirty, fifty pages of the work. We remember there was an old-fashioned but not ill-written treatise on _Chemistry_ among the number, quite bulky enough of itself to fill a small volume. There was a sensibly written treatise on _Law_, too; a treatise on _Anatomy_ not quite unworthy of the Edinburgh school; a treatise on _Botany_, of which at this distance of time we remember little else than that it rejected the s.e.xual system of Linnaeus, then newly promulgated; a treatise on _Architecture_, sufficiently incorrect, as we afterwards found, in some of its minor details, but which we still remember with the kindly feeling of the pupil for his first master; a treatise on _Fortification_, that at least taught us how to make model forts in sand; treatises on _Arithmetic_, _Astronomy_, _Bookkeeping_, _Grammar_, _Language_, _Theology_, _Metaphysics_, and a great many other treatises besides. The least interesting portion of the work was the portion devoted to Natural History: it named and numbered species and varieties, instead of describing instincts and habits, and afforded little else to the reader than lists of hard words, and lines of uninteresting numerals.
But our appet.i.te for books was keen and but ill supplied at the time, and so we read all of the work that would read,--some of it oftener than once. The character of the whole reminded us somewhat of that style of building common in some of the older ruins of the north country, in which we find layers of huge stones surrounded by strips and patches of a minute pinned work composed of splinters and fragments.
This Dictionary of the three quarto volumes was the first edition of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_,--the identical work in its first beginnings, of which the seventh edition has been so recently completed. It was published in 1771--in the days of Goldsmith, and Burke, and Johnson, and David Hume--several years ere Adam Smith had given his _Wealth of Nations_ or Robertson his _History of America_ to the public, and ere the names of Burns or Cowper had any place in BRITISH LITERATURE.
The world has grown greatly in knowledge since that period, and the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ has done much more than kept pace with it in its merits of acquirement. The three volumes have swelled into twenty-one; and each of the twenty-one contains at least one-third more of matter than each of the three. The growth and proportions of a work of genius seem to be very little dependent on the period of its production. Shakespeare may be regarded as the founder of the English drama. He wrote at a time when art was rude, and science comparatively low. All agree, at least, that the subjects of Queen Victoria know a very great deal which was not known by the subjects of Queen Elizabeth. There was no gas burned in front of the Globe Theatre, nor was the distant roar of a _locomotive_ ever heard within its dingy recesses; nor did ever adventurous aeronaut look down from his dizzy elevation of miles on its tub-like proportions, or its gay flag of motley. And yet we question whether even Mr. Wakley himself, with all his advantages, would venture to do more than a.s.sert his equality with the Swan of Avon. Homer, too, wrote in a very remote period,--so very remote and so very uncertain, that the critics have begun seriously to doubt whether the huge figure of the blind old man, as it looms through the grey obscure of ages, be in reality the figure of one poet, or of a whole school of poets rolled up into a bundle. But though men fight much more scientifically now than they did at Troy, and know much more about the taking and defending of walled towns, no poet of the present day greatly excels Homer,--no, not the Scotch schoolmaster even who wrote Wolfe"s Ode, or the gentleman who sends us abstruse verses which we unluckily cannot understand, and then scolds us in perspicuous prose for not giving them a place in our columns.
Works of genius bear no reference in their bulk and proportions, if we may so speak, to the period at which they are produced; but it is far otherwise with works of science and general information: they grow with the world"s growth; the tomes from which the father derived his acquaintance with facts and principles, prove all inadequate to satisfy the curiosity of the son: almost every season adds its ring to the "tree of knowledge;" and the measuring line which girthed and registered its bulk in one age, fails to embrace it in the succeeding one. And hence one element at least in the superiority of this edition of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ to every other edition, and every other Encyclopaedia.
It appears at the period of the world"s greatest experience. But there are other very important elements, characteristic, as we have said, of a peculiarity in the literature of the age, which have tended also to this result. We have remarked that the first edition appeared in the days of Hume, Robertson, and Adam Smith. None of these men wrote for it, however.
In France the first intellects of the country were engaged on their National Encyclopaedia, and mighty was the mischief which they accomplished through its means; but works of this character in Britain were left to authors of a lower standing. Smollett once conducted a critical review; Gilbert Stuart an Edinburgh magazine; Dr. Johnson drew up parliamentary debates for two years together; Edmund Burke toiled at the pages of an Annual Register; and Goldsmith, early in his career, wrote letters for the newspapers.
But, like the apothecary in Shakespeare, it was their "poverty, not their will, that consented;" and when their fortunes brightened, these walks of obscure laboriousness were left to what were deemed their legitimate denizens--mere mediocritists and compilers. A similar feeling seems to have obtained regarding works of an encyclopaediacal character. The authors of the first edition of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ were merely respectable compilers,--we know not that any of their names would now sound familiar to the reader, with perhaps the exception of that of Smellie, an Edinburgh writer of the last century, whose philosophical essays one sometimes meets with on our bookstalls.
But among the other great changes produced by the French Revolution, there was a striking and very important change effected in our periodical literature. The old foundations of society seemed breaking up, and the true nature of that basis of opinion on which they had so long rested came to be everywhere practically understood.
Minds of the larger order found it necessary to address themselves direct to the people; and the newspaper, the review, the magazine, the pamphlet, furnished them with ready vehicles of conveyance.
Archimedes, during the siege of Syracuse, had to quit the sober quiet of his study, and to mix with the armed defenders of his native city, amid the wild confusion of sallies and a.s.saults, the rocking of beleaguered towers, the creaking of engines, and the hurtling of missiles. It was thus with some of the greatest minds of the country during the distraction and alarm of the French Revolution. Coleridge conducted a newspaper; Sir James Mackintosh wrote for one; Canning contributed to the _Anti-Jacobin_; Robert Hall of Leicester became a reviewer; Southey, Jeffrey, Brougham, Scott, Giffard, all men in the first rank, appeared in the character of contributors to the periodicals.
The aspect of this department of literature suddenly changed, and the influence of that change survives to this day. Even now, some of our first literary names are known chiefly in their connection with magazines and reviews. Men such as Macaulay and Sidney Smith have scarce any place as authors dissociated from the _Edinburgh_; and Lockhart and Wilson are most felt in the world of letters in their connection with _Blackwood_ and the _Quarterly_. And this change affected more than the periodicals. Its influence extended to works of the encyclopaediacal character. The two great Encyclopaedias of Edinburgh--that which bears the name of the city, and that whose name we have placed at the head of this article--came to reckon among their contributors the first men of the kingdom, both in science and literature: they benefited as greatly by the change we describe as the periodicals themselves. The Revolution, in its reflex influence, seems to have drawn a line in the British encyclopaediacal field between the labours of mere compilers and the achievements of original authorship; and the peculiarity of plan in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_, to which we have already referred--that peculiarity which gives an art or science entire as a treatise, instead of breaking it down into as many separate articles as it possesses technical terms--enabled this work to avail itself to the fullest extent of the improvement. No author, however great his powers, can be profound in the compa.s.s of a few paragraphs.
Goldsmith could a.s.sert that in an essay of a page or two it is even a merit to be superficial; and few there are who possess, with Goldsmith, the pure literary ability of being superficial with good effect.
But it is not enough to say of this work that it is enriched by contributions from not a few of the ablest writers which the present century has produced. It should be added, further, that it contains some of the masterpieces of these men. No one ever excelled Sir James Mackintosh in philosophical criticism. It was peculiarly his _forte_. He was rather a great judge of metaphysical power than a metaphysician. And yet it is this admirable critic who decides that the exquisitely cla.s.sical dissertation of Dugald Stewart, written for this _Encyclopaedia_, is the most magnificent of that philosopher"s works; and remarks, in accounting for the fact, that the "memorable instances of Cicero and Milton, and still more those of Dryden and Burke, seem to show that there is some natural tendency in the fire of genius to burn more brightly, or to blaze more fiercely, in the evening than in the morning of human life." We are mistaken if Sir James"s own contribution to this work does not take decidedly a first place among his productions. The present age has not produced a piece of more exquisitely polished English, or of more tasteful or more nicely discriminating criticism.
There is an occult beauty and elegance in some of his thoughts and expressions, on which it is no small luxury to repose,--lines of reflection, too, along which one must feel as well as think one"s way.
What can be finer, for instance, than his remarks on the poetry of Dr.
Thomas Brown, or what more thoroughly removed from commonplace? He tells us how the philosophic poet "observed man and his wider world with the eye of a metaphysician;" that "the dark results of such contemplations, when he reviewed them, often filled his soul with feelings which, being both grand and melancholy, were truly poetical;"
that "unfortunately, however, few readers can be touched with fellow-feeling;" for that "he sings to few, and must be _content with sometimes moving a string in the soul of the lonely visionary, who, in the daydreams of youth, has felt as well as meditated on the mysteries of nature_." The dissertation of Playfair is also pitched on the highest key to which that elegant writer ever attained. If we except the unjust and offensive estimate of the powers of Franklin, a similar judgment may be pa.s.sed on the preliminary dissertation of Sir John Leslie. Jeffrey"s famous theory of beauty is, of all the philosophic pieces of that accomplished writer, by far the most widely known; and Sir Walter Scott"s essay on the drama is at least equal to any of the serious prose compositions of its great author. There is something peculiarly fascinating in the natural history of this edition,--a department wholly rewritten, and furnished chiefly by the singularly pleasing pen of Mr. James Wilson. It is not yet twenty years since Constable"s supplement to the last edition appeared; and yet in this province, so mightily has the tide risen, that well-nigh all the old lines of cla.s.sification have been obliterated or covered up. Vast additions have been also made. At no former time was there half the amount of actual observation in this field which exists in it now; and it is well that there should be so skilful a workman as Mr. Wilson to avail himself of the acc.u.mulating materials. His treatises show how very just is the estimate of his powers given to the public in _Peter"s Letters_ considerably more than twenty years ago, at a time when he was comparatively little known. But we cannot enumerate a t.i.the of the masterpieces of the British Encyclopaedia.
Judging from the list of contributors" names attached to the index, we must hold that Moderatism in the field of literature and science is very much at a discount. But there is no lack of data of very various kinds to force upon us _this_ conclusion. Among our sound non-intrusionists we find the names of Lord Jeffrey, Sir David Brewster, Professor John Fleming, Professor David Welsh, Professor Anderson, Dr. Irvine, the Rev. Mr. Hetherington, the Rev. Mr. Omond, Mr. Alexander Dunlop, and Mr. Cowan; whereas of all the opposite party who record their votes in our church courts, we have succeeded in finding the name of but a single individual, Dr. John Lee.
Why has Dr. Bryce thus left the field to the fanatics? had he nothing to insert on missions? Or could not Mr. Robertson of Ellon have been great on the article Beza?
Was there no exertion demanded of them to save the credit of the Earl of Aberdeen"s learned clergy? One of the main defects of omission in the work (of course we merely mention the circ.u.mstance) is the omission of the name of one very great non-intrusionist. Ethical and metaphysical philosophy are represented by Dugald Stewart and Sir James Mackintosh; mathematical and physical science by Sir David Brewster, Sir John Leslie, Playfair, and Robinson; political economy by Ricardo, M"Culloch, and Malthus; natural history by James Wilson and Dr. Fleming; Hazlitt and Haydon discourse on painting and the fine arts; Jeffrey on the beautiful; Sir Walter Scott on chivalry, the drama, and romance; the cla.s.sical pen of Dr. Irvine has ill.u.s.trated what may be termed the biographical history of Scotland; physiology finds a meet expounder in Dr. Roget; geology in Mr. Phillips; medical jurisprudence in Dr. Traill. But in whom does theology find an ill.u.s.trator? Does our country boast in the present age of no very eminent name in this n.o.ble department of knowledge--no name known all over Scotland, Britain, Europe, Christendom--a name whom we may a.s.sociate with that of Dugald Stewart in ethical, or that of Sir David Brewster in physical science? In utter ignorance of the facts, we can, as we have said, but merely refer to the omission as one which will be a.s.suredly marked in the future, when the din and dust of our existing controversies shall be laid, and when all now engaged in them who are tall enough to catch the eye of posterity, will be seen in their genuine colours and their true proportions. The article Theology in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ is written, not by Dr. Chalmers, but new-modelled from an old article by the minister of an Independent congregation in Edinburgh, Mr. Lindsay Alexander--we doubt not an able and good man, but not supereminently the _one_ theologian of Scotland.
We mark, besides, a few faults, of _commission_ in the work, apparently of a sub-editorial character, but which, unlike the defect just pointed out, the editor of some future edition will find little difficulty in amending. Works the production of a single mind, bear generally an individual character; works the productions of many minds, are marked rather by the character of the age to which they belong. We find occasional evidence in the _Encyclopaedia_ that it belongs to the age of Catholic Emanc.i.p.ation,--an age in which the _true_ in science was deemed a very great matter by men to whom the _true_ in religion seemed a much less one. One at least of the minds employed on the minor articles of the work had palpably a papistical leaning.
A blaze of eulogium, which contrasts ludicrously enough with the well-toned sobriety of what we may term its staple style, is made to surround, like the halo in old paintings, some of the men who were happy enough to be distinguished a.s.sertors of the Romish Church. We would instance, as a specimen, the biographical sketches of Bossuet and the Jesuit Bourdaloue, written by the late Dr. James Browne.
These, however, are but comparatively minute flaws in a work so truly great, and of such immense multiplicity. They are some of the imperfections of a work to which imperfection is inevitable, and which, after all such deductions have been made, must be recognised as by much the least faulty and most complete of its cla.s.s which the world has yet seen.
_April 30, 1842._
A VISION OF THE RAILROAD.
[_Private._] ----, ISLE OF SKYE.
.... I know not when this may reach you. We are much shut out from the world at this dead season of the year, especially in those wilder solitudes of the island that extend their long slopes of moor to the west. The vast Atlantic spreads out before us, blackened by tempest, a solitary waste, unenlivened by a single sail, and fenced off from the land by an impa.s.sable line of breakers. Even from the elevation where I now write--for my little cottage stands high on the hill-side--I can hear the measured boom of the waves, swelling like the roar of distant artillery, above the melancholy moanings of the wind among the nearer crags, and the hoa.r.s.er dash of the stream in the hollow below. We are in a state of siege: the isle is beleaguered on its rugged line of western coast, and all communication within that quarter cut off; while in the opposite direction the broken and precarious footways that wind across the hills to our more accessible eastern sh.o.r.es, are still drifted over in the deeper hollows of the snow of the last great storm. It was only yester-evening that my cousin Eachen, with whom I share your newspaper, succeeded in bringing me the number published early in the present month, in which you furnish your readers with a report of the great railway meeting at Glasgow.
My cousin and I live on opposite sides of the island. We met at our tryst among the hills, not half an hour, before sunset; and as each had far to walk back, and as a storm seemed brewing--for the wind had suddenly lowered, and the thick mists came creeping down the hill-sides, all dank and chill, and laden with frost-rime, that settled crisp and white on our hair--we deemed it scarce prudent to indulge in our usual long conversation together.
"You will find," said Eachen, as he handed me the paper, "that things are looking no better. The old Tories are going on in the old way, bitterer against the gospel than ever. They will not leave us in all Skye a minister that has ever been the means of converting a soul; and what looks as ill, our great Scotch railway, that broke the Sabbath last year, in the vain hope of making money by it, is to break it this year at a dead loss. And this for no other purpose that people can see, than just that an Edinburgh writer may advertise his business by making smart speeches about it. Depend on"t, Allister, the country"s _fey_."
"The old way of advertising," said I, "before it became necessary that an elder should have at least some show of religion about him, was to get into the General a.s.sembly, and make speeches there. If the crisis comes, we shall see the practice in full blow again. We shall see our anti-Sabbatarian gentlemen trans.m.u.ted into voluble Moderate elders, talking hard for clients without subjecting themselves to the advertis.e.m.e.nt duty,--and the railway mayhap keeping its Sabbaths."
"Keeping its Sabbaths," replied Eachen; "ay, but the shareholders, perhaps, have little choice in the matter. I wish you heard our catechist on that. Depend on"t, Allister, the country"s _fey_."
"Keeping its Sabbaths? Yes," said I, catching at his meaning, "if we are to be visited by a permanent commercial depression--and there are many things less likely at the present time--the railway _may_ keep its Sabbaths, and keep them as the land of Judea did of old. It would be all too easy, in a period of general distress, to touch that line of necessarily high expenditure below which it would be ruin for the returns of the undertaking to fall. Let but the invariably great outlay continue to exceed the income for any considerable time, and the railway _must_ keep its Sabbaths."
"Just the catechist"s idea," rejoined my cousin. "He spoke on the subject at our last meeting. "Eachen," he said, "Eachen, the thing lies so much in the ordinary course of providence, that our blinded Sabbath-breakers, were it to happen, would recognise only disaster in it, not judgment. I see at times, with a distinctness that my father would have called the second sight, that long weary line of rail, with its Sabbath travellers of pleasure and business speeding over it, and a crowd of wretched witnesses raised, all unwittingly and unwillingly on their own parts, to testify against it, and of coming judgment, at both its ends. I see that the walks of the one great city into which it opens are blackened by shoals of unemployed artisans; and that the lanes and alleys of the other number by thousands and tens of thousands their pale and hunger-bitten operatives, that cry for work and food. They testify all too surely that judgment needs no miracle here. Let but the evil continue to grow--nay, let but one of our Scottish capitals, our great mart of commerce and trade sink into the circ.u.mstances of its manufacturing neighbour Paisley--and the railway _must_ keep its Sabbaths. But alas! there would be no triumph for party in the case. Great, ere the evil could befall, would the sufferings of the country be, and they would be sufferings that would extend to all." What think you, Allister, of the catechist"s note?"
"Almost worth throwing into English," I said. "But the fog still thickens, and it will be dark night ere we reach home." And so we parted.
Dark night it was, and the storm had burst out. But it was pleasant, when I had reached my little cottage, to pile high the fire on the hearth, and to hear the blast roaring outside, and shaking the window-boards, as if some rude hand were striving to unfasten them. I lighted my little heap of moss fir on the projecting stone that serves the poor Highlander for at once lamp and candlestick, and bent me over your fourth page, to scan the Sabbath returns of a Scottish railroad.
But my rugged journey and the beating of the storm had induced a degree of la.s.situde; the wind outside, too, had forced back the smoke, until it had filled with a drowsy, umbery atmosphere, the whole of my dingy little apartment: Mr. M"Neill seemed considerably less smart than usual, and more than ordinarily offensive, and in the middle of his speech I fell fast asleep. The scene changed, and I found myself still engaged in my late journey, coming down over the hill, just as the sun was setting red and lightless through the haze behind the dark Atlantic. The dreary prospect on which I had looked so shortly before was restored in all its features: there was the blank, leaden-coloured sea, that seemed to mix all around with the blank, leaden-coloured sky; the moors spread out around me, brown and barren, and studded with rock and stone; the fogs, as they crept downwards, were lowering the overtopping screen of hills behind to one dead level. Through the landscape, otherwise so dingy and sombre, there ran one long line of somewhat brighter hue: it was a long line of breakers tumbling against the coast far as the eye could reach, and that seemed interposed as a sort of selvage between the blank, leaden sea, and the deep, melancholy russet of the land. Through one of those changes so common in dreams, the continuous line of surf seemed, as I looked, to alter its character. It winded no longer round headland and bay, but stretched out through the centre of the landscape, straight as an extended cord, and the bright white saddened down to the fainter hue of decaying vegetation. The entire landscape underwent a change. Under the gloomy sky of a stormy evening, I could mark on the one hand the dark blue of the Pentlands, and on the other the lower slopes of Corstorphine. Arthur"s Seat rose dim in the distance behind; and in front, the pastoral valley of Wester Lothian stretched away mile beyond mile, with its long rectilinear mound running through the midst,--from where I stood beside one of the ma.s.sier viaducts that rose an hundred feet overhead, till where the huge bulk seemed diminished to a slender thread on the far edge of the horizon.
It seemed as if years had pa.s.sed--many years. I had an indistinct recollection of scenes of terror and of suffering, of the shouts of maddened mult.i.tudes engaged in frightful warfare, of the cries of famishing women and children, of streets and lanes flooded with blood, of raging flames enwrapping whole villages in terrible ruin, of the flashing of arms and the roaring of artillery; but all was dimness and confusion. The recollection was that of a dream remembered in a dream.
The solemn text was in my mind, "Voices, and thunders, and lightnings, and a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake and so great;" and I now felt as if the convulsion was over, and that its ruins lay scattered around me. The railway, I said, is keeping its Sabbaths. All around was solitary, as in the wastes of Skye. The long rectilinear mound seemed s.h.a.ggy with gorse and thorn, that rose against the sides, and intertwisted their p.r.i.c.kly branches atop. The sloe-thorn, and the furze, and the bramble choked up the rails. The fox rustled in the brake; and where his track had opened up a way through the fern, I could see the red and corroded bars stretching idly across. There was a viaduct beside me: the flawed and shattered masonry had exchanged its raw hues for a crust of lichens; one of the taller piers, undermined by the stream, had drawn two of the arches along with it, and lay adown the water-course a shapeless ma.s.s of ruin, o"ermasted by flags and rushes. A huge ivy, that had taken root under a neighbouring pier, threw up its long pendulous shoots over the summit. I ascended to the top. Half-buried in furze and sloe-thorn, there rested on the rails what had once been a train of carriages; the engine ahead lay scattered in fragments, the effect of some disastrous explosion, and damp, and mould, and rottenness had done their work on the vehicles behind. Some had already fallen to pieces, so that their places could be no longer traced in the thicket that had grown up around them; others stood comparatively entire, but their bleached and shrivelled panels rattled to the wind, and the mushroom and the fungus sprouted from between their joints. The scene bore all too palpably the marks of violence and bloodshed. There was an open s.p.a.ce in front, where the shattered fragments of the engine lay scattered; and here the rails had been torn up by violence, and there stretched across, breast-high, a rudely piled rampart of stone. A human skeleton lay atop, whitened by the winds; there was a broken pike beside it; and, stuck fast in the naked skull, which had rolled to the bottom of the rampart, the rusty fragment of a sword. The s.p.a.ce behind resembled the floor of a charnel-house--bindwood and ground-ivy lay matted over heaps of bones; and on the top of the hugest heap of all, a skull seemed as if grinning at the sky from amid the tattered fragments of a cap of liberty. Bones lay thick around the shattered vehicles; a trail of skeletons dotted the descending bank, and stretched far into a neighbouring field; and from amid the green rankness that shot up around them, I could see soiled and tattered patches of the British scarlet. A little farther on there was another wide gap in the rails.
I marked beside the ruins of a neighbouring hovel a huge pile of rusty bars, and there lay inside the fragment of an uncouth cannon marred in the casting.
I wandered on in unhappiness, oppressed by that feeling of terror and disconsolateness so peculiar to one"s more frightful dreams. The country seemed everywhere a desert. The fields were roughened with tufts of furze and broom; hedgerows had shot up into lines of stunted trees, with wide gaps interposed; cottage and manor-house had alike sunk into ruins; here the windows still retained their shattered frames, and the roof-tree lay rotting amid the dank vegetation of the floor; yonder the blackness of fire had left its mark, and there remained but reddened and mouldering stone. Wild animals and doleful creatures had everywhere increased. The toad puffed out his freckled sides on hearths whose fires had been long extinguished, the fox rustled among its bushes, the masterless dog howled from the thicket, the hawk screamed shrill and sharp as it fluttered overhead. I pa.s.sed what had been once the policies of a t.i.tled proprietor. The trees lay rotting and blackened among the damp gra.s.s--all except one huge giant of the forest, that, girdled by the axe half a man"s height from the ground, and scorched by fire, stretched out its long dead arms towards the sky. In the midst of this wilderness of desolation lay broken ma.s.ses, widely scattered, of what had been once the mansion-house. A shapeless hollow, half filled with stagnant water, occupied its immediate site; and the earth was all around torn up, as if battered with cannon. The building had too obviously owed its destruction to the irresistible force of gunpowder.
There was a parish church on the neighbouring eminence, and it, too, was roofless and a ruin. Alas! I exclaimed, as I drew aside the rank stalks of nightshade and hemlock that hedged up the breach in the wall through which I pa.s.sed into the interior--alas! have the churches of Scotland also perished? The inscription of a mutilated tombstone that lay outside caught my eye, and I paused for a moment"s s.p.a.ce in the gap to peruse it. It was an old memorial of the times of the Covenant, and the legend was more than half defaced. I succeeded in deciphering merely a few half sentences--"killing-time," "faithful martyr,"
"b.l.o.o.d.y Prelates;" and beneath there was a fragmentary portion of the solemn text, "How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost Thou not judge and avenge our blood?" I stepped into the interior: the scattered remains of an altar rested against the eastern gable. There was a crackling as of broken gla.s.s under my feet, and stooping down I picked up a richly-stained fragment: it bore a portion of that much-revered sign, the pelican giving her young to eat of her own flesh and blood--the sign which Puseyism and Popery equally agree in regarding as adequately expressive of their doctrine of the real presence, and which our Scottish Episcopalians have so recently adopted as the characteristic vignette of their service-book. The toad and the newt had crept over it, and it had borrowed a new tint of brilliancy from the slime of the snail. Destruction had run riot along the walls of this parish church. There were carvings chipped and mutilated, as if in sport, less apparently with the intention of defacing, than rendering them contemptible and grotesque. A huge cross of stone had been reared over the altar, and both the top and one of the arms had been struck away, and from the surviving arm there dangled a noose.
The cross had been transformed into a gibbet. Nor were there darker indications wanting. In a recess set apart as a cabinet for relics, there were human bones all too fresh to belong to a remote antiquity; and in a niche under the gibbet lay the tattered remains of a surplice dabbled in blood. I stood amid the ruins, and felt a sense of fear and horror creeping over me: the air darkened under the scowl of the coming tempest and the closing night, and the wind shrieked more mournfully amid the shattered and dismantled walls.
There came another change over my dream. I found myself wandering in darkness, I knew not whither, among bushes and broken ground; there was the roar of a large stream in my ear, and the savage howl of the storm. I retain a confused, imperfect recollection of a light streaming upon broken water--of a hard struggle in a deep ford--and of at length sharing in the repose and safety of a cottage, solitary and humble almost as my own. The vision again strengthened, and I found myself seated beside a fire, and engaged with a few grave and serious men in singing the evening psalm, with which they closed for the time their services of social devotion.
"The period of trial wears fast away," said one of the number, when all was over--a grey-haired, patriarchal-looking old man--"The period of trial is well-nigh over, the storms of our long winter are past, and we have survived them all. Patience! a little more patience, and we shall see the glorious spring-time of the world begin! The vial is at length exhausted."
"How very simple," said one of the others, as if giving expression rather to the reflection that the remark suggested, than speaking in reply,--"how exceedingly simple now it seems to trace to their causes the decline and fall of Britain! The ignorance and the irreligion of the land have fully avenged themselves, and have been consumed in turn in fires of their own kindling. How could even mere men of the world have missed seeing the great moral evil that lay at the root of"--
"Ay," said a well-known voice that half mingled with my dreaming fancies, half recalled me to consciousness; "nothing can be plainer, Donald. That lawyer-man is evidently not making his smart speeches or writing his clever circulars with an eye to the pecuniary interests of the railroad. No person can know better than he knows that the company are running their Sabbath trains at a sacrifice of some four or five thousand a year. Were there not a hundred thousand that took the pledge? and can it be held by any one that knows Scotland, that they aren"t worth over-head a shilling a year to the railway? No, no; depend on"t, the man is guiltless of any design of making the shareholders rich by breaking the Sabbath. He is merely supporting a desperate case in the eye of the country, and getting into all the newspapers, that people may see how clever a fellow he is. He is availing himself of the principle that makes men in our great towns go about with placards set up on poles, and with bills printed large stuck round their hats."
Two of my nearer neighbours, who had travelled a long mile through the storm to see whether I had got my newspaper, had taken their seats beside me when I was engaged with my dream; and after reading your railway report, they were now busied in discussing the various speeches and their authors. My dream is, I am aware, quite unsuited for your columns, and yet I send it to you. There are none of its pictured calamities that lie beyond the range of possibility--nay, there are perhaps few of them that at this stage may not actually be feared; but if so, it is at least equally sure that there can be none of them that at this stage might not be averted.
THE TWO MR. CLARKS.
Among the some six or eight and twenty volumes of pamphlets which have been already produced by our Church controversy, and which bid fair to compose but a part of the whole, there is one pamphlet, in the form of a Sermon, which bears date January 1840, and two other pamphlets, in the form of Dialogues, which bear date April 1843. The Sermon and the Dialogues discuss exactly the same topics. They are written in exactly the same style. They exhibit, in the same set phrases, the same large amount of somewhat obtrusive sanctimoniousness. They are equally strong in the same confidence of representing, on their respective subjects, the true mind of Deity. They solicit the same circle of readers; they seem to have employed the same fount of types; they have emanated from the same publishers. They are liker, in short, than the twin brothers in Shakespeare"s _Comedy of Errors_; and the only material dissimilarity which we have been yet able to discover is, that whereas the Sermon is a thorough-going and uncompromising defence of our Evangelical majority in the Church, the Dialogues form an equally thorough-going and uncompromising attack upon them. This, however, compared with the numerous points of verisimilitude, the reader will, we are sure, deem but a trifle, especially when he has learned further that they represent the same mind, and have employed the same pen--that the Sermon was published by the Rev. Alexander Clark of Inverness in 1840, and the Dialogues by the Rev. Alexander Clark of Inverness in 1843.