MACAULAY ON SCOTLAND.

Otago Witness, Issue 253, 4 October 1856, Page 5

MACAULAY ON SCOTLAND.

By Hugh Milxer.

A~RTICLE FIRST. So long as Mr. Macaulay was but repre- " seritative in Parliament, we hesitated to make any remarks on his treatment of " Scotland in the two recently-published volumes of his History. We were unwilling to expose ourselves to the suspicion of being animated in our literary strictures by any political considerations. Now, however, that the connection between the author and the metropolis of Scotland, nomi- . nal as it was, is dissolved, we feel ourselves free from that restraint. Grave doubts have been entertained whether, as a Member, he represented us at all ; we may now be permitted to examine how he has represented us as an Historian. Mr. Macaulay, as his name indicates, is of Celtic lineage, his grandfather having been a Highland minister at Cardross, in the Presbytery of Dumbarton. The fa- • ther of the historian, Zachary Macaulay, may therefore be presumed to have inhaled in early youth the bracing air of the Grampians, to have spouted the inspiring strains of Ossianin the original Gaelic of Macpherson, and to have sported the kilt. There is no reason to believe that the grandson, Thomas Babbington, who was destined to write very sparkling periodical articles in the Edinburgh Review, to deliver very elaborate periodical orations in Parliament, and to produce very sparse periodical volumes dn history, was born on Scottish soil. But it is not beyond the limits of probability that the youth may have occasionally paid a visit to the manse of his grandfather ; and that for his minute acquaintance with Highland poverty and barbarism he is not entirely indebted to fancy or to Captain Burt. Early recollections may have contributed to the point and pungency of his narrrative. "In many dwellings, the furniture, the food, the clothing, nay, the very hair and skin of his hosts, would have put his philosophy to the proof. His lodgings would sometimes have been in a hut, of which every nook would have swarmed with vermin. He would have inhaled an atmosphere thick with peat smoke, and foul with a hundred noisome exhalations. At supper, grain fit only for horses would have been set before him, accompanied by a cake of blood drawn from living cows. Some of the company with which he would have feasted would have been covered with cutaneous eruptions, and others would have been smeared with tar like sheep. His couch would have been the bare earth, dry or wet as the weather might be ; and from that couch he would have risen, half poisoned with stench, half blind with the reek <Af turf, and half mad with the itch." There 'may be much of the sadness of truth in this picture ; and yet we can hardly forgive the hand that drew it, remembering that the blood flowing in that hand is of Highland origin, and that it owes something to the " living cows" which grazed on the hills of Cardross, and something to the despised grain, to which he has applied the definition of Johnson's dictionary. Amidst the uneasy sensations which it calls up, we are compelled to say, that it is hardly fair in a scion, of the clan Macaulay, which is numbered with the Macnabs and Macgregors, that fought at Killiecrankie and perished at Culloden, thus to expose to public gaze the nakedness and rudeness of his ancestors. " Half blind with the reek of turf," as we cannot help feeling while we peruse the graphic . description, we instinctively cry out, " O, rake not up the ashes of your fathers !" But the whole picture, we need hardly say, is pure exaggeration. Nor did the author need to go so far as his native Highlands for such a revolting caricature, when the materials lay in greater abundance within reach of a morning walk in the purlieus of Westminster. " Half poisoned with the stench of barbarism," as a cockney like Burt might be, when visiting some wretched hut on the Highland borders, we - would prefer it, after all, to be poisoned outright by the stench of civilization ; for we can attest from experience the force of the remark made by Coleridge, that he was sensible of seventy distinct diabolical smells in the perfumed city of Cologne. There are other associations, of' a more personal kind, which might, we think, have bespoken a more reverent appreciation of his fatherland. The Macaulays of Dumbartonshire were originally, we believe, small farmers in- the island of Lewis, one of the most Celtic of all our Highland districts. But the grandfather and granduncleaf our historian' were' rather celebrated men*in their day. The former Mr. {alias Angus) Macaulay,.. when minister ' of-Apple'cross, in Rotfs-sMre, wafe' accused iii 1V59 by a clerical brother; Mr.

iEneas (or Angus) Sage, of heresy. On this occasion,, as we learn from the Annals of the Assembly, his brethern " testified their dissatisfaction with Mr."Macaulay for some indecent and some obscure expressions contained in that sermon, and recommended to him not to preach- above the capacity of his hearers ; but agreed to reprove Mr. Sage for his conduct in this affair, and to enjoin him NOT TO BE OVER READY TO FISH OUT HERESIES without very good and justifiable reasons." His brother, Kenneth Macaulay, minister, first in Harris and afterwards at Cawdor, was the author of the " History 'of St. Kilda," whom Dr. Johnston visited in his tour to the Hebrides, having formed a high opinion of his book,- which, he said was " a very pretty piece of topography," and with whom, as Boswell informs us, the great man had a tough debate on creeds and confessions, which ended in Johnson saying to him, " Sir, you are a bigot to laxness." We see no reason why Mr. Macaulay shold be ashamed of his Highland kin ; and the public may perhaps take some pleasure in tracing to the two brothers whom we have introduced to them, the leading traits by which he has been distinguished. In his grandfather, Angus, who soared so high on the wings of Gaelic, " above the capacity of his hearers," they will not fail to discover the germs of the future orator, somewhat high-minded and dubiously heretical ; while in the dogmatical Kenneth they may discern some prognostics of the literary tastes and stiff-necked liberalism of his grand-ne-phew. We have heard some complain that Mr. Macaulay's references to Scotland are so ! scanty and so contemptuous. Contemptuous enough they certainly are ; but for a " History of England," the allusions to our country, if .we embrace under that name the Highlands, are more numerous than we had reason to expect. Indeed, like the English artists who visit our picturesque scenery, Mr. Macaulay finds the history of England too tame and level for his pencil ; it is only when he comes to Scotland that he gets scope for his epigrammatic sentences, and strong light and shade sketches of men and manners. To one who depends so much on the effects of the chiaro-scuro in his treatment of history, a Cameronian of the Patrick Walker type, — a crack-brained William Wilson, " some time schoolmaster in Park," — or a "bloodthirsty ruffian" like -^ir Robert Hamilton,— must have been a perfect treasure. Where among all the prosaic statesmen of the English Court could such a character be found to sit for his picture as Sir James Dalrymple of Stair, with his wry neck, his poignarding daughter, and his Witch of Endor Lady, seated beside him on the cloth of state in the likeness of a cat? What were all the cabals of William's Dutch and English courtiers, viewed as furnishing materials for a para s graph, compared with such an Eldorado as the Massacre of Glencoe ? Seriously, however, we have to charge Mr. Macaulay with having sacrificed the truth of history to mere pictorial effect. The general impression seems to be, that he is actuated by a species of spite, almost personal in its bitterness, against Scotland and all things Scottish. To such a suspicion he has certainly laid himself open ; but it is equally apparent that, in the indulgence of that spirit, he is actuated by the very poor ambition of shining as a composer of smart and telling sentences. To what else can we trace his representations of the state of parties in Scotland at the Revolution? No man acquainted in the most superficial way with these, and merely seeking to describe things as they were, would fix upon the Cameronian party, for example, as hay- ! ing had an active share in bringing about that event, or giving shape or direction to the political movements of the period. William, it is true, calculated on the persecution of the Covenanters as one of his elements of success \ but the followers of Cameron formed but a small party of the Covenanters; at the Revolution 'they did not even form a Church in the Presbyterian sense, not having any ministers for several years, and not having been constituted into a Presbytery till the middle of the succeeding century. They stood aloof, in fact, from' the Revolution settlement, contenting themselves with testifying and remonstrating against all that was done. Their peculiarities were not shared by the' great body of their.countrymen. Even the last ministers of the party, Messrs.' Shiels, 'Lirihing, • and ' Boyd, 'came to see that the principles" which had led Cameron and 1 Rendwick to proclaim war against a Popish' tyrant whb openly siibveftingthe' la^vs and liberties of realm,' coujd'harclly

apply to 1 a Protestant sovereign who was 'ready to re-establish the Presbyterian government, and to protect the freedom of his subjects ; and they cast in their lot with the Revolution Church. And yet the reader of these volumes, — more especially the English reader, — is led to go away with the impression that there were only two parties in Scotland at that period, — a set of stubborn, mulish, unreasonable Covenanters on the one hand, and a pack of " the most dishonest arid unblushing time-servers that the world ever saw" on the other. "It is a remarkable circumstance," says the author, " that the same country should have produced in the same age the most wonderful specimens of both extremes of human nature." Were this intended merely to contrast things very opposite in nature, it might be allowed to pass, as affording an opportunity too tempting to be resisted for the author's powers of description. But while he takes care to guard himself against the charge, by dropping such expressions as " the extreme Covenanters," he is equally careful to keep up the impression that they represented the Presbyterians of Scotland by ignoring the existence of any other Presbyterian, party. Let any one read, for example, the passage (vol. iii. p. 293, 4), in which he speaks of " the fiery Covenanters," who would " rather have been fired upon by files of musketeers, or tied to stakes within low-water mark, than have uttered a prayer that God would bless William and Mary," and, after denouncing these " absurd principles," proceeds to speak of " another set of men who had no principles at all ;" and let him say if — 1 supposing he had read no more on the subject — he could have imagined that the great mass of the nation were sober-minded Presbyterians, too glad to escape from the tyranny of James not to feel grateful for the accession of his son-in-law, and rather moderate than anything else in their religious sentiments, — that the Church of Scotland, ministers and people, with the exception of the curates, too many of whom were allowed to remain quietly in their charges, hailed the Revolution as a glorious deliverance, — and that the " extreme Presbyterians," of whom Macaulay speaks so much, were a few scattered prayer societies? 1 who, though a mere handful of the population, yet, like all protesting parties, talked and scribbled more than all the rest in proportion to the fewness of their numbers, and thus contrived to make themselves be heard, just as a single hiss or yell is heard in a popular assembly amidst a thousand cheers. Even these worthy though wrong-headed men have been grossly misrepresented in the pages of this history. When he says that " their temper was singularly savage and implacable," and that they " never heard any achievement in the history of their country more warmly praised by their favourite teachers than the butchery of Cardinal Beaton and of Archbishop Sharpe," he states what is simply untrue. The assassination of Sharpe was disowned by the martyrs that suffered for it, and those suspected of it were refused communion by the Covenanters. Of the " Rabbling of the Curates," too, he makes a great deal more than it deserved. Depending on the exaggerated reports sent up to London by the ejected curates, he first represents it as a series of the most shocking outrages ; and yet he is compelled to acknowledge in the end, that when these same " singularly savage and implacable" people had a fair opportunity of avenging their wrongs with impunity on those men whom they justly regarded as the spies of the Government which had persecuted them and slain their brethren, " they do not appear to have been guilty of any intentional injury to life or limb." Why not mention the case of John Bell, who had " a hundred snow-balls thrown at him;" or that of Mr. William Little, who was beset by fifty women, " some of them beating his head and shoulders with their fists, and others of them scratching and nipping his bare back," with many such enormities recorded in " The Case of the Present Afflicted Clergy?" If, however, the anti-Revolution party are treated with so little ceremony, the friends of that cause come in for an equal amount of censure. Mr. Macaulay hardly knows whether more to reprobate the fanaticism of the one, or to denounce the avarice and meanness of the other. To no party in Scotland does he feel himself entitled to accord a word of praise ; to no Scottish measure will he allow the smallest credit. A curious %lustration of this is afforded by the. way in which he attempts to rob' Scotland of the honour which! every lover' of liberty has awarded her, of having declared that James' Vll. had forfeited 1

has right to the Crown, instead of the milder* phrase of abdicated, which was that employed by the English at Westminster. We must not suppose, he says, from the language of this resolution, " that sound political principles had made a greater progress in Scotland than in Englruid." And why not? Because, forsooth, as James had not " resided in Scotland," the Scots could not say, as the English could do, that he had " deserted his post !" (vol. iii. pp. 285, 286.) This is the rarest piece of logic we have met with for a long time. When the English said that James had "abdicated the throne," all they meant was, it seems, that he had run away from the country. And could not the Scots say the same thing ! No, says Mr. Macaulay ; he did not reside in their country, and they could not therefore say that he had deserted his post ; it was " absolutely necessary for them to decide the question whether subjects may lawfully depose a bad prince ;" " that question the Estates of Scotland could not evade !" Poor creatures : James was their king, as well as the King of England; but then, unfortunately, he had chosen to reside in his palace at Whitehall, instead of Holyrood ; and the Scot- < tish Estates must therefore, from sheer necessity, decide a question which the English Convention prudently evaded ! ■He could only communicate with Edinburgh by letter, and therefore the Scots were " forced to adopt a resolution distinctly declaring that James the Seventh had by his misconduct forfeited the crown!" A more gratuitous insult to Scotland could hardly have been expressed in more ungracious terms, or supported by a more ridiculous attempt at reasoning. If anything could enhance the meanness of the slur, it would be the consideration of the quarter from which it is thrown. A professed Whig, the boastful assertor of civil liberty, rather than grant to the country of his fathers the honour of having put forth thenoblest assertion of the rights and liberties of the people which the history of Britain affords, would bury it under an unworthy insinuation, and trample upon it with a sneer of contempt. It is well that such miserable sophistries as that we have exposed • seldom outlive a second inspection. It is well, too, that we can confront them with the instrument itself, which will survives^, long after the historical paintings of Macaulay shall have ceased to find an admirer. From this, the conclusion of which we subjoin, it will be apparent that the Estates of Scotland founded their resolution on no local grounds, but on principles which applied to the whole kingdom :—: — " Therefore the Estates of the Kingdom of Soot- ' land Find and Declare that king James the Seventh, . being a profest Papist, did assume the regal power and acted as King without ever taking the oath required by law, and hath, by the advice of evil and wicked counsellors, invaded the fundamental Constitution of this Kingdom, and altered it from a legal limited .monarchy to an arbitrary despotic power, and has exercised the same to the subvetsion of the Protestant religion, and the violation of the laws and liberties of the Kingdom, inverting all the ends of Government, — whereby he hath FORFEITED THE RIGHT TO THE CROWN, and the throne is become vacant." The assaults -which Mr. Macaulay has made on the public men who then guided the affairs of Scotland are marked by the same spirit of bitter and indiscriminating contempt. None will attempt to deny that many among them were disgraced by the vices which he stigmatizes. But the remarkable feature is, that he applies his lash, riot so much to the notoriously unprincipled, as to those who have borne the highest character for probity. We might instance, without going further at present, the character which he ascribes to the Earl of Crawford. This aged nobleman, who had suffered much during the persecution, and had been robbed of his father's, lands, which had been transferred to the bishops, incurs the special resentment of Mr. Macaulay, for no other reason that we can discover, except it be his occasional use of the language of the Old Testament. His letters, so far as we could ever see, are distinguished by nothing so much as plain, natural common sense. A phrase now and then drops from his pen, borrowed from the, Scripture, which the old man could not help applying to the late wonderful deliverance granted to his beloved Church and nation. In these there is not an atom of revenge, not a drop of^gall. And yet, says our author, " It is a circumstance strikingly characteristic of the • man, and of the school in which he had been trained,, jihat, in all the mass of his writing which Has corn'e down to us, there is not, a single word indicating that he had ever in his lifeheard of the New .Testament !" He accuses Bin of selfishness, rapacity^ and cruelty.. r -'HJs only proofs of these changes ar<^ tjiak^ooi? Crawford tells

xxeqnest, hovrqas&xty bisio^rics Ms father had ■ a wght to y^andlds having presided over the j administration of torture to a conspirator, in regard to which he says, — ' ( My stomach is i truly so far out of tune by being witness to an act so far cross to my natural temper, that I am fitter for rest than anything else." To which strong proofs he adds, with a simplicity which will bring a smile to the countenance of every Scottish reader, " See also the dedication of the celebrated tract, entitled 'Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence Displayed !'" So much at present for Macaulay on Scotland. We have some other small accounts to settle before we have done with him.

(7*o be continued.)