A Diversity of Scotsmen
Scottish Diaries and Memoirs, 1746-1843. Arranged and Edited by J. G. Fyfe. (Eneas Mackay. 128. 6d.)
HERE is a panorama of Scottish life, almost as rich, varied and humorous as the panorama of the Waverley Novels ; and, indeed, we are often reminded of Waverley characters as we read these records of their living contemporaries. It is surely the voice of Peter Peebles (the litigant in Redgauntlet) that speaks in these words of a bonnet-laird recorded by Dr. James Begg: "I really ditma ken ony greater pleasure on earth than a weel-gawin' law plea."
Although he makes good use of books not easily available to the general reader, Mr. Fyfe does not therefore neglect the familiar and valuable diarists and autobiographers like Lord Cockburn and the enchanting Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus. Clerics pre- dominate among the twenty writers ; Mr. Fyfe opens with a splendidly contrasted pair. First, the Jacobite Bishop, Robert Forbes (compiler of The Lyon in Mourning), on an episcopal visitation through the Highlands in 1762: By 12 o'clock we returned to our Creel House at the General's Hut, where we dined sumptuously upon Venison, a piece of a Roe, dress'd partly in Collops, with Sauce, and partly on the Grid-Iron, a Leg of fine Mutton two good Pullets, Flour Bread, good Claret, White Wine, and Gooseberries after Dinner ; and the Landlady, a Forbes by her Father and a Fraser by her Husband, was extremely fond to see a Forbes in her Creel-House, and tho' an old Body, she sang like a Nightingale, and danced to her own Music.
After him comes John Mill, of Sandwick in Shetland, who opens an entry in 1755 with, "Meantime Satan raged exceedingly," and who records the conversion of his daughter Nell with surprise as well as Pleasure, because "not long before she was much given to dress, diversions, and encouragement of young frothy men." But any hasty generalisations about humane Episcopalians and rigid Presbyterians must be revised when we come to George Ridpath, minister of Stitchel and Home. He reads Plato and Horace, Tristram Shandy and David Hume's History, with his cronies deals "pretty liberally in Bonum Magnums" at a dinner on the Prince of Wales's birthday (1759), plays parlour games, occasionally spends an evening in "a sort of mirth more wild than elegant," is far more worried by debts than devils, and dismisses a Presbytery meeting with "some trifling business about a fornicator."
Mr. Fyfe, however, is by no means just an entertainer ; and for the light his compilation throws on everyday life in Scotland, and the impact on individuals of great national movements and events, it is worthy to stand on the bookshelves beside H. G. Graham's classic, Social Life in Scotland in the Eighteenth Century. The saddest pages record the decay of the old ways of life in the Highlands. Donald Sage, minister of Achness, shows the process at its most brutal when he describes how in the notorious Suther- land Clearances the crofters of Strathnaver were given half an hour to shift their gear before their cottages were burnt to the ground. Equally revealing are the memories of the eighth Duke of Argyll, a genuinely well-intentioned and high-principled landlord, who simply could not understand why the Highlander should stubbornly stick to an outworn, inefficient method of cultivation when better ways had been demonstrated to him. That the people might be clinging to something far more than their system of communal holdings—to a whole complex pattern of life which they instinctively felt would be threatened by his improvements—seems never to have occurred to him.
It is this same Duke who, apropos of English misconceptions about the Establishment in Scotland, remarked that "John Bull, with all his great qualities, is a very parochial creature." Scots are parochial too, of course, but in a slightly different way, always liking to relate the wildest and furthest things to the nearest and homeliest. Here, as example, is Carlyle of Inveresk describing a conversation with Colonel Alexander Dow: "As he was telling us that night, that, when he had the charge of the Great Mogul, with two regiments under his command, at Delhi, he was tempted to dethrone the monarch, and mount the throne in his stead, which he said he could easily have done: —when I asked him what prevented him from yielding to the temptation, he gave me this memorable answer, that it was reflecting on what his old school-fellows at Dunbar would think of • him for being guilty of such an action."
JANET ADAM SMITH.
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