A Wet February—Good Time Coming—Sir Walter Scott—Mr.
Gladstone—Death of Sir David Brewster.
One swallow
doesn't make a summer, says the proverb, and unless one fine day (the
19th) makes a spring, we haven't for the last six weeks [February 1870]
and more had a single hour of a character to be disassociated from one
of the wettest and wildest winters on record. No sooner has one storm
died away, less from any voluntary cessation on its part than from sheer
exhaustion of its forces, than, after a slushy, sludgy interregnum of
brief duration, it has been succeeded in every instance by another and
another still of equal or greater violence and fury, so that of quiet or
calm we have known little, and of sun or moon or stars we have seen
hardly the briefest glimpse since Old New Year's Day. "When Foote, the
incomparable comedian (Johnson said of him that (the dog was irresistible"),
after acquiring and dissipating several fortunes, Avas at
last lucky enough to be able to set up his carriage in a more dashing
style than ever, he selected as his motto, and emblematical of his
career, the words Iterum,
Iterum, Iterumque ! (Again,
and Again, and Again!) It has struck us that if the Meteorological
Society Avere to
apply to the Herald's College for a crest and armorial bearings to be
displayed on the title-page of their volume of "Transactions" for the
first quarter of the current year, we, should they do us the honour to
consult us, would suggest a cloud-cumulus, rain-surcharged, proper on
the shield, with Aquarius
and the "watery" Hyades as supporters; Eolus ordering "a fresh hand to
the bellows" as
a crest, and the Iterum,
Itervm, Iterumque
of Foote's chariot as a motto of singular appropriateness
and meaning. How delighted, by the way, must our amphibious friend Mr.
Symons be in the midst of all this rainfall! His crest
again should be a man's head on a fish's body in an overflowed meadow, natant, and
his supporters an anemometer and rain-gauge proper
! It is needless to say that anything like spring work is with us not
only in a very backward state, but has hardly been commenced. Before the
end of February we had our own corn seed and potatoes in the ground last
year. If we get them down this year any time during the next month, it
will be earlier than the weather at the date of the present writing
promises. Our ornithological studies extend over a greater number of
years than we care at this moment very accurately to count; but never
have we known our wild-birds so listless and loveless on Shrovetide Eve
as they are this season. Except an occasional carol from the wren, who
has a soul as big as that of his namesake Sir Christopher, who built the
dome of St. Paul's (the wren also, by the way, is a dome-builder), and
an irregular strophe at rare intervals from the redbreast, our woods are
songless, and of nidification there is not a sign. Meliora
sperare, nevertheless,
is sound philosophy. Let us hope for better things : He is faithful that
promised that while
the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer
and winter, and day and night, shall not cease. Scott
has few finer passages than the following, which we are fond of
repeating in such a season as this. It occurs in his epistle to William
Stewart Eose, introductory to the first canto of Marmion,and,
though very beautiful, is seldom quoted :—
"No longer Autumn's glowing red
Upon our Forest hills is shed;
No more, beneath the evening born,
Fair Tweed reflects their purple gleam;
Away hath passed the heather bell
That bloomed so rich on Needpath fell;
Sallow his brow, and russet bare
Are now the sister-heights of Yair.
The sheep, before the pinching heaven,
To sheltered dale and down are driven,
Where yet some faded herbage pines
And yet a watery sunbeam shines:
In meek despondency they eye
The wither'd sward And wintry skv,
And far beneath their summer hill
Stray sadly by Glenkinnon's rill:
The shepherd shifts his mantle's fold,
And wraps him closer from the cold;
His dogs no merry circles wheel,
But, shivering, follow at his heel;
A cowering glance they often cast,
As deeper moans the gathering blast.
"My imps, though hardy, bold, and wild,
As best befits the mountain child,
Feel the sad influence of the hour,
And wail the daisy's vanished flower;
Their summer gambols tell, and mourn,
And anxious ask—Will spring return,
And birds and lambs agaiu he gay,
And blossoms clothe the hawthorn spray?
"Yes, prattlers, yes. The daisy's flower
Again shall paint your summer bower;
Again the haw thorn shall supply
The garlands you delight to tie;
The lambs upon the lea shall bound,
The wild birds carol to the round;
And while you frolic light as they,
Too short shall seem the summer day."
On her rich roll of worthies, Scotland has but few names
of whom she has more reason to be proud than that of Walter Scott. If we
had even said not
one, an
objector might perhaps find the assertion more difficult to disprove
than he wots of. Nor has the star of his marvellous power and influence
for good set or been extinguished; it has only been clouded for a season
by the intervention of exhalations of the "earth, earthy"—exhalations
that the growth of a healthier and holier taste is already dissipating,
and the Wizard's star shall reappear in undiminished lustre, and young
and old will clap their hands and rejoice in its purity and power. Some
years ago arose a school of poetry that flared and flickered for a
season, and found admirers on the same mysterious principle, we suppose,
that Antoinetta Bourignon and Joanna Southcott found followers. It was
happily styled the "spasmodic" school; and it died and disappeared—the
best thing it could do. A new school has succeeded, that may be called
the sensuous, and, we had almost said, the lascivious, and with a strong
tendency to the reproduction in modern guise of all that was worst and
best in the ancient Greek drama. Of this school, Mr. Swinburne is, facile
princeps, the
chief. It also will last but for a season, and will die and disappear
ignominiously, as did its predecessor. There is yet another school, that
has existed for some time longer—full of missy
ism, sentimentalism,
and languid goodyism—"too
good for banning, too bad for a blessing." It also
is slowly dwindling, and dwining, and dying, and must soon expire,
leaving people hardly any better or worse than it fdund them. And so
with the novels of the day, with their "sensations," their seductions,
murders, and unspeakable horrors, worse than were mingled in the
bubbling cauldron of the witches in Macbeth:
their day
is doomed; for purer taste, banished but for a moment, must reappear—is
already reappearing—and people, awakening as if from a dream, will once
again consent to quench their thirst at healthier fountains, and to
wander in less questionable bye-paths. The poetry and novels of Scott
will then resume their attraction and reassert their influence and
power; and whithersoever he leads,
no parent need be ashamed to follow, or feel obliged in the interests of
morality to forbid and forego the companionship of wife or children
through scenes where there is everything to delight and nothing to
offend. It is well that in the world of poetry and fiction, as in social
and political affairs, the maxim holds true that—
"Res nolunt diu male adminietrari."
Of Mr. Gladstone, the politician, there are many more
enthusiastic admirers than ourselves, though we would not willingly he
supposed to yield to any one in our ardent admiration of his ripe
scholarship and unrivalled eloquence; hut we shall think better of him
while we live, and have a kindlier and warmer interest in all he says
and does, on account of his recent eulogium on the character and
writings of Sir Walter Scott.
And who can speak of Scott, or think of Abbotsford and
Melrose and the classic Tweed at the present moment, without also
thinking of Allerly and Sir David Brewster, one of the greatest men of
science that Scotland has ever produced; and greater far, as sometimes
happens in such cases, out of
it than in it,
for during ,full forty years, wherever, throughout the habitable parts
of the earth, science had lit her lamp and could count her votaries,
however humble, there the
name of David Brewster was familiar as a household word, and his
discoveries known and applauded. He was the first really distinguished
man of letters and science we ever knew, and it was while writing one of
the earlier chapters of this work, on a subject in which he felt the
keenest interest, and in connection with which we had occasion to
mention his name, that the grand old man, venerable in honours and in
years, was breathing his last, with a Christian resignation to the
Divine will, and a Christian's joyful faith in the Divine mercy and
goodness. Passing through the valley of death, he feared no evil, for
his Lord and Saviour sustained his steps. Through the first Lady
Brewster (nbe Macpherson),
to whom we had the honour of being known before we had yet seen her
distinguished husband, we were fortunate enough to be admitted, at the
very beginning of our curriculum at college, to a degree of familiarity
with the Principal of our University, that our relative positions would
not otherwise have warranted, and which we have the satisfaction to
remember we had sense enough to value highly and to be proud of even at
that early age. It was by his practised Land that
the instrument was adjusted through which we had our first view of two
of the most beautiful sights that the telescope reveals to us—Jupiter
with his belts and retinue of attendant moons, and Saturn with his
rings; and very patient and good-natured and kindly were his replies to
our eager questionings with regard to the nature of the wonders then
first opened to our gaze. Sir David, if forced into it, could fight, and
never turned his back on an assailant. If you hit him, he hit again, and
he always hit severely; but he was, notwithstanding, a man of kindest
heart and most amiable disposition, and it would be difficult to meet
with any one more cheerful or courteous or pleasant within the circle of
his own family and in his daily intercourse with his acquaintances and
friends. Requiescat in
pace: he
was in truth a great man. Not often does it happen that in the same
country, and within so short a time of each other, two such stars so
large and lustrous as Faraday and Brewster have disappeared from the
firmament of science. A century may elapse ere the thrones they have
left vacant shall again be adequately filled. There is something
extremely beautiful and affecting in one of Sir David Brewster's last
utterances upon earth. On the morning of his death, Sir James Simpson,
standing by his bedside, remarked that it had been given to him to show
forth much of God's great and marvellous works; and the dying,
philosopher solemnly and quietly replied, "Yes, I have found them to be
great and marvellous, and I have found and felt them to be His." |