[260]

BLACKWOOD’S

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

No. CCCLXXXIX.            MARCH, 1848.             Vol. LXIII.

CONTENTS.

EDINBURGH:
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, 45, GEORGE STREET;
AND 37, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.

To whom all Communications (post paid) must be addressed.

SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.

PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS; EDINBURGH.

[261]

MR COBDEN ON THE NATIONAL DEFENCES.

It is popularly averred by our
Southern neighbours that the house of
every Englishman is his castle. No
doubt to a certain extent this may be
true. In the modern mansion, as in
the ancient fortalice, the victualing department
is always a matter of prime
importance, and Chubb’s patent safety
lock may be accepted as a convenient
substitute for the portcullis. Yet,
after all, we suspect that the resemblance,
if the matter be closely investigated,
will turn out to be rather
imaginary than real. A castle, according
to the ideas which we have
imbibed from an early course of miscellaneous
and feudal reading, must
have been a sort of earthly paradise,
and the possessors of it wholly exempt
from that never-ending series of
daily persecution to which we, unhappy
moderns, are subjected. With
a good eight-foot thick wall of solid
masonry around, a moat broad enough
to baffle the leap of Flying Childers,
and deep enough to have drenched the
scalping-lock of Goliath of Gath, and
a few falconets and patereroes symmetrically
arranged along the parapets,
a man might afford to enjoy a
quiet night’s rest without dread of
duns, or any fear of the visits of that
most malignant of unexecuted ruffians,
the tax-gatherer. He might give a
jocular rejoinder to the summons of
the pursuivant who appeared before his
gates with the intelligence of a further
railway call; and dismay any invading
snip by the apparition of a scarecrow
dangling from a gallows on the summit
of the donjon-keep. Nay, if currency
were absolutely indispensable
for the purpose of paying the garrison,
Castle Dangerous would be more
effective than the bank parlour has
shown itself in late times under the
operation of Sir Robert Peel’s Act for
the perpetuation of national bankruptcy.
A simple announcement in
the neighbouring town of a large assortment
of cast-off uniforms and rusty
armour for sale, would infallibly attract
to the stronghold a collection of
Caucasians who adhere to the Jewish
persuasion. Once within the guard-room,
we should deal summarily, and
after the manner of Sir Reginald Front-de-Bœuf,
with these infidels. The
forceps should be produced, and no
ether or chloroform, upon any pretext
whatever, allowed. We should negotiate
with Moses or Mephibosheth at
the rate of units for a stump, tens for
a decayed, and hundreds for an unimpeachable
grinder; and may we
never shake shekel again if we do not
think we could extract a reasonable
amount of ransom from the jaws of
the Princes of the Captivity! As to
the advent of many enemies, we should
be utterly and entirely fearless.
Cohorn and Vauban might come with
their lines, and mines, and battering-trains
without disturbing our equanimity,
or causing the slightest tremor
in our hand as we filled out our post-prandial
bumpers of Bordeaux. So
long as powder lasted and shot was
plentiful, we should reciprocate the
hostile compliments by all manner of[262]
shell and canister; and, if the metal of
the rogues proved, in the long run,
too heavy for us, they should have our
full permission to pound away until
they were tired; and, on entering the
citadel, they would find us smoking
our pipe in the cartridge-room, as cool
as a cucumber, or as Marius at Carthage,
or General Chassé at Antwerp,
or any other warrior and hero of antiquity
whomsoever.

Now take that picture—compare it
with the state of your present domicile—and
tell us whether, in effect,
the fortalice is not an Eden? What
kind of existence do you lead in that
Heriot Row house, for which, last year,
when shares were up, you were ass
enough to pay some two or three thousand
pounds? You cannot go into your
room after breakfast to write an article
for Blackwood, or to draw a condescendence,
without hearing every five
minutes the dissonance of that ceaseless
bell. Not unearned are poor Grizzy’s
eleemosynary Christmas shoes, for
fully one-half of the day is that most
weary wight occupied in flitting from
the regions beneath to answer the
summons which may bring an invitation
or a fee, but which, in nine cases
out of ten, is the announcement of a
gaping creditor. First, in comes a
document wafered, according to that
beastly practice, which, for the credit
of Tyre and Sidon, we hope is a
modern invention. That, of course,
goes into the waste basket without
more remark than a passing objurgation.
Then follow the prospectuses of
three insurance companies, you being
nearly ruined already with the amount
which you are compelled to pay annually,
in virtue of your marriage contract,
to the Scottish Widows’ Fund.
Next appears a long slip, purporting
to be the intimation of a police assessment.
You swear savagely, having
ascertained the fact, by dint of a spirited
correspondence in the newspapers,
that the available force of that esteemed
body in the metropolis of Scotland
is not much over a dozen, and having
accurate personal corroboration of
the statistics by walking the other day
into an unmolested bicker, from which
you emerged with a broken hat, and
a head phrenologised by a blacking
bottle. Before you have recovered
from this, you receive another missive
with a charge for cleaning the streets—an
operation which you know, to your
cost, has been performed throughout
the last thaw exclusively by the petticoats
of the females; and upon the
back of this appear mulctures touching
gas and water. A huge oblong missive,
the envelope whereof bears on a
corner the letters O. H. M. S., and
which is sealed with a most imposing
and royal escutcheon, deludes you for
a moment into the belief that Lord
John Russell has at last exhibited a
gleam of common-sense, and has recommended
you to her Majesty either
for a commissionership or for a reasonable
place on the pension list, in
consequence of your balaamite contributions
to the unsaleable Edinburgh
Review. You open it, and behold, it
contains nothing but a warning that
you have not paid the last quarter of
your compounded and thrice confounded
income-tax! A gentleman next
requests the honour of a moment’s
interview. In the hope that he may
prove a Writer to the Signet, you
weakly yield; and incontinently an
individual with a strong Israelitish
countenance, a fetid breath, and an
odour of stale tobacco floating around
his person, solicits the honour of your
custom for a packet of sealing-wax, a
gross of steel pens, or a new edition of
the Pentateuch. You eject him in
a tornado of wrath; but the cup of
your misery is not full. Aaron is
succeeded by Mendizabel—an expatriated
Spanish grandee, who bears a
strong recommendation from an individual
whose handwriting seems to be
attached to every begging petition in
the country. This fellow won’t choose
to understand you, however frantic
you may appear; so that, for the sake
of peace, you violate your conscience
and get rid of him at the expenditure
of a shilling. Grizzy is called up, and
severely reprimanded for her want of
discrimination in admitting the illustrious
stranger; and the consequence
is that, on the very next summons,
she peremptorily denies you to a Glasgow
agent who has come through
by special train for a consultation
on a case of emergency. Last of
all, just as you are settling steadily
to your work, and turning over the
third sheet of foolscap, in walks your
friend the Haveril, on no earthly[263]
errand whatever, except to inquire
how you are getting on. Of all social
pests, this kind of animal is undoubtedly
the worst. In intellect he
is singularly weak: in disposition
curious and prying. He hops about
your study like a magpie, eying every
letter, as though he longed to make
himself master of its contents; and,
notwithstanding that you believe the
creature to be strictly honest, you
would on no account leave him for a
couple of minutes in undisturbed possession
of the sanctum. He peeps into
every book, indulges you with a quantity
of small literary swipes, and finally
fastening upon a volume of prints, entreats
you to go on with your occupation,
as he, the Haveril, is perfectly
competent to the task of entertaining
himself. Culpable homicide, say our
law-books, ranges from a crime of great
enormity to the smallest possible fraction
of imputed guilt; and if, under such
aggravating circumstances, you were
to toss your acquaintance out of the
window, it is not likely that your subsequent
sentence would be severe.
But you have at the bottom of your
heart a sort of attachment to the
nincompoop, whom you know to be
utterly harmless, and who, moreover,
to do him justice, invariably stands
up for you, whenever you are assailed
in your absence. Therefore you abstain
from violence, and the penance
which you heroically undergo is but
one degree short of martyrdom. Under
the visitation of these Egyptian
plagues, the morning wears insensibly
away; and the imp of darkness, when
he calls for copy about dinner-time, is
summarily exorcised, and dispatched,
empty-handed, to the solitudes of his
awful den! Is there, then, any feasible
case of resemblance between the fortress
and the modern mansion?

We have been led into this train of
thought by a perusal of the speeches
lately delivered at Manchester on the
subject of our national defences. The
question is one of undoubted interest to
us all, and it is well that it should be
brought forward and thoroughly discussed
in time. If there is danger,
either immediate or impending, let us
know it, and then, to a certain extent,
we shall be forwarned if not forearmed.
The Duke of Wellington—a tolerable
military authority, as times go—has
already given us his opinion on the point,
and that opinion has been immediately
met and contradicted by the sapient
Mr Richard Cobden. We have yet to
learn the exact amount of Mr Cobden’s
attainments in the arts of strategy and
fortification; but as he is undoubtedly
a “myriad-minded” gentleman, of
fair average conceit, and more than
average effrontery, and as we have
hitherto abstained from making special
mention of him in our columns, it may,
perhaps, be worth while to see how
he has acquitted himself in the lists
against the veteran conqueror of Napoleon.
Our old friend Tomkins—he
of the Ten Tumblers—used to be,
if we recollect aright, rather eloquent
upon this weighty topic. Tomkins, in
early life, had sustained an amatory
disappointment, in competition with a
thwacking drum-major; and therefore
always looked upon the army with
somewhat of a jaundiced eye. The
sound of the fife, clarion, and trumpet
was ever after distasteful to his ear;
and he never trotted his mare past a
marching regiment of these scarlet
locusts, without a spasm of righteous
indignation. “They eat our bread,
sir!” he would say, “and drink of our
cup, and do absolutely nothing in return.
The sooner we get rid of them
the better. An Englishman, sir, needs
no hired supernumeraries to protect his
home. When was our soil ever invaded?
Let the French come, and we
will give them graves!” And having
delivered himself of this sublime sentiment,
Tomkins would incontinently
ring for another tumbler. It always
struck us, however, as a singular proof
of the eccentricities or rather inconsistencies
of genius, that our distinguished
friend, when in his cups, and
towards the close of the evening, invariably
began to glorify himself upon
his length of lineage and descent. In
support of these heraldic claims, he
was wont to cite the case of his great
progenitor, “the founder of the family,”
who just about a century ago
had the condescension to hold the
stirrup of Lord George Murray, as
he alighted from his horse when the
clans marched into Derby. Tomkins,
on the strength of this anecdote, had
rather a kindly feeling towards the
Jacobites, and would never allow that
the enterprise had at any time the[264]
character of an invasion. “We were
ready, sir,” he would exclaim, “to
have marched up, in the Reform year,
from Birmingham to London; and who
can doubt that, had we done so, we
should have driven the household
troops before us as the chaff flies out
from the fanners?”

We have often deeply regretted that
Tomkins did not survive to witness
the consummation of the triumphs of
free-trade—a cause which he contributed
materially by his efforts and his
writings to advance. The leading feature
of his character was the total
absence of every kind of prejudice or
bigotry. He held it to be a fundamental
principle, as old as Magna
Charta, that England was to be governed
mainly through the influence
of cotton: that all other interests were
immeasurably inferior to this, and
that the settlement and maintenance
of our colonies was a gross instance of
reckless and frantic extravagance.
“Let us thrive,” he would say,
“through the arts of universal peace.
Let us set a bright example to the
world by opening our ports to the free
admission of all foreign produce, without
any kind of reciprocity whatever.
If our artisans and workmen cannot
maintain their ground, let them go to
the comfortable Unions we have provided,
and pick oakum in return
for their rations of wholesome bone-soup!
Let us hear no more nonsense
about humanity or short-time! Cram
the children into the factories so soon
as they can walk. Early habits are
the surest means of promoting and
fostering industry. Let us look to our
imports, and the exports will look after
themselves. Disband the army. Reduce
the navy. Do away with Church
establishments. Contract the currency.
Flabbergast the colonies; and
Great Britain must go ahead!” Such
were the expressed opinions of that
great and good man, who now sleeps
in a premature sepulchre at Staley
Bridge: and we need hardly add, that
in matters of revenue, he was an uncompromising
advocate of the sponge.
Had his valuable existence been prolonged
for a few years, he would
doubtless have been at the head of the
onward movement, and might have
shared in the rewards which are gratefully
accorded to the patriots of this
latter age. Andrew Marvell, sitting
incorruptible in his garret with a
shoulder-blade of mutton, has ceased
to be a favourite example with the
new democratic school. They affect
ovations and banquets, perform continental
reforming tours, and demean
themselves after the manner of our
able correspondent, Mr Dunshunner,
who, we are glad to observe, has been
lately invited to a free-trade demonstration
on the banks of the Bosphorus,
by several of the leading Muftis of
Constantinople. Dunshunner writes
in great spirits, and has promised us
an early paper, on the advantage of
our establishing free-trade relations
with the domestic Circassian market.

Failing Tomkins, we have every
reason to be proud of his disciple and
successor, Mr Cobden. In fact, the
mantle of our lamented friend has
fallen most gracefully upon his shoulders;
and in nothing is the genuine
likeness more displayed, than in the
contempt which both of them have
exhibited for the standing army of
Great Britain. Yet, perhaps, in this
we may be doing Mr Cobden some
little wrong. Tomkins, we know, had
just and natural reason for abhorring
the sight of a red-coat; Cobden,
so far as we are aware, has no such
motive for dislike. Of the two, he is
the calmer and the cooler man, and
very naturally looks sedulously about
him for the means of substantiating
his theories. After all the fine words
which Sir Robert Peel bestowed upon
him, to no visible improvement of his
parsnips, Mr Cobden very naturally
felt a little uneasy at the non-fulfilment
of several of his prophecies. It
is a pity that a man cannot vaticinate
in this country without undergoing a
certain risk of subsequent stultification;
and yet, if he does not affect the
gift of prophecy, your patriot is usually
at a discount. Our memory is not a
very good one, and yet we have hardly
forgotten certain flourishes by Mr Cobden,
regarding the immense amount
of employment which was to accrue
to this country, immediately after the
passing of his favourite measures.
Bread was to be as cheap as dirt,
common luxuries within the reach of
every one, and the whole British
nation, through its length and breadth,
was to hold a perpetual jubilee and[265]
jollification, to the music of the engine
and the shuttle.

and, were we to add, in the words of
Mr Canning’s imitation of the above
passage, the concluding line,

“Till France shall come, and all laws be repeal’d,”

it would not, we apprehend, be entirely
foreign to the subject. The
result, however, so far as we have yet
seen, has by no means justified the
experiment. Trade, instead of improving
under the stimulus of free-trade,
has fallen off, and a year of
commercial panic and misery has been
the result of the liberal nostrum.
This, no doubt, is very galling to our
friends of the billy-roller. Old stagers
like us, who are sometimes represented
as prosy, because we reverence time-honoured
principles, love the constitution
of our country, and defend the
memory of those who were the true
founders of its greatness, are supposed
to feel some triumph at the aspect of
the present depression, and to exult
over the slough of despond in which
the Whigs are left to flounder. If
there be any who, judging from their
own mean nature, so think of us, it is
hardly worth our while to undeceive
them. Bitterly indeed have we
mourned over the spectacle of fraud
and imbecility which the last two years
have disclosed in the higher places of
the land, and most earnestly do we hope
that, ere long, the true-hearted people
of this country will awake to a full
sense of their present perilous and by
no means creditable position. All
the difficulties which are just now
pressing upon ministers, and which,
for a longer period than we can venture
to calculate, must continue to
environ them, are of their own creating,
and are the natural effects of that
unconstitutional policy which would
sacrifice every thing for the mere possession
of power. Do we speak truth
or not? Let the Chancellor of the
Exchequer answer us. What but free-trade
and its concomitant schemes
has lessened the revenue and increased
the pauperism of the country? What
but the vicious and yet invincible
desire of change, consequent on a contest
for popularity, has struck a blow
at the prosperity, and even the existence,
of our colonies, which has
already reacted with fearful effect
within the centre of the mother-country?

Mr Cobden, on being twitted with
the failure, or, at all events, the
non-realisation of his unqualified prophecies,
very naturally, but not very
wisely, flies into a passion. He fixes,
of course, upon the failure of the
harvest of 1846 as the prime element
of justification. Can I control the
elements?—says he—can I regulate
the seasons? Certainly not, Mr Cobden.
We presume that no one, not
even the stupidest operative that
used to bellow in your congregation,
and who believed every one of the
golden promises which you were
hardy enough to enunciate, ever
dreamed that you were in possession of
that power. Several of us, moreover,
are of opinion that, upon the whole,
you have been rather overrated as a
conjurer, and that, having failed in your
endeavours to get into an empty quart
bottle, you are not a whit more likely
to succeed when you come to experiment
upon a pint. But let us whisper
in your ear that this excuse will
hardly serve your turn, and that it is
wholly irreconcilable with the arguments
which you used to advance.
A copious supply of foreign grain was
the very thing for which you and your
associates primarily clamoured. You
wanted an import to a prodigious extent,
and you flattered yourselves
that, for each quarter of American
wheat, you would be able to send in
exchange so many yards of that
calico which you fondly maintain to
be the principal fabric of the world.
You were content, and you have said
it over and over again, to take your
chance of the home market, provided
the other ones were opened to you.
Now that you have them open, and
now that wheat has come in such
abundance as even your most sanguine
anticipations could not have conceived,
you have the coolness and
effrontery to turn round and throw
the blame upon Providence, for having
speedily brought about the very
thing which every charlatan in Great
Britain has been shouting for since the[266]
anti-corn-law league began! Do you
really think that this will go down with
any portion of the community? that
such deplorable wriggling will not
insure you, throughout the country,
the contempt of every man of average
and common understanding? or that
the labourer on short time, and the
artisan whom you have deprived of
his employment, will put up with such
miserable excuses? The plain state
of the fact is,—and you know it,—that
your theories are crumbling beneath
your feet. You cannot expect
that your gross and egregious error
will escape a speedy detection. You,
without any previous qualification
for the task, save your natural talent,
which is not much, have thrust
yourself forward to a prominence
which you never were entitled to
occupy. You may fancy yourself,
if you choose, the people’s man; but
so were Jack Cade, and Wat Tyler,
and several others, who, mistaking
energy for knowledge, and ill-regulated
enthusiasm for calm deliberate
judgment, took upon themselves the
task of misleading the English people,
and either perished amidst the ruin
they had caused, or sank back into their
pristine obscurity. There is a favourite
cant phrase very current just now,
to the effect that “we are living in
new times.” The same thing might
have been said by our common progenitor
Adam, the day after his expulsion
from Paradise. It is the most
trite truth of the world. Every new
day brings its change, but every new
day does not obliterate the memory
of those which have gone before. All
the “new times” which this universe
has seen, have not sufficed to alter
in the slightest iota the original character
of mankind. Human nature
still remains the same; and the man
who does not acknowledge and adopt
this as a principle, is a crazed and
dangerous visionary. Never, under
any circumstances, ought such a one
to gain ascendancy in the state, or to
be allowed to reduce his unsound theories
to practice. If he does so, woe
be to the country which countenances
him in the rash attempt!

History and its philosophy are the
true studies for a statesman in every
age. In that educational point of
view, we strongly suspect that the
present ministerial cabinet is sorely
deficient. The Whigs, as a body,
are conversant with a very small
space of history indeed. They are
constantly jabbering about the fundamental
principles of the constitution,
which they date back no further
than the advent of William of Orange.
Their pet historian, and the ablest man
among them, cannot make a single
speech without dragging in, neck and
heels, some vapidity about the Revolution
Settlement of 1688; and they
try to be profound in their criticisms
upon the policy of Walpole and of
Bute. Charles James Fox, of course,
still continues to be their principal
fetish, and they cling to antiquated
party toasts with a superstition that
would disgrace a Mussulman. But of
the freer and bolder regions of history—of
all that is great and elevating—of
the numerous lessons to be
gleaned, and the examples to be
gathered from the grand old records
of kingly and loyal England, or of the
fall and fate of nations through the
imbecility of their rulers, or the ambition
of ignorant demagogues, they
either know nothing practically, or
they fail to acknowledge their importance.
Whiggery is a small machine
which works according to conventional
rules of its own, and will not
make allowance for the great springs
of human action. A cabinet of Whigs
is admirably adapted for the control
and legislation of the sovereign state
of Pumpfernickel, or some analogous
German principality; but they never
can assume their place at the helm of
affairs in a great empire such as that
of Britain, without landing the whole
of us in dangerous difficulties, and
sneaking off at the last hour under a
humiliating sense of their own impotence
and presumption.

The case is still worse when men
like Mr Cobden come forward to try
their hand either as pilots or as coadjutors.
We presume that Mr
Cobden, if the question were put
to him, would candidly admit the
narrowness of the range of his peculiar
historical studies. We understand
that he does not pretend
to be a scholar, and that the amount,
of the information which he possesses,
however great that may be, is limited
to modern facts and premises, upon[267]
which he usually reasons. A worse
kind of education for a statesman, or
for the leader of a popular movement,
cannot be found than this. It was
this kind of partial knowledge, unilluminated
by the clear lucid light
which bygone history alone can shed
authoritatively upon passing events,
which, in the recollection of many
still alive, led to the dark catastrophe
and horrors of the French Revolution.
There is hardly one social change,
hardly one political experiment now
making, for which a prototype cannot
be furnished from the pages of history.
And of what possible use, it may be
well asked, is history, if we are not to
recur to it for a solution of the difficulties
which may arise in our onward
progress? Are we to gain no confidence,
nor take any warning from
the rise and decline of nations, not
much less powerful than our own,
whose checkered career and the
causes of it are open to our view?
Is the world behind us a blank, that
we should go stumbling on at the instigation
of every reckless adventurer,
more culpable in his attempts to
guide us, than the ship-captain who
should presume to thread the coral
reefs of the Indian Ocean without
consulting the authoritative chart?
Are we always to derive our information,
not from what has been done
and acted in the globe before—not
from an attentive examination of
men and their motives, and the
countless springs of action which stir
them, but from statistical tables and
long columns of figures, compiled by
rusty officials in their dens, and
brought forth for the first time to be
cited as overwhelming testimony by
some premier who is meditating apostasy,
or seeking some palliative to
cover his shameful abandonment of a
party? The features of the so-called
statesmanship of the present day are
essentially those of bureaucracy. A
drudging arithmetical clerk, with
whom a unit is every thing, and
who would be nearly driven to despair
by the discovery of a misquoted fraction,
is a leading authority with our
statesmen; and his vamped-up tables
of export and import are considered
sounder expositions of the destinies of
the human race, than all the accumulated
wisdom, learning, and experience
which the annals of the world
can afford.

The “tables,” however, are now
turned, and therefore we shall not say
any more for the present about the
blue-book and ledger system. Let
us go back to Mr Cobden, whom we
still find rather uselessly employed in
protesting his total inability to command
the clemency of the seasons.
We have already shown, by papers
published in this Magazine in December
last and January of the present
year, that our exports have lamentably
fallen off, and that the balance
of trade is against us. Such, we maintained,
and we continue still to maintain,
must be the effect of the new
theories, especially under the restricted
operation of the currency. We are
glad to see that upon this latter
point, at all events, we are supported
by a large majority of the press. Mr
Cobden, however, denies the evils of
the currency; so that he must fall
back upon something else to account
for the unexpected defalcation.

Such is our position at home and
abroad; and if we have been guilty
of a digression, which we cannot
altogether deny, we shall plead our
motive in justification. When Mr
Cobden comes forward with his
views of foreign policy, with his ideas
of the social progress of the universe,
and with his notions as to the policy
which hereafter may be adopted by
great and ambitious foreign states,—when,
after delivering his opinion
upon these very weighty matters, he
arrives at the inference, not only
that we require no addition to our
national defences, but that our present
establishment of a standing army
and navy is absurd, extravagant, and
superfluous, we are entitled to inquire
into the success with which his first
experiment in legislative agitation has
been crowned. Of the abundance of
good things which he promised, how
many have been realised, how
many are like to emerge from the dark
experimental gulf? If writhing
colonies, diminished exports, want of
employment, distress at home, enormous
failures, monetary restriction,
and vast depreciation of property,
have followed in the wake of free-trade—if
ministry are at present racking
such brains as they possess to[268]
discover some means of keeping up
the revenue to its ordinary level, and
if they are forced to lay on a direct
additional war-tax in times of the
profoundest peace,—surely we shall
not incur a charge of fickleness or
ingratitude, if we should receive this
new oracle of the free-trading Mokanna
with some symptoms of dubiety
and distrust.

The whole question arose thus. It
appears that the Duke of Wellington,
whose illustrious reputation and great
services entitle him to be heard with
the deepest and most reverential respect,
has long entertained great uneasiness
on account of the undefended
state of this country in the case of a
hostile invasion. That such an event
is likely to take place, no one supposes
or has said—that it possibly might
take place, very few will venture to
deny. The idea is not a new one;
for within the range of the present
century, preparations have been actually
made for that purpose, and that
whilst the wonderful power and
facilities of steam-navigation were
unknown. Fulton—we have seen
men who knew him when he was a
humble artisan in the West of
Scotland—had, despairing of success
at home, submitted his models
to the French government, who, fortunately
for us, did not then appreciate
the merits of the invention.
Three years afterwards, he started
his first steamer on the Hudson in
America. The power which our
French neighbours had once so nearly
within their grasp, at a time when it
might have been used to the exceeding
detriment of England, became
generally known and adopted, and
we need not speak of its progress. It
has altogether changed the tactics of
naval warfare. It can conquer the
old difficulties of wind and tide, and
it has immensely shortened the period
of transit from the continental coast
to our own. The security, therefore,
of our insular barriers has been materially
weakened, and thus far the
possibility of an invasion from abroad
has been increased. We are not
now speaking of the probability, which
is matter for subsequent consideration.

This open and admitted fact is the
foundation of the whole argument of
the Duke of Wellington. In the
evening of a glorious life, the greater
part of which has been spent in the
active service of his country, the
veteran soldier has thought it his duty
to remind us, for our own guidance
and that of our children, of the actual
existing state of our national defences,
which he deems to be insufficient.
It is one of the last, but not,
we think, the least important of the
services which the venerable Duke has
rendered to the nation, with whose
proudest history his name will be
eternally associated. We take it—or
at least we ought to take it—from
his lips, as a solemn warning; as the
disinterested testimony of a man
alike pre-eminent in war and in
council; as the deliberate opinion of
the GREAT PACIFICATOR OF EUROPE.
For notwithstanding the irreverent,
mean, and scurrilous taunts of the
Manchester gang of demagogues, it is
undeniable that the Great Duke has
been the chief instrument in procuring
for us the blessing of that peace which
for two and thirty years we have enjoyed.
It was his conquest at Waterloo
which hushed the world. The
tranquillity of Europe was the stake
for which he fought, and he nobly
won it. And now, when, at the last
hour, this illustrious man comes forward
to offer us his advice, and to
warn us against the folly of trusting
too implicitly to the continuance of
that tranquillity, is it wise that we
should scorn his counsel?

And what is the proposal which
has excited such wrath, and so sorely
roused the choler of the bilious Cobden?
Simply this—that the British nation
should at all times maintain at home
a military force sufficient to repel an
invasion, should such be attempted,
from our shores. The Duke believes
and maintains that we cannot now,
as formerly, rely solely and implicitly
upon our navy for defence, but that,
in the event of a war, we must provide
against the contingency of an enemy’s
landing. Our arsenals, he thinks,
and our dockyards, should be supported
by a military force, and at least we
ought to exhibit such a front as will
hold out no temptation to a hostile
attempt. These are not aggressive,
but precautionary measures; and without
them, according to the Duke, we
cannot consider ourselves secure.

[269]Such are the proposals which Cobden
and his clique—we are sorry to
observe a gentleman like Sir William
Molesworth among them—are prepared
to resist to the last. They want
no defences at all. They are opposed
to any augmentation of the army.
They would rather do without it, or
reduce the establishment so as to
make the national saving equivalent
to the diminished amount of revenue
consequent upon their commercial
experiments. They look upon free-trade
as a universal panacea which is
to cure all national and social ailments,
and to remedy every grievance. War
is to be no more—territorial aggressions
unknown—and the advent of
the millennium is to be typified by an
unbounded exportation of calico!

These are the views which have
been lately propounded at Manchester,
and the parties are therefore at issue.
Cobden has matched himself against
Wellington, and Quaker Bright has
volunteered to be his bottle-holder.
We really wish that it had been permitted
us to approach the argument
without mingling with it any asperity.
But this is now totally out of the question.
The disgusting and vulgar
language which Mr Cobden has
thought fit to use towards the greatest
historical character of the age—the
low-minded scurrility which pervades
the whole of his egotistical discourse,—put
him beyond the pale of conventional
courtesy, or even of dignified
rebuke. The man who could stand
up in his place—no matter what
audience was before him—stigmatise
the Duke of Wellington as being in
his old age a whetter and fomenter of
discord, and finally insinuate dotage as
the only intelligible excuse, deserves,
if there is a spark of national feeling
left, to be publicly pilloried throughout
Britain. “Would it not,” says
this disloyal prater, “have been a
better employment for him to have
been preaching forgiveness for, and
oblivion of the past, than in reviving
the recollection of Toulon, Paris, and
Waterloo?” Forgiveness! and for
what? For having vindicated the
rights of the nations, terminated the
insatiable career of Napoleon’s rapine,
and restored to us that peace which
he is still desirous to preserve by
maintaining Britain invulnerable,
secure, and free!

But let us pass from a matter so
deeply discreditable both to the
speaker, and to the audience that
applauded his sentiments. Meanly
as we think of the latter, we are yet
to believe that the next morning
brought to many some feelings of
compunction and of shame. Not so
the former, who, wrapped up in the
panoply of his own ridiculous conceit,
a would-be Gracchus, must remain a
Thersites for ever.

Irrespective of the purse argument,
which, as a matter of course, is the
chief motive of these gentry, the free-traders
attempt to brand the Duke of
Wellington with a charge of attempting
to raise a hostile feeling between
this country and the continental
states. The accusation is as false as
it is frivolous. The attitude of Britain
is not, and never will be, aggressive.
She is at this moment in the
proud position of the mighty mediator
of Europe; and it is to her strong
right arm, and not to her powers of
producing calico, that she owes that
ascendency. Our interest clearly
and incontestibly is to maintain peace,
but that we cannot hope to maintain,
if we abandon the power to enforce it.
Among nations as among individuals,
the weak cannot hope to prosper in
active competition with the strong—nay,
they are even in a worse position,
because the law will protect
individuals, whilst to nations there
exists no common Court of Appeal. If
we are content to renounce our position,
and to give up our foreign possessions—a
consummation which the
free-trade theorists appear abundantly
to desire—if we are to confine ourselves
simply to our insular boundaries,
and advertise as the workshop of
the world—then, indeed, we shall surrender
our supremacy, and with it
the hope of maintaining peace. Can
these men read no lessons from history?
Does the sight of what is
daily acting around them justify their
anticipations of a millennium? What
is the real state of the fact? Russia,
having absorbed Poland, is now engaged
in a territorial war with the
Circassians, upon which she has already
expended an enormous amount
of treasure and of men; and she is
prepared for a double sacrifice, if by
such means she can gain possession of
the passes which are the keys to[270]
southern Asia. Austria is hanging
upon the skirts of Italy, concentrating
her forces upon the frontier, and
menacing an immediate invasion.
Very lamb-like and pacific has been
the conduct of America to Mexico.
As for the French, whom Cobden
eulogises as the most “affectionate
and domesticated race on the face of
the earth”—did the man ever hear
of the Revolution?—they are notoriously
the most aggressive of all the
European nations. Did domestic
feelings excite them to the conquest
of Algeria? Did affection lead
them to Tahiti? Was it a mania
for free-trade that brought about
the Montpensier marriage? Really
it is difficult to know for which palm,
that of ignorance or effrontery, this
Manchester manufacturer is contending.
Has he forgot the Joinville
letter, which was hailed with such
rapture on the other side of the
Channel? Was Paris fortified without
a purpose? Is he blind to the
fact that the peace of Europe at this
moment depends upon the life of a
man now in his seventy-fifth year?
We maintain that there never was a
period, at least within our recollection,
when the maintenance of general
tranquillity throughout Europe was
more precarious. And yet, this is
the very moment which Mr Cobden
selects for a crusade, or rather a
tirade, against our military establishments!

Our feelings are any thing but those
of dislike towards the “affectionate and
domesticated” French. We admire
their genius, and read their novels,—and
we have a peculiar affection for their
wine. In one point alone we agree
with Mr Cobden. We still retain the
ancient Caledonian predilection for
claret in competition with port, and
we should be sorry to be deprived of
champagne. Still sorrier should we
be to lose our annual spring trip to
Paris; to be banished from the Boulevards
and the Palais Royal, and to enjoy
only in memory those delicious dinners
at the Rocher de Cancale. We have
no wish to run the risk of a compulsory
detention at Verdun. Nay, we
shall go further, and apprise Mr Cobden,
that had our lot been cast a few
centuries back, we should in all probability
have been fervent maintainers
of the ancient bond of alliance
between King Achaius of Scotland
and the Emperor Charlemagne; and
nothing would have given us greater
pleasure than to have visited Manchester
along with a few thousand
lads who swore by Saint Andrew,
whilst the partisans of Denis were
amusing themselves in the neighbourhood
of Portsmouth. But times have
changed. We have contracted an
alliance with the nation of which Mr
Cobden is so creditable a representative;
and upon the whole, we are not
altogether dissatisfied with the arrangement.
We can now look upon
the French with an eye undimmed
by affection; and we must confess
that we have very little, if any, faith
in that marvellous change of their
character which is sworn to by the
Manchester spouters. They may be
very excellent fellows, but we would
rather not trust them with our keys.
The tone and temper of a nation do
not alter quite so rapidly as Mr Cobden
seems to suppose. The history
of Algeria is a very significant hint
that the old ideas of the French on
the score of conquest are not yet
wholly obliterated; and we should
rather imagine that they have not quite
forgotten their pristine appetite for
plunder. They deserve, however,
considerable credit for the dexterous
manner in which they have thrown
dust into the eyes of Mr Cobden.
You would think, to hear the man,
that he is an inoculated Frenchman.
Presume to criticise their character,
and his scream is like that of a railway
engine. Just hint that you consider
them unscrupulous, and our
calico-printer overboils “with horror
and shame and indignation.” We have
no doubt that he considers it a great
pity that history cannot be annihilated—that
is, supposing he has ever condescended
to notice any thing so
trivial as history. Will he not favour
the world with a new version of the
French Revolution? We are anxious
to hear his grounds for supposing the
French to be an “affectionate and
domestic people;” and since we are,
to fraternise with them altogether, it
would be comfortable to know our
brethren as they really are. We
want to have a true account of the
Noyades. Were these really wholesale
drownings, or a mere ebullition
of national fun? Doubtless, there[271]
is much humour—though we have not
yet been able to see it—in the clanking
of the guillotine; and the expeditions
to Moscow and Madrid, with
their accompanying tales of rapine
and butchery, may possibly be demonstrated
by Mr Cobden as instances
of a practical joke. Davoust,
as the Hamburgians know, was a fine
fellow; and so, upon examination,
may prove Robespierre and Marat.
Perhaps, too, he will come down a
little later, and tell us the particulars
of the gallant and gentleman-like
behaviour of M. Dupetit-Thouars
towards Queen Pomare. Or will he
undertake to prove that Abd-el-Kader
is an infamous scoundrel, utterly beyond
the pale or security of national
faith and of plighted honour?

It is plain, either that Mr Cobden
has been egregiously humbugged by
the acute foreigners, or that he has
subsided into a state of calm, settled,
and imperturbable idiocy. It is too
cruel in Bright to parade in such a
way his former friend and master,
and to quote from his private correspondence.
We wonder what is Sir
Robert Peel’s present opinion of the
man whom he chose to bespatter with
his praise, and for whose sake he was
content to forfeit the elaborate reputation
of a life-time. But bad as Cobden
may be, he is fairly surpassed in
Gallic enthusiasm by the notorious
George Thompson, whose patriotism
may be gathered from the tone of the
following paragraph:—”Why, what
were the toasts given at the sixty
reform banquets of France? This
has been one of their toasts at least,
‘Fraternity, liberty, equality.’ Let
us echo from these shores the shouts
that have been raised there, and I am
sorry to say, stifled, so far as Paris is
concerned, for the banquet did not
come off there. Let us send back the
echo, fraternity, liberty, equality!”
And this pestilential raving has been
applauded to the echo in Manchester.

Let us have peace with the French
by all means, and with all the world
beside; but let us not fall into the despicable
and stupid blunder of supposing
that human passion and human
prejudice, the lust for power, and the
cravings of ambition, can ever be
eradicated by any system of commercial
arrangement. Britain is naturally
an object of envy to all the continental
states. It is her strength and
position which have hitherto maintained
the balance of power—and
of that the European states are fully
and painfully aware. Every step
which can tend to weaken the fidelity
of her colonies, is regarded with
intense interest abroad, and more
especially in France. The people
of that country envy us for our
wealth, and dislike us for our power;
and war with Britain, could the French
afford it, would at any time find a host
of advocates. We are not believers
in the probability of such an event, if we
keep ourselves reasonably prepared;
but the very first relaxation upon our
part would inevitably tend to accelerate
it. It is quite possible that France
may yet have to undergo another
dynastic convulsion. The death of
Louis Philippe may be the signal for
intestine disorder. The Count of
Paris is a mere boy, and popularity is
not on the side of his uncle and guardian.
A powerful party still exists,
acknowledging no king save the rightful
heir of St Louis; and the fanatical
republican section is still strong and
virulent. These are things which it
would be imprudent to disregard, and
of which no man living can venture
to predict the result. The death of
the Queen of Spain would, according
to all appearances, give rise to a
rupture with France, and possibly
test, within a shorter period than we
could have believed, the sufficiency of
our national defences. There is at
this moment every reason why our
real strength and power should be
made apparent to the world, and our
weakness, where it does exist, immediately
remedied and repaired.

Had the Duke of Wellington proposed,
like Friar Bacon in Greene’s
old play,

“To girt fair England with a wall of brass,”

the outcry could not have been greater.
An iron wall might perhaps have been
rather popular in the mining districts.
But his Grace proposes no such thing.
He only suggests the propriety of a
small augmentation of the regular
forces at home, the strengthening of
our neglected fortifications, and the
gradual reimbodiment of the militia.
It is for the British nation, or rather[272]
its representatives, to adopt or reject
the proposal. Now, it is worth while
that we should keep in mind what is
our actual disposable force at present.

According to the most recent authorities,
the armies of the principal European
powers would rank as follows:

The disproportion of force exhibited
by this list is sufficiently obvious; but
when we descend to particulars, it
will in reality be found much greater.
Abroad, the majority of the male population
are trained to the use of arms:
with us it is notoriously the reverse.
France, in the course of one week,
could materially increase the amount
of her regular army; whilst here that
would be obviously impossible. Beyond
Algeria, France has almost no
colonies as stations for her standing
force. We have to provide for the
East and West Indies, Canada, Australia,
New Zealand, the Cape,
Ceylon, Hong Kong, the Mauritius,
Gibraltar, Malta, the Ionian Islands,
and others. The profession of the
British soldier is any thing but a
sinecure. A great portion of his life
must be spent abroad; he may be
called upon to undergo the most rapid
vicissitudes of climate, to pass from
one hemisphere to another in the discharge
of his anxious duty. There is
no service in the world more trying
or severe; and it very ill becomes
Mr Cobden, or any of his class, to
sneer at that establishment, which is
kept up for the direct promotion of
our commerce. So large a portion of
the territorial surface of the world is
nowhere defended at so little cost
either of money or of men. Indeed,
as recent events have shown, we are
but too apt to save the one at the
expense of the other. No doubt, if
the free-trade policy is carried out to
the uttermost—if our colonies are to
be thrown away as useless, and our
foreign stations dismantled, we might
submit to a still further reduction.
France will be too happy to receive
Gibraltar or Malta from our hands,
and will cheerfully free us from the
expense of maintaining garrisons there.
Let us but make over to that affectionate
and domesticated people the
keys of the Mediterranean, and we
shall soon see with what eagerness
they will co-operate in the dissemination
of Mr Cobden’s free-trade
dogmas.

Apart from the colonies, we have a
serious difficulty at home. Ireland—that
most wretched and ungrateful
country, which no experience can improve—is
as far from tranquillity as
ever. The hard-working population
of Britain submitted last year without
a murmur to an exorbitant taxation,
for the purpose of relieving the
distress occasioned by the failure of
the potato crop. The return is a
howl of defiance from the brutal
demagogue, and an immediate increase
of murder and of crime. Notwithstanding
every kind of remedial measure—notwithstanding
their exemption,
which is an injustice to us,
from many of the heaviest burdens of
the state—notwithstanding the mistaken
policy which fostered their institutions
and their schools, the Roman
Catholics of Ireland stand out in bad
pre-eminence, as the most cold-blooded,
unthankful, and cowardly assassins
of the world. In order to repress that
outrage, which is so villanously rife
among them, and which nothing but
physical force can restrain from breaking
out into open rebellion, we are
compelled at all times to keep the
largest portion of our remanent disposable
force quartered in Ireland.
The consequence is, that a mere handful
of our standing army is left in
Great Britain.

If Mr Cobden should like to see a
little terrestrial paradise, in which few
birds, with that gaudy plumage which
is so offensive to his eyes, can be
found, he had better come down to
Scotland, and pay us another visit.
He is kind enough, we observe, to
make himself the mouthpiece of our
sentiments upon this matter of the
defences; and, certainly, if there be
any truth in the adage that we are
entitled at least to see what we are
paying for, Scotland has no reason to
be peculiarly warlike in her sentiments.
Mr Cobden will find us quite
as affectionate and domesticated a
people as the French; and he may
rely upon it, that he will not be[273]
shocked by any over-blaze of scarlet.
From a turbulent, we have gradually
settled down to be a quiet race; and
as a natural consequence, we share in
none of those benefits which are
heaped so liberally upon the “persecuted
Irish.” Our only excitements
are a Church squabble, which does
not require the interference of the
military, but exhausts itself in the
public prints; or a bread row, which
is always over, long before a detachment
can be brought from the nearest
station, it may be at the distance of
some hundred miles. We are never
noticed in Parliament, except to be
praised for our good behaviour, or to
have some remaining fragment of our
national establishments reduced. We
pay for an army and a navy which
we never see; indeed, of late years
the French and Danish flags have been
far more frequently displayed upon our
coasts than the broad pendant of
Great Britain. In many of our counties
a soldier is an unknown rarity;
and the only drum that has been heard
for the last thirty years, is in the
peaceable possession of the town-crier.
England, we apprehend, except in the
immediate neighbourhood of the metropolis
and of Manchester, is not
much better supplied: in short, so
far as Britain is concerned, we have
a remarkably insufficient force, and
one which has been declared by the
highest military authority alive, wholly
incompetent for our protection in the
case of an attempted invasion. Cobden,
who has no veneration for successful
warriors, having feathered his
nest very pleasantly otherwise, admits
that he has not the slightest practical
knowledge of the trade of war. We
therefore demur to his position that
this is a question for civilians to
determine, and that military and naval
men have nothing to do with it. His
previous admission involves an inconsistency.
He might as well say, that,
having no acquaintance whatever with
engineering, he is entitled to deliver
his opinions in opposition to Walker
or Stephenson, on the construction of
a skew bridge, or the practicability of
boring a tunnel. If one of those
vessels in the Tagus, which, according
to Cobden, are kept there for the sole
purpose of instructing our seamen in
the culture of the geranium, was to
spring a leak, we should assuredly
apply to Jack Chips, the carpenter,
to stop it, before invoking the aid of
the peripatetic apostle of free-trade.
And just so is it with the state of our
national defences. Manchester must
excuse us, if we prefer the testimony
of the Duke of Wellington upon this
point to the more dubious experiences
of Cobden. It is, of course, quite
another question, whether the leak
shall be stopped, or the vessel permitted
to founder peaceably. Mr
Cobden may be heard upon that point,
under special reference to the magnitude
of the stake which he hazards,
but we decline receiving his opinion
on the subject of military fortifications.
He can no more pronounce a judgement
on the adequate state of our
defences, than he can parse a paragraph
of Xenophon; and therefore,
by approaching the subject, he has
been guilty of presumption and impertinence.

Mr Cobden proposes that we should
rely upon the maintenance of peace by
removing all obstacles to invasion.
He admits, indeed, that for the present
he is in a minority, but he hopes very
soon to change it to a majority, and
until that time comes he is content to
remain in the following position:—”I
say this, I am for acting justly and
fairly, and holding out the olive branch
to the whole world; and I will then
take upon myself, so far as my share
goes, all the risk of any thing happening
to ME, without paying for another
soldier or another sailor.” This is
good! What a glorious insurance is
here offered to the nation against the
risk of foreign aggression! If every
man, woman, and child in this mighty
empire will remain satisfied without
the means of repelling foreign invasion,
the magnanimous Cobden will
take his risk, so far as his share goes,
of all that may happen to HIM! Why,
who the deuce cares what happens to
him or his? Are we all engrossed in
Cobden’s weal or woe? Would it
matter one straw to us, or to the universe,
if he and his calico print-works
were wrapped in universal conflagration
to-morrow? This is, without
exception, the most impudent offer of
guarantee which we ever remember
to have heard of; and it justifies us
in remarking that, if all accounts be[274]
true, Mr Cobden would be no very
great loser by the immediate advent
of the French. If any thing happens
to him, he may be assured of this, that
notwithstanding his cautious salvo,
he will have no claim for damage and
loss, and little commiseration from
any quarter whatsoever. Is the man
insane enough to suppose, that he,
armed with his olive branch, stands
forth as prominently in the eyes of
the world as if he were a sign of the
Zodiac? Curtius, who leaped into
the gulf in the Forum, which would
not close until the most precious thing
of Rome was thrown into it, shrinks
into insignificance, and becomes absolutely
bashful, when compared with
the emulous Cobden. According to
the Man-in-the-Moon, Curtius was
pronounced by the Flamen to be the
most precious fool of his day, but in
point of conceit he is fairly trumped by
the honourable member for the West
Riding of Yorkshire. In his opinion
there is nothing worth protecting save
an inland mill, and he does not care
what becomes of our arsenals so long
as there is an immunity for calico!

If there are no armaments, thinks
Mr Cobden, there can be no wars;
and for once he is tolerably right. If
iron did not exist there could be no
swords; and without gunpowder, or
its modern substitute cotton, a discharge
of musketry is impossible.
But unfortunately there are other armaments
besides ours, and no symptom
whatever of their reduction.
Here the reciprocity theory is once
more brought into play. Let Britain
be the first to set the example, and
every other nation will follow in her
wake. Cannons, by unanimous consent,
will be spiked, banners handed
over to the respectable fraternity of Odd
Fellows, and the soldier condemned
to the stiffing walls of the factory,
never more to stand at ease. Such
are the dreams of Cobden; and if he
really believes in them, and in the
actual regeneration of human nature
by means of free-trade instead of religion,
we should like to see him try the
experiment on a minor scale. Let
him, after having collected within his
premises as much plate as he can conveniently
acquire, and as much cash
as he is worth, dispense with the unnecessary
precautions of lock and key;
let him dismiss the watchmen from
his works, and put up an advertisement
that the whole public are welcome
to enter at any hour they please,
and that not the slightest attempt at
resistance will be offered. We presume
that the Manchester operatives
are at least as affectionate and domesticated
as the French; but, notwithstanding
that, we should entertain
some apprehension as to the fate of
Mr Cobden’s spoons. The temptation
would really be too great. The seeming
solidity of the albata plate or
purified nickel-silver would infallibly
tempt the cupidity of some affectionate
artisan. A midnight visit would
be paid, and on the morrow there
would be wail for the missing tureen!
To be consistent, we should begin with
municipal reforms. Let us proclaim
honesty as a universal principle, do
away with the police, abolish Chubb,
and keep our doors wide open for ingress
as well as for ventilation. If
our greatcoats disappear not, if umbrellas
are not less, and if the tale of
our forks is complete after a reasonable
lease of the experiment, we shall
then have acquired some data for
making a further trial, and intrusting
the wealth of Great Britain to the forbearance
of our foreign neighbours.

When Blucher, on his visit to this
country after the war, rode through
the streets of London, he was observed,
amidst all the shouts of acclamation,
to be peering curiously at the
windows of the shops, which then, as
now, exhibited a tempting and valuable
display. When asked what he
thought of the metropolis, the worthy
veteran replied with a deep sigh,
whilst a tear rolled down his venerable
cheek—”Mein Gott! What a city for
to sack!” Such were the first impressions
of old Marshal Forwards; and,
with all deference to Cobden’s sagacity,
we suspect that the amiable
French, if they had it in their power,
would not be slow to realise the sentiments.
Indeed, his Royal Highness
the Prince of Joinville, being of an
open and candid nature, does not hesitate
to acknowledge it in as many
words. We do not think a whit the
worse of Joinville for saying so: on the
contrary, we are obliged to him, and,
if wise, we shall treasure the hint.
He merely speaks the sentiments of a[275]
large portion of his countrymen, who
very probably have no abstract wish
for war, and would rather let things
rest as they are. Of all nations in
the world, the French have the best
possible excuse for reducing their
armaments, since France is inundated
with troops, and they have few foreign
territorial possessions. As compared
with Britain proper, France could afford
to shake off nearly three-fourths
of her establishment, and yet remain
upon an equality; but although Algeria
may now be considered as safe and
tranquil, there are no demonstrations
of the kind. The French army is organised
and ready to act upon any emergency:
ours is too small, is dispersed,
and we have not an adequate reserve
at home.

Whilst, therefore, the possibility of
an invasion remains, we are bound on
every consideration of prudence and
of policy, to act as if the probability
were likewise at hand. The youngest
of us has seen too many changes and
revolutions—too many political disagreements
and jarrings among the
European family, to prophesy with
confidence that these shall never
be renewed. Even in commerce we
have not got reciprocity, and we
cannot expect to get it in the more
abstract point of armaments. Woodburne
House was better fortified by
Dominie Sampson’s folios, than Britain
possibly could be by bales of Cobden’s
cotton. Our sincere belief is, that the
surest method of accelerating a war is
to take the advice of the Manchester
demagogues, repudiate the ideas of
the Duke of Wellington, and remain
in stupid inactivity. It was necessary
for public safety that this matter
should be laid before the country; and
the Duke for doing so may yet deserve
a debt of gratitude, which will
amply recompense him for the vulgar
contumely of a host of disloyal bagmen.
But it would be preposterous
to suppose that the discussion which
has arisen at home has not attracted
deep observation abroad. The eyes
of Europe are upon us, watching what
course we are to adopt; and France
in particular is waiting, with indrawn
breath and tremulous anxiety,
the result of the coming discussion.
Our weakness at home is now apparent
to the world; we cannot conceal
it; the sole question is, whether we
shall apply the remedy.

Admit the possibility, and the question
is a serious one indeed! Let us
suppose that, from some unforeseen
accident, some stoppage in the wheels
of diplomacy, or some untoward
casualty, war was declared between
Great Britain and France, or even any
other continental power. Such an
event could not happen without dividing
the nations of Europe. We could
not afford to withdraw our forces from
the colonies, because these would probably
be made the earliest points of
attack,—nor from Ireland, except at
the immediate and imminent risk of
a rebellion. Even should it be thought
prudent to leave the colonies to their
fate, the transport of the garrisons
would involve a considerable period
of time—a fact of which our enemy
must be aware, and of which he would
be foolish not to take advantage. We
should be compelled to recruit immediately,
and upon a large scale; and it
would take some time to metamorphose
Mr Cobden’s operatives, or even
that respectable senator himself, into
any thing like the semblance of soldiers.
If fifty thousand armed men
were to be landed on the southern
coast—and no one seems to doubt
the possibility of such an occurrence—we
should like to know what are
our means of resistance? We have
read a good many letters upon the
subject, in the daily prints—some of
them apparently by ex-military men,
and some by politicians of the school of
Tomkins and Cobden—but not one of
them has been able to make out a decent
case of opposition. The best, and,
indeed, the only rational letters, proceed
upon the supposition that there
would be a general rising en masse of
the English population—that every
hawbuck would turn out with a musket
to repel the invaders, and that the
railways from London would vomit
forth a cloud of intrepid musketeers.
Every hedge, they think, would be
manned, and every farm-house a sort
of minor fortress. Now, with all submission,
this is downright deplorable
drivel. Ever since the English people—and
that is now a very old story—have
given up the use and exercise of
arms, and agreed to be mulcted in
purse, rather than undergo the personal[276]
fatigue and annoyance of exercise,
there has been no martial spirit
at all exhibited by the bulk of the
population. No doubt, when an invasion
was actually threatened by
Napoleon, and three hundred thousand
men were assembled at Boulogne,
there were large demonstrations of
volunteer activity; but then, it must
be remembered that we were in the
very height and fever of a war—the
belligerent spirit and strong antipathy
to France had prepared us for such a
crisis, and we had not been besotted
and enfeebled by more than thirty
years of peace, and almost as many of
gradual but sure demoralisation. We
had not then adopted such men as the
Manchester Jacobins for our teachers;
we were then content to be national
and not cosmopolitan in our ideas.
We were fighting for our faith and our
freedom—not truckling for calico or for
yarn. The same crisis is not likely to
occur again, and we cannot—dare not
venture to calculate upon a similar demonstration
of energy. Free-trade and
liberal measures have put that utterly
beyond our power. We have no more
doubt than we have of our own existence,
that a body of men of Mr Cobden’s
way of thinking could be found
in this country, ready to contract with
the French government for conveying
over to Britain an invading army at
the rate of eight shillings a-head,
victuals included; and, if the weather
was stormy, they would unquestionably
clear a handsome profit by the
speculation. Morals have nothing
earthly to do with free-trade—patriotism
is opposed to it—and why
make any distinction between the
freightage of Frenchmen and of bullocks?
The contractors, of course,
would take care that their own premises
were sufficiently far removed
from the scene of immediate action;
and we cannot pitch upon a fitter
locality than that which is exhibited
in Manchester.

We would ask any or all of those
gentlemen who depend upon a general
rising, to take the trouble, for some
half hour or so, to revert to history.
If they do so, and seriously think over
the matter, they will speedily be convinced
that an invasion is by no means
a difficult matter, and that no reliance
whatever can be placed upon the co-operation
of the undisciplined people,
either of the country or the metropolis,
in the event of an actual invasion. In
fact, judging from history, Paris is
literally impregnable compared with
London, and yet it has been occupied
by the Allies. In 1688, William of
Orange, a foreign prince, having no
claim to the crown, and against the
will of the people of England, whatever
may be said of the aristocracy, landed
in Britain, advanced to London, and
took the throne, without the slightest
demonstration of hostility. The population
were perfectly quiescent. It
was not their business to fight: they
paid for an army; and accordingly
they allowed the Orangeman to march
on, just as they would do to Joinville,
provided he desired his troops to be
reasonably accommodating and civil.
Sack and rapine might undoubtedly
provoke resistance; but if ordinary
courtesy were used, and more especially
if the French proclaimed that
they came upon a free-trade errand,
and a friendly visit to Mr Cobden,
there would be far fewer shots fired,
than at the present moment are resounding
from the peaceful hedgerows
of Tipperary.

The next instance we select—omitting
minor efforts—is the enterprise
of 1745, which peculiarly concerns
Scotland, and of which we are
by no means ashamed. The heir of
the Stuarts landed in the North, supported
by no force at all. The clans,
to their immortal honour, and a portion
of the best Lowland blood of
Scotland, maintaining those principles
of loyalty which free-trade cannot
comprehend, assumed the white
cockade, and after thrashing the English
army effectually at Prestonpans,
marched south, on the desperate errand
of displacing the reigning dynasty.
And how were they received? It is
important to note the idea which the
English people had, at that time, of
the Highlanders. They considered
them a race of cannibals who ate children;
so that it was no uncommon
matter, when a Highland officer entered
a house, to find the mistress on
her knees, praying for a Lenten diet,
whilst the terrified urchins were all
the while concealed beneath the bed.
Such is the positive fact; and yet we
will venture to say, that there never[277]
was, in the history of the world, an
instance of a more blameless or more
humane invasion. Donald, though
quite ready to cleave a bearded
Hanoverian to the chin, had an extreme
weakness for children, and
would not, on any provocation, have
insulted a defenceless woman. Had
Mr Cobden fallen into his hands, the
Highlander, after a due estimate of
his physical capabilities, would probably
have put him to ransom for a
quarter of a pound of tobacco. The
feeling in England was not in favour
of the exiled family, the antipathy to
the Highlanders was extreme, and yet
an irregular and ill-disciplined host of
about six thousand men, with no
artillery, no commissariat, and a mere
handful of cavalry, penetrated into
the heart of England without any
show of popular opposition, and reached
Derby without the loss of a single man.
It is not difficult to understand why
Manchester is so uproarious against the
military, when we recall to mind the
splendid instance of poltroonery exhibited
by the manufacturing capital on
that memorable occasion. The town
of Manchester was captured by a
Scots sergeant of the name of Walter
Dickson, who, supported by a drummer
and a wench, took possession of it in
name of Prince Charles, four-and-twenty
hours before the clans came
up! Not a magistrate was to be
found bold enough to issue his warrant
against the intruder, nor a constable
to execute it, nor a single operative
to support it. There was no talk
then about finding graves for the invaders:
the invaded were quite content
with finding cellars for their own
particular shelter. Gentlemen who
had talked big enough when the danger
was at a distance, recoiled at the
idea of personal peril, whenever the
danger drew nigh; and, being unsupported
by a regular force, very prudently
abstained from opposing their
persons to the terrible sweep of the
claymore. But for internal dissensions
and some infirmity of purpose,
it is now beyond a doubt that the
clans might have penetrated, without
any opposition, to London. So
little martial spirit was exhibited in
the capital, that parties were actually
made and carriages engaged for Caxton,
to see the Highlanders march
by; and George the Second was in
full preparation for removing, and
had stowed away his valuables in his
yachts. As it was, the invaders returned
back to their own country
almost as scaithless as they came,
without any experience of that fiery
and patriotic spirit which the correspondents
of the newspapers profess to
discover blazing within the bosom of
every Briton at the mere idea of an
invasion.

In fact, it is mere trash to maintain
that raw levies or extempore guerilla
resistance can be of the slightest use
in opposition to a disciplined force.
For ourselves, we do not believe that
such resistance would be attempted.
Men require to be brought together
and trained before their individual
stanchness can be relied on; and we
know perfectly well that a mob has
no chance, at any time, against an
immeasurably smaller body, if properly
organised and directed. Let the
people of this country be disciplined
and accustomed to the use of arms,
and you may search the world in vain
for braver or better soldiers. But the
power is still latent, and, according to
Cobden, it never must be called forth.
This is mischievous and stupid folly. If
any thing is to be done at all, it must
be done regularly and effectively. Let
us have the knowledge, the certainty
that, at a few hours’ notice, a formidable
body of troops, well disciplined
and prepared, can be concentrated
at any given point of
the island,—let this fact be made known
to the world, and we have a far
better security for the maintenance of
peace than if we were to adopt the
stupid and pragmatical notions of Mr
Cobden. Mr Disraeli took a sound
view of the case, when he reminded
the honourable member, “that although
the profound peace which he
had announced might come within
the time of those who heard him, still
there was something in the catastrophes
of nations sœvior armis,—catastrophes
from other causes leading
to their decay. Happily in those causes
the limited experience of the Roman
empire had not included the rapacity
of rival industry, and the quackery of
economic science.” We are afraid
that the lesson which Mr Disraeli
attempted to inculcate—one which,[278]
of late years, we have repeatedly
insisted on in these pages—was
somewhat thrown away upon his
pupil. Gentlemen of the Cobden
school set little store upon the philosophy
of history, and prefer to reason
within the limits of their own experience.
They can as little explain
the causes of the decline of ancient
empires, as they can account for the
palpable falling off in the amount of
our exports; and it is idle to remind
men of things which they have never
heard. It is not to them, but to the
intelligent classes of the community,
that we would fain address our argument.
There is a remarkable and striking
analogy between the present state
of the country, and the position of
England at the time of the Highland
descent in 1745. The nation had
become accustomed to peace at home,
and was therefore proportionally
enervated. The use of arms, and the
training of the militia had been abandoned;
a false economy had reduced
the numbers of the regular forces; and
the greater proportion of those which
remained were abroad. Under those
circumstances the expedition took
place: the weakness of the front exhibited
by England was the temptation,
and we have already seen the
consequences. It is now seriously
proposed that we shall remain liable
to a similar assault, when the stake at
issue is incomparably greater. What
would be the result of a swoop upon
London according to the published
Joinville plan? and yet there is
hardly another capital in Europe,
which has not during the last fifty
years been occupied by a hostile
force.

We have all an interest in this
question, for a descent may be made
any where. We have not even the
benefit of ships to protect us here in
the North; and three or four French
frigates would, we apprehend, find
little difficulty in effecting a landing
in the Forth. Will Mr Cobden be
good enough to favour us with his
opinion as to the course we should
pursue, supposing such a calamity to
happen? A simultaneous attack may
be made on the south of England,
and the Castle and Piershill barracks
emptied for the purpose of reinforcing
Portsmouth, too weak to maintain
itself without their aid. Would he
advise us to resist or succumb? Shall
we throw ourselves under the protection
of our friend George M’Whirter,
W.S., and the Edinburgh squadron of
the Royal Mid-Lothian Yeomanry?
Shall we sound the tocsin of war, and
call out Captain Haining with his
reserved band of twenty police, all
fierce and furious for battle? Shall
we persuade the Archers to string
their bows, and compete for the Goose
medal with a fire-eating Frenchman
as the butt? Shall we barricade
Leith Walk, block up the Granton
Railway in the teeth of a suspension
and interdict, and contest, to the last
drop of our blood, the possession of
every house in Inverleith Row? May
we calculate upon any support from
the middle districts of England in the
event of such a calamity? Will Mr
Bright array himself in drab armour,
and come to our rescue, with Welford
the flower of chivalry, who has a
special objection to guns? Can we
depend upon Cobden himself? Will
he pledge himself to back us at our
need with an overpowering army
from the factories, clad in calico, and
armed with the tremendous and invincible
billy-roller? Will George
Thompson, chief of a thousand wordy
fights, be there,—or Wilson, ex-monarch
of the league? Shall we
send them the beacon blaze, or—faster
still—the telegraphic signal to
the south imploring immediate succour?
Or shall we trust to their
own noble impulses, and hold—

Indeed, if we are to believe the last
mentioned gentleman, we have that
assurance already, for he has spoken
as follows:—”I may venture to foretell
that the Free-Trade Hall, of Manchester
will be more than a match
for Apsley House and the Horse
Guards put together;”—a highly satisfactory
account of the town which
was whilom captured by a sergeant!

Upon the whole, unless we can
come to a serious understanding with
Manchester, we have grave doubts as
to the propriety of offering any very
obstinate resistance. If we are to do
it, we must send off all the women to[279]
the Trosachs by the Scottish Central
Railway, and perhaps it would be as
well for all of us to join the Celtic
Society, and fight the battles of our
country in the pass of Roderick Dhu.
An honourable capitulation, on the
understanding that the French were
to behave themselves, would probably
be the wisest course we could pursue
under the circumstances. We love
George M’Whirter, and have every
confidence in his valour, but we could
not bear to see him gasping in his
gore; and therefore, unless the regulars
are forthcoming, or the Manchester
legion on their way, he had
better fall back with his comrades
upon the western warriors of Dalmahoy.
The number of our guardians
of the night is at present so
small, that we positively cannot
afford to spare even one of them as
food for powder. It would, we fear,
be imprudent to risk the fate of the
Scottish capital upon the issue of a
combat between our dashing Toxophilites
and a body of French artillery,
and we are reluctantly compelled to
admit that there was some truth in
Major Dalgetty’s sarcasm against
bows and arrows. And now, having
gone over the catalogue of our available
native forces, which is not quite
so long as the Homeric muster-roll of
the ships, will any body tell us what
we are to do? It would be a sore
humiliation were we compelled to
illuminate Holyrood, and give a grand
ball in honour of the Duc D’Aumale,
and our other ancient and now redintegrated
allies. But if you abolish
the British uniform, and allow the
French to supersede it, what else can
you expect? We want to be loyal if
you will only tell us how—if not, we
see nothing for it but the illumination
and the ball.

Mr Cobden is pleased to be especially
bitter upon the “horrid trade”
of soldiering. He characterises it as
barbarous and damnable, and would
be rid of it at all risks. Now, setting
aside the idiocy of his remarks, there
is a monstrous deal of ingratitude in
this language of the free-trade apostle.
Had it not been for our arms, where
would our market have been? If we
had succumbed to France instead of
humbling her at Waterloo—and we
presume that Mr Cobden would have
preferred the former alternative, since
he thinks that the Duke should now
be preaching forgiveness for the past—where
would have been our trade,
and where our exportations of calico?
Hindostan is an acquired country,
and British arms have opened up the
markets of China; and are these
commercial evils? Really it is throwing
away language to attempt enforcing
a point so clear as this. Commerce
owes every thing to the exertions
and protection of that military
power which these purblind theorists
complain of; and were our armaments
abolished to-morrow, we should look
round us in vain for a customer.

And pray what does the arrogant
upstart mean by characterising the
honourable profession of a soldier as a
damnable trade? Does he intend to
disgorge his contempt and contumely
upon the graves of those who fell on
the field of battle fighting nobly for
their king and country? Are we
now to be told that the names which
we have written in our annals, and
embalmed in our memories, are detestable
and odious as those of homicides
and of robbers? If it has come
to this, and if public scorn is not roused
to overwhelm the man who can conceive
and utter such ignoble sentiments,
then indeed we may believe
that demoralisation has partially done
its work, and that the mean ethics of
Manchester are henceforward to influence
the nation. Not damnable
nor horrid, unless justice and freedom
be so, is the profession of those who
have drawn the sword in the service
of Britain, and died for the maintenance
of order, liberty, and religion.
Other trades there are far more liable
to such epithets, but with these, thank
heaven! we have but little practical
acquaintance. The trade of the greedy
taskmaster, who rears infants for his
mills, and grinds them to their task
until the sinews shrivel up and the
limbs are warped into early decrepitude—of
him who will not recognise the
existence of an imperishable soul
within the tender framework of the
children whom he makes the victims
of his avarice—of the advocate of
long hours, because thereby he may
keep his human machinery under the
complete control of exhaustion,—the
trade of that man, we say, though it[280]
may be tolerated in a Christian land,
is but one shade less horrid, and not a
whit less damnable, than that of the
slave-trader, who is now chuckling
over his living cargoes on the African
coast—cargoes for which he is indebted
to the enlightened legislation of
Mr Cobden and his liberal confederates!
Are these the men who are to
revile and traduce our army? Faugh!
The leprosy of mammon is upon them,
and our nature recoils from their
breath.

In conclusion, let us express a fervent
hope that we have heard the last
of this dull and deplorable drivelling.
It is to the credit of the Whigs, that,
far as they have been led astray by
adopting the newfangled political doctrines,
rather, as we believe, for the
sake of maintaining power than from
any belief in their efficacy, they have
declined all participation with the
Manchester crew in their recent attempt
to lower the position and diminish
the influence of Great Britain.
The chiefs of that party know full
well how much we have at stake, and
what a responsibility would rest upon
their heads, were they to reject the
advice of the great captain who has
already saved his country, and who
again comes forward at the close of
life to warn that country of its danger.
Mr Cobden likewise is furious
with the public press, and charges a
large portion of it for refusing to be
dragged through the Manchester mire,
with having abrogated their duties on
this question. We apprehend that the
editors of the journals to which he
alludes are perfectly competent to the
discharge of their duties, without submitting
to the dictatorial interference
of this very much over-rated and
extremely shallow personage. As for
the Duke of Wellington, he is not
likely to suffer in health or reputation
from any want of respect or veneration
on the part of Mr Cobden. His fame
is too bright to be polluted by such
dirty missiles; and the veriest vagabond
who broke the windows of Apsley
House would shrink from repeating
the insults which fell from the lips of
the calico-printer.

In short, our impression in rising
from the perusal of this notable speech,
is deep surprise that such a man
should ever have been made the leader
of a popular party, or the representative
of a fixed opinion. That it should
have been so, is a reflection that cannot
be flattering to many of his followers,
and least of all to those who
threw aside their opinions to undertake
the advocacy of his. But the
spell is now broken, the mask removed,
and we behold the egotist, the
railer, and the fanatic. Let us sum up
in a few words, for the benefit of posterity,
the great free-trader’s opinion
of the Duke of Wellington, and then
take leave of the most discreditable
subject which for a long time we have
been called upon to notice.

Mr Cobden does not share in
the general veneration for the
Duke. Mr Cobden thinks that
the Duke ought to preach
forgiveness for Waterloo. Mr
Cobden thinks that every man,
possessing the ordinary feelings
of humanity, must condemn
the Duke for having stated
that, in his opinion, the defences
of the country are insufficient.
Mr Cobden thinks it a
lamentable spectacle that the
Duke should have written such
a letter. Mr Cobden hints that
the Duke is a dotard, because
he has ventured to express, on a
military subject, an opinion contrary
to that of Cobden. And
Cobden further maintains, that
there is not a more affectionate
nor domesticated race on the
face of the earth than the
French.

After this we need add nothing
more. Our opinion of Mr Cobden
could be thoroughly expressed in a
much shorter sentence.

[281]

ROMANISM IN ROME.

CATECHISM IN THE MINERVA.

“Occidit miseros crambe repetita magistros.”—Juvenal.

“Et qui parlant beaucoup ne disent jamais rien.”—Boileau.

Visitors to Rome are ofttimes
puzzled and surprised at hearing the
very unusual affix, della Minerva, applied
to one of the Christian churches
of that city; more especially when
they find it also familiarly known to
the common people, not so well read
as their priests in the calendar of the
saints, as La Sta. Minerva; but the
apparent misnomer originates in an
ellipsis of the full title, which runs
thus, Sta. Maria sopra Minerva—the
church in question having supplanted
a temple formerly dedicated to Pallas,
upon the ruins of which it has been
reared. But though the goddess of
wisdom still retains a nominal interest
in the edifice, certainly, to judge
from the catechetical exercises of
which we are about to give a specimen,
her reign is past, and there remains
but the nominis umbra in lieu
of it. Exorcised the church, she
has been fain to accept such a humiliating
asylum in the library adjoining,
as inquisitorial Dominicans
would be likely to afford a heathen
goddess, whose proceedings they must
narrowly watch. There she has the
mortification of hearing, from year to
year, some new relay of “gray-hair’d
synods damning books unread,” and,
club-fashion, blackballing all her
friends in order to make way for
their own; just as old Pope Gregory is
said to have burned a whole library of
Pagan literature, that the Christian
Fathers and Roman Catholic Saints
might have more elbow-room; and
also that, in the absence of rivals,
their authority might not be disputed.
“Fertur beatus Gregorius bibliothecam
combussisse gentilum, quo divinæ
paginæ gratior esset locus et major
auctoritas et diligentia studiosior.“[A]

At Easter-tide, those who have any
curiosity on the subject may hear
Bellarmine’s Catechism, as it is
squealed, bawled, or otherwise intonated
by the young children of the
different Riones, and commented on
and explained for their edification
by the pedagogue priest of the district.
He is generally surrounded at such
times by a bevy of from forty to fifty
scholars, gamins or gamines as the
case may be; and to work they set
with such earnestness of vociferation
that all Bedlam and Parnassus, raving
and reciting together, could not
well surpass the discord: the shrill
diapason, peeling through nave and
aisle, shakes the floating Baldaquino,
and makes the trembling walls bellow
again, furnishing an apt and lively
illustration of the “convulsaque marmora
clamant” of the poet.

Though we had often frequented
the churches at this season, and had
scores of times heard questions both
asked and answered therein, yet, generally
intent on the marbles or monuments
of the edifice, we had not
hitherto given ear to the proceedings
of these obstreperous young bull-calves:
but, before leaving Rome
definitely, it seemed fair to give
them an hour’s attention on some
convenient opportunity, in order
to form an unbiassed judgment of
how their early religious education
was carried on. One soon presented
itself in the above-named
church of the Minerva; for, chancing
to be there at the right hour on an
examination-day, in crossing in front
of the black-columned chapel of St
Dominick, we came suddenly upon a
covey of little girls nestling in one of
its corners, under the sumptuous tomb
of the thirteenth Benedict, and waiting,
all primed, for their instructor.
Some, absorbed in the contemplation
of the silver crown and faded finery of
St Philomel—we trust, at so tender
an age, without infringement of the
tenth commandment—were delighting
themselves in anticipating the day[282]
when they too might become saints,
and wear similar decorations; others,
too young for such speculations, were
staring with intense vacancy at the
flickering of a tiny lamp, in front of
a very dingy-looking madonna, to
which one or two, in baby simplicity,
were repeating Latin creeds, paternosters,
and aves. Not knowing exactly
how long the preceptor of these
small folk might keep them waiting,
we left them, and proceeded to the
body of the building, where a detachment
of boys was already drawn up
for action, with their padre in the
midst. Approaching as softly as might
be, we stood against a neighbouring
pilaster to hear what might be required
of such young pupils, and how they
were prepared to acquit themselves.
Their incessant movements did not
promise a very sustained attention,
whatever might be the business in
hand: many of them were evidently
plagued with fleas—all with
fidgets; some shrugged up their shoulders,
others swung themselves by their
hands on the form; these were buttoning,
those unbuttoning their dress;
and not a few warmed their feet by
kicking the sounding pavement, and
then listening to the echoes from the
vaults. Every boy carried a book in
his hand; but on these no wandering
eye ever looked, not even for an
instant, in its numerous glancings
round. As soon as the additional commotion,
occasioned by the approach
of a stranger, had subsided, the
priest, harking back to what he had
just been saying, and not quite sure
of his whereabouts, asks his class
touching the last question. “You
asked that boy,” said one, pointing to
a comrade near him, “how he supposed
he ought to come to church.”
“Well,” said the priest, resuming his
cue, and reverting to the last examinee;
“and how did you tell me you
were to come?” “Colle mani giunte
così,” said the boy, locking his hands,
and standing up as he did so. “Niente
avanti?” said the priest, glancing at
two very dirty paws. “Oh yes! I
was to wash them.” “Poi?” “I
was to cross myself as I came out of
my room, and to cast down my eyes,
like the Mater Indolorata yonder.”
“And then?” “As I came to church,
besides looking grave, I was to walk,
not così“—and he walked a few paces
as he ought not to walk,—”but così“—changing
the rhythm of his march—”as
if I were following my brother’s
funeral. E poi finalmente,” (as he resumed
his place with a jerk,) “I was
to be seated so, and hold my tongue
till the padre should address me.”
“Well, my little man,” (to another
of the motley class,) “were we not
talking about the sacrament?” “Oh
yes! no one may receive that who has
been guilty of any mortal sin.” “Bene,
that’s quite right; but why not?”
The following gabble, to which it was
quite obvious that none were of an
age to attach any meaning, served for
a reply, and was received as perfectly
satisfactory by the priest:—”Siccome
il pane naturale non può dare vita ad
un corpo morto; così il pane della
Santissima, Eucaristia non può dare
vita ad un anima morta.” “And
what may mortal sins be?” turning
to the next scholar. “Eh! chi lo sa;
who is to tell you that?” said a young
butcher’s boy, turning off the question,
and freely offering it to any one
who would take it up. Upon this the
boys made much noise, and laughed
out lustily, not encountering any reprimand
from the padre, or so gentle
a one as to prove no check to their
mirth. At length, quiet being partially
restored, he resumed his task, and
asked a child of six years old to give
him an example of mortal sin! Not
receiving an answer, this question
travelled nearly to the end of the first
line before any one would take upon
himself to venture even a random
response; then, at last, by dint of
prompting, one boy suggested, that
the tasting food before receiving the
sacrament was of such a kind; and
having been first much commended
for his erudition, was next subjected
to a long list of suppositions from the
examiner; such as, “Suppose I were
to drink a little water merely?”
“Niente! no, you mus’nt.” “Well;
but suppose I only took a small piece
of consecrated wafer?” “Ne anchè;
not that neither.” “What! would even
these small indulgences be infringing
the rule?” But as the boy had received
an approving “bene” for his
first negative, he had no difficulty in
keeping to his text; and at last the
whole class, enjoying the joke of punishing[283]
their padre by cutting him off
from all supplies at every fresh demand,
roared out in chorus, “Niente,
niente—you mus’nt touch a bit;” till,
tired of the shouting, the good man
proceeded to the next interrogatory.
We were tiring too; but being really
desirous of hearing, if possible, something
more to the purpose, remained,
notwithstanding, yet another half hour
at our post—indeed quite long enough
to be sure that “niente” was all we
were likely to get for our pains. Some
of the questions were simply frivolous,
many jesuitical, others deeply profound;
and whatever their character,
all were answered in the same careless
and irreverent tone; à tort et à travers,
according to the fancy of the
young respondent. In a word, a more
complete waste of time for both teacher
and taught could not have been easily
devised. The instruction of this and
similar classes—for we have no reason
to suppose that others differ from it—seems
about as intellectual and useful
(and no more so) than that of an
aviary of parrots in the town of
Havre, where the young French psittaci
chiefly learn their χαιρης, and
their “petits dejeuners.” Alike in quality,
it is not very dissimilar neither
in the mode of its administration. The
shopman proposes the first word of a
sentence to the whole community, and
the greater or less accuracy with
which it is taken up and completed,
evinces the relative aptitudes of his
tyros; and though great allowance is
always made, in the case of both boy
and bird, for transpositions or leavings
out, yet the priest, like the parrot-merchant,
keeps an eye on the pupil
who promises to do most credit to his
training, and brings him forward on
every public occasion. “In all labour,”
says Solomon, “there is profit, but
the talk of the lips tendeth only to
poverty.” It requires no Solomon to
see how completely this is the case here;
but there is one particular in which
the padre really deserves praise, and
we cheerfully accord it. The forbearance,
the patience, meekness, and
bonhomie which he exercises in proposing
the dull routine of questions,
and in listening while the pupils “ring
round the same unvaried chimes” in
reply, cannot be too much admired.
Like the patient schoolmaster in Juvenal,
he puts up with all their idleness
and inattention—in the very
doubtful proficiency of many of his
scholars, gives them the favour of the
doubt—and, above all, never loses
his temper! This drilling and preparation
of the district classes has for
ulterior object a general field-day,[B]
which occurs once a-year; when the
congregated schools, in the presence
of the canons and other dignitaries of
the church, being now supposed fully
supplied

for the warfare, are expected

In short, these living fantoccini are
taught to expose heresies, and expound
the dogmas of their faith, in
words found for them by their priests;
and he who best retains the lesson,
and proves himself most loud and
overbearing in the exercise, receives,
for reward, a crown and royal robe,
and is metamorphosed out of the
imp, which he was an hour before,
into the imperator; more fortunate
by half, in the undisputed tenure of
his title for a twelvemonth, than many
of his Roman predecessors in the
laurel. The little girls have an exhibition
somewhat similar, but still more
theatric in its character. At Christmas
they assemble in the churches,
dressed out by their parents (who
delight in making them as fine as
possible) very much, it must be admitted,
like ballet-dancers; but supposed
to represent, in their habiliments,
youthful Christian virgins and
martyrs. Thus apparelled, they hold
forth on a platform in front of some
favourite Præsepe, and sustain, with
Pagan rivals, long dialogues on the
Nativity, syllogising, in the shrill thin
voice of childhood, upon all the sublime
mysteries of our faith, till the Pagans
abandon the scornful air with which[284]
they are taught to commence the discussion,
and confess themselves vanquished
by the arguments brought
against them. The chief spokeswoman
is then rewarded, like the head-boy,
with robe and crown, and retains
her regal dignity for the same period.
Of all such education, what shall we
say? Why, truly, in Hudibrastic
plainness of speech, that it is

Are our British infant schools
quite free from participation in the
defects just noticed? By no means;
and though the subject is far too
important to be dismissed with a few
words at the end of a slight sketch
like the present, (especially since we
hope to return to it later,) yet, even
here, we must glance at one or two
blemishes, that lie so immediately
on the surface as to strike even the
most casual observer, when once his
attention is called to them. In such
seminaries, it is known, the ages of
the children usually vary from eighteen
months to six years, at which tender
period of life it is almost impossible
to exercise too much discretion not
to over-burden the memory, or to
obscure the dawning reason; but
alas! in the always well-meant, but
certainly not always judicious, zeal
for beginning education betimes, how
often is it begun too early and pushed
too far! In an over-anxiety to prevent,
by pre-occupation of the ground, the
arch-enemy of mankind from sowing
his tares, how often is the good seed
thrown in before it can have a chance
of quickening! Festinare lente should
be the motto, in moral and religious,
as it is in all other branches of education;
since neither in religion nor morals
can we hope to arrive at the full
stature of perfection, but by slow
degrees and long training. The Bible,
to be sure, (the only true source of
either,) is the Book for all mankind;
but as it contains “strong meat for
men,” as well as “milk for babes,”
great judgment is necessary, in separating
these diets, to give to each
age the food particularly adapted for
it. We have the apostolic injunction
for such discrimination,—”Every one
that uses milk is unskilful in the word
of righteousness: for he is a babe. But
strong meat belongeth to them that are
of full age; even those who by reason
of use have their senses exercised to
discern both good and evil.”[C] It is
further obvious, from St Paul’s catalogue
of the armour which is to
resist all the attacks of the world,
the flesh, and the devil, that it comprises
many pieces of which young
children can neither be made to
comprehend the design, nor, at their
time of life, to require the use.
How unskilful, then, and abortive
must be the attempt to put into
the hands of instinct the weapons of
mature reason; to seek to explain the
“beauty of holiness” to a child who
does not “know his right hand from
his left,” and to invest an unbreeched
urchin in the whole Christian panoply
at once! With all due respect, too,
to the pains-taking compilers of some
of the manuals used in these classes,
we cannot help thinking that their
labour has been at times worse than
thrown away; and it has excited our
surprise to hear really judicious[D] persons
speak of these lesson-books as
“perfectly suited” to the purpose of
infant education, and as requiring no
amendment. Surely they cannot
have read them; or they must have
forgotten, when doing so, the age and
condition of those for whom they are
intended. Not to be thought captious
for nothing, we will let that “farrago
libelli“—that sausage of all the
sciences—that “Teacher’s Assistant,”
speak for itself. It has gone through
we know not how many editions, and
continues to perpetuate in each succeeding
one all the blunders of its predecessors.
To begin at the beginning,—The
scholars have to learn therefrom
as many alphabets as there are[285]
letters; a historical, a geographical,
a profane, and a biblical alphabet,
&c., &c., not to attempt an enumeration
of the whole. In the biblical,
each letter is put opposite to some
proper or improper person mentioned
in Scripture, for whom it is said to
stand representative—(leaving it to
be supposed that it has been called into
existence for no other purpose.) By this
means the written character of course
becomes associated in the child’s
mind with the moral character of the
individual whose initial it is; and thus
a certain prejudice is apt to arise
against certain letters. For instance,
the letter H is rendered fearfully significant,—

“H stands for Herod, who spilt infants’ blood!”

A theorist might, perhaps, trace the
absence of the aspirate in the speech
of maturer years to the awe created
by that dread tetrarch’s name in infancy,
when it is first feebly articulated,
then dropped, and not recovered
afterwards.[E] But we are not theatrical;
in proof whereof, we observe that a
child’s natural aspirations are for tarts,
dolls, or marbles; while, to counteract
such propensities, these little hypocrites,
before their time, are taught to
sing out, among other Scripture wishes,
the following formulary, which must,
of course, act as a specific:—

A rhythmical dispute between
two children, entitled a “Sabbath
Dialogue,” brings to our mind a
similar farce at Ferrara, which we
have formerly described. In this
lively piece of absurdity, the naughty
boy invites the good one to play instead
of going to church, and, waxing
warm as the other proves intractable,
at length becomes absolutely abusive
on finding he is not to prevail.

Once again. Behold a class of children
with the picture of a sheep before
them—to be taught, one would have
supposed, the natural history of that
animal, and to learn something about
the material of which their little
flannel petticoats and worsted stockings
are made; when lo! in place of
this, they are informed that “though
their sins are red as crimson, they
shall be as wool!!” If it were necessary
to use any interjection here, surely
a loud ovine bah! would be the most
appropriate and natural. But revenons
à nos moutons, for presently afterwards
occurs this question—”What
does the Bible tell us about wool?”
Answer: “Gideon wrung a fleece!”
Bah! again, for what other commentary
can be made on such instruction
as this? Why, Jason filched one;
and the Lord Chancellor sits upon a
woolsack; and either of these answers
would convey as much useful knowledge
to a child’s mind, though they
are not to be met with in the Bible.

These unfortunate babes are to
know a little of every thing: so,
after going through versified weights
and measures—arithmetic, including
the higher branches—geometry—we
hardly know what is omitted in this
most comprehensive miscellany—they
arrive at philosophy, and learn a great
deal to the tune of “Miss Bailley.”
We give one stanza out of many, as
an example:—

At the end of each verse, the infant
chorus repeats with enthusiasm, not
“Poor Miss Bailley! unfortunate
Miss Bailley!” &c., but—

The geography is as good as the
physics:—

      .    .    .    .    .

No doubt of it! enough and to spare!
This is a fine specimen of the class of
truths called unquestionable. There is,
moreover, a pleasing enjouement about
this last line, which recommends it to
our regard. The teacher seems to be
expostulating with her young charge,
and saying, “My dear little four-year-old,
eager for instruction beyond
your years, but fearful of learning up
every thing at school,—don’t be
frightened; the world will always find
science sufficient to employ all good
little boys like you.” But though this
truth be unquestionable, we doubt
whether the line which conveys it be
genuine; and rather fancy, should the
original manuscript turn up, it would
be found to run—

“Enough’s enough an infant’s mind to store!”

which, though somewhat harsh to the
ear, conveys an excellent meaning.
Should this be thought to make the
verse too rugged, we have yet a second
various reading to propose, and that
is simply to change the last word into
bore, by which means the easy flow
of the verse is preserved, and the
significatio prœgnans of the original,
though somewhat modified, is maintained.

Notwithstanding these blemishes—which,
after our strictures on foreign
classes, we felt bound to point out—our
English schools are very far superior
to the Italian for the same rank.
With us, the attention of government
and of the public is roused, and
directed to their improvement; laymen
join with the clergy in forwarding
the same scheme; great part of
the tuition devolves upon females—and
who so fitted as woman to form the
mind at an early age? It is no small
advantage, too, that authoresses of
talent and judgment should have
devoted their time to the composition
of exclusively moral and religious
tales and histories for the young.
Lastly, with us, there is none of that
masquerading and display, which
we reprobate as forming so prominent
a part in all Italian tuition.
In these schools, women are excluded
from their natural office of
teaching; there are no books adapted
to infant minds; the whole business
is vested in the hands of the priests;
and they, in strict compliance with
the spirit of their Church, train the
pupils in passive obedience to authority,
and teach them very little
besides. We fear it will be long
before any revolution can reach these
seminaries. The sense of personal importance
attaching—not only to the
children themselves, but to their
parents—from these contemptible
yearly exhibitions, added to the interested
motives which induce the Church
to foster such vanity, would render any
considerable alteration for the better
extremely difficult, even were the
evil more generally felt than we fear
it is likely to be under the present system
of things. We state this opinion
with regret; for what is the tendency
of such education? Can it inculcate
that real humility, not abasement of
mind, which should characterise the
true disciples of our blessed Saviour?
Nay, must it not rather, by holding out,
as it does, a premium to natural quickness
and a superficial acquaintance
with the dogmas of theology, tend to
foster pride and selfishness—those
monster evils which it is the prime
object of religion to eradicate—whilst
the heart remains untouched and the
moral sense unexercised? and will not
the poor children, who are its victims,
learn to prize a few dry leaves from
the Tree of Knowledge, beyond the
fair fruit of the Tree of Life?

The Cara Vita is a small church situated
in the Corso, and not possessing
within itself any thing to attract the
stranger’s particular attention. It is
interesting, however, from the solemn
services which take place there every
Friday in Lent. On these occasions,
after an exciting harangue from the
officiating priest, the lights are extinguished,
knotted scourges are handed
round by the sacristan, and each individual
of the congregation takes one
and begins to flagellate himself. We
have been told—for we were never present
at these exhibitions—that the
noise and excitement are terrible—every
penitent seeking to ease his inner
at the expense of his outer man, and
proportioning the amount of his physical
suffering to that of the moral evil
which it is intended to counteract.
But all the ceremonies in the Cara
Vita are not of this character; and the
same friend who described the above,
informed us that the preaching there
was often eloquent, and the music
always fine; so, when we read in the
Diario di Roma, that at twelve o’clock
on Good Friday there was to be a
solemn funzione, or Service in commemoration
of our Saviour’s Passion,
and that in all probability the church
would be crowded, we repaired thither
on that day an hour before the time
mentioned in the paper, in order to
secure a place. Doubtful of the propriety
of witnessing, as a pageant, a
representation of the most awful and
affecting scene that the mind of man
can contemplate, yet fearing, from
some experience in Roman ceremonies,
that our visit might issue merely
in that, we lingered some time about
the porch; then, pushing aside the
heavy curtain, irresolutely entered;
and what a contrast presented itself
between the two sides of that matted
door! It seemed the portal between
life and death: light, noise, confusion,
reigned without; within, all
was dark, solemn, still. The ear that
had been stunned by the babel of
the streets, was startled at the unwonted
calm; and the eye, dazzled
by the splendour of the meridian sun
upon the pavement, experienced a
temporary blindness, and required
some time before it could accommodate
its powers to the obscurity of the
interior. By degrees, however, it was,
apparent that the church, notwithstanding
the voiceless quiet which
prevailed, was full. The whole assembly
sat as if spell-bound; not a whisper
was to be heard; an awful curiosity
tied every tongue. The business and
pleasures of life were forgotten; the
sexes exchanged no furtive glances;
men and women, alike unobservant of
their neighbours, counted their beads
and bent their eyes upon the ground;
while each new comer, awed by the
deep silence, entered with cautious
tread, and took his seat noiselessly.
When our eyes had become somewhat
familiarised with the artificial light,
they were attracted to two elevated
extempore side-boxes, brilliantly illuminated
with wax, and filled with choristers
in full costume. Between them
was stretched a voluminous curtain, not
so opaque but that a number of tapers
might be seen faintly glimmering
through it; and before this curtain a
dark temporary stage was erected. The,
religious calm that prevailed around
was at length gently broken by some
soft and plaintive notes, proceeding
from the white-robed choir. In a
few minutes these died away again
upon the ear, and a figure, suddenly
rising from the stage, exclaimed in a
voice of strenuous emotion—”Once
again, ye faithful ones! ye are assembled
here to accompany me to Calvary!
Yes! another Good Friday has come
round, another anniversary of the day
announced by God himself for man’s
deliverance from the wages of his sin;
this is the great day when typical sacrifice
was done away with, and our
blessed Lord made of ‘himself a full and[288]
sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the’
faithful. But in order to triumph, my
brethren, we must conquer—to conquer
we must contend; there is no warfare
without wounds, and our Saviour,
while in the flesh, must partake of
our infirmities: he must be ‘the man
of sorrows and acquainted with grief,’
before he can ‘lead captivity captive,
and receive gifts’ for his holy Church;
the ransom of his faithful followers
must be at the expense of his own
blood. He bled, as you know, on Good
Friday; and accordingly, we are met
here—not to celebrate a triumph, but
to learn humility, patience, and forgiveness
of injuries at the foot of the
cross, in order that we, like our great
Head, may become perfect through
suffering. Permit me, then, to ask you,
with the Psalmist, ‘Are your hearts
set upon righteousness, O ye congregation?’
and are your minds prepared
to follow the Lord to Calvary? Have
you, for instance, been studying lately
his sufferings at the different stations
of the cross? have you been thinking
at all upon his passion? thinking
what it must have been to be
hooted at, spit upon, reviled, buffeted,
and friendless upon earth? If
not, ponder well these things now;
now, at this moment; for are we not
arrived at the most sacred hour of this
most sacred but sad and solemn day?
About this hour was the Saviour condemned
by his unjust judge, delivered
up to the rabble to be crucified. Go
back in your minds to that moment;
see him crowned with thorns, and bearing
the cross upon his shoulder, till,
lo! he faints under its weight, and his
persecutors compel a stranger to carry
it to the fatal spot. Then see him toiling
onward, surrounded by his deadly
enemies; his chosen friends have forsaken
him and fled! a few women
follow him afar off, bewailing his fate;
he turns and speaks; listen to his
words—’Daughters of Jerusalem!
weep not for me, but weep for yourselves
and for your children!’ Well
might the merciful Saviour speak thus,
when he had just heard the mad
shout of the multitude, ‘his blood be
upon us and upon our children.’ The
crowd approaches Golgotha! they
halt to rear the fatal tree; methinks
I hear the exulting outcries of his
vindictive murderers as they fix it in
the ground!” Here the curtain drawn
between the preacher and the back of
the stage fell, revealing three wooden
crucifixes lit up by a lurid red light
from above. The effect was startling,
and produced a shudder of horror
throughout the whole auditory. After
a breathless pause, the preacher,
turning towards the cross, exclaimed,
“What! are we too late for the
beginning of this tragedy! Is the
Redeemer of mankind already nailed
to the cross? Oh, cruel and fiendlike
man, is this your triumph! surely he
who came to save will reject you now!
Such might be our feelings, but they
were not Christ’s. No, my brethren,
far from it. Oh, let us contemplate, for
our own future guidance, the behaviour
of Jesus to his murderers, not after
but at the moment of his extreme torture;
and may the Holy Spirit give
us grace to profit by the exercise.
Look on your crucified Redeemer
writhing and maddened with suffering;
and listen to the first words
uttered in the depth of his agony:
he imprecates no curse upon these
guilty men, but exclaims, ‘Father,
forgive them; they know not what
they do!’ Caro Jesu!” Here there
was much emotion both in the preacher
and in the congregation; when it had
subsided, he added persuasively, “You
have heard Christ pray that his murderers
may be forgiven, and shall you
hesitate to forgive one another?” Then,
taking the words of our Saviour for a
text, he delivered a short animated
sermon upon the forgiveness of
injuries; after which came a prayer
for grace to perform this duty; the
pause which succeeded being filled
with music and chanting. Then again
the dark form of the preacher rose up.
“What, my brethren! did not Christ
pass three hours in his agony, and
shall we leave him in the midst?
He has still more gracious words in
store. My dear brethren and fellow
sinners, now hear his dying address
to the penitent thief, ‘Verily I say
unto thee, to-day shalt thou be with
me in Paradise!’ Ladro felice! but
was he then predestinated to salvation,
and his companion to be the victim
of God’s wrath? Niente, niente; believe,
not a word of this false and heretical
creed.” Then followed a second discourse,
with a diatribe against Calvin[289]
(who deserved it!) and all heretics (who
might not deserve it), with an anathema
against heresy in general, and a
prayer for the pardon and acceptance
of the true Catholic, id est Roman,
Church. In like manner the preacher
continued to set before his hearers all
the circumstances of our Saviour’s
passion; pronouncing a short discourse
upon every sentence uttered
by him in his agony. Each sermonette
was succeeded by prayer;
and that by an interlude of music
and chanting, which enabled him to
recover himself, and proceed with
undiminished energy during a three
hours’ service. We had listened attentively,
not always agreeing with
his doctrine, but without any great
shock to our Protestant principles,
when, in conclusion, he exclaimed,
“Now, brethren, before we disperse,
let us do homage to the blessed
Virgin, and sympathise with the
afflicted and inconsolable Mother of
our Lord. Think of her sufferings to-day;
think and weep over them;
and forget not the worship due to
her holy name; whom Christ honoured,
shall not we honour too?
Sons of the blessed Virgin! is not
your brother Christ her son also?
make her then your friend; propitiate
her, in order to obtain pardon from
him! Let us all, then, fall down upon
our knees before the Indolorata.” A
long prayer to the Madonna followed,
then a hymn in her honour; and
after a last glorious outburst of the
organ, accompanying the ardent and
sustained Hallelujahs of both choir
and congregation, the curtain falls,
the doors are thrown open, daylight
rushes in through the no longer darkened
windows; and presently the
thronged and noisy Corso has absorbed
the last member of the much moved,
slowly dispersing crowd.

A heartfelt and affecting ceremony
was that we had just witnessed; every
body had shed tears, and there had
been evidently great attrition, and
probably some contrition also. The
strong appeals of the priest had told,
though they were not legitimate;
for what could be less so than, in the
end, his misdirecting the thoughts
from the true object of worship, to her,
who was, after all, but a mere mortal
like ourselves?

Yet devotional feelings had been
called forth, and in this it was unlike,
and surely better than, the ordinary
cold, formal, glittering, shifting pantomimic
service of Te-Deums, and
high masses, which, instead of “filling
the hungry with good things,”
send all “empty away;” or worse,
satisfied with “that which is not
bread.” Could piety really be appealed
to through the senses, then might
the ceremonies of the Romish Church
hope to reach it, captivating as they
are to most of them. The ear is
pleased with exquisite music; the eye
is dazzled with pictures, processions,
scenic representations, glittering
colours, gorgeous robes, rich laces,
and embroidery; and even the nostril
is propitiated by the grateful odour of
frankincense; but the only address to
the heart and intellect is a barbarous
Latin prayer, unintelligible (were it
to be heard) to most of the congregation,
and rendered so to all by the
mode in which it is gone through.
On returning from such exhibitions
as these, we feel more forcibly than
ever, how much reason we have to
thank those pious compilers of our
expurgated English prayer-book, who,
renouncing an unknown tongue, and
rejecting all unscriptural interpolations,
drew from the rich stores of
Rome herself, and from the primitive
Church, an almost faultless Liturgy,[G]
where every desire of the human
heart is anticipated, and every expression
so carefully weighed, that
not an unbecoming phrase can be
found in it.

It is impossible for any one who
has been much in Roman Catholic
countries, to avoid drawing comparisons
between the two services; and
especially at this time, when many of
our countrymen are halting between
two opinions, and almost persuading[290]
themselves that there was no need of
a Reformation, it behoves those not
under the influence of

nor yet led away

to protest against the return of Popery
to this land, to the surrender of our
consciences and our Bibles again into
the hands of a fellow sinner.[H] “Quis
custodet custodem?”—who shall
watch our watcher?—was a question
that men had been asking themselves
for many years in England, but
hitherto without result; till our pious
Reformers, addressing themselves to
the study of the Scriptures, received
the sword of the Spirit, with which
they were enabled to wage successful
war against that wily serpent, coiled
now for centuries round the Church
of Christ, and waiting but a little
further development to crush her in his
inextricable folds. Alike unallured by
concessions and unterrified by threats,
they boldly denounced the heretical
usurpation of Rome; opposing an
honest conscience, and Christ the only
mediator, to the caprice of councils,
and the false unity of a pseudo-infallible
head;[I] refusing to purchase their
lives by rendering homage to any
Phalaris of the Triple Crown.

THE BEATIFICATION.

To receive Beatification, which is
the first step towards Canonisation,
and may in time lead to a fellowship
with the saints,—to be pronounced
“blessed” by him who arrogates to
himself the title of Holy, and must
therefore know the full value of the
dignity he confers—sic laudari a
laudato, and that too in the finest
church in Christendom, before the
eyes of a countless assembly of all
the nations of Europe,—is an honour
indeed! No wonder, then, that
every promotion should be jealously
canvassed, and that sometimes the
rumour of “unfairness,” or “favouritism,”
should be heard among the
people, when each fresh brevet comes
out. For example—”Who’s this
third St Anthony? Are not two
enough in the Calendar? The great
St Antonio, and he of the pig!—(del
porco,)—another will only create confusion;”
or else, “Surely the Beata[291]
Ernestina has not been long enough
dead to have attained to such an
‘odour of sanctity;'” or, “Though
the good Pasquale might deserve the
title, the pious Teodoro’s miracles are
as well attested, and much more numerous,
and should therefore have
been first recognised.” Of such sort
are the comments of the crowd. All
this grumbling, however, is at an end,
when once the Festa comes round; the
Church, by the brilliancy of her exhibitions,
wins over her discontented children,
and the installation is sure to be
well attended. Sometimes the saint
expectant stops short of true canonisation;
and, having gained one step, finds
himself like a yellow admiral, placed
on the shelf without chance of further
promotion. (This by the way.) No
one can say precisely what entitles the
dead to these honours. Large bequests
alone are not always sufficient; witness
the rejection of a certain distinguished
Begum, who left much of her enormous
wealth to the Pope, with a
well-known view to this distinction.
Some imagine that eminent piety is a
necessary condition; but no! there is
very little talk of religion. It seems
chiefly to be the attestation of a sufficient
number of miracles at a tomb,
which confers the title of Beatus on
its tenant, and converts it into a
shrine, sure ever after to be profusely
hung with glass eyes, wax fœtuses,
silver hearts, discarded crutches,
votive shipwrecks, &c., &c.,[K] in token
of cures and deliverances which have
emanated from it. Next to miracles,
perhaps, we may reckon dates—seniores
priores—first buried, first beatified, and
no superannuation here: on the contrary,
holiness, like many other good
things, requires time to ripen its virtues
and to bring it to perfection; and
it is a rule of the Church that chemistry
must disintegrate the mortal
before she can build up the saint. Thus
it happens of two candidates of equal
merit; he whose dissolution took place
half a century or so before his rival,
obtains the preference. The first
steps are taken by the lawyers; one
being retained to advance the merits
of the aspirant saint, another to asperse
them if possible. Should the election
be contested, much special pleading is
then resorted to. Both sides are paid
by the Church, but he who opposes the
nomination is termed the devil’s counsel.
This title, however, is a legal
or rather a theological fiction; the
miracles alleged to have been performed
by the defunct being only more
triumphantly established and set off
by the apparent disposition of the rival
pleader to deny their reality; who,
after a proper show of resistance and
incredulity, allows himself to be foiled.
This is indeed beating Satan with his
own weapons; but the advocates of
saints belong to that party who

We had never witnessed a Beatification:
so, when the Pope, in his
character of umpire, had pronounced
his fiat in favour of “good sister
Frances,” and all that remained to
be done was the church ceremonial
necessary to admit her to piety’s
peerage, we procured one of the many
thousand tickets printed for the occasion,
and followed the crowd to St
Peter’s. Here all was prepared to
give due effect to the scene: the
interior was studiously darkened,
that the rich upholstery might be set
off by a grove of countless wax lights,
thick and tall as young pine trees.
The workmen, after a whole fortnight
of bustle and activity, had done their
part well. Curtains had been hung
and carpets spread; organs wheeled
up towards the throne of St Peter;
and a whole gallery of villanously
painted historical pictures, blasphemous
and absurd, were suspended
round, representing the miracles for
which the new “beatified” was to[292]
receive her first degree towards sainthood;
and showing amongst other
wonders, how in one case her blood,
in another her image, restored a blind
man to sight, and so completely cured
the palsy of one Salvator di Sales,
that he is dancing a hornpipe on his
recovery, while a priest is looking on
approvingly. We were too early for
the ceremony; and after curiously
scanning these preparations, our attention
was attracted to a group near,
eagerly listening to the recital of a
bare-footed Capuchin. On approaching,
we found that he was discoursing
on the virtues of a picture of the Virgin,
known by the name of Sta Maria
del Pianto, a fresco daub, painted in
a very dirty back street. He was
affirming that it had lately taken to
winking, and had also been seen to
shed tears over the body of a man
recently found murdered under the
lamp. “Who saw her weep?” inquired
one of his hearers. “Do you
doubt the miracle, my son?” said the
friar. “No indeed, father,” returned
he; “but why did she not call out to
the assassin; and what is the use of
weeping over a dead man?” “It was
owing to the gentleness of her sex,”
said another, who appeared interested
in proclaiming the notoriety of the
shrine: he proceeded, therefore, to inform
the attentive listeners, that he had
the face newly painted some months
back, since which operation there was
no end to the miracles performed by it.
Several persons round hereon testified
to having heard repeatedly of these
wonders. “Ah!” said a sceptical
craftsman, “I dare say you live in
another quarter of the city, for it is
well known that those at a distance
see these things more clearly than the
neighbours, unless, like our friend
here,” nodding to the restorer of the
shrine, “they hope to attract customers
to the shop by drawing votaries
to the shrine.” “I don’t believe
a word of it,” said we, taking part
in the colloquy. “Caro lei—who can
help that? we can only pity your
unbelief,” said the good-humoured
Capuchin, offering us, however, a
pinch out of his snuff-box. “You,”
continued he, “should call to mind ‘in
dubiis fides;’ and we, in compassion
to your being a heretic, will remember
‘in omnibus caritas.'” We accepted
the good man’s courtesy, albeit no
snuff-taker; and he was resuming the
interrupted narrative, when a stir
among the crowd outside announced
the near approach of the procession,
and every one hastened to secure a
good seat. Presently the Swiss
guards enter, the choristers take their
places, in come priests, bishops, cardinals,
all sumptuously arrayed; at
length the Pope himself arrives and
assumes his throne. Mass commences.

And here the reader doubtless expects,
if not a full description of the
ceremony of canonisation, at least an
accurate detail of the various steps of
the process by which it was effected;
but, as we have stated above, the
incubation had been completed six
weeks before in a private Eccaleiobion,
and the pageant to-day was merely
to give publicity to the metamorphosis—to
read in, and to enrol among the
saints the Beata Francesca. As we
cannot give a particular account of
the funzione, we give a general one
of all masses:—

[293]

CRIMES AND REMARKABLE TRIALS IN SCOTLAND.

INCIDENTS OF THE EARLIER REIGNS—AN INQUIRY INTO THE CHARACTER OF MACBETH.

The sunshine and the green leaves
embrace not all that we should know of
physical nature. Storm and darkness
have their signs, which we do well to
study; and in the tempests of the tropics,
or the long winter darkness of the
poles, we have types of the character of
different sections of the globe, more
marked than the varying warmth of
the sun, or the character of the vegetation—but
not perhaps so pleasing.
Even so, the storm and darkness of
the human soul—the criminal nature
of man, provide their peculiar food
for the thinker and inquirer. The
annals of virtue have their own
elevations and delights; but those
of vice are no more to be passed
over than the dark and stormy hours in
the history of each revolution round
the sun. “While some affect the sun,
and some the shade,” there may even
be those whose most deeply cherished
associations are with these unlit hours—who
prefer the night thoughts to the
day dreams. But to all, the crimes
peculiar to different nations are a
large part of the knowledge which
man may profitably have of his race.
In the history of its great criminals, a
nation’s character is drawn, as it were,
colossally, with the broadest brush,
and in the deepest shadows. National
virtues have delicate and subtle tints,
and exquisitely minute shadings, inviting
to a nearer view—like Carlo
Dolci’s Madonnas, or Constable’s forest
landscapes: the crimes of a nation
present the character of its people, as
they rise from the dead in Michael
Angelo’s Last Judgment. The ordinary
vices of men have a certain vulgar
air of uniformity; but each great
crime is a broad dash of the national
character of the people among whom
it was committed. The Cenci, and
Joanna of Naples were of Italy. It
was in Holland that two great and
virtuous statesmen were torn to pieces
by the mob. The dirk, long buried
beyond the Grampians, has re-appeared
across the Atlantic in the
shape of the bowie-knife. The country
of Woldemar and the sorrows of Werther
produced that most amiable and
sentimental of murderesses, Madame
Zwanziger, who loved and was beloved
wherever she went; so sensitive,
so sympathising, so sedulous, so
studious of the wants of those by
whom she was surrounded, so disinterestedly
patient; she had but one
peculiarity to distinguish her from an
angel of light—it was an unfortunate
propensity to poison people! We
read in the Causes Célèbres, of a Bluebeard
who slew a succession of wives
by tickling them till they died in convulsions;
and at once we are reminded
of that populace who are said to partake
of the natures of the ape and the
tiger. The people who, for more centuries
than are included in the events
of European history, have been resolved
into the mysterious classification
of castes, produced those equally mysterious
criminals the Thugs, for
whose deeds our so utterly different
habits and ideas are quite incapable of
finding or conceiving a motive. Our
own country produced the assassinations
of Rizzio, Regent Murray, and
Archbishop Sharpe—all pregnant
with marked national characteristics;
aristocratic pride, revenge of wrong,
and fanatical fury. We propose to
offer for the amusement or instruction—which
he pleases—of our reader, a
few more records of Scottish crimes,
not probably all so conspicuously
known to the general reader as the
three we have just alluded to, yet
not, we trust, without something
to commend them to notice, as
characteristic of the country and the
age in which they were respectively
enacted.

The raw materials from which we
propose to work out our little groups,
are the records of our criminal trials;
and yet we feel an insuperable inclination
to begin with a name not certainly
unknown, yet not to be found
in the proceedings of the Court of
Justiciary—Macbeth, King of Scotland.
Perhaps we might consider it
a sufficient reason for holding his case
equivalent to a trial, that before a
tribunal called the Public Opinion, he
has been tried, and that at the instance[294]
of such a public prosecutor as never
opened his lips in any court of law—one
whose accusation has carried a
conviction deep into the very heart of
literature, whence no archæological
evidence, and no critical pleading will
ever eradicate it. Nor would we desire
to touch it: let Macbeth the murderer
remain to all time the most
powerful picture of temptation, leading
its victim through crime into the
hideous shadows of remorse, that
human pen has ever drawn. But
there was an actual prose Macbeth,
as different from the ideal as the canvass
bought by Raphael of some respectable
dealer in the soft line, was
from the Transfiguration which he
afterwards painted on it. With him,
being but a simple historical king, we
may take liberties; and the liberty we
propose to take on the present occasion
is that of vindicating his character.
Vindications are fashionable;
and since Catiline and Machiavelli,
Richard III., and Philip II. have been
vindicated, why not Macbeth? We
shall say ’tis our humour to whiten
him, and no man can say it is a criminal
or mischievous one.

The main question is, did Macbeth
murder Duncan? It was an older
story in Shakspeare’s time than the
murder of Darnley is now, and he
may have taken a false view of it.
We shall approach the question by an
inquiry who Duncan and Macbeth
were, and in what relation they stood
to each other. About the end of the
eleventh century, there reigned in
Scotland a king called Kenneth III.
Like all the other Scottish monarchs
of the period, the chroniclers have
given him his own peculiar tragic
history, in this wise: he was induced
to poison the young prince Malcolm
Duff, who might possibly show a title
to the throne enabling him to compete
with Kenneth’s own offspring. This
troubled his conscience. He “ever
dreaded in his mind,” in the expressive
words of old Bellenden, that it “should
come some time to light: and was so
full of suspicion, that he believed
when any man rounded to his fellow,
that they spake evil of him; for it is
given by nature to ilk creature, when
he is guilty of any horrible crime, by
impulsion of his conscience, to interpret
every thing that he sees to some
terror of himself.” He was one night
appalled by a terrific vision, and next
morning making his confession, he
was sentenced to a pilgrimage to the
tomb of St Palladius at Fordun.
When the pilgrimage was over, he
was invited to partake of the hospitalities
of a lady named Fenella—a
very neat name for a romance—at
her fortalice of Fettercairn. In the
civil conflicts or the administration of
justice during his reign, some of the
relations of this lady had been slain;
among the rest her son. Having got
the king into her toils, she resolved
to put him to death; and the method
which the chroniclers make her adopt,
shows a superfluous ingenuity ridiculous
enough to strip a murder of all
its horrors. Kenneth was taken to
see a tower of the castle “quhilk was
theeket with copper, and hewn with
maist subtle mouldry of sundry
flowers and imageries, the werk so
curious, that it exceeded all the stuff
thereof.” In the middle of this tower
stood an image of Kenneth himself,
in brass, holding in his hand a golden
apple studded with costly gems.
“That image,” said the lady, “is set
up in honour of thee, to show the
world how much I honour my king;
the precious apple is intended for a
gift for the king, who will honour his
poor subject by taking it from the
hand of the image.” Now matters
were so arranged, that the removal of
the apple caused certain springs to
touch the triggers of a series of bent
cross-bows pointed to the spot, and
so, when the unsuspecting monarch
went to take the gift, a whole
sheaf of arrows penetrated to his
heart. On the death of this king,
though he left a son called Malcolm,
the succession went to a rival line.
His immediate successor was Constantine,
who was killed by another
Kenneth, called IV., who in his turn
was killed by Malcolm, who thus regained
the throne his father had filled.
“The gracious Duncan” was the son of
a daughter of this Malcolm. His
father, strangely enough, appears to
have been a priest; he is called in the
old dry chronicles, which are the only
ones to be depended on, Duncan the
son of Trini, or Trivi, abbot of Dunkeld.
Now the Kenneth IV. of the
rival line, who had been slain by[295]
Duncan’s grandfather, left behind him
a son, and that son left a daughter,
whose name was Gruach, and in
whom the reader, though certainly in
an unusual shape, must welcome Lady
Macbeth herself. There being thus
two rival races, alternately seizing the
throne: while Duncan was the son of
a daughter of one king, she was the
daughter of the son of another. This
gave her no contemptible title to the
throne, and when she married Macbeth,
or Machaboedth, as he is called
by the chroniclers, she had a husband
who, possessing the almost independent
principality of Ross, might be
able to fight her battles. It is somewhat
remarkable that, in an ecclesiastical
record still preserved, in which
a royal grant is made to a religious
house, dedicated to St Servanus,
Macbeth’s wife appears along with
himself, as granter of the deed; and
they are called, “Machabet filius
Finlach, et Gruach filia Bodhae—Rex
et Regina Scotorum;”[L] an equal
juxtaposition, only to be accounted
for by the supposition that Macbeth
was king in right of his wife. As to
Macbeth himself, his origin, save in
the supernatural legend we shall hereafter
notice, appears not to have been
known; but Fordun seems to intimate,
that he was a descendant of that same
Fenella who had so curiously murdered
Duncan’s great-grandfather. If
we were disposed, indeed, to take a
proper antiquarian partisanship of the
one dynasty against the other, we
might speak of Duncan as a treacherous
usurper, and Lady Macbeth
as an injured and insulted queen,
whose cause is heroically adopted and
vindicated by a true knight, who,
while redressing her wrongs, wins her
heart and hand.

Let us now look to the manner in
which the death of Duncan is spoken
of by the most ancient authorities.
Old Andrew Wyntoun, Prior of St
Serfs on Lochleven, who has never
yet, to our great wonder, been upheld
as one of the greatest poets of
his own or any other age,—perhaps
we may undertake the task some day,
let our readers judge by the extracts
on the present occasion with what
prospect of success:—Wyntoun narrates
the event with the true simplicity
of genius, in these two lines:—

This is distinct enough, in all truth:
there is no ambiguity, or room for critical
doubt; nor is his fellow annalist,
Fordun, less distinct, for he speaks
of the slain monarch as occisus scelere.
But these chroniclers wrote between
three and four centuries after the event
they commemorate, standing chronologically
almost as near our own day
as Macbeth’s; and when we look into
those far older, if not contemporary,
annals, which narrate successive events
in the briefest possible shape, we find
that they contain nothing to indicate
that Duncan’s death took place in
any more atrocious manner than the
multitudinous slaughters of kings, with
which their narratives are often as
crowded as a Peninsular campaign
gazette with killed officers. Thus,
the register of the Priory of St Andrews
simply states, that Duncan
interfectus est. It is true that the
Latin language is deficient in any
word to express murder as distinguished
from other kinds of slaughter.
Trucido is the verb we have been
accustomed to associate most nearly
with the idea of assassination; but
in one of the most circumspect and
prosaic of the old annals, that of
Tighernac, this very word is applied
to the death of Macbeth himself.
Blackstone notices the circumstance
that the English lawyers had to coin,
for their own special use, the substantive
murdrum and the verb murdrare;
equally creditable to their good taste
in Latinity and to the social condition
of their country. In fact, the Romans
looked upon death, in any form, as so
bad a business, that they cared little
for making nice distinctions about the
motive that had occasioned it, or the
manner in which it was effected; and
it was a condition so generally disliked,
that, if any man was absurd
enough voluntarily to place himself
in it, neither the law nor public
opinion troubled itself to express disapproval,
either by driving a stake
through the body or in any other
way. Undoubtedly there were justifiable[296]
slaughters and unjustifiable;
but the practice of single combat had
not arisen to draw a strong and distinct
line between death in a fair
tournament or duel, and secret assassination.
A recollection that this was
also the social state of Scotland in the
days of Macbeth, will help us far better
towards the truth than a criticism
on the ambiguous Latin words. It was
between that age and the period of
Wyntoun and Fordun that single-combat
chivalry and the laws of honour
had grown up; so, while the older
chroniclers had simply to say that the
man was killed, without troubling
themselves about the manner, those
of later date were moved to divide the
deaths into two departments—the
killed in combat and the murdered.
More, probably, by chance than design,
the fate of Duncan was put into
the latter category; and then a super-structure
of particulars was raised
upon it—for it must be observed,
that the romantic incidents of the
slaughter were added at a still later
period than that of Fordun or Wyntoun—by
Boece and Hollinshed.
Here, then, is our case, as lawyers
say: Macbeth, in right of his
wife, was a claimant of the crown.
He kills the existing holder; but there
is nothing in the older accounts of the
affair to show that he did so otherwise
than in the fair course of war. It was
what the old civilians would have
called a casus belli,—an expression
which, by the way, we find some
accomplished editors using as the
Latin for a justification of war. The
murder is found only in the later
chronicles, which, in all parts of their
narrative, have covered their more
sober predecessors with a coating of
fabulous details like the stalactites of
a dripping cave. However the real
fact may have stood, we have no
statement of Macbeth having murdered
Duncan until between three and four
centuries after the event. Why,—the
case looks vastly better than we
thought it did when we began with
it; we have some thoughts of believing
our own theory, which is more
than ever we knew a historical critic
do, within the range of our personal
observation.

Having so disposed of this question,
we are inclined to amuse our
readers with some further notices—real
and unreal—about Macbeth.
Wyntoun gives us a strange wild
legend of his supernatural parentage,
beginning

Such is the description of the putative
father of Macbeth. In the sententious
explanation of Wyntoun, who
scorned expletives, “he the devil
was;” and so he told the wandering
damsel—

Wyntoun’s melodious verses were lying
in a dusty parchment manuscript
when Shakspeare wrote; we know
not if he had access to the volume,
nor have we any strong reason for
presuming that he would have perused
it if he had. It would be too adventurous
to predict whether, knowing
the legend, he would have considered
any reference to it as consistent with
the character of his drama; but it is
curious to observe, that the tale
appears to have been in the eye of
Sir Walter Scott, when he wrote the
history of Brian the Hermit, in the
Lady of the Lake, beginning—

We shall now indulge our readers
with a glance at a totally different
feature in the career of Macbeth. It
appears that he was a very able financier.
We presume that he was his
own First Lord of the Treasury and
Chancellor of the Exchequer: yet in
his days there was no pressure on the
money-market; there was no drain
of gold; there was no restriction of[297]
issue; no great houses suspended
payment; there were no rumours of
turns-out and distress in the manufacturing
districts; there was no
Highland destitution. Our proof of
this position lies in two lines of our
illustrious poet Wyntoun, which contain
as much as a smaller genius could
have crowded into a volume on “The
state and progress of Scotland during
the reign of Macbeth; with an account
of the arts, industry, and manufactures
of the country; returns of
the exports and imports, and of the
goods entered for home consumption,
with the annual gross and net revenue
from customs and excise, post-office,
assessed taxes, hereditary revenue,
and other miscellaneous sources, during
that reign: dedicated, by permission,
to the Statistical Society.”
Wyntoun’s simple statement is—

What more is necessary? It is
true, that on another occasion we have
repudiated Wyntoun as an authority;
but it is the privilege of the antiquarian
speculator to found on an author
when he is right, and repudiate him
when he is wrong.

We now come to a subject on which
really, jocularity apart, we stand upon
firm and secure ground—the spot
where Macbeth fell. All the chroniclers
with one voice state that it was
at a place called Lunfanan. Even
Raphael Hollinshed, whose version, it
is universally admitted, was the one
perused by Shakspeare,—after he tells
how the beleaguered fugitive beheld
the miraculous forest with which his
doom was involved approaching him,
continues to say—”Nevertheless, he
brought his men in order of battle,
and exhorted them to do valiantly:
howbeit, his enemies had scarcely cast
from them their boughs, when Macbeth,
perceiving their numbers, betook
him straight to flight, whom
Macduff pursued with great hatred,
even till he came to Lunfannane.”
Perhaps Shakspeare, not knowing
precisely where Lunfanan lay, supposed
that it was some spot close to
Dunsinane, and did not wish to burden
his action with the particularity
of an unimportant movement. Lunfanan
is, however, north of the Dee,
and distant full fifty miles in a straight
line from Dunsinane, the rough mountains
of the Braes of Angus lying between
the two places; so that the two
parties must have had a pretty long
running fight, and Macbeth stood out
even harder game than he has generally
credit for. Our favourite poet
describes the chase across the broad
valley of Strathmore, through the
rocky glens of Clova, over the Isla
and the Esk, down through the hoary
forest of Glentanner, across the raging
Dee, and up again through mountain
and forest, in this sententious and
emphatic couplet,

When the victory was completed, we
are told that they cut off his head,
and bore it to King Malcolm at Kincardine—a
pleasant village on the
banks of the Dee, about ten miles
from Lunfanan.

This same Lunfanan is a spot
which it requires particular taste to
love, and yet we have perambulated
it not without interest. The Chroniclers
speak of it as a forest, but the
highest elevations are now generally
bare of trees, save where in a few
sheltered hollows the birches cling to
the rocks. The hills are of considerable
height, but round and bare, with
few precipices, and little character of
outline; but the glens between the
hills are sheltered and well cultivated,
each is enlivened by a small stream,
and still more enlivened by the scanty
population seeking the shelter of the
recesses of the glen, and making it
populous amid the waste. But we
shall afford a better description than
our own, in a few lines from “The
Fortunate Shepherdess,” by a poet
who lived in a glen not far distant—Alexander
Ross. It will be admitted,
by the way, that our poetical quotations
to-day are not of a hackneyed
kind, whatever other censure they
may incur.

[298]Occasionally, when the new earth
is turned up, strange uncouth warlike
instruments are found in this
district—remnants of ancient strife,
so unlike any weapons recorded in
the genuine history of the military
art, that it were hard to say whether
they belong to the age of Macbeth,
or to unknown anterior centuries.
Flint arrow-heads, stone hammers and
axes,—such is their general character,
though we have also seen among
these mysterious discoveries, such a
thing as a long flat mass of decomposed
iron, which may have once
been the blade of a dagger, or short
sword. Here the knowing reader,
who has been induced, on the field of
Waterloo, to purchase a ball-perforated
cuirass and helmet, which he
afterwards discovers to have been
made at a manufactory of Waterloo
relics, will curl his lip in scorn; but
he is wrong. Lunfanan is no relic-collecting
district. We question if
the inhabitants ever made a shilling
of any one, the present company excepted,
by the military stores discovered
by them when ploughing
their tough peat soil. We did not
require there to practise the method
of self-defence which we adopted on
a visit to the field of Waterloo; and
by the way—as we are inclined to
recommend it strongly to our friends,
as an effectual preservative from the
main annoyance to which the hero-worshipper
is subjected—we may
here describe our method. On hiring
our guide, we desired him to procure
for us a fragment of an old kettle.
Carrying this conspicuously in our
hard, to each band of relic-sellers
who came up, we stated that we were
in the trade ourselves, that we had
just acquired a very valuable article,
and were willing to part with it at a
moderate price. The cuirassiers did
not look more ridiculous, when they
attempted to storm the squares, than
our assailants, when we fortified ourselves
behind this piece of defensive
armour. But to return to Lunfanan.

In one of the narrow glens, near
the old parish-church, there is an oblong
solid turf bank, or mound, of
considerable height, and regular construction,
as clean and sharp in its
outline as the glacis of a modern fortification.
A neighbouring stream has
been diverted round it, or rather the
waters have been divided and distributed
on either side, so as to surround
it with a fosse. This curious
antiquity is called “the Peel Bog,”
or Castle Bog. “The course,” says
the author of the statistical account
of the parish, “by which the water
was conveyed from the burn of Lunphanan
may still be traced; the measure
of the circumvallation by which
the water was confined may still be
made; the situation of the drawbridge
is still discernible; the path leading
from the fosse to the top of the mound
may still be trodden; and the sluice
by which the water issued from the
moat, was laid bare by the flood of
1829.”[M] Even the sceptical Lord
Hailes ventured to associate Macbeth’s
name with the spot; “as no
remains of buildings,” he says, “are
to be seen, it is probable that the
fortress was composed of timber and
sod. In this solitary place, we may
conjecture that Macbeth sought an
asylum.” At some distance from the
Peel Bog, a low thin rampart of earth
and stone encircles the summit of a
conical hill; it is an inferior specimen
of the old British hill-fort, well
known both in Scotland and the
north of England. But on the brow
of one of the hills, there is a still more
emphatic memorial of the monarch’s
fate. There a heap of gray stones,
considerably larger than many others
surrounding it, is still called, and is
represented in the county maps as
Cairn Beth. We must admit that,
were it in a tourist’s district, or were
it the spot which popular literature,
of any kind had marked as the grave
of Macbeth, this would be suspicious.
But no tourist’s footstep seeks the
quiet uninviting wilds of Lunfanan.
There is no railway line, not even a
stage-coach communication, between
it and the world. You have but to
see the rough, primitive, granitic air
of the Lunfananers assembled at the
parish church, to know that they are
incapable of any imposition. Legends
we always distrust, especially when
they are connected with any spot[299]
sanctified by poetry. At Dunsinane,
we believe, some vestiges are shown
as marking the spot of the usurper’s
death, the “genuine” spot, “all others
being spurious imitations;” but we
suspect this legend is not even so old as
Shakspeare’s day, that it is no older
than the revival of Shakspearean literature,
and the rise of a general
public interest in the spots illuminated
by his genius.[N] For more than one
castle, Cawdor included, has the merit
been claimed of being the identical
edifice in which Duncan was slain,
and undoubted four-posted bedsteads
have been shown in actual
existence to put scepticism to scorn.
But any popular association of the
actual events of Macbeth’s career
with quiet remote Lunfanan has been
barred by the silence of Shakspeare,
and the unwillingness of topographical
critics to break the spell of the
accepted localities. Though legends
spring up like rumours, with a breath,
the names of places which they have
received from historical incidents are
generally of long standing, and, indeed,
a large proportion of the lowlands
of Scotland is full of places
which to this day bear Celtic names,
given them by tribes who cannot have
inhabited the districts for a thousand
years at least. The old chroniclers,[300]
without exception, lay Macbeth’s
death in Lunfanan; the people of the
spot, who never read these chronicles,
and never, perhaps, heard of
Macbeth, or if they did, heard the
popular account of his death in Dunsinane,
call a certain monumental
tumulus Cairn Beth—this, we think,
is very nearly conclusive.[O] And yet,
sitting on that Cairn, with the fresh
breeze blowing round one, and the
blue heavens above, and the blooming
heather-bells around, or reclining
on the smooth green turf of the Peel
Bog, on a summer day, with the sun
shining hot upon the hills, and the
babbling brook singing its “quiet
tune,” it is not easy to associate the
spot with that history of blood and
horror, or to feel that its features are
ancient, or that they ever were connected
with warfare. In the gloomy,
galleries of Glammis or Cawdor, with
their grim old portraits, their armour,
their secret staircases, their mysterious
hidden chambers, and iron
hooks in the wall—the idea of the
haggard murderer, and all the associations
of his deeds and his remorse
creep more vividly on that imaginative
conscience, which more or less
makes cowards of us all in such
places. Yet the history of the arts
tells us that not one stone of these
edifices, ancient though they be, can
have stood upon another till the history
of Macbeth was as old as that of
Queen Mary is now. Why, then,
should they retain their hold on us?
They are contemporary with Shakspeare’s
Macbeth, though not with the
historians’, and are the style of edifice
in which he cast his tragedy. It
must be a feudal stronghold, heavily
arched, buttressed, fortified, and
gloomy,—where the lady in a vaulted
half-lighted chamber may say:

The timber edifice on such an eminence
as the Peel Bog—probably, as
the sagacious Lord Hailes imagines,
the true character of the edifices possessed
by Macbeth—would no more
fill up the true architectural wants of
the drama, than a marble Grecian
temple, or a Canadian settler’s log-house.

Crimes briefly told without details
have no interest, unless they can
be put in the shape of statistics—some
people will be inclined to deny that the
exception is the reverse of the rule.
We are not writing history, and if
we were, the historical details which
go no further than that A stabbed
B, and C poisoned D, and E mutilated
F, are not such as we are inclined
to believe our readers would
thank us for. It is very clear that
the death of Duncan, if we had no
more than authentic annals to deal
with—if it had been a question merely
of history, and not in some measure
incidentally connected with the highest
rank of human intellectual effort—would
have formed a very meagre
object of comment. The society of
antiquaries might have endured a
paper on it—for such endurance is
the martyrdom they have chosen—but
no other person would. In looking,
then, down through Scottish
history from the accession of Macbeth’s
successor, we find little that
can be noticed with any applicability
to our particular purpose, until we
reach the time when the records provide
us with some of the details.

Yet there is one very early tragic
incident, which appears to us to have
considerable interest, as one of the
first striking instances where the fierce
spirit of clan animosity—the burning
desire to avenge the wrongs of the
chief—was exhibited by the Highlanders.
It occurred about the year
1242. A tournament was held on the
English Border, at which two young
knights, Patrick Earl of Athole, and
Walter de Bysset, a cadet of the
family who were lords of the great
northern districts, subsequently the
patrimony of Lord Lovat, encountered
each other. Bysset was unhorsed.
Not long afterwards, the building in
which the Earl of Athole lived, in
Haddington, was burned to the
ground, and he, with several of his
followers, died in the flames. By[301]
some accounts the Earl was previously
murdered, and the house was burned
to conceal the deed. Let us here
have recourse to the distinct and considerate
account of the incident in
our favourite poet:—

Some Highland gillies from Bysset’s
country had been seen in the neighbourhood,
and suspicion immediately
fell upon the head of that house. He
tried to prove an alibi—that he was,
at the time of the tragedy, in Forfar,
some eighty miles distant from Haddington,
doing the honours of hospitality
to the Queen. As our historical
poet says:

like a good old country gentleman.
But an alibi went for little in a
Highland feud.

It was still the age of ordeals. The
hot ploughshares were, perhaps, obsolete,
but single combat was in full
practice; and even jury trial was considered
a species of ordeal rather than
a deliberate judgment upon evidence.
The accused party in the one case appealed
to the chances of war—or, taking
the reference in its more solemn
aspect, he left his cause to be vindicated
by the God of battles: in the
other, he threw himself upon the suffrages
of his peers. Both ordeals were
considered about equally reasonable
and fair; and if the man who preferred
the ordeal of battle were a
gigantic warrior, unconquered, and
terrible in the lists, he was, to the true
believer in ordeals, not more formidable
than the feeblest of his contemporaries,
for a just Deity might wither
his uplifted arm; and if he retained
the physical superiority he had previously
indicated, it was because the
All-seeing Eye knew of the justice of
his cause. Now Bysset, who seems to
have been somewhat of a sceptic in
ordeals, had no objection to trust the
issue to single combat, and challenged
whomsoever would dare to stand forth
against him. But he would not submit
to an assize or jury, for he said the
whole country had prejudged him.
His opponents had, somehow or other,
greater faith in the ordeal of an assize
than that of battle, and would not
accept his challenge. In the meantime,
to show his sincerity, he requested
the northern clergy to curse
and excommunicate the perpetrators
of the deed.

Wild justice began to be enforced
in the country of the Byssets, which
was overrun by their enemies: in
the pathetic language of our poet—

At length, the Byssets agreed “to
come into the king’s will,” or abide by
his arbitration. They came under an
obligation to depart to the Holy Land,
and there for the remainder of their
days pray for the soul of the murdered
man. Their broad estates were
forfeited, and a portion of them coming
into the hands of a family named Frezelier
or Frazer, they planted the roof-tree
of the great chiefship of that name
in the northern Highlands.

There is little doubt that the murder
of Athole was a piece of clannish
vengeance over which the chief had
no control. His wild Highland followers
saw him unhorsed: it was
enough. Into such puerile refinements[302]
as the law of chivalry, which
bound him to take the unhorsing with
the meekness of those who turn the
left cheek when the right is smitten,
they could not enter. The more they
believed in the high spirit of their
chief, the more they would be confident,
that he would exult in a signal
vengeance for the insult. Of course,
when the vengeance was accomplished,
it would rouse an unquenchable desire
of retaliation in the men of Athole;
and indeed it may be conjectured
from the circumstances of the whole
proceeding, that the king believed the
Byssets personally innocent, but dared
not, for the peace of the country, allow
them to remain in Scotland. And
yet, what is on the whole the most
remarkable feature of the Highland
feuds of the day,—neither the Athole
nor the Bysset family were old hereditary
patriarchs of the people. They
were foreign adventurers, but recently
rooted in the country. The
Celtic races seem to have at once
rallied round such intruders, in the
strongest and fiercest spirit of devotion.
When a chief had descendants,
his race held, of course, generally a
position which a stranger could not
shake. But if the people had quarrelled
with their chief, or if from other circumstances
the headship were vacant,
they clung with instantaneous tenacity
to the first Norman adventurer to
whom the monarch assigned their
territory; and the descendants of these
refined sons of chivalry by degrees
assimilated themselves to the people
among whom they were cast; becoming
ostensibly of the same race as
that over which they held rule.

The banishment of Bysset was
connected with important historical
results. Instead of going to Palestine,
per agreement, to pray for the soul of
the slaughtered Earl of Athole, he
went, according to Matthew Paris, to
a nearer and more agreeable place, the
court of England. There he fostered
in Henry III., those notions of the
feudal vassalage of the Scottish kings
to England, which produced the
invasion of his successor, Edward I.
Bysset had a considerable personal
interest in this question; for, if the
king of England had a paramount
superiority over Scotland, his banishment
and forfeiture might be reversed.
Such conduct shocks all historical
notions of patriotism; but what
better claim had Scottish nationality
on the Norman adventurer, than the
respectability of Juggernaut has on
a member of the supreme council of
Calcutta? The ancestors of the house
probably came over with William, a
century and a half earlier; the banished
lord was perhaps brought over
from England with his father or
grandfather, to accept the chiefship
of a portion of the Highland wastes,
over which the King of Scots professed
to hold sovereignty. Aggrandisement
was the sole object
among the barbarians of the north;
and when they ceased to derive a
territorial revenue within Scotland,
their connexion with the country
where they lived was as completely
closed, as that of the governor of a
colony when he is recalled.

The subsequent history of this race
was as strange and eventful as their
first appearance in the Scottish annals.
They became great lords in Ulster;
and early in the fifteenth century they
were again represented by a Scotsman,
Donald Balloch, the hero of the
battle of Inverlochy, whose mother
was the heiress of the Byssets. For
some time after this, we might trace
their descent, like the track of a wild
beast, by the marks of rapine and disorder;
and at a later period we finally
lose sight of the pedigree of the Byssets,
in Montrose’s celebrated ally,
Kilkittoch.

Few of the incidental notices connected
with those minor offences
which mark the general character of
the people, can be found anterior to
the commencement of the criminal
records. Hector Boece and our friend
the poet occasionally tell wondrous
incidents; but they are not to be depended
on, and few of them have
enough of dramatic spirit to be interesting
as fables. We are inclined,
however, to mention, in passing, the
judicial feats of stout old Regent Randolph,
whom the poet maintains to have
been the greatest of law reformers; in
testimony whereof, he adduces a case
in point, far beyond the nicety of modern
juridical philosophy. The regent
hanged a man for stealing his own property.
There was a law, that the community
should make good every theft,[303]
the perpetrator of which could not be
discovered. Founding on this law, a
husbandman secreted his plough-irons,
and received compensation.

The fraud was discovered, and the perpetrator
of it hanged.

The murder of James I. is one of
the few crimes anterior to the commencement
of the records, of which a
contemporary account, circumstantial
and truthlike, has been preserved.[P]
Few historical tragedies bear comparison
with this, either in the audacity
with which the assassination was
planned, or the relentless atrocity
with which it was perpetrated. Nothing
can afford so lively an illustration
of the perilous tenure of the Scottish
crown in the fifteenth century. We
would fain have had the telling of this
story, and of that part, especially,
where, after the household traitor had
removed the great iron bolt, a young
damsel, a daughter of the house of
Douglas, thrust her arm in the socket.
“She was but young,” says Hector
Boece, “and her bones not solid, and
therefore her arm was soon broken in
sunder, and the door dung open by
force.” Poor child! few have been
the acts of loyal devotion so heroic
as hers; but the whole narrative has
been so fully and minutely incorporated
with history, as to afford us no
excuse for here repeating it.[Q]

There are, on the other hand, among
the early criminal records, two instances
of conspiracy against the life
of the monarch, of which the particulars
are not sufficiently ample to give
them the interest of mystery. To
excite curiosity, we must see a certain
way, while we are unable to see so far
as we desire: but in these cases we
have little more than the accusation
and the condemnation. One of the
sufferers was Janet Lady Glammis,
condemned to be burned on the 17th
of July 1537; we find her name in
the criminal record five years earlier,
charged with “art and part of the intoxication
of John Lord Glammis her
husband.” The charge has not a very
formidable sound, but it doubtless
meant either poisoning or sorcery or
both; for they were then held to be
one concern, as the Romans showed
that they deemed them by the title
they conferred on the witch, “venefica.”
This trial is remarkable from
the circumstance of a number of gentlemen
having preferred paying a
penalty to acting on the jury. Perhaps
they were inclined, as a later
bulwark of our constitution is said to
have done, to find a verdict of ‘sarved
him right.’ It was through the instrumentality
of poison that the unfortunate
lady was charged with
intending to effect her design against
the life of the king; but of her motive,
or ultimate object there is no indication,
beyond her relationship to the
Douglas family, and probable connexion
with their intrigues. The
other charge of treason occurred so
closely at the same juncture, that for
this reason alone historians have supposed
that they had both some untraced
connexion with a common plot.
The culprit in this instance was John
Master of Forbes, who was charged
with a design to shoot the king as he
passed through the town of Aberdeen.
It was a service which he was likely
to have performed as successfully as
Bothwellhaugh, for he had already
shown his abilities in the murder of
his neighbour, Seton of Meldrum. In
those days, the people who took upon
them to fire at kings—very different
from the maudlin wretches whose
diseased brains conceive such horrid
projects in a civilised age—knew what
they were about, and were generally
successful. They were well accustomed
to “break into the bloody
house of life;” and the attempt on a
crowned monarch was merely a higher
range of practice, tasking their best
abilities. The simple truth is this:
that in the present age we are not
accustomed to shooting people, and[304]
therefore, when any wretch takes into
his frenzied brain a design to fire at a
Louis Philippe, he gets confused and
makes a bungle of it. It is not a
practice suited to the age, and no man
of any sense would adopt it.

The earliest of the Scottish criminal
records that have been preserved begin
in the reign of James IV., about
the year 1488. Mr Pitcairn, who has
generously laid these early records
before the public, not at the expense
of the record commission but at his
own, says of them,—”The books of
adjournal and minute books of the
supreme criminal tribunal of Scotland,
as well as the records of the Justice
Aires, &c. at these remote periods,
were kept in an obscure forensic Latin.
This circumstance, added to the well-known
difficulty of deciphering the ordinary
MSS. of these centuries, and the
fact of the books now preserved being
generally mere scrolls and memoranda,
written with many contractions and
evidently during the hurry of the
court proceedings, have hitherto rendered
the task of examining them,
and presenting the public with the
more important cases, a labour of a
peculiarly irksome and repulsive kind.”
We do not doubt it, and hence our
gratitude to Mr Pitcairn, for not only
deciphering these discouraging manuscripts,
but translating the Latin into
English. Those indeed who, like ourselves,
have perused his volumes—if
any other person has perused them—owe
a double debt of gratitude to Mr
Pitcairn; for he has enabled us to
read, in excellent type, what we would
otherwise have had to decipher in distressing
MS., and he has given us the
means of pursuing the task of research
by our own fireside, instead of in the interior
of the Register House; while we
have the satisfaction to feel, in perusing
his quartos, that the number of
people to whom, in common with
ourselves, they have laid the field open,
is a very limited one indeed—so
limited, that we shall consider every
quotation we make from his volumes
as select and valuable as if we were
able to subjoin MS. penes auct. to it.

The earliest of these translations
from the old Latin records contain
the minutes of circuit courts on the
Borders. The entries are as like each
other as those of a police charge book.
Plunder of cattle is the perpetual
theme, and the quantity of business
done by individuals is sometimes
startling. Here is an ordinary specimen:—

“Walter Scott of Howpaslot,
allowed to compound for treasonably
bringing in William Scott, called
Gyde, John his brother, and other
traitors of Levyn, to the Hereship of
Harehede. Item, for theftuously and
treasonably resetting of Henry Scott
and other traitors of Levyn: item, for
the treasonable stouthrief of forty
oxen and cows, and two hundred sheep,
from the tenants of Harehede, at the
same time. Robert Scott of Quhitchester
became surety for his entry at the
next Justice Aire.”

Such were the gentry who, in the
words of the namesake of Howpaslot,

Another entry like the former, containing
more names that will sound
not unfamiliar, may be given as a
further specimen. The two, from
their similarity, will satisfy the
reader that it would tend little to
edification to make a more extensive
selection.

“John Scott of Dalloraine, allowed
to compound for art and part of the
resetting of John Rede and John Scott
in Tushielaw in his theftuous deeds;
and especially the time that the said
John Scott stole a ‘drift’ of sheep from
Thomas Johnson forth of Quhithop.
Item, for treasonably resetting Hector
Armstrong, a traitor of Levyn, in his
theftuous deeds and treasons, &c., &c.
Item, for common oppression of the
lieges, in taking and plundering them
of their horses and goods by his own
authority. Item, for intercommuning
with the English in treasonable manner.
Item, for common reset of the
thieves of Liddesdaile, Eskdale, and
Ewesdale. Item, for slaughter of one
called Colthride, &c., &c. Robert Scott
of Quhitchester became surety to
satisfy the parties.”

The reader of Scottish history knows
that, in the year 1530, James V., finding
that by Circuit Courts of Justiciary
he produced little more effect
upon these Border depredators than if
he had made a gratuitous distribution
of Cicero de Officiis among them, made[305]
war on them, by leading an army
through their country, and destroyed
their strong-holds, as the German free
cities destroyed the castles of their
professional brethren on the Rhine.
It was on this occasion that Johnny
Armstrong visited him with twenty-four
armed “gentlemen,” according
to Pitscottie, “very richly apparelled,”
and that the king, turning haughtily
round from the freebooter’s proffered
courtesy said, “What wants yon
knave that a king should have?” There
is something sad in Armstrong’s
fate. He appears almost to have considered
the king one of his own class,—a
leader of men, but a greater leader.
Somewhat pompous and conceited he
appears to have been;—somewhat too
trustful in the effect of his hearty hail-fellow-well-met
way of approaching
the royal presence. In fact, Johnny
Armstrong “did not know his place,”
and treated the king too much like a
brother freebooter, of a higher standing
than himself. But, in his apprehension
and execution, there is something
that makes the nearest possible
approach to treachery; and we can
imagine a blush rising in the royal
cheek, when the robber captain turned
haughtily round and said, “I am but
a fool to seek grace at a graceless
face.” The entry regarding the redoubted
leader, in these records, is as
brief as it is humiliating, for the lion had
not the telling of the tale;—”John
Armstrong, alias BlakJok, and Thomas
his brother, convicted of common theft,
and reset of theft, &c., hanged.”

During the same reign, outbreaks
in the Highlands assumed a somewhat
similar character to those of the
Border rievers; but the Celts conducted
their operations on a much larger scale,
and we intend to devote to them a
separate paper.

The disturbances connected with the
Reformation are essentially a part of
the history of the kingdom, and in that
shape too well known to have a place
here: but a considerable time before
these great convulsions, some smaller
offences occasionally connected themselves
with the priesthood, and their
relation to the rest of the community.
Even in the days when the church
of Rome was so far Catholic as to be
almost co-extensive with Christianity,
Scotland was not without occasional
ebullitions, in which the savage nature
burst the spiritual bonds that, in its
ordinary moments, held it in subjection.
Boece relates an affair of this sort,
and its consequences, with a rapidity
almost unmatched, when we consider
the quantity and the serious character
of the business transacted. It was in
the reign of Alexander III. that, according
to his translator, “The men of
Caithness burnt Adam, their bishop,
after that he had cursed them for non-payment
of their teinds. King Alexander
hearing sic terrible cruelty done
to this noble prelate, ceased not till
four hundred of the principal doers
thereof were hanged.” “King Alexander,”
continues the chronicler, “for
this punition was gretumly beloved
by the Pope.” No wonder! Nearly
contemporary with the crusade of
James V. against the Border rievers,
was the murder of James Inglis, abbot
of Culross, by Blacater baron of Tullyallan,
and William Lothian, a priest,
both of whom were found guilty and
beheaded, while others were acquitted.
The trial seems to have excited much
interest, for Bishop Leslie tells us
that the ceremony of the degradation
of the priest, previously to
his being handed over to the civil
power, took place upon “ane public
scaffold in the toun of Edinburgh,”
“the King, the Queen, and a great
multitude of people being present.”
A year or two afterwards we find the
somewhat singular circumstance of a
whole list of priests charged with an
act of violence;—”John Roull, prior
of Pittenweem; Patrick and Bartholomew
Forman, and six other canons;
Mr Alexander Ramsay, rector of
Muckart; Sir John Ramsay, and
three other chaplains, and John Blackadder,
parish clerk of Sawling.” They
were re-pledged to be tried by their
own ecclesiastical court. It appears
that, in the course of a dispute regarding
the right to the produce of the
land of Pittenweem, an officer of the
court was appointed to reap the crop.
When he repaired to the spot, the
sub-prior and an assemblage of followers
threatened him with violence.
He found himself placed in a very
curious position, and made an equally
curious request. When a messenger
is deforced, those who have used
violence are liable to damages. The
messenger on this occasion, being a
shrewd and calculating man, surveyed[306]
the forces of his opponents before
making a “return of deforcement.”
To his mortification he perceived that,
to use an expression of modern origin,
“they were not worth powder and
shot.” There were none among them
“but religious men and priests, hinds’
wives and bairns, which were not
responsal to our sovereign lord gif
he had taken deforce.” He made
a request that they should “send
for Andrew Wood in Pittenweem,
John Brown of Anstruther, the laird
of Balcasky, or some other responsal
persons, to stop him, so that
he might indorse his deforcement and
depart, which they plainly refused.”
The request was about as reasonable
as if a gentleman, knocked down by a
ragged ruffian, were to ask him to get
some capitalist, able to pay respectable
damages, to come and aid in
the operation. The prior, meanwhile,
came to the assistance of his subordinates,
and put himself at the head of a
truly formidable array: three hundred
men, who “with hagbuts, culverings,
cross-bows, hand-bows, spears, halberts,
axes, and swords, came in
arrayed battle, with convocation and
ringing of their common bell,” and,
falling on the messenger’s party,
“shot divers pieces of artillery at
them.” The ecclesiastical people were
removed to their own court, so that
we lose trace of the proceedings against
them. Some of the laymen were
charged with the slaughter of the
messenger’s followers, and others outlawed
for failing to appear.

The same Spartan brevity that characterises
the early portions of the
criminal records, sometimes reduces the
history of bloody family feuds, the
particulars of which might fill volumes
of romance, to the most tantalising
dimensions. They are rather inventoried
or enumerated by head-mark,
than even recorded, and generally
present no more satisfactory detail
than the following:—

“1554, Oct. 26.—Robert Henry, alias
Deill amang us, convicted of art
and part of the cruel slaughter of
Thomas Bissate, young laird of
Querrel. Beheaded.”

“1532, July 3.—Rolland Lindesay,
Alan Lokhart of Lee, and William
Mosman, convicted of art and part
of the cruel slaughter of Ralph
Weir. Beheaded.”

That one of the parties might be a
magistrate administering the law, was
no impediment to the prosecution of a
feud, but rather served to give solemnity
and importance to the perpetration
of some act of vengeance: thus—

“1527, October 8.—George Ramsay of
Clatty, John Betoune of Balfour,
James Betoune Of Melgum, John
Grahame of Claverhouse, and
others, found caution to underly
the law at the first Justice Aire of
Fife, for convocation of the lieges,
to the number of 80 persons, and
in warlike manner invading John
Lord Lindesay, Sheriff of Fife, in
the execution of his office, in a
fenced court within the Tolbooth
of Cowper, the doors being shut,
and the assize inclosed; and for
breaking up the said doors.”

The meagreness of these entries
whets one’s appetite for some detail
of the stirring and tragical events of
which they form the bare indexes.
With the exception of the great
Highland feuds, which burned on so
large a scale as to be in a manner
historical, the earliest detailed account
of a crime arising in family animosity
is connected with the feud between
the Drummonds and the Blairs in the
year 1554. The crime which brought
the feud within the notice of the law,
was the murder of George Drummond
of Leadcrieff and William his son.
The perpetrators, besides a long list of
Blairs, include several other names still
known in the Braes of Perthshire—such
as Chalmers, Butter, Smyth, and
Robertson. They were charged with
assembling to the number of eighty,
“with jacks, coats of mail, steel bonnets,
lance-staffs, long culverings with
lighted lints, and other weapons invasive.”
The day on which this tumultuous
assembly proceeded to their
work of vengeance was a Sunday, and
the place chosen for the perpetration
was the church of Blair. Being apparently
afraid of the number of friends
and retainers by whom their victims
happened to be surrounded during the
performance of divine worship, it is
stated that they were obliged to postpone
their purpose, and that “they
passed to the Laird of Gormok’s place,
and their dyned with him:” a pretty
large dinner-party, certainly. Leaving
spies to watch the enemy’s motions,
they were soon afterwards summoned[307]
to their task, and their victims became
an easy prey. The occupation
of Drummond and his son—when we
remember that it was a Sabbath afternoon—might,
perhaps, be scarcely
considered so characteristic of Scottish
habits as their assassination. They
were “alane, at their pastime-play,
at the row-bowles, in the high market-gate,
beside the kirk of Blair, in
sober manner, trusting na trouble nor
harm to have been done to them, but
to have lived under God’s peace.”

The retribution on the offenders is
certainly not the least curious part of
the affair. That eighty armed men
should seize, and put to death, two
individuals, either in or out of a
church, appears to have been a matter
with which the law and the public
were under no obligation to interfere,
if the parties immediately interested
could come to terms. Accordingly,
we find on the record some fragments
of a negotiation between the head of
the Drummonds and the murderers.
Some of them, among other more
substantial offers, agree “to gang, or
cause to gang,” the four head pilgrimages
of Scotland; to do penance for
the souls of the dead for any reasonable
number of years; and, thirdly,
“to do honour to the kin and friends”
by kneeling and offering the handle of
a naked sword held by the point.
These offers are treated with some
disdain, as too “general and simple”
to require an answer. A further offer
of a thousand merks is treated with
more attention; but the kin declare
that it is far too small a fine “for the
committing of so high, cruell, and abominable
slaughters and mutilations of
set purpose.” To heighten the picture,
the deed of the murderers is set in contrast
with the peaceable and inoffensive
conduct of the deceased, whose great
merit was his “never offending them,
neither by drawing of blood, taking
kirks, tacks, steadings, or rooms, over
any of their heads, or their friends’.”
Thus the murder would have been
considered less unjustifiable, if the
victim had ever been concerned in
ejecting his assailants from their
holdings, or offering to take them
“over their head:” a doctrine of the
sixteenth century in Scotland, which
events of the nineteenth, in other
parts of the empire, have made only
too intelligible. The negotiation was
not quite successful, for some of the
parties were beheaded. One of them,
Chalmers of Drumlochie, along with
an offer to let his son marry Drummond’s
daughter, and his cousin marry
his sister, “without any tocher,”—an
arrangement which he seems to have
thought might be equivalent to
“lands, goods, or money,” of none of
which was he possessed,—proclaimed
himself “ready to do any other thing
quhilk is possible to him, as please my
lord and friends to lay to his charge,
except his life and heritage.” He bound
himself to Lord Drummond as a personal
vassal and follower, by a “band of
man-rent:” an instrument well-known
in old Scottish jurisprudence, and perpetually
cropping out in connexion
with any historical events—such as
the murder of Rizzio,—in which many
persons united themselves together
for the perpetration of a great crime.
It was a curious feature of national
character,—the form of law running
down through every thing, even to
the very document framed for setting
law at defiance. Chalmers’ bond was
merely one of general partisanship
and following, and he bound himself
to the Drummonds, and their heirs,
to “take their true and one-fold part,
in all and sundry their actions and
causes, and ride and gang with them
therein upon their expenses, when
they require me or my heirs thereto,
against all and sundry persons, our
sovereign lady and the authority of
this realm alanerly excepted. And
hereto I bind and oblige me and my
heirs to the said noble and mighty
lord and his heirs in the straitest form
and sicker stile of band of manrent
that can be devised, no remeid nor
exception of law to be proponed nor
alleged in the contrair.” It might be
no small consolation to the chief who
had lost a vassal to get a slave in his
stead; but the public peace would not
be much benefited by this method of
settlement.

Some of the precautions against
turbulent offences are not less curious
than this method of dealing with them
when they were committed. An
heiress might be compelled to find
security, or enter into recognisances
that she shall not give her hand and
fortune to an outlaw or scapegrace.
Thus, on the 13th of September 1563,
Mariene Carruthers, being “ane of[308]
the twa heretrixes of Moweswald,”
produced two landed proprietors who
became bound that she “shall not
mary ane chief traiter nor other broken
man of the country, nor join herself
with any sic person, under the
pain of ane thousand pounds.”

Whatever it may have been in
England, there was little divinity
hedging a Scottish king of the sixteenth
century. Perhaps, as a rich
peer and a poor peer are very different
things in popular estimation,
though equal in the Lord Chamberlain’s
list of precedence, so it may
have been with kings. The Scottish
king was poor, ill-housed, parsimoniously
served, meagerly guarded. His
pulse might beat with the blood of a
hundred monarchs; but the far-stretching
palaces, the long gorgeous trains
of attendants, the wealth at command,
were wanting, and divine right was
but a theory, that could neither give
parasites rich offices, nor dazzle the
eyes of worshippers. Thus it happens
that, side by side with the most magnificent
theoretical assumptions of
regal prerogative, stand the most ludicrous
instances of the crown’s weakness
and smallness. On the 11th
July 1526, Robert Bruce of Airth
and others are respited for having
committed a highway robbery on his
Majesty’s artillery—”for art and part
of the stouthrief of certain manganels
and artillery coming from the
castle of Stirling to the king’s Majesty,
at his burgh of Edinburgh, for the defence
of his person; and for art and
part of the stouthrief of the king’s
letters from his officers, and laying
violent hands on them.” We have
not far to wander for like instances,
making the monarch a simple human
being, against whom one commits, not
the majestic crime of high treason, but
the vulgar offences of theft and robbery.
Thus, in the very next entry, we find
“Walter Drummond acquitted by an
assize of art and part of the theft and
concealment of the king’s crown from
his crown-room, with the precious
stones therein contained, forth of the
palace and monastery of Holyrood.”

Every petty laird dined and slept
within the walls of his thick square
tower; isolated by moat or precipice,
by long dark passages and iron
grated door. In an age when individuals
thus protected themselves, it
naturally astonishes one to observe
how accessible the royal person
generally appears to have been—how
slightly protected from contact with
the people, how easily approached by
the assassin. One man was able to
remove all the impediments which
stood in the way of the Highland
band who slew James I. at Perth.
The murder of Rizzio, with all its
circumstances of cool premeditation,
and calm, steady, bitter insult, need
not be recalled to the reader, among the
other incidents, which show how thin a
partition separated the sovereign from
rude violence. The various forms in
which that turbulent and most pertinacious
of rebels, Francis Earl of
Bothwell, assailed King James, are
fraught with a ludicrous versatility
in the art of haunting and tormenting
a king. The official act of forfeiture
characterised it as “invading, assieging,
and persuing of his Majesty’s
most noble person, by fire and sword,
breaking up his chalmer doors with fore
hammers, and cruelly slaying his Highness’
servants coming to his Majesty’s
rescue.” “Ane treason and cruelty,” continues
the indignant document,
“not heard nor seen committed by
subjects so highly obliged to their
native king and prince.” The contemporary
chronicler, Birrel, characterised
the outrage as “a stoure,”
which the rebel created by striking
“with ane hammer at his Majesty’s
chamber door.” In his more renowned
and successful attempt, the
pathway to the person of royalty was
so completely cleared for him by a
courageous female, the Duchess of
Athole, whose house was next door
to the palace, that the weapons of
the guard were removed; the queen’s
bed-room, to which the beleaguered
monarch might have fled, was locked;
and the prime conspirator and his assistant
were comfortably lodged behind
the arras of the ante-room to the king’s
sleeping apartment. What might
not a boy Jones have accomplished
in those days? Should we, however,
pursue this subject further, we would
be trespassing on that ground of established
history which it is our desire
on the present occasion to avoid.

[309]

SIR SIDNEY SMITH.

[R]

A glance at the history of European
fleets would give, perhaps, the
highest conception of human powers
in the whole progress of mankind.
Philosophy, literature, and legislation,
of course, have attained illustrious
distinctions. But the naval service
combines every thing: personal intrepidity,
the strongest demand upon
personal resources, the quickest decision,
the most vigorous exertion of
manual and mechanical skill, the
sternest hardihood, and the most
practical and continual application of
science.

The unrivalled triumph of human
invention is the instrument by which
all those powerful qualities are brought
into play: a ship of the line, with all
its stores, its crew, and its guns on
board, is the wonder of the world.
What must be the dexterity of the
arrangement by which a thousand
men can be victualled, at the rate of
three meals a-day, for four months; a
thousand men housed, bedded, clothed,
and accoutred; a battery of a hundred
and twenty guns—the complement
of an army of fifty thousand
men, and two or three times the
weight of field-guns—fought; this
mighty vessel navigated through every
weather, and the profoundest practical
science applied to her management,
through night and day, for years
together? No combination of human
force and intellectual power can
contest the palm with one of those
floating castles, of all fortresses the
most magnificent, the most effective,
and the most astonishing.

The history of the British navy, in
its present form, begins with that
vigorous and sagacious prince, Henry
VII., who was the first builder of
ships, calculated not merely for the
defence of the coast, but as an establishment
of national warfare. The
strong common-sense of his rough,
but clear-headed son, Henry VIII.,
saw the necessity for introducing order
into the navy; and he became the
legislator of the new establishment.
He first constructed an admiralty, a
Trinity-board for the furtherance of
scientific navigation; appointed Woolwich,
Deptford, and Portsmouth as
dockyards, and declared the naval
service a profession.

Elizabeth, who had all the sagacity
of Henry VII., and all the determination
of his successor, paid especial
attention to the navy; and the national
interest was the more strongly
turned to its efficacy by the preparations
of Spain, which was then the
paramount power of Europe. When
the Armada approached the English
shores, she met it with a navy
of one hundred and seventy-six
ships, manned with fourteen thousand
men. And in that spirit of wise
generosity, which always marked her
sense of public service, she doubled
the pay of the sailor, making it ten
shillings a-month. The defeat of the
Armada gave a still stronger impulse
to the popular feeling for the sea;
signals were formed into a kind of
system, and all the adventurous spirits
of her chivalric court sought fame in
naval enterprise.

From that period a powerful fleet
became an essential of British supremacy;
and the well-known struggle
of parties, in the time of the unfortunate
Charles, began in the refusal
of a tax to build a fleet. In the early
part of his reign, Charles had built
the largest ship of his time, “The
Sovereign of the Seas,” carrying one
hundred guns.

The civil war ruined every thing,
and the navy was the first to suffer.
Cromwell found it dilapidated, but
his energy was employed to restore
it. Blake, by his victories, immortalised
himself, and raised the name of
the British fleet to the highest point
of renown; and Cromwell, at his
death, left it amounting to one hundred
and fifty-four sail, of which one-third
were of the line. The Protector
was the first who proposed naval[310]
estimates, and procured a regular sum
for the annual support of the fleet.

The Dutch war, in the reign of
Charles, compelled further attention
to the navy; and when William
ascended the throne, he found one
hundred and fifty-four vessels, carrying
nearly six thousand guns; but the
French still exceeded us by one thousand
guns.

In the reigns of George I. and II.
the fleet continued to increase in size,
strength, and discipline. Much of
this was owing to the Spanish and
French wars. In the war of 1744
we had taken thirty-five sail of the
French line! But the incessant treachery
of French politics was soon to
be still more strikingly exhibited, and
more severely punished.

The revolt of the American colonies
stimulated the French government
to join the rebels. The
hope of doing evil to England has
always been enough to excite the
hostility of foreigners. France was
in alliance with us; but what was
good faith to the temptation of inflicting
an injury on England? An act
of intolerable treachery was committed;
France, unprovoked, suddenly
sent a fleet and army to the
aid of America, and the French war
began, to the utter astonishment of
Europe.

But there is sometimes a palpable
retribution even here. In that war,
which was wholly naval on the part
of France, her fleets were constantly
beaten; and the defeat of De Grasse,
in the West Indies, finished the naval
contest by the most brilliant victory of
the period. Another vengeance was
reserved for England in Europe. The
siege of Gibraltar, if not undertaken
directly at the suggestion of France, at
least a favourite project of hers, and attended
by French officers and princes,
became one of the most gallant and
glorious defences on record; the besiegers
were defeated with frightful
loss, and the war closed in a European
acknowledgment of English superiority.

But the retribution had not yet
wrought its whole work. Rebellion
broke out in France. The French
troops returning from America had
brought back with them republican
views and vices. The treaty-breaking
court was destroyed at the first
explosion; the treaty-breaking ministers
were either slain, or forced to
take refuge in England: the treaty-breaking
king was sent to the scaffold;
and the treaty-breaking nation was
shattered by civil and foreign war;
until, after a quarter of a century of
fruitless blood, of temporary successes,
and of permanent defeats,
the empire was torn in pieces; France
was conquered, Paris was twice seized
by the Allies, and Napoleon died a
prisoner in English hands.

The naval combats of the American
war had a remarkable result. They
formed a preparation for the still more
desperate combats of the French naval
war. They trained the English officers
to effective discipline; they accustomed
the English sailors to victory, and
the French to defeat; and the consequence
was, a succession of English
triumphs and French defeats in the
war of 1793, to which history affords
no parallel.

The French republican declaration
of war was issued on the memorable
first of February 1793. Orders
were instantly sent to the ports for
the fleet to put to sea. Such was its
high state of preparation, that almost
immediately fifty-four sail of the line,
and a hundred and forty-six smaller
vessels, were ready for sea. The republican
activity of France had already
determined on contending for naval
empire; and a fleet of eighty-two sail
of the line were under orders, besides
nearly as many more on the stocks.
But all was unavailing. The defeats
suffered in the ten years previous to
the peace of Amiens in 1803, stripped
France of no less than thirty-two
ships of the line captured, and eleven
destroyed; and her allies, Holland,
Spain, and Denmark, of twenty-six
of the line, with five hundred and
nineteen smaller ships of war taken
or destroyed, besides eight hundred
and seven French privateers also
taken or destroyed. The French
had become builders for the English.
Of their ships of the line fifty were
added to the English navy.

On the recommencement of the
war in 1804, the British fleet numbered
nearly double that of the enemy;
but the French ships were generally
larger and finer vessels. It is difficult[311]
to understand from what circumstance
the French, and even the
Americans, seem always to have the
superiority in ship-building. Our
mechanical skill seems always to
desert us in the dockyard.

During the war, our naval armament
continued to increase from year
to year, until, in 1810, it had reached
the prodigious number of five hundred
pennants, of which one hundred were
of the line, with one hundred and forty-five
thousand seamen and marines!

Since the peace, a good deal of
attention has been paid to the construction
of ships of war. But it appears
to have been more successful in
the economical arrangement of the
interior than in the figure, which is
the essential point for sailing. The
names of Seppings, Symonds, Hayes,
Inman, and others, have attained
some distinction; but we have not
yet obtained any certain model of a
good sailing ship. Some vessels have
succeeded tolerably, and others have
been total failures, though built on
the same stocks and by the same
surveyor. Yet the strength, the
stowage, and the safety, have been
improved. It is rather extraordinary
that government has never
offered a handsome reward for the
invention of the best sailing model;
as was done so long since, and with
such effect, in the instance of the
time-keepers. Five thousand pounds
for a certain approach to the object,
and five thousand more for
complete success, would set all the
private builders on the pursuit; and
it can scarcely be doubted that they
would ultimately succeed. Even
now, the private yacht-builders produce
some of the fastest sailing vessels
in the world; the merchant ship-builders
send out fine ships, of the
frigate size, and the private steam-ship
builders are unrivalled; while
we have continual complaints of the
deficiencies of the vessels built in the
royal dockyards.

Some of those complaints may be
fictitious, and some ignorant; but the
constant changes in their structure,
and their perpetual repairs, imply inferiority
in our naval schools of architecture.
The chief attention of the
royal dockyards, within these few
years, has been turned to the building
of large steam-ships, armed with guns
of the heaviest calibre. But the
attempt is evidently in a wrong direction.
The effort to make fighting
ships of steamers, ruins them in both
capacities. It destroys their great
quality, speed; and it exposes them
with an inadequate power to the
line-of-battle ship. They are incomparable
as tugs to a fleet, as conveying
troops, as outlying vessels, as every
thing but men-of-war. A shot would
break up their whole machinery, and
leave them at the mercy of the first
frigate that brought its broadside to
bear upon them in their helpless condition.
In all the trials of the fleet
during the last two years, the heavy
armed steamers were invariably left
behind in a gale, while one of the
light steamers ran before every frigate.

We have now two fleets on service,
one in the Tagus, and another at Malta;
but both are weak in point of numbers,
though in a high state of equipment.
A few rasee guardships are scattered
round the coast. Some large steamers
remain at Portsmouth and Plymouth
ready for service; but, from all accounts,
there is nothing of that active
and vigorous preparation which
ought to be the essential object of the
country, while France is menacing us
from day to day, while she has an immense
naval conscription, is building
powerful ships, is talking of invasion,
and hates us with all the hatred of
Frenchmen. In such emergencies, to
think of sparing expense is almost a
public crime; and no public execration
could be too deep, as no public punishment
could be too severe, if neglect of
preparation should ever leave us at
the mercy of the most mischievous of
mankind. But no time is to be
thrown away.

Whether we shall be prepared to
meet and punish aggression, ought no
longer to be left dependent on the will
of individuals. The nation must bestir
itself. It must have meetings,
and subscriptions, and musters. We
must be ready to give up a part of our
superfluities to save the rest. Whether
France intends to attack us,
without provocation, and through a
mere rage of aggression, we know not;
but the language of her journals is
malignant, and it is the part of wise
and brave men to be prepared.

[312]We shall now give an outline of
the gallant career of one of those
remarkable men, who, uniting courage
and conduct, achieved an imperishable
name in our naval annals.

William Sidney Smith was born on
the 21st of June 1764. He began
his naval career before he was twelve
years old. All his family, for four
generations, had been naval or military.
His great-grandfather was
Captain Cornelius Smith. His grandfather
was Captain Edward Smith,
who commanded a frigate, in which
he was severely wounded in an attack
on one of the Spanish settlements in
the West Indies, where he died shortly
after. His father was the Captain
Smith of the Guards, whose
name became so conspicuous on the
trial of Lord George Germaine, to
whom he was aide-de-camp at the
battle of Minden, and who after that
trial retired from the army in disgust.
Sir Sidney’s uncle was a general, and
his two brothers were Lieut.-Colonel
Douglas Smith, governor of Prince
Edward’s Island, and John Spencer
Smith, who held a commission in the
Guards, but afterwards exchanged
the service for diplomacy, in which
his name became distinguished as
an envoy to several Continental
courts during the war of the Revolution.
Sir Sidney’s mother was the
daughter of a Mr Wilkinson, an opulent
London merchant, who, however,
seems to have disinherited his daughter
from discontent at her match, and
left the chief part, if not the entire, of
his property to her sister, who was
married to Lord Camelford. Sir
Sidney was for a few years at Tunbridge
School, from which, however,
he was withdrawn at an age so early
that nothing but strong natural talent
could have enabled him to exhibit in
after-life the fluency, and even the
occasional eloquence, which distinguished
his pen. His first rating on
the books of the Admiralty was in the
Tortoise, in June 1777. In the beginning
of the next year he was appointed
to the Unicorn, and began
his career by a gallant action, in
which his ship captured an American
frigate. He was then but fourteen.
In 1779 he joined the Sandwich, the
flag-ship of Rodney, in which he was
present at the victory obtained over
the Spaniards in the next year.

Those were stirring times. In the
same year he was appointed lieutenant
of the Alcide. And in this ship he
was present at Graves’ action with
the French, off the Chesapeake.

In the following year he was in the
greatest naval action of the war—the
famous battle of the 12th of April
1782, off the Leeward Islands, when
Rodney defeated the French fleet,
commanded by the Comte de Grasse.
In the following May, he was appointed
to the command of the Fury sloop,
by Rodney; and in the October following
was promoted to the rank of
captain into the Alcmene, having
been on the list of commanders only
five months.

Thus he was a captain at the age of
eighteen! The war was now at an
end; his ship was paid off, and he
went to reside at Caen, for the purpose
of acquiring a knowledge of the
French language. There he spent a
well-employed and agreeable time.
Many of the French families of condition
resided in the neighbourhood;
and the young captain, having brought
letters to the Duc de Harcourt, governor
of the province, was hospitably
received. The French were then a
polished people; they knew nothing
of republicanism, and were not proud
of their ferocity; they had none of that
frantic hatred of England which is the
folly and the fashion of our day, and
might be regarded as a civilised people.
The duke invited him to his
country-seat, and there showed him
the improvements in his grounds, and
introduced him to his visitors.

Like most men destined to distinction,
Sir Sidney Smith was constantly
preparing himself for useful
service, by the acquisition of knowledge.
The Mediterranean is naturally
presumed to be the great theatre
of naval exploits. He obtained leave
of absence, and went to the Mediterranean.
While at Gibraltar, thinking,
from the violent language of the Emperor
of Morocco, that there might
be a Moorish war, he made a journey
along the coast of Morocco, for the
purpose of acquainting himself with
the condition of its naval force and
harbours. Having obtained the necessary
information, which obviously
required considerable exertion and no
slight expense, he stated its results in
a manly and intelligent letter to the[313]
Admiralty, offering his services in
case of hostilities, and suggesting the
appointment of a squadron to be stationed
outside the Straits, for the
prevention of any naval enterprise on
the part of the Moors.

Among the most accessible ports, he
mentions Mogadore, which, as not
being a bar harbour, is easily approachable
by ships of force; and
though the works contained many
guns, yet they were so ill-placed, that
in all probability they could not resist
an attack. We recollect that the
cannonade of this town was one of
the exploits on which the Prince de
Joinville plumed his heroism, and of
which all France talked as if it were
the capture of a second Gibraltar.

The same spirit of inquiry and preparation
for probable service led him
to Sweden, during the war of the brave
and unfortunate Gustavus with the
Empress Catherine.

We may pause a moment on the
memory of one of the most remarkable
princes of his time. Gustavus, born
in 1746, in 1771 ascended the throne
of Sweden, on the death of his father
Frederic.

The Swedish nobility were poor,
and affected a singular habit of following
the fashions of France, of
whose government, probably, the
chiefs of their body were pensioners.
The lower orders were ignorant, and
probably not less corrupted by the
gold of Russia. Gustavus found his
throne utterly powerless between
both,—a States-General possessing the
actual power of the throne, and even
that assembly itself under the control
of a Russian and a French faction, designated
as the hats and caps. Gustavus,
a man of remarkable talent,
great ardour of character, and much
personal pride, naturally found this
usurpation an insult, and took immediate
means for its overthrow. He lost
no time; his first efforts were exerted
to attach the national militia to his
cause. When all was ready, the explosion
came. The governor of one
of the towns suddenly issued a violent
diatribe against the States-General.
The king was applied to to punish the
contumacious rebel. He instantly
sent a large military force, with his
brother at its head, to punish
the governor. By secret instructions
it joined him. The plan was
now ripening. In all that follows, we
are partly reminded of Charles I., of
Cromwell, and of Napoleon. Like
Charles, the king entered the assembly
of the States and demanded some of
the members. Like Napoleon, he
had the regiments of the garrison ready
on parade, and rushing out of the assembly,
he was received by the troops
with shouts. The oath of allegiance
was renewed to him with boundless
acclamation. Several of the chiefs of
the States-General were immediately
put under arrest, and the whole body
were completely intimidated. On the
next day, the States-General were
once more invited to assemble. The
king, at the head of his military staff,
like Cromwell, entered the hall, and
presented them with the “new constitution.”
The troops had already
settled the question. On its being put
to the vote of the assembly, a majority
appeared in its favour. The States-General
sank into a cipher, and the
revolution was triumphant.

The new constitution had given
great joy to the people, long disgusted
with the arrogance of the
States-General. But the nobles,
whose powers had been curtailed,
nourished a passion for vengeance.
The war of 1788 with Russia, in
which the finances of the kingdom
began to be severely pressed, gave
them the opportunity. The States
still existed; and the disaffected nobles,
influenced their votes, to the extent
of refusing the supplies, though the
Danes were in the Swedish territory,
and actually besieging Gothenburg at
the moment. The king must have
been undone, but for the patriotism of
the mountaineers of Dalecarlia; who,
if they could not give him money,
gave him men. Gustavus, indignant
at his palpable injuries, now determined
on extinguishing the power
which had thus thwarted him in his
career. In 1788, he suddenly arrested
the chiefs of the opposition, and introduced
a law, still more controlling
the power of the nobles. But this
act was regarded as doubly tyrannical,
and deserving of double vengeance.

On the conclusion of the war within
two years after, the malcontents,
fearful that the leisure of peace would[314]
produce further assaults on their privileges,
resolved to take the decision
into their own hands.

The period began to be troubled.
The French revolution had just broken
out, and it had at once filled all the
Continental sovereigns with alarm,
and all the population with vague
theories of wealth, enjoyment, and
freedom. The king of Sweden, known
for his talents, distinguished in war,
and loud in his hatred of France and
her furies, had been chosen by the
allied monarchs to head the invasion
of the republic. Whether the councils
of the nobles partook more of fear, or
hatred, or the hope of political overthrow,
can now be scarcely ascertained;
but they issued in an atrocious
conspiracy against the royal life.

It is remarkable that there is
scarcely an instance of conspiracy
against the lives of eminent personages,
in which the design was not
previously discovered, and was successful
only through an unwise and
contemptuous disregard of the intelligence.
This seems to have been the
course of things, from the days of
Cæsar. The King of Sweden was
informed of his danger; and even
that the attempt was deferred only
until the period of some fêtes, to be
given at court. But the king, accustomed
to danger, and probably refusing
to believe in the existence of a
crime rare among his countrymen,
disdained all measures of precaution,
and even appears not to have taken
any further notice of the conspiracy.
This might have been the conduct of
a brave man, but the consequence
showed that it was not the conduct of
a wise one.

On the 16th of March 1792, the
ball was given: the king appeared
among the maskers: he was evidently
careless of all hazard, and was conversing
with a group, when, Ankerstrom,
the intended assassin, entered
the Salle. This traitor had been a
captain in the service, but had been
dismissed, or had conceived himself to
be insulted by the king. Gustavus
was pointed out to him by one of the
conspirators: he stole behind the king,
and fired at his back a pistol loaded
with slugs and nails. Gustavus fell
mortally wounded, and was carried to
his chamber in agony. The assassin
coolly walked out of the Salle, unobserved
in the confusion, but was arrested
next day. He was brought to
trial, and died the death of a regicide.
The chief conspirators were banished.
The king languished until the end of
the month, when he died, with great
firmness and resignation.

On the pistol of Ankerstrom may
have turned the fortunes of the French
Revolution. Gustavus, a king, a
man of military genius, and ardent in
all that he undertook, would have
escaped all the errors of the Duke of
Brunswick. His personal rank would
have rendered him independent of the
wavering politics of the allies; his
talent would have rectified the obsolete
notions of their statesmen; and his
spirit of enterprise would have rescued
his army from the most fatal of all
dangers to an invader—delay. He
would have overruled the prejudices
of the Aulic Council, and the artifices
of the Prussian cabinet; and hoisted
the allied flag in Paris, before the first
levy of the Republic could have taken
the field.

France can scarcely be regarded as
having an army until 1795. The old
royal army, though consisting of
180,000 men, was scattered in position
and doubtful in principle. The
Republican levies were yet but
peasantry. The King of Sweden, at
the head of 150,000 Prussians and
Austrians, then the first troops in
Europe in point of equipment and
discipline, would have walked over
all resistance; and France would have
been spared the most miserable, and
Europe the bloodiest, page of its
annals.

The fall of Gustavus was also fatal
to his dynasty. His son, Gustavus
IV., inheriting his passions without
his talents, and quarrelling with his
allies without being able to repel his
enemies, was expelled from the throne,
after a series of eccentricities almost
amounting to frenzy. He was arrested
in the streets by General
Alderkreutz, by order of the Diet.
His uncle, the Duke of Sudermania,
was appointed regent; and, on the
king’s subsequent abdication, was
proclaimed king, by the title of Charles
XIII.

On his death, Bernadotte was
elected to the throne, which he retained[315]
through life;—the solitary instance
of permanent power among
all the generals of the French empire;
but an instance justified by high
character, by his acquirement of the
throne without crime, and by its possession
without tyranny.

There may be no royal road to fame,
but there are some habits which naturally
lead to it; one of those, activity
of spirit, Sir Sidney Smith possessed
in a remarkable degree. Wherever any
thing new or exciting in his profession
was to be seen, there he was certain to
be. In 1789, the Swedish and Russian
fleets were fighting in the Baltic.
England was at peace,—his ship had
been paid off; relaxation, the London
balls, the Parisian theatres, rambles
through the German watering-places,
were before him. Ten thousand idlers
of the navy would have enjoyed them
all without delay. But the young
captain was determined to rise in his
profession; and, as the time might
come when a Swedish or a Russian
war might be on the hands of England
herself, he felt that it might be advantageous
for an English officer to have
some knowledge of the Baltic.

Unluckily, the chief portion of his
correspondence in Sweden has been
lost. It was very voluminous; but,
with all his documents on the subject
of his Swedish service, it had been left
in Camelford House, to the care of its
proprietor, Lord Grenville. The house
was subsequently let for the residence
of the Princess Charlotte, and the
papers were removed to the care of a
tradesman near Cavendish Square,
whose premises were destroyed by
fire, and the MSS. were almost wholly
consumed. If there is no other moral
in the story, it should at least be a
warning to diplomatic and warlike
authorship, to apply to the press as
speedily as possible.

But, from his Swedish expedition
is certainly to be dated the whole distinction
of his subsequent career.
He might otherwise have lingered
through life on half-pay, or have been
suffered merely to follow the routine
of his profession, and been known
only by the Navy List.

In 1789, he applied for six months’
leave of absence to go to the Baltic,
but without any intention to serve.
There he was introduced to the King
of Sweden, and attracted so much interest
by his evident ability and animation
of manner, that the king was
desirous of fixing him in his service,
and of giving him an important command.
The temptation was strong,
but we need scarcely say, that even if
leave were given, it ought not to have
been accepted. No man has a right
to shed the blood of man but in defence
of his own country, or by command
of his own sovereign. But in
the next year he received the following
flattering request from the king.

“Captain Sidney Smith,—The great
reputation you have acquired in serving
your own country with equal success
and valour, and the profound calm
which England enjoys not affording
you any opportunity to display your
talents at present, induce me to propose
to you to enter into my service
during the war, and principally for
the approaching campaign.

“To offer you the same rank and
appointments which you enjoy in your
own country, is only to offer you
what you have a right to expect; but
to offer you opportunities of distinguishing
yourself anew, and of augmenting
your reputation, by making
yourself known in these northern seas
as the élève of Rodney, Pigot, Howe,
and Hood, is, I believe, to offer you
a situation worthy of them and yourself,
which you will not resist; and the
means of acquitting yourself towards
your masters in the art of war, by extending
their reputation, and the estimate
in which they are held already
here.

“I have destined a particular command
for you, if you accept my offer,
concerning which I will explain myself
more in detail when I have your
definitive answer. I pray God to
have you in his holy keeping. Your
very affectionate

Gustavus.

“Haga, January 17, 1790.”

This showy offer overcame Sir Sidney’s
reluctance at once; but as he
could not enter into the Swedish
service without leave from home, he
took advantage of the opportunity of
bringing home despatches from the
minister in Stockholm, and thus became
the bearer of his own request.
The Duke of Sudermania, the king’s
second in command, also wrote to
him a most friendly letter, entreating[316]
of him to return as speedily as possible,
and bidding him bring some of his
brave English friends along with him.

The offer to him had been the command
of the light squadron. Sir
Sidney set out on the wings of hope
accordingly, and expected to be received
with open arms by the ministers;
but he was seriously disappointed
in the expected ardour of his
reception. It was with extreme
difficulty that he could find any
one to listen to him. At last he
obtained an audience of the Duke
of Leeds, who, however, would give
no answer, until the whole matter had
been laid before a cabinet council.
The gallant sailor now began to experience
some of those trials to which
every man in public life is probably
subjected, at one time or another.
He now determined to wait with
patience, and his patience was amply
tried. In this state he remained for
six weeks, until at last he determined
to write to the King of Sweden,
proposing to give up his appointment,
but stating that he was determined
to return to join the Duke of Sudermania
as a volunteer. Sir Sidney
now offered to be the bearer of
despatches to Sweden, but the offer
was declined with official politeness.
He immediately sailed for Sweden,
when the King placed him on board
a yacht which followed the royal
galley in action.

We must now take leave of this
war of row-boats, in which, however,
several desperate actions were fought;
but though row-boats or galleys were
the chief warriors, both fleets exhibited
a large number of heavy frigates or
line-of-battle ships. Those, however,
were scarcely more than buoys, among
the narrow channels of the Baltic, obstructed
as they were by islands, headlands,
and small defensible harbours.
Sir Sidney was active on all occasions.
In one instance, where an attack
on the Russian fleet was proposed,
and the objection made by the captains
was the difficulty of proceeding
by night through an intricate channel,
he rode across a neck of land, took a
peasant’s boat from the shore, sounded
the channel during the night, and
made himself master of the landmarks,
settling the signals with the
advanced post on shore.

He was soon after engaged in a desperate
action, in which he, with his
little troop, having been abandoned
by the divisions ordered to attack on
other points, was beaten, after a most
gallant resistance.

But the King knew how to feel for
brave men, however unlucky, and sent
him a complimentary letter, on the
gallantry and zeal which “he had the
faculty of communicating to those who
accompanied him.” The King, in several
communications, remarks on this
quality of exciting the spirit of activity
and enterprise in others, which seems
to have been Sir Sidney’s characteristic
in almost every period of his naval career;
and which doubtless proceeded
from peculiar ardour and animation in
himself.

The war closed by an armistice
and treaty, in 1792. But Sir Sidney
then received the reward of his gallant
zeal, in his investiture with the Grand
Cross of the Swedish Order of the
Sword, by George III. himself; which
we believe to have been an unusual
distinction in the instance of foreign
orders, and to have been at the request
of the late King of Sweden.

Though Sir Sidney Smith had apparent
reason to complain of the coldness
of his reception on his first return
to England, it is evident that his conduct
in Sweden had attracted the
attention of ministers. As a simple
English captain, attracting the notice
of the most warlike monarch of Europe,
evidently holding a high place
in his confidence, offered a distinguished
command, and receiving one
of the highest marks of honour that
could be conferred by Gustavus, he
was regarded as having done honour
to his country. But we have heard
from those who were intimate with
him in early life, that he was also a
remarkably striking personage in person
and manners; his countenance
singularly expressive, his manner full
of life, and his language vivid and intelligent.
His person was then thin
and active, which in after-life changed
into heaviness and corpulency—a most
complete transformation; but if the
countenance had lost all its fire, it retained
its good sense and its good
nature.

From an early period of the Revolutionary
war, the eyes of France had[317]
been turned on Egypt, a country which
the extravagant descriptions of Savary
had represented as capable of “being
turned into a terrestrial paradise, if
in possession of France.” There her
men of science were to reveal all
the mysteries of the Pyramids, her
philosophers were to investigate human
nature in its most famous cradle,
her soldiers were to colonise in patriarchal
ease and plenty; and even her
belles and beaux were to luxuriate in
gilded galleys on the waters of the inscrutable
Nile, and revel in painted
palaces in the shade of tropical gardens,
and bowers that knew no winter!
Further collision with England
led to further objects; and in time,
when the Republic had assumed a
shape of direct hostility with all
Europe, with England at its head,
the seizure of Egypt tempted France
in another form, as the first step to
the conquest of India.

But long before this period, the sagacity
of the English cabinet had seen
the probable direction of French enterprise,
and felt the necessity of
obtaining all possible information relative
to the coasts of Asiatic Turkey
and Syria. For this important purpose
Sir Sidney Smith was chosen,
and sent on a secret mission to Constantinople;
partly, perhaps, from the
circumstance that his brother, Mr Spencer
Smith, who was then our ambassador
there, would communicate with
him more advantageously than with a
stranger; but undoubtedly much more
for his qualifications for a service of
such interest and importance.

Nothing is left of those memorials,
further than a few notes of the expenses
of his journeys; from which he
appears to have examined the coasts
of the Black Sea, the Bosphorus, the
Dardanelles, the Archipelago, and the
Ionian Islands. But he was now to distinguish
himself on a higher scene of
action.

In September 1793, the officers of
the French navy at Toulon, and the
chief inhabitants, disgusted with the
Revolution, and alarmed by the cruelties
of the Revolutionary tribunals;
hoisted the white flag, and proposed
to Lord Hood, commanding the British
squadron off the coast, that he
should take possession of the city and
shipping, in the name of Louis XVII.

It must be confessed, that there
never was a great military prize, more
utterly thrown away, nor an effort
of loyalty more unlucky. The whole
transaction only gives the lesson, that
what the diplomatists call “delicacy”
is wholly misplaced when men come
to blows, and that in war promptitude
is every thing. The first act of Lord
Hood ought to have been to remove
the fleet, strip the arsenals, and send
the whole to England, there to be kept
secure for its rightful king. The next
ought to have been, to give every inhabitant
the means of escaping to some
safer quarter, with his property. The
third ought to have been, to garrison
the forts with every soldier who could
be sent from Gibraltar and England;
from which we could have sent 50,000
men within three weeks. Toulon then
might have been made the stronghold
of a loyal insurrection in the south,
and the garrison of all the foreign
troops, which the French princes could
muster.

Not one of these things was done.
The ships were left until the last moment,
through “delicacy” to the people;
the people were left to the last
moment, through a perilous confidence
in the chances of war; and Toulon
was lost by an attack of ragamuffins,
and the battery of Lieutenant Buonaparte,
which an English regiment
would have flung into the sea, and
sent its commandant to an English
prison.

But, even in the midst of these instances
of ill-luck, Sir Sidney Smith
made himself conspicuous by his services.
When returning from his Mediterranean
survey, he happened to stop
at Smyrna; and there observing a number
of British sailors loitering about
the streets, he offered them service;
and purchasing a small lateen-rigged
vessel, about forty feet long, which
he manned with forty sailors, and
steering for Toulon, he turned over his
little vessel and its crew to Lord
Hood.

This was another example of that
activity of mind and ready attention
to circumstances, which characterised
his career. A hundred other officers
might have seen those sailors wandering
about Smyrna, without thinking
of the purchase of a vessel to
make them useful to their country;[318]
or might have been too impatient to
return to England, for a detour to
Toulon.

Lord Hood, though a brave man,
was a dull one, and had all the formality
of a formal time. Sir Sidney’s
gallant volunteering was forgotten,
and the defence of Toulon was carried
on under every possible species of
blundering. At length the enemies’
guns began to play from the heights,
and the order was given for the fleet
to retire. Whether even this order
was not premature may still be
doubted; for the French batteries, few
and weak, could scarcely have made
an impression on so powerful a
fleet; and the British broadsides might
have made it impossible for the enemy
to hold the town, especially after all
its works had been dismantled. But
the order was given, and was about to be
executed, when Sir Sidney asked the
question which seems to have occurred
to no one else: “What do you mean
to do with all those fine ships: do
you mean to leave them behind?”
Some one called out,—”Why, what
do you mean to do with them?” The
prompt answer was,—”Burn them, to
be sure.” By some chance, the answer
reached Lord Hood’s ears; he
immediately sent for Sir Sidney, and
to him, though on half pay, and then
irregularly employed, was given this
important duty.

The employment was highly perilous,
not only from the hazards of
being blown up, or buried in the
conflagration, but from the resistance
of the populace and galley-slaves,
besides that of the troops, who, on the
retreat of the English, were ready to
pour into the town. His force, too,
was trifling, consisting only of the
little vessel which he had purchased
at Smyrna, three British gun-boats,
and three Spanish. But the operation
was gallantly performed. The stores
of the arsenal were set on fire; a fireship
was towed into the middle of the
French fleet, and all was soon one immense
mass of flame: perhaps war
never exhibited a scene more terribly
sublime. Thirteen sail of the line,
with all the storehouses, were blazing
together. The French, too, began to
fire from the hills, and the English
gun-boats returned the fire with discharges
of grapeshot on the troops as
they came rushing down to the gates
of the arsenal. All was uproar and
explosion.

The most melancholy part of the
whole narrative is the atrocious vengeance
of the Republicans on gaining
possession. An anecdote of this scene
of horror, and of the especial treachery
of Napoleon, is given on the authority
of Sir Sidney.

“The Royalist inhabitants, or the
chief portion of them, had been driven
into the great square of the town, and
compressed there into one huge mass.
Napoleon then discharged his artillery
upon them, and mowed them down.
But as many had thrown themselves
on the ground to escape the grapeshot,
and many were only wounded, this
villain of villains cried out aloud,—’The
vengeance of the Republic is
satisfied, rise and go to your homes.’
But the wretched people no sooner
stood up than they received another
discharge of his guns, and were all
massacred. If any one act of man
ever emulated the work of the devil,
this act, by its mingled perfidy and
cruelty, was the one.”

It is impossible to read the life of
this intrepid and active officer, without
seeing the encouragement which it
holds forth to enterprise. In this sense
it ought to have a part in the recollections
of every soldier and sailor of
England. Sir Sidney had perhaps
rivals by the thousand in point of
personal valour and personal intelligence;
but the source of all his distinctions
was, his never losing sight of
his profession, and never losing an opportunity
of service. On this principle
we may account for every step
of his career, and on no other. He
appears to have had no parliamentary
interest, no ministerial favour, no connexion
of any kind which could essentially
promote his interest, and even
to have been somewhat neglected by
admirals under whom he served. But
he never lost an opportunity of being
present where any thing was to be
done, and of doing his best. It was
this which produced even from the
formal English admiral a note of this
order, written on the evening of the
conflagration,—

“My dear Sir Sidney,—You must
burn every French ship you possibly
can, and consult the governor on the[319]
proper method of doing it, on account
of bringing off the troops.

“Very faithfully yours,

“Hood.”

This was written at three in the
afternoon. It would appear that Sir
Sidney, in his answer, made some observation
with reference to the smallness
of the force put under his command.
His Lordship, in a note dated
at six in the evening, thus replied:—

“I am sorry you are so apprehensive
of difficulty in the service you
volunteered for. It must be undertaken;
and if it does not succeed to my
wishes, it will very probably facilitate
the getting off the governor and the
troops in safety, which is an object.
The conflagration may be advantageous
to us. No enterprise of war is
void of danger and difficulty; both
must be submitted to.

“Ever faithfully yours,

“Hood.”

The remonstrance of Sir Sidney
must evidently have been with respect
to the inadequacy of preparation, for
he remarks,—”I volunteered the service
under the disadvantage of there
being no previous preparation for it
whatever;” and the only failure arose
from the want of force; for he was unable
to burn the ships in the basin;
while it argues extraordinary skill and
daring, to have effected the burning of
the rest with a few gun-boats and a
felucca.

But this service, executed at the
right time, and in the right spirit, immediately
fixed upon him the eyes of
the fleet; and the admiral, on sending
home the despatches from Toulon,
made Sir Sidney their bearer. He
was received with great attention by
ministers; and Lord Spencer, then at
the head of the Admiralty, particularly
complimented him on the promptness
and energy of his services at
Toulon.

As it was now determined to fit out
a light squadron for the purpose of
disturbing the enemy’s coasts on the
Channel, Sir Sidney Smith was selected
for the command; and he was appointed
to the Diamond frigate, with
which he immediately made sail for
the coast of Holland. This little fleet
consisted of thirty-two vessels of various
sizes, from the frigate to the gun-boat.
With this fleet he kept watch
on the enemy’s harbours, hunted privateers,
made landings on the shore,
carried off signal-posts, and kept the
whole coast in perpetual alarm. One
of those services shows the activity
and intelligence required on this duty.
It being rumoured that a French expedition
had sailed from Brest, Sir
Sidney was ordered to execute the
difficult task of ascertaining the state
of the harbour. He disguised his ship
so as to look like a French vessel,
hoisted French colours, and ran into
the road. Unluckily, a large French
ship of war was working in at the
same time, but which took no notice
of him, probably from the boldness of
his navigation. At sunset the Frenchman
anchored, as the tide set strong
out of the harbour, and Sir Sidney
was compelled to do the same. He had
hoped that, on the turning of the tide,
she would have gone up the harbour,
but there she lay in the moonlight, a
formidable obstacle. The question
was now whether to leave the attempt
incomplete, or to run the hazard of
passing the French line-of-battle ship.
The latter course was determined on,
and she was fortunately passed. As
they advanced up the road, two other
ships, one of which was a frigate,
were seen at anchor. Those, too,
must be passed, and even the dawn
must be waited for before a good
view of the road could be obtained.
The crew were ordered to be silent:
the French ships were passed without
notice. As morning broke, a
full view of the road was obtained,
and it was evident that the enemy’s
fleet had put to sea. The task was
performed, but the difficulty was now
to escape. On the first attempt
to move towards the sea, a corvette,
which was steering out in the same
direction, began to give the alarm by
making signals. The two vessels
at anchor immediately prepared to
follow, and the line-of-battle ship made
a movement so as completely to obstruct
the course. There seemed to
be now no alternative but to be sunk
or taken. These are the emergencies
which try the abilities of men, and the
dexterity on this occasion was equal
to the difficulty. As resistance was
hopeless, Sir Sidney tried stratagem.
Running directly down to the line-of-battle[320]
ship, which he now perceived to
be in a disabled state, pumping from
leaks and under jury topmasts, he
hailed the captain in French, which
he fortunately spoke like a native,
offering him assistance. The captain
thanked him, but said that he required
none, as he had men enough; but on
this occasion Sir Sidney exhibited a
feeling of humanity which did him
still higher honour than his skill. As
he lay under the stern of the Frenchman
he might have poured in a raking
fire, and, of course, committed great
slaughter among the crew, who were
crowded on the gunwale and quarter,
looking at his ship. The guns were
double loaded, and his crew were
ready and willing. But, considering
that, even if the enemy’s vessel had
been captured, it would be impossible
to bring her off, and that the only
result could be the havoc of life; and,
to use the language of his despatch,
“conceiving it both unmanly and
treacherous to make such havoc while
speaking in friendly terms and offering
our assistance, I trusted that my
country, though it might be benefited
in a trifling degree by it, would gladly
relinquish an advantage to be purchased
at the expense of humanity
and the national character; and I
hope, for these reasons, I shall stand
justified in not having made use of the
accidental advantage in my power for
the moment.”

And even then this act of generosity
may not have been without its
reward; for the other ships, seeing that
he was spoken to by the French vessel,
discontinued the pursuit. The exploit
was finished, and the harbour was
left behind. If he had fired a shot into
the exposed line-of-battle ship, he
would inevitably have been chased by
the others and probably taken. From
this period scarcely any of the smaller
convoys, conveying ammunition or
provisions to the enemy’s ports, could
escape.

Yet, in the midst of this warlike
vigilance and vigour, humanity was not
overlooked; the British vessels were
forbidden to fire at patrols on shore,
and were ordered to spare fishing-boats,
villages, and private dwellings.

The winter was spent in hunting
along the shore every French flotilla
that ventured to peep out. But one
action deserves peculiar remembrance,
from its mingled daring and perseverance.
A convoy, consisting of a
corvette of 16 guns, four brigs, and
two sloops, had been chased into,
Herqui. As they, of course, were
likely to take the first opportunity to
escape, Sir Sidney determined not to
wait for the rest of his squadron, but
to attempt their capture in the Diamond
frigate alone. While he was
preparing for this adventure, two other
armed vessels joined him. The attempt
was hazardous, for the bay was
fortified. Two batteries were placed
on a high promontory, and the coast
troops were ready to oppose a landing.

The Diamond dashed into the bay,
but the fire from the batteries began
to be heavy, and could be returned
only with slight effect, from the commanding
nature of their position. It
was, therefore, necessary to try another
style of attack. This was done by
ordering the marines and boarders into
the boats, and sending them to attack
the batteries in the rear. This movement,
however, was met by a heavy
fire of musketry on the boats, from the
troops drawn up to oppose their landing.
The frigate, too, was suffering
from the fire of the batteries, and the
navigation was intricate. At this
critical moment Sir Sidney pointed out
to Lieutenant Pine, one of his officers,
that it might be possible to climb the
precipice in front of the batteries! The
gallant officer and his men started
immediately, landed under the enemy’s
cannon, climbed the precipice, and
made themselves masters of the guns,
before the troops on the beach could
regain the heights. The frigate continued
her fire to check the advance of
the troops. The guns were spiked,
and the re-embarkation was effected.
It might have been expected that this
brilliant little assault could not have
been effected without serious loss;
but such is the advantage of promptitude
and gallantry, that the whole
party returned safe, with the exception
of one officer wounded.

But the enemy’s vessels still remained.
To get them out was impossible,
for the rocks around were
covered with troops, who kept up an
incessant fire of musketry. It was,
therefore, determined to burn them.
The corvette and a merchant ship[321]
were set on fire: but the tide falling,
the troops poured down close to the
vessels, and the party in possession of
them returned on board.

Here Sir Sidney might have stopped.
He had done enough to signalise
his own talent and the bravery of
his people. But this success was not
enough for him. The convoy were
still before him, though still under
the protection of the troops. He
determined on attacking them again.
The boats were manned and rowed to
the shore. The troops poured in a
heavy fire. But the vessels were
finally all boarded and burnt, with the
exception of one armed lugger.

Enterprises of this order are the true
school of the naval officer. They may
seem slight, but they call out all the
talent and activity of the profession.
They might also have had an important
influence on the naval war, for
these convoys generally carried naval
stores to the principal French dockyards,
and the loss of a convoy might
prevent the sailing of a fleet.

Lieutenant Pine was sent to the
Admiralty with the colours which he
had captured on the heights, and with
a strong recommendation from his
gallant captain. The whole affair was
regarded in England as remarkably
well conceived and well done. The
exploits of the Diamond were the popular
theme, and Sir Sidney rose into
high favour with the Admiralty and
the nation.

These are the opportunities which
distinguish the frigate service. An
officer in a line-of-battle ship must
wait for a general engagement. An
officer on land must wait for the lapse
of twenty years at least before he can
expect the command of a regiment, or
the chance of seeing his name connected
with any distinguished achievement.
But the youngest captain, in
command of a frigate, may bring the
eyes of the nation upon him. The young
lieutenant, even the boy midshipman,
by some independent display of intrepidity,
may fix his name in the annals
of the empire.

But the caprices of fortune are
doubly capricious in war. While the
captain of the Diamond was receiving
plaudits from all sides, the mortifying
intelligence arrived, that he had fallen
into the enemy’s hands.

The origin of this casualty was his
zeal to capture a lugger, which had
done considerable damage among our
Channel convoys. Its stratagem was,
to follow the convoys, until it could
throw men on board, then to let the
prize continue her course, to avoid
attracting the vigilance of the escorting
frigate, and, when night fell, to
slip off to a French port. Sir Sidney
determined to cut short the lugger’s
career. At length the opportunity
seemed to have come. The vessel was
discovered at anchor in the inner
fort of Havre under a ten-gun battery.
The Diamond’s boats were instantly
manned and armed; but, on the inquiry
who was to command, it was
found that the first lieutenant was ill
and in bed, and the second and third
lieutenants were on shore. Sir Sidney
then took the command himself. The
attacking party proceeded in four
boats and a Thames wherry, in which
was Sir Sidney, to the pier of Havre,
where the lugger lay. It was night,
and the vessel was gallantly boarded
on both sides at once, the crew of the
wherry boarding over the stern. The
Frenchmen on deck were beaten after
a short struggle. Sir Sidney, rushing
down into the cabin, found the four
officers starting from their sleep and
loading their pistols. He coolly told
them that the vessel was no longer
theirs; ordered them to surrender,
and they gave up their arms.

But the flood-tide was running
strong, and it drove the vessel above
the town, there being no wind. At
day-light the lugger became the centre
of a general attack of the armed vessels
of the port. The Diamond could
not move from want of wind; and,
after a desperate resistance of three
quarters of an hour, Sir Sidney and
his companions were forced to surrender.
Six officers and nineteen
seamen were taken.

Sir Sidney’s capture was a national
triumph, and he was instantly ordered
to be sent to Paris. No exchange
could be obtained; his name was too
well known. He was charged with
incendiarism for the burning of Toulon;
and it was even hinted that his
being found so close to Havre was for
the purpose of burning the town.

Sir Sidney’s imprisonment was at
first in the Abbaye, which had been[322]
made so infamously memorable by the
slaughters of September 1793. He
was afterwards placed in the prison
of the Temple. In all probability,
the first object was to exhibit him
to the Parisians. An English captain
as a prisoner was a rare exhibition,
and his detention also saved them
from the most active disturber of their
Norman and Breton navigation. But
his confinement was not strict, and he
was even suffered occasionally to
walk about Paris on giving his parole
to the jailer. At length, after various
British offers of exchange, which were
all rejected by the French, he escaped
by a counterfeit order of liberation;
and, encountering several hair-breadth
hazards, reached Havre, seized a boat,
put off, and was taken up at sea by
the Argo frigate, commanded by Captain
Bowen, who landed him at Portsmouth,
and he arrived in London in
April 1798, having been in France
about two years and a month.

It is sometimes difficult to know,
respecting any event, peculiarly in
early life, whether it is a misfortune
or the contrary. Sir Sidney’s capture
must have been often felt by him as
the severest of calamities, by stopping
a career which had already made him
one of the national favourites, and had
given him promise of still higher distinction.
From the command of the
Diamond to the dreary chambers of
the Temple was a formidable contrast;
yet the event which placed him there
may have been an instance of something
more than what the world terms
“good luck.” If he had remained in
command of his frigate, he might have
fallen in some of those fights with the
batteries and corvettes which he was
constantly provoking. But in his
French prison he was safe for the time,
and yet not less before the public eye.
In reality, the sympathy felt for him
there, and the fruitless attempts of the
Admiralty to effect his exchange, kept
him more the Lion than before; and
he returned just in time, to be employed
on a service of the first importance,
and which, by its novelty, adventure,
and romantic peril, seemed
to have been expressly made for his
genius.

The French expedition, under Napoleon,
had taken possession of Egypt;
the Turks were a rabble, and were
beaten at the first onset. The Mamelukes,
though the finest cavalry in the
world as individual horsemen, were
beaten before the French infantry,
as all irregular troops will be beaten
by regulars. At this period, the object
of the ministry was to excite the indolence
of the Turkish government to
attempt the reconquest of Egypt, and
Sir Sidney was appointed to the command
of Le Tigre, a French eighty
gun-ship, which had been captured by
Lord Bridport three years before. If
it be said that he owed this command
in any degree to his having been sent
on a mission to Turkey some years
before, which is perfectly probable; let
it be remembered, that that mission
itself was owing to the gallantry and
intelligence which he had displayed
in his volunteer expedition to Sweden.
Sir Sidney’s present appointment
was a mixture of diplomacy with a
naval command; for he was appointed
joint-plenipotentiary with his brother
Spencer Smith, then our minister at
Constantinople. But this junction of
offices produced much dissatisfaction
in both Lord St Vincent and Nelson;
and it required no slight address, on
the part of Sir Sidney, to reconcile,
those distinguished officers to his employment.
However, his sword soon
showed itself a more effectual reconciler
than his pen, and the siege of
Acre proved him a warrior worthy of
their companionship. After the siege,
Nelson, as impetuous in his admiration
as he was in his dislikes, wrote,
to Sir Sidney the following high
acknowledgment:—

“My dear Sir,—I have received,
with the truest satisfaction, all your
very interesting letters, to July. The
immense fatigue you have had in
defending Acre against such a chosen
army of French villains, headed by
that arch-villain Buonaparte, has never
been exceeded; and the bravery shown
by you and your brave companions
is such as to merit every encomium
which all the civilised world can bestow.
As an individual, and as an
admiral, will you accept of my feeble
tribute of praise and admiration, and
make them acceptable to all those
under your command?

“Nelson.

“Palermo, Aug. 20, 1799.”

Sir Sidney found the Sultaun willing
to exert all the force of his dominions,[323]
but wretchedly provided with the
means of exertion—a disorganised
army, an infant navy, empty arsenals,
and all the resources of the state in
barbaric confusion. Two bomb-vessels
and seven gun-boats were all
that he could procure for the coast
service. He ordered five more gun-boats
to be laid down, waiting for
guns from England. But he was
soon called from Constantinople.
Advice had been received by the
governor of Acre, Achmet Pasha,
that Buonaparte, at the head of an
army of twelve or thirteen thousand
men, was about to march on Acre.
The position of this fortress renders
it the key of the chief commerce in
corn at the head of the Levant, and
its possessor has always been powerful.
Its possession by the French
would have given them the command
of all the cities on the coast, and
probably made them masters of Syria,
if not of Constantinople. Buonaparte,
utterly reckless in his cruelties, provided
they gained his object, had
announced his approach by the following
dashing epistle to the Pasha:—”The
provinces of Gaza, Ramleh,
and Jaffa are in my power. I have
treated with generosity those of your
troops who placed themselves at my
discretion. I have been severe towards
those who have violated the rights of
war. I shall march in a few days
against Acre.” His severity had already
been exhibited on an unexampled
scale. Having taken Jaffa by
assault, and put part of the garrison
to the sword, he marched his prisoners,
to the number of three thousand
seven hundred, to an open space outside
the town. As they were disarmed
in the town, they could make no
resistance; and, as Turks, they submitted
to the will of Fate. There
they were fired on, until they all fell!
When this act of horrid cruelty was
reported in Europe by Sir Robert
Wilson, its very atrocity made the
honourable feelings of England incredulous;
but it has since been acknowledged
in the memoir by Napoleon’s
commissary, M. Miot, and the massacre
is denied no longer. The excuse
which the French general subsequently
offered was, that many of
the Turks had been captured before,
and liberated on parole; that having
thus violated the laws of war, he could
neither take them with him, nor leave
them behind. But the hollowness of
this excuse is evident. The Turks
knew nothing of our European parole;
they felt that it was their duty to
fight for their Pasha; they might have
been liberated with perfect impunity,
for, once deprived of arms, and stript
of all means of military movement,
they must have lingered among the
ruins of an open town, or dispersed
about the country. The stronger
probability is, that the massacre was
meant for the purposes of intimidation,
and that on the blood of Jaffa
the French flag was to float above
the gates of Acre.