Part 14

of Glasgow, lived for some time in the Island of Mull, in the house of a relative--for, as his name imports, he was a pure Celt--and from his sires he drew song, melancholy, and superstition. The superstition he never could completely shake off. He could laugh at a ghost story, could deck it out with grotesque or humorous exaggeration; but the central terror glared upon him through all disguises, and, hearing or relating, his blood was running chill the while. Returning to his native city, he was entered an apprentice in a public manufactory, and here it was--fresh from ruined castle, mist folding on the Morven Hills, tales told by mountain shepherd or weather-beaten fisherman of corpse lights glimmering on the sea; with English literature in which to range and take delight in golden shreds of leisure; and with everything, past Highland experience and present dim environment, beginning to be overspread by the "purple light of love"--that Mr Macdonald became a poet. Considering the matter now, it may be said that his circumstances were not unfavourable to the development of the poetic spirit. [Sidenote: Glasgow poets.] Glasgow at the period spoken of could boast of her poets. Dugald Moore was writing odes to "Earthquake" and "Eclipse," and getting quizzed by his companions. Motherwell, the author of "Jeanie Morrison," was editor of the _Courier_, and in its columns fighting manfully against Reform. Alexander Rodger, who disgusted Sir Walter by the publication of a wicked and witty welcome--singular in likeness and contrast to the Magician's own--on the occasion of the visit of his gracious Majesty George IV. to Edinburgh, was filling the newspapers of the west with satirical verses, and getting himself into trouble thereby. Nay, more, this same Alexander Rodger, either then or at a later period, held a post in the manufactory in which Mr Macdonald was apprentice. Nor was the eye without education, or memory without associations to feed upon. Before the door of this manufactory stood Glasgow Green, the tree yet putting forth its leaves under which Prince Charles stood when he reviewed his shoeless Highland host before marching to Falkirk. Near the window, and to be seen by the boy every time he lifted his head from work, flowed the Clyde, bringing recollections of the red ruins of Bothwell Castle, where the Douglases dwelt, and the ivy-muffled walls of Blantyre Priory where the monks prayed; carrying imagination with it as it flowed seaward to Dumbarton Castle, with its Ossianic associations, and recalling, as it sank into ocean, the night when Bruce from his lair in Arran watched the beacon broadening on the Carrick shore. And from the same windows, looking across the stream, he could see the long straggling burgh of Rutherglen, with the church tower which saw the bargain struck with Menteith for the betrayal of Wallace, standing eminent above the trees. And when we know that the girl who was afterwards to become his wife was growing up there, known and loved at the time, one can fancy how often his eyes dwelt on the little town, with church tower and chimney, fretting the sky-line. And when he rambled--and he always _did_ ramble--inevitably deeper impulses would come to him. Northward from Glasgow a few miles, at Rob Royston, where Wallace was betrayed, lived Walter Watson, whose songs have been sung by many who never heard his name. Seven miles southward from the city lay Paisley in its smoke, and beyond that, Gleniffer Braes--scarcely changed since Tannahill walked over them on summer evenings. [Sidenote: A poetic education.] South-east stretched the sterile district of the Mearns, with plovers, and heather, and shallow, glittering lakes; and beyond, in a green crescent embracing the sea, lay a whole Ayrshire, fiery and full of Burns, every stock and stone passionate with him, his daisy blooming in every furrow, every stream as it ran seaward mourning for Highland Mary--and when night fell, in every tavern in the county the blithest lads in Christendie sitting over their cups, and flouting the horned moon hanging in the window pane. And then, to complete a poetic education, there was Glasgow herself--black river flowing between two glooms of masts--the Trongate's all-day roar of traffic, and at night the faces of the hurrying crowds brought out keenly for a moment in the light of the shop windows--the miles of stony streets, with statues in the squares and open spaces--the grand Cathedral, filled once with Popish shrines and rolling incense, on one side of the ravine, and on the other, John Knox on his pillar, impeaching it with outstretched arm that clasps a Bible. And ever as the darkness came, the district north-east and south of the city was filled with shifting glare and gloom of furnace fires; instead of night and its privacy, the splendour of towering flame brought to the inhabitants of the eastern and southern streets a fluctuating scarlet day, piercing nook and cranny as searchingly as any sunlight--making a candle needless to the housewife as she darned stockings for the children, and turning to a perfect waste of charm, the blush on a sweetheart's cheek. With all these things around him, Mr Macdonald set himself sedulously to work, and whatever may be the value of his poetic wares, plenty of excellent material lay around him on every side.

[Sidenote: Hugh Macdonald.]

To him all these things had their uses. He had an excellent literary digestion, capable of extracting nutriment from the toughest materials. He assiduously made acquaintance with English literature in the evenings, gradually taking possession of the British essayists, poets, and historians. During this period, too, he cherished republican feelings, and had his own speculations concerning the regeneration of the human race. At this time the splendid promise of Chartism made glorious the horizon, and Macdonald, like so many of his class, conceived that the "five pints" were the _avant-couriers_ of the millennium. For him, in a very little while, Chartism went out like a theatrical sun. He no longer entertained the idea that he could to any perceptible extent aid in the regeneration of the race. Indeed, it is doubtful whether, in his latter days, he cared much whether the race would ever be regenerated. Man was a rascal, had ever been a rascal, and a rascal he would remain till the end of the chapter. He was willing to let the world wag, certified that the needful thing was to give regard to his own private footsteps. His own personal hurt made him forget the pained world. He was now fairly embarked on the poetic tide. His name, appended to copies of verses, frequently appeared in the local prints, and gained no small amount of local notice. At intervals some song-bird of his brain of stronger pinion or gayer plumage than usual would flit from newspaper to newspaper across the country; nay, several actually appeared beyond the Atlantic, and, not unnoticed by admiring eyes, perched on a broadsheet here and there, as they made their way from the great cities towards the Western clearings. All this time, too, he was an enthusiastic botanist in book and field, a lover of the open country and the blowing wind, a scorner of fatigue, ready any Saturday afternoon when work was over for a walk of twenty miles, if so be he might look on a rare flower or an ivied ruin. And the girl living over in Rutherglen was growing up to womanhood, each charm of mind and feature celebrated for many a year in glowing verse; and her he, poet-like, married--the household plenishing of the pair, love and hope, and a disregard of inconveniences arising from straitened means. The happiest man in the world--but a widower before the year was out! With his wife died many things, all buried in one grave. Republican dreamings and schemes for the regeneration of the world faded after that. Here is a short poem, full of the rain cloud and the yellow leaf, which has reference to his feelings at the time--

Gorgeous are thy woods, October! Clad in glowing mantles sear; Brightest tints of beauty blending Like the west, when day's descending, Thou'rt the sunset of the year.

"Fading flowers are thine, October! Droopeth sad the sweet blue-bell; Gone the blossoms April cherish'd-- Violet, lily, rose, all perish'd-- Fragrance fled from field and dell.

"Songless are thy woods, October! Save when redbreast's mournful lay Through the calm gray morn is swelling, To the list'ning echoes telling Tales of darkness and decay.

"Saddest sounds are thine, October! Music of the falling leaf O'er the pensive spirit stealing, To its inmost depths revealing: 'Thus all gladness sinks in grief.'

"I do love thee, drear October! More than budding, blooming Spring-- Hers is hope, delusive smiling, Trusting hearts to grief beguiling; Mem'ry loves thy dusky wing.

"Joyous hearts may love the summer, Bright with sunshine, song, and flower; But the heart whose hopes are blighted, In the gloom of woe benighted, Better loves thy kindred bower.

"'Twas in thee, thou sad October! Death laid low my bosom flower. Life hath been a wintry river, O'er whose ripple gladness never Gleameth brightly since that hour.

"Hearts would fain be with their treasure, Mine is slumb'ring in the clay; Wandering here alone, uncheery, Deem 't not strange this heart should weary For its own October day."

The greater proportion of Mr Macdonald's poems first saw the light in the columns of the _Glasgow Citizen_, then, as now, conducted by Mr James Heddenvick, an accomplished journalist, and a poet of no mean order. The casual connexion of contributor and editor ripened into friendship, and in 1849, Mr Macdonald was permanently engaged as Mr Hedderwick's sub-editor. He was now occupied in congenial tasks, and a gush of song followed this accession of leisure and opportunity. Sunshine and the scent of flowers seemed to have stolen into the weekly columns. You "smelt the meadow" in casual paragraph and in leading article. The _Citizen_ not only kept its eye on Louis Napoleon and the Czar, it paid attention to the building of the hedge-sparrow's nest, and the blowing of the wild flower as well.

Still more to prose than to verse did Mr Macdonald at this time direct his energies; and he was happy enough to encounter a subject exactly suited to his powers and mental peculiarities. He was the most uncosmopolitan of mortals. He had the strongest local attachments. In his eyes, Scotland was the fairest portion of the planet; Glasgow, the fairest portion of Scotland; and Bridgeton--the district of the city in which he dwelt--the fairest portion of Glasgow. He would have shrieked like a mandrake at uprootal. He never would pass a night away from home. But he loved nature--and the snowdrop called him out of the smoke to Castle Milk, the lucken-gowan to Kenmure, the craw-flower to Gleniffer. His heart clung to every ruin in the neighbourhood like the ivy. He was learned in epitaphs, and spent many an hour in village churchyards in extracting sweet and bitter thoughts from the half-obliterated inscriptions. Jaques, Isaak Walton, and Old Mortality, in one, he knew Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire, and Ayrshire by heart. Keenly sensible to natural beauty, full of antiquarian knowledge, and in possession of a prose style singularly quaint, picturesque, and humorous, he began week, by week, in the columns of the _Citizen_, the publication of his "Rambles Round Glasgow." City people were astonished to learn that the country beyond the smoke was far from prosaic--that it had its traditions, its antiquities, its historical associations, its glens and waterfalls worthy of special excursions. These sketches were afterwards collected, and ran, in their separate and more convenient form, through two editions. No sooner were the "Rambles" completed than he projected a new series of sketches, entitled, "Days at the Coast"--sketches which also appeared in the columns of a weekly newspaper. Mr Macdonald's best writing is to be found in this book--several of the descriptive passages being really notable in their way. As we read, the Firth of Clyde glitters before us, with white villages sitting on the green shores: Bute and the twin Cumbraes are asleep in sunshine; while beyond, a stream of lustrous vapour is melting on the grisly Arran peaks. The publication of these sketches raised the reputation of their author, and, like the others, they received the honour of collection, and a separate issue. But little more has to be said concerning his literary activity. The early afternoon was setting in. During the last eighteen months of his life he was engaged on one of the Glasgow morning journals; and when in its columns he rambled as of yore, it was with a comparatively infirm step, and an eye that had lost its interest and lustre. "Nature never did betray the heart that loved her;" and when the spring-time came, Macdonald, remembering all her former sweetness, journeyed to Castle Milk to see the snowdrops--for there, of all their haunts in the west, they come earliest and linger latest. It was a dying visit, an eternal farewell. Why have I written of this man so? Because he had the knack of making friends of all with whom he came into contact, and it was my fortune to come into more frequent and more intimate contact with him than most. He was neither a great man nor a great poet--in the ordinary senses of these terms--but since his removal there are perhaps some half-dozen persons in the world who feel that the "strange superfluous glory of the air" lacks something, and that because an eye and an ear are gone, the colour of the flower is duller, the song of the bird less sweet, than in a time they can remember.

Both Dr Strang and Mr Macdonald have written about Glasgow, and by their aid we shall be able to see something of the city and its surroundings.

[Sidenote: Early history of Glasgow.]

The history of the city, from the period of St Mungo to the commercial crisis in 1857 and the fall of the Western Bank, presents many points of interest. Looking back some thirteen centuries into the gray morning-light of time, we see St Mungo led by an angel, establishing himself on the banks of the Molendinar, and erecting a rude chapel or oratory. There for many summers and winters he prayed his prayers, sung his aves, and wrought his miracles. The fame of his sanctity spread far and wide, and many pilgrims came to converse with, and be counselled by, the holy man. In process of time--the prayers of the saint proving wondrously efficacious, and the Clyde flowing through the lower grounds at a little distance being populous with salmon--people began to gather, and a score or so of wooden huts, built on the river bank, was the beginning of the present city. In 1197 the cathedral was consecrated by a certain Bishop Jocelyn, and from thence, on to the Reformation, its affairs continued in a prosperous condition; its revenues, taking into consideration the poverty of the country and the thinness of the population, were considerable; and its bishops were frequently men of ambition and of splendid tastes. Its interior was enriched by many precious relics. On days of high festival, the Lord Bishop and his officials, clad in costly vestments, entered by the great western door, and as the procession swept onward to the altar, incense fumed from swinging censers, the voices of the choir rose in rich and solemn chanting, the great organ burst on the ear with its multitudinous thunders, and rude human hearts were bowed to the ground with contrition, or rose in surges of sound to heaven in ecstasy. Glasgow, too, is closely connected with Wallace. The Bell o' the Brae saw the flash of his sword as the Southrons fled before him. At the kirk of Rutherglen, Sir John Menteith and Sir Aymer de Vallance met to plan the capture of the hero: and at Rob Royston the deed of shame was consummated. Menteith, with sixty followers, surrounded the house in which Wallace slept. Traitors were already within. His weapons were stolen. Kierly, his servant, was slain. According to Blind Harry, at the touch of a hand Wallace sprung up--a lion at bay. He seized an oaken stool--the only weapon of offence within reach--and at a blow broke one rascal's back, in a second splashed the wall with the blood and brains of another, when the whole pack threw themselves upon him, bore him down by sheer weight, and secured him. He was conveyed to Dumbarton, then held by the English, and from thence was delivered into the hands of Edward. The battle of Langside was fought in the vicinity of the city. Moray, lying in Glasgow, intercepted Mary on her march from Hamilton to Dumbarton, and gave battle. Every one knows the issue. For sixty miles without drawing rein the queen fled towards England and a scaffold. Moray returned to Glasgow through the village of Gorbals, his troopers, it is said, wiping their bloody swords on the manes of their horses as they rode, and went thence to meet his assassin in Linlithgow town. During the heat and frenzy of the Reformation, nearly all our ecclesiastical edifices went to the ground, or came out of the fierce trial with interiors pillaged, altars desecrated, and the statues of apostles and saints broken or defaced. Glasgow Cathedral was assailed like the rest; already the work of destruction had begun, when the craftsmen of the city came to the rescue. Their exertions on that occasion preserved the noble building for us. They were proud of it then; they are proud of it to-day. During the persecution, the country to the west of Glasgow was overrun by dragoons, and many a simple Covenanter had but short shrift--seized, tried, condemned, shot, in heaven, within the hour. The rambler is certain to encounter, not only in village churchyards, but by the wayside, or in the hearts of solitary moors, familiar but with the sunbeam and the cry of the curlew, rude martyr stones, their sculptures and letters covered with lichen, and telling with difficulty the names of the sufferers and the manner of their deaths, and intimating that--

"This stone shall witness be 'Twixt Presbyterie and Prelacie."

[Sidenote: Prince Charles.]

The next striking event in the history of the city is the visit of Prince Charles. Enter on the Christmas week of 1745-46 the wild, foot-sore, Highland host on its flight from Derby. How the sleek citizens shrink back from the worn, hairy faces, and fierce eyes in which the lights of plunder burn. "The Prince, the Prince! which is the Prince?" "That's he--yonder--wi' the lang yellow hair." Onward rides, pale and dejected, the throne-haunted man. He looks up as he catches a fair face at a window, and you see he inherits the Stuart smile and the Stuart eye. He, like his fathers, will provoke the bitterest hatred, and be served by the wildest devotion. Men will gladly throw away their lives for him. The blood of nobles will redden scaffolds for him. Shepherds and herdsmen will dare death to shelter him; and beautiful women will bend over his sleep--wrapped in clansman's plaid on bed of heather or bracken--to clip but one shred of his yellow hair, and feel thereby requited for all that they and theirs have suffered in his behalf. But with all his beauty and his misfortunes, his appearance in Glasgow created little enthusiasm. He scarcely gained a recruit. Only a few ladies donned in his honour white breast-knots and ribbons. He levied a heavy contribution on the inhabitants. A prince at the head of an army in want of brogues, and who insisted on being provided with shoe-leather gratis, was hardly calculated to excite the admiration of prudent Glasgow burgesses. He did not remain long. The Green beheld for one day the far-stretching files and splendour of the Highland war, on the next--in unpaid shoe-leather--he marched to his doom. Victory, like a stormy sunbeam, burned for a moment on his arms at Falkirk, and then all was closed in blood and thunder on Culloden Moor.

[Sidenote: Glasgow Clubs.]

It is about this period that Dr Strang's book on the "Clubs" begins. In those old, hospitable, hard-drinking days, Glasgow seems to have been pre-eminently a city of clubs. Every street had its tavern, and every tavern had its club. There were morning clubs, noon-day clubs, evening clubs, and all-day clubs, which, like the sacred fire, never went out. The club was a sanctuary wherein nestled friendship and enjoyment. The member left his ordinary life outside the door, like his greatcoat, and put it on again when he went away. Within the genial circle of the club were redressed all the ills that flesh is heir to: the lover forgot Nerissa's disdain, the debtor felt no longer his creditor's eye. At the sight of the boon companions, Care packed up his bundles and decamped, or if he dared remain, he was immediately laid hold of, plunged into the punch-bowl, and there was an end of him for that night at least. Unhappily those clubs are dead, but as their ghosts troop past in Dr Strang's pages, the sense is delicately taken by an odour of rum-punch. [Sidenote: The Anderston Club.] Shortly after the Pretender's visit to the city, the Anderston Club--so called from its meetings being held in that little village--flourished, drank its punch, and cracked its jokes on Saturday afternoons. Perhaps no club connected with the city, before or since, could boast of a membership so distinguished. It comprised nearly all the University professors. Dr Moore, professor of Greek; Professor Ross, who faithfully instilled the knowledge of Humanities into the Glasgow youth; Drs Cullen and Hamilton, medical teachers of eminence; Adam Smith; the Brothers Foulis--under whose auspices the first Fine-Art Academy was established in Scotland, and from whose printing-press the Greek and Roman classics were issued with a correctness of text and beauty of typography which had then no parallel in the kingdom--were regular and zealous members. But the heart and soul of the Anderston Club seems to have been Dr Simson, professor of mathematics. His heart vibrated to the little hostelry of Anderston as the needle vibrates to the pole. He could have found his way with his eyes shut. The following story, related of the professor by Dr Strang, is not unamusing in itself, and a fair specimen of the piebald style in which the greater portion of the book is written:--