Part 11 (1/2)

Why sh earth's dark caves, o'er heaven's fair plains, can sweep, Can range its hidden cell, where toils the unfathoy floor, beneath the shade Of bushy rock-weed tangled, dusk, and brown, She sees the wreck of founder'd vessel laid, In slimy silence, many a fathom down From where the star-beam trembles; o'er it thrown Are heap'd the treasuresgroan, That bubbled ' o'er the bones, the restless tides complain

Gloomy and wide rolls the sepulchral sea, Grave of rave!

Perchance, where now he sleeps, a space for reen wave

It well may he! Poor bosom, why dost heave Thus wild? Oh, many a care, troublous and dark

On earth attends thee still; the mermaid's cave Grief haunts not; sure 'twere pleasant there tobarque

Sure it were pleasant through the vasty deep, When on its boso speed by bower and cave to sweep; When flah by tides and gales, the screaay The crimson weeds, proud ocean's pendants, streah scenes so strangely fair 'twere pleasant, sure, to stray

Why this strange thought? If, in that ocean laid

The ear would cease to hear, the eye to see, Though sights and sounds like these circled h the ht beam'd on me (If a dull heap of bones retained my name, That bleach'd or blacken'd 'olden beaht stream

Yet dwells a spirit in this earthy frame Which Oceans cannot quench nor Time destroy;-- A deathless, fadeless ray, a heavenly flame, That pure shall rise when fails each base alloy That earth instils, dark grief, or baseless joy: Then shall the ocean's secrets ht;-- For I do hold that happy souls enjoy A vast all-reaching range of angel-flight, Froht

Now night's dark veil is rent; on yonder land, That blue and distant rises o'er the loon'd, thy whisperings soothed uor bred

But now reet a lovelier scene Than fancy pictured: frolorious head

I found e, and several other friends and relations, waiting fortheood deal from debility, but not ain, about ten years after this time, I visited the south of Scotland, it was to receive the instructions necessary to qualify me for a bank accountant; and when I revisited it at a still later period, it was to undertake the ement of a led with a different sort of persons from those hom I had co leave of the lower class, Ithee which has taken place in this country during the last hundred years Up till the times of the Rebellion of 1745, and a little later, it was its reerous portions; and the effective strongholds froradually gained upon old anarchy and barbarisreat towns We are told by ecclesiastical historians, that in Rous_) caarded as synonymous with heathen, from the circumstance that the worshi+ppers of the Gods were then chiefly to be found in remote country places; and we know that in Scotland the Refor that of Christianity itself in the old Roer and more influential towns; and it was in the reered longest, and found its ow, Perth, St Andrews, Dundee, were all Protestant, and sent out their well-taught burghers to serve in the aration, when Huntly and Ha their vassals to contend for the obsolete faith In a later age the accessible Lowlands were ielistic Presbyterianism, when the more mountainous and inaccessible provinces of the country were still in a condition to furnish, in as known as the Highland Host, a dire instrument of persecution Even as late as theto a popular writer, ”never got aboon the Pass of Killicrankie;” and the Stuarts, exiled for their adherence to Popery, continued to found almost their sole hopes of restoration on the swords of their co-religionists the Highlanders

During the last hundred years, however, this old condition of reat towns that _Paganism_ now chiefly prevails In at least their lapsed classes--a rapidly increasing proportion of their population--it is those cities of our country which first caught the light of religion and learning, that have become preeminently its dark parts; just, if I may employ the comparison, as it is those portions of the ht when she is in her increscent state, and shi+ne like a thread of silver in the deep blue of the heavens, that first become dark when she falls into the wane

It isthe elapsed half of the present century that this change for the worse has taken place in the large towns of Scotland In the year 1824 it was greatly less than half acco on; and I saw, partially at least, the processes in operation through which it has been effected The cities of the country have increased their population during the past fifty years greatly beyond the proportion of its rural districts--a result in part of the revolutions which have taken place in the agricultural systehlands; and in part also of that extraordinary developdoenerations have witnessed Of the wilder Edinburgh mechanics hom I formed at this time any acquaintance, less than one-fourth were natives of the place The others were mere settlers in it, who had removed mostly from country districts and small towns, in which they had been known, each by his own circle of neighbourhood, and had lived, in consequence, under the wholesoe at the tihbours--they were set free frouidance of higher principle, found themselves at liberty to do very eneral_ opinion to control--cliques and parties of their wilder spirits soon formed in their sheds and workshops a standard of opinion of their own, and found only too effectualtheir weaker coreat deal of wild dissipation and profligacy, united, of course, to the inevitable ih dissipation and ience in the first generation, they are sure always to part company from it in the second The faht fanorance; and, with evil example set before and around it, it al the lapsed classes In the third generation the descent is of course still greater and more hopeless than in the second There is a type of even physical degradation already e towns, especially araded females, which is scarce less ro, and which both ow readers h Streets of these cities The features are generally bloated and overcharged, the profile lines usually concave, the coh, and the expression that of a dissipation and sensuality become chronic and inherent And how this class--constitutionally degraded, and with the moral sense, in most instances, utterly undeveloped and blind--are ever to be reclairant Irish forradation of our large towns They are, however, _pagans_, not of the new, but of the old type: and are chiefly formidable from the squalid wretchedness of a physical character which they have transferred from their mud cabins into our streets and lanes, and from the course of ruinous competition into which they have entered with the unskilled labourers of the country, and which has had the effect of reducing our lowlier countrymen to a humbler level than they perhaps ever occupied before Meanwhile, this course of degradation is going on, in all our larger towns, in an ever-increasing ratio; and all that philanthropy and the Churches are doing to counteract it is but as the discharge of a few squirts on a conflagration It is, I fear, preparing terrible convulsions for the future When the dangerous classes of a country were located in its remote districts, as in Scotland in the early half of the last century, it was comparatively easy to deal with them: but the _sans culottes_ of Paris in its First Revolution, placed side by side with its executive Government, proved very formidable indeed; nor is it, alas! very ie towns, broken loose froe on the upper classes and the Churches of the country the indifferency hich they have been suffered to sink

I was infore, shortly after my arrival, that rocer for two years, had given up business, and gone to college to prepare hie, after co desire to meet with me His mother, too, had joined in the invitation--would I not take tea with thee had been asked to accoe, and, after an interruption in our intercourse of about five years, spent the evening with my old friend And for years after ere inseparable cohbourhood, spent together aliven to private study or inevitable occupation, and hen separated by distance, exchanged letters enough to fill volurown men; and for the first feeeks we took stock of each other's acquirements and experiences, and the measure of each other's calibre, with some little curiosity The mind of my friend had developed rather in a scientific than literary direction He afterwards carried away the first e, and the second in natural philosophy; and he had, I now found, great acuteness as a metaphysician, and no inconsiderable acquaintance with the antagonistic positions of the schools of Hume and Reid On the other hand, reater than his, and my acquaintance with men, and even with books, e of idea which we carried on, both were gainers: he occasionally picked up in our conversations a fact of which he had been previously ignorant; and I, ument I introduced hi a small collection, which, ere he ulti the others, the second specimen of _Pterichthys_ ever found; and he, in turn, was able to give h--for natural science was not taught at the university which he attended--I found of use in the arrangeh to stand in need of those threads of theory without which large accuether in the memory There was one special hypothesis which he had heard broached, and the utter ih to detect, which for a tiination It had been said, he told me, that the ancient world, in which etable, had flourished and decayed--a world greatly older than that before the Flood--had been tenanted by rational, responsible beings, for who, a resurrection and a day of final judgment had awaited But many thousands of years had elapsed since that day--eone Of all the accountable creatures that had been suathered to its bone, so that not a vestige of the framework of their bodies occurred in the rocks or soils in which they had been originally inhumed; and, in consequence, only the remains of their irresponsible conteetable productions of their fields and forests, were now to be found

The dreah poetry estive and bold, I need scarce say that it has itself no foundation in science Man had _no_ responsible predecessor on earth At the determined time, when his appointed habitation was completely fitted for hies had been ages of iood,” but not yet ”very good,” nor yet ripened for the appearance of a ent, whose nature it is to be a felloorker with the Creator in relation to even the physical and the material The planet which we inhabit seems to have been prepared for h my friend, but in part also from the circumstance that I retained a measure of intimacy with such of my schoolfellows as had subsequently prosecuted their education at college, I was acquainted, during the later years in which I wrought as a ht lads; and I so inal calibre I did not always find that general superiority on the side of the scholar which the scholar hiranted

What he had specially studied he knew, save in rare and exceptional cases, better than the workinghis Greek and Latin, and expatiating in Natural Philosophy and the Matheelse; and it is at least a fact, that all the great readers of my acquaintance at this tilish literature--were not the men who had received the classical education On the other hand, in frae lay with the scholars In that coue, and which enables h the journey of life, I found that the classical education gave no superiority whatever; nor did it appear to for an introduction to the realities of business as that course of dealing with things tangible and actual in which the working man has to exercise his faculties, and from which he derives his experience One cause of the over-low estimate which the classical scholar so often forence of that class of the people to which our skilled , arises very much from the forwardness of a set of blockheads who are always sure to obtrude thearded by hie specient mechanic obtrusive Men of the stamp of my two uncles, and of my friend William Ross, never press themselves on the notice of the classes above thee, for instance, often finds that it is the dolts of his flock that first force themselves upon his acquaintance I have heard the late Mr Stewart of Cromarty remark, that the humbler dunderheads of the parish had all introduced the ere he found out its clever fellows And hence often sadwith the people It see them men of his own calibre, and, in certain practical departht than he; and that this superior class is always sure to lead the others And in preaching down to the level of the men of humbler capacity, he fails often to preach to men of any capacity at all, and is of no use Soe that, in exercising his adot to lower himself to his people, and so preached over their heads And at times, when they themselves came to occupy his pulpit, as occasionally happened, they addressed to the congregation serh for even children to coht at the time a class of boys in the Cromarty Sabbath-school, and invariably found on these occasions, that while the ed to the full with the striking thoughts and graphic illustrations of the very elaborate discourses deeh for them, they remembered of the very simple ones, specially lowered to suit narrow capacities, not a single word or note All the atte a cheap literature that have failed, have been atteher-toned efforts have usually succeeded If the writer of these chapters has been in any degree successful in addressing himself as a journalist to the Presbyterian people of Scotland, it has always been, not by writing _down_ to the his best on all occasions to write _up_ to theht of them as represented by his friend Williae--by shrewd old John Fraser, and his reckless though very intelligent acquaintance Cha; and by addressing to theood sense and as solid information as he could possiblytheir ear, and perhaps, in soment

FOOTNOTE:

[10] The extreme picturesqueness of these fires--in part a consequence of the great height and peculiar architecture of the buildings which they destroyed--caught the nice eye of Sir Walter Scott ”I can conceive,” we find hiht s on fire fro out flames, like a volcano, fro down one after another, into an abyss of fire, which rese but hell; for there were vaults of wine and spirits which set up huge jets of flames whenever they were called into activity by the fall of these ments Between the corner of the Parlia sos at the lower extremity”

CHAPTER XVII

”Beware, Lorenzo, a slow, sudden death”--YOUNG

There was one special subject which e seriously upon ious iood a business, that in two years he had already saved e course of education And assuredly, never did hly disinterested than his Patronage ruled supreme in the Scottish Establishment at the time; and my friend had no influence and no patron; but he could not see his way clear to join with the Evangelical Dissenters or the Secession; and believing that thesouls, he had entered on his new course in the full conviction that, if God had work for hih character to do, He would find hihly in earnest, and as part of the special employment to which he had devoted himself, he set himself to press upon , of religious concerns

I was not unacquainted with the standard theology of the Scottish Church In the parish school I had, indeed, acquired no ideas on the subject; and though I now hear a good deal said, chiefly with a controversial bearing, about the excellent religious influence of our parochial seminaries, I never knew any one ed other than the e to these institutions, and not a single individual who had ever derived fro In truth, during almost the whole of the last century, and for at least the first forty years of the present, the people of Scotland were, with all their faults, considerably er part of their schoolmasters