Leading Articles on Various Subjects Part 4

Let us next consider what the influence of the ministers of our Church would be under a national scheme such as that which we desiderate, and what the probability that the national teaching would be religious. The minister, as such, would possess, nominally at least, but a single vote; and if he were what an ordained minister may in some cases be--merely a suit of black clothes surmounted by a white neckcloth--the vote, _nominally_ one, would be also _really_ but one; nor ought it, we at once say, to weigh in such cases an iota more than it counted. Mere black coats and white neckcloths, though called by congregations, and licensed and ordained by presbyteries, never yet carried on the proper business of either Church or school. But if the minister was no mere suit of clothes, but a Christian man, ordained and called not merely by congregations and presbyteries, but by G.o.d Himself, his one vote in the case would outweigh hundreds, simply because it would represent the votes of hundreds. Let us suppose that, with the national schools thrown open, a vacancy had occurred in the parish school of Cromarty during the inc.u.mbency of the lamented Mr. Stewart. The people of the town and parish, possessing the educational franchise, would meet; their committee would deliberate; there would be a teacher chosen,--in all probability, the present excellent Free Church teacher of the town; and every man would feel that he had exercised in the election his own judgment on his own proper responsibility. And yet it would a.s.suredly be the teacher whom the minister had deemed on the whole most eligible for the office, that would find himself settled, in virtue of the transaction, in the parish school. How? Not, certainly, through any exercise of clerical domination, nor through any employment of what is still more hateful--clerical manoeuvre--but in virtue of a widespread confidence reposed by the people in the wisdom and the integrity of the minister sent them by G.o.d Himself to preach to them the everlasting gospel. In almost all the surrounding parishes--in Resolis, Rosskeen, Urquhart under the late Dr.

M'Donald, Alness, Kiltearn, Kincardine, Kilmuir, etc. etc. etc.--in similar cases similar results would follow; and if there are preachers in that vast northern or north-western tract--which, with the three northern counties, includes also almost the entire Highlands--in which such results would _not_ follow, it would be found that in most cases the fault lay rather with the ordained suits of black, topped by the white neckcloths, than with the people whom they failed to influence.

As for the religion or the religious teaching of the schools, we hold it to be one of the advantages of the proposed scheme, that it would really stir up both ministers and people to think seriously of the matter, and to secure for the country truly religious teaching, so far as it was found to be at once practicable and good. Previous to the year 1843, when the parish schools lay fully within our power, there was really nothing done to introduce religious teaching into _them_; we had it all secure on written sheepskin, that their teaching should and might be religious, for we had them all fast bound to the Establishment; and, as if that were enough of itself, ministers, backed by heritors and their factors, went on filling these parish schools with men who stood the test of the Disruption worse, in the proportion of at least five to one, than any other cla.s.s in the country, and who, if their religious teaching had but taken effect on the people by bringing them to their own level, would have rendered that Disruption wholly an impossibility.{16} And then, when that great event occurred, we flung ourselves into an opposite extreme,--eulogized our Educational Scheme as the best and most important of all the Schemes of our Church, on, we suppose, the principle so well understood by the old divines, that whereas the other schemes were of G.o.d, and G.o.d-enjoined, this scheme was of ourselves,--introduced, further, the design of '_inducting_' our teachers, as if an idle ceremony could be any subst.i.tute for the indispensable commission signed by the Sovereign, and could make the non-commissioned by Him at least _half_ ecclesiastics.{17} And then, after _teaching_ our schoolmasters to _teach_ religion, we sent them abroad in shoals--some of them, no doubt, converted men, hundreds of them unconverted, and religious but by certificate--to make the children of the Free Church as good Christians as themselves. And by attempting to make them half ecclesiastics, we have but succeeded in making them half mendicants, and somewhat more,--a character which a.s.suredly no efficient schoolmaster ought to bear; for while his profession holds in Scripture no higher place than the two _secular_ branches of the learned professions, physic and the law, he is as certainly worthy of his reward, and of maintaining an independent position in society, as either the lawyer or the physician. In schools truly national--with no sheepskin authority to sleep over on the one hand, and no idle dream of semi-ecclesiastical 'induction' to beguile on the other--the item of religious teaching, brought into prominence by both the Free and the Established Churches in the preliminary struggle, would a.s.sert and receive its due place.

Scotland would possess what it never yet possessed,--not even some twenty years or so after the death of Knox,--a system of schools worthy, in the main, of a Christian country. We are told by old Robert Blair, in his Autobiography, that when first brought under religious impressions (in the year 1600), 'he durst never play on the Lord's day, though the schoolmaster, after taking an account of the Catechism, dismissed the children with that express direction, "Go not to the town, but to the fields, and play." I obeyed him,'

adds the worthy man, 'in going to the fields, but refused to play with my companions, as against the commandment of G.o.d.' Now it is not at all strange that there should have been such a schoolmaster, in any age of the Presbyterian Church, in one of the parish schools of our country; but somewhat strange, mayhap, considering the impression so generally received regarding the Scottish schools of that period, that Blair should have given us no reason whatever to regard the case as an extreme or exceptional one. Certainly, with such a central board in existence as that which we desiderate, no such type of schoolmaster would continue to hold office in a national seminary.

Further, it really seems difficult to determine whether the difference between the old educational scheme of Knox and that proposed at the present time by the Free Church, or the difference between the circ.u.mstances of Scotland in his days and of Scotland in the present day, be in truth the wider difference of the two. Knox judged it of 'necessitie that every several kirk should have one schoolmaster appointed,'--'such a one at least as was able to teach grammar and the Latine tongue;' 'that there should be erected in every notable town,'

a 'colledge, in which the arts, logic, and rhethorick, together with the tongues, should be read by masters, for whom _honest_ stipends should be appointed;' and further, 'that fair provision should be made for the [support of the] poor [pupils], in especial those who came from landward,' and were 'not able, by their friends nor by themselves, to be sustained at letters.' We know that the notable towns referred to here as of importance enough to possess colleges were, many of them, what we would now deem far from notable. Kirkwall, the Chanonry of Ross, Brechin, St. Andrews, Inverary, Jedburgh, and Dumfries, are specially named in the list; and we know further, that what Knox deemed an 'honest stipend' for a schoolmaster, amounted on the average to about two-thirds the stipend of a minister. Such, in the sixteenth century, was the wise scheme of the liberal and scholarly Knox, the friend of Calvin, Beza, and Buchanan. Are we to recognise its counterpart in the middle of the nineteenth century, in a scheme at least three-fourths of whose teachers are paid with yearly salaries of from 10 to 13, 13s. 4d.--about half ploughman's wages--and of whom not a fourth have pa.s.sed the ordeal of a Government examination, pitched at the scale of the lowest rate of attainment?

The scheme of the n.o.ble Knox! Say rather a many-ringed film-spinning grub, that has come creeping out of the old crackling parchment, in which the sagacious Reformer approved himself as much in advance of his own age, as many of those who profess to walk most closely in his steps demonstrate themselves to be in the rear of theirs.

Let us next mark how entirely the circ.u.mstances of the country have changed since the days of the First Book of Discipline. With the exception of the clergy, a few lay proprietors, and a sprinkling of the inhabitants of the larger towns, Scotland was altogether, in the earlier period, an uneducated nation. Even for more than a century after, there were landed gentlemen of the northern counties unable, as shown by old deeds, to sign their names. If the Church had not taken upon herself the education of the people in those ages, who else was there to teach them? Not one. Save for her exertions, the divine command, 'Search the Scriptures,' would have remained to at least nine-tenths of the nation a dead letter. But how entirely different the circ.u.mstances of Scotland in the present time! The country has its lapsed ma.s.ses,--men in very much the circ.u.mstances, educationally, of the great bulk of the population in the age of Knox; and we at once grant that, unless the Churches of the country deal with these as Knox dealt with the whole, there is but little chance of their ever being restored to society or the humanizing influences of religion, let Government make for them what provision it may.{18} But such is not the condition of the membership of at least the evangelical Churches.

Such is palpably not the condition of the membership of the Free Church, consisting as it does of parents taken solemnly bound, in their baptismal engagements, to bring up their children in the 'nurture and admonition of the Lord,' and of the children for whom they have been thus taken bound. Save in a few exceptional cases, _their_ education is secure, let the Church exert herself as little as she may. She is but exhausting herself in vain efforts to do what would be done better without her. She has all along contemplated, we are told, merely the education of her own members; and these form exactly that portion of the people which--unless, indeed, the solemn engagements which she has deliberately laid upon them mean as little as excise affidavits or Bow Street oaths--may be safely left to a broad national scheme, wisely based on a principle of parental responsibility.

'If thou altogether holdest thy peace at this time,' said Mordecai to Esther, 'then shall there enlargement and deliverance arise to the Jews from another place, but thou and thy father's house shall be destroyed.' Scotland will have ultimately her Educational Scheme adequate to the demands of the age; but if the Free Church stand aloof, and suffer the battle to be fought by others, her part or lot in it may be a very small matter indeed. What, we ask, would be her share, especially in the Highlands, in a scheme that rendered the basis of the educational franchise merely co-extensive with the basis of the political one? Nay, what, save perhaps in the northern burghs, would be her share in such a scheme over Scotland generally? A mere makeweight at best. But at least the lay membership of the Free Church will, we are a.s.sured, not long stand aloof; and this great question of national education being in no degree an ecclesiastical one, nor lying within the jurisdiction of presbyteries or a.s.semblies, true lovers of their country and of their species, whether of the Established or of the Free Churches, will come forward and do their duty as Scotchmen on the political platform. In neither body does the att.i.tude a.s.sumed by the ecclesiastical element in this question, so far as has yet been indicated, appear of a kind which plain, simple-minded laymen will delight to contemplate. The Established Church courts are taking up the ground that the teaching in their parish schools has been all along religious, and at least one great source from which has sprung the vitalities of the country's faith. And who does not know that to be a poor, unsolid fiction,--a weak and hollow sham? And, on the other hand, some of our Free Churchmen are a.s.serting that they are not _morally_ bound to their forlorn teachers for the meagre and altogether inadequate salaries held out to them in prospect, when they were set down in their humble schools, divorced from all other means of support, to regulate their very limited expenditure by the specified incomes. Further, they virtually tell us that we cannot possibly take our stand as Scotchmen on this matter, in the only practical position, without being untrue to our common Christianity, and enemies to our Church. It has been urged against our educational articles, that we have failed to take into account the fall of man: he would surely be an incorrigible sceptic, we reply, who could look upon statements such as these, and yet doggedly persist in doubting that man has fallen. But, alas! it is not a matter on which to congratulate ourselves, that when the Established Church is coming forward to arrest the progress of national education with her strange equivocal caveat, the Free Church--the Church of the Disruption--should be also coming forward with a caveat which at least _seems_ scarce less equivocal; and that, like the twin giants of Guildhall--huge, monstrous, unreal--both alike should be turning deaf and wooden ears to the great clock of destiny, as it strikes the hours of doom to their distracted and sinking country. O for an hour of the great, the n.o.ble-minded Chalmers! Ultimately, however, the good cause is secure.

It is a cause worth struggling and suffering for. We know a little boy, not yet much of a reader, who has learned to bring a copy of Scott's _Tales of a Grandfather_, which now opens of itself at the battle of Bannockburn, to a little girl, his sister, somewhat more in advance, that she may read to him, for the hundredth time, of Wallace and the Black Douglas, and how the good King Robert struck down Sir Henry Bohun with a single blow, full in the sight of both armies. And after drinking in the narrative, he tells that, when grown to be a big man, he too is to be a soldier like Robert the Bruce, and to 'fight in the battle of Scotland.' And then he asks his father when the battle of Scotland is to begin! Laymen of the Free Church, the battle of Scotland has already begun; and 'tis a battle better worth fighting than any other which has arisen within the political arena since the times of the Reform Bill. Your country has still claims upon you: the Disruption may have dissolved the tie which bound you to party; but that which binds you to Scotland still remains entire. The parental right is not dissolved by any traditionary requirements of the altar; nor can we urge with impunity to our country,--'It is Corban, that is to say, a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me.'

{16} There are about one thousand one hundred parish schoolmasters in Scotland: of these, not more than eighty (strictly, we believe, seventy-seven) adhered to the Free Church at the Disruption.

{17} The Church as such ought to employ the schoolmaster, it has been argued, in virtue of the divine injunction, 'Search the Scriptures:' what G.o.d _commands_ men to do, it is her duty to _enable_ men to do. The argument is excellent, we say, so far as it goes; but of perilous application in the case in hand. It is the Church's duty to teach those to read the Scriptures, who, _without her a.s.sistance, would not be taught to read them_. But if by teaching Latin, arithmetic, algebra, and the mathematics to _ten_, she is incapacitating herself from teaching _twenty_ to read the Bible; or if, by teaching twenty to read the Bible who would have learned to read it whether she taught them or no, she is incapacitating herself from teaching twenty others to read it, who, unless she teach them, will never learn to read it at all; then, instead of doing her recognised duty in the matter, she is doing exactly the reverse of her duty--doing what prevents her from doing her duty. Let the Free Church but take her stand on this argument, and straightway her rectors, her masters in academies, and her schoolmasters planted in towns and populous localities, to teach the higher branches, become so many bars raised by herself virtually to impede and arrest her, through the expense incurred in their maintenance, in her proper work of enabling the previously untaught and ignorant to read the word of G.o.d, in obedience to the divine injunction.

{18} This statement has been quoted by an antagonist as utterly inconsistent with our general line of argument; but we think we may safely leave the reader to determine whether it be really so.

Did we ever argue that any scheme of national education, however perfect, could possibly supersede the proper _missionary_ labours of the Churches, whether educational or otherwise? a.s.suredly not.

What we really a.s.sert is, that if the Churches waste their energies on work not missionary, the work which, if they do it not, cannot be done must of necessity be neglected; seeing that, according to Bacon, 'charity will hardly water the ground where it must first fill a pool.'

LORD BROUGHAM.

The history of Lord Brougham has no exact parallel in that of British statesmen. Villiers Duke of Buckingham (the Duke of the times of Charles II.) sunk quite as low, but not from such an elevation. Of him too it was said, as of his Lordship, that 'he left not faction, but of that was left,'--that every party learned to distrust and stand aloof from him, and that his great parts had only the effect of rendering his ultimate degradation the more marked and the more instructive.

Hume tells us that by his 'wild conduct, unrestrained either by prudence or principle, he found means to render himself in the end odious, and even insignificant.' But the Duke of Buckingham had been a mere courtier from the beginning, and no man had ever trusted or thought well of him.

Bolingbroke bears a nearly similar character. There was a mighty difference between the influential and able minister of Queen Anne, recognised by all as decidedly one of the most accomplished statesmen of his age or country, and the same individual,--forlorn and an exile, disliked and suspected by parties the most opposite, and who agreed in nothing else,--a fugitive from his own country to avoid the threatened impeachment of the Whigs for his Jacobitism, and a fugitive from France to avoid being impeached by the Pretender for his treachery.

But Bolingbroke had never very seriously professed to be the friend of his country, nor would his country have believed him if he had.

According to the shrewd remark of Fielding, the temporal happiness, the civil liberties and properties of Europe, had been the game of his earliest youth, and the eternal and final happiness of all mankind the sport and entertainment of his advanced age. He would have fain destroyed the freedom of his countrymen when in power, and their hope of immortality when in disgrace. Neither can we find a parallel in the history of that other Lord Chancellor of England, who has been described by the poet as 'the greatest, wisest, meanest of mankind.'

Two of the epithets would not suit Lord Brougham; and though he unquestionably bore himself more honourably in the season of his elevation than his ill.u.s.trious predecessor, he has as certainly employed himself to worse purpose in the time of his disgrace.

Unlike Lords Bolingbroke, Buckingham, or Bacon, Lord Brougham entered public life a reformer and a patriot. The subject of his first successful speech in Parliament was the slave-trade. He denounced not only the abominable traffic itself,--the men who stole, bought, and kept the slave; but also the traders and merchants,--'the cowardly suborners of piracy and mercenary murder,' as he termed them, under whose remote influence the trade had been carried on; and the sympathies of the people went along with him. He was on every occasion, too, the powerful advocate of popular education. Brougham is no discoverer of great truths; but he has evinced a 'curious felicity'

in expressing truths already discovered: he exerted himself in sending 'the schoolmaster abroad,' and announced the fact in words which became more truly his motto than the motto found for him in the Herald's Office. He took part in well-nigh every question of reform; stood up for economy, the reduction of taxes, and Queen Caroline; found very vigorous English in which to express all he ought to have felt regarding the Holy Alliance and the ma.s.sacre at Manchester; and dealt with Cobbett as Cobbett deserved, for doing what he is now doing himself. There was always a lack of heart about Brougham, so that men admired without loving him.

There were no spontaneous exhibitions of those n.o.blenesses of nature which mark the true reformer, and which compel the respect of even enemies. Luther, Knox, and Andrew Thomson were all men of rugged strength,--men of war, and born to contend; but they were also men of deep and broad sympathies, and of kindly affections: they could all feel as well as see the right; what is even more important still, they could all thoroughly forget themselves, and what the world thought and said of them, in the pursuit of some great and engrossing object: they could all love, too, at least as sincerely as they could hate.

Brougham, on the contrary, could only see without feeling the right; but then he saw clearly. Brougham could not forget himself; but then he succeeded in identifying himself with much that was truly excellent. Brougham could not love as thoroughly as he could hate; but then his indignation generally fell where it ought. His large intellect seemed based on an inferior nature--it was a brilliant set in lead; nor were there indications wanting all along, it has been said, that he was one of those patriots who have their price. But the brilliant was a true, not a fact.i.tious brilliant, whatever the value of the setting; and the price, if ever proffered, had not been sufficiently large. Brougham became Lord Chancellor, the Reform Bill pa.s.sed into a law, and slavery was abolished in the colonies.

The country has not yet forgotten that the Lord Chancellor of 1832 and the two following years was no wild Radical. There was no leaven of Chartism in Lord Brougham, though a very considerable dash of eccentricity; and really, for a man who had been contending so many years in the Opposition, and who had attained to so thorough a command of sarcasm, he learned to enact the courtier wonderfully well. Neither 'Tompkins' nor 'Jenkins' had as yet manifested their contempt for the aristocracy; nor had the 'man well stricken in years' written anonymous letters to insult his sovereign. The universal suffrage scheme found no advocate in the Lord Chancellor. He could call on Cobbett in his chariot, to attempt persuading the stubborn old Saxon to write down incendiarism and machine-breaking. He breathed no antic.i.p.ation of the 'first cheer of the people on the first refusal of the soldiery to fire on them.' As for Reform, he was very explicit on that head: really so much had been accomplished already, that a great deal more could not be expected. Little could be done in the coming years, he said, just because there had been so much done in the years that had gone by. The Lord Chancellor was comparatively a cautious and prudent man in those days--on the whole, a safe card for monarchy to play with. Radicalism had learned that Whigs in office are not very unlike Tories in office; and to Brougham it applied the remark: nor was he at all indignant that it did so. All his superabundant energies were expended in Chancery. We unluckily missed hearing him deliver his famous speech at Inverness, and that merely by an untoward chance, for we were in that part of the country at the time; but we have seen and conversed with scores who did hear him: we are intimate, too, with the gentleman who gave his speech on that occasion to the world, and know that a more faithful or more accomplished reporter than the editor of the _Inverness Courier_ is not to be found anywhere, nor yet a man of nicer discrimination, nor of a finer literary taste. There was no mistake made regarding his Lordship's sentiments when he spoke of the Reform Bill as well-nigh a final measure; nor did his delight in the simple-minded natives arise when he pledged himself to recommend them, by the evening mail, to the graces of good King William, from their wishing the bill to be anything else than final. Even with its limited franchise, he deemed it a very excellent bill; and the woolsack, to which it had elevated him, a very desirable seat. People did occasionally see that Hazlitt was in the right--that he was rather a man of speech than of action; that he was somewhat too imprudent for a leader, somewhat too petulant for a partisan; and that he wanted in a considerable degree the principle of co-operation.

But Chatham wanted it quite as much as he; and it was deemed invidious to measure so accomplished a man, and so sworn a friend of peace and good order, by the minuter rules. But Napoleon should have died at Waterloo, Brougham at Dunrobin.

What is ex-Chancellor Brougham now? What party trusts to him? What section of the community does he represent? Frost had his confiding friends and followers, and Feargus O'Connor led a numerous and formidable body. Even Sir William Courtenay had his disciples. Where are Brougham's disciples? What moral influence does the advocate of popular education, and the indignant denouncer of the iniquities of the slave-trade, exert? In what age or what country was there ever a man so 'left by faction?' The Socialism of England and the Voluntaryism of Edinburgh entrust him with their pet.i.tions, and Chartism stands on tiptoe when he rises in his place to advocate universal suffrage; but no one confides in him. Owen does not, nor the Rev. Mr. Marshall of Kirkintilloch, nor yet the conspirators of Sheffield or Newport. Toryism scarcely thanks him for fighting its battles; Whiggism abhors him. There is no one credulous enough to believe that his aims rise any higher than himself, or blind enough not to see that even his selfishness is so ill-regulated as to defeat its own little object. His lack of the higher sentiments, the more generous feelings, the n.o.bler aims, neutralizes even his intellect. He publishes his speeches, carefully solicitous of his fame, and provokes comparison in laboured dissertations with the oratory of Demosthenes and Cicero; he eulogizes the Duke of Wellington, and demands by inference whether he cannot praise as cla.s.sically as even the ancients themselves; but his heartless though well-modulated eloquence lingers in first editions, like the effusions of inferior minds; nor is it of a kind which the 'world will find after many days.' Brougham will be less known sixty years hence than the player Garrick is at present.

Bolingbroke, when thrown out of all public employment-gagged, disarmed, shut out from the possibility of a return to office, suspected alike by the Government and the Opposition, and thoroughly disliked by the people to boot--could yet solace himself in his uneasy and unhonoured retirement by exerting himself to write down the Ministry.

And his _Craftsmen_ sold even more rapidly than the _Spectator_ itself.

But the writings of Brougham do not sell; he lacks even the solace of Bolingbroke. We have said that his history is without parallel in that of Britain. Napoleon on his rock was a less melancholy object: the imprisoned warrior had lost none of his original power--he was no moral suicide; the millions of France were still devotedly attached to him, and her armies would still have followed him to battle. It was no total forfeiture of character on his own part that had rendered him so utterly powerless either for good or ill.

_July 8, 1840._

THE SCOTT MONUMENT.

The foundation-stone of the metropolitan monument in memory of Sir Walter Scott was laid with masonic honours on Sat.u.r.day last. The day was pleasant, and the pageant imposing. All business seemed suspended for the time; the shops were shut. The one half of Edinburgh had poured into the streets, and formed by no means the least interesting part of the spectacle. Every window and balcony that overlooked the procession, every house-top almost, had its crowd of spectators.

According to the poet,

'Rank behind rank, close wedged, hung bellying o'er;'

while the area below, for many hundred yards on either side the intended site of the monument, presented a continuous sea of heads. We marked, among the flags exhibited, the Royal Standard of Scotland, apparently a piece of venerable antiquity, for the field of gold had degenerated into a field of drab, and the figure in the centre showed less of leonine n.o.bleness than of art in that imperfect state in which men are fain to content themselves with semblances doubtful and inexpressive, and less than half the result of chance. The entire pageant was such a one as Sir Walter himself could perhaps have improved. He would not have fired so many guns in the hollow, and the grey old castle so near: he would have found means, too, to prevent the crowd from so nearly swallowing up the procession. Perhaps no man had ever a finer eye for pictorial effect than Sir Walter, whether art or nature supplied the scene. It has been well said that he rendered Abbotsford a romance in stone and lime, and imparted to the king's visit to Scotland the interest and dignity of an epic poem.

Still, however, the pageant was an imposing one, and ill.u.s.trated happily the influence of a great and original mind, whose energies had been employed in enriching the national literature, over an educated and intellectual people.

It is a bad matter when a country is employed in building monuments to the memory of men chiefly remarkable for knocking other men on the head; it is a bad matter, too, when it builds monuments to the memory of mere courtiers, of whom not much more can be said than that when they lived they had places and pensions to bestow, and that they bestowed them on their friends. We cannot think so ill, however, of the homage paid to genius.

The Masonic Brethren of the several lodges mustered in great numbers.

It has been stated that more than a thousand took part in the procession. Coleridge, in his curious and highly original work, _The Friend_--a work which, from its nature, never can become popular, but which, though it may be forgotten for a time, will infallibly be dug up and brought into public view in the future as an unique fossil impression of an extinct order of mind--refers to a bygone cla.s.s of mechanics, 'to whom every trade was an allegory, and had its guardian saint.' 'But the time has gone by,' he states, 'in which the details of every art were enn.o.bled in the eyes of its professors by being spiritually improved into symbols and mementoes of all doctrines and all duties.' We could hardly think so as we stood watching the procession, with its curiously fantastic acc.u.mulation of ornament and symbol; it seemed, however, rather the relic of a former age than the natural growth of the present--a spectre of the past strangely resuscitated.

The laugh, half in ridicule, half in good nature, with which the crowd greeted every very gaudily dressed member, richer in symbol and obsolete finery than his neighbour, showed that the day had pa.s.sed in which such things could produce their originally intended effect. Will the time ever arrive in which stars and garters will claim as little respect as broad-skirted doublets of green velvet, surmounted with three-cornered hats tagged with silver lace? Much, we suppose, must depend upon the characters of those who wear them, and the kind of services on which they will come to be bestowed. An Upper House of mere diplomatists--skilful only to overreach--imprudent enough to subst.i.tute cunning for wisdom--ignorant enough to deem the people not merely their inferiors in rank, but in discernment also--weak enough to believe that laws may be enacted with no regard to the general good--wrapped up in themselves, and acquainted with the ma.s.ses only through their eavesdroppers and dependants--would bring t.i.tles and orders to a lower level in half an age, than the onward progress of intellect has brought the quaintnesses of mechanic symbol and mystery in two full centuries. We but smile at the one, we would learn to execrate the other. Has the reader ever seen Quarles' _Emblems_, or Flavel's _Husbandry and Navigation Spiritualized_? Both belong to an extinct species of literature, of which the mechanic mysteries described by Coleridge, and exhibited in the procession of Sat.u.r.day last, strongly remind us. Both alike proceeded on a process of mind the reverse of the common. Comparison generally leads from the moral to the physical, from the abstract to the visible and the tangible; here, on the contrary, the tangible and the visible--the emblem and the symbol--were made to lead to the moral and the abstract. There are beautiful instances, too, of the same school in the allegories of Bunyan,--the wonders in the house of the Interpreter, for instance, and the scenes exhibited in the cave of the 'man named Contemplation.'

Sir Walter's monument will have one great merit, regarded as a piece of art. It will be entirely an original,--such a piece of architecture as he himself would have delighted to describe, and the description of which he, and he only, could have sublimed into poetry. There is a chaste and n.o.ble beauty in the forms of Greek and Roman architecture which consorts well with the cla.s.sic literature of those countries.

The compositions of Sir Walter, on the contrary, resemble what he so much loved to describe--the rich and fantastic Gothic, at times ludicrously uncouth, at times exquisitely beautiful. There are not finer pa.s.sages in all his writings than some of his architectural descriptions. How exquisite is his _Melrose Abbey_,--the external view in the cold, pale moonshine,

'When b.u.t.tress and b.u.t.tress alternately Seemed formed of ebon and ivory;'

internally, when the strange light broke from the wizard's tomb! Who, like Sir Walter, could draw a mullioned window, with its 'foliaged tracery,' its 'freakish knots,' its pointed and moulded arch, and its dyed and pictured panes? We pa.s.sed, of late, an hour amid the ruins of Crichton, and scarce knew whether most to admire the fine old castle itself, so worthy of its poet, or the exquisite picture of it we found in _Marmion_.

Sir Walter's monument would be a monument without character, if it were other than Gothic. Still, however, we have our fears for the effect. In portrait-painting there is the full life-size, and a size much smaller, and both suit nearly equally well, and appear equally natural; but the intermediate sizes do not suit. Make the portrait just a very little less than the natural size, and it seems not the reduced portrait of a man, but the full-sized portrait of a dwarf. Now a similar principle seems to obtain in Gothic architecture.

The same design which strikes as beautiful in a model--the piece which, if executed in spar, and with a gla.s.s cover over it, would be regarded as exquisitely tasteful--would impress, when executed on a large scale, as grand and magnificent in the first degree. And yet this identical design, in an intermediate size, would possibly enough be p.r.o.nounced a failure. Mediocrity in size is fatal to the Gothic, if it be a richly ornamented Gothic; nor are we sure that the n.o.ble design of Mr. Kemp is to be executed on a scale sufficiently extended.

We are rather afraid not, but the result will show. Such a monument a hundred yards in height would be one of the finest things perhaps in Europe.

What has Sir Walter done for Scotland, to deserve so gorgeous a monument? a.s.suredly not all he might have done; and yet he has done much--more, in some respects, than any other merely literary man the country ever produced. He has interested Europe in the national character, and in some corresponding degree in the national welfare; and this of itself is a very important matter indeed.

Shakespeare--perhaps the only writer who, in the delineation of character, takes precedence of the author of _Waverley_--seems to have been less intensely imbued with the love of country. It is quite possible for a foreigner to luxuriate over his dramas, as the Germans are said to do, without loving Englishmen any the better in consequence, or respecting them any the more. But the European celebrity of the fictions of Sir Walter must have had the inevitable effect of raising the character of his country,--its character as a country of men of large growth, morally and intellectually. Besides, it is natural to think of foreigners as mere abstractions; and hence one cause at least of the indifference with which we regard them,--an indifference which the first slight misunderstanding converts into hostility. It is something towards a more general diffusion of goodwill to be enabled to conceive of them as men with all those sympathies of human nature, on which the corresponding sympathies lay hold, warm and vigorous about them. Now, in this aspect has Sir Walter presented his countrymen to the world. Wherever his writings are known, a Scotsman can be no mere abstraction; and in both these respects has the poet and novelist deserved well of his country.

Within the country itself, too, his great nationality, like that of Burns, has had a decidedly favourable effect. The cosmopolism so fashionable among a certain cla.s.s about the middle of the last century, was but a mock virtue, and a very dangerous one. The 'citizen of the world,' if he be not a mere pretender, is a man to be defined by negatives. It is improper to say he loves all men alike: he is merely equally indifferent to all. Nothing can be more absurd than to oppose the love of country to the love of race. The latter exists but as a wider diffusion of the former. Do we not know that human nature, in its absolute perfection, and blent with the absolute and infinite perfection of Deity, indulged in the love of country? The Saviour, when He took to Himself a human heart, wept over the city of His fathers. Now, it is well that this spirit should be fostered, not in its harsh and exclusive, but in its human and more charitable form.