Part 15

"The mathematician ever made it a rule to throw algebra and arithmetic 'to the dogs,' save in so far as to discover the just _quadratic equation_ and _simple division_ of a bowl of punch. One thing alone in the club he brought his mathematics to bear upon, and that was his glass. This had been constructed on the truest principles of geometry for emptying itself easily, the stalk requiring to form but a very acute angle with the open lips ere its whole contents had dropped into the æsophagus. One fatal day, however, Girzy, the black-eyed and dimple-cheeked servant of the hostelry, in making arrangements for the meeting of the club, allowed this favourite piece of crystal, as many black and blue eyed girls have done before and since, to slip from her fingers and be broken. She knew the professor's partiality for his favourite beaker, and thought of getting another; but the day was too far spent, and the Gallowgate, then the receptacle of such luxuries, was too far distant to procure one for that day's meeting of the fraternity. Had Verreville, the city of glass, been then where it has since stood, the mathematician's placid temper might not have been ruffled, nor might Girzy have found herself in so disagreeable a dilemma. The club met, the hen-broth smoked in every platter, the few standard dishes disappeared, the _medoc_ was sipped, and was then succeeded, as usual, by a goodly-sized punch-bowl. The enticing and delicious compound was mixed, tasted, and pronounced nectar: the professor, dreaming for a moment of some logarithm of Napier's, or problem of Euclid's, pushed forward to the fount unconsciously the glass which stood before him, drew it back a brimmer, and carried it to his lips; but lo! the increased angle at which the professor was obliged to raise his arm, roused him from his momentary reverie, and, pulling the drinking-cup from his lips as if it contained the deadliest henbane, exclaimed, 'What is this, Girzy, you have given me? I cannot drink out of this glass. Give me my own, you little minx. You might now well know that _this_ is not mine.' 'Weel-a-wat, it's a I hae for't, Maister Simson,' answered Girzy, blushing. 'Hush, hush,' rejoined the mathematician, 'say not so. I know it is not _my_ glass, for the outer edge of this touches my nose, and _mine_ never did so.' The girl confessed the accident, and the professor, though for some minutes sadly out of humour, was at length appeased, and swallowed his _sherbet_ at the risk of injuring his proboscis."

[Sidenote: Dr Simson.]

Dr Strang informs us that the eccentric mathematician, in his progress from the University to Anderston, was in the habit of counting his steps, and that, walking blind-folded, he could have told the distance to a fraction of an inch. He has omitted, however, to tell us whether the Doctor's steps were counted on his return, and if the numbers corresponded!

Along with the notices of the clubs subsequent to the one mentioned, Dr Strang gives his reader a tolerable notion of how it went with Glasgow in those years. We have a peep of the Trongate during the lucrative tobacco trade, when Glasgow had her head not a little turned by her commercial prosperity. There are rich citizens now in the streets. Behold Mr Glassford, picking his steps daintily along the Crown o' the Causeway, with scarlet cloak, flowing wig, cocked-hat, and gold-headed cane! He has money in his purse, and he knows it too. All men warm themselves in the light of his countenance. If he kicks you, you are honoured, for is it not with a golden foot? How the loud voice droops, how the obsequious knee bends before him! He told Tobias Smollett yesterday that he had five-and-twenty ships sailing for him on the sea, and that half-a-million passed through his hands every year. Pass on a little farther, and yonder is Captain Paton sunning himself on the ample pavement in front of the Tontine. Let us step up to him. He will ask us to dinner, and mix us a bowl of punch flavoured with his own limes--

"In Trinidad that grow."

For hospitality was then, as now, a characteristic of the city. The suppers--the favourite meal--were of the most substantial description. A couple of turkeys, a huge round of beef, and a bowl--a very Caspian Sea--of punch, seething to its silver brim, and dashed with delicate slices of lime or lemon--formed the principal ingredients. Good fellowship was the order of the day. In the morning and forenoon the merchants congregated in the Tontine reading-room for news and gossip, and at night the punch-bowl was produced, emptied, replenished, and emptied again, while the toasts--"Down with the Convention," "The Pilot that weathered the storm"--were drunk with enthusiasm in some cosy tavern in the then aristocratic Princes Street. At a later period, during the disturbed years that preceded the Reform Bill, we see the moneyed classes--"soor-milk jockeys" they were profanely nicknamed by the mob--eagerly enrolling themselves in yeomanry corps: on field days resplendent in laced jacket and shako, or clanking through the streets with spur and sabre. As we approach our own times the clubs pale their ineffectual fires--they shrink from planets to will-o'-the-wisp; at last

"They die away And fade into the light of common day."

Glasgow is now, so far as history is concerned, a clubless city.

[Sidenote: The Glasgow operative.]

During the commercial distress of 1848-49, and the agitation consequent on the flight of Louis Philippe and the establishment of the French Republic, Glasgow had the bad eminence of going further in deeds of lawlessness and riot than any other city in the empire. The "Glasgow operative" is, while trade is good and wages high, the quietest and most inoffensive of creatures. He cares comparatively little for the affairs of the nation. He is industrious and contented. Each six months he holds a saturnalia--one on New-year's day, the other at the Fair, (occurring in July,) and his excesses at these points keep him poor during the intervals. During periods of commercial depression, however, when wages are low, and he works three-quarter time, he has a fine nose to scent political iniquities. He begins to suspect that all is not right with the British constitution. These unhappy times, too, produce impudent demagogues, whose power of lungs and floods of flashy rhetoric work incredible mischief. To these he seriously inclines his ear. He is hungry and excited. He is more anxious to reform Parliament than to reform himself. He cries out against tyranny of class-legislation, forgetting the far harder tyranny of the gin-palace and the pawn-shop. He thinks there should be a division of property. Nay, it is known that some have in times like these marked out the very houses they are to possess when the goods of the world are segregated and appropriated anew. What a dark sea of ignorance and blind wrath is ever weltering beneath the fair fabric of English prosperity! This dangerous state of feeling had been reached in the year spoken of. Hungry, tumultuous meetings were held on the Green. The ignorant people were maddened by the harangues of orators--fellows who were willing to burn the house of the nation about the ears of all of us, if so be _their_ private pig could be roasted thereby. "The rich have food," said they, "you have none. You cannot die of hunger. Take food by the strong hand wherever you can get it." This advice was acted upon. The black human sea poured along London Street, and then split--one wave rushed up the High Street, another along the Trongate--each wasting as it went. The present writer, then a mere lad, was in the streets at the time. [Sidenote: Glasgow riots.] The whole thing going on before his eyes seemed strange, incredible, too monstrous to be real--a hideous dream which he fought with and strove to thrust away. For an hour or so all order was lost. All that had been gained by a thousand years of strife and effort--all that had been wrested from nature--all the civilities and amenities of life--seemed drowned in a wild sea of scoundrelism. The world was turned topsy-turvy. Impossibility became matter of fact. Madness ruled the hour. Gun-shops were broken open, and wretched-looking men, who hardly knew the muzzle from the stock, were running about with muskets over their shoulders. In Buchanan Street a meal cart was stopped, overturned, the sacks ripped open with knives, and women were seen hurrying home to their famishing broods with aprons full; some of the more greedy with a cheese under each arm. In Queen Street a pastry cook's was attacked, the windows broken, and the delicacies they contained greedily devoured. A large glass-case, filled with coloured lozenges, arranged in diamond patterns, stood serene for a while amid universal ruin. A scoundrel smashed it with a stick; down rushed a deluge of lozenges, and a dozen rioters were immediately sprawling over each other on the ground to secure a share of the spoil. By this time alarm had spread. Shops were shutting in all directions, some of the more ingenious traders, it is said, pasting "A Shop to Let" upon their premises--that they might thereby escape the rage or the cupidity of the rioters. At last, weary with spoliation, the mob, armed with guns, pistols, and what other weapons they had secured, came marching along the Trongate, a tall begrimed collier, with a rifle over his shoulder, in front. This worthy, more than two-thirds drunk, kept shouting at intervals, "Vive la Republic! We'll hae Vive la Republic, an' naething _but_ Vive la Republic!" to which intelligible political principle his followers responded with vociferous cheers. At last they reached the Cross. Here a barricade was in process of erection. Carts were stopped and thrown down, and London Street behind was crowded with men, many of them provided with muskets. On a sudden the cry arose, "The sogers, the sogers!" terrible to the heart of a British mob. Hoofs were heard clattering along the Trongate, and the next moment an officer of Carabineers leaped his horse over the barricade, followed by his men, perhaps a dozen in all. The effect was instantaneous. In five minutes not a rioter was to be seen. When evening fell the Trongate wore an unwonted appearance. Troops stacked their bayonets, lighted their fires, and bivouacked under the piazzas of the Tontine. Sentinels paced up and down the pavements, and dragoons patrolled the streets. Next day the disturbance came to a crisis. A riot occurred in Calton or Bridgeton. The pensioners were sent to quell it there. While marching down one of the principal streets, they were assailed by volleys of stones, the crowd meanwhile falling back sullenly from the bayonet points. The order was given to fire, and the veterans, whose patience was completely exhausted, sent their shot right into the mass of people. Several were wounded, and one or more killed. When the pensioners were gone, a corpse was placed on boards, carried through the streets shoulder-high by persons who, by that means, hoped to madden and rouse the citizens; a large crowd attending, every window crammed with heads as the ghastly procession passed. As they approached the centre of the city, a file of soldiers was drawn across the street up which they were marching. When the crowd fell back, the bearers of the dead were confronted by the ominous glitter of steel. The procession paused, stopped, wavered, and finally beat a retreat, and thus the riots closed. That evening people went to look at the spot where the unhappy collision had taken place. Groups of workmen were standing about, talking in tones of excitement. The wall of one of the houses was chipped in places by bullets, and the gutter, into which a man had reeled, smashed by the death-shot, had yet a ruddy stain. Next day tranquillity was in a great measure restored. [Sidenote: Special constables.] Masses of special constables had by this time been organised, and marched through the city in force. Although they did not come into contact with the rioters, the bravery they displayed in cudgelling what unfortunate females, and _keelies_ of tender years fell into their hands, gave one a lively idea of the prowess they would have exhibited had they met foes worthy of the batons they bore.

Glasgow, as most British readers are aware, is situated on both sides of the Clyde, some twenty or thirty miles above its junction with the sea. Its rapidity of growth is perhaps without a parallel in the kingdom. There are persons yet alive who remember when the river, now laden with shipping, was an angler's stream, in whose gravelly pools the trout played, and up whose rapids the salmon from the sea flashed like a sunbeam; and when the banks, now lined with warehouses and covered with merchandise of every description, really merited the name of the Broomy Law. Science and industry have worked wonders here. The stream, which a century ago hardly allowed the passage of a herring-boat or a coal-gabbert, bears on its bosom to-day ships from every clime, and mighty ocean steamers which have wrestled with the hurricanes of the Atlantic. Before reaching Glasgow the Clyde traverses one of the richest portions of Scotland, for in summer Clydesdale is one continued orchard. As you come down the stream towards the city, you have, away to the right, the mineral districts of Gartsherrie and Monkland--not superficially captivating regions. Everything there is grimed with coal-dust. Spring herself comes with a sooty face. The soil seems calcined. You cannot see that part of the world to advantage by day. With the night these innumerable furnaces and iron-works will rush out into vaster volume and wilder colour, and for miles the country will be illuminated--restless with mighty lights and shades. It is the Scottish Staffordshire. [Sidenote: Moors of the covenant.] On the other hand, away to the south-west stretch the dark and sterile moors of the covenant, with wild moss-haggs, treacherous marshes green as emerald, and dark mossy lochs, on whose margins the water-hen breeds--a land of plovers and curlews, in whose recesses, and in the heart of whose mists, the hunted people lay while the men of blood were hovering near--life and death depending on the cry and flutter of a desert bird, or the flash of a sunbeam along the stretches of the moor. In the middle of that melancholy waste stands the farm-house of Lochgoin, intimately connected with the history of the Covenanters. To this dwelling came Cameron and Peden and found shelter; here lies the notched sword of Captain John Paton, and the drum which was beaten at Drumclog by the hill-folk, and the banner that floated above their heads that day. And here, too, was written the "Scots Worthies," a book considerered by the austerer portion of the Scottish peasantry as next in sacredness to the Bible. And it has other charms this desolate country: over there by Mearns, Christopher North spent his glorious boyhood; in this region, too, Pollok was born, and fed his gloomy spirit on congenial scenes. Approaching the city, and immediately to the left, are the Cathkin Braes: and close by the village of Cathcart, past which the stream runs murmuring in its rocky bed, is the hill on which Mary stood and saw Moray shiver her army like a potsherd. [Sidenote: The estuary of the Clyde.] Below Glasgow, and westward, stretches the great valley of the Clyde. On the left is the ancient burgh of Renfrew; farther back Paisley and Johnston, covered with smoke; above all, Gleniffer Braes, greenly fair in sunlight; afar Neilston Pad, raising its flat summit to the sky, like a table spread for a feast of giants. On the right are the Kilpatrick Hills, terminating in the abrupt peak of Dumbuck; and beyond, the rock of Dumbarton, the ancient fortress, the rock of Ossian's song. It rises before you out of another world and state of things, with years of lamentation and battle wailing around it like sea-mews. By this time the river has widened to an estuary. Port-Glasgow, with its deserted piers, and Greenock, populous with ships, lie on the left. Mid-channel, Rosneath is gloomy with its woods; on the farther shore Helensburgh glitters like a silver thread; in front, a battlement of hills. You pass the point of Gourock, and are in the Highlands. From the opposite coast Loch Long stretches up into yon dark world of mountains. Yonder is Holy Loch, smallest and loveliest of them all. A league of sea is glittering like frosted silver between you and Dunoon. The mighty city, twenty miles away, loud with traffic, dingy with smoke, is the working Glasgow; here, nestling at the foot of mountains, stretching along the sunny crescents of bays, clothing beaked promontories with romantic villas, is another Glasgow keeping holiday the whole summer long. These villages are the pure wheat; the great city, with its strife and toil, its harass and heart-break--the chaff and husks from which it is winnowed. The city is the soil, this region the bright consummate flower. The merchant leaves behind him in the roar and vapour his manifold vexations, and appears here with his best face and happiest smile. Here no bills intrude, the fluctuations of stock appear not, commercial anxieties are unknown. In their places are donkey rides, the waving of light summer dresses, merry pic-nics, and boating parties at sunset on the splendid sea. Here are the "comforts of the Sautmarket" in the midst of legendary hills. When the tempest is brewing up among the mountains, and night comes down a deluge of wind and rain; when the sea-bird is driven athwart the gloom like a flake of foam severed from the wave, and the crimson eye of the Clock glares at intervals across the frith, you can draw the curtains, stir the fire, and beguile the hours with the smiling wisdom of Thackeray, if a bachelor; if a family man, "The Battle of Prague," or the overture to "Don Giovanni," zealously thumped by filial hands, will drown the storm without. Hugging the left shore, we have Largs before us, where long ago Haco and his berserkers found dishonourable graves. On the other side is Bute, fairest, most melancholy of all the islands of the Clyde. From its sheltered position it has an atmosphere soft as that of Italy, and is one huge hospital now. You turn out in the dog-days, your head surmounted with a straw-hat ample enough to throw a shadow round you, your nether man encased in linen ducks, and see invalids sitting everywhere in the sunniest spots like autumn flies, or wandering feebly about, wrapt in greatcoats, their chalk faces shawled to the nose. You are half-broiled, they shiver as if in an icy wind. Their bent figures take the splendour out of the sea and the glory out of the sunshine. They fill the summer air as with the earthy horror of a new-made grave. You feel that they hang on life feebly, and will drop with the yellow leaf. Beyond Bute are the Cumbraes, twin sisters born in one fiery hour; and afar Arran, with his precipices, purple-frowning on the level sea.

[Sidenote: Arran]

In his preface to the "Rambles" Mr Macdonald writes:--

"The district of which Glasgow is the centre, while it possesses many scenes of richest Lowland beauty, and presents many glimpses of the stern and wild in Highland landscape, is peculiarly fertile in reminiscences of a historical nature. In the latter respect, indeed, it is excelled by few localities in Scotland--a circumstance of which many of our citizens seem to have been hitherto almost unconscious. There is a story told of a gentleman who, having boasted that he had travelled far to see a celebrated landscape on the Continent, was put to the blush by being compelled to own that he had never visited a scene of superior loveliness than one situated on his own estate, and near which he had spent the greater part of his life. The error of this individual is one of which too many are guilty."

[Sidenote: Celebrated scenery disappointing.]

These sentences would make an admirable text for a little week-day sermon. For we are prone, in other matters than scenery, to seek our enjoyments at a distance. We would gather that happiness from the far-off stars which, had we the eyes to see, is all the while lying at our feet. You go to look at a celebrated scene. People have returned from it in raptures. You have heard them describe it, you have read about it, and you naturally expect something very fine indeed. When you arrive, the chances are that its beauties are carefully stowed away in a thick mist, or you are drenched to the skin, or you find the hotel full, and are forced to sleep in an outhouse, or on the heather beneath the soft burning planets, and go home with a rheumatism which embitters your existence to your dying day. Or, if you are lucky enough to find the weather cloudless and the day warm, you are doomed to cruel disappointment. Is _that_ what you have heard and read so much about? That pitiful drivelling cascade! Why, you were led to expect the wavy grace of the Gray Mare's Tail combined with the flash and thunder of Niagara. That a mountain forsooth! It isn't so much bigger than Ben Lomond after all! You feel swindled and taken in. You commend the waterfall to the fiend. You snap your fingers in the face of the mountain. "You're a humbug, sir. You're an impostor, sir. I--I'll write to the _Times_ and expose you, sir." On the other hand, the townsman, at the close of a useful and busy day, walks out into the country. The road is pretty; he has never been on it before; he is insensibly charmed along. He reaches a little village or clachan, its half-dozen thatched houses set down amid blossoming apple-trees; the smoke from the chimneys, telling of the preparation of the evening meal, floating up into the rose of sunset. A labourer is standing at the door with a child in his arms; the unharnessed horses are drinking at the trough; the village boys and girls are busy at their games; two companies, linked arm-in-arm, are alternately advancing and receding, singing all the while with their sweet shrill voices--

"The Campsie Duke's a riding, a riding, a riding."

[Sidenote: Unexpectedness of pleasure.]