CHAPTERS OF REMINISCENCE.*
A BOOK of recollections by the well-known Edinburgh advocate and authority upon Scots ecclesiastical law, Dr. Taylor Innes, has been posthumously published. The recollections contain much that is of real interest to the general public, though they are chiefly concerned with Scottish church disputes. Too little space has been given to the personal and private side of the narrative. The little we are told of our author's boyhood and the then existing conditions of life both in the Highlands and Lowlands, makes us long for more. At Tain, in Ross-shire, where Dr. Innes was born, the popula- tion was mainly Celtic, and the picturesque town teemed with tradition—historical, poetical, and religious. The ruined castle round which it clustered had belonged from time immemorial to an Innes, though not, as Dr. Innes tells us -with almost gratuitous and most un-Celtic frankness, to any ancestor of his. Fierce tales of other days stirred the imagination of the town boys. Our author repeats one of them which specially delighted his youth. A story of blood and trickery ends with the triumph of the lady of the castle, who carried her enemy's head to Edinburgh, and " casten at the King's feet "; "a deed," he goes on to explain, '• which even the admiring biographer of the clan confesses was too masculine to be commended in a woman.'"
The religious emotion which seethed in the Highlands of Scotland sixty years ago was of a kind to make an indelible impression upon the mind of a young boy. The passion for loyalty and leadership which has always characterized the Highlander had taken a strange form. "The men who followed Prince Charlie must always have someone to follow even when their chief interests had come to be in Protestant theology. The objects of this devotion in my time were not great preachers only, but saintly souls also among private Christians widely known as The Men, and forming a Hagiology curiously parallel to that set up at the opposite pole of Christendom." The Highlanders of his youth were, Dr. Innes tells us, characterized by a "direct aspiration to the infinite and divine." On the other hand, "the keen Celtic appreciation of logic, system, and sequence" led them to a complete sacrifice of private judgment in favour of the Westminster Confession and the Shorter Catechism. This sacrifice " weakened throughout the whole Highlands the moral independence and the mental initiative of religious men, and increased their natural and racial submissiveness."
Edinburgh University has, or at any rate had, the power to rouse something like passion in the hearts of her sons. Our author tells us something of the keen delight of his first college session. "To this day," he writes, "I never come to the dark days of early November in Edinburgh without experiencing an unreasoning exhilaration of heart and mind." To the eager boy not yet seventeen years old Sir William Hamilton—of whom it had been said that "his bodily frame was like a breathing intellect "—and "Christopher North" appeared as gods ; even Wilson's successor, Professor Blackie, "with less poetry, more learning, and a more calculated, yet a
• Chapters of Reminiscence. By the late A. Taylor Lulea, LL.D. London Dodder and Stoughton. [5a. net.] more irrepressible eccentricity," did not fail to charm him. In these early days Lord Brougham, then old and "almost forgotten," was Chancellor of the University. His gift of oratory had left him. Yet he still " gesticulated with every feature of his face—particularly with his eyebrows, but above all with his enormous nose." Dr. Innes gives us a tragie sketch of another great Edinburgh light, Lord Gifford, "who left eighty thousand pounds to institute philosophico- theological lectures in the Scottish Universities." He had been all his life an advocate in great practice.
"A few weeks after he was raised to the Bench I met him some- where at dinner, and as he walked home through the slippery streets leaning on my arm, he became confidential. He first told me of the torture it was to sit 'up there,' listening to young men slowly unfolding, arguments the conclusion of which he had fore- seen as soon as they began to speak. (Many new-made judges find it difficult to listen even decently.) Then he went deeper. have all my life looked forward passionately to the last few weeks. All those years I have hoped to be set free from law, and to get back to philosophy. And now the leisure has come. I am free : and yet—and yet—' Again and again he tried to explain how he felt helpless and baffled, that when he would untie the simplest speculative knots his fingers seemed thumbs; and that the universe, instead of opening to his eyes a path of endless inquiry, rose before him more like a blank wall."
Lord Gifford died not very long after. A large portion of these reminiscences is devoted to Mr. Gladstone. It is, unfortunately, the least interesting portion of the book. Our author fails to give any recognizable portrait of the great statesman "mediating," as Richard Holt Hutton so finely said, "between the moral and material interests of the age." Of Dr. Rainy, on the other hand, the characterization is very fine. Here is a remarkable word-portrait :—
" The face could be extraordinarily genial in private, and extra- ordinarily impressive in public; but ordinarily it was more or less of a mask. This was partly due to a congenital defect of vision, which the observer felt long before he knew that it was there; but in part also to the severe and statuesque lines on which the counten- ance was moulded, and in part undoubtedly to a deep reserve of nature which those lines were fitted to express and to guard."
Dr. Rainy's enemies called him an "ecclesiastical schemer." This verdict was, in Dr. Innes's eyes, "as nearly as possible the converse of the truth." Dr. Rainy was, however, our author admits, an opportunist. [Dr. Innes uses the word in a favourable sense] :— " Both Gladstone and Rainy were, in my view, great oppor- tunists. But the former, I think, was so chiefly because, having at all times a superabundance of energy—no doubt chiefly moral energy—to work off, he found that of the many fields of duty in which he was keenly interested, circumstances seemed at each moment to throw open to him only one, and he hurled himself into that accordingly. Rainy, like Gladstone, was born of a Conservative family ; and like Gladstone he became a great pro- gressive leader. But, as we have seen, he remained to the last largely conservative both in temperament and on principle; and while he was far too big a man to be bounded by mere conven- tions, he had a profound respect for all obstacles really existing in human life and in the order of providence. While progressive therefore during his whole public career, he progressed not by choice, but as a matter of duty, on the line of least resistance; he saw in opportunity the beckoning finger of God."
In Scotland this book will, we are sure, be read with really
great pleasure in its entirety. We hope we have quoted enough to show how much it contains of interest to the world
at large.
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