Half an Hour's Rambling Gossip.

Southland Times, Issue 11673, 2 March 1891, Page 2

Half an Hour's Rambling Gossip.

4. Did Sir Walter Scott ever see Melrose Abbey by moonlight ? This question was asked in a newspaper paragraph some years ago, and I think it was answered in the negative. The other day I came across Sir Walter's own statement to the same effect, It was in a small book eutitled, ' Poems and Letters, by Bernard Barton.' A memoir of the poet by his daughter Lucy is prefixed to the selection, for suoh the book is — a selectiou of poems and letters ' in some measure to carry out her dearest father's favourite but unfulfilled design of an autobiography.' Barton was one of the numerous minor poets who nourished, as the phrase goes, in the earlier part of the present century. Their name was legion, but they are nearly all forgotten by the reading publicof the present day. Is not most minor poetry written, so to speak, for oblivion ? Yet it is not without its uses. It serves its day and generation, like other humble things; brinmglad- { ness or solace to many persons who Hive no acquaintance with, ami perbape uo great taste for, the mightier sons of eotig. The minor poets might be compared to the underwood in our New Zealand forests, while the tall pines which wave thhir branches high overhead would stand for the Homers anil Virgils, the Dantes and Sliakespeares, the Spencers and Miltons. &c. Of course a comparison of this kind (loos not exactly go on ail fours. Great poets are not nearly so plentiful as tall pines (good thing too), nor are the minor brethren perhaps so beautiful (the girl's epithet for her favourite rhymer) as the aforesaid undergrowth, though many of them are quite as Barton was not blessed with a large endowment of the ' vision and the faculty divine.' ■Some minor poets have been poets in a very genuine sense — minor on account of the small bulk rather than the meagre quality of their productions. Barton pul.lisb.ed a good many ] volumes, but none of his verses are in any proper sense inspired. They are pious, edifying, and some of them pleasing enough : to a certain kind of readers in certain moods, j They are, however, hardly poetry at all. In ! spite of all their good qualities, they do not j sing themselves as you read them, as all the best poetry does. is no spontaneity about them, no original melody, indeed, no melody ol any kind, ao felicity of exprewton,

no peculiar beauty of imagery, ana not a particle of what is called imagination, the one quality that, resting on a basis of passion marks the true poet, and without which verse is naught. Barton was a Quaker, and he had the limitations, as regards poetry,^ which we might expect in one of his sect. The Quakers looked askance at the tine arts, thinkiDg there was some witchery about them which was apt to lead the mind astray from the purity and simplicity of the Gospel. I say looked, for the sect is fast losing its distinctive character, and, so to speak, melting into the world, against whose vanitie3, fashions, frivolities, and insincerities it used to be a kind of standing protest Towards literature as a whole Quakers maintained a distant attitude. Mauy of the oid Friends wrote books, but it was for the most part in defence of their tenets, or to set forth the godly liven and sufferings of their brethren. Sewell's ' History of the Quakers' is a most interesting old folio. It was one of Charles Lamb's favourite books, antl it would have attractions even for the ordinary run of readers if it were presented to them in a less formidable shape than the origiual folio. Barclay's 'Apology for the Quakers,' the most famous of all Quaker books, was also one of the ablest productions of the seventeenth century. It appeared both in English and Latin. It is interesting to think that the man who systematised the doctrine which George Fox evolved out of his inner consciousness, and defended it with so much ability and learning, was a Scotsman. Barclay was born in the year in which Fox began his itinerant preaching, and they both died in 1690, the former at the early age of fortytwo. Robert Barclay was the great-great grandfather of the celebrated Captain Barclay. No two characters could have been more unlike each other. The Quaker apologist was strong in the spirit, his great-great-grandson ■strong in the flesh (we mean in the literal, not the evil sense). The early death of the Quaker apologist does not speak of a very strong vitality. But he had led an anxious, arduous life. In bis youth he was a. hard. student, and to show his proficiency in learning it is only necessary to state that hia ' Apology' was published when he was only twenty-eight. Then, like all the militant Quakers of his day, he passed many years in wandering from place to place, preaching and disputing. He was frequently in prison, and must have endured many severe hardships in his peregrinations. This extraordinary man was full of the enthusiasm of his times. He once felt constrained, by some sudden prompting of his internal guide, to walk through the streets of Aberdeen clothed in sackcloth, though in great agony of spirit; not like bis leader, George Fox, who, I fancy, rather enjoyed an exhibition of that kind. But the intenseness with which Barclay experienced the strange excitement which characterised the outburst of Puritanism in the seventeenth century, no doubt shortened his days. For he was come of a strong race. His father, who bought Uric, which is now indissolably associated with the name of the family, though it has passed out of their possession, was a tough old soldier, and one of the strongest men in the kingdom. This Scotch laird and warrior was converted to Quakerism by a fellow-countryman of the name of Svvinton, when lying in prison in Edinburgh for the part he had taken in the civil commotions. At. that time Robert waa on the Continent, but his father sent for him lest he should be tempted to turn Papist, and he himself states in one of his books that he had not altogether escaped the defilement of Popery. He too, on his return, became a Quaker. He waa only seventeen years o age when he became a. convert to the do« triucs of the man who had been a herd boj and a shoemaker, and from that time till hi death his labotu-3 in behalf of the new sect were unceasing. But thoagh he himself died young, he left three sons and four daughters att of whom were alive fifty years after his death, v> that he may be said to have transmitted the vitality which belonged to that branch of the Barclays. The great strength which distinguished his father was also passed on. Captain Barclay, in whom this extraordinary endowment may be said to have culminated could lift half a ton when he was twent) years of age, and be lifted a man of eighteen stone on his right hand steadied with his left from the floor on to a table. Bat hia great feat, which has made him in {a manner as famous as his Quaker ancestor, was as a pedestrian — walking one mile in each of 1000 successive hours, a perfonhanoa which showed an unexampled vigour- and power of endurance. In 1800 he walked 110 miles in 19 hoars and 27 minutes in srmuddy park » in 1802, he did 64 miles in KUlburs ; and an another occasion 72 miles between breakfast and dinner ! In 1808 he started at 5 a.m., walked 30 miles grouse shooting, dinsd at 5 p.m., walked 60 miles to^is house atUri* in 11 hours, after attending to buaiaaaa walked 16 (miles t» lanrnasekirk, daaoed at a ball, returned to Uric by 7 H.m., and spent the day partddge shooting, hat* ing travelled 130 mile*, and been without sleep for two nights and thf«e day* ! O»P> tain Barclay's feats recall the laboan of Hercnles. He died in 1854 of paralysis, brought on by the kick.- of a horse. His* grandfather was known as Barclay 'the strong,' and his father once walked from Uric to London. (510 miles] inlO days. Tb» Barclays in ancient times woald have been a race of heroes. Id these, day* however great bodily strength is of coßsyatasfrely little me except to profesrional a&ltsei! I have «aid that Uric ik> toibtor belongs to the Barclays. It was bodgSfsow after the death of the famous pedcsWLacTby one of the Bairds of Gartsherrie, a proprietor who formed almost a stall greater contrast to the author of the " Apology." ' About 30 year* ago I reoMtsber dropping into an auctioneer's rooms in Edi&buigmeoe summer afternoon to look at eosse Jsvoks which were advertised for aaje: Ifeand to my astonishment that they came mm Uric* and that most of them bad' belonged to Robert Barclay. It was. not a verrlaifi collection, bat it contained ■-/*. number « very interesting votsunea, among others, two copies, in splendid oswlftie*, of Bat*'! Indian Bible, One of them, U I refneattar right, was a presentation copy from JpsV author to Barclay. 'They brought sAo*tlfp - each, and were, the presentation JPBJr especially, cheap at the money. ThejVwilsV thick squarish volumes, beautifully printap> and the paper as clear and bright as the jdisy ■ it was made. Ia it not lameataofo jto.7«si* < sider that more than 20GUfcars after As) apostle of tbe Indians translated the Word of God into one of their dialects, tbe sohfiete of the United States should be shooting them down like vermin? Perm the Quakers, .. treatment of the Indiana' is cue of the* brightest spots in the history of British colonisation ; but it was the spirit of Ben* jamiu Franklin, and not that of William Perm, that moulded the public character of the Americans. But the fact is that no colonists have ever treated native now kindly and honestly. Quakerism made considerable progress in Scotland in the early days, but it waa scarcely suited to the Scotch temperament anil way of thinking, and the meetings of Friends soon dwindled down to very small companies in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and some of the other larger towns. I once stumbled across a small Quaker burying-gtpund somewhere in the neighbourhood of Kukintillocb, but where exactly I cannot rememl>er. It was a very small . 'God's acre.' Afl the fate waa locked, I scrambled over (ho wail, and I can a'ill recall the feelings with which I surveyed the grass grown graves and nodding headstones, plaio as a Quakeress's bonnet. It is probably the only place of the kind in all Scotland. Charles Lamb says in one of his essays, ' If thou won Mat know what true peace and yuiet mean, conic with me into a Quaker* Meeting ;' but a deeper sense of peace- of tbe peace 1 might say which p&sseth all understanding — would methiuks be found in a Quaker burying -ground, at least in one like that which I so vividly remember, though I saw it only once, a little nook of ground in the corner of a field by the wayside, inclosed with a stone wall, and no human habitation near. As I stood among the graves I almost fancied I conld hear the ) spirits of tbe buried Friends uttering a faint j ' Hush.' Or it might have been the sound of I my own heart rebuking me for trespassing i upun the solitude and repose of that hallowed spot. I din certain there were headstones to some of the graves, as it was from them I discoverd ! it to be the last, resting place of a small community of Quakers which existed, or more . • correctly speaking, had existed, fur it watvV • bow (edtwd to * tew ftmiltat, Ut tnd twwl i

Glasgow. It is not however the custom of the Friends to erect such memorials of the dead. Tombstones had been so often inscribed with flattery and lies that they judged it proper in this case also to depart from the ways of the world. What more unBeemly thau to raise false-speaking monuments to the dead ? It was not only a solemn mockery, but there was something to the Quaker mind akin to blasphemy in the practice, as though they heard the dead whose praise was sounded forth from their tombs exclaiming in pain and indignation, ' Why call you us good ? There is none good but God ?' The Friends in these later times allow plain tablets, stating the name and the dates of birth and death, when these are desired by the relatives of the departed, but as a rule Quaker graves are uumarked except by tbe spade of the gravedigger. They are generally in rows, and relatives are not buried beside one another, but the graves are opened in turn, and thus those who were Friends in life lie promiscuously together in death, the earthly relations, as it were, ceas ing when the breath goes out of the body, and all resting quietly in hope of the same resurrection. It is the socialism of the grave. In one of his letters Barton refers to some Friendly tittle-tattle about his having repaired his grandfather's tomb at Carlisle. His grandfather was a churchman, and Bernard would, according to the Quaker sentiments, be falling in with the customs and vanities of the world in thus spending a few pounds to keep the tomb of the sturdy old yeoman from going to decay. But the poet cannot see that he has done anything amiss, and thinks it a pity that Quaker graves should have nothing to distinguish one from another. — 'I could wish gravestones' he says •were allowed in our burial grounds. Confine what ia put on them, and welcome, to name date and age ; rigidly interdict all flattery and folly : But I own it would feel pleasamt to me to know the precise spot where those I have loved lie. / never feel quite sure xchich is my Lucy's grave out of the family row.' Lacy was hie wife, who died young, leaving an only child, a girl, and a Lucy too, who survived her father, and wrote the short account of his life prefixed to the Selection before mentioned. Sentiment of any kind, in the ordinary sense, is almost necessarily proscribed by the Quaker habit of thought ; the Friends would, at any rate, hold that there should be an end of such feelings or fancies when the remains of our friends and relatives are consigned to earth. They are not there, but ouly their rotting bodies. And perhaps after all the feelings that make most of us haunt the graves of those we have loved and lost are somewhat mistaken or misplaced ; when they are excessive, they certainly become unseemly. There is something to be said for the Quaker view of the matter. Bat to come back to Barton and Quaker poerty. Bernard was a bank clerk. In his youth, when he began to feel the stirrings of ambition within him, he thought of devoting bis life to literature ; but was fortunately dissuaded from the project. He would never have made a great figure as an author by profession. It may be said that he gave the world all that was iv him — which indeed was not very much. At the time he was meditating a flight from his home in the north of England to Grub Street, he received a capital letter from Byron, to whom he had communicated bis design. The noble poet wrote in the kindest, mostbrotherly manner, and with that remarkable good sense which was ever present to his thoughts, and so often absent from his actions. Byron's letters generally are so full of sprightly wit and practical wisdom, and written in such nervous, idiomatic English, that one cannot help regretting that he did not, like Scott, turn to prose when he found the Muse deserting him, as he most have done when he was spinning oat the latter cantos of Don Juan. Here is part of the letter : — ' Waving your obliging expressions as to my own productions, for which I thank you very sincerely, and assure you that I think not lightly of the praise of one whose approbation is valuable; will you allow me to talk to you candidly, not critically, on the subject of yours ? You will not •aspect me of a wish to discourage, since I pointed out to the publisher (Mr Murray) the propriety of complying with your wishes. I think more highly of your poetical talents than it vould perhaps gratify you to hear expressed, for I believe from what I observe of your mind, that yon are above flattery. To come to tli3 point, you deserve success ; but we knew before Addison wrote his Cato, that desert does not always command it. But suppose it attained — Yon know what ills the author's life assail, Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.' Do not renounce writing, but never trust entirely to authorship. If yon have a profession retain it, it will be, like Prior's fellowship, a last and sure resource. Compare Mr Rogers with other authors of the day ; assuredly he is among the first of living poets (Byrcn was no great critic), but is it to that he owes his station in society and his intimacy in the best circles? No, it is to his prudence and respectability. The world (a bad one I own) courts him because he has no occasion to court it. . . . A truly well cultivated mind will ever be independent. That you may be so is my sincere wish, and if others think as well of your poetry as I do you will have no reason to complain oi your readers.' Soutbey and Lamb wrote him to the same purpose, and the result was that he stuck to his desk to tbe end of his life. Like bis friend Lamb he often found the labour of posting ledgers and adding up long rows of figures irksome enough, but it made him independent, which he could not possibly have been as a booksellers' hack. Sou they wrote in his grave, dignified manner, and Lamb, of coarse, in the style of ' F.lia.' 'Throw yourself on the world,' exclaims the latter, 'without any rational plan of support beyond what the chance employ of booksellers would afford you ! Throw yourself rather, my dear sir, from the steep Tarpeian rock, slapdash headlong upon iron spikes. If you have but fiye consolitary minutes between the desk and the bed, make much of them, and live a century in them, rather than turn slave to the booksellers. They are Turks and Tartars when they have poor authors at their beck. . . . . Keep to your bank, and the bank will k*ep you. Trust not to the public ; you may hang, starve, drown yourself for anything that worthy personage cares. I bless every star that Providence, not seeing good to make me independent, has seen it next good to settle me upon the stable foundation of Leadenball. Sit down, good 8.8., in the banking office. What ! is there not from six to eleven, p.m., six days in the week, and is there not all Sunday ? Fie, what a superfluity of man's time, if you could think so ! Enough for relaxation, mirth, convers", | pietry, good thoughts, quiet thoughts. O, the corroding, torturing, tormenting thoughts j that disturb the brain of the unlucky wight who mu9t draw upon it for daily sustenance ! Henceforth I retract all my fond complaints of mercantile employment— look upon them as lovers' quarrels. I was but half in earnest. Welcome dead timber of a desk that gives me life. A little gr umbling is a wholesome medicine for tbe spleen, but ia my inner heart do I approve and embrace this our close but unharassing way of life. I am quite serious.' Authorship is not so risky in these dayß of multitudinous readers ac it was at the beginning of the century. A tenth-rate novelist, to whom grammar is a mystery, will make almost as much as was made by Byron or Scott, if he or she (the she's are legion) can trick oat a vulgar sensation iv tawdry language. Litertaure is not only threatened, it is already devastated with an invasion of barbarians. It is the same with art. There are thousands of artiste, and scarcely a single painter, though Sir John Millais says that his own pictures and those of his friends onlywant age to make them equal to Titians ! Barton met with a hit of good fortune when he was still in the prime of life. ' A few members of his Society, including some of the wealthier of his own family, raised £1200 among them for his benefit.' He seems to have felt some delicacy in accepting thtß handsome gift, and wrote to Lamb on the subject. 4 1 hasten,' says C. L in reply, 'to Bay that if my opinion can strengthen you in your choice it is decisive for your acceptance of what has been so handsomely offered. I can see nothing injurious to your most honorable sense. Think that you are cal.ed to a poetical ministry— nothing worse—the mm Uer is worthy of his hire. . . IfyoustiU have doubts read over Sanderson s ' Cases ot C .nscience,' and Jeremy Taylor's • Doctor DabiUntium,' the first a moderate octavo, asd tbt lftttar a folio of nioe hundred olei)

j digested the admirable reasons pro and con which they give for every possible case, you will be— just as wise as when you began.' Barton accepted the money, which was given in a highly honourable spirit — aa a kind of thanksgiving to God for sending the Society of Friends a poet of their own. But the good Bernard was but a homely, and too often rather a prosy rhymer. There has been no great Quaker poet, nor is it at all likely that the world will ev-.Tsee one even of the second rank. Quakerism is indeed fast decaying both at home and in America ; in another half century, or perhaps less, it will be practically a thing of the past; but even if it were to revive and continue in all its original vigour for centuries, the assertion might be ventured that it would not produce a poot. Barton and the Howitta and VVhittier are mere rhymers. The wonder is th&t this sober and singularly prosaic form of Puritanism should have produced a 6rst-rate orator like John Bright. But the Friends, notwithstanding the proverb about a 'Quakers' meeting,' have been always great speakers. Asa rule, they are good conversers, and in the earty days of the sect their principles were furthered quite as much by public speaking aa by their non-resisting silence. Nature, too, will have vent. Shut out from intercourse with the fineartß, and from the amusements of the world, they latterly took up with philanthropy, and it was as a political philanthropist that Bright forced his way to the front rank of orators. With all their gifts of silence, aud in spite of their doctrine of nonresistance, the Friends are besides a most combative people. Some writers have traced this characteris'ic to the fact of so many of the original Quakers having been soldiers in Cromwell's armies. It was as a philanthropist too, that Whittier won his fame as a rhymer. They must have some good cause or other on which to exercise their gifts. But philanthropy, whether of the political or hu.nanitarian kind, is not favourable to the Muse. Neither, as I have said, is Furitanism in any form. It is absurd to call Milton a Puritan. He was Cromwell's secretary, and he was bitterly opposed to the Cavalier party and to the hierarchy, but he was no more a Puritan than Laud himself. He knew nothing of the inward throes that distinguished what we may call religious Puritans — those mental conflicts with sin and the Evil One which Bunyan has so vividly described from his own personal recollections, and which at one time shook the robust frame and not less robust mind of Oliver himself. Milton was in fact a republican. There is a touching reference in Paradise Lost, whichl havenever seennoticed. to the failure of his hopes after the 'blessed' Restoration. It occurs in the description of the work of creation on the sixth day — ' the sixth, and of creation last' — and is aa follows : — 'The parsimonious Emmet, provident Of future; in small room large heart inclosed ; Pattern of jiixt equality, perhaps, He.rfM.fttr, joined in her popular tribes Of commonalty.' It was only accident that associated Milton with the Puritans, with whom, : doctrinally, he had little or no sympathy, except in their hatred of bishops and monkery. Whatever Puritanism may be, it is certainly not poetical, and Quakers, in particular, are perhaps the most matter-of-fact people in the civilised world. Even Bernard Barton, whose Muse was uo imperious mistress, found the customs and manners of his sect a little too confining. ' Barton lives more in the letters of Charles Lamb than in his own poetry. His own letters are not very interesting; they are indeed duller than his verses. The truth is that the Quaker poet was a very ordinary, commonplace kind of man, who would never have been heard of in the world but for his taste and slender talent for rhyming ; and I (loubt if even this would have sufficed to get him the reputation he enjoyed had he not been a Quaker. A Quaker poet was in those days as great a rarity as a white crow. B. B. was, as we have seen, fond of corresponding with distinguished literary men. Lamb always treats him kindly, though it is easy to see with more respect for his character than his talents. 1 don't suppose he wrote often to Scott. The following letter from the great Magician, to which I have come hack again after a long rirrumbeudUni,*, may possibly be in answer to Barton's first and last short letter to him. Lockhart gives none of Scott's to the Quaker bard. Amiable and respectable as the latter was, his talents would uot enable him to correspond on anything like equal terms with the great guns among hie contemporaries. Lamb wa«, of course, nearer his level than Scott or Byron, though the author of the Essays of Elia was in his way, and a delightful way too, as real a genius as either of these illustrious men ; but even Lamb, as I have just said, scarcely ever deigned to treat him quite seriously. Some of hi 3 letters to him, however, are rnimitaUe, and it is in these that Bernard Barton has his only chance of immortality. But here, to conclude this rambling gossip, is Scott's letter to the humble Quaker poet, one of whose merits, I may say, was tfli.t he neither had a high conceit of his owti performances nor a particle of envy of his brother poets. The letter settles the question as to whether Sir Walter ever saw Melrose by moonlight. But I must first quote the lines from the lay of the Last Minstrel, which gave rise to the question, familiar as they must be to mosl readers of the Southland Times; — If thou wonldst view fair Melrose aright, Go visit it by the pale moonlight; For the gay beams of lightsome day Gild, but to flout, the ruins grey. When the broken arches are black in night, And each shafted oriel glimmers white; When the cold light's uncertain shower Streams on the ruined central tower; When butress and butress, alternately, Seem framed of ebon and ivory; When silver edges the imagery, And the scrolls that teach thee to live and die; When distant Tweed is heard to rave, And the owlet to hoot o'er the dead man's grave; Then go — but go alone the while — Then view St. David's ruined pile; And home returning, soothly swear, j Was never scene so sad and fair. The letter refers, besides, to transcripts of some curious old M S.S., rehting to Scottish history, lent to Sir Walter for perusal through Barton. The latter had been requested by a friend to a3k Scott to copy for her, by way of autograph, the above description. The request was good-naturedly granted, but instead of the four last lines the poet penned the following humorous variation: -• Then go — and meditate with awe On scenes the author never saw, Who never wandered by the moon To see what could be seen by noon. And now for the letter an \ the final conclusion of this, I fear, tedious rigmarole:— " My dear Sir, — I have been lazy in sending you the two transcripts. In calling back the days of my youth, I was surprised into confessing what I might have as well kept to myself, that I had been guilty of sending persons a bat-hunting to see the ruins of Melrose by moonlight, which I never saw myself. The fact is rather curious, for as> I have often slept nights at Melrose (when I did not reside so near the place) it is singular that I have not seen it by moonlight fin some chance occasion. However, it so happens that I never did, and must (unless I get cold by going on purpose) lie contented with supposing that these ruins look very like other Gothicbuildings whichl have seen by the wan light of the moon. I was never more rejoiced in my life than by the safe arrival of the curious papers. The naming of the regent Morton, instead of Murray, in the transcript was a gross blunder of the transcriber, who hail l»ecn dreaming of these two celebrated persons till he confused them in his noddle. I shall despatch them by a capable frank, • having only to apologise for its length of ar- , rival by informing you I have been absent iv Dumfriesshire for some time, waiting on '; my young chief, like a faithful clansman. I am always, Most faithfully yours, Waltkk Scott. Bth October, Abbot.sford, 1824." A trifle, but yet characteristic of the greatest Scotsman of modern times. | Sootcs.