BOOKS.

DR. NORMAN MACLEOD'S " MEMOIR." • READERS of Gibbon will remember the story of Ali, the loved Cousin of the Prophet, and the first after his wife to believe in him,—how, twice passed over for the Caliphate, he contentedly retired into privacy, to meditate and pray, the bravest, most pious, and disinterested of men ; and how, chiefly to prevent division and bloodshed, at a perilous crisis he overcame his dislike of politics and intrigue, and accepted the Caliphate, only to see inaugurated the schism he would have died to

prevent ; afterwards dying to mitigate that division, and to shed abroad a benignant stream of uniting influence. It may be startling to some of our readers, if we confess that often

in the course of reading this life of Norman Macleod we have thought of that pious, meditative, yet brave, self-denying Arab. So, nevertheless, it has been. The generous, witty, open-hearted Scottish clergyman, who has been somewhat short-sightedly spoken of as a great Church politician after the fashion of Carstares and Robertson, and proclaimed the Primate of the Scottish Church, was really in many respects a recluse, burdened with sadness, and finding no relief in the perpetual conflicts and controversies over small points in which he could not help being involved. He hated politics and intrigue. He would willingly have taken the lowest place, if it would have secured him the longed-for quietude to meditate and pray, and enjoy that solitary communion with Nature he so truly loved. Formed above many men for unfettered joyousness, his life was cramped and contorted by alien circumstances. Up to the end, the lights of humour flash out ; he was manly, and could conceal his sufferings from others ; but constantly there rises the sigh for escape from the frittering strife. Norman Macleod did much : he organised several parishes with great success, reclaiming many rough, indifferent men and women, and gaining the love of all ; and his last large parish, the Barony, in Glasgow, he made the model for a modern city ; he wrote a few books ; he edited a popular magazine ; he travelled largely ; he became very popular as a preacher ; he visited India to forward mission-work there, and on the best testimony in- fluenced as few men have done the cultivated Hindoos by his large and conciliatory views ; he was chosen Moderator of the Scottish Church, the highest honour it can confer ; and yet the impression

left in reading this most carefully-written and suggestive Memoir is that in him a larger bulk of possibility was thrown away than in the case of auy other man of quite recent times. We wonder whether this did ever occur to the man himself ? We fancy not.

Or if it did, it never reached anything like a complete conviction, his healthy spontaneity soon chasing it away. But now and again it suggests itself very sadly with reference to particular things. Near the opening of the Memoir—that is, soon after his settle- ment in his first parish, Loudoun—and just as the rising swell of the Disruption controversy begins to appear in the distance, we find him writing :—" I am very dowie and cast down, not because I am alone, for I love the bachelor life more and more, and delight

in the independence with which I can rise, eat, read, write, when I like ! but this Church of ours is going between me and my sleep."

After the Disruption has been accomplished, he writes thus to John Mackintosh, "the Earnest Student" who went with the Free Church, and whose memoir it was later Dr. Macleod's pleasure and duty to write :—

" Oh, for a day of peace,—one of those peaceful days which I used to enjoy when a boy in the far west l Such days are gone, Sod. I cannot grasp the sense of repose I once felt,—that feeling, you know, which one has in a lonely corry, or by a burnie's side, far up among the mountains, when, far from the noise and turmoil of mortal man, and the fitful agita- tions of this stormy life, our souls in solitude become calm as the blue sky on which we gazed as we lay half-asleep in body, though awake in soul, among the brackens or the blooming heather. Could Isaak Walton be a member of a Scotch Presbtery, or General Assembly ? he who felt thankful for his food and raiment, the rising and setting sun, the singing of larks, and leisure to go angling ? Dear old soul 1 ' One of the lovers of peace and quiet, and a good man, as indeed most anglers are.' Isaak never would have been a member of any committee along with —, —, and Co. That is certain. Don't be angry, dear John Do let me darer with you, and smile or cry, just as I feel inclined. We shall slide into business and gravity soon enough."

At the close it was still the same. In his journal, a month before he died, we find him saying:—" Nothing amazes or pains me more than the total absence of all pain, all anxiety, all sense of burden or difficulty, among nine-tenths of the clergy I meet, as to

* Memoir of Norma* Macleod, D.D., one of Her Majesty's Chaplains, and Dean of the Chapel Royal, ee. By his Brother, the Rev. Donald Macleod, B.A., one of her Majesty's Chaplains. London: Daidy, Isbister, and Co.

questions which keep other men sleepless." And his biographer tells us that even in his last illness—a day or two before his death—" a great sadness weighed on him, a weariness of the noise and disputings of men, of the burden and the mystery' of life ; and out of this arose a more childlike clinging to Christ, and to the love and goodness of God." We remark on this element, because it is pervasive, and will, no doubt, astonish those who knew Dr. Macleod merely as the genial, humorous man, with great breadth and sensitiveness, ready to catch the pervading in- fluence and sympathetically answer to it. Humour and sadness have been often allied, and indeed there is a sense in which they are inseparable ; but "good spirits" is a different matter ; and most people, we fancy, on a casual acquaintance, would have written

down Dr. Macleod as beyond most men blessed with good spirits. Separate paragraphs even of this Memoir might give countenance

to this impression,—that description of the manner in which he beguiled his fellow-travellers in the East, for example :-

"Anyone who bap travelled in Palestine can understand how fatiguing it must have been for a man of his age and physique to pass days in the saddle in such a climate. Yet there were few evenings on which the encampment was not made a scene of merriment by his good-natured fun with the Fellahin er Bodawin who crowded round the tents. He had provided himself, before leaving London,w ith musical snuff-boxes and fireworks, and it was his delight to hear the ,illashallahr of the astonished natives when music burst out in some unexpected corner, or when a rocket whizzed aloft and fell in a shower of fire. He claimed this use of fireworks as an original invention for the protection of travellers, and he was eo confident of its merits, that he would not have been sorry had the Bodawin of the Jordan given him a fair opportunity of showing the effect on their valour of a discharge of crackers or a bouquet of rockets."

But these lighter outbursts are due, after all, to the relief needed in the reactionary escape from melancholy musings, which his peculiar position in reference to Church disputes had done much to deepen and confirm. He would doubtless have held that his powers had been consecrated to the noblest object, and that if they were frittered away, it was in a worthy service ; but it may be open to those who can detach themselves and look at matters more impartially to question whether it redounds to the honour of any country that a genius which could have employed itself so fruitfully in many departments—say, in literature—and in the line of the highest spiritual objects,—the better perhaps that, as has been well said, he was not fitted to become an "exact theologian,"—never had the chance of doing anything like justice to himself, because be was patriotic and attached to the Church in which he had been reared.

We are not aware that the peculiar part played by the Celtic element in Dr. Macleod's character and work has yet been sig- nalised as it claims to be. Even Mr. Donald Macleod glances at it rather than treats it in any respect systematically. It has a large bearing on his own development and influence. Born in Campbelltown, where the aroma of the Western Highlands seems to gather and concentrate itself, in face of the keen sea-blasts, he spent his boyish days in Morven, drinking in the romance and sentiment of Highland life, and learning to appreciate the beauty and manliness of character, oftener, perhaps, found there in lowly situations than in most other places. There he laid the foundation of that large tolerance and courtesy which are never found divorced from large imaginative grasp ; there, too, he learned to respect, even to reverence, the associations of the "past." If this

Celtic phantasy, to which we trace the finest touches in his stories (wedding itself, as it does, with the shrewd common-sense and "pawky" penetration of the lowland Scotch) made him impatient

of fine-spun logical subtleties and dogmatic refinements, it made him, Celt-like, conservative in clinging to the forms and symbols around which many " beautiful souls " had breathed devotion. And in nothing is this more seen than in the fine sympathy with which, in spite of many personal traits far from accordant with his own, he raised himself to the highest reach of Dr. Macleod Campbell's thought, and made it influential in a manner the thinker could never have done. Mr. Donald Macleod has well and generously recognised that influence in at once softening and elevating. Dr. Macleod has sometimes been accused of tem- porising; this, we can say, he can hardly be accused of doing so from personal motives ; but sometimes he was, from the force of such feelings as we have just dwelt on, divided between what was due to the future and what was due to the past. Even so ate as 1865, we find him saying, in the General Assembly :—

" I say, further, let us hold fast and firm by our Confession of Faith. But I really wish that gentlemen would feel the delicacy of these ques- tions of tests and signatures, and not be perpetually dragging up this subject I do not know at this moment any one question that requires finer handling, so to speak. I desire to see retained our whole Confes- sion of Faith as the expression of the Church's faith in the past and in the present. Do not let us be the Church of the past merely, let us also be the Church of the present and the Church of the future ; and this I will boldly maintain, that we are the freest Church at this moment in Scotland. I think honestly we are. I know our respected brethren who left us do not repent doing so, and that there is not a step they have taken which they would not honestly and calmly take again- But I say also, neither do I repent for a moment the position I have occupied, but would calmly give over again every vote I have giver,. and take again every step I have taken. I believe that God is over- ruling all this for, perhaps, a higher good than we are looking to. But as an Established Church, we are limited by a Constitution—a noble Constitution—which secures ns freedom, because giving us security at once against the tyranny of the State and the tyranny of the Clergy ; and within the limits of the Constitution, we have freedom at this moment to examine all questions brought before us, and to express our judgment upon them, moulding the Church to meet the wants of the" country as it now is."

These remained his sentiments to the end ; but he was constantly warning his brethren to beware of letting little matters shut out the whole world from their view, and his opinion every year gained.

emphasis that dogmatic forms are the clothes, and not the body; and.

that the time to dispense with them would come. At the same time, he exhibited unwearied effort in practical Christian work. He-

was indefatigable in his parish and deeply interested in all mission work at a distance, especially in the mission work of India, which

had always appealed powerfully to his imagination. It is here that Norman Macleod may be said to mediate powerfully between the indifference to practical Christian effort—tending always to is certain hardness—to which what are strictly Broad-Churchmen —especially Scottish Broad-Churchmen—are extremely prone, an inclination, indeed, inseparable from their peculiar position.- It has been said, and certainly with some truth, that "im

proportion as they are true labourers for the Church of the future, are they less true servants to the Church of the present." Probably, Mr. Maurice had this idea before- his mind, when he 'so distinctly stated the qualifications under which he would allow himself to be ranked as a " Broad Church- man," and in this respect, as in some others—though he would; not have followed some of Mr. Maurice's refinements—Dr. Mac- leodwould have gone with Mr. Maurice, rather than with Professor Jowett and Dean Stanley, though there were many points on, which he could fully meet them. But he would not have con- sented to allow an attitude of intellectual protest to weaken his- hands for practical work in the present, and his testimony, ac- companied as it was with so much geniality and influence of another kind, was all the more valuable.

Another point well worth noting was the radiant humour in• which Dr. Macleod contrived to wrap ugly or repellent things,.

thus recovering a kind of quiet or restful affection for them. The- Memoir presents many specimens of this, and it lay at the root of his creative faculty. In "The Starling," for example, the narrow,

rigid minister, is painted with such an evident liking, that we are-

fully satisfied when he is brought round to the author's views of right at the end. The ready power of adapting himself to very

varied atmospheres which we note in Dr. Macleod was closely related to his humour, though it may seem somewhat odd to say so ; and there is just as little sense of inconsistency in his story of Mrs. Huggins as there is in his account of his sitting beside the- Queen as she span at the bld-fashioned wheel, reading "Tam or Shanter" and " A Man's a Man for a' that," which, we are told, was her Majesty's favourite piece. This is the humorous picture- of Mrs. Huggins, to whom he went to read Wordsworth, and by which he illustrated his complete isolation from literature and' refinement in his first parish :—

" I found her in her usual seat by the fireside, her face calm ands meditative, her thumbs still pursuing their endless chase after each, other, as if each had vowed an eternal revenge of his brother. On her time-worn features there was an air of placid repose, combined with an intellectual grandeur, caught from her long residence with the late illustrious Mr. Huggins, and also a nervous twitching of the features, with an occasional lightning-flash about the eye, which I have no doubt was caused by living near the powder for thirty years. I was disap- pointed with her views of poetry. I read the introduction, and the following conversation ensued :—I : We have here, I think, a fine

combination of the poet with the poetic artist.' H.: wadna doot.. How's yer sister?' I: Well, I thank you. She has been a long time cultivating the ideal under me; but her talent is small, her genius. nothing.' H.: Is her cock (cough) better ?' I: ' Rather, Mrs. Hug- gins. Bat, pray, how do you like Wordsworth ?' H.: 'I dinna ken him. Whar does he leave ? [Anglice, live]. In Pettigrew's Close ? be the stickit minister?"'

Most characteristic of all, perhaps, is his account of his being tackled by the deaf old woman over the " fundamentals :"—

" On his first diet of visitation at Darvel, he called on an old pauper woman, who was looked upon as a great light among the Covenanters. When he entered the house he found her grasping her tin ear-trumpet (for she was very deaf), and seated formally in the midst of a group of neighbours and co-religionists summoned to meet him. Unlike his other parishioners, she did not at first acknowledge him as minister, but,. beckoning him to sit down beside her, and putting the trumpet to her ear, said, Gang weer the fundamentals !' and there and then he had to. bawl his theology till the old dame was satisfied, after which he received a hearty welcome as a true ambassador of Christ."

We have left ourselves no space to speak of Dr. Macleod's great influence in other directions. Readers must follow our advice, and go to the Memoir itself to trace out these. There they will find variety enough, and human interest never lacking,—the rarest outbursts of humour, and little clever caricatures thrown off on the spur of the moment, lying close, sometimes one is tempted to feel a little too close, to the most sacred self-corn- munings and confessions. The final impression is, as we have hinted, that here we have a man who might have been many things, might have come far nearer to realising his ideal in literary form, had the times been less stormy, ecclesiastically. The Memoir is done with skill—the subject being allowed to tell his own story freely—and the bits of description necessary to intro- duce and to give setting to the extracts from diaries and letters being uniformly done with good-taste, and a certain graceful, picturesque power. Nothing could well be finer than the sketch of Campbelltown, with its "characters," its maiden aunts and retired officers, and diffused flavour of the sea-salt. In a word, Mr. Donald Macleod has written a Memoir worthy of the subject, in that it is calculated in the best way to carry forward the lead- ing aims of the life he chronicles, in teaching patience, tolerance, and that genial open-mindedness which, in these days of artifici- ality and dogmatism, so much need to be cultivated. It may well do for Scotland what Dr. Stanley's Life of Arnold did for England.