GLENCREGGAN..t.
AMONG the most noticeable peculiarities of the existing aspect of English literature is, we are inclined to think, the great and daily increasing importance of the position which has gradually been assumed by the comic element within the last few years. At the i present day, the funny writer occupies no mean place in the literary world; and it must be confessed that, if the most unflinching audacity be regarded as sufficient to deserve success, his position is not so greatly in advance of his merits as it might appear to be at first sight, at least to a severely critical eye. There is scarcely any subject within the whole range of human knowledge, not even excepting those whose inherent dignity or difficulty might, one would think, render them secure from his assaults, which this daunt- less and indefatigable individual has not unhesitatingly attacked, and at least endeavoured to make his own. We have had a comic History of England, a comic Blackstone, a comic Arithmetic, a comic Spelling book, and a comic Grammar; and we may hope shortly to be favoured with a comic Aristotle, a comic Milton, and, in due time, a comic Bible and Prayer-book. Before, however, this desirable con- summation is ultimately arrived at., 'there are a few terms in the
• Histoire des RdvolutIons de Hongrie,koL L p. 349. t Vebse: Geschiehte des OesterreieNtichen Hotes, voL v. pp. 270 sqq.1 Hormayr: Anemonen, vol. L pp. 138, 139; Fesaler: Geschiehte der Ungarn, voL ix. pp. 391, s22.; Historic Eccles's!, Evangelic"-, in Hangar% p. 43. t akncreggan ; or, a Highland Home in Cantire. By Cuthbert Bede. In two volumes. London: Longman and Co. series yet to be supplied. One of these "missing links" is a combo Guide-book. Comic impressions of travel, indeed, such as those which that prolific writer, Mr. G. W. Thornbury, reels of with such astonishing facility, we have in abundance; but hitherto we have, as far as we know, been without any work which aims at conveying, in a jocose and fascinating manner, that particular kind of 'detailed in- formation which Mr. Murray's series of Handbooks is designed to fur- nish to the travelling public. This want is at length, to some degree at least, supplied. by the volumes now before us; and, if we look at the antecedents of their author, it must be confessed that-thici 'task.. which he has undertaken could scarcely have been entrusted to fitter; . hands. Mr. Cuthbert Bede is, in his public capacity at least, eSsea.z. tially a funny man. The daring caricature of Oxford life, with Which his name is, perhaps, most generally associated, was unquestionably': intended to produce a comic effect ; and it was, to a certain extent,. successful in its aim, since it undoubtedly excited considerable amuse- meat among those who had any actual experience of the manners and customs of which it professed to be an accurate representation. In the present instance, Mr. Cuthbert Bede labours under the material disadvantage of being personally acquainted with the scenes which he undertakes to describe ; but, in spite of this serious drawback, he has, we are bound to say, succeeded in producing a publication which is in many respects worthy to take its place by the side of his earlier and most characteristic work.
Looked at from a purely utilitarian point of view, merely as a guide-book, the volume before us may be disposed of in comparatively few words. It is not a very hazardous assertion to say that they con- stitute the best handbook which the traveller in Cantire can possibly provide himself with; for we have it on Mr. Bede's authority, that there is no other at present in existence. The fact is, that Cantire appears. to have met with gross neglect at the bands of each and all of those indefatigable gentlemen who have hitherto devoted themselves to the collection of information for the benefit of the Scottish tourist. Many of them ignore its existence altogether; and the few who do mention it at all, bestow upon it, for the most part, a very brief and not always a very complimentary notice. Mr. Bede has, there- fore, nothing to fear from competition in the field which he has se- lected on the present occasion. He is fully alive to the advantages which may be derived from this circumstance ; and congratulates himself upon it in a passage which, as it is a more than commonly favourable sample of his style, we may, perhaps, venture to quote : " In these days of multifarious pennings of places and people, when the ' Complete Letter-Writer,' who provides you with a stereotyped form of episto- lary communication for every circumstance of life, is altogether outstripped by the' complete' Tourist's Guide,' who will give you a more or less faithful description of every place to which you may or may not wish to go, it is a rare accident to light upon a virgin spot of earth innocent as yet of much author's craft, and for whom the scribbler's ink has not yet been greatly spilled. Few districts are there in the United Kingdom whose charms have been as yet unsung. Well, therefore,. might the author, in search of a subject, shout an Eureka when he steps upon Campbelton pier; and, looking northwards towards Tarbet, sees a long stretch of twice twenty miles of western coast, with its villages, and farms, and country seats; its churches, and manses, and schools ; its mountains, and moors, and, lochs, and rivers ; its fisheries and shooting; its good roads, traversed twice a day by a dashing mail-cart, but net once crossed by an obstructive silver-extract-. ing turnpike—well, indeed, might the subjectless author echo the glad Eureka' of Archimedes and Mr. Shirtmaker Ford, for he bath lighted on a land of which
there is but the barest record in print."
Since Cantire is so little known to the general public, the reader may, perhaps, require to be informed that it is a peninsula on the• south-western coast of Scotland, in the midst of the southern Hebrides,. to which group, being itself so very nearly an island, it is sometimes.' reckoned to belong. It runs from north to south, and is about forty miles long, and varies in breadth from seven to twelve miles. Its. southern extremity is nearer to Ireland than any other point in Great Britain, being distant not more than eleven miles and a half from Tor Point, in the county of Antrim. It is a district of considerable historical and antiquarian interest, having been the scene of many of the most romantic adventures of Robert Bruce ; and its chief town, Campbelton, is remarkable as having been the earliest seat of the Scottish monarchy, and of the Christian religion in Scotland. Mr.. Bede imparts to us a good deal of information respecting Cantire, of a legendary and philological, as well as of a topographical character, a very considerable proportion of which is compiled from previously existing works ; a circumstance which may, perhaps, be regarded as tending to prove that our author has somewhat overrated the neglect with which this particular district has been treated by former travellers. Glencreggan itself is a house situated about midway on the western shore of the peninsula, and is, as Mr. Bede informs us, with a most praiseworthy attention to detail, " the property of Cap- tain Smollett M. Eddington, but now let. on lease to William Han- cocks, Esq., of Blakesliall House, Worcestershire, who occupies it as a shooting-box during the greater part of August, September, and October, and has the shooting on these and the adjacent moors." Mr. Bede was the guest of this latter gentleman during part of the autumn of 1859, to which fortunate circumstance we are indebted for the volumes now before us. Their author seems, indeed, to have regarded Mr. Hancock's hospitality somewhat in the light of a re- taining fee, in return for which he felt himself bound to exhibit the scene of his entertainer's autumn sojourn in the most favourable light that he possibly could. The fact, however, even on Mr. Bede's own showing, appears to be that, in point of scenery, Cantire is decidedly inferior to many other districts in the Western Highlands. Still, we are quite willing to believe that it is in possession of a fair share of natural charms ; while there is no doubt that it is a place of more than ordinary attraction to the traveller who is interested in the de.. tails of early Scottish history. But after all, by far the most characteristic and important feature We have already intimated that not even the most extreme old age disqualifies a joke for Mr. Bede's favour; and perhaps the most striking instance of his toleration in this respect is to be found in the fact that he not only reproduces, but actually takes the trouble to illustrate, the very venerable story of a Highland waiter astonishing an English tourist by the information that he could have for dinner "a fool, or a duke, or a mere fool." We must find room for one more specimen of Mr. Bede's ready wit, in the shape of a remark upon a statement which he quotes from Mr. Planche as to the an- tiquity of the Highland dress : "And, only think of this, Mr. Civi- lized Pinkerton ! the Romans called us breeched barbarians,' because our rude ancestors wore tartan breeches, and did not follow their custom of wearing tunics at such times when the nation of the gown' did not use the toga for its toggery'—id est, toga-ry." The foregoing samples may perhaps serve to convey some idea, not, indeed, of the quantity, but of the quality of Mr. Bede's puns ; and they will, we think, be sufficient to induce the reader to coincide in our opinion that the companionship of this gentleman during a summer tour would be a trial to which not even the patience of Job himself could be safely exposed. Our notice of Glencreggan would he very incomplete if we were to pass over in silence the numerous illustrations, all from drawings by the author, which are scattered with the most lavish profusion through. out its pages. There is, indeed, abundant evidence that Mr. Bede is deeply impressed with the importance of his artistic skill, regarding it as by no means the least essential of his qualifications as a popular author. At the very commencement of his book, he favours us with the following profound and novel observations on the subject : "The power of sketching adds greatly to the simple enjoyment of natural scenery. It enables those who possess it to detect beauties that would be passed over by the .non-sketcher, and to gaze upon them with a more appreciative relish than would be felt by those who merely look upon them with a vague and limited pleasure." He is never weary of telli g us that lie is going out sketching ; and com- pels us to be, in some sort, eye-witnesses of the operation, by enume- rating every step of the process in the minutest detail. His gun, he tells us, is his pencil, and his bag his sketch-book ; an expression which he considers so felicitous that he repeats it verbatim on several occasions. He even goes out of the way to acquaint us with the fact that one, at least, of his drawings has appeared in Punch, and in his anxiety that we should be able to identify this valuable produc- tion, favours us with a minute description of its subject ; and he en- livens an account of the wretched dwellings of the Highland cottagers by the very interesting and appropriate information that "the gentle- man to whom this book is dedicated has, during the past year (from of Mr. Bede's volumes is not the information which they contain, but the manner in which that information is conveyed. The compilation of statistics, and the collection of legendary tales, are tasks which may be performed with tolerable success by almost any decently edu-
cated person who may be willing to devote his energies to that object ; but the faculty of imparting the results of such labours in a way which is calculated to captivate the attention and conduce to the amusement of the reader, is a qualification which is far less univer- sally bestowed. Those Who are acquainted with Mr. Bede's former works will scarely require to be informed that the method which he
has adopted in order to render his dry facts acceptable to the general
public, is that of sowing his narrative broadcast with puns of various degrees of audacity. The subject of his present book is one which, at least in the hands of so distinguished a master, appears to lend itself to this mode of treatment with peculiar facility. The very name of the district which he describes has special capabilities of
its own, which he does not fail to utilize by designating a .car-ride of five-and-twenty miles along the coast, " a canter through Cantire." Again, the southern extremity of the peninsula is called the "Mull
of Cantire," a name which is obviously open to very effective treat- ment at the smallest possible expense of ingenuity. The precise signification, however, of the following remark on this circumstance is, to our comprehension at least, rather obscure : " Although," says Mr. Bede, "there are many meanings to the word mull,' in Scot- land, yet this particular kind of mull means a promontory, or point ;' though it does not follow that the point of a Scotch jest is
synonymous (in slang language) to the mull of that jest, notwith- standing Sydney Smith's declaration that it required a surgical ope-
ration to get a joke into a Scotchman." This enigma is followed by a more intelligible woodcut, entitled " Scotch mulls," which repre- sents two Scotchmen earnestly contemplating a large ram's-head snuff- box, and taking snuff out of a horn of their own; while the back- ground is occupied by rough outlines of the Island of Mull and the Mull of Cantire, and by a few figures in Highland costume, under which is the date 1745. • The fact that illicit whisky-making is car- ried on in some parts of Cantire enables our author to reproduce a joke which we fancy we have heard before, by designating another illustration " Still-life in the Highlands—' Still, I love thee ;' " and the presence of heather on the moors of the peninsula affords him the opportunity of exclaiming with considerable effect, "How happy could I be with heather." The moors themselves give occasion for some of Mr. Bede's most brilliant efforts, as the following extracts will show : " Suppose," says he, " we take a walk there ! As Tamora says in Titus Andronicus
" Now will I hence to seek my lovely moor!' " And again " While the other Glencreggan guests are enjoying their sport, I, within hearing of their guns, enjoy myself more quietly after my own fashion, and say with lago :- "' Myself the while will draw the Moor apart.' "
the designs of the author), erected eight cottages, each containing three bedrooms." We are, of course, very glad to hear all that Mr. Bede chooses to tell us about his artistic performances ; but we may perhaps be pardoned if we feel a little surprise that so much miscel- laneous information on this point should be volunteered by a gentle- man whose sense of literary propriety is so acute as to be shocked by the "discursiveness and offensive egotism" of Christopher North's " Recreations." As to the quality of the illustrations in the volumes before us, the chromo-lithographs are the best ; while those woodcuts which have been engraved as well as drawn by the author are de.. cidedly the worst.. The reader will probably have gathered from the foregoing re- marks that we have not formed a very high estimate of the value of Mr. Cuthbert Bede's latest work. The fact is, that we have no liking for the class of books to which it belongs. Such violent attempts to instruct and aniuse us at the same time almost invariably fail to attain either one or the other of their objects. They always remind us of a nostrum which, as many of our readers will remember, was proposed some years ago as a universalpanacea for all earthly ills— we mean brandy-and-salt. Either of these ingredients is, when • taken separately, good and wholesome; but the mixture of the two produces a compound from which no human being can possibly derive either pleasure or profit. Two good things have been spoiled in order to produce one had one—unless, indeed, the brandy be of inferior quality and the salt have lost its savour. Should Mr. Cuth- bert Bede wish to claim indulgence on this ground, we are quite ready to admit the justice of his plea ; but it is more than probable that he will scarcely think it worth his while to do so.
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