STORY OF SECOND CITY OF EMPIRE A CENTURY AGO

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 270, 13 November 1937, Page 11 (Supplement)

STORY OF SECOND CITY OF EMPIRE A CENTURY AGO

The second city in the Empire has figured a good deal in fiction and is the scene of quite a number of modern novels. The story of its own career, like that of many of its citizens, reads like a romance, Beginning as a small cathedral city, which it remained up till the Reformation, Glasgow was still comparatively small in Defoe's day, though he paid it the compliment of calling it "the beautifullest little city" he had seen in Britain. It was after the union of the English and Scottish Parliaments in 1707, and largely as a result of the trade it developed with America, that it began the rapid growth which has made it to-day the centre of a population of from 2,500,000 to 3,000,000. Miss N. Brysson Morrison has taken the city as it was about a hundred years ago for the scene of her latest novel, "When the Wind Blows" (Collins), and she makes it very real to us. These were the days when coaches took the place that trains now fill, and the homes were lit by candles. Steam shipping was just beginning, and ' in this novel we are given a vivid picture of the wreck of the "Comet," Henry Bell's little steamer of. 30 tons, that plied between Glasgow and Greenock, and was the first boat to run regularly on a river. They were the days, too, when ministers preached in black kid gloves, and when any suspicion of heterodoxy meant deposition. The theme of tbe novel is the fortunes of a family of a wealthy merchant. Miss Morrison knows how to draw character, and she can create "atmosphere," especially in connection with the happenings—some of them tragic; —"when the wind blows." The quaint sayings of the nurse Bells and the sewing maid Annie, the shrewd, pawky epigrams of old MacDiarmid, the cloth merchant, and the love affairs are other agreeable features of the story.