SCOTTISH INFLUENCE IN BRITISH

LITERATURE.*

IT was in the winter of 1786-87 that the poet Burns, a new prospect having been suddenly opened up to him by the kind intervention of Blacklock, and a few other influential men in Edinburgh, abandoned his desperate project of emigrating to the West Indies, and hastened to pay his first and memorable visit to the Scottish metropolis. During that winter, as all who are acquainted with his life know, the Ayrshire ploughman, then in his twenty-ninth year, was the lion of Edinburgh society. Lord Monboddo, Dugald Stewart, Harry Erskine, Dr. Robertson, Dr. Hugh Blair, Henry Mackenzie, Dr. Gregory, Dr. Black, Dr. Adam Ferguson-such were the names then most conspicuous in the literary capital of North Britain; and it was in the company of these men, alternated with that of the Creeches, the Smellies, the Willie Nicols, and other contemporary Edinburgh celebrities of a lower grade, that Burns first realized the fact that he was no mere bard of local note, but a new power and magnate in Scottish literature.

To those who are alive to the poetry of coincidences, two anecdotes connected with this residence of Burns in Edinburgh will always be interesting. What reader of Lockhart's Life of Scott is there who does not remember the account there given of Scott's first and only interview with Burns? As the story is now more minutely told in Mr. Robert Chambers's Life of Burns, Scott, who was then a lad of sixteen, just

* NORTH BRITISH REVIEW: August, 1852.-Life of Lord Jeffrey; with a Selection from his Correspondence. By LORD COCKBURN, one of the Judges of the Court of Session in Scotland. 2 vols. 1852. [What is here printed is only the introductory part of the article as it stood in the Review.]

removed from the High School to a desk in his father's office, was invited by his friend and companion, the son of Dr. Ferguson, to accompany him to his father's house on an evening when Burns was to be there. The two youngsters entered the room, sat down unnoticed by their seniors, and looked on and listened in modest silence. Burns, when he came in, seemed a little out of his element, and, instead of mingling at once with the company, kept going about the room, looking at the pictures on the walls. One print particularly arrested his attention. It represented a soldier lying dead among the snow, his dog on one side, and a woman with a child in her arms on the other. Underneath the print were some lines of verse descriptive of the subject, which Burns read aloud with a voice faltering with emotion. A little while after, turning to the company and pointing to the print, he asked if any one could tell him who was the author of the lines. No one chanced to know, excepting Scott, who remembered that they were from an obscure poem of Langhorne's. The information, whispered by Scott to some one near, was repeated to Burns, who, after asking a little more about the matter, rewarded his young informant with a look of kindly interest, and the words, (Sir Adam Ferguson reports them,) "You'll be a man yet, sir." Such is the one story, the story of the "literary ordination," as Mr. Chambers well calls it, of Scott by Burns-a scene which we think Sir William Allan would have delighted to paint. The other story, we believe, is now told for the first time by Lord Cockburn. Somewhere about the very day on which the foregoing incident happened, "a little black creature' of a boy, we are told, who was going up the High Street of Edinburgh, and staring diligently about him, was attracted by the appearance of a man whom he saw standing on the pavement. He was taking a good and leisurely view of the object of his curiosity, when some one standing at a shop-door tapped him on the shoulder, and said, "Ay, laddie, ye may weel look at that man! that's Robert Burns." The "little black creature," thus early addicted to criticism, was Francis Jeffrey, the junior of Scott by two years, and exactly four years behind him in the

classes of the High School, where he was known as a clever nervous little fellow, who never lost a place without crying. It is mentioned as a curious fact by Lord Cockburn, that Jeffrey's first teacher at the High School, a Mr. Luke Fraser, had the singular good fortune of sending forth, from three successive classes of four years each, three pupils no less distinguished than Walter Scott, Francis Jeffrey, and Henry Brougham.

It is not for the mere purpose of anecdote that we cite these names and coincidences. We should like very much to make out for Scotland in general as suggestive a series of her intellectual representatives as Lord Cockburn has here made out for part of the pedagogic era of the worthy and long dead Mr. Luke Fraser. Confining our regards to the eighteenth century, the preceding paragraphs enable us to group together at least three conspicuous Scottish names as belonging, by right of birth, to the third quarter of that century-Burns, born in Ayrshire in 1759; Scott, born in Edinburgh in 1771; and Jeffrey, born in the same place in 1773. Supposing we go a little farther back for some other prominent Scottish names of the same century, the readiest to occur to the memory will be those of James Thomson, the poet, born in Roxburghshire in 1700; Thomas Reid, the philosopher, born near Aberdeen in 1710; David Hume, born at Edinburgh in 1711; Robertson, the historian, born in Mid-Lothian in 1721; Tobias Smollett, the novelist, born at Cardross in the same year; Adam Smith, born at Kirkaldy in 1723; Robert Fergusson, the Scottish poet, born at Edinburgh in 1750; and Dugald Stewart, born at Edinburgh in 1753. And if for a similar purpose, we come down to the last quarter of the century, five names at least will be sure to occur to us, in addition to that of Brougham-Thomas Campbell, born at Glasgow in 1777; Thomas Chalmers, born at Anstruther in Fifeshire in 1780; John Wilson, born, if we may trust our authorities, at Paisley in 1788; Thomas Carlyle, born at Ecclefechan in Dumfries-shire in 1795; and Sir William Hamilton, born at Glasgow before the close of the century. In this list we omit the distinguished contemporary Scottish

names in physical science; we ought not, however, to omit the names of Sir James Mackintosh, born near Inverness in 1765; and James Mill, born at Montrose in 1773. The short life of Burns, if we choose him as the central figure of the group, connects together all these names. The oldest of them was in the prime of life when Burns was born, and the youngest of them had seen the light before Burns died.

On glancing in order along this series of eminent Scotchmen born in the eighteenth century, it will be seen that they may be roughly distributed into two nearly equal classesmen of philosophic intellect, devoted to the work of general speculation, or thought as such; and men of literary or poetic genius, whose works belong more properly to the category of pure literary or artistic effort. In the one class may be ranked Reid, Hume, Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart, Mackintosh, Mill, Chalmers, and Sir William Hamilton; in the other, Thomson, Smollett, Robertson, Fergusson, Burns, Scott, Jeffrey, Campbell, Wilson, Irving, and Carlyle. Do not let us be mistaken. In using the phrases "philosophic intellect” and "literary genius," to denote the distinction referred to, we do not imply anything of accurate discrimination between the phrases themselves. For aught that we care, the phrases may be reversed, and the men of the one class may be styled men of philosophic genius; and those of the other, men of literary habit and intellect. If we prefer to follow the popular usage in our application of the terms, it is not with any intention of making out for the one class, by the appropriation to it of the peculiar term "genius," a certificate of a higher kind of excellence than belongs to the other. Even according to the popular acceptation of the term, several of those whom we have included in the literary category-as, for example, Robertson-must be denied the title of men of genius while, according to no endurable definition of the term, could the title of men of genius be refused to such men as Adam Smith, or Chalmers, or Hamilton. Nor even, when thus explained, will our classification bear any very rigid scrutiny. By a considerable portion of what may be called the fundamental or unapparent half of his genius, Carlyle

belongs to the class of speculative thinkers; while, on the other hand, the case of Chalmers is one in which the thinking or speculative faculty, which certainly belonged to him, was surcharged and deluged by such a constant flood from the feelings that, instead of ranking him with the thinkers as above, we might, with equal or greater propriety, transpose him to the other side, or even name him on both sides. His thinking faculty, which was what he himself set most store by, was so beset and begirt by his other and more active dispositions, that instead of working on and on through any resisting medium with iron continuity, it discharged itself almost invariably, as soon as it touched a subject, in large proximate generalizations. On the whole, then, instead of the foregoing classification of eminent Scotchmen into men of speculation and men of general literature, one might adopt as equally serviceable a less formal classification which the common satirical talk respecting Scotchmen will suggest. The hard, cool, logical Scotchman-such is the stereotyped phrase in which Englishmen describe the natives of North Britain. There is a sufficient amount of true perception in the phrase to justify its use; but the appreciation it involves reaches only to the surface. The well-known phrase, perfervidum ingenium Scotorum, used, Buchanan tells us, centuries ago on the Continent to express the idea of the Scottish character then universally current, and founded on a large induction of instances, is, in reality, far nearer to the fact. Without maintaining at present that all Scotchmen are perfervid,—that Scotchman in general are, as we have seen it ingeniously argued, not cool, calculating, and cautious, but positively rash, fanatical, and tempestuous,-it will be enough to refer to the instances which prove at least that some Scotchmen have this character. The thing may be expressed thus:-On referring to the actual list of Scotchmen who have attained eminence by their writings or speeches in this or the last century, two types may be distinguished, in one or the other of which the Scottish mind seems necessarily to cast itself—an intellectual type specifically Scottish, but Scottish only in the sense that it is the type which cultured Scottish minds assume when