BOOKS.
m SCOTTISH HISTORY. t LORD HALDANE, in a touching preface to the last historical essays of the late Professor Hume Brown, says with truth that his old friend's death was a real loss to the public. " He was no orator ; he disliked rhetoric ; in what he wrote there were few epigrams or striking phrases. But he exercised at short range a deep influence on those with whom he came into contact, and that influence was a lasting and permeating one. It was due partly to a personality highly refined by constant reflection, and partly to the sense he gave, not only of great and exact knowledge of his own subjects, but of a background in which they were set for him." Those who knew Professor Hume Brown only by his writings on Scottish history will recognize the accuracy of Lord Haldane's language. It was precisely that " sense of a background " which distinguished Professor Hume Brown from most other Scottish historians. He wrote about Scotland just as he might have written about Greece or Rome or Germany, with a dispassionate interest in the facts that can be ascertained from the chronicles and from the State papers. He did not set out to demonstrate the peculiar virtues of Scotsmen, whether Highlanders or Lowlanders ; he did not seek to prove any particular theory, and he eschewed with almost excessive care the romantic treatment to which Scottish history, with its wealth of personal anecdote and legend, lends itself. Readers who had been brought up on Scott's " Tales of a Grandfather " and the Waverley Novels probably thought Professor Hume Brown rather dull, but they would admit that he corrected their perspective and gave them a sober and trustworthy view of the formation and development of the Scottish people. He never forgot that Scotland was, after all, a small, poor and remote country, from the European standpoint, and he judged her achievements more generously and her failings more leniently because he was a good European. He had qualified himself for his special work by long and strenuous labours on
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Surveys of SeoWsk Iteetwy. By the late P. Hume Brown. Glasgow: Daaclehose. 17s. lid. uet.1 the editing. of State records, and, as the first man to hold a their of Scottish history in a. Scottish university, he did much to place these studies on a more scientific basis. Probably he owed no small part of his success to the fact that his mental outlook was not bounded by the Scottish coasts and the Cheviots. Lord Haldane says that he used for many years to pay regular visits with Professor Hume Brown to Weimar, Gottingen, llmenau and other places, so that the Professor might gather Materials for a new life of Goethe--" a work on which he had concentrated his passion for excellence more closely even than an his ' History of Scotland,' " and which he had finished before he died. Modern Germany, he thought, was paying, the penalty for her disregard of the large views of her old intellectual leaders like Goethe.
The essays and addresses collected in this volume deal for the most part with broad aspects of Scottish history or with historical writing in general. The paper on " The Moulding of the Scottish Nation " is an admirable summing up of essential facts. It is well to be reminded that Scotland in the days of our Henry the Seventh was almost as much divided against itself as some of the new States which are struggling for existence in Eastern Europe. The Highlands, Celtic Galloway and the Lowlands had little in common except their religion and their fear of English aggression ; they differed in race and in language, and their allegiance to a common king was little more than a form. James the Fourth, who, by marrying Henry the Seventh's daughter, paved the way for the union of the Crowns in the person of his great-grandson, also did more than any of his predecessors to unite the peoples of Scotland. He curbed the Highland clans ; he made the Lords of the Isles submit to him ; he fixed his capital in Edinburgh, where he governed through his Privy Council and administered law through his Supreme Court and the regular sessions of the itinerant justices. He imposed his will on the unruly nobles, instead of being ruled by them. Professor Hume Brown makes the striking suggestion that, of all the actions and events of his reign, it was perhaps its closing disaster that most effectually served the happy end." Such a calamity as that of Flodden has a power to evoke a consentaneous national feeling which no other experience can produce." There was scarcely a family of note in all Scotland that did not leave at least one member on the fatal field beside the Till. Professor Hume Brown might well have strengthened his case by adducing the parallel of Kossovo. That crushing defeat of the Serbs by the Turks in the late fourteenth century has served ever since as a source of inspiration ler Serbian patriots, even in the blackest days of the war now ended when Serbia was in the power of enemies even more malignant than the Turk. Half-a-century after Flodden the Scottish nation—or, as the author cautiously defines it, " that section of the population which by its capacity of thought and feeling, by the strength of its convictions and the strenuousness of its action, determines the main current of the general life and presents the characteristics which specifically distinguish one nation from another "—had to decide between adhering to the old faith and the old French alliance or accepting the Reformed faith and the English alliance. The memories of Flodden and of. Bannockburn did not prevent the majority from choosing Protestantism and the support of Scotland's hereditary foe. Time, the great healer, has assuaged those old griefs. Another excellent essay is concerned with the Scottish nobility and their part in the national history. The author admits their faults, but he emphasizes their services. It was they who gave Scotland its limited monarchy ; the Reformation and the Covenants were largely their work, and but for them the Revolution and the Union might have had no place in our history. With this record of their action, can we doubt that in considerable measure Scotland owes to her nobility what she is to-day ? " Another paper on the Union is valuable especially as a reminder that the Union was unpopular in Scotland long after 1707, and that it did not come to be accepted as part of the natural order of things until its material and moral benefits were too obvious to be disputed. The similar Union with Ireland would doubtless have ceased to be questioned long since if the majority of the Irish people had been Protestants like the Scots. The controversy is kept alive in the supposed interests of the Roman Catholic Church.
The volume includes several essays on lighter topics. One of them deals with the more notable Scotsmen who have influenced European thought, from Richard of St. Victor, who defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, Michael
ScOt who translated the Arabic versions of Aristotle into Latin, and George Buchanan, to Hutcheson, Hume, Adam Smith and Sir Walter Scott. .Another paper sketches the romantic career of a wandering scholar, Florence Wilson,' who, in accordance with the fashion of the sixteenth century, Latinized his name as Florentius Volusenus. He was born in or near Elgin about the year 1500, and was educated at Aberdeen under Hector Boyce or Boece and at Paris. He served as a tutor in Wolsey's household and as an agent of Thomas Cromwell's in Paris ; he set out for Italy in the train of Jean Du Bellay and, falling ill at Avignon, sought a quiet post in a new school at Carpentras, where the future Cardinal Sadoleto was residing as Bishop. The bonds that united all scholars in these golden days of the Renaissance are exemplified in one of Sadoleto's elegant Latin letters, describing how the wandering Scot called on him and charmed him so much as to obtain an invitation to dine with the magistrates, who appointed Wilson to the vacant mastership. Wilson became well known at Lyons, then as now a great intellectual centre, and died young while on his way home, leaving a book on The Tranquillity of the Soul," which was still read in the eighteenth century. The rise of nationality has doubtless benefited the world, but it is not unpleasant to look back to those far-off days when educated Europe was one community, speaking as well as writing Latin, so that Swiss scholars could lecture at Oxford or Scottish scholars at Bordeaux or even Coimbra in Portugal. The last paper in a very-interesting book treats of the private life of that astonishing man, John Napier of Merchiston, whose invention of logarithms revolutionized mathematics, although Lord Randolph Churchill is said to have confessed that he could never understand " those —dots." Apart from his logarithms, Napier seems to have been a well-to-do Protestant landowner with a taste for litigation and a passion for studying the Apocalypse—characteristics which have been shared by innumerable people of ordinary talent. Napier was best known to his educated contemporaries by his " Plaine Discovery of the whole Revelation of St. John," which he dedicated to James the Sixth with an outspoken epistle begging the King to cut himself loose from Papistry. He assumed that the Pope was Antichrist, and he calCulated that the day of God's judgment appears to fall betwixt the years of Christ 1688 and 1700," and would fall at any rate before 1786. Napier was popularly regarded as a wizard, and his familiar spirit was said to inhabit a jet-black cock. One of the stories current in his neighbourhood represented him as ridding his fields of a neighbour's pigeons by enchantment. There is documentary evidence for the fact that he was asked by the adventurer Robert Logan of Restalrig, notorious in the Gowrie plot, to find a treasure supposed to be hidden in that grim fortress, Fast Castle. A paper by him, preserved at Lambeth, gives a list of dreadful engines of war which he had invented or hoped to invent, including a Tank—" a chariot which would be like a moving mouth of mettle and scatter destruction on all sides "—and a submarine. His one real discovery, despite its inestimable value, seems to have attracted little notice in his lifetime. Probably Napier would be as much surprised as his contemporaries to know that he is still venerated as the inventor of logarithms.
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