When Sharpe first heard of the rebellion, he applied to Sir
Alexander Ramsay, the Provost, for soldiers to guard his house.
Disliking their occupation, the soldiers gave him an ugly time of
it.  All the night through they kept up a continuous series of
'alarms and incursions,' 'cries of "Stand!" "Give fire!"' etc.,
which forced the prelate to flee to the Castle in the morning,
hoping there to find the rest which was denied him at home. {6c}
Now, however, when all danger to himself was past, Sharpe came out
in his true colours, and scant was the justice likely to be shown
to the foes of Scottish Episcopacy when the Primate was by.  The
prisoners were lodged in Haddo's Hole, a part of St. Giles'
Cathedral, where, by the kindness of Bishop Wishart, to his credit
be it spoken, they were amply supplied with food. {6d}

Some people urged, in the Council, that the promise of quarter
which had been given on the field of battle should protect the
lives of the miserable men.  Sir John Gilmoure, the greatest
lawyer, gave no opinion--certainly a suggestive circumstance--but
Lord Lee declared that this would not interfere with their legal
trial, 'so to bloody executions they went.' {6e}  To the number of
thirty they were condemned and executed; while two of them, Hugh
M'Kail, a young minister, and Neilson of Corsack, were tortured
with the boots.

The goods of those who perished were confiscated, and their bodies
were dismembered and distributed to different parts of the country;
'the heads of Major M'Culloch and the two Gordons,' it was
resolved, says Kirkton, 'should be pitched on the gate of
Kirkcudbright; the two Hamiltons and Strong's head should be
affixed at Hamilton, and Captain Arnot's sett on the Watter Gate at
Edinburgh.  The armes of all the ten, because they hade with
uplifted hands renewed the Covenant at Lanark, were sent to the
people of that town to expiate that crime, by placing these arms on
the top of the prison.' {6f}  Among these was John Neilson, the
Laird of Corsack, who saved Turner's life at Dumfries; in return
for which service Sir James attempted, though without success, to
get the poor man reprieved.  One of the condemned died of his
wounds between the day of condemnation and the day of execution.  '
None of them,' says Kirkton, 'would save their life by taking the
declaration and renouncing the Covenant, though it was offered to
them. . . . But never men died in Scotland so much lamented by the
people, not only spectators, but those in the country.  When
Knockbreck and his brother were turned over, they clasped each
other in their armes, and so endured the pangs of death.  When
Humphrey Colquhoun died, he spoke not like an ordinary citizen, but
like a heavenly minister, relating his comfortable Christian
experiences, and called for his Bible, and laid it on his wounded
arm, and read John iii. 8, and spoke upon it to the admiration of
all.  But most of all, when Mr. M'Kail died, there was such a
lamentation as was never known in Scotland before; not one dry
cheek upon all the street, or in all the numberless windows in the
mercate place.' {6g}

The following passage from this speech speaks for itself and its
author:

'Hereafter I will not talk with flesh and blood, nor think on the
world's consolations.  Farewell to all my friends, whose company
hath been refreshful to me in my pilgrimage.  I have done with the
light of the sun and the moon; welcome eternal light, eternal life,
everlasting love, everlasting praise, everlasting glory.  Praise to
Him that sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb for ever!  Bless the
Lord, O my soul, that hath pardoned all my iniquities in the blood
of His Son, and healed all my diseases.  Bless Him, O all ye His
angels that excel in strength, ye ministers of His that do His
pleasure.  Bless the Lord, O my soul!' {6h}

After having ascended the gallows ladder he again broke forth in
the following words of touching eloquence:  'And now I leave off to
speak any more to creatures, and begin my intercourse with God,
which shall never be broken off.  Farewell father and mother,
friends and relations!  Farewell the world and all delights!
Farewell meat and drink!  Farewell sun, moon, and stars!--Welcome
God and Father!  Welcome sweet Jesus Christ, the Mediator of the
new covenant!  Welcome blessed Spirit of grace and God of all
consolation!  Welcome glory!  Welcome eternal life!  Welcome
Death!' {6i}

At Glasgow, too, where some were executed, they caused the soldiers
to beat the drums and blow the trumpets on their closing ears.
Hideous refinement of revenge!  Even the last words which drop from
the lips of a dying man--words surely the most sincere and the most
unbiassed which mortal mouth can utter--even these were looked upon
as poisoned and as poisonous.  'Drown their last accents,' was the
cry, 'lest they should lead the crowd to take their part, or at the
least to mourn their doom!' {6j}  But, after all, perhaps it was
more merciful than one would think--unintentionally so, of course;
perhaps the storm of harsh and fiercely jubilant noises, the
clanging of trumpets, the rattling of drums, and the hootings and
jeerings of an unfeeling mob, which were the last they heard on
earth, might, when the mortal fight was over, when the river of
death was passed, add tenfold sweetness to the hymning of the
angels, tenfold peacefulness to the shores which they had reached.

Not content with the cruelty of these executions, some even of the
peasantry, though these were confined to the shire of Mid-Lothian,
pursued, captured, plundered, and murdered the miserable fugitives
who fell in their way.  One strange story have we of these times of
blood and persecution:  Kirkton the historian and popular tradition
tell us alike of a flame which often would arise from the grave, in
a moss near Carnwath, of some of those poor rebels:  of how it
crept along the ground; of how it covered the house of their
murderer; and of how it scared him with its lurid glare.

Hear Daniel Defoe:  {6k}

'If the poor people were by these insupportable violences made
desperate, and driven to all the extremities of a wild despair, who
can justly reflect on them when they read in the Word of God "That
oppression makes a wise man mad"?  And therefore were there no
other original of the insurrection known by the name of the Rising
of Pentland, it was nothing but what the intolerable oppressions of
those times might have justified to all the world, nature having
dictated to all people a right of defence when illegally and
arbitrarily attacked in a manner not justifiable either by laws of
nature, the laws of God, or the laws of the country.'

Bear this remonstrance of Defoe's in mind, and though it is the
fashion of the day to jeer and to mock, to execrate and to contemn,
the noble band of Covenanters--though the bitter laugh at their
old-world religious views, the curl of the lip at their merits, and
the chilling silence on their bravery and their determination, are
but too rife through all society--be charitable to what was evil
and honest to what was good about the Pentland insurgents, who
fought for life and liberty, for country and religion, on the 28th
of November 1666, now just two hundred years ago.


EDINBURGH, 28th November 1866.




THE DAY AFTER TO-MORROW



History is much decried; it is a tissue of errors, we are told, no
doubt correctly; and rival historians expose each other's blunders
with gratification.  Yet the worst historian has a clearer view of
the period he studies than the best of us can hope to form of that
in which we live.  The obscurest epoch is to-day; and that for a
thousand reasons of inchoate tendency, conflicting report, and
sheer mass and multiplicity of experience; but chiefly, perhaps, by
reason of an insidious shifting of landmarks.  Parties and ideas
continually move, but not by measurable marches on a stable course;
the political soil itself steals forth by imperceptible degrees,
like a travelling glacier, carrying on its bosom not only political
parties but their flag-posts and cantonments; so that what appears
to be an eternal city founded on hills is but a flying island of
Laputa.  It is for this reason in particular that we are all
becoming Socialists without knowing it; by which I would not in the
least refer to the acute case of Mr. Hyndman and his horn-blowing
supporters, sounding their trumps of a Sunday within the walls of
our individualist Jericho--but to the stealthy change that has come
over the spirit of Englishmen and English legislation.  A little
while ago, and we were still for liberty; 'crowd a few more
thousands on the bench of Government,' we seemed to cry; 'keep her
head direct on liberty, and we cannot help but come to port.'  This
is over; laisser faire declines in favour; our legislation grows
authoritative, grows philanthropical, bristles with new duties and
new penalties, and casts a spawn of inspectors, who now begin,
note-book in hand, to darken the face of England.  It may be right
or wrong, we are not trying that; but one thing it is beyond doubt:
it is Socialism in action, and the strange thing is that we
scarcely know it.

Liberty has served us a long while, and it may be time to seek new
altars.  Like all other principles, she has been proved to be self-
exclusive in the long run.  She has taken wages besides (like all
other virtues) and dutifully served Mammon; so that many things we
were accustomed to admire as the benefits of freedom and common to
all were truly benefits of wealth, and took their value from our
neighbours' poverty.  A few shocks of logic, a few disclosures (in
the journalistic phrase) of what the freedom of manufacturers,
landlords, or shipowners may imply for operatives, tenants, or
seamen, and we not unnaturally begin to turn to that other pole of
hope, beneficent tyranny.  Freedom, to be desirable, involves
kindness, wisdom, and all the virtues of the free; but the free man
as we have seen him in action has been, as of yore, only the master
of many helots; and the slaves are still ill-fed, ill-clad, ill-
taught, ill-housed, insolently treated, and driven to their mines
and workshops by the lash of famine.  So much, in other men's
affairs, we have begun to see clearly; we have begun to despair of
virtue in these other men, and from our seat in Parliament begin to
discharge upon them, thick as arrows, the host of our inspectors.
The landlord has long shaken his head over the manufacturer; those
who do business on land have lost all trust in the virtues of the
shipowner; the professions look askance upon the retail traders and
have even started their co-operative stores to ruin them; and from
out the smoke-wreaths of Birmingham a finger has begun to write
upon the wall the condemnation of the landlord.  Thus, piece by
piece, do we condemn each other, and yet not perceive the
conclusion, that our whole estate is somewhat damnable.  Thus,
piece by piece, each acting against his neighbour, each sawing away
the branch on which some other interest is seated, do we apply in
detail our Socialistic remedies, and yet not perceive that we are
all labouring together to bring in Socialism at large.  A tendency
so stupid and so selfish is like to prove invincible; and if
Socialism be at all a practicable rule of life, there is every
chance that our grand-children will see the day and taste the
pleasures of existence in something far liker an ant-heap than any
previous human polity.  And this not in the least because of the
voice of Mr. Hyndman or the horns of his followers; but by the mere
glacier movement of the political soil, bearing forward on its
bosom, apparently undisturbed, the proud camps of Whig and Tory.
If Mr. Hyndman were a man of keen humour, which is far from my
conception of his character, he might rest from his troubling and
look on:  the walls of Jericho begin already to crumble and
dissolve.  That great servile war, the Armageddon of money and
numbers, to which we looked forward when young, becomes more and
more unlikely; and we may rather look to see a peaceable and
blindfold evolution, the work of dull men immersed in political
tactics and dead to political results.

The principal scene of this comedy lies, of course, in the House of
Commons; it is there, besides, that the details of this new
evolution (if it proceed) will fall to be decided; so that the
state of Parliament is not only diagnostic of the present but
fatefully prophetic of the future.  Well, we all know what
Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it.  We may pardon it some
faults, indeed, on the ground of Irish obstruction--a bitter trial,
which it supports with notable good humour.  But the excuse is
merely local; it cannot apply to similar bodies in America and
France; and what are we to say of these?  President Cleveland's
letter may serve as a picture of the one; a glance at almost any
paper will convince us of the weakness of the other.  Decay appears
to have seized on the organ of popular government in every land;
and this just at the moment when we begin to bring to it, as to an
oracle of justice, the whole skein of our private affairs to be
unravelled, and ask it, like a new Messiah, to take upon itself our
frailties and play for us the part that should be played by our own
virtues.  For that, in few words, is the case.  We cannot trust
ourselves to behave with decency; we cannot trust our consciences;
and the remedy proposed is to elect a round number of our
neighbours, pretty much at random, and say to these:  'Be ye our
conscience; make laws so wise, and continue from year to year to
administer them so wisely, that they shall save us from ourselves
and make us righteous and happy, world without end.  Amen.'  And
who can look twice at the British Parliament and then seriously
bring it such a task?  I am not advancing this as an argument
against Socialism:  once again, nothing is further from my mind.
There are great truths in Socialism, or no one, not even Mr.
Hyndman, would be found to hold it; and if it came, and did one-
tenth part of what it offers, I for one should make it welcome.
But if it is to come, we may as well have some notion of what it
will be like; and the first thing to grasp is that our new polity
will be designed and administered (to put it courteously) with
something short of inspiration.  It will be made, or will grow, in
a human parliament; and the one thing that will not very hugely
change is human nature.  The Anarchists think otherwise, from which
it is only plain that they have not carried to the study of history
the lamp of human sympathy.

Given, then, our new polity, with its new waggon-load of laws, what
headmarks must we look for in the life?  We chafe a good deal at
that excellent thing, the income-tax, because it brings into our
affairs the prying fingers, and exposes us to the tart words, of
the official.  The official, in all degrees, is already something
of a terror to many of us.  I would not willingly have to do with
even a police-constable in any other spirit than that of kindness.
I still remember in my dreams the eye-glass of a certain attache at
a certain embassy--an eyeglass that was a standing indignity to all
on whom it looked; and my next most disagreeable remembrance is of
a bracing, Republican postman in the city of San Francisco.  I
lived in that city among working folk, and what my neighbours
accepted at the postman's hands--nay, what I took from him myself--
it is still distasteful to recall.  The bourgeois, residing in the
upper parts of society, has but few opportunities of tasting this
peculiar bowl; but about the income-tax, as I have said, or perhaps
about a patent, or in the halls of an embassy at the hands of my
friend of the eye-glass, he occasionally sets his lips to it; and
he may thus imagine (if he has that faculty of imagination, without
which most faculties are void) how it tastes to his poorer
neighbours, who must drain it to the dregs.  In every contact with
authority, with their employer, with the police, with the School
Board officer, in the hospital, or in the workhouse, they have
equally the occasion to appreciate the light-hearted civility of
the man in office; and as an experimentalist in several out-of-the-
way provinces of life, I may say it has but to be felt to be
appreciated.  Well, this golden age of which we are speaking will
be the golden age of officials.  In all our concerns it will be
their beloved duty to meddle, with what tact, with what obliging
words, analogy will aid us to imagine.  It is likely these
gentlemen will be periodically elected; they will therefore have
their turn of being underneath, which does not always sweeten men's
conditions.  The laws they will have to administer will be no
clearer than those we know to-day, and the body which is to
regulate their administration no wiser than the British Parliament.
So that upon all hands we may look for a form of servitude most
galling to the blood--servitude to many and changing masters, and
for all the slights that accompany the rule of jack-in-office.  And
if the Socialistic programme be carried out with the least fulness,
we shall have lost a thing, in most respects not much to be
regretted, but as a moderator of oppression, a thing nearly
invaluable--the newspaper.  For the independent journal is a
creature of capital and competition; it stands and falls with
millionaires and railway bonds and all the abuses and glories of
to-day; and as soon as the State has fairly taken its bent to
authority and philanthropy, and laid the least touch on private
property, the days of the independent journal are numbered.  State
railways may be good things and so may State bakeries; but a State
newspaper will never be a very trenchant critic of the State
officials.

But again, these officials would have no sinecure.  Crime would
perhaps be less, for some of the motives of crime we may suppose
would pass away.  But if Socialism were carried out with any
fulness, there would be more contraventions.  We see already new
sins ringing up like mustard--School Board sins, factory sins,
Merchant Shipping Act sins--none of which I would be thought to
except against in particular, but all of which, taken together,
show us that Socialism can be a hard master even in the beginning.
If it go on to such heights as we hear proposed and lauded, if it
come actually to its ideal of the ant-heap, ruled with iron
justice, the number of new contraventions will be out of all
proportion multiplied.  Take the case of work alone.  Man is an
idle animal.  He is at least as intelligent as the ant; but
generations of advisers have in vain recommended him the ant's
example.  Of those who are found truly indefatigable in business,
some are misers; some are the practisers of delightful industries,
like gardening; some are students, artists, inventors, or
discoverers, men lured forward by successive hopes; and the rest
are those who live by games of skill or hazard--financiers,
billiard-players, gamblers, and the like.  But in unloved toils,
even under the prick of necessity, no man is continually sedulous.
Once eliminate the fear of starvation, once eliminate or bound the
hope of riches, and we shall see plenty of skulking and
malingering.  Society will then be something not wholly unlike a
cotton plantation in the old days; with cheerful, careless,
demoralised slaves, with elected overseers, and, instead of the
planter, a chaotic popular assembly.  If the blood be purposeful
and the soil strong, such a plantation may succeed, and be, indeed,
a busy ant-heap, with full granaries and long hours of leisure.
But even then I think the whip will be in the overseer's hands, and
not in vain.  For, when it comes to be a question of each man doing
his own share or the rest doing more, prettiness of sentiment will
be forgotten.  To dock the skulker's food is not enough; many will
rather eat haws and starve on petty pilferings than put their
shoulder to the wheel for one hour daily.  For such as these, then,
the whip will be in the overseer's hand; and his own sense of
justice and the superintendence of a chaotic popular assembly will
be the only checks on its employment.  Now, you may be an
industrious man and a good citizen, and yet not love, nor yet be
loved by, Dr. Fell the inspector.  It is admitted by private
soldiers that the disfavour of a sergeant is an evil not to be
combated; offend the sergeant, they say, and in a brief while you
will either be disgraced or have deserted.  And the sergeant can no
longer appeal to the lash.  But if these things go on, we shall
see, or our sons shall see, what it is to have offended an
inspector.

This for the unfortunate.  But with the fortunate also, even those
whom the inspector loves, it may not be altogether well.  It is
concluded that in such a state of society, supposing it to be
financially sound, the level of comfort will be high.  It does not
follow:  there are strange depths of idleness in man, a too-easily-
got sufficiency, as in the case of the sago-eaters, often quenching
the desire for all besides; and it is possible that the men of the
richest ant-heaps may sink even into squalor.  But suppose they do
not; suppose our tricksy instrument of human nature, when we play
upon it this new tune, should respond kindly; suppose no one to be
damped and none exasperated by the new conditions, the whole
enterprise to be financially sound--a vaulting supposition--and all
the inhabitants to dwell together in a golden mean of comfort:  we
have yet to ask ourselves if this be what man desire, or if it be
what man will even deign to accept for a continuance.  It is
certain that man loves to eat, it is not certain that he loves that
only or that best.  He is supposed to love comfort; it is not a
love, at least, that he is faithful to.  He is supposed to love
happiness; it is my contention that he rather loves excitement.
Danger, enterprise, hope, the novel, the aleatory, are dearer to
man than regular meals.  He does not think so when he is hungry,
but he thinks so again as soon as he is fed; and on the hypothesis
of a successful ant-heap, he would never go hungry.  It would be
always after dinner in that society, as, in the land of the Lotos-
eaters, it was always afternoon; and food, which, when we have it
not, seems all-important, drops in our esteem, as soon as we have
it, to a mere prerequisite of living.

That for which man lives is not the same thing for all individuals
nor in all ages; yet it has a common base; what he seeks and what
he must have is that which will seize and hold his attention.
Regular meals and weatherproof lodgings will not do this long.
Play in its wide sense, as the artificial induction of sensation,
including all games and all arts, will, indeed, go far to keep him
conscious of himself; but in the end he wearies for realities.
Study or experiment, to some rare natures, is the unbroken pastime
of a life.  These are enviable natures; people shut in the house by
sickness often bitterly envy them; but the commoner man cannot
continue to exist upon such altitudes:  his feet itch for physical
adventure; his blood boils for physical dangers, pleasures, and
triumphs; his fancy, the looker after new things, cannot continue
to look for them in books and crucibles, but must seek them on the
breathing stage of life.  Pinches, buffets, the glow of hope, the
shock of disappointment, furious contention with obstacles:  these
are the true elixir for all vital spirits, these are what they seek
alike in their romantic enterprises and their unromantic
dissipations.  When they are taken in some pinch closer than the
common, they cry, 'Catch me here again!' and sure enough you catch
them there again--perhaps before the week is out.  It is as old as
Robinson Crusoe; as old as man.  Our race has not been strained for
all these ages through that sieve of dangers that we call Natural
Selection, to sit down with patience in the tedium of safety; the
voices of its fathers call it forth.  Already in our society as it
exists, the bourgeois is too much cottoned about for any zest in
living; he sits in his parlour out of reach of any danger, often
out of reach of any vicissitude but one of health; and there he
yawns.  If the people in the next villa took pot-shots at him, he
might be killed indeed, but so long as he escaped he would find his
blood oxygenated and his views of the world brighter.  If Mr.
Mallock, on his way to the publishers, should have his skirts
pinned to a wall by a javelin, it would not occur to him--at least
for several hours--to ask if life were worth living; and if such
peril were a daily matter, he would ask it never more; he would
have other things to think about, he would be living indeed--not
lying in a box with cotton, safe, but immeasurably dull.  The
aleatory, whether it touch life, or fortune, or renown--whether we
explore Africa or only toss for halfpence--that is what I conceive
men to love best, and that is what we are seeking to exclude from
men's existences.  Of all forms of the aleatory, that which most
commonly attends our working men--the danger of misery from want of
work--is the least inspiriting:  it does not whip the blood, it
does not evoke the glory of contest; it is tragic, but it is
passive; and yet, in so far as it is aleatory, and a peril sensibly
touching them, it does truly season the men's lives.  Of those who
fail, I do not speak--despair should be sacred; but to those who
even modestly succeed, the changes of their life bring interest:  a
job found, a shilling saved, a dainty earned, all these are wells
of pleasure springing afresh for the successful poor; and it is not
from these but from the villa-dweller that we hear complaints of
the unworthiness of life.  Much, then, as the average of the
proletariat would gain in this new state of life, they would also
lose a certain something, which would not be missed in the
beginning, but would be missed progressively and progressively
lamented.  Soon there would be a looking back:  there would be
tales of the old world humming in young men's ears, tales of the
tramp and the pedlar, and the hopeful emigrant.  And in the stall-
fed life of the successful ant-heap--with its regular meals,
regular duties, regular pleasures, an even course of life, and fear
excluded--the vicissitudes, delights, and havens of to-day will
seem of epic breadth.  This may seem a shallow observation; but the
springs by which men are moved lie much on the surface.  Bread, I
believe, has always been considered first, but the circus comes
close upon its heels.  Bread we suppose to be given amply; the cry
for circuses will be the louder, and if the life of our descendants
be such as we have conceived, there are two beloved pleasures on
which they will be likely to fall back:  the pleasures of intrigue
and of sedition.

In all this I have supposed the ant-heap to be financially sound.
I am no economist, only a writer of fiction; but even as such, I
know one thing that bears on the economic question--I know the
imperfection of man's faculty for business.  The Anarchists, who
count some rugged elements of common sense among what seem to me
their tragic errors, have said upon this matter all that I could
wish to say, and condemned beforehand great economical polities.
So far it is obvious that they are right; they may be right also in
predicting a period of communal independence, and they may even be
right in thinking that desirable.  But the rise of communes is none
the less the end of economic equality, just when we were told it
was beginning.  Communes will not be all equal in extent, nor in
quality of soil, nor in growth of population; nor will the surplus
produce of all be equally marketable.  It will be the old story of
competing interests, only with a new unit; and, as it appears to
me, a new, inevitable danger.  For the merchant and the
manufacturer, in this new world, will be a sovereign commune; it is
a sovereign power that will see its crops undersold, and its
manufactures worsted in the market.  And all the more dangerous
that the sovereign power should be small.  Great powers are slow to
stir; national affronts, even with the aid of newspapers, filter
slowly into popular consciousness; national losses are so unequally
shared, that one part of the population will be counting its gains
while another sits by a cold hearth.  But in the sovereign commune
all will be centralised and sensitive.  When jealousy springs up,
when (let us say) the commune of Poole has overreached the commune
of Dorchester, irritation will run like quicksilver throughout the
body politic; each man in Dorchester will have to suffer directly
in his diet and his dress; even the secretary, who drafts the
official correspondence, will sit down to his task embittered, as a
man who has dined ill and may expect to dine worse; and thus a
business difference between communes will take on much the same
colour as a dispute between diggers in the lawless West, and will
lead as directly to the arbitrament of blows.  So that the
establishment of the communal system will not only reintroduce all
the injustices and heart-burnings of economic inequality, but will,
in all human likelihood, inaugurate a world of hedgerow warfare.
Dorchester will march on Poole, Sherborne on Dorchester, Wimborne
on both; the waggons will be fired on as they follow the highway,
the trains wrecked on the lines, the ploughman will go armed into
the field of tillage; and if we have not a return of ballad
literature, the local press at least will celebrate in a high vein
the victory of Cerne Abbas or the reverse of Toller Porcorum.  At
least this will not be dull; when I was younger, I could have
welcomed such a world with relief; but it is the New-Old with a
vengeance, and irresistibly suggests the growth of military powers
and the foundation of new empires.




COLLEGE PAPERS




CHAPTER I--EDINBURGH STUDENTS IN 1824



On the 2nd of January 1824 was issued the prospectus of the Lapsus
Linguae; or, the College Tatler; and on the 7th the first number
appeared.  On Friday the 2nd of April 'Mr. Tatler became
speechless.'  Its history was not all one success; for the editor
(who applies to himself the words of Iago, 'I am nothing if I am
not critical') overstepped the bounds of caution, and found himself
seriously embroiled with the powers that were.  There appeared in
No. XVI. a most bitter satire upon Sir John Leslie, in which he was
compared to Falstaff, charged with puffing himself, and very
prettily censured for publishing only the first volume of a class-
book, and making all purchasers pay for both.  Sir John Leslie took
up the matter angrily, visited Carfrae the publisher, and
threatened him with an action, till he was forced to turn the
hapless Lapsus out of doors.  The maltreated periodical found
shelter in the shop of Huie, Infirmary Street; and No. XVII. was
duly issued from the new office.  No. XVII. beheld Mr. Tatler's
humiliation, in which, with fulsome apology and not very credible
assurances of respect and admiration, he disclaims the article in
question, and advertises a new issue of No. XVI. with all
objectionable matter omitted.  This, with pleasing euphemism, he
terms in a later advertisement, 'a new and improved edition.'  This
was the only remarkable adventure of Mr. Tatler's brief existence;
unless we consider as such a silly Chaldee manuscript in imitation
of Blackwood, and a letter of reproof from a divinity student on
the impiety of the same dull effusion.  He laments the near
approach of his end in pathetic terms.  'How shall we summon up
sufficient courage,' says he, 'to look for the last time on our
beloved little devil and his inestimable proof-sheet?  How shall we
be able to pass No. 14 Infirmary Street and feel that all its
attractions are over?  How shall we bid farewell for ever to that
excellent man, with the long greatcoat, wooden leg and wooden
board, who acts as our representative at the gate of Alma Mater?'
But alas! he had no choice:  Mr. Tatler, whose career, he says
himself, had been successful, passed peacefully away, and has ever
since dumbly implored 'the bringing home of bell and burial.'

Alter et idem.  A very different affair was the Lapsus Linguae from
the Edinburgh University Magazine.  The two prospectuses alone,
laid side by side, would indicate the march of luxury and the
repeal of the paper duty.  The penny bi-weekly broadside of session
1828-4 was almost wholly dedicated to Momus.  Epigrams, pointless
letters, amorous verses, and University grievances are the
continual burthen of the song.  But Mr. Tatler was not without a
vein of hearty humour; and his pages afford what is much better:
to wit, a good picture of student life as it then was.  The
students of those polite days insisted on retaining their hats in
the class-room.  There was a cab-stance in front of the College;
and 'Carriage Entrance' was posted above the main arch, on what the
writer pleases to call 'coarse, unclassic boards.'  The benches of
the 'Speculative' then, as now, were red; but all other Societies
(the 'Dialectic' is the only survivor) met downstairs, in some
rooms of which it is pointedly said that 'nothing else could
conveniently be made of them.'  However horrible these dungeons may
have been, it is certain that they were paid for, and that far too
heavily for the taste of session 1823-4, which found enough calls
upon its purse for porter and toasted cheese at Ambrose's, or
cranberry tarts and ginger-wine at Doull's.  Duelling was still a
possibility; so much so that when two medicals fell to fisticuffs
in Adam Square, it was seriously hinted that single combat would be
the result.  Last and most wonderful of all, Gall and Spurzheim
were in every one's mouth; and the Law student, after having
exhausted Byron's poetry and Scott's novels, informed the ladies of
his belief in phrenology.  In the present day he would dilate on
'Red as a rose is she,' and then mention that he attends Old
Greyfriars', as a tacit claim to intellectual superiority.  I do
not know that the advance is much.

But Mr. Tatler's best performances were three short papers in which
he hit off pretty smartly the idiosyncrasies of the 'Divinity,' the
'Medical,' and the 'Law' of session 1823-4.  The fact that there
was no notice of the 'Arts' seems to suggest that they stood in the
same intermediate position as they do now--the epitome of student-
kind.  Mr. Tatler's satire is, on the whole, good-humoured, and has
not grown superannuated in ALL its limbs.  His descriptions may
limp at some points, but there are certain broad traits that apply
equally well to session 1870-1.  He shows us the DIVINITY of the
period--tall, pale, and slender--his collar greasy, and his coat
bare about the seams--'his white neckcloth serving four days, and
regularly turned the third'--'the rim of his hat deficient in
wool'--and 'a weighty volume of theology under his arm.'  He was
the man to buy cheap 'a snuff-box, or a dozen of pencils, or a six-
bladed knife, or a quarter of a hundred quills,' at any of the
public sale-rooms.  He was noted for cheap purchases, and for
exceeding the legal tender in halfpence.  He haunted 'the darkest
and remotest corner of the Theatre Gallery.'  He was to be seen
issuing from 'aerial lodging-houses.'  Withal, says mine author,
'there were many good points about him:  he paid his landlady's
bill, read his Bible, went twice to church on Sunday, seldom swore,
was not often tipsy, and bought the Lapsus Linguae.'

The MEDICAL, again, 'wore a white greatcoat, and consequently
talked loud'--(there is something very delicious in that
CONSEQUENTLY).  He wore his hat on one side.  He was active,
volatile, and went to the top of Arthur's Seat on the Sunday
forenoon.  He was as quiet in a debating society as he was loud in
the streets.  He was reckless and imprudent:  yesterday he insisted
on your sharing a bottle of claret with him (and claret was claret
then, before the cheap-and-nasty treaty), and to-morrow he asks you
for the loan of a penny to buy the last number of the Lapsus.

The student of LAW, again, was a learned man.  'He had turned over
the leaves of Justinian's Institutes, and knew that they were
written in Latin.  He was well acquainted with the title-page of
Blackstone's Commentaries, and argal (as the gravedigger in Hamlet
says) he was not a person to be laughed at.'  He attended the
Parliament House in the character of a critic, and could give you
stale sneers at all the celebrated speakers.  He was the terror of
essayists at the Speculative or the Forensic.  In social qualities
he seems to have stood unrivalled.  Even in the police-office we
find him shining with undiminished lustre.  'If a CHARLIE should
find him rather noisy at an untimely hour, and venture to take him
into custody, he appears next morning like a Daniel come to
judgment.  He opens his mouth to speak, and the divine precepts of
unchanging justice and Scots law flow from his tongue.  The
magistrate listens in amazement, and fines him only a couple of
guineas.'

Such then were our predecessors and their College Magazine.
Barclay, Ambrose, Young Amos, and Fergusson were to them what the
Cafe, the Rainbow, and Rutherford's are to us.  An hour's reading
in these old pages absolutely confuses us, there is so much that is
similar and so much that is different; the follies and amusements
are so like our own, and the manner of frolicking and enjoying are
so changed, that one pauses and looks about him in philosophic
judgment.  The muddy quadrangle is thick with living students; but
in our eyes it swarms also with the phantasmal white greatcoats and
tilted hats of 1824.  Two races meet:  races alike and diverse.
Two performances are played before our eyes; but the change seems
merely of impersonators, of scenery, of costume.  Plot and passion
are the same.  It is the fall of the spun shilling whether seventy-
one or twenty-four has the best of it.

In a future number we hope to give a glance at the individualities
of the present, and see whether the cast shall be head or tail--
whether we or the readers of the Lapsus stand higher in the
balance.



CHAPTER II--THE MODERN STUDENT CONSIDERED GENERALLY



We have now reached the difficult portion of our task.  Mr. Tatler,
for all that we care, may have been as virulent as he liked about
the students of a former; but for the iron to touch our sacred
selves, for a brother of the Guild to betray its most privy
infirmities, let such a Judas look to himself as he passes on his
way to the Scots Law or the Diagnostic, below the solitary lamp at
the corner of the dark quadrangle.  We confess that this idea
alarms us.  We enter a protest.  We bind ourselves over verbally to
keep the peace.  We hope, moreover, that having thus made you
secret to our misgivings, you will excuse us if we be dull, and set
that down to caution which you might before have charged to the
account of stupidity.

The natural tendency of civilisation is to obliterate those
distinctions which are the best salt of life.  All the fine old
professional flavour in language has evaporated.  Your very
gravedigger has forgotten his avocation in his electorship, and
would quibble on the Franchise over Ophelia's grave, instead of
more appropriately discussing the duration of bodies under ground.
From this tendency, from this gradual attrition of life, in which
everything pointed and characteristic is being rubbed down, till
the whole world begins to slip between our fingers in smooth
undistinguishable sands, from this, we say, it follows that we must
not attempt to join Mr. Taller in his simple division of students
into LAW, DIVINITY, and MEDICAL.  Nowadays the Faculties may shake
hands over their follies; and, like Mrs. Frail and Mrs. Foresight
(in Love for Love) they may stand in the doors of opposite class-
rooms, crying:  'Sister, Sister--Sister everyway!'  A few
restrictions, indeed, remain to influence the followers of
individual branches of study.  The Divinity, for example, must be
an avowed believer; and as this, in the present day, is unhappily
considered by many as a confession of weakness, he is fain to
choose one of two ways of gilding the distasteful orthodox bolus.
Some swallow it in a thin jelly of metaphysics; for it is even a
credit to believe in God on the evidence of some crack-jaw
philosopher, although it is a decided slur to believe in Him on His
own authority.  Others again (and this we think the worst method),
finding German grammar a somewhat dry morsel, run their own little
heresy as a proof of independence; and deny one of the cardinal
doctrines that they may hold the others without being laughed at.

Besides, however, such influences as these, there is little more
distinction between the faculties than the traditionary ideal,
handed down through a long sequence of students, and getting
rounder and more featureless at each successive session.  The
plague of uniformity has descended on the College.  Students (and
indeed all sorts and conditions of men) now require their faculty
and character hung round their neck on a placard, like the scenes
in Shakespeare's theatre.  And in the midst of all this weary
sameness, not the least common feature is the gravity of every
face.  No more does the merry medical run eagerly in the clear
winter morning up the rugged sides of Arthur's Seat, and hear the
church bells begin and thicken and die away below him among the
gathered smoke of the city.  He will not break Sunday to so little
purpose.  He no longer finds pleasure in the mere output of his
surplus energy.  He husbands his strength, and lays out walks, and
reading, and amusement with deep consideration, so that he may get
as much work and pleasure out of his body as he can, and waste none
of his energy on mere impulse, or such flat enjoyment as an
excursion in the country.

See the quadrangle in the interregnum of classes, in those two or
three minutes when it is full of passing students, and we think you
will admit that, if we have not made it 'an habitation of dragons,'
we have at least transformed it into 'a court for owls.'  Solemnity
broods heavily over the enclosure; and wherever you seek it, you
will find a dearth of merriment, an absence of real youthful
enjoyment.  You might as well try


'To move wild laughter in the throat of death'


as to excite any healthy stir among the bulk of this staid company.

The studious congregate about the doors of the different classes,
debating the matter of the lecture, or comparing note-books.  A
reserved rivalry sunders them.  Here are some deep in Greek
particles:  there, others are already inhabitants of that land


'Where entity and quiddity,
'Like ghosts of defunct bodies fly -
Where Truth in person does appear
Like words congealed in northern air.'


But none of them seem to find any relish for their studies--no
pedantic love of this subject or that lights up their eyes--science
and learning are only means for a livelihood, which they have
considerately embraced and which they solemnly pursue.  'Labour's
pale priests,' their lips seem incapable of laughter, except in the
way of polite recognition of professorial wit.  The stains of ink
are chronic on their meagre fingers.  They walk like Saul among the
asses.

The dandies are not less subdued.  In 1824 there was a noisy dapper
dandyism abroad.  Vulgar, as we should now think, but yet genial--a
matter of white greatcoats and loud voices--strangely different
from the stately frippery that is rife at present.  These men are
out of their element in the quadrangle.  Even the small remains of
boisterous humour, which still clings to any collection of young
men, jars painfully on their morbid sensibilities; and they beat a
hasty retreat to resume their perfunctory march along Princes
Street.  Flirtation is to them a great social duty, a painful
obligation, which they perform on every occasion in the same chill
official manner, and with the same commonplace advances, the same
dogged observance of traditional behaviour.  The shape of their
raiment is a burden almost greater than they can bear, and they
halt in their walk to preserve the due adjustment of their trouser-
knees, till one would fancy he had mixed in a procession of Jacobs.
We speak, of course, for ourselves; but we would as soon associate
with a herd of sprightly apes as with these gloomy modern beaux.
Alas, that our Mirabels, our Valentines, even our Brummels, should
have left their mantles upon nothing more amusing!

Nor are the fast men less constrained.  Solemnity, even in
dissipation, is the order of the day; and they go to the devil with
a perverse seriousness, a systematic rationalism of wickedness that
would have surprised the simpler sinners of old.  Some of these men
whom we see gravely conversing on the steps have but a slender
acquaintance with each other.  Their intercourse consists
principally of mutual bulletins of depravity; and, week after week,
as they meet they reckon up their items of transgression, and give
an abstract of their downward progress for approval and
encouragement.  These folk form a freemasonry of their own.  An
oath is the shibboleth of their sinister fellowship.  Once they
hear a man swear, it is wonderful how their tongues loosen and
their bashful spirits take enlargement, under the consciousness of
brotherhood.  There is no folly, no pardoning warmth of temper
about them; they are as steady-going and systematic in their own
way as the studious in theirs.

Not that we are without merry men.  No.  We shall not be ungrateful
to those, whose grimaces, whose ironical laughter, whose active
feet in the 'College Anthem' have beguiled so many weary hours and
added a pleasant variety to the strain of close attention.  But
even these are too evidently professional in their antics.  They go
about cogitating puns and inventing tricks.  It is their vocation,
Hal.  They are the gratuitous jesters of the class-room; and, like
the clown when he leaves the stage, their merriment too often sinks
as the bell rings the hour of liberty, and they pass forth by the
Post-Office, grave and sedate, and meditating fresh gambols for the
morrow.

This is the impression left on the mind of any observing student by
too many of his fellows.  They seem all frigid old men; and one
pauses to think how such an unnatural state of matters is produced.
We feel inclined to blame for it the unfortunate absence of
UNIVERSITY FEELING which is so marked a characteristic of our
Edinburgh students.  Academical interests are so few and far
between--students, as students, have so little in common, except a
peevish rivalry--there is such an entire want of broad college
sympathies and ordinary college friendships, that we fancy that no
University in the kingdom is in so poor a plight.  Our system is
full of anomalies.  A, who cut B whilst he was a shabby student,
curries sedulously up to him and cudgels his memory for anecdotes
about him when he becomes the great so-and-so.  Let there be an end
of this shy, proud reserve on the one hand, and this shuddering
fine ladyism on the other; and we think we shall find both
ourselves and the College bettered.  Let it be a sufficient reason
for intercourse that two men sit together on the same benches.  Let
the great A be held excused for nodding to the shabby B in Princes
Street, if he can say, 'That fellow is a student.'  Once this could
be brought about, we think you would find the whole heart of the
University beat faster.  We think you would find a fusion among the
students, a growth of common feelings, an increasing sympathy
between class and class, whose influence (in such a heterogeneous
company as ours) might be of incalculable value in all branches of
politics and social progress.  It would do more than this.  If we
could find some method of making the University a real mother to
her sons--something beyond a building of class-rooms, a Senatus and
a lottery of somewhat shabby prizes--we should strike a death-blow
at the constrained and unnatural attitude of our Society.  At
present we are not a united body, but a loose gathering of
individuals, whose inherent attraction is allowed to condense them
into little knots and coteries.  Our last snowball riot read us a
plain lesson on our condition.  There was no party spirit--no unity
of interests.  A few, who were mischievously inclined, marched off
to the College of Surgeons in a pretentious file; but even before
they reached their destination the feeble inspiration had died out
in many, and their numbers were sadly thinned.  Some followed
strange gods in the direction of Drummond Street, and others slunk
back to meek good-boyism at the feet of the Professors.  The same
is visible in better things.  As you send a man to an English
University that he may have his prejudices rubbed off, you might
send him to Edinburgh that he may have them ingrained--rendered
indelible--fostered by sympathy into living principles of his
spirit.  And the reason of it is quite plain.  From this absence of
University feeling it comes that a man's friendships are always the
direct and immediate results of these very prejudices.  A common
weakness is the best master of ceremonies in our quadrangle:  a
mutual vice is the readiest introduction.  The studious associate
with the studious alone--the dandies with the dandies.  There is
nothing to force them to rub shoulders with the others; and so they
grow day by day more wedded to their own original opinions and
affections.  They see through the same spectacles continually.  All
broad sentiments, all real catholic humanity expires; and the mind
gets gradually stiffened into one position--becomes so habituated
to a contracted atmosphere, that it shudders and withers under the
least draught of the free air that circulates in the general field
of mankind.

Specialism in Society then is, we think, one cause of our present
state.  Specialism in study is another.  We doubt whether this has
ever been a good thing since the world began; but we are sure it is
much worse now than it was.  Formerly, when a man became a
specialist, it was out of affection for his subject.  With a
somewhat grand devotion he left all the world of Science to follow
his true love; and he contrived to find that strange pedantic
interest which inspired the man who