ART. IX. Journal of Henry Cockburn; being a Continuation of "Memorials of his Time.' 2 Vols. 8vo. Edinburgh:

IT

1874.

is sixteen years ago since we reviewed in this Journal a posthumous work entitled Memorials of his Time, by Henry Cockburn.' The author was the judge of the Supreme Court of Scotland, well known under the title of Lord Cockburn. The book was full of freshness and vivacity, and gave a vivid and amusing picture of the manners and habits of society, the politics and the gossip, the distinguished men and the public events of the period of his youth and earlier manhood, in the northern portion of the island. It was written with considerable power and humour, and was a very pleasant and, as it proved, a very popular and successful autobiography.

In our former notice we took the opportunity of describing the general character of its author, who was a man, although not much known perhaps beyond the limits of Scotland, singularly well known within them. Apart altogether from his professional and forensic abilities, which were very considerable, his genial temper, kindly manners, and fund, which never failed, of humorous and lively thought and expression, made him a favourite with all classes, and with men of all shades of opinion. There were few men-indeed there were none, of note or distinction in Scotland during the period of which he wrote-with whom he had not lived on terms of intimacy. The friend of Scott and Jeffrey, Horner and Brougham, Playfair and Dugald Stewart; a scion of the house of Dundas, but a strong adherent of Fox and the Whigs-he had opportunities of observation, as well as personal experience, which imparted zest and colour to these desultory but lively reflections of the past. Terminating in 1830, the object of the book was to sketch, as it did with considerable brightness, a state of society which was then expiring, and which has now entirely passed away. It contained also a history of the early vicissitudes and struggles of the Whig leaders and party in Edinburgh; of the commencement of the Edinburgh Review,' and of the circle to whom it owed its birth, to which he himself belonged; of the gradual growth, and ultimate culmination and triumph, of the opinions which it asserted; and broke off just as the crisis was at hand, and the creed, so long in the shadow, was about to emerge into the sunshine.

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The two volumes now before us, the title of which we have prefixed to this article, are a continuation of the Memorials,'

and embrace the period from 1830 down to 1854. The author seems to have jotted down, at pretty close intervals, his thoughts and views of passing events. These memoranda were continued till within a very few days of his death. We do not doubt, and these volumes indicate the fact pretty plainly, that there may have been among the original materials many reminiscences recorded which a prudent editor would be inclined to suppress, even after the comparatively long interval which has elapsed. We observe with pleasure that the editing of the work deserves all commendation. It is laudably and exceptionally free from faults too common in such publications. The selection contains nothing approaching to a violation of private confidence; nor have the editors been tempted, for the sake of point or pungency, to include anything which could justly wound the feelings or the reputation of the living. Some passages occur, of strength and vigour, in regard to the actions and character of public men; but they never transgress or even approach the boundaries of fair and honourable criticism. There is no egotism-no affectation-nothing which does not breathe the kindly taste and affectionate spirit of the man.

How much Cockburn himself would have shrunk from such posthumous treachery as is not unusual in the present day, may be gathered from the following extract from his Journal in 1845:

'I have all my life had a bad habit of preserving letters, and of keeping them all arranged and docqueted; but seeing the future use that is often made of papers, especially by friendly biographers who rarely hesitate to sacrifice confidence and delicacy to the promotion of sale or excitement, I have long resolved to send them all up the chimney in the form of smoke; and yesterday the sentence was executed. I have kept Richardson's and Jeffrey's, and some correspondence I had during important passages of our Scotch progress; but the rest, amounting to several thousands, can now, thank God, enable no venality to publish sacred secrets, or to stain fair reputations by plausible mistakes. Yet old friends cannot be parted with without a pang. The sight of even the outsides of letters of fifty years recalls a part of the interest with which each was received in its day, and their annihilation makes one start, as if one had suddenly reached the age of final oblivion. Nevertheless as packet after packet smothered the fire with its ashes, and gradually disappeared in dim vapour, I reflected that my correspondents were safe, and I was pleased.' (Vol. ii. p. 103.)

It was not to be expected that as Cockburn's notes approached more nearly to the times of the present generation, they should retain the charm which distance lent to his retrospect, or the quaint and picturesque effect which was produced by his recollections of less familiar habits. Since 1830 everything in the

kingdom has been gravitating to the metropolis, and the force operates in an increasing ratio every year. Distinctive and traditional manners and customs are necessarily rubbed off and ground down by the friction produced by constant inter-communication. The old ways are lost, although the new may not become familiar; the characteristics of a separate nation vanish, and only leave those of a province in their place. Cockburn, who was greatly attached to the traditions of Scottish society, saw and much lamented the accelerated pace at which they were in the course of disappearing. He speculates thus in 1836, as to the probable effect of more rapid intercourse with London, and his anticipations have proved within the mark:

'In twenty years London will probably be within fifteen hours by land of Edinburgh, and every other place will be shaking hands, without making a long arm, with its neighbour of only a county or two off. This will add to our wealth, and in many respects to our ease. But is not seclusion often a blessing? Difficulty of being reached has its advantages. Our separate provincial characters will be lost in the general mass where London will predominate; just as the picturesque peculiarities of the old personal characters of individuals are now all melted in the fusion of common society.' 'Geneva,' he says, 'could not have been Geneva near Paris, nor Edinburgh, Edinburgh near London.'

This process of attrition and levelling is of course in constant operation. Long as Scotland may retain the substance of her ancient institutions, or laws, or habits, or religion, or language, yet still the process of fusion goes on insensibly, to the injury of the distinctive and picturesque, and the creation of a uniform standard in which individuality is lost in the mass. The old Scots philosophers, -the strong, coarse, powerful, tyrannical Scottish Bench-the drinking, roistering, shrewd, and humorous lairds-who were familiar to Cockburn's youth, had not only departed, but had become impossible in 1830. They could not have lived in the altered atmosphere. Probably the group to which our author belonged-not undistinguished when it numbered Brougham, Scott, Wilson, Jeffrey, and Horner in its ranks, and which has now left not one of its number behind, is not likely again to find its counterpart in the society of the present generation, although Edinburgh still contains more than one circle distinguished by intellect, learning, and accomplishment.

Another gloomy element which oppresses our author, is the increasing amount of daily business-the larger exactions of life on our time and leisure. Doubtless we should all be much the better for a little more idleness-the not unwholesome medicine

of the mind. How much of the glorious and the beautiful of existence, and how much of the lofty thought and conception which they engender, are not lost by our meritorious representatives who spend their summer days in committee rooms, and their nights in debate, and breathe the fresh air only as they walk dismally home at sunrise in June? So it is through all ranks and occupations. The world moves too fast to wait for the elaborate or the grand. Thus Cockburn bewails the curtailment of the holidays of the Court of Session:

'What signifies this,' he says, 'or the law, or the public? Our vacation is encroached upon; our two months in spring, and the long glories of the four months in summer and autumn are no more secure. We may be left some part of them, but their comfortable security is gone. We live in a fright. And what vacations they were! How opportune for the place called London for those who liked it in spring, for the Continent in autumn, for study, for the country, for the general refreshment of the soul! O my spring flowers! My roses! The endless succession of birds and of bloom, from the early half-chilled March snowdrops, to the late lingering November carnation! The vernal blackbird, the summer evening, the utter cessation of business, the long truce, the mind's recovery of itself, the relapse into natural voluntary habits. People talk of the surcease of justice—what a mercy for suitors. What a proportion of our eminent men have been trained in this scene. But had they been worked out by nearly constant professional toil, or expectations, or vulgarised by law being the chief object of their lives, they would have contributed no more to the glory of Edinburgh or of Scotland than any other body of legal practitioners.'

The intense love of Nature, whom he certainly worshipped and reverenced much more than Themis, was strongly developed in our author's mind. He chafed and rebelled against the chain which kept him to the oar. This strain comes out strongly in these volumes, and imparts a fresh and breezy atmosphere to his thoughts. Some of his descriptions of scenes now well known, but not so familiar then, are sketched with a bold and powerful hand. He encountered them mainly in his Circuit wanderings, between the assizes at the different towns in the North and West. The uppermost thought in his mind, however, ever was, when should he escape to the Pentland hills? and the days were counted from his leaving them until his return.

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'Why, amidst all the beauty,' he exclaims, which surrounds Edinburgh have we never had a single English hedge alehouse, or English country inn? Whisky no doubt is a devil; but why has this devil so many worshippers? Chiefly because exclusion, with its horror of open sunny recreation, will give the people no deity to follow. Nice, well placed, Auburn inns would certainly succeed. But we must be able to

get to them through green fields, happy with white lambs, and fragrant with fresh mown hay, or rich with heavy grain. We shall then be trained to sit without being stared or laughed at, on clean chairs, set out on the garden turf; to be sober, though merry; and well-bred and at ease although other parties, equally happy, should be near us. Would that our dun sky could borrow some of the Italian blue; but much of the coarseness of our climate would be abated, if we turned the good that is in it to better account.' (Vol. ii. p. 106.)

What Sir Wilfrid Lawson would say to this praise of an English alehouse we cannot tell. The picture is doubtless a pleasant one-but then that dun sky, the pitiless easterly blast, the dank grass, the soaking shower, would sadly spoil its Arcadian beauty. Scotland must have an English climate before such scenes as Morland painted can be reproduced across, the border.

His appreciation of natural beauty led him to constitutehimself the guardian and protector of the picturesque features of his native city, which ingenuity has done much to destroy.. One of the latest of his productions was a pamphlet which he quaintly entitled A Letter to the Lord Provost on the best way of spoiling the Beauties of Edinburgh'; but although he accomplished some things in this direction, more fatal outrages succeeded in spite of his remonstrances. The beautiful valley which lies, or rather lay to the North of the Castle Rock and the Old Town, is now a railway station, and every traveller enters the city over ground from which Cockburn long struggled to exclude him. Retribution has followed the offence, for it is the worst railway station in the kingdom.. The public of Edinburgh have not forgotten these exertions of their popular and good-humoured citizen, and a new quarterof the town, recently opened, close to some of the scenes in which he took the greatest interest, has since been called by his name. Nor were his sympathies confined to Edinburgh. He wails over the destruction which has overtaken St. Andrews, and which, when he wrote, was impending over Glasgow University, and has since befallen it. Of the latter, among other ancient relics, he commemorates one, which he thus describes :

There is a grey stone image, something like a leopard, perched on one of the pillars of the great outer stair leading up to the hall. It has sat there with its four legs up, and its pleased countenance smiling graciously on many generations of teachers, and students, and strangers. The head of this single creature is better worth preserving and consulting than the heads of all the living Professors.'

While these volumes, however, possess less of that distinc