Characteristics of the people—Influences of race, history, and physical
circumstances — Teuton and Celt: "Natural selection"— Success of the early
immigrants—Land and people—Situation unfavourable to international commerce
: Aberdonian enterprise in shipping, foreign and colonial trade, and
banking—Former extensive participation in the trade of the West Indies—Aberdonians
in foreign armies: The soldiers of fortune and their great success—In the
British service : Empire makers—Lumsden, - Outram, Sir William M'Gregor,
General Gordon—Naval officers —Statesmanship and administration—Jurists and
judges—Ecclesiastics—Medical men—Travellers—Inventors—Gifted families and
hereditary genius: The Gregorys, Reids, Fordyces, &c.—Aberdeen society in
the eighteenth century—Principal Campbell and his contemporaries — "The Wise
Club" — English students: Burney, Colman—Hall and Mackintosh—Dr Johnson's
visit— Honorary burgess-ship—Aberdeenshire poets and men of letters —Burns
and Skinner—Byron—Criticism—Philosophy : Aberdeen the birthplace of the
Scottish school—The association philosophy —History a speciality—Journalism:
Perry, Gordon Bennett, Douglass Cook, &c.—Artists and architects—Aberdeen
scholars : Latinists, Hellenists, and Orientalists—The influence of
education. Throughout
this long course of years there are apparent certain characteristics of the
people of Aberdeenshire and Banffshire, the result partly of race and partly
of environment, which differentiate them from their fellow-countrymen, and
to some extent explain the distinctive part they have played as local
communities or as individual participants in the world's affairs. These
characteristics had their earliest historical manifestations in the
territorial lords, who were the political administrators and military
leaders of the province, and in some of the great churchmen. It was the
fortune of this north-eastern region, in its comparative isolation between
the Grampians and the sea, to be under the influence at an early date of
some of the most enlightened and widely experienced of Scottish
statesmen—such as David Earl of Huntingdon and the Garioch, acting through
his Leslie deputy, and successive heads of the great houses of Cumyn,
Durward, Byset, and Cheyne—who had their part in national as well as
provincial affairs, and were imbued with the culture and chivalry of their
time. But influences of a deeper character are to be traced from the early
history of these counties. Scandinavians, Anglo - Saxons, and Flemings came
in and possessed the land, absorbing the Celtic remnant and forming a new
population in which all these elements were blended. The rulers were for the
most part of Norman-French descent, but in the main the several Teutonic
streams arrived in their native force unmodified by softening strains
acquired in their progress hither. The rude strength of the Scandinavian
Vikings sufficed for the conquest of the Scottish islands and much of the
mainland ; but neither in itself nor with native Celtic admixture has it
exercised a commanding influence on the destinies of the country. In
Aberdeenshire it was soon united with more practical elements derived from
German and Flemish sources. The strongly marked peculiarities of the north -
eastern dialect bear witness still to the special form of the early Teutonic
predominance in these counties. One of the writers in Sir John Sinclair's '
Statistical Account of Scotland' remarks of the people of Buchan that they
seem to differ considerably from those of other parts of the country : he
thought them wanting in the liveliness of imagination and warmth of feeling
that existed elsewhere, and remarks that in their phlegmatic type of
character they are more akin to Dutchmen than to the other inhabitants of
Scotland. With this temperament we may associate the caution here so
markedly observable in the average mind, of which illustrations are seen in
some of the most characteristic phases of Aberdeenshire history — such as
the early resistance to agricultural improvement or the disfavour shown to
ecclesiastical change. William Meston d'd not belie their characteristics
when he wrote of the inhabitants of Aberdeenshire as a people who "live
quietly and pay their cesses," loving " a creed that's short and sound," and
who "are not fond of innovations, Nor covet much new Reformations ; They are
not for new paths, but rather Each one jogs after his old father ; In other
things discreet and sober, Their zeal no warmer than October."
This constitutional aversion
to newfangled ways is distinguishable, however, from mere slothful
indifference : it has always been accompanied by a readiness to uphold with
boundless zeal and energy the cause believed to be right and beneficial, or
to give effect to innovations that have commended themselves to the general
mind and conscience.
A severe process of " natural
selection " was early brought to bear on the character of the Aberdeenshire
population. While part of the former inhabitants remained on the land as
bondmen and were ultimately absorbed, another part were driven into the
upland and mountainous districts, from which they long continued to carry on
a guerilla of reprisal stimulated by poverty. For weak or timid men,
accordingly, there could be no place among the pioneers of the Teutonic
colonisation. The Cumyn and Durward statesmen of Scotland had to face in
their territorial spheres and withstand from their fortress-castles the
resentment and lawlessness of an old population displaced by strangers, and
either reduced to a condition of bondage or driven into the Highland glens
to become the progenitors of "caterans," who regarded the cattle and goods
of the low country as 'their lawful prey. The immigrants were of hardy
stocks, and their environment kept in exercise the qualities that make for
self-preservation, and developed potentialities that were to bear fruit many
centuries afterwards when the men of Aberdeenshire and Banffshire became
again the pioneers of empire and administrators of law among subject or
barbarous peoples. Among these qualities a prominent place must be assigned
to what may be broadly generalised under the name of governing capacity.
Great military expeditions to the north, like those of Malcolm Canmore,
Malcolm the Maiden, and the first Alexander, drove back the Celts and
planted new settlers on the land. The new barons, to whom these territories
were granted as rewards of military service, and often as the direct fruits
of conquest, must have been men of nerve, prepared at any moment to defend
their possessions. But other qualities than military prowess and courage
were called forth. The hardy adventurers who thus laid hold of the land, and
fought when necessary in assertion of their new rights, combined with their
vigour in repressive action a tactful attention to the arts of peace and
skill in dealing with the conditions under which they found themselves
placed. The Cumyns not only ruled in Buchan but established themselves among
the Celtic population of Badenoch, and the Gordons exercised great influence
over the large body of Celts under their sway in Banffshire, Strathbogie,
and Deeside. Though feuds between families were frequent in the Lowland
parts, we hear little of race conflict except where raiders from within the
Highland line made irruptions into the low country; and this significant
fact must be attributed in part to the success with which the new lords
cultivated the arts of peace among the remnants of the old population on
their domains.
The physical a'spects of the
counties have affected in no small degree the character and history of their
people. This has been seen in comparatively recent times in the case of land
reclamation carried out at an almost incredible cost in the neighbourhood of
Aberdeen by a comparatively wealthy class, and over a large part of the two
counties by the toil and self-sacrifice of the small farmers and crofters.
Not only was the land in itself difficult to bring under cultivation, but
the irregular and hilly contour of much of the country rendered it
permanently difficult to work, and the crops which it bore were in upland
places meagre and uncertain. These untoward conditions served to bring into
exercise some of the distinctive traits of character inherited by
Aberdeenshire men, who on the whole had marvellous success in this conflict
with the forces of nature. When we pass from agriculture to commerce, the
effects of physical and geographical circumstances are equally manifest.
Nature has not endowed the north-east with the mineral resources or other
economic advantages from which arise the great seats of commerce,
manufacture, and thriving population. "Merchant princes" must accordingly be
looked for elsewhere, and Aberdonians who have attained to that rank have in
general begun by transferring themselves and their endowments to some more
advantageously situated sphere of action. Two important lines of steamships,
the one trading with Australia and the other with Natal and South-east
Africa, are registered and owned in Aberdeen,1 each being called "the
Aberdeen line"; but all their sailings are from London, which also is their
home destination. Before the days of iron steamships in long-voyage ocean
transit these two lines were represented by fleets of the swift-sailing
vessels known all over the world as the " Aberdeen Clippers "—a class of
ocean-racers built on the Dee which were long supreme in the China tea trade
as well as in the rapidly growing commerce of Australia.1
Nor is it irrelevant to remark that of the two men chiefly instrumental in
building the longest railway in the British Empire—the Canadian Pacific—the
one, Lord Mount Stephen, was born on the eastern bank of the Spey, and began
the work of life in Aberdeen ; while the other, Lord Strathcona and Mount
Royal, sprang from the region immediately beyond that river, and is of the
same north-eastern stock. Both went in early life to the British empire
beyond the sea, and in colonial commerce acquired the wealth and developed
the practical foresight that enabled them to carry out this great
enterprise.
In former days the Dutch and
Baltic or Polish trades afforded a sufficient sphere for the merchant
Forbeses, Aedies, Skenes, and Farquhars; at a later period other Forbeses
founded and carried on the great mercantile and banking house in Bombay
known by their name; while John Farquhar, the successor of Beckford in the
ownership of Font-hill, amassed his wealth as an army contractor and
merchant in India. The cautious temperament and shrewdness of the Aberdonian
have achieved marked success in the departments of banking and finance ; and
it is noteworthy that the first provincial bank in Scotland was projected in
the northeastern city, while of the ten joint-stock corporations in whose
hands all Scottish banking is now concentrated two have their headquarters
there. Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo was head of the most important of the
Scottish private banks, which was ultimately united with a joint-stock
establishment to form the Union Bank of Scotland; and of the London bankers,
the Farquhars are descendants of Provost Sir Robert Farquhar; the great
banking-house of Barclay & Company was founded, and, in the second century
of its existence, is still directed by descendants of the Quaker Apologist
and neighbour of Aberdeen; and the Couttses were of an Aberdeenshire stock
which migrated southward by stages to London. Robert Arbuthnot of Paris and
David Gregory of Dunkirk were Aberdeenshire bankers carrying on business in
France in the eighteenth century; and the development of commerce in the
nineteenth century has placed in the local or general management of eastern
and colonial banks many responsible officers who began life in the
north-east of Scotland.
The same spirit of
enterprise, finding larger scope for itself than these counties afforded
within their own limits, has been shown in other directions. It is
surprising how many landed estates in Aberdeenshire and the adjacent
counties were purchased by means of fortunes acquired in the trade of the
West Indies. Some of the new proprietors, as Sir John Gladstone (whose
Kincardineshire estates extended into the basin of the Dee), were strangers
to the north-east; but the West Indian Gordons, Farquharsons, Shands,
Leith-Lumsdens, Allardyces, and Towers went out as at least comparatively
poor men from the district in the land of which they ultimately acquired a
stake. That Aberdeen itself was for a time deeply concerned in the
prosperity of the West Indies, and even had a direct shipping trade with
that part of the world, is a half-forgotten fact of local history of which a
memento survives in " Sugarhouse Lane," and a second sugar refinery was
erected by James Moir, the Jacobite laird of Stonywood, near his residence
in Lower Donside. Apart from those who acquired considerable landed estates
in the north-eastern counties, a number of retired planters and others who
had spent part of their lives in the West Indies became possessors of
residential properties in the suburbs or vicinity of the city. In such
records as the college lists, the obituaries in the old files of the local
newspapers, and the inscriptions on tombstones, a remarkably large number of
Aberdeenshire names connected with the West Indies are met with. Medical
practitioners were supplied by Aberdeen for their unhealthy climate, and
from many a parish manse young men, equipped with little riches beyond their
own talents and a sound practical education, went to the West Indies a
century ago in quest of a career, just as in later times young men of the
same class have gone to India and the Far East or to the British colonies
and possessions in other parts of the world.
Aberdeenshire early became
too narrow a sphere for the activities of its people, and patrician cadets,
weary of the dull life of " kindly tenants" on their brothers' estates,
sought employment in the armies of France, Sweden, the Empire, and Muscovy.
From the early part of the fifteenth century, when the Earl of Buchan and
Scottish valour won the battle of Beauge, a Scottish force was permanently
enrolled in France; and when the second Marquis of Huntly was in command of
this force, before his accession to the Marquisate, he had five Gordon
cadets and two Forbeses among his officers. In the prospect of permanent
tranquillity at home after the urn on of the crowns, north-eastern soldiers
of fortune flocked across the North Sea to seek employment under the
Governments engaged in the Thirty Years' War. Prominent in the armies of
Gustavus Adolphus were Alexander and David Leslie, who afterwards commanded
in our own civil wars and founded peerages, and amongst the officers of his
Scottish regiments were Sir James King (Lord Eythin\ Colonel David Barclay
of Ury, and numerous young men of the various landed families of
Aberdeenshire. Alexander Leslie, who, according to Spalding, " conquest fra
nocht honour and wealth in great abundance," 1 rose to the rank of
field-marshal in the Swedish service, in which he was engaged for thirty
years, returning home with great prestige in the early days of the Covenant.
In the military counsels of the Covenanters " such was the wisdom and
authority of that old, little, crooked soldier " that the proud nobility of
Scotland "gave over themselves to be guided by him as if he had been Great
Solyman." Under Tilly and Wallenstein fought Colonel John Gordon, of a
younger branch of the Gight family, and Walter Leslie, son of the tenth
Baron of Balquhain, whorwere prisoners together in the hands of Gustavus and
afterwards contrivers together of Wallenstein's death. Both received the
emperor's immediate reward, and were placed on the highroad of promotion,
Gordon attaining to a marquisate of the empire and the office of high
chamberlain, while Leslie was created a count, received the lordship of
Neustadt, and was appointed a field-marshal, governor of Sclavonia, Knight
of the Golden Fleece, and ambassador at Constantinople, to which city he
proceeded with a retinue of unprecedented splendour and magnitude. The
second Count Leslie of the Holy Roman Empire defeated the Turks in twenty
pitched battles, recovering the greater part of Hungary from their
domination. Contemporary with Count Walter was his distant kinsman, Sir
Alexander Leslie of Auchintoul, a general in the Muscovite service and
governor of Smolensko, in whose time there were in the same service many
officers of the name of Leslie.1 A typical Dalgetty of the period was Sir
John Urrie, or Hurry, of Pitfichie, in Monymusk, who on his return from the
Continent fought in the wars of the Covenant, and was always an effective
warrior on the side that engaged his services.
But there is no more famous
name in the long list of soldiers of fortune than that of Patrick Gordon of
Auch-leuchries, who fought on the Swedish and Polish side according as he
was taken prisoner by the one or the other, agreed to enter the Austrian
service but did not, and ultimately transferred his sword and energies to
Russia, where the highest promotion awaited him, and Peter the Great watched
and wept by his deathbed. Probably no son of Aberdeenshire was ever buried
with such pomp as attended the interment of Patrick Gordon before the high
altar of his chapel in Moscow. His diary preserves the names of many of his
compatriots and kinsmen who did their part in, the battles of Eastern
Europe, including his son-in-law and biographer. Alexander Gordon of
Auchintoul, who was Lieutenant-General of the Jacobite army of 1715. Among
other Aberdeenshire men in the Russian service were William Guild, Andrew
Burnett, George Keith, Thomas Menzies of Bal-gownie, and Paul, son of Sir
Gilbert Menzies of Pitfodels, who had been a student for the priesthood at
Douai, served in the Polish and Muscovite armies, and was envoy of Russia to
the Republic of Venice. James Keith, the brother of the last Earl Marischal,
served in Russia for nineteen years before he entered the service of
Frederick the Great, under whom he attained to the highest military rank,
contributed to the early victories of the Seven Years' War, conducted the
retreat from Olmiitz, and fell in the battle of Hochkirch while for the
third time charging the enemy. Among the last Aberdonians leading in foreign
armies, and he was an Aberdonian only by descent, was Prince Barclay de
lolly,1 who organised the tactics by which Napoleon's Moscow expedition was
overwhelmed in disaster. Another was General John Forbes of Skellater,
field-marshal in Portugal, who married a princess of the blood royal and
emigrated with the Court to Brazil.
Such are a few of the
Aberdonians of martial renown who threw their energies into the service of
foreign states, before their own empire afforded sufficient scope for the
talents and ambitions of its people. These counties have never been without
their roll of worthy soldiers in every rank. In the Peninsular War
distinguished and prominent service was rendered by the sixteenth Lord
Saltoun and the fourth Earl of Fife; and in its Forbeses, Gordons, Leiths,
and Le'th-Hays, amongst others, Aberdeenshire has furnished the army of the
empire with soldiers who in responsible commands have upheld and added to
its renown. To the rank and file the north-east has also yielded its quota
of brave and vigorous men. When the Black Watch, afterwards one of the most
renowned regiments of the line, was called into existence in 1730 by Duncan
Forbes, then Lord Advocate, and afterwards the great Lord President, it
consisted of six companies of local militia for checking Highland raids. A
few years later these companies were consolidated into a regiment of 1000
men, many of whom had been enrolled at Braemar. The regiment, after part of
it had tried to take the law into its own hands and escape foreign service,
had its first serious engagement in the battle of Fontenoy, where its
chaplain, Adam Ferguson, son of a former minister of Crathie, grandson of a
Gordon laird of Hallhead, and endowed with the martial energy of his race,
graduated in arms in the thick of the fight ere he passed on to his chair in
Edinburgh and his part among the literary giants of that city. The rising of
1745 was followed in a few years by the response to Lord Chatham's call for
recruiting in the Highlands, when Keith's regiment was raised in Braemar and
x\thole, and the first Gordon regiment was formed chiefly from the duke's
estates in Banffshire and Aberdeenshire. Social and economic changes that
followed in the wake of the abolition of the clan system led, after a time,
to an almost entire stoppage of Highland recruiting ; but in 1794 the
popularity and influence of the heir to the dukedom of Gordon sufficed to
raise in the northeastern counties in a few weeks the famous regiment of
Gordon Highlanders, which established in Sir Ralph Aber-cromby's expedition
to Egypt a military prestige which was to be confirmed and enhanced by its
career in the Peninsula, at Waterloo (its twenty-sixth battle), in the
Indian Mutiny, in Afghanistan, in South Africa and Egypt, and at Dargai.
In the work of empire-making
in India and elsewhere Aberdeenshire and Banffshire, through their sons,
have borne perhaps a still more notable part than in the sphere of general
military service. There are several instances of remarkable success in
enlisting the goodwill and zealous co-operation of men of alien blood and
sympathies, and in converting resentful foes into faithful friends and
upholders of the new and better rule. A singular mastery over men in this
sense is shown in the career of Sir Harry Burnett I/umsden, who, out of the
most daring freebooters of the north-west frontier, formed the famous Corps
of Guides; of Sir James Outram, " the Bayard of India," who, in the
memorable words of Colonel Yule on the base of his statue at Calcutta, in
early manhood " reclaimed wild races by winning their hearts "— fit prelude
to his great and knightly career as soldier and ruler; of Sir" William
M'Gregor, the first administrator of British New Guinea, to whose
extraordinary success in introducing the beginnings of law and civilisation
among a barbarous and unruly people the strongest testimony has been borne2
by the Queensland authorities and the Imperial Government; and of General
Charles George Gordon, the hero, of Aberdeenshire descent, who, perhaps more
than any other in recent times, has touched the public imagination— who rose
to military renown as leader of the Ever-Victorious army of China, and was
pioneer of humane rule in the Sudan, while never were great qualities more
memorably displayed than when he went back to lay down his life at Khartum
in single-handed conflict with insurgent fanaticism, his last great
achievement being to organise the escape of thousands of helpless refugees.
General Gordon had no compeer, and may have no successor, but the work of
Outram and Sir Harry and Sir Peter Lumsden has been upheld by many an able
and true-hearted officer from these counties; and in
Field-Marshal Sir
Donald Stewart the military heroism of Banffshire has at present its most
illustrious representative.
Comparatively few naval
officers have emanated from this province. In the early days Alexander
Stewart, Earl of Mar, fought by sea as well as by land, and Sir Andrew Wood
of Largo, the famous Scottish admiral, had his hereditary as well as
acquired connections with Aberdeen. Of later Aberdeenshire admirals there
have been three members of the Gordon family, one Duff, Sir Arthur Farquhar
(father and son), and Sir George Nares, the naval head of the Challenger
voyage of scientific research, and commander of the last great Polar
expedition. The elder Farquhar, by his gallant defence of the Acheron
against overwhelming odds, did much to justify the remark attributed to
Nelson concerning him, that he would not hesitate to board a frigate though
he commanded but a cock - boat. The gallant Viscount Keith, remotely
connected with these parts, carried into many a sea-fight of the American
and French wars his inheritance of the martial spirit so strongly manifested
in his grand-uncle who fell at Hochkirch.
In men of distinction in
statesmanship and the higher walks of the public service the great governing
families of the north-east have been fairly prolific. From a single branch
of the Gordons, the Earls of Aberdeen — and taking into account only the
members in the direct succession and their sons—have sprung in the course of
seven generations a Lord President of the Court of Session and Lord
Chancellor of Scotland, another Scottish judge, two admirals, two generals,
and two other military officers holding important positions (one of them
aide-de-camp to the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo), a Secretary of State
for Foreign Affairs and Prime Minister, an ambassador of the first rank, a
Colonial Governor of exceptionally wide experience, and a Viceroy of Ireland
and Canada. Hereditary talents of a high order have been frequently
manifested in the other territorial families, while many men from humbler
ranks have shone in the spheres of arms and government. The profession of
law attracted the same practical genius, especially in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, when a large number of the Scottish judges were
Aberdeenshire men or alumni of the University. Of " jurists" there were
William Barclay of Pont-a-Mousson and Angers (father of the author of "
Ar-genis"), Sir Thomas Craig, Sir John Skene, and Irvine of Lynturk; and of
judges Chancellor Seton, David Chalmers (Lord Ormond), Robert Burnet (Lord
Crimond), the first Earl of Aberdeen, Richard Maitland (Lord Pittrichie),
George Nicolson (Lord Kemnay), James Scougall (Lord Whithill), David
Dalrymple (Lord Westhall), Sir Alexander Seton (Lord Pitmeddenj, Sir Francis
Grant (Lord Cullen), William Grant (Lord Prestongrange), Alexander Fraser
(Lord Strichen), James Ferguson (Lord Pitfour), and James Burnett (Lord
Monboddo). Of ecclesiastical rulers and men of note, besides Bishop Patrick
Forbes and the Doctors, there have been several distinguished prelates of
the Forbes and Leslie connections; and in their several ways Archbishop
Sharp, Bishop Gilbert Burnet, and the Presbyterian Andrew Cant all played a
great part in the affairs of their time. Bishop Elphinstone was an immigrant
from the south, but Bishop Dunbar, in common with Cheyne, Lichtoun, and
others of his predecessors, was a son of the soil, and the attachment of the
north-east to Episcopacy, formerly represented by the Forbeses and Skinners,
has been exemplified in these latter days by Archbishop Tait, who came of
Buchan ancestry; by Bishop Ewing of Argyle, the son of an Aberdeen lawyer
who founded one of the local banks and one of the insurance offices ; by the
genial Dean Ramsay, who has so delightfully illustrated north-eastern life
and character; and by a succession of Colonial bishops, as Bishop Strachan
of Toronto, Bishop Maclean of Saskatchewan, and the present Primates of
Canada and New Zealand, Archbishop Machray and Bishop Cowie. The scholarly
and saintly Henry Scougal, son of the Restoration bishop, inspired the
Wesleys and Whitefield by his writings, and so connects Aberdeen with the
great Methodist movement of England and America.5
In the Presbyterian Church the north-east has had no such pre-eminence, but
the powerful personalities of Craig and Cant, Campbell and Reid, count for
much; Professors Fordyce, Gerard, and Mearns were men of fame and influence
in their day; Dr James Fordyce had few compeers as a popular preacher; Dr
James Robertson, of Ellon and Edinburgh, and Principal Pirie, were well
known as church leaders ; and among distinguished men in the Free Church
there have been Principal David Brown, Dr Walter C. Smith, Dr Garden Blaikie,
Principal Salmond, and Professor A. B. Davidson.
Of all the learned
professions, however, it is in that of medicine that Aberdeen men have most
excelled. The long roll of eminent physicians and surgeons born or educated
here includes a considerable number of court physicians, many men of
administrative eminence in the army and the Indian service, and many
renowned teachers and practitioners. Chronologically the list is headed by
Donald Bannerman, physician to King David II., whose services to the king
and the Church were recompensed by gifts of lands in the vicinity of
Aberdeen.6 Walter Prendergist, " medicus," was
admitted to honorary burgess-ship in 1444, and William Urquhart, chirurgeon,
was similarly honoured about a century later " for his gratuitous service to
the town." 7 Principal Boece, as we have seen,
possessed among his other accomplishments a knowledge of the healing art;
and his colleague, James Cumyne, the first "mediciner" of King's College,
occupied the medical chair created by Bishop Elphinstone, which survives in
changed form as the oldest British foundation for instruction in medicine.8
To Cumyne succeeded Robert Gray, "salubris medicinse bachalarius," whose
successor was Gilbert Skene, author of a tract on " The Pest,"
9 who afterwards settled in Edinburgh, and was "
own physician" to James VI. William Barclay, the student of Lipsius at
Louvain and Professor of Humanity in Paris, was a medical practitioner in
Aberdeen and Nantes, and author of ' Nepenthes' (a panegyric on the virtues
of tobacco), ' Callirhoe,' commonly called the "Well of Spa" (in Aberdeen),
Latin poems, and other works. From the list may also be cited the names of
Duncan Liddel, physician to the Duke of Brunswick, prime luminary of the
University of Helmstadt, and early benefactor of Marischal College; Gilbert
Jack, who practised medicine and taught philosophy at Leyden and elsewhere;
Walter Donaldson, the Aberdeen physician-professor of Sedan; Arthur
Johnston, who, after his academic career abroad, cultivated the muses in
Aberdeen, and acted as physician at the English Court of Charles I., which
also had the professional services of the Latin Secretary's brother,
Alexander Reid, the pioneer of scientific medical education among the "
barber-surgeons " of London ; Robert Morison, the great botanist of his day,
who returned from official service under the king of France to become
botanical professor at Oxford, and physician to the second Charles, in which
last oifice he had two other Aberdeen physicians as his colleagues —namely,
Alexander Fraser and Thomas Burnet, the latter of whom survived and
practised through the following reigns down to and including that of Queen
Anne. The succession is continued by John Arbuthnot, the wit and physician
of Anne's Court ; Sir Patrick Dun, the founder and first president of the
Dublin College of Physicians; Charles Maitland, who introduced inoculation
into England; George Cheyne of London and Bath, the "apostle of abstinence,"
and popular medical writer, reputed the foremost physician of his day ; the
medical Gregorys, including the Aberdeen professors, and Drs John and James
of Edinburgh; Sir William and Dr George Fordyce of London, the one a
fashionable practitioner, and the other famous also as a scientific teacher;
Sir Walter Farquhar, son of a minister of Peterhead and Chapel of Garioch,
who attended George III., and was consulting physician to the Prince Regent;
Dr John Abercrombie, another " son of the manse," who went to Edinburgh and
became head of the profession and first physician to the king; Sir James
Clark, physician-in-ordinary to the royal household in the early years of
Queen Victoria; the equally famous Sir Andrew Clark, foremost among London
physicians in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and President of
the Royal College of Physicians; the brothers George Skene Keith and Thomas
Keith of Edinburgh, the latter identified with a beneficent advance in
surgery; and James Matthews Duncan, the contemporary of the Keiths at school
and college in Aberdeen and in practice in Edinburgh —"a man of genuine
capacity and worth," as was said by Dr John Brown, " strong-brained,
right-minded, true-hearted." 1 Of medical men of eminence in Aberdeen there
were successive Skenes, Livingstones, Williamsons, and Dyces, with two
surgeons of note, William Keith and Professor Pirrie, and a physician long
the acknowledged head of the profession in the north, Dr Alexander Kilgour.
Dr Neil Arnott, a contemporary of Byron at the Grammar-School, received the
first part of his medical education in Aberdeen, where he was also a student
of natural philosophy under Professor Patrick Copland, an eminent and
inspiring teacher. While pursuing the career of a successful London
physician, Dr Arnott, who was one of the founders of the University of
London, continued to cultivate natural philosophy with the enthusiasm of
genius, and became, in his famous treatise on " Physics," one of its most
luminous and popular expositors. Among the otficers of marked distinction
which the Aberdeen medical school has furnished to the public service was
Sir James M'Grigor, to whose memory the large obelisk in the quadrangle of
Marischal College is erected, and who, before leaving the city, was the
founder of its still flourishing Medico-Chirurgical Society. One of the
first manifestations of the energy with \vh;ch he organised victory over
disease and mortality in the army was seen at the siege of Bergen-op-Zoom,
where he converted the church into his first hospital for the sick and
wounded, and by careful nursing effected a vast improvement in the lot of
the disabled soldier and the prospects of his recovery. From the Low
Countries he passed to India, and there, as afterwards on the home
establishment, he displayed the qualities of mind and character that
designated him for the great office of chief of the medical staff of the
allied armies under Wellington in the Peninsula, where, with the
co-operation of a staff on which were several zealous and effective officers
from the north-east of Scotland, the great work of his life was performed.
Sir James M'Grigor may indeed be regarded as the representative and chief of
a numerous body of departmental officers in the military, naval, and Indian
services whose early days were spent in the district between the Dee and the
Spey, and whose preparatory training, at least its earlier stages, was
carried through in Aberdeen.
The union of scientific with
professional eminence seen in Dr Neil Arnott is also illustrated by Dr David
Ferrier, whose brilliant academic career was followed by his remarkable
series of experimental researches into the localisation of cerebral
functions; by Dr Andrew Leith Adams (son of the scholarly Dr Francis Adams
of Banchory x), who to distinction as an army surgeon added the pursuits of
an observant naturalist, and after his retirement was professor of natural
history in one-of the Irish colleges; and by Sir George King, who, while a
member of the army medical service, carried out in India his great work in
the sphere of economic botany. In the natural sciences have been enlisted Dr
Alexander Garden, of Charleston, the correspondent of Linnaeus; Dr Robert
Brown, the botanist; and an inspiring teacher of Marischal College,
Professor William Macgillivray, the ornithologist.
Among travellers in recent
times Aberdeen or its University has sent out the brothers Gerard to Central
Asia and the Himalayas, Colonel James Augustus Grant to Africa, and Mr Henry
Ogg Forbes the naturalist-explorer of New Guinea and the Eastern
Archipelago. In the cultivation of the mathematical and physical sciences,
passing over men temporarily holding office in either University, such as
Colin Maclaurin and Clerk Maxwell, these counties and their seat of learning
are represented by Dr Thomas Bower, Dr Robert Hamilton, and Professor
Chrystal; by a stream of men who have taken high places in the Cambridge
mathematical tripos, including four senior wranglers in the ten years
1858-1867; by James Ferguson, the self-taught astronomer, and Dr David Gill,
head of the Royal Observatory at the Cape of Good Hope. The practicality
predominant in the genius of Aberdeenshire has resulted in the inventions of
the breech - loading rifle by Patrick Ferguson, and the percussion cap by Dr
Alexander John Forsyth, minister of Belhelvie; in the numerous and ingenious
contrivances by which Sir John Anderson of Woolwich improved the instruments
of warfare and accelerated their production in the Government factories; and
in the inventions of Dr Neil Arnott, including those by which he applied the
true principles of heating and ventilation and his hydrostatic bed.
No part of the country has
produced more remarkable examples of intellectual gifts of a high order
running in the same families from generation to generation. During the first
quarter of the seventeenth century there were living n Aberdeen two men
destined to be the common ancestors of a famous group than whom no more
brilliant illustration of hereditary genius is known. One was James Gregory,
a saddler who had been admitted a burgess in 1505, but of whom little more
is known except that his son, John Gregory, parson of Drumuak, who was
persecuted by the Covenanters, was served heir to him in 1623. The other was
David Anderson, described by the parson of Rothiemay as "the most skilful
mechanic that lived in Scotland in his time,"1 known among his
fellow-citizens as " Davie Do-a'-Things," from his skill in engineering and
constructive work, and applauded by Baillie Alexander Skene as the
"ingenious and virtuous citizen," who by means of floats and the force of
the rising tide raised and transported out of the way a great stone that
blocked the entrance to the harbour.2 David Anderson was a near relative of
Alexander Anderson the Paris mathematician, and uncle of Jamesone the
painter; and his wife was a sister of Dr William Guild, the Principal of
King's College. Janet Anderson, daughter of " Davie Do-a'-Things," and niece
of Guild, became the wife of the parson of Drumoak, and mother of David
Gregory, who prospered as a merchant,. acquired the estate of Kinnairdy, in
Lower Banffshire, and cultivated science; and of James Gregory, the inventor
of the reflecting telescope and Professor of Mathematics in St Andrews and
Edinburgh. David Gregory had three sons who became respectively Savilian
Professor of Astronomy in Oxford and Professors of Mathematics in Edinburgh
and St Andrews, and two daughters from whom descended two Aberdeen
professors, one of them Dr Thomas Reid. A son of the Savilian professor
occupied the chair of modern history in Oxford; the St Andrews professor was
succeeded by his son ; and the descendants of the inventcr of the reflecting
telescope for four generations were professors of medicine and chemistry in
the Universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh. Altogether, at least fourteen
descendants of Parson Gregory have been professors in British Universities.
The Reids are worthy of being
named along with the Gregorys, and similar, if not quite so conspicuous,
ability descended amongst the Johnstons. The Fordyces were another family of
various talent, and besides Professor David Fordyce, who in his day gave
fame to Marischal College, it produced two leadmg physicians, an eloquent
preacher, and a city banker—three brothers and a nephew—all occupying
prominent positions in London at the same time. The Burnetts and Fergusons
have yielded several men of note in the walks of learning, law, and affairs;
and of no ordinary eminence in many directions have been the Forbeses, who,
while inferior to the Gordons in political influence, have excelled them in
learning and range of aptitude, and have given several bishops to the
church, more than one distinguished judge to the bench, several sagacious
and successful men to commerce and finance, some notable men of science and
scholarship to the academic world, and a goodly number to the work of
administration and arms.
The brilliant epochs of
Bishop Elphinstone, the founding of Marischal College, and the Aberdeen
Doctors have been discussed in preceding chapters. After the dreary period
of literary barrenness inaugurated by "The Troubles" came a marked revival
of learning and culture in the eighteenth century. One of its leaders was
Thomas Blackwell, the younger, a professor and afterwards Principal of
Marischal College, who restored the effective study of Greek literature,
infused new life into the University, and was mainly instrumental in
procuring the final overthrow of the system of " regents," and the
restoration of professors who each confined himself to one branch of
knowledge.1 The reputation of the University at this time was enhanced by
his relative and colleague, David Fordyce, to whose eloquence as a preacher
and lecturer the strongest testimony is borne by his contemporary, Dr Thomas
Reid. Reid himself, a man worthy of his brilliant kith and kin on both
sides, was a graduate and librarian of Marischal College, minister of
Newmachar, and professor for thirteen years (1751-1764) in King's College.
The Aberdeenshire clergy, in
the days when Reid adorned their ranks, had a reputation for learning and
manners superior to that of their brethren in other parts of the country.
They were generally "Moderates," and acquired the respect and confidence of
the classes which had formerly sympathised with Episcopacy. For many years
the ecclesiastical leader in the north-east was Dr George Campbell,
Principal of Marischal College. Besides being an eminent ecclesiastic,
Campbell had a high reputation in the world of letters. His dissertation on
Miracles, in answer to Hume, had much celebrity, and was translated into
several European languages : more enduring, however, has been the vogue of
his ' Philosophy of Rhetoric,' which is to a large extent a treatise on
psychology, and is pointed to by so eminent an authority as Archbishop
Whately as the most important modern work on its subject, its merit lying "
not only in depth of thought and ingenious original research, but also in
practical utility to the student." Of considerable fame likewise was Dr
Alexander Gerard, Professor of Divinity and author of several philosophical
essays and dissertations. The ultimate reputation of their illustrious
colleague, Thomas Reid, was, however, destined to be very much greater than
that of either of these able men. Another of the group was James Beattie,
whose contemporary fame exceeded that of his compeers.
In his student days Campbell
founded a Theological Club, which included John Skinner, the poet, and
William Trail, afterwards Bishop of Down and Connor. A more important and
widely celebrated body, which had no small influence on Scottish thought,
was the Philosophical Society of Aberdeen, or "Wise Club," formed in 1758 by
Reid and Dr John Gregory—among its members being Campbell, Gerard, Beattie,
the medical Skenes, and the mathematical professor John Stewart. The Society
met fortnightly in a tavern, and from the minutes, which are still extant,
it may be gathered that much of the published writings of its more prominent
members was first submitted to its criticism.
As a seat of learning
Aberdeen, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, began to attract
students from England. One was Charles Burney, the Greek scholar, brother of
Madame D'Arblay and son of the historian of music and friend of Johnson.
Burney took his degree as Master of Arts at King's College in 1781, at which
date there was among the undergraduates an Englishman of very different
style in the person of George Colman " the younger," sent north by his
father to be away from the scenes of dissipation in London and at Christ
Church, Oxford, and committed to the care of Professor Roderick Macleod,
afterwards Principal. The contrast between the Aberdeen " parks" and those
of Colman's imagination was not greater than that which he found between the
professor, with his unprctent: )us Scottish speech, and the heavy dons of
Oxford; the humble lodgings of the students presented another contrast to
his mind, and instead of the severe discipline of his expectadon he found
almost unlimited freedom; but he left Aberdeen with regret, after having
voluntarily acquired at King's College, as he confessed, a great deal more
classical knowledge n two years than he had been taught in more than five
times as long at Marylebone, Westminster, and Oxford.1 Two other students at
this period, both of whom bear unqualified testimony to the stimulating and
invigorating character of their studies and intercourse in Aberdeen, were
Sir James Mackintosh and Robert Hall. Mackintosh graduated at King's College
in 1784, and Hall in the following year. The two were assiduous students of
Greek and philosophy and joint luminaries of a college literary society; and
it is on record that their friendly disputations were carried on with great
animation not only in their rooms but in frequent walks on the Links and
sea-beach and along the banks of the Don. From these undergraduate
discussions and studies Sir James Mackintosh, by his own testimony, learnt
more "as to principles" than from all the books he ever read.
A passing event in the
literary life of Aberdeen was the visit of Dr Johnson, to whom the freedom
of the city was presented "with a good grace" by Provost Jopp. Johnson made
a genial reply; and he testifies in his account of the journey to the
Hebrides that " the honour conferred had all the decorations politeness
could add, and, what_ I am afraid I should not have had to say of any city
south of the Tweed, I found no petty officer bowing for a fee ! " Just
before he left London he had written to Boswell, who was to be his companion
in the journey, that Beattie was there, but was " so caressed and invited,
and treated, and liked, and flattered by the great," that there was reason
to hope he would be " well provided for," in which event they would " live
upon him at Marischal College without pity or modesty." Beattie, however,
had not returned, and when the travellers arrived the New Inn was full and
unwilling to receive them until the disclosure of Boswell's hereditary
influence mellowed the host. Boswell had some acquaintances among the
learned society of Aberdeen ; and Sir Alexander Gordon of Lebinoir, the
Professor of Medicine in King's College, whom Johnson had met in London,
introduced him to the academic and other notabilities of the city. The
"Ossian" controversy, in which Johnson bore so vigorous a part, was at its
height, and at a dinner-party at Sir Alexander Gordon's he proposed that
Mac-pherson, who had been a student in Aberdeen not many years before,
should deposit in one of the colleges the manuscript of the poems which he
said he translated, and f the professors certified its authenticity there
would be an end of the matter, while a refusal to take this obvious and easy
course would confirm the doubt for which there was so much a priori ground.
Utterances of this sort in the course of the tour reached Macpherson, who
wrote the letter to Johnson which elicited the famous reply, that he was not
to be deterred from detecting a cheat by the menaces of a ruffian. But the
talk was mainly on Johnson's side, and he found the conversational powers of
the Aberdonians greatly inferior to those of Lord Monboddo, by whom he had
been entertained in passing through Kincardineshire. From Aberdeen the
travellers passed to Slains Castle, Banff, and westward. The situation of
Slains was declared by Johnson to be " the noblest" he had ever seen, better
even than Mount-Edgecumbe, and "if he had any malice against a walking
spirit he would condemn him to reside in the Buller of Buchan."
Young Colman also received
the freedom of the city, the honour having previously been bestowed on two
other English students; and his just reflection on the circumstance is that
bestowing upon "three such raw subjects" the same honour as had been
conferred upon Dr Johnson could only be considered as an intended compliment
to the English in general.
But honorary burgess-ship was
not thrown about indiscriminately. Campbell and Beattie, two of the most
eminent citizens, had received it a few years before ; it was conferred on
Skinner a few years later; and among other honorary burgesses created about
this time were Sir John Sinclair, Walter Scott (in 1796, the year of his
first appearance in authorship with the Burger translations), Sir John
Rennie, the engineer, who had done much to develop the granite trade, and
Sir Ralph Abercromby and Sir David Baird of military renown.
In respect of literature no
Scottish county has a longer record than Aberdeenshire. Barbour, its first
great author, stands alone in early Scottish literature, but as time
advances there are no north-eastern names to compare with Henryson and
Dunbar, Sir David Lyndsay, and Drummond of Haw-thornden. Gavin Douglas had
his origin among the southern spurs of the eastern Grampians, and his
clerical career began at Monymusk, but his connection with Aberdeenshire was
of short duration. Principal Arbuthnot came north and remained ; and Arthur
Johnston, as scholar, teacher, physician, and poet, an Aberdonian of the
Aberdonians, is of permanent repute; but on the whole the record of the
north-east is one of comparative barrenness of poetical genius—a barrenness,
however, which was shared by the rest of Scotland in the long period of
ecclesiastical and civil contention. It can hardly be said to have been
relieved by the Hudibrastic verse of Meston, a characteristic product of the
early years of the eighteenth century. Among the brilliant wits and
satirists of Queen Anne's court, however, another Jacobite alumnus of
Marischal College had his place in the person of Dr John Arbuthnot, who
achieved the rare distinction of imitating Swift so successfully that the
understudy is sometimes not recognisable from the great original. High merit
is found at the dawn of the new day of Scottish poetry, in the anonymous
patriotic poem "Albania," published in London in 1737 as the work of a
deceased Scottish clergyman. From internal evidence afforded by the poem
itself, the author appears to have been an Aberdonian ; and Aaron Hill, who
was much in the north in connection with the York Buildings Company's
enterprises, speaks of him as "known though unnamed." The poem, which has
descriptive power, and is instinct with poetic spirit, strongly commended
itself to Sir Walter Scott; and- Dr Leyden, who had drawn Scott's attention
to it, made diligent inquiry concerning it in Aberdeen, but as two-thirds of
a century had elapsed he could learn nothing, and the author remains
unidentified.
Alexander Ross, long
schoolmaster of the secluded par.sh of Lochlee, in the heart of the eastern
Grampians, who was born in Deeside and educated at Marischal College, wrote
" Helenore; or the Fortunate Shepherdess," which ranks with Allan Ramsay's
work of similar name as one of the two best pastoral poems produced in
Scotland. Besides painting nature with deftness and rehearsing the litde
drama of the hills in the days of the cateran raids, it is of incidental ;nter-est
as preserving the local dialect of the times. Burns wrote to Skinner of Ross
as a " * ild warlock " and " oar true brother " ; but he is far from being
their equal, though his songs retain their place in Scottish collections.
Robert Fergusson, the precursor of Burns, was the child of Aberdeenshire
parents, but was born and nurtured elsewhere; and Burns himself was of a
well-rooted north-eastern stock, his father and all his paternal ancestry
for centuries having been born in Kincardineshire, within a few miles of the
Dee. Beattie, a son of the Mearns, who was associated with Aberdeen through
all his active life, may not rank very high as a poet, but the " Minstrel,"
with its pleasingly descriptive strain and its touch of poetic emotion,
survives in literature when his prose writings, which had so much celebrity
in their day, have for the most part passed into oblivion. Racier of the
northeastern soil is John Skinner, a poet of truest note, whose extant
writings in verse are all comprehended in a small volume of less than a
hundred pages.
Burns visited the two shires
during his Highland tour of 1787. Reversing the course of Johnson, he
crossed the Spey eastward at Fochabers, and was hospitably received by the
accomplished Duchess of Gordon, who had seen him in Edinburgh, and had
"never met with a man whose conversation so completely carried her off her
feet."1 The Duke made Burns happier " than ever great man did," during the
brief dinner - hour they were together • the Duchess was " charming, witty,
kind, and sensible," and they pressed him to remain at the castle for a
time. How the poet was dragged away by his travelling-companion is well
known. Gordon Castle lingered in his memory, and he sent back a poem or two
in its praise, but a more notable fruit of this part of the tour is his
stirring " Macpherson's Farewell." On calling in Aberdeen at the
printing-office of Mr James Chalmers, Burns met Bishop Skinner, the son of
the poet. " On Mr Chalmers mentioning that I was the son of ' Tullochgorum,'"
the bishop wrote to his father, " there was no help but I must step into the
inn hard by and drink a glass with him and the printer"; and poet, prelate,
and printer sit together for an hour " most agreeably," discussing Scottish
song. The bishop's account of the interview elicited from Skinner an epistle
in verse which Burns considered " by far the finest poetic compliment he
ever got"; and a correspondence followed in which Burns reiterated his
regret that when in the north he had missed paying a younger brother's
dutiful respect to the author of the best Scotch song.
Dr John Ogilvie, minister of
Midmar, an able and learned man, son of the minister of St Nicholas who had
extended a welcome to Whitefield and Wesley, wrote voluminous epi :s and
allegories, and a treatise on the theology of Plato. Johnson, at the
instance of Boswell, agreed to see him in London, but on condition that he
should " give us none of his poetry" ! In the legion of minor " bards of
Bon-Accord," one of more than local fame is William Thom, the hapless
weaver-poet of Inverurie and author of touching lyric verse. The brilliant
and versatile John Stuart Blackie was an Aberdonian by nurture if not by
nature, and Sir Theodore Martin is one by descent. Aberdonian in the fullest
sense is Dr Walter Chalmers Smith, the richly reflective, imaginative, and
lyrically gifted preacher-poet of our time.
The greatest of poets
connected with Aberdeenshire, Lord Byron, used to boast that he was " half a
Scot by birth, and bred a whole one "; and he tells again and again how h's
early impressions of Deeside scenery remained with him through all his
experiences and wanderings. Of Lochnagar and Mor-ven he sang in memorable
verse, though topographically inexact, extolling them in comparison with
Alps and Apennines, and he tells how he thought of them as he gazed on the
Phrygian Ida and reflected on Troy. Nor were these the only Aberdeenshire
memories that lived with him.
"My heart flies to my head As
' Auld Lang Syne' brings Scotland, one and all,— Scotch plaids, Scotch
snoods, the blue hills, and clear streams, The Dee, the Don, Balgownie's
brig's black wall, All my boy feelings, all my gentler dreams Of what I then
dreamt, clothed in their own pall Like Banquo's offspring."
If in launching the shafts of
his satire against certain reviewers he "railed at Scots," the cherished
feelings of his youthful days, and what he called " the Scotchman in his
blood," inevitably reasserted themselves. His scapegrace and spendthrift
English father had married Miss Catherine Gordon, the proud and emotional
heiress of Gight, and quickly dissipated her fortune, so that in two years
the estate was sold and only ^150 a-year remained for her. The only child of
this unfortunate marriage, the future poet, was brought in early infancy to
Scotland, and his mother settled in a comparatively humble way in Aberdeen.
Here Byron had as teachers John Bower, who taught him to repeat certain
monosyllables by rote; Ross, the " devout and clever little clergyman," who
instructed him in Roman history, and whose teaching was remembered by him
long afterwards as he looked down from the heights of Tusculum on Lake
Regillus; the nurse who filled his mind with stories and legends, and
through whose care he had read much of the Old Testament before he was eight
years of age, and had some of the Psalms committed to memory; and his tutor,
Joseph Paterson, afterwards for sixty years minister of Montrose, from whom,
with a rudimentary knowledge of Latin, he passed to the Grammar-School,
where he " threaded all the classes to the fourth," or highest but one. It
was when in his ninth year, during convalescence from scarlet fever, and
while residing at Ballatrich near Ballater, that the scenery of Deeside
produced its great influence on his susceptible mind. Byron was only in his
eleventh year when, on succeeding to his uncle's peerage and estates, he
left for England; but his Aberdeen education may be said to have been
resumed for two years at the boarding-school at Dulwich under the direction
of Dr William Glennie, from which he went to Harrow.
In prose imaginative
literature one or two Aberdeenshire men have attained to eminence if not to
the highest rank. Of Dr George MacDonald's many writings, the most salient
are those which relate to his native district of Strathbogie and to college
life in Aberdeen, especially two of the earliest, ' David Elginbrod' and '
Alec Forbes of Howglen.' Matchless as an accurate representation of the life
and language of rural Aberdeenshire is the ' Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk' of
Dr "William Alexander; historical and descriptive matter concerning Buchan
is set forth with much literary felicity in 'The Crookit Meg' of Sir John
Skelton, whose early connection with Peterhead gives him some title to be
ranked among north-eastern authors; and a fourth writer of fict'on who has
done his part in portraying the life of the northeast is Mr Allardyce, whose
'Balmoral,5 a vivid romance of the days of Jacobite struggle, is one of the
distinctive books of Aberdeenshire.
But it is not in the sphere
of imaginative literature, verse or prose, that the genius of Aberdeenshire
has chiefly shown itself, and the great Scottish names in these departments
of literary production belong to more southern latitudes. Burns was an
Ayrshire bard of Kincardineshire descent, and Byron, in spite of his
protestation, is a doubtful asset of Aberdeenshire; Sir Walter Scott was
wholly of Lothian, as Lothian was understood when Celtic passed into feudal
Scotland; Tobias Smollett obtained his honorary medical degree in Aberdeen,
but little of his literary inspiration ; and other parts of Scotland have
their Thomson, Allan Ramsay, and Thomas Campbell, their " modern Athenians "
and Carlyle, their Miss Ferrier, John Gait, and Mrs Oliphant, not to mention
recent " schools " of novelists. The intellectual aptitudes of these
counties have been mainly in other directions. Criticism, philosophy, and
historical literature are among their specialities.
In the field of criticism
there are few writers who have rendered a service to English literature at
all comparable in extent or value with that of Alexander Dyce in his
scholarly edition of the English dramatists and poets. As a great critic and
the most painstaking of editors, he did wonders in rectifying textual
corruptions and elucidating obscurities and allusions in the works of the
Elizabethan writers. Of several professors of English literature whom
Aberdeen has given to British universities and colleges, one of the most
eminent is Dr David Masson, in whose monumental work on Milton the offices
of biographer, historian, and critic are combined. Professor William Minto,
who graduated with academic "honours" in three departments of study, made
several notable contributions to the esthetic criticism of English
literature, and was one of the most extensive contributors on literary
subjects to the ' Encyclopaedia Britannica."
The great distinction of
Aberdeen at the time of high intellectual activity in the eighteenth
century, when the " Wise Club " was holding its symposia, and one of the
most salient facts in its history, is that it became the birthplace of the
national system of thought known as the Scottish Philosophy. The reaction
against the philosophical scepticism of Hume, in which the Aberdeen
philosophers took the lead, gave their chief employment for years to the
best-known members of this academic coterie; but it was the genius of Thomas
Reid, in pursuance of this counter-movement, that created the Scottish
school of philosophy, based on the reality of knowledge, and that gave to
the world the epoch - making ' Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles
of Common-Sense.' Reid's great work was accomplished, and the ' Inquiry,'
containing the whole gist of his philosophy, passed through the press during
his professoriate in King's College, though it was after his removal to
Glasgow, as successor of Adam Smith in the Chair of Moral Philosophy there,
that he rose to the full height of his reputation and influence; and it was
in Glasgow that he had among his students Dugald Stewart, who was to be his
philosophical heir, and, as the successor of Adam Ferguson in Edinburgh, to
give to the Scottish school its w:dest celebrity. Of this school, and
educated in Aberdeen, though after Reid's time, was Sir James Mackintosh,
whose strength, however, was greater in law and polity than in his
philosophical dissertations; and Dr John Abercrombie, whose treatises on the
intellectual powers and the moral feelings had great contemporary
popularity, and passed through many editions.
But Reid and the Scottish
School, which he founded and inspired, represent only part of the large
contribution made by this part of the country to the history and course of
philosophic thought. The genealogical interest of Aberdeenshire in the
economics and sociology of Adam Smith and Ferguson, and still more in the
critical philosophy of Kant, is at best but one element in the case, and the
nurture as well as the family-tree of these philosophers has to be
recognised. Much, however, of the work of a second great and characteristic
school is unquestionably derived from the north-east of Scotland. Little
more than the ridge of the Cairn-a-Mounth separates the birthplace of James
Mill, on the North Esk, from that of Thomas Reid, on the Feugh.13
Mill's great mental endowments were exercised in the spheres of history,
economics, and polity, as well as in that of metaphysics, and were in large
measure inherited and applied in similar directions by his more famous son,
John Stuart Mill; and father and son together were chief exponents of the
association school of psychology, which for many years had its most eminent
representative in Professor Bain, the first professor of logic in his native
city of Aberdeen, and author of the treatises containing the most complete
analytical exposition of the mind.1 Another Aberdonian representative of
this school was Professor Croom Robertson of London, who organised and
edited the quarterly review of psychology and philosophy called ' Mind.' The
association psychology of the Mills and Bain, as well as the common-sense
philosophy of Thomas Reid, may therefore be said to be an intellectual
product of the north-east of Scotland. Mention may also be made of Mr Leslie
Stephen, the historian of the utilitarianism of Bentham and the Mills and of
English thought in the eighteenth century, who, himself in the front rank of
literary essayists, is a member of a family group, of Aberdeen descent,
remarkable for its achievements in the spheres of law, history, philosophy,
and literature.
History has always had strong
attractions for Aberdonians and Aberdeen alumni, and the list of those of
them by whom it has been successfully cultivated is surprisingly long. At
the head of this list stands the name of John Barbour, the author of the
national epic; while of the Scottish chroniclers Wyntoun had Aberdeenshire
connections,2 and John of Fordun was a canon of the Cathedral of St Machar.
The fourth name, not only for Aberdeen but for Scotland, is that of Hector
Boece, the first Principal of the University, who, in retailing
unauthenticated tradition and giving rein to patriotic imagination, shared
in the common infirmity of the early historians, but who is an authority for
the events of his own time.
To the next generation
belongs John Leslie (or Lesley), Bishop of Ross, the champion of Queen Mary
and principal Catholic historian of Scotland. Leslie's ' History,' written
in Latin, with an incomplete version in the vernacular for Mary's use, while
not rejecting the fabulous tales and genealogies, is careful and exact from
the point at which it becomes historical, though limited in perspective and
stopping short just at the point where it would have been invaluable as an
offset to the racy English and brilliant Latin of the partisan histories of
Knox and Buchanan. A more famous name in historical literature as in
scholarship is that of Thomas Dempster, the most voluminous writer of his
time, and author of the erudite and untrustworthy ' Historia Ecclesiastica
Gent's Scotorum';1 but of far greater service to histoi c truth were Sir
John Skene,2 and, in their different ways, Robert Gordon of Stralocb,3 the
antiquarian writer and cartographer, and his son James Gordon, parson of
Rothiemay and historian of the first years of the " Troubles," the fuller
record of which, however, is to be found in the vivid pages of John
Spalding, the quaint Commissary of Aberdeen.
Bishop Gilbert Burnet, the
historian of the Reformation and of ' His Own Time,' was a student of
Marischal College at ten and a graduate at fourteen. From Marischal College
also proceeded Bishop Robert Keith, the ecclesiastical historian. Few indeed
are the writers whose real services to Scottish history are equal to those
of Father Thomas Innes, as embodied in his ' Critical Essay on the Ancient
Inhabitants of Scotland' and in his ' Civil and Ecclesiast* History'; and
with him Patrick Abercromby, the eulogist of Scottish martial achievements,
Adam Anderson, the historian of commerce, and George Chalmers, the author of
' Caledonia,' all proceeded from the country between the Dee and the Spey,
as also did the philosophical historian, Dr Adam Ferguson. The '
Ecclesiastical History of Scotland' of John Skinner, the poet, is of value
as an account of the Jacobite period and the Scottish non-jurors; and
Alexander Chalmers, in the next generation, was a diligent historian and
biographer. Walter Cullen in the sixteenth century, Provost Jaffray and
Baillie Alexander Skene in the seventeenth, and James Man, Walter Thom, and
William Kennedy in the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth, with
other writers whose names will be found in the bibliography appended to this
volume, have contributed in their several degrees to the local annals either
as contemporary chroniclers or as collectors of data. Invaluable work in the
sphere of history and literary antiquities has been rendered by the group of
antiquaries who founded the Spalding Club in 1839, and edited its great
collection of the authentic documents of north-eastern history, topography,
and genealogy. Dr Joseph Robertson and Dr John Stuart, the two originators
of the Club, and Professors Cosmo Innes and George Grub, who were associated
with them in its work, combined with their tireless industry and passion for
accuracy in details a breadth of historical perspective and an insight into
the operation of general causes which raise them to a far higher status than
that of dryasdust antiquaries. Of the Aberdeen school likewise are the last
three historiographers-royal of Scotland, John Hill Burton, William Forbes
Skene, and David Masson, together with Canon Craigie Robertson, the latest
considerable exponent of ecclesiastical history, and Dr George Burnett, a
diligent and able worker who has contributed much to the eluc:datJon of
particular parts of Scottish history. The second or " New" Spalding Club
continues the work of its predecessor, and has issued a series of important
works in north-eastern history, genealogy, and literature.
To journalism, again — the
history of our time from day to day — no part of the country has given so
many successful and highly-skilled experts and organisers. Some of them have
contributed much to the development of the newspaper press. The Aberdonian
James Perry, already the wonder and envy of the 'ournalists of his day for
the excellence and amplitude of his reports of public proceedings,
introduced a new era by organising Parliamentary reporting by relays of
note-takers and publishing in the morning the debates of the preceding
night. A still more remarkable man in his way was James Gordon Bennett, a
native of Lower Banffshire, who, after entering as a student at the Roman
Catholic College at Aquhorthies (afterwards removed to Blairs), emigrated to
America, and from small beginnings built up the ' New York Herald,' as
proprietor and editor of which he was long at the head of American
journalism. A third notability of the newspaper press was John Douglass
Cook, the projector and first editor of the 'Saturday Review.' Starting as a
contributor to an Aberdeen paper, he acquired, chiefly in London, the
experience which enabled him to become one of the most successful of
editors, and not only to enlist the co-operation of many of the keenest
intellects and most brilliant writers of the time for his weekly review, the
scheme of which was his own and largely a novelty in journalism, but to
select wisely from among them as occasion required, to elicit their best
work, to avoid the numerous pitfalls besetting his path, and to impart to
his journal its characteristic and pervasive unity. The strength of Perry,
Gordon Bennett, and, on a higher plane, Douglass Cook, lay principally in
organisation and in practical udgment as to aims and men. One of the most
accomplished writers for the newspaper press was James Macdonell, a member
of the ' Times' staff, of whom, at the time of his premature decease, one of
the best judges — the editor of the ' Spectator'—justly remarked that in
addition to unusual breadth of culture and special knowledge he " possessed
almost in their perfection the faculties of the modern journalist," and on
some subjects "a most unusual brilliancy of expression." Another
representative man, foremost in his own special department of war
correspondent, and trained in the army as well as the university, is
Archibald Forbes, who in successive campaigns performed unexampled feats of
comprehensive observation, rapid and copious description, and swift
transmission, sometimes at the cost of great physical exertion and
endurance, as in his famous ride of no miles in fifteen hours with the news
of the battle of Ulundi. The northeastern newspapers have been served by
several men of note and modest eminence, the chief among them being William
M'Combie, founder and first editor of the ' Aberdeen Free Press,' who was
also a practical agriculturist, the author of several volumes of profound
essays (' Hours of Thought,' ' Unity and Schism,' ' Education,' ' Modern
Civilisation,' ' Memoir of Alexander Bethune,' &c.), and a man of much
personal influence and weight among the more thoughtful of the community.
Others that may be named are Dr William Alexander,3 James Adam, William
Forsyth (author of the ' Martyrdom of Kelavane' — a poem, ' Idylls and
Lyrics,' and frequent contributions in prose and verse to leading
periodicals), and Dr Alexander Ramsay (editor of the 'Banffshire Journal').
The pioneer of Aberdeen journalism and founder of the first newspaper
published north of Edinburgh was James Chalmers, who had gone to Oxford as a
student and perfected himself in the art of printing by the side of Benjamin
Franklin in London. Returning to Aberdeen, he obtained the appointments of
printer to the town and university, and shortly after the suppression of the
last Jacobite rebellion, by which, as a prominent loyalist, he suffered at
the hands of the rebels, he started the ' Aberdeen Journal,' which for three
generations was carried on by his descendants, with the literary and
editorial co-operation, at different times, of John Ramsay,1 a scholarly and
talented writer and minor poet, and William Forsyth. S.r Hugh Gilzean Reid,
first president of the Institute of Journalists, edited a journal in his
native district of Aberdeenshire, and Dr Joseph Robertson and Professors
Masson and Alinto were engaged for a time in this characteristic occupat.'on
of Aberdeenshire men, the two first-named in Aberdeen itself. At least half
a dozen of the daily newspapers of London and provincial England are under
the control of editors from these counties, few of the great ournals are
without the assistance of Aberdonians in responsible positions, and special
and technical journalism is largely manned from the same unfailing source.
Journalism, in short, draws its recruits to an exceptional extent from these
counties and the north-eastern temperament and aptitudes lend themselves
readily to its exacting demands. From the University a remarkable number of
young graduates pass into this sphere, which seems to have become
increasingly attractive in recent years.
Conditions in the north-east
have not been favourable to the cultivation of the higher forms of art
either literary or pictorial. The only painter of wide celebrity who
permanently settled in Aberdeen was Jamesone, and that was during a time
when Aberdeen was the chief seat of learning and culture in Scotland. The
genius of the counties is on the whole scholarly and practical rather than
emotional or artistic, yet they have not been barren of men in whom these
latter qualities have received development under the more genial influences
prevailing in the south. In art the most prominent examples are William Dyce
and John Phillip " of Spain " among painters, and Sir John Steell and
William Brodie among sculptors. In Dyce it may be said indeed that Scottish
art attained its loftiest elevation, and his paintings and frescoes rank
among the finest products of British artistic genius. Sir George Reid, the
President of the Royal Scottish Academy, is another migrant to the south.
Artists of distinction who have sprung from these counties are comparatively
numerous, and in recent years the hope has been raised by the indications
first seen in Giles, Cassie, and others, of the foundation of a distinctive
school of painting in Aberdeen. Architecture had some significant
illustrations, ecclesiastical and baronial, at an early date. After
Galloway's day the architect of greatest celebrity is James Gibbs, who,
under the patronage of the Earl of Mar, Secretary of State and rebel leader,
and with an artistic and professional education improved by foreign study,
established himself in London in the latter days of Sir Christopher Wren,
from whom, as would appear, he derived some inspiration. Several important
works bear testimony to Gibbs's powers, including the Radcliffe Library at
Oxford, which has been described as the grandest feature in the grandest of
English architectural landscapes, the "additional buildings" at King's
College, Cambridge, the London churches of St Martin-in-the-Fields and St
Mary-in-the-Strand, and, among many other ecclesiastical buildings in town
and country, the West Church of St Nicholas in his native city. After a
period of depraved taste an architectural revival was led in Aberdeen in the
first half of the nineteenth century by Archibald Simpson, by whom many
public buildings, including those of what is now the older portion of
Marischal College, were designed; and in the hands of John and William Smith
(the latter being the designer of Balmoral Castle;, James Matthews, and
others, a great improvement in the general aspect of Aberdeen was effected,
which has been continued and enhanced by their successors in recent years.
If the wandering scholars of
three hundred years ago were largely a professional class like the soldiers
of fortune, the northern seat of learning has reared a goodly band of men of
note in the walks of erudition. John Vaus, alumnus of Aberdeen and first
humanist in its university, was the earliest Scottish grammarian ;
Wedderburn of the Grammar-School, and Reid the Latin secretary, were among
the foremost Latinists of their time; and the scholarship of the
seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries hod three of its brightest
representatives in Arthur Johnston, Thomas Ruddiman, and James Melvin—the
first a rival of Buchanan in Buchanan's own sphere of Latin poetry; the
second being the greatest Scottish editor of classical authors, and author
of the text-book from which successive generations derived their systematic
knowledge of the Latin tongue ; and the third a great teacher, whose
scholarship and character gave him an influence that has rarely been
equalled. High in the bead-roll must also be inscribed the name of Melvin's
contemporary, Dr Francis Adams of Banchory, author of 'Arundines Devae,'
who, in the obscurity of a country medical practice, rose to fame as " the
finest Greek scholar in Scotland," and as a compeer of Buchanan and Johnston
in Latin verse. It may be added that the traditions of Aberdeen scholarship
continue to be worthily represented at different seats of learning, and that
it is not confined to classical literature. Prominent among Orientalists
have been such Aberdonians as Dr Matthew Lumsden, Canon Nicoll of Oxford,
and Professor Forbes Falconer of London. The greatest of Anglo-Chinese
scholars was Dr James Legge, Professor of Chinese in Oxford, who went from
Aberdeen to the missionary college at Malacca (afterwards Hong - Kong)
founde'd by Dr William Milne, himself one of a number of able and zealous
men who have gone from the north-east of Scotland as pioneers of
Christianity. Eminent likewise in Oriental as in other scholarship was Dr
William Robertson Smith, deposed after much controversy from his
professorship of Hebrew in the Free Church College of Aberdeen on account of
the alleged " dangerous and unsettling tendency" of his articles on Old
Testament subjects in the ' Encyclopaedia Britannica,' and afterwards editor
of the Encyclopaedia, and librarian and Professor of Arabic in the
University of Cambridge. Mention must also be made of the great tasks of
permanent utility accomplished by two other Aberdonians, Dr John Ogilvie,
editor of the ' Imperial Dictionary,' and Alexander Cruden, compiler of the
' Concordance.'
The preceding pages have made
apparent the remarkable extent to which the intellectual potentialities of
these counties have asserted themselves in concrete form and in practical
achievement. Nothing in this history is more striking than the immense
influence which their exceptionally efficient system of education has
exerted upon the fortunes of the people. Some men, almost entirely
self-taught, have risen to distinction in science or literature, and success
in business or industry has often been attained without much aid from
schools or books. But to an incalculable extent the far-reaching initiative
of Bishop Elphinstone and the fifth Earl Marischal has shaped the destinies
of this sturdy breed of men. The eighteenth century was indeed in progress
before all parts of the province had their full equipment of parish schools,
but the two colleges had established an educational ideal and opened wide
the portals of the learned professions; and when the scarcity of ministers
which prevailed for some generations after the Reformation was at last
supplied, many graduates in arts became schoolmasters in the hope of
ultimately obtaining a presentation to the incumbency of some vacant parish.
In this way the north-eastern parish schools were provided with a body of
well-educated teachers from the universities, many of them licentiates in
divinity, who played an important part in the educational economy. Elsewhere
in Scotland the university graduate and church licentiate, once not uncommon
in the schools, had disappeared from them generations before the passing of
the Education Act, but in Aberdeenshire and Banffshire this class of teacher
still continued to flourish. The too meagre public provision for the
remuneration of the parish schoolmaster was latterly reinforced in these
counties by the Dick and Milne Bequests —the former conferring an endowment
of substantial amount on teachers who passed satisfactorily an examination
in the university subjects of Latin, Greek, and mathemat :s; while the
latter had the twofold object of raising the status of the Aberdeenshire
schoolmasters and giving free education to the poor. The Royal Commission
which in 1875 inquired into the effects of these endowments found that 85
per cent of the teachers were masters of arts, while elsewhere not one in
fifty was a graduate; that there were few schools in which the higher
branches of education were not well taught, and that thus the steady flow of
youthful ability from the country schools into the university, and from the
university into the learned professions, including that of parish
schoolmaster, had been greatly promoted.
The ambition for university
education was more widely prevalent in the north-east than elsewhere, and
the means of giving effect to it existed in the parish schools and the
bursary system, which was more fully developed in Aberdeen than at the other
seats of learning. In the University of Aberdeen at the present time the
bursaries, scholarships, fellowships, and prizes, exclusive of the ordinary
class prizes, number about 350, their annual value being nearly £8000. Sons
of citizens had their grammar-school, at which country boys whose parents
could afford it likewise attended for a time to prepare for the university;
but many went direct from the parish school to the bursary competition. It
was no unusual thing, in the days before roads were made or public
conveyances existed, for the student to walk to Aberdeen at the beginning of
the college session and to return home again on foot at its close—a
distance, it might be, of fifty or a hundred miles. Thomas Ruddiman, for
instance, walked from his native parish of Boyndie, in Lower Banffshire, to
the King's College competition of 1690, falling among gipsies, it is said,
by the way, and, to the surprise of those who judged by appearances, he
obtained the highest place. How little circumstances have changed in regard
to the influence of the university and its bursary system was shown at a
recent gathering of Aberdeen graduates in London, where a well-known
colonial statesman acknowledged that he owed everything to the university,
without which he and others of them might have been following the plough,
working at a country handicraft, or keeping a village shop.1 In cases
innumerable the university has given a passport to success in life, and it
has done so with entire impartiality. Beyond this has had an important
leavening effect on public sentiment. The Scottish Universities Commission
of 1826-30 reported specially of the two Aberdeen colleges that "they have
silently and unostentatiously raised the intellectual state of Scotland."
Education may accordingly be
regarded as the most distinctive of the industries of Aberdeen, and the
yearly output of disciplined minds as the most important of its products.
The two universities were united from 1640 till after the Restoration, and
four different schemes of reun'on, with the view of improving the position
of the professors and providing for the teaching of new subjects, were
pio-jected in the eighteenth century; but it was not till 1859, after much
local opposition, that their " fusion" was finally effected. New
professorships and lectureships are gradually being added, and a great
scheme of building extension is in progress at Marischal College, now the
seat of the faculties of science, medicine, and law. There are also in
Aberdeen two training colleges for teachers and a Free Church College or
Divinity Hall, besides the Roman Catholic College at Blairs, a few miles
from the city, at which sixty or seventy students undergo their preliminary
training for the priesthood. In the eighteenth century the Scottish seminary
for this purpose was at Scalan, an obscure place in the remote district of
Glenlivet; then for thirty years it was at Aquhorthies ; and in 1829 the
college of Blairs was established on a small estate gifted to the Church by
the last Menzies of Pitfodels. Secondary or intermediate education is
provided for at the Grammar-School and Robert Gordon's College and at
several centres in the two counties, Banff and Keith being two that have
notably contributed successful competitors to the bursary tournament. Thus,
with the School Board system highly developed, including " continuation" and
evening schools, a complete provision is made for classical, scientific, and
technical instruction, as well as for the elementary branches. And thus it
is as true to-day as it was five or six generations ago, that the " natural
ingenuity" of the inhabitants is "improved by education," at once accessible
and effective, along the whole line from the elementary to the higher
academic stages; and the shires of Aberdeen and Banff continue to send far
more than their proportionate number of men into the learned professions and
the higher grades of the public service throughout the empire. |