SPECTATOR'S LIBRARY.

BIOGRAPHY,

Lives of Simon Lord Lovat and Duncan Forbes of Culloden. From Original Sources. By John Hill Burton, Advocate, Author of " The Life of David Hume.'

HUTORY, Chapman and Hall. History of the Reformation in Germany. By Leopold Ranke. Translated by Sarah Austin. Vol. III Longman and Co. FlenoN,

Kirkholme Priory, or Modern Heroism ; a Tale. By the Author of " The Ransom."

In three volumes Bentley.

POETRY,

Irish Popular Songs ; with English Metrical Translations, and Introductory Re- marks and Notes. By Edward Walsh Orr and Co.; JPGlashan,

MR. BURTON'S LIVES OF LORD LOVAT AND PRESIDENT FORBES.

THE two most remarkable public characters of Scotland during the last century were Simon Lord Lovat and Duncan Forbes. Several Scotchmen attained higher position and greater success in life ; some reached greater historical eminence, and exercised a wider influence on society, but in a British field of exertion,—as Lord Mansfield; several gained a more shining fame, but by means of literature,—as Hume, Ro- bertson, and Lord Karnes ; Lord George Murray was more conspicuously engaged, and in purely national affairs, as commander-in-chief of the Pretender's army; and several Jacobites, by their exertions or misfortunes, were as prominently if not for so long a period before the public eye. But except where poetry, as in the case of Lochiel, has given currency to a name, few men are so well known as Lovat and Forbes ; none ex- cite so solid an attention.

The secret of this eminence is probably to be found in their strength of character. Both were men of determined will, of extraordinary energy and resolution, with that self-reliance and power to dare and do which wanted but a wider field of action and a less provincial cast of mind to partake of the heroic. A further cause of the attention they have excited was, that each, with a very strong individuality, represented a large class. The feeble-minded Ciomarty and the bluff Bahnerino were mere persons. Duncan Forbes was a type of the respectable Scottish gentleman and politician of the last century ; Lovat, of the worst of the Highland chieftains, as well as of the low cajoling selfish man of the world everywhere. It has been said that Lo-vat represented the old feudal baron of Scotland, in contrast with modern civilization. Mr. Burton considers he was a type of " the old reign of fraud and force, rendered more conspicuous by protruding into an sera of transition." But if Scotch or any other feudality resembled some of Lovat's earlier deeds,— as the abduction and nominal marriage but real rape of the dowager Lady Lovat of another sept,—it more nearly resembled the brutalities of banditti than such a social system as we have been taught to suppose it. These outbreaks of a barbarian nature in early youth were, let us hope, personal, not Celtic; as his shameless and unscrupulous falsehood, lying like truth from its very magnitude and audacity, may also be consi- dered peculiar to himself. The more general traits of Highland character seem to have been the mixture of a liberal education and worldly know- ledge with strong clannish prejudices, which Lovat carefully concealed from the world at large, but made good use of among his own people, and, unless he kept up his hypocrisy to the last, really felt himself. He had also the selfishness, intriguing disposition, and want of principle, which characterized the worst of the Highland chieftains, if not all of them. Inquiry is a terrible dissipater of romance; and the deeper the subject is gone into, the more the Highland Jacobite leaders appear to have been in- fluenced by purposes or grievances of their own rather than by any chi- valrous principle of loyalty. Most of them were ready at any and all times to have bartered their Jacobitism for a commission or place of proportion- ate value ; as the most " devoted " of these timeservers were ready to have used the power that trust would have given them, to betray their trusters, if they saw sufficient motive,—a shocking laxness of morality which then more or less pervaded public life, but was deeper and more systematic, we fear, in the Highlands than anywhere else. In this political craft Lovat was a master : he had an impudence, a dexterity, a readiness, and a cool- ness both of denial and invention, which never left him at a loss either to plan a scheme or to escape from it. His intellectual abilities, though gross and limited, were very great of their kind ; and he had sharpened them by education, practice, and much experience of men in various countries. His courage both animal and mental was surprising ; his hypocrisy pro- found. That he had no sense of or care for religion during his life, is without doubt ; from his confidential jests it would appear he had no be- lief of any kind. Yet his acting at his death was so perfect that he might be supposed a model of piety.

" He desired the attendance of Mr. Baker, the chaplain of the Sardinian. Am- bassador, and declared that he died in the faith of the Roman Catholic Church;

that he adhered to the rock upon which Christ built his Church; to St. Peter and the succession of pastors from him down to the present time; and that he rejected and renounced all sects and communities that were rejected by the Church.' But even on this solemn question he showed his old propensities: when asked if he was a Jesuit,* he said, No, a Jansenist; evidently out of a spirit of mystification. " When he reached the scaffold, he looked round and said, God save us ! why should there be such a bustle about taking off an old grey head that cannot get up three steps without two men to support it ?' He embraced one of his clans- men, James Fraser, and said, My dear James, I am going to heaven; but you must continue to crawl a little longer in this evil world. "

With his hard practical worldly sense, his extensive knowledge of man- kind, and his learned education, it would seem unlikely that he should entertain the Highland ancestral and clannish prejudices : but he ap- pears really to have done ao,—perhaps the only feeling he possessed un- connected with some of his own objects of advancement. Yet there may be a doubt about this, if it be true that, on reading the inscription on his * The question referred to a report that during his sojourn in France he had become a Jesuit. Mr. Burton doubts the fact, as his previous life would not have borne the inquiry which the order institutes. It seems probable that he turned priest, and preached successfully.

coffin,—" Simon Dominus Fraser de Lovat, decollat April 9, 1747 ; zetat. sure 80,"--he exclaimed,

" Nam genus et proavos, et gum non fecimus ipsi, Vix ea nostra voco."

It is a great moral lesson to consider, that notwithstanding all his na- tural and acquired advantages, and without one scruple of shame, fear, honour, or conscience, to restrain him, he did not greatly advance in life ; and what little he did gain he was constantly losing, while he failed so egregiously at last that he closed his career upon the scaffold. His dou- ble treacheries rendered him suspected by both parties, doomed him to linger out some ten years of the prime of his life in France under Jacobite surveillance, and cost him his estate. When further treachery to the Stuarts procured its restoration from the house of Hanover, and a mag- nified service procured him some politic reward, he lost the ground he had gained by further intriguing treasons. In fact, to escape from the consequence of his crimes was about the highest extent of his temporary success ; and even this sorry cord broke at last. The career of Duncan Forbes, though not a failure like that of his acquaintance Lovat, was not a striking success proportioned to his abilities and services. The son of a wealthy Whig family, regularly trained to the bar, and becoming eminent as a practitioner, he had a right to look for the honours of his profession,—Lord Advocate and President of the Court of Session, or what in England would be called Attorney- General and Lord Chief Justice. There was then a more political and ministerial character connected with these offices in Scotland than their legal counterparts in England ever attained, unless in the ancient Justiciary ; and Duncan Forbes was eminent for his rule in Scotland and the services he rendered to the house of Brunswick during the rebellion of 1745-6. But he seems to have been merely a resolute minister, and not to have left any statesmanlike impress upon Scotland : his exertions during the rebellion were so far from being properly rewarded, that he does not appear to have been repaid his advances out of pocket, made under official authority,--a fraud which embarrassed his affairs, and doomed his son for many years to penury and retirement. If this affair be as it is represented by the Forbes family papers, it was a piece of official swindling. There was perhaps some reason for his neglect by Government. The fact is, that his mind was Scotch, not British : he could not rise above the local ideas that were rife in his youth, before the Union, and for a long time after- wards. Though a Whig by birth and education, as well as by reflection, he seemed to think that the Highlanders had a right to rebel and to es- cape from the consequences of their rebellion. His remonstrances to the Duke of Cumberland were distasteful, and gave rise to a pretty general notion that he was a Jacobite himself. Cruelty is at all times abhorrent. It is easy for us, who can look back for a century, with the milder feel- ings of a century, to stigmatize the conduct of the victors of Culloden as mere gratuitous brutality. But our knowledge could not be theirs : for sixty years the whole island had been kept anxious and uneasy by the state of the Highlands ; thrice had they raised the standard of rebellion, causing bloodshed and confusion, without even a reasonable •prospect of success ; the rapid extinction of the Stuart race was then a very unlikely prospect; and endless uncertainty, ever recurring rebellions would have existed, had not the spirit of the clans been broken and the whole system of clanship destroyed. Deep-seated evils exist in certain states of society ; to remedy which, common modes of acting must be suspended. Had William the Conqueror been a smaller and less determined mind, he would have set up a temporary kingdom, similar to those which were perpetually rising and falling from the departure of the Romans to the invasion of the Normans : bad Henry the Eighth been more conscientious and less " right royal," the incubus of the property and power of a preposterously wealthy priest- -hood would still have ridden over the country, or we should have been in- volved in endless contests to shake it off : had Cumberland been more tender-hearted, the system of clanship would not have been so thoroughly destroyed ; the Jacobite spirit might have descended to another generation as a living principle, not as an effete superstition—an ulcer in time of peace, and probably a destructive fever during the American and French ReVolutionary wars. We do not mean to deny that passion as much as policy was allowed to operate in the Highlands, and that the campaign was stained by needless cruelty to the humbler clansmen ; but we may see in Smollett's Humphrey Clinker how effective the proceedings of Cumberland and the Ministry were; and it is pretty certain that Forbes's prejudices would have opposed any proceedings that would have gone to the root of the evil.

Considering how frequently the leading incidents in the lives both of Lovat and Forbes have been noticed in the numerous works on the sub- ject of the Jacobite intrigues and insurrections, it may fairly be asked,- was such a work as the one before us needed at this time of day ? or were the persons of sufficient importance to require a separate and elabor- ate biography ? In a common case the answer must be in the negative: but Mr. Burton has had access to new and valuable information; a variety of original documents have been placed in big hands relating to Lord Lovat, and the whole of the family papers at Culloden House have been laid before him. What is of more consequence, his mind is satu- rated with his subjects. He appears to have been long familiar with the scenery of the Fraser country, and all the other places which derive any interest from Lovat or Forbes ; and to have studied all that exists in printed books on the subject of his heroes, as well scattered and inciden- tal as direct. The same sort of knowledge which gave a vital character to Mr. Burton's "Life of Hume" is also visible here. He cannot, of course, personally know the state of society and opinion in which Forbes and Lovat moved ; but he has been himself a part of that which suc- ceeded it, and he appears to know it thoroughly by tradition. His knowledge of Scotch law and customs also serves him well ; and these aircumstances, as in the case of Hume's Life, give a natural air to the book. The subjects seem men, not abstractions. Lovat especially comes out more natural than in the common notices of him. Less of the mere mon- ater or devil, and more of what he really was—a hard-hearted, selfish, ruffianly, but clever and plausible man of the world, encouraged into crime by the power he possessed as a Highland chief, and the lax state of morality around him. An idea of his own system of ethics may be formed from a letter he wrote to his " doer " or solicitor, at a time when he was involved in litigation respecting the Fraser estate. Mr. Burton considers that the lawyer's remonstrance was " probably against some very villanous proposal" on the part of the Lord.

" 29th April 1729.

" Dear Sir—I had the honour of your fine moral and philosopbicale letter by this poet; and tho' it is writ in a very pathetick, smooth way, yet I have read so many good authors on the subject, without being able to reduce their advice to practice, that an epistle from a Scotch lawyer can have but very little influence on me, that now by a long experience knows that those fine moral reflections are no more but a play of our intellectual's, by which the author carresses his own genius by false ideas that can never be put in practice. You may give me as many bony words as you please; but words will never gain me the estate of Lovat, nor my peerage, without assiduously acting that part I ought to get that effec,- tuat: and though some people charged me with liking some of the Roman Catho- lic principles, yet I do assur you that I do not expect new miracles in my favours, and that I am fully resolved to use all the ordinary meanes in my power to save my family. I told you so plainly in my last letter, that I had no satisfactory answer to any of my essential queries, that I will not trouble you with repeating what I have said; only I must tell you, that I alwise observed since I came to know anything in the world, that an actif man with a small understanding will finish business and succeed better in his affairs, than an indolent lazy man of the brightest sense and of the most solidjudgment. So since I cannot flatter myself to have a title to the last character, I ought to thank God that I am of a very active temper; and Ile be so far from relenting, that lie double my activity if possible."

Unlike the generality of biographers, Mr. Burton has little or no bias in favour of his subjects or their times ; but brings a sound critical judgment to bear upon everything,—unless it be that he occasionally ascribes too great a weight to some of Lovat's own statements in his let- ters. The favour of King George the First was a subject of endless boast with Lovat, though we believe it has no confirmatory evidence ; without which, no statement of his can ever be relied on. To such a height did he carry his confidence in the credulity of others, that he even writes to Forbes that he has advanced the credit of Argyll and his brother, by speaking favourably of them to the King.