summer haunts, and the cold and darkness of their last retreat, when I heard my master bidding the workmen lay by their tools. I looked up, and saw the sun sinking behind the thick fir wood beside us, and the long dark shadows of the trees stretching downwards towards the shore.

This was no very formidable beginning of the course of life I had so much dreaded. To be sure, my hands were a little sore, and I felt nearly as much fatigued as if I had been climbing among the rocks; but I had wrought and been useful, and had yet enjoyed the day fully as much as usual. It was no small matter, too, that the evening, converted by a rare transmutation into the delicious blink of rest' which Burns so truthfully describes, was all my own. I was as light of heart next morning as any of my brother workmen. There had been a smart frost during the night, and the grass was white and crisp as we passed onward through the fields; but the sun rose in a clear atmosphere, and the day mellowed as it advanced into one of those delightful days of early spring which give so pleasing an earnest of whatever is mild and genial in the better half of the year. We all rested at midday, and I went to enjoy my half-hour alone on a mossy knoll in the neighbouring wood, which commands through the trees a wide prospect of the bay and the opposite shore. There was not a wrinkle on the water nor a cloud in the sky, and the branches were as moveless in the calm as if they had been traced on canvas. From a wooded promontory that stretches half-way across the firth there ascended a thin column of smoke. It rose as straight as the line of a plummet for more than a thousand yards, and then, on reaching a thinner stratum of air, spread out equally on every side like the foliage of a stately tree. Ben-Weavis [Wyvis] rose to the west, white with the yet unwasted snows of winter, and as sharply defined in the clear atmosphere as if all its sunny slopes and blue retiring hollows had been chiselled in marble. A line of snow ran along the opposite hills; all above was white, and all below was purple. They reminded me of the pretty French story in which an old artist is described as tasking the ingenuity of his future son-in-law by giving him, as a subject for his pencil, a flower piece composed of only white flowers, the one-half of them in their proper colour, the other half of a deep purple, and yet all perfectly natural; and how the young man resolved the riddle and gained his mistress by introducing a transparent purple vase into the picture, and making the light pass through it on the flowers that were drooping over the edge. I returned to the quarry, convinced that a very exquisite pleasure may be a very cheap one, and that the busiest employments may afford leisure enough to enjoy it. (From Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, 1839.)

The National Intellect of England and Scotland. There is an order of English mind to which Scotland has not attained: our first men stand in the second rank, not a foot-breadth behind the foremost of England's second-rank men; but there is a front rank of British intellect in which there stands no Scotchman. Like that class of the mighty men of David to which Abishai and Benaiah belonged-great captains who went down into pits in the time of snow and slew lions, or who lifted up the spear against three hundred men at once, and prevailed '—they attained not, with all their greatness, to the might of the first class. Scotland

has produced no Shakespeare; Burns and Sir Walter Scott united would fall short of the stature of the giant of Avon. Of Milton we have not even a representative. A Scotch poet has been injudiciously named as not greatly inferior, but I shall not do wrong to the memory of an ingenious young man [Pollok], cut off just as he had mastered his powers, by naming him again in a connection so perilous. He at least was guiltless of the comparison; and it would be cruel to involve him in the ridicule which it is suited to excite. Bacon is as exclusively unique as Milton, and as exclusively English; and though the grandfather of Newton was a Scotchman, we have certainly no Scotch Sir Isaac. I question, indeed, whether any Scotchman attains to the powers of Locke: there is as much solid thinking in the Essay on the Human Understanding, greatly as it has become the fashion of the age to depreciate it, and notwithstanding his fundamental error, as in the works of all our Scotch metaphysicians put together. It is, however, a curious fact, and worthy certainly of careful examination, as bearing on the question of development purely through the force of circumstances, that all the very great men of England-all its first-class men-belong to ages during which the grinding persecutions of the Stuarts repressed Scottish energy and crushed the opening mind of the country; and that no sooner was the weight removed, like a pavement slab from over a flower-bed, than straightway Scottish intellect sprang up, and attained to the utmost height to which English intellect was rising at the time. The English philosophers and literati of the eighteenth century were of a greatly lower stature than the Miltons and Shakespeares, Bacons and Newtons, of the two previous centuries; they were second-class men-the tallest, however, of their age anywhere; and among these the men of Scotland take no subordinate place.

Mrs Hugh Miller (Lydia Falconer Fraser; 1811-76), besides writing prefaces to several of her husband's books and helping him with Witness articles, wrote books for young people and an anonymous novel, Passages in the Life of an English Heiress (1847). The eldest daughter published several stories; the eldest son became Lieutenant-Colonel and Commandant of the 17th Madras Infantry; another, Hugh, was a member of the Scottish Geological Survey. See the somewhat too copious Life and Letters of Hugh Miller (2 vols. 1871), by Peter Bayne; the Life and Times of Hugh Miller, by J. N. Brown (1858); Hugh Miller, by W. Keith Leask (1896); Mrs Hugh Miller's Journal, in Chambers's Journal (1902); and the Memorial volume containing speeches and proceedings at centenary celebrations at Cromarty (1902), especially Sir Archibald Geikie's glowing tribute.

Sir Archibald Alison (1792-1867), author of the History of Europe, was the eldest son of the Rev. Archibald Alison, author of the Essay on Taste (Vol. II. p. 639); and his mother was a daughter of Dr John Gregory of Edinburgh. He was born at his father's parsonage of Kenley in Shropshire; but Mr Alison having in 1800 removed to Edinburgh, Archibald studied at Edinburgh University, was admitted to the Bar in 1814, was advocate-depute (public prosecutor) in 1822-30, and in 1834 was appointed Sheriff of Lanarkshire, thenceforward living at Possil House near Glasgow. He was an industrious and prosperous advocate, and a hard-working and independent judge, who systematically so economised his time as never to allow his constant literary labours to encroach on his often harassing judicial

work. In earlier days he made several long Continental tours. He had distinguished himself in the literature of his profession by his Principles of the Criminal Law of Scotland (1832), long a standard work, and his Practice of the Criminal Law (1833). But his magnum opus was his famous History of Europe. Amongst the multitudes drawn from every part of Europe to Paris to witness the meeting of the allied sovereigns in 1814 after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars was 'one young man who had watched with intense interest the progress of the war from his earliest years, and who, having hurried from his paternal roof in Edinburgh on the first cessation of hostilities, then conceived the first idea of narrating its events, and amidst its wonders inhaled that ardent spirit, that deep enthusiasm which, sustaining him through fifteen subsequent years of travel and study, and fifteen more of composition, has at length realised itself in the present history.' The work thus characteristically referred to by its author was The History of Europe, from the Commencement of the French Revolution to the Restoration of the Bourbons (10 vols. 1839-42), which had by 1853 passed through nine editions, brought the fortunate author fame and large sums of money, and been translated into French, German, and even Arabic. A work so popular must have substantial merits, or must supply a want universally felt. The author visited most of the localities described, and was able to add many interesting minute touches and graphic illustrations from personal observation, or the statements of eye-witnesses on the spot; and he appears to have been diligent and conscientious in consulting written authorities. The work is one of immense industry, and is fairly accurate, and meant to be candid; but the high Tory prejudices of the author and his strong opinions on the currency question-the influence of which he greatly exaggerates-render him a rather unsafe guide. His moral and political reflections and deductions are mostly superfluous and generally tedious. The style is careless, never picturesque, and verbose to a degree. Beaconsfield is plainly hitting at Alison when Rigby advises Coningsby to make himself master of Mr Wordy's History of the Late War in twenty volumes, a capital work, which proves that Providence was on the side of the Tories. No doubt much of the extraordinary success of the history was due to the fact that Alison chose a good subject at a happy moment, and was the first to occupy the field. In describing the causes which led to the French Revolution, he enumerates fairly enough the enormous wrongs and oppressions under which the people laboured; but inconsistently proves also that the immediate source of the convulsion was the spirit of innovation which overspread France. Some of the features of the Revolution are well and fairly described and recorded. Alison

subsequently wrote a continuation-The History of Europe from the Fall of Napoleon in 1815 to the Accession of Louis Napoleon in 1852 (8 vols. 1852-59), which was, however, not well received by the critics even of his own party. It was hastily written, and was disfigured by blunders, omissions, and inconsistencies. Some of the author's political opinions and economical crotchets are pushed to a ridiculous extreme; and the diffuse style of narrative, felt as a drawback in the earlier history, was still more conspicuous in the sequel. Other writings-exclusive of pamphlets on Free Trade and the Currency-were a work on population; an ineffective criticism of Malthus (1840); Lives of Marlborough and Castlereagh; and three volumes of Essays, Political, Historical, and Miscellaneous, originally published in Blackwood's Magazine, to which Alison was a frequent contributor; and a highly self-complacent but interesting Autobiography (2 vols. 1883). Sir Archibald was successively Lord Rector of Marischal College, Aberdeen, and of Glasgow University; was D.C.L. of Oxford; and in 1852 was created a baronet by Lord Derby's administration. Two of his sons were distinguished soldiers.

The French Revolutionary Assassins. The small number of those who perpetrated these murders in the French capital under the eyes of the legislature is one of the most instructive facts in the history of revolutions. Marat had long before said that with two hundred assassins at a louis a day he would govern France and cause three hundred thousand heads to fall; and the events of the 2nd September seemed to justify the opinion. The number of those actually engaged in the massacres did not exceed three hundred; and twice as many more witnessed and encouraged their proceedings; yet this handful of men governed Paris and France with a despotism which three hundred thousand armed warriors afterwards strove in vain to effect. The immense majority of the well-disposed citizens, divided in opinion, irresolute in conduct, and dispersed in different quarters, were incapable of arresting a band of assassins engaged in the most atrocious cruelties of which modern Europe has yet afforded an example-an important warning to the strenuous and the good in every succeeding age to combine for defence the moment that the aspiring and the desperate have begun to agitate the public mind, and never to trust that mere smallness of numbers can be relied on for preventing reckless ambition from destroying irresolute virtue. It is not less worthy of observation that these atrocious massacres took place in the heart of a city where above fifty thousand men were enrolled in the National Guard, and had arms in their hands; a force specifically destined to prevent insurrectionary movements, and support, under all changes, the majesty of the law. They were so divided in opinion, and the revolutionists composed so large a part of their number, that nothing whatever was done by them, either on the 10th August, when the king was dethroned, or the 2nd September, when the prisoners were massacred. This puts in a forcible point of view the weakness of such a force, which, being composed of citizens, is distracted by their feelings and actuated by their passions. In ordinary times it may

exhibit an imposing array and be adequate to the repression of the small disorders; but it is paralysed by the events which throw society into convulsions, and generally fails at the decisive moment when its aid is most required.

The Reign of Terror.

This terminated the Reign of Terror, a period fraught with greater political instruction than any of equal duration which has existed since the beginning of the world. In no former period had the efforts of the people so completely triumphed, or the higher orders been so thoroughly crushed by the lower. The throne had been overturned, the altar destroyed, the aristocracy levelled with the dust: the nobles were in exile, the clergy in captivity, the gentry in affliction. A merciless sword had waved over the state, destroying alike the dignity of rank, the splendour of talent, and the graces of beauty. All that excelled the labouring classes in situation, fortune, or acquirement had been removed; they had triumphed over their oppressors, seized their possessions, and risen into their stations. And what was the consequence? The establishment of a more cruel and revolting tyranny than any which mankind had yet witnessed; the destruction of all the charities and enjoyments of life; the dreadful spectacle of streams of blood flowing through every part of France. The earliest friends, the warmest advocates, the firmest supporters of the people were swept off indiscriminately with their bitterest enemies; in the unequal struggle, virtue and philanthropy sank under ambition and violence, and society returned to a state of chaos, when all the elements of private or public happiness were scattered to the winds. Such are the results of unchaining the passions of the multitude; such the peril of suddenly admitting the light upon a benighted people. The extent to which blood was shed in France during this melancholy period will hardly be credited by future ages. The Republican Prudhomme, whose prepossessions led him to anything rather than an exaggeration of the horrors of the popular party, has given the following appalling account of the victims of the Revolution:

persons slain in the little town of Bedoin, of which the whole population perished. It is in an especial manner remarkable, in this dismal catalogue, how large a proportion of the victims of the Revolution were persons in the middling and lower ranks of life. The priests and nobles guillotined are only 2413, while the persons of plebeian origin exceed 13,000! The nobles and priests put to death at Nantes were only 2160; while the infants drowned and shot are 2000, the women 764, and the artisans 5300! So rapidly in revolutionary convulsions does the career of cruelty reach the lower orders, and so widespread is the carnage dealt out to them, compared with that which they have sought to inflict on their superiors. The facility with which a faction, composed of a few of the most audacious and reckless of the nation, triumphed over the immense majority of their fellow-citizens, and led them forth like victims to the sacrifice, is not the least extraordinary or memorable part of that eventful period. The bloody faction at Paris never exceeded a few hundred men; their talents were by no means of the highest order, nor their weight in society considerable; yet they trampled under foot all the influential classes, ruled mighty armies with absolute sway, kept 200,000 of their fellow-citizens in captivity, and daily led out several hundred persons, of the best blood in France, to execution. Such is the effect of the unity of action which atrocious wickedness produces; such the ascendency which in periods of anarchy is acquired by the most savage and lawless of the people. The peaceable and inoffensive citizens lived and wept in silence; terror crushed every attempt at combination; the extremity of grief subdued even the firmest hearts. In despair of effecting any change in the general sufferings, apathy universally prevailed, the people sought to bury their sorrows in the delirium of present enjoyments, and the theatres were never fuller than during the whole duration of the Reign of Terror. Ignorance of human nature can alone lead us to ascribe this to any peculiarity in the French character; the same effects have been observed in all parts and ages of the world as invariably attending a state of extreme and long-continued distress. The death of Hebert and the anarchists was that of guilty depravity; that of Robespierre and the Decemvirs, of sanguinary fanaticism; that of Danton and his confederates, of stoical infidelity; that of Madame Roland and the Girondists, of deluded virtue; that of Louis and his family, of religious forgiveness. The moralist will contrast the different effects of virtue and wickedness in the last moments of life; the Christian will mark with thankfulness the superiority in the supreme hour to the sublimest efforts of human virtue which was evinced by the believers in his own faith.

Patrick Fraser Tytler (1791-1849), author of a History of Scotland, was the son of Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee, who wrote Elements of General History (1801), and grandson of William Tytler, who, as author of the Inquiry into the Evidence against Mary Queen of Scots (1759), was hailed by Burns as the 'revered defender of beauteous Stuart.' Patrick Fraser Tytler was, like his father, bred mainly at Edinburgh for the Scottish Bar, and wrote Lives of the Admirable Crichton (1819), Sir Thomas Craig (1823), the Scottish Worthies (1831-33), Sir Walter

Raleigh, and Henry VIII. (1837). His History of Scotland (1828-43), from the accession of Alexander III. to the union of the crowns in 1603, was an attempt to 'build the history of that country upon unquestionable muniments.' The author claimed to have anxiously examined the most authentic sources of information, and conveyed a true picture of the times, without prepossession or partiality. By his conscientious study of original authorities he, like Pinkerton, Chalmers, and M'Crie, threw fresh light on many periods of Scottish history; and though he took up a few doubtful opinions on questions of fact (such as that John Knox was accessory to the murder of Rizzio), his work is in large departments of the subject still well worthy of study, and has by no means been superseded by his successorsin some respects his history is better proportioned and better written than Hill Burton's. Sir Walter Scott's suggestion that he undertook the task, and he devoted to it twenty years of hard work. In 1839 he edited two volumes of original documents illustrating the reigns of Edward VI. and Queen Mary Tudor, a praiseworthy contribution to the study of historical records. Dean Burgon wrote a Life of Tytler (1859).

It was at

Cosmo Innes (1798-1874), most learned and accomplished of Scottish legal antiquaries, came up from Deeside to the Edinburgh High School, and graduated both at Glasgow and at Oxford. Having passed as advocate in 1822, he became Sheriff of Moray in 1840, then an official of the Court of Session, and in 1846 Professor of Constitutional Law and History in the University of Edinburgh. He is best known as the author of an eminently suggestive book on Scotland in the Middle Ages (1860) and of interesting Sketches of Early Scotch History (1861). He helped to edit some of the early Acts of the Scottish Parliament; was a member of the Bannatyne, Maitland, and Spalding Clubs; and edited for them several register-books of the old religious houses of Scotland. His lectures (practically a manual) on Scottish Legal Antiquities (1872) have never been superseded; and he wrote several memoirs, including one of Dean Ramsay. A Memoir of him was prepared by his daughter, Mrs Hill Burton (1874).

David Laing (1793–1878), a learned, laborious, and accurate antiquary, was the son of an Edinburgh bookseller, for thirty years followed his father's trade, and from 1837 till his death was librarian of the Signet Library. Honorary secretary of the Bannatyne Club, he edited many of its issues; and his contributions to the Transactions of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland were innumerable. An LL.D. of Edinburgh, he bequeathed many rare MSS. to the university. His more important works were his editions of Baillie's Letters and Journals (1841-42), of John Knox's works (1846-64), and of the Scottish poets, Sir David Lyndsay, Dunbar, and Henryson.

Mark Napier (1798–1879), son of an Edinburgh lawyer sprung from the Merchiston stock, was educated at the High School and university of his native town, and having practised as advocate for near quarter of a century, was appointed Sheriff of Dumfries and Galloway. He published some legal works, but is best known for his Memoirs of the Marquis of Montrose (2 vols. 1856) and Memorials of Graham of Claverhouse (1859-60), both written in a vehemently anti-Presbyterian, Cavalier, and Jacobite temper, and, though conspicuously without the judicial and historical spirit, by no means lacking in historical value. He raised a fierce controversy by attempting to prove that the Wigtown Martyrs' were pardoned, although they had certainly been condemned to be (and according to tradition were) drowned for refusing the abjuration oath in 1685.

George Lillie Craik (1798–1866), a Fife man from Kennoway, studied for the Church at St Andrews, but went to London in 1826, and in 1849 became Professor of History and English Literature in Queen's College, Belfast. Among his works were The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties (1831); a History of British Commerce (3 vols. 1844); books on famous English trials, on Spenser, Bacon, the romance of the peerage, Shakespeare's English; and his best-known work, the History of English Literature and the English Language (2 vols. 1861), which passed through nine or ten editions. It was a modified form of a six-volume work, a History of Literature and Learning in England, issued in 1844. He wrote much for the Penny Magazine and the like, prepared a number of manuals, and was joint-author with another of The Pictorial History of England.

His youngest daughter, Georgiana Marion Craik (1831-95), born in London, married Mr A. W. May, and from 1857 published over thirty novels-Lost and Won (1859) the most popular.-Miss Mulock (Mrs Craik) the novelist married his nephew.

Joseph Train (1779–1852), son of a farmgrieve in the upland Ayrshire parish of Sorn, became a weaver in Ayr, then served in the militia, and from 1806 was an excise officer in Ayrshire. Here and later at Newton-Stewart he read industriously, collected traditions, and wrote verses. Strains of the Mountain Muse (1814), incorporating local traditions of the south-west of Scotland, supported by acute notes, secured Scott's esteem; and for many years Train sent all the scraps of song or folklore he could collect direct to Scott. Thus Scott got very valuable materials for poems and novels for Red Gauntlet, Wandering Willie's Tale, and The Tales of my Landlord amongst others, as well as the characters of Old Mortality, Edie Ochiltree, and Madge Wildfire. Train was ultimately supervisor of revenue at Castle-Douglas till his retirement in 1850. He was a contributor to Chambers's Journal, and wrote a history of the Isle of Man and of the Buchanite sect.

James Hogg (1770-1835), 'The Ettrick Shepherd,' was sprung of shepherd stock, and born in the parish of Ettrick; the date of his birth is unknown, but it is certain that he was baptised on the 9th of December 1770. When a mere child he was put out to service as cow-herd, until he could take care of a flock of sheep; and he had in all but little schooling, though he was too prone to represent himself as an uninstructed prodigy of nature. At twenty he entered the service of a neighbouring sheep-farmer, already an eager reader of poetry and romances, as of all the miscellaneous contents of a circulating library in Peebles to which he subscribed. Till an illness brought on by over-exertion injured his good looks

JAMES HOGG.

From a Drawing by S. P. Denning in the National Portrait
Gallery.

he was an exceptionally fine-looking young fellow, with a profusion of light-brown hair, coiled up under his blue bonnet. The reading of Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd and a modernised Blind Harry's Wallace had kindled poetic impulses; his first literary effort was in song-writing, and in 1801 he published a small volume of verse. Introduced to Sir Walter Scott by his master's son, Willie Laidlaw, he assisted in the collection of old ballads for the Border Minstrelsy. These he soon imitated with great felicity; and in 1807 he published another volume of songs and poems, The Mountain Bard. Meanwhile he wrote a successful book on the diseases of sheep. Bent on being a sheepfarmer, he proposed in 1803 to migrate to Harris. The scheme fell through, but in a later venture (1808) in Dumfriesshire he lost the £300 he had

saved as a shepherd and made by his book. He then settled in Edinburgh, and endeavoured to subsist by his pen. A collection of songs, The Forest Minstrel (1810), was followed by a periodical called The Spy; but it was The Queen's Wake (1813) that established his reputation. This 'legendary poem' consists of a collection of tales and ballads supposed to be sung to Mary, Queen of Scots, by the native bards of Scotland assembled at a royal wake at Holyrood, in order that the fair queen might prove the wondrous powers of Scottish song.' Its design and execution both helped to rank Hogg among the first of modern Scottish poets. The imaginary lays of the local minstrels are strung together by an ingenious and often surprisingly graceful thread of narrative-in English, like the bulk of his longer poems, whereas his best-known songs are in vernacular Scotch. Other works followed-Mador of the Moor, in Spenserian stanza; The Pilgrims of the Sun, in blank verse; The Hunting of Badlewe, The Poetic Mirror (imitations of Wordsworth, Byron, Scott, Coleridge, and others), Queen Hynde, Dramatic Tales; also several novels, including Winter Evening Tales, The Brownie of Bodsbeck, The Three Perils of Man, The Three Perils of Woman, The Confessions of a Justified Sinner. The last, also called Confessions of a Fanatic, is a powerful fragment, the authorship of which has sometimes been attributed to Lockhart, but on inadequate evidence. Hogg collected two volumes of Jacobite Relics (1819-20); and some of the songs contributed by his own pen are among the best known of the so-called Jacobite lyrics ('Cam ye by Athol,' 'Flora Macdonald's Lament'). Mr Henderson credits Hogg with the authorship of Auld Maitland' and parts of other fine ballads in Scott's Border Minstrelsy. A really valuable contributor to Blackwood's Magazine, he was partly idealised, partly caricatured by Wilson as one of the interlocutors in the Noctes Ambrosiana. He never was the 'half-inspired, delightful talker of the Noctes; but he was one of the most characteristic of the figures that brought 'Maga' its fame. His vanity and desire for notoriety were indeed portentous; his head was turned by his success, and his familiarity in society went beyond the bounds of good breeding. The suggestion of the famous Chaldee MS. (October 1817) was his; he claimed, indeed, to have written most of it (specifically the first two chapters, part of the third and of the last), though much of the best is certainly Lockhart's. On the other hand, Hogg complained, and with reason, that ballads and verses of all kinds which he had never seen were in 'Maga' put in his mouth. An illustration of the Shepherd of the Noctes will be found in the article on Professor Wilson (page 249). Later prose works were Lay Sermons, Montrose Tales, and his sadly ill-judged book on The Private Life of Sir Walter Scott. Hogg's prose is very unequal. He had no skill in characterdrawing. He is often vulgar and extravagant;