Part 9
acquaintance with Strathearn and Strath Tay. But in my case there were hindrances that may not have presented themselves to the begetter of _Waverley_. To him this choice country might not be so much shut up by high park walls, or by enclosures of the rich strath lands. And in my day there were toll bars on the roads, when a schoolboy’s pocket-money was scrimper than seems to be the lot of this generation. One could not ride a dozen miles in any direction without counting the cost. The cheapest roads were twopenny ones, which thus became the most familiar. On one or two, the charge for my small steed was threepence, which required more consideration. One forbidding highway proudly demanded fourpence, though on it you could trot a couple of miles before reaching the expensive barrier. And when one had treated oneself to a fourpenny scamper along it, there came a second lion on that path. For more than a mile a railway ran beside the road, on the same level, separated only by a hedge, as alarming to inexperienced Highland shelties as the broad bridge on which another railway crossed another road askew, so as to form a miniature Grotto of Prosilippo, where overhead might come rumbling an invisible thunderstorm as one sped through its gloomy pass. Once, having paid my fourpence, I had pushed on almost to the end of the perilous stretch, when a train puffed and rattled up to meet me, which my horsemanship failed to make the pony face in a philosophic spirit. For all I could do, it swerved round and took to racing the engine along the flat road, for a time keeping company with its bogy. On that highway race, John Gilpin would not have been in it. If I had no wig to fly away, and no stone bottles swinging by my side, what bothered me was having an open knife in my hand, with which I had been cutting a switch from the hedgerow, as the monster came upon us from round a corner. Our headlong course was at last stopped by a gipsy or such-like wayfarer, as shamefaced guerdon for whom I had only twopence in my pocket, nearly drained by that unconscionable toll. Such trivial reminiscences I set down partly to please myself, partly to explain how my familiarity with this region is oddly incomplete, as in the case of a student who knew all about Africa, America, and Asia, but had stopped subscribing to the Encyclopædia before it touched on Europe. Yet the reader must take fair notice that there are few roads hereabouts upon which I may not be tempted to trot out my own early memories; and if, belike, he likes not this mood of anecdotage, let him turn to the article on Strathearn in some ponderous cyclopædia or plodding guide-book.
Mr. Hall, for his part, did not despise the trout-fishing for which the Farg was notable in my youth; and he had a good day’s sport, when so few strangers sought its shady course that he found some difficulty in getting his host to make out a bill, that for two days’ entertainment of man and beast, including a bottle of wine and other beverages, came to less than ten shillings. By Culfargie, the little Farg runs into the Earn, here a goodly river of smooth channels and deep pools, meandering through a rich valley between the wooded bluffs of Moncrieff Hill and the green slopes of the Ochils. Except for its craggy walls, there is nothing Highland about this part of the strath, as thickly set with mansions, farms, and woods as any snug scene of England. Of it, I have already spoken in _Bonnie Scotland_; and will only add that Mr. Hall was scandalised at the numbers of old bachelors he found resorting to the Spa of Pitkeathly, then as frequented as “St. Ronan’s Well,” where it appears that bachelors, young and old, were very apt to get into mischief.
Above the Bridge of Earn, over which goes the high road to Perth, the river is crossed by the two converging railway lines that tunnel through Moncrieff Hill to burst into daylight on the Tay. It is the next reaches of the winding Earn that are hardly known to strangers, unless in glimpses from the train; yet here it flows by scenes of as much historic interest as beauty. Forgandenny is a picturesque village, beside which an old mansion, destroyed by fire, has been replaced by a new one, notable for its fine gardens, like so many other seats in the neighbourhood. Forteviot, a little higher up, has come down from the rank of an ancient royal seat. Here died Kenneth McAlpine, 860, after hammering the Picts into a new kingdom; and for three centuries later shadowy Scottish kings are seen flitting through a royal stronghold that stood on the tongue of land between the Earn and its tributary the May.
The May, one of the merriest and sweetest of Ochil streams, trips down by the park of Invermay and the “birks” sung before Burns. As “Endermay,” this spot inspired the Earn-born poet, David Mallet or Malloch, whom Dr. Johnson belittled, but he filled a considerable place in London literary life of his generation. Opposite Invermay, on the northern slope of the Earn, stands Dupplin Castle, seat of Lord Kinnoull, whose richly wooded grounds are now renowned, and the gardens nursing exotics such as an araucaria thought to be the largest in the kingdom.--“Oh, Dr. Johnson, Dr. Johnson, oh!” But these noble avenues stand on what was once Dupplin Moor, where in 1332 Edward Balliol and his English allies made such a slaughter among the Scots “that the dead stood as high from the ground as the full length of a spear,” and the work of Bannockburn was for a time undone; indeed the boy king David’s crown might have been wholly lost, had not Edward of England’s hands been then too full, grasping at the lilies of France as well as the Scottish thistle that so often proved a sore handful.
Above Dupplin comes Gask, home of the Oliphants, one of whom was to win victories of sentiment for the lost Jacobite cause dear to this family. Carolina, Lady Nairne, the “Flower of Strathearn,” had as warm a heart for her native stream as for memories of Prince Charlie.
Fair shone the rising sky, The dewdrops clad wi’ many a dye, Larks lilting pibrochs high To welcome day’s returning. The spreading hills, the shading trees, High waving in the morning breeze, The wee Scots rose that sweetly blows Earn’s vale adorning!
The ruins of Gascon Hall beside the river claim to have made a refuge for William Wallace, when, hunted by a sleuth-hound through Gask wood, he struck off the head of his flagging comrade Fawdon, then could not so easily lay that traitor’s or hinderer’s ghost. The present mansion is the third or fourth worn out here by the Nairne family. It stands on the site of a Roman camp, with a Roman road beside it, one of many bits of way still locally known as “street roads.” At Gask we look over to the mouth of Strathallan, the pass between the Ochils and the foothills of the Grampians, that must often have echoed the clank of Roman arms. Across the moor of Orchill, with Wade’s military road running beside it, the Ardoch Camp is best preserved of such Roman fortresses in Britain, and one of the largest, laid out to contain an army of 25,000 men. And hereabouts, in Celtic stones and place-names, there are thick traces of still older history, overgrown by the plantations and steadings of a race enriched from regions where the Cæsars’ eagles never flew.
Ardoch stands out of the Earn basin, and the Allan flows to the Forth. From the end of the Ochils, the Ruthven Water is their last tributary to the Earn, whose next affluent comes off Highland moors. Strathallan Castle seems to belie its name in being on the north side of the pass by which the Caledonian railway debouches on a plain studded with notable names. Here is Tullibardine, cradle of the Atholl Murrays; Kincardine Castle shows how Montrose’s ancestral home was ruined by Argyll in their tit-for-tat warfare; and the gallant Grahames had Aberuthven for their burial-ground.
The chief place on this side is Auchterarder, where the first shot was fired in the Disruption of 1843. Nor is this the sole note of the neighbourhood in Scottish Church history. Behind Auchterarder, the upper waters of the Ruthven come down from Gleneagles, a beautiful gorge in the Ochils, leading over to Glendevon. Gleneagles was the old home of the Haldanes, now replaced here by their kinsman Lord Camperdown; but Mr. Haldane, whose name is familiar as author of our “Territorials,” has still a seat on the Ochil slopes at Cloanden. This war-minister--who rose to political note at an early age, for as a schoolboy I can remember being taken into his nursery to see him invested with his first dignity as “the new baby”--bears a name that has been better known to Scotland in connection with its religious life, when, a century ago, his grandfather and granduncle became the Wesleys of the Kirk then sunk to its zero of cold morality.
Robert and James Haldane, nephews of Admiral Duncan, began life as high-spirited lads with fair prospects of worldly fortune. The elder had dispositions towards the ministry, repressed at a time when the Scottish Church seemed no career for gentle blood; the younger declined the chance of a partnership in Coutts’ Bank. The one spent some early years in the Navy, while the other, entering the East India Company’s service, under family influence rose to be a captain at twenty-five, a post he could sell for a small fortune. Leaving the sea young, both brothers conceived an evangelical enthusiasm, at first somewhat tinged with the early hopes of the French Revolution, which so many nobler spirits of their day hailed as a new dispensation--
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!
For the Haldanes, as well as for Wordsworth, the democratic heaven soon clouded over; and the brothers turned their zeal to the spread of the gospel, after the model of such Southron preachers as Charles Simeon and Rowland Hill, both of whom carried their awakening into Scotland. Robert sold his estate of Airthrey, beautifully situated on the Ochils, and proposed devoting his life and means to a mission in India, a scheme nipped in the bud by the authorities there. James took to field-preaching, to the scandal of parish ministers and magistrates, itinerating all over Scotland, through the Highlands, and as far as the Orkneys and Shetlands. Robert’s gifts were less in the way of eloquence; he rather gave himself to organisation of the effort, training lay preachers, buying circuses both in Edinburgh and Glasgow as chapels, and issuing the tracts which by his school were held as special means of grace.
Such proceedings on the part of laymen did not commend themselves to the clergy; the stern Seceders also looked askance on this new revival. The Haldanes, for their part, had soon drifted away from Presbyterianism; and when the circus-like Tabernacle, still to be seen on the side of the Calton Hill, was built at Robert Haldane’s expense, it opened as a Congregational Chapel, with James Haldane as pastor, who continued his evangelical tours. By and by differences of opinion arose in the new congregation; and both brothers went over to Baptist views. Robert, especially, in his zeal for soundness, was all along much given to controversy--with Zachary Macaulay over a plan for bringing young Africans to be educated in Britain, as later with his famous son anent the ballot; with the Bible Society for its backsliding in publishing the Apocrypha; with the degenerate Socinian Calvinism of Geneva; with the divers errors of Irvingites and Sandemanians; and with the Presbyterian “Voluntaries” as to their refusal to pay the “Annuity Tax,” which was the church rate of Edinburgh. In their old age the Haldanes found more fellowship in the Presbyterian Church, especially when it had been warmed by Free Church enthusiasm. They seem both to have been earnest and sincere in struggling after what they held for purity of saving truth; and when they died in the middle of last century, they could congratulate themselves on having stirred the life of their country in a way that might be better remembered had they not been concerned to leave “their work and not their name.”
Gleneagles has taken us too far from the Earn, to which we come back at Kinkell Bridge, below the castle and collegiate church of Innerpeffray, burial-place of the Drummonds. On the north side lies Madderty, where, near the railway line from Perth to Crieff, may be visited the remains of Inchaffray Abbey, whose Abbot so effectually asked a blessing on the Scottish arms at Bannockburn. On the south side of the river runs the older branch line from Crieff Junction, with a station for Muthill, a goodly village that a century ago was as large as Crieff, and a century before had been burned, with Auchterarder and other neighbours, by the old Pretender’s forces, the harmless inhabitants being hustled out into a January night by soldiers whom they had sometimes received as guests--a needless cruelty to be set against that Whiggish harrying of Glencoe.
Muthill has kept some notable ecclesiastical antiquities; and in my youth it had, what was a rarity for a Scottish village, an English “chapel,” if I remember right, not in communion with the Scottish Episcopal Church, but one of several scattered over Scotland that counted themselves as belonging to the Church of England, and looked to Carlisle as their diocesan see. I am not sure how far this body still holds out, its sap having been cut off by the refusal of later Carlisle bishops to exercise their functions across the Border; then for a time its congregations had to depend for a precarious supply of sacramental grace upon colonial and other stray bishops who could be engaged by the job. This small Church, in fact, represented the old evangelical party that for the last generation has been waning on both sides of the Border, while the Scottish Episcopalians of that day lay under a dark imputation of being “Puseyites.” Through one of its Episcopal ministers, Muthill had a chance of standing high in song and story, for his daughter, Mary Erskine, is said to have been loved in vain by Walter Scott. It was for her consolation, in the loss of a beloved child, that Carolina Oliphant wrote _The Land o’ the Leal_.
Muthill has another connection, now almost forgotten, with the religious life of Scotland. About the time of the Original Secession, to an Earnside farmer in this parish was born a son named John Barclay, who became a probationer in the Kirk, but soon fell out with its fathers upon his interpretation of saving doctrine. He founded a sect which took the name of the Bereans, as searching the Scriptures with peculiar zeal, where they seem to have found assurance of salvation as a leading tenet, on the strength of which they cultivated a grace of cheerfulness not too common among Calvinist believers. “Rejoice evermore” is the suggestive title of one of their founder’s books. Their communion spread over several parts of Scotland, even into England and across the Atlantic. When Mr. Hall was at Abernethy he heard of theirs as one of the most flourishing congregations at Newburgh, having for its head Alexander Pirie, who for a time had been professor of divinity at the Seceders’ rustic college, then from an Anti-burgher softened down into a Burgher, from which he passed on to the Relief Church, and finally found rest among the Bereans. The English parson, who goes out of his way for a sneer at Robert Haldane’s missionary devotion, is rather satirical on those dissenters, whom he inclines to lump with the Sandemanians, and hints at accusations of sinning that grace may abound. They are, he says, “drunk or sober, as merry as grigs.” What struck him most about their ceremonies was the social love feast in which they copied the Sandemanians; and he repeats a scandalous story of the Crieff congregation sending to a public-house to get wine on trust for this function. At Crieff, which may be called its native soil, the body held together till the middle of last century, when its property was divided by lot among the members; and, so far as I know, the Bereans are now everywhere extinct, unless, perhaps, in America, where so many sects have taken fresh root on virgin soil.
Muthill lies between the grounds of Culdees Castle and of Drummond Castle, the latter famous for its gardens, avenues, and nobly wooded demesne. In passing up Tayside, I have told how it came into Southron hands, when the power of its old lords split on the rock that wrecked so many another Jacobite family; while the neighbour house of Murray tacked and trimmed its fortunes into calm waters. Strathearn has dark memories of the feuds between those names. When the old church of Monzievaird was being turned into a mausoleum for the Ochtertyre family, a quantity of charred wood and calcined bones came to light to bear out the tradition how a band of Murrays, fleeing before Drummonds, took refuge in this church with their wives and children, and were there burned to death by the savage pursuers. For this atrocity, indeed, several Drummonds came to be executed at Stirling. Only one Murray had escaped the holocaust, by the help, it is said, of a Drummond who loved his sister; later, this Drummond having fled for refuge to Ireland, he in turn was helped to pardon by the man he had saved, and came back with the agname Drummond-Ernoch, handed down to the victim of another revolting tragedy told in the introduction to _A Legend of Montrose_.
Drummond Castle is the Versailles of Crieff, itself the capital of Strathearn, where it stands among lovely surroundings and notable mansions--Monzie, Abercairney, Cultoquhey, Inchaffray, Ochtertyre, names that “fill the mouth as the mountains the eyes.” Such sounding names are, of course, wreckage of the once familiar speech that has ebbed far back into the Highlands. I never met any one in Perthshire who did not speak English; and even a knowledge of Gaelic, I fancy, is exceptional in this southern half of the country, certainly so in the lower half of Strathearn. But I forget what writer of a century or so back can record that at Monzie Castle--recently burned--only a mile separated the English-speaking lodge-keeper from neighbours who could not understand his tongue. A German traveller, in the early years of Queen Victoria, noted the east-enders of Loch Tay as speaking English, while Gaelic was still common about the other end. In our own generation, old inhabitants of Crieff could remember how troops of shock-headed lads and lasses came tramping down from the glens--like the _Schwabenkinder_ of Tirol--to learn English by working a summer on Lowland farms, turning an honest penny out of this course of education.
Not that Scotland was without schooling long before the days of School Boards. In out-of-the-way parts of the Highlands, as well as in Lowland Gandercleughs, Dr. Johnson could hear of day-schools, even boarding-schools, kept here and there under difficulties, perhaps in summer by a bookish youth who for his winter studies walked all the way to Aberdeen or Glasgow. When a society seemed necessary for the diffusion of Christian knowledge in the Highlands, thanks to John Knox every English-speaking and Shorter Catechism-conning parish, at least, had its dominie, who, thanks to those land-grabbing Lords of the Congregation, was often such a “downtrodden, underfoot martyr” as Carlyle deplores, eking out his exiguous dues by a medley of occupations, and by unworthy perquisites that fell to him at the annual cock-fighting holiday. He was fain not only to perform all the duties of his school, down to mending pens and sharpening the points of his tawse, but to act as precentor, session-clerk, and general man of business for the parish; “even the story ran that he could gauge.” He has been known to play the cobbler in his hours of ease. Not seldom he was a “stickit minister,” qualified to wag his head in a pulpit, if he could get one, hindered perhaps from that eminence by some infirmity, such as a tied tongue or a too red nose. Often he was a “character,” who has figured in many a tale told by graceless Roderick Randoms when they grew out of dread of his skelpings and palmies. The most famous of such presentments ought to be Jedediah Cleishbotham, who presents himself as quite superfluously editing the _Tales of My Landlord_; but few impatient readers of our day spend much time over the mystifying patter with which that Wizard of the North thought necessary to introduce his feats of imagination. I should like, by the way, to point out how the self-important schoolmaster of Gandercleugh seems to have sent a thriving progeny across the Atlantic. Surely it is one of his family who, as the Rev. Homer Wilbur, A.M., so long occupied a pulpit at Jaalam, Mass., where one “talented parishioner,” Hosea Biglow, might call cousins with the Peter Pattieson who penned a story when he should have been engrossing rudimentary instruction on the skins of the lower classes.
Let us drop a tear over the dominie, who in the last generation or two has been vanishing from the world of fact. His place is now taken by Normal-school teachers of both sexes, well-trained, well-inspected, and less ill-paid than their predecessors. Every young Scot gets such mouthful of learning as can be crammed into him; but, to copy Johnson’s coarse metaphor, I am not sure that there were not better bellyfuls going under the old dispensation of scholarship. With all his faults, of which whisky was apt to be the worst, the snuffy dominie had sometimes the knack of turning out silk purses among sows’ ears, and with the most imperfect tools. The general run of his pupils perhaps profited most by being kept out of mischief, wholesomely hardened to chastisement, and awed by the mysteries of Effectual Calling, while the choicer natures had their chance to be brought into touch with an inspiring example that showed them the way to learning, a more important course of education than the cleverness of teaching which goes to load the minds of a whole class with not always fruitful instruction.
And those rude schools of old days had this educational advantage, that the minister’s bairn, and even the laird’s, might tumble and quarrel with the cottar’s, picking up the local vernacular and accent, but little more harm at an age when all sons of Adam are in the savage state of development, not easily inoculated with the curse of snobbery that sets classes apart, barred from the kindly intercourse of the older generations, among whom gentle and simple knew their place too well for troublesome presumption or uneasy stand-offishness. The parish school at least was a little republic, tempered sometimes, indeed, by grudges of favouritism on the part of its president. While English squires and parsons still looked suspiciously on the three R’s for peasants, barefooted Scottish laddies, sometimes lassies, would tackle Latin, even Greek, under the village dominie, who sent forth some of his pupils into the world equipped at least with a turn of mind and a stirred ambition that put them at advantage wherever they went. But now they go out into a new world, in which man may not be so much master of his own fate. What self-help could do for him is, it seems, to be done rather by the State, conceived of as a national Trades Union, which need not consider the chance of national bankruptcy in providing for the general welfare. The very virtues that winged a prosperous career--thrift, industry, enterprise, force of character--become suspected for vices in the interest of the common herd. It is a bad lookout for Scotsmen in that golden age of mediocrity so glibly promised by certain social reformers, who might begin by doing away with prizes and punishments in schools, if they cannot altogether level down Nature’s distinctions.