The Purgatory of Suicides.

167

the general consciousness that there was a virgin field of poetry in Scotch scenery, manners, and legends-a debt which Walter Scott himself probably owed to the Ayrshire peasant just as much as Hogg did. Indeed, we perhaps are right in saying, that had Burns not lived, neither Wilson, Galt, Allan Cunningham, or the crowd of lesser writers who have found material for their fancy in Scotch peculiarities, would have written as they have. The three first names, Wilson's above all, must have been in any case distinguished; yet it is surely no derogation to some of the most exquisite rural sketches in "Christopher North's Recreations," to claim them as the intellectual foster-children of "The Cottar's Saturday Night." In this respect, certainly, the Ettrick Shepherd has a place in Burns's school, and, in our own opinion, one which has been very much overrated. But the deeper elements of Burns's mind, those which have especially endeared him to the working man, reappear very little, or not at all, in Hogg. He left his class too much below him; became too much of the mere æsthetic prodigy, and member of a literary clique; frittered away his great talents in brilliant talk and insincere Jacobite songs, and, in fine, worked no deliverance on the earth. It is sad to have to say this, but we had it forced upon us painfully enough a few days ago, when re-reading "Kilmeny." There may be beautiful passages in it; but it is not coherent, not natural, not honest. It is throughout an affectation of the Manichæan sentimental-sublime, which God never yet put into the heart of any brawny, long-headed, practical Borderer, and which he therefore probably put into his own head, or, as we call it, affected, for the time being; a method of poetry writing which comes forth out of nothing, and into nothing must return.

This is unfortunate, perhaps, for the world; for we question whether a man of talents in anywise to be compared with those of the Ettrick Shepherd has followed in the footsteps of Burns. Poor Tannahill, whose sad story is but too well known, perished early, at the age of thirty-six, leaving behind him a good many pretty love-songs of no great intrinsic value, if the specimens of them given in Mr. Whitelaw's collection are to be accepted as the best. Like all Burns's successors, including even Walter Scott and Hogg, we have but to compare him with his original to see how altogether unrivalled on his own ground the Ayrshire farmer was. In one feature only Tannahill's poems, and those later than him, except where pedantically archaist, like many of Motherwell's, are an improvement on Burns; namely, in the more easy and complete interfusion of the two dialects, the Norse Scotch and the Romanesque English, which Allan Ramsay attempted in vain to unite; while Burns, though

not succeeding by any means perfectly, welded them together into something of continuity and harmony-thus doing for the language of his own country very much what Chaucer did for that of England.-A happy union, in the opinion of those who, as we do, look on the vernacular Norse Scotch as no barbaric dialect, but as an independent tongue, possessing a copiousness, melody, terseness, and picturesqueness which makes it, both in prose and verse, a far better vehicle than the popular English for many forms of thought.

Perhaps the young peasant who most expressly stands out as the pupil and successor of Burns, is Robert Nicoll. He is a lesser poet, doubtless, than his master, and a lesser man, if the size and number of his capabilities be looked at; but he is a greater man, in that, from the beginning to the end of his career, he seems to have kept that very wholeness of heart and head which poor Burns lost. Nicoll's story is, mutatis mutandis. that of the Bethunes, and many a noble young Scotsman more. Parents holding a farm between Perth and Dunkeld, they and theirs before them for generations inhabitants of the neighbourhood, "decent, honest, God-fearing people." The farm is lost by reverses, and manfully Robert Nicoll's father becomes a daylabourer on the fields which he lately rented and there begins, for the boy, from his earliest recollections, a life of steady sturdy drudgery. But they must have been grand old folk these parents, and in nowise addicted to wringing their hands over "the great might-have-been." Like true Scots Bible-lovers, they do believe in a God, and in a will of God, underlying, absolute, loving, and believe that the might-have-been ought not to have been, simply because it has not been; and so they put their shoulders to the new collar patiently, cheerfully, hopefully, and teach the boys to do the same. The mother especially, as so many great men's mothers do, stands out large and heroic, from the time when, the farm being gone, she, "the ardent book-woman," finds her time too precious to be spent reading, and sets little Robert to read to her as she works-what a picture!-to the last sad day, when, wanting money to come up to Leeds to see her dying darling, she "shore for the siller," rather than borrow it. And her son's life is like her own-the most pure, joyous, valiant little epic. Robert does not even take to work as something beyond himself, uninteresting and painful, which, however, must be done courageously: he lives in it, enjoys it as his proper element, one which is no more a burden and an exertion to him than the rush of the strid is to the trout who plays and feeds in it day and night, unconscious of the amount of muscular strength which he puts forth in merely keeping his place in the stream. Whether carrying Kenilworth

in his plaid to the woods, to read while herding, or selling currants and whisky as the Perth storekeeper's apprentice, or keeping his little circulating library in Dundee, tormenting his pure heart with the thought of the twenty pounds which his mother has borrowed wherewith to start him, or editing the Leeds Times, or lying on his early deathbed, just as life seems to be opening clear and broad before him, he

"Bates not a jot of heart or hope,"

but steers right onward, singing over his work, without bluster or self-gratulation, but for very joy at having work to do. There is a keen practical insight about him, rarely combined, in these days, with his single-minded determination to do good in his generation. His eye is single, and his whole body full of light.

"It would indeed," writes the grocer's boy, encouraging his despondent and somewhat Werterean friend, "be hangman's work to write articles one day to be forgotten to-morrow, if that were all; but you forget the comfort-the repayment. If one prejudice is overthrown, one error rendered untenable; if but one step in advance be the consequence of your articles and mine-the consequences of the labour of all true men-are we not deeply repaid?"

Or again, in a right noble letter to his noble mother :

"That money of R.'s hangs like a mill-stone about my neck. If I had paid it, I would never borrow again from mortal man. But do not mistake me, mother; I am not one of those men who faint and falter in the great battle of life. God has given me too strong a heart for that. I look upon earth as a place where every man is set to struggle and to work, that he may be made humble and purehearted, and fit for that better land for which earth is a preparation -to which earth is the gate. . . . If men would but consider how little of real evil there is in all the ills of which they are so much afraid-poverty included-there would be more virtue and happiness, and less world and Mammon-worship on earth than is. I think, mother, that to me has been given talent; and if so, that talent was given to make it useful to man."

...

And yet, there is a quiet self-respect about him withal :—

"In my short course through life," says he in confidence to a friend at one-and-twenty, "I have never feared an enemy, or failed a friend; and I live in the hope I never shall. For the rest, I have written my heart in my poems; and rude and unfinished, and hasty as they are, it can be read there."

"From seven years of age to this very hour, I have been dependent only on my own head and hands for everything-for very bread. Long years ago-aye, even in childhood-adversity made me think,

and feel, and suffer; and would pride allow me, I could tell the world many a deep tragedy enacted in the heart of a poor, forgotten, uncared-for boy. . . . But I thank God, that though I felt and suffered, the scathing blast neither blunted my perceptions of natural and moral beauty, nor, by withering the affections of my heart, made me a selfish man. Often when I look back I wonder how I bore the burden-how I did not end the evil day at once and for ever."

Such is the man, in his normal state; and as was to be expected, God's blessing rests on him. Whatever he sets his hand to, succeeds. Within a few weeks of his taking the editorship of the Leeds Times, its circulation begins to rise rapidly, as was to be expected with an honest man to guide it. For Nicoll's political creed, though perhaps neither very deep nor wide, lies clear and single before him, as everything else which he does. He believes naturally enough in ultra-Radicalism according to the fashions of the Reform Bill era. That is the right thing; and for that he will work day and night, body and soul, and if needs be, die. There, in the editor's den at Leeds, he "begins to see the truth of what you told me about the world's unworthiness; but stop a little. I am not sad as yet .. . . If I am hindered from feeling the soul of poetry among woods and fields, I yet trust I am struggling for something worth prizing-something of which I am not ashamed, and need not be. If there be aught on earth worth aspiring to, it is the lot of him who is enabled to do something for his miserable and suffering fellow-men; and this you and I will try to do at least."

Ilis friend is put to work a ministerial paper, with orders "not to be rash, but to elevate the population gradually;" and finding those orders to imply a considerable leaning towards the By-ends, Lukewarm, and Facing-both-ways school, kicks over the traces, wisely, in Nicoll's eyes, and breaks loose."

"Keep up your spirits," says honest Nicoll. "You are higher at this moment in my estimation, in your own, and that of every honest man, than you ever were before. Tait's advice was just such as I should have expected of him; honest as honesty itself. You must never again accept a paper but where you can tell the whole truth without fear or favour. . . . Tell E. (the broken-loose editor's ladylove) from me to estimate as she ought, the nobility and determination of the man who has dared to act as you have done. Prudent men will say that you are hasty: but you have done right, whatever may be the consequences."

This is the spirit of Robert Nicoll; the spirit which is the fruit of early purity and self-restraint, of living "on bread and cheese and water," that he may buy books; of walking out to the Inch of Perth at four o'clock on summer mornings, to write and read in peace before he returns to the currants and the

whisky. The nervous simplicity of the man comes out in the very nervous simplicity of the prose he writes; and though there be nothing very new or elevated in it, or indeed in his poems themselves, we call on our readers to admire a phenomenon so rare, in the "upper classes" at least, in these days, and taking a lesson from the peasant's son, rejoice with us that "a man is born into the world."

For Nicoll, as few do, practises what he preaches. It seems to him, once on a time, right and necessary that Sir William Molesworth should be returned for Leeds; and Nicoll having so determined, "throws himself, body and soul, into the contest, with such ardour, that his wife afterwards said, and we can well believe it, that if Sir William had failed, Robert would have died on the instant !"-why not? Having once made up his mind that that was the just and right thing, the thing which was absolutely good for Leeds, and the human beings who lived in it, was it not a thing to die for, even if it had been but the election of a new beadle? The advanced sentry is set to guard some obscure worthless dike-end-obscure and worthless in itself, but to him a centre of infinite duty. True, the fate of the camp does not depend on its being taken; if the enemy round it, there are plenty behind to blow them out again. But that is no reason whatsoever why he, before any odds, should throw his musket over his shoulder, and retreat gracefully to the lines. He was set there to stand by that, whether dike-end or representation of Leeds; that is the right thing for him; and for that right he will fight, and if he be killed, die. So have all brave men felt, and so have all brave deeds been done, since man walked the earth. It is because that spirit, the spirit of faith, has died out among us, that so few brave deeds are done now, except on battle-fields, and in hovels whereof none but God and the angels know.

So the man prospers. Several years of honourable and selfrestraining love bring him a wife, beautiful, loving, worshipping his talents; a help meet for him, such as God will send at times to those whom he loves. Kind men meet and love and help him-"The Johnstones, Mr. Tait, William and Mary Howitt ;" Sir William Molesworth, hearing of his last illness, sends him unsolicited fifty pounds, which, as we understand it, Nicoll accepts without foolish bluster about independence. Why not? -man should help man, and be helped by him. Would he not have done as much for Sir William? Nothing to us proves Nicoll's heart-wholeness more than the way in which he talks of his benefactors, in a tone of simple gratitude and affection, without fawning, and without vapouring. The man has too much self-respect to consider himself lowered by accepting a favour,