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religious expressions, Lamb tranquilised him by, "Ne-ne-never mind what Coleridge says; he's full of fun."

Of a Scotchman, "His understanding is always at its meridian. Between the affirmative and the negative there is no border-land with him. You cannot hover with him on the confines of truth."

A fine sonnet of his, "The Gipsy's Malison," being refused publication, he exclaimed, "Hang the age! I will write for antiquity."

Mrs K., after expressing her love for her young children, added, tenderly, "And how do you like babies, Mr Lamb" His answer, immediate, almost precipitate, was, "Boi-boiboiled, ma'am."

Hood, tempting Lamb to dine with him, said, "We have a hare." "And many friends?" inquired Lamb.

The Scotch, whom he did not like, ought, he said, to have double punishment, and to have i fire without brimstone.

REV. JOHN THOMSON.

[1778-1840.]

BY ALEXANDER SMITH.

IN glancing backward over the last century and a half of Scottish history, it will be noticed that distinguished men have come in clusters, and that the intellectual products of these are visible in well-defined belts or zones. Nature there, as elsewhere, built capacious brains, and when her hand was in, it was her habit to build more than one; and so the clever Scotchmen of a generation have a family resemblance, and the works produced by them have a family resemblance also. Hume, Robertson, and Adam Smith came together; and through these we have the philosophic and historical belt. Scott and Galt created the imaginative belt; Jeffrey, Wilson, and Lockhart the critical belt. In any enumeration of eminent Scotchmen the name of Burns cannot be omitted, but then Burns has no place in any such loose generalisations. In his greatness he is the loneliest of all the northern geniuses. He had, strictly speaking, no predecessor, he had no companion, he has had no successor. Critics have delighted to point out that the "Farmer's Ingle" of Fergusson was the prototype of the "Cottar's Saturday Night," but the truth is, that Fergusson had no more share in the most exquisite of homely idylls than the leaves of the mulberry tree on which the silkworm feeds has a share in the silk which is produced. Putting Burns aside, as in some sense a special phenomenon, who must be considered by himself if considered at all, the three broadlymarked belts or zones of Scottish mental activity are indicated by the "Essays, Moral and Philosophical," and the "Wealth of Nations;" the novels of Scott and Galt; and the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood's Magazine. So much one can see looking back on the past; but it would be extremely difficult to say what, since the establishment of the famous Review, and the still more famous Magazine, is the salient Outstanding feature of Scottish intellectual life.

| And the difficulty lies in this, that, ecclesiastical matters apart, there has, during the last twenty or twenty-five years, been hardly any distinctive Scottish life at all. "Stands Scotland where it did?" asks Macduff; and the answer to-day is, "No; if you seek Scotland, you must go to London for her." The old frontier line has been effaced by the railway and the post-office. The Tweed no longer divides peoples with different interests. Scotland and England have melted into each other and become Britain, just as red and blue melt into each other and become purple; and in the general intellectual activity of the empire, it would be as difficult to separate that contributed by north and south as to separate the waters of the Forth and the Humber in the German Ocean, or the taxes gathered on either side of the Tweed in the imperial exchequer. John Bull and Patrick serve in the ranks of the Black Watch and the Greys, and Sandy is a sentry at the Horse Guards. An English professor is the most distinguished disciple of the Scottish Sir William Hamilton; and the representative of a metropolitan constituency-a Scot at least by extraction-is the intellectual descendant of the English Bentham. It is from this interconnection of the two peoples, that for the last quarter of a century there has been so little distinctive Scottish intellectual life. Scotland has overflowed its boundaries, and it has no longer a separate existence in thought or geography. It is not, however, to be supposed that, although working under different conditions, there is any diminution in the northern vigour. The Scot thinks as shrewdly and acts as prudently in Cheapside as at Aberdeen or at John o' Groat's; and when great things have to be done-when, for instance, a treaty has to be negotiated with China, when a revolted India has to be subdued, when a "Life of Frederick" has to be written-the

doers of those feats of diplomacy, arms, and letters, are not unfrequently found wearing Scottish names. But the difficulty of pointing out any broad, salient, outstanding feature in Scottish intellectual life, does not altogether arise from the cessation of that life in the sense which has been explained, but in some degree from the fact that, since the establishment of Blackwood's Magazine, Scottish intellect and fancy have more and more sought a new manifestation and direction. For long, Scotland was the best educated and least æsthetic nation in Europe. Beauty and ornament had never specially been the denizens of the Scottish house or the Scottish street; and at the Reformation they were sternly thrust forth and forbidden to enter the ecclesiastical edifice. In Scotland, Beauty was churchless, and on Sundays had to abide with the daisy in the field, the cloudshadow on the hill-side, and to consort with the poet, who was a commoner of Nature like herself, and under the same social ban. Not the least religious nation in the world, the Scotch were content to worship in barn-like buildings, with windows hard in outline and innocent of colour as those of factories; and Music, suspected of popish parentage, and of haunting the playhouse and the opera, was turned away from the church-door, and had to go romp in the fields with Beauty and the poet. Untouched by the softening influences of art, the Scottish nation was devout, deep-hearted, humorous, sincere; but it was harsh in manner, deficient in graciousness and suavity. The visitor, on coming to Scottish towns, was struck by the lack of politeness on the part of the inhabitants. He saw them, unyielding as tides, jostle each other on the pavement. If he asked to be directed to a particular street, he not unfrequently received a churlish response. He noted that in these towns statues and public monuments were rare, that they were disregarded and often ill kept; and, if a travelled man, he drew disadvantageous comparisons between the Scottish towns and the French or Italian ones. This hardness and lack of graciousness, this lack of art and of regard for art, was attributable to a considerable extent to the national poverty and the national faith. There is no social civiliser like art, but art does not grow in poor countries any more than grapes on poor soils. You may keep a poet on £70 a year, and get a good deal out of him, just as our fathers for something like that sum got a tremendous deal out of Burns; but you cannot so cheaply maintain painters and sculptors. If you will adorn your apartments with their works, they can at least claim upholsterers' wages. And, putting inspiration out of the question altogether, pigments and marble are much more expensive than pens and ink, and the backs of old letters, or excise schedules at a pinch. On Calvinism you can breed first-rate men, but not so easily first-rate

artists. Art delights in minster and cathedral, in painted window and fuming incense, in gorgeous vestments and the voices of singing-men and singing-women, and finds but little sustenance in barn-like churches, discordant psalmody, rigid pews, and intrepid, closely-knit, logical discourses. Scotland was a well-educated country, as countries went, but it wanted artistic susceptibility; and it was only when it became comparatively rich, and when its social atmosphere became a little more genial, that art began to develop itself in any general or unmistakable manner. The picture and the statue came with wealth into the private apartment; the ornate church, the famous man in bronze or marble, came with wealth into the street; and the public eye becoming accustomed to these things, gradually learned to enjoy them. The establishment of the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood's Magazine was the last distinct phase of Scottish-that is, of Scottish as distinct from British-intellectual life; and at that time Scottish art was in its vigorous youth, and quite abreast of Scottish literature. Scotchmen, save in isolated instances, and generally out of their own country, have done nothing very remarkable in literature since; but at home there has grown up a school of art, distinct, vigorous, individual, which has spread far and wide, and which has more than one representative amongst the Forty of the Royal Academy. The pen was long the favourite weapon of the clever Scot, but since John Wilson's time the cleverest men in Scotland have wielded the brush rather than the pen.

The school of Scottish art had at first, as was natural, a good deal in common with the more favourite form of Scottish literature of poetry more especially. When the northern genius was not piercingly lyrical-tingling to the very marrow in song and ballad-it was for the most part garrulous and manners-painting. Rustic life, with its humours, its fun, its jealousies, its petty passions, its coarseness even-when these were reflected in some incident like a marriage, a festival, a fair, or a wapinschaw-has always had special attraction for the Scottish muse. This vein of manners-painting is visible from "Christ's Kirk on the Green," down through the "Gentle Shepherd" of Ramsay, the "Leith Races" of Fergusson, the "Jolly Beggars" and "Hallowe'en" of Burns, to the "Anster Fair" of Tennant; and in the same way, and for the same reasons, the Scottish school of painting abounds in admirable representations of rustic life: witness the best pictures of David Allan, the "Penny Wedding," and a dozen others of Sir David Wilkie, the "Curlers" of Mr Harvey, and the works of many others less distinguished. The Scottish painters have in an indirect, yet most sufficient manner, illustrated the Scottish poets. In this special department Scottish art will take rank with Dutch-with the advantage that it

has more opet uut en of men rint wing wat voor In the domain of ninetajhat as there a no acrisera épenser er Kizubest and we bebind England, and has, perhaps, to proga regresentative, if we except the late Mr Dard both and the present ár J. Noi Pen. In portraiture and indscape the Boot tist mchoni exstia In the department of portrupore the both as datingished by a vidity of basis and treatment, and a direct roing at casentials to the neglect of subsidiaries Any one looking at the men fir Henry Raeburn, Dr John Wataon Gordon, and Sir Daniel Mac nee have painted, will see that, in the delinea tion of charateristic heads and faces, of men who are individual and not conventional, the national shrewdness, humour, biographical talent, and insight, have in the most mysterious way become mixed with the colours. I say the men these artists have painted, for somehow they have not succeeded so well with women. If the Bootch style has a specialty, it is that of, robustness, of solid force and character-elements which are much more masculine than feminine. Given a granite-faced Provost of Peterhead, wrinkled all over with shrewd, pawky, tell-tale lines, and there are half-a-He was in every way an accomplished man. He dozen Scotchmen who will paint him so to the life, that the spectator will know what kind of a voice he has, whether he has been married twice, and what he usually takes for breakfast. Given an elegant laddy, and perhaps Sir Francis Grant is the only Scotchman who can paint her in her self-possession and easy security high bred to the finger-tips, and perfectly comme il faut in every least matter of detail. Sir Henry Raeburn struck the key-note of Scottish portrait painting, and it is vibrating still. In Scottish landscape again-which partakes of similar characteristics the key-note was struck by the Rev. John Thomson of Duddingstone; and his influence is still observable, not only in Mr Macculloch's "cold and splendour of the hills," in the Wordsworthian repose of Harvey's pastoral hill-sides, but in Mr Peter Graham's "Mountain River in Flood," when amongst the landscapes of the Royal Academy, the observed of all observers.

the course of his ministrations I s Kely that benzid prejem—~And Airatum rose up early in the morning, and saófed his ass, and took two of his young men và him, and Isaac his son, and cave the wood for the burnt-offering, and rose up, and went to the place of which God had told him. Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place : for off"—one would like to know what mental image be formed of the yet templed Moriah; was it a Syman mount, or the double-peaked Benleti-the H of God of his own country— with the Scottish morning spread above it! One would like to know, if one could, whether Thomson brought the landscape painter with him into the palpit. But of his quality as a preacher no information can be obtained. The people who bought his pictures did not care for his sermons; the people who listened to his sermons did not care for his pictures, His parishioners regarded his landscape painting as they regarded his violin playing-a pretty amusement enough, but one not in the least befitting the dignity of his cloth. Thomson was, no doubt, an excellent preacher, after a quiet, elegant, unenthusiastic, charitable fashion.

Mr Thomson, while he lived, was the most distinguished landscape painter of the Scottish school; and he was unique in this, that he was clergyman as well as painter; that it was his work to study the page of nature and the page of revelation. It would be interesting to know, if it were at all now possible, how he conducted this double life-if the artistic and clerical elements lived together, reciprocally enriching and assisting each other-the one bringing reverence and sanctity into his studio, the other bringing pictures into his sermons. When discoursing on the Dead Sea, did he behold in imagination the red hills of Moab looming low on the horizon? If prelecting on the passage-as in

had a competent knowledge of literature, and, when working on his landscapes, was in the habit of reciting from the classical and English poets passages that seemed to illustrate the scene he was depicting; he was an exquisite musician; he was well read in the natural sciences, and contributed several papers on such subjects to the Edinburgh Review. We know how he painted, we can guess how he preached; and the fact that he was both preacher and painter takes him out of the category of ordinary men. A solitary, sad-eyed, mediæval monk, illuminating missals in a cloistered silence, broken only by the tinkling of refectory or prayer bells, is familiar enough to the imagination; but a modern Presbyterian clergyman, painting pictures on week-days, and preaching sermons on Sundays; writing papers on optics for the Edinburgh Review, and drawing tears in the evening in his drawing-room by his violin performances; throwing down his brushes of a forenoon, placing against the wall a picture of the Bass, with a thunder-cloud blackening over it; going out to see an ailing parishioner, noting on his way how a sunbeam made gleam the ivies on Craigmillar which a shower had just wet, and returning to receive to dinner Sir Walter Scott, fresh from the "Bride of Lammermoor;" or Sir David Wilkie, fresh from Spain and the study of Velasquez-this complex activity, this variety of duty, this fulness of noble life, is something not very frequently met with.

Young Thomson was born at Dailly, in Ayrshire, of which parish his father was minister, in the latter half of the last century; and there, amid the beautiful scenery surrounding him, he

in its preposterous fashion. And this little clachan of twenty or thirty houses is walled, too, like a Babylon or Nineveh; its wall not one on which six chariots could race abreast, but of strictly modest pretensions. Descending on Duddingstone, you find it retired, low-lying, sunshiny, umbrageous; a place in which in summer you may expect plenty of dust in the narrow streets, plenty of drowsy bees around the double-flowered white and purple stocks in the gardens, plenty of flies buzzing in the sunny parlour windows. You see the old low-roofed Norman-looking church-several centuries old some portions of it, antiquaries say-with its pointed windows and flagged roof; the churchyard heaped and mounded with generations on generations of village dead; the rusty "jougs" -an iron collar, in which malefactors did penance of old-hanging on the churchyard wall near the gate of entrance, with its "louping-onstane," well worn by the hobnails of dead farmers. Near the church is the manse, in which the minister-painter lived, looking out with all its windows on the lake; on ivied Craigmillar, in which Queen Mary dwelt; on the low hills of Braid, over which Marmion rode, and on which Fitz Eustace

nourished his taste for landscape. His fathering its long neck under water, tilts itself upward destined him for the sacred profession; and, in accordance with a Scottish fashion not yet obsolete, at a very early age he was sent to the University of Edinburgh, to attend literary and philosophical classes, preparatory to entering on the study of divinity. At the lodgings of his elder brother, who had come to Edinburgh some years before, and who, in after-life, became distinguished as a feudal lawyer and an antiquarian, the enthusiastic young man made the acquaintance of Walter Scott, Francis Jeffrey, and others. He stuck to his work during the winter sessions; but in his summer vacations at home he devoted himself to painting and violin playing, to the no small consternation of his father, who could not help marvelling at the strange bird growing up in the quiet, orderly, clerical nest. All this while, whatever may have been his progress, he had no teacher but nature, and it was only during the last year of his theological curriculum that he had the advantage of lessons from Alexander Nasmyth, and that only for the period of one month. At the age of twenty-one he was licensed; and on the death of his father, in the first year of the century, he succeeded to the Dailly manse and the Dailly pulpit. A year after, he married; and in a house rapidly filling with babies he composed his sermons, painted his pictures, and played on his violin. In 1805 he was translated to the parish of Duddingstone, near Edinburgh-a at sight of the old Edinburgh of the Jameses, place perhaps the best suited for him in Scot-smoke-swathed; and beyond, on the lovely unland-where he could walk out into the fields at eventide, like Isaac; where he could watch the purple thunder-gloom gathering on the distant hills, like Claude.

In May, passing along the Queen's Drive in a south-easterly direction-sheep and lambs bleating above, the starling glistening as it sweeps past through the sunshine-you see Duddingstone Loch beneath you, with its stunted and pollard willows, whitey-green in the wind, its banks and promontories of rushes, its swans and beds of water-lilies, its cloudshadows crossed by the trail of low-flying teal. Proceeding some twenty yards or so, you come in sight of the little village itself, and note its grey, low-roofed, Norman-like church, its scattered houses, with garden slopes behind filled with plum and apple blossom; its yellow-faced inn, in which tradition mumbles Prince Charles slept the night before the battle of Prestonpans, or else the night after; and the swiftly-greening woods beyond, stretching towards Portobello and the sea. As you look down upon it from the Drive, 'tis a mere toy-village, breathing soft smoke pillars, breathing fruit-tree fragrance. The quietest place in the whole world, you would say; not a creature to be seen in the little bit of a street visible; silent as Pompeii itself; motion only on the lake, when the coot shoots across its surface, or when a swan, thrust

"Raised his bridle hand,

And made a demivolte in air,"

dulating line of the Pentlands, stained, as in these bright spring days, with the white uprolling vapour of the heather-burnings. Duddingstone is the prettiest place in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh in summer; and it is, if possible, still more worth seeing about Christmas. Then the swans are of course gone; the chestnuts have lost their broad drooping fans, and have donned their strange snow draperies; from out the frosty blue, white Arthur's Seat looks down on the little village. At that season Edinburgh flocks Duddingstone-wards. Pedestrians and carriages stand along the margin of the loch; carriages and pedestrians move slowly along the Queen's Drive above. The lake itself is crowded as Vanity Fair; skaters shoot hither and thither; while in a carefully-preserved circle, members of the Edinburgh Skating Club go through the most graceful evolutions, and interweave with each other the prettiest loops and chains. At a little distance the curlers are busy, their faces red with exercise, their eyes bright with excitement, the on-lookers stamping their chilled feet in the snow, and attempting to breathe a little warmth into their frostbitten fingers. Elsewhere, on great belts of slides, people are working their arms like awkward windmills. Here skims a skate-shod Diana-fleet huntress of men-yonder, in a sleigh driven by admirers, sits a lady enveloped in furs. Past your ear

whizzes a shinty ball, and down upon you in hot pursuit thereof comes, with a noise like a troop of wild horses, a horde of young fellows, each armed with a cudgel, a long-haired Highlander leading the charge-as Murat was wont to do-several lengths in front. The Highlander is up with the ball, as he turns on it his foot slips, and in a moment the crowd are over him. There is a general mêlée, and then out of the crowd, and in an opposite direction, spins the ball, another fellow leading the pursuit now, the eager crowd streaming behind him like a comet's tail. So around Duddingstone the seasons come and go-so they came and went while Thomson lived there, with umbrageousness of summer, pallor of winter; each differing from the other, yet each aiding the painter's education.

In the pretty Duddingstone manse Thomson established himself, and there, for thirty-five years, his life flowed on peacefully, prosperously, honoured by high and low. As a clergyman, he was much esteemed by his parishioners, consisting mainly of well-to-do folks who lived in villas, small market-gardeners who brought their produce into Edinburgh, and washerwomen who worked for the inhabitants of the city, washing the clothes in the loch, and bleaching and drying them on the slopes of Arthur's Seat, where they caught the scent of the broom. To the former class, the minister commended himself by his accomplishments, his gentlemanly manners, and his distinction; to the latter by his liberality and kind-heartedness, and his frank ways of going in and out amongst them. The price of many a landscape came to the poor people, when sickness or distress was prevalent, in the shape of bottles of wine or even of comforts more substantial. It was at Duddingstone that Thomson first devoted himself to landscape painting as a profession. Craigmillar was before his eyes every time he looked out of his window, and this subject he frequently painted —often with grand effect by moonlight. While at Dailly he distributed landscapes amongst his friends; at Duddingstone he accepted payment. The first picture was sold for fifteen guineas; and the artist, it is said, was so startled by the mighty sum, that it was only when Mr Williams, the delineator of Greek scenery, whom he consulted on the subject, told him that the work was worth three times as much, that he could comfortably consign the coins to his breeches' pocket. As his reputation rose the demand for his works increased, and in his hey-day of health and artistic prosperity, he was in the receipt of £1800 per annum. Some idea of Thomson's industry may be gathered from the prices he received. For a picture thirty inches long, and from twenty to twenty-five inches broad, he got twenty-five guineas; for one forty-eight or fifty inches by thirty-six, his price was fifty guineas. These were high prices for a Scottish artist at

His

that date; and for the works executed for the Duke of Buccleuch, and which may be seen at Bowhill, he received still larger sums. passion for his art grew with his years, and he searched the country for subjects for his easel with greater ardour, one almost fears, than he showed in searching the Scriptures for texts for his sermons. His pulpit at Duddingstone had to be filled of course, but then the capital was near and probationers were plentiful. By the time the young artist left the manse on Saturday afternoon, the probationer had arrived with a couple of sermons in his carpet-bag. In company with his friend Mr Williams-"Grecian Williams" he was called, familiarly and affectionately, from those pictures already alluded to on which his reputation mainly rests-he explored the country for ancient houses with trees round them, picturesque glens, castles beetling over the sea, and bare moors with a group of old Scotch firs, their bronze trunks and black-green crowns glowing in the fires of autumn sunset. The two friends sketched together and were each the other's critic. In these passionate sketching pilgrimages, extending over many years, Thomson visited the most picturesque districts of Scotland, and painted Dunstaffnage, Dunluce, Wolf's Crag, the Falls of Kilmorack, Glenfinlas, Lochs Awe and Etive; nay, he even penetrated as far as Skye and painted the magnificent peak of Ben Blaven, and the edges of Cuchullin holding dark communion with the cloud. Being a clergyman, Thomson, although urged to do so, would never become a member of any incorporated body of artists; but he always sent his pictures to the exhibitions of the Royal Scottish Academy. From 1808 to 1840 he contributed to those exhibitions one hundred and nine works. He not the less was strangely disinclined to exhibit in London, and, as a rule, Englishmen are not acquainted with his pictures. In the beginning of the year 1840 his health began to fail; but though no improvement took place during summer, he still worked on at picture and sermon. Conscious that his end was nigh, on a lovely October afternoon he desired to be taken to a window, and propped up by pillows, that he might watch once more the setting sun. It was a last interview between the ancient friends-an eternal farewell-taking. The sun set ruddily. Thomson was dead next morning. He was twice married-happily both times-and his portrait,

* He visited Sir David Brewster while he was staying at Belville, Invernesshire. "Exploring romantic Glen Feshie," writes the daughter and biographer of Brewster, "my father was startled by the exclamation, 'Lord God Almighty!' and on looking round tears, so much had the wild grandeur of the scene he saw the strong man bowed down in a flood of and the sense of the One creative hand possessed the soul of the artist. Glen Feshie afterwards formed the subject of one of Thomson's best pictures."

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