the modern athens 15

the modern athens 15

Never was the philosophic adage of “soonest hot, soonest cold,” more

completely verified, than in the case of the loyal official men of

Scotland. At every point, and in every thing, they had been eclipsed;

in most things they had felt a fancied neglect and disappointment; and

never did Welsh squire or Highland chief, when justled by the London

crowd in Cheapside or the Strand, sigh more for his white villa or grey

fortalice, than they did for a return to the snug honours of their

respective burghs. There was wormwood in the cup which they durst not

throw away, and which they were unwilling to drink,--there were from

each burgh, men whom they had formerly attempted to look down upon, in

consequence of an assumed or presumed influence at court; and those

men had seen with what indifference themselves and their very best

addresses had been treated; and they would not fail to communicate this

to the people at home. Where they had hoped to shine, they had only

smoked; where they had made sure of rising, they had sunk; where they

had counted upon honours and rewards, they had only incurred expense

which their constituents would compel them to pay out of their own

pockets; and where they had sown hopes the most sweet, they could reap

nothing but disappointment the most bitter. It was piteous to see their

looks,--blank and dull enough when they first came in the flush of

their importance; but now doubly blank, and trebly dull.

 

“_Et tu Brute!_” The very magistrates of Edinburgh,--that provost

Arbuthnot, the moment that he knew his own was to be the only

“_gentry_” conferred upon a Scottish magistrate, cut his country

cousins. Not even Glasgow herself, notwithstanding her lodgings hired

at a thousand guineas a week, could be permitted to taste so much as a

glass of cold water in the presence of the King. Perth “tried herself

o’ the Gaelic,” and swore all the oaths of the mountains; the little,

side-fidgetting, owl-faced provost of Inverness, who had come “over the

hills and far away” in a dog-cart, in order that he might avoid the

contamination of his bailies, poked out his under-lip like the edge

of a singed pan-cake, and with his right hand gave a most fierce and

ominous scratching to his left elbow. Aberdeen blasted the eyes of his

own cats, and vowed that he would “vote for Josaph Heem, oat o’ pyure

retrebeeshon.”

 

Never, indeed, was bold beginning brought to so lame and impotent a

conclusion; but it was a conclusion which any person, except a Scotch

burgh magistrate, might have anticipated. Even the Lord-Mayor of

London is a commoner at Hampstead or Brixton, and what, then, could

an Inverness or a Perth Bailie, or even a Glasgow Provost, be in the

modern Athens, and while the whole of the official men there were

bowing before the King, in the hope of securing all the advantage to

themselves? If neglect be the portion of the man who can afford to

place upon the table at his election-dinner as much turtle as would

float a seventy-four, and who sends over the world,

 

----“Argosies with portly sail,

Like signiors and rich burghers of the flood,”

 

what could be expected of the man who retailed pig-tail tobacco by the

yard, or played the leach to the breechless urchins of the mountains?

“Nothing,” will be the answer of any uninterested spectator or hearer;

but to put any corporation man, more especially if he be Scotch, in

possession of this part of his utter insignificance without his own

burgh, or indeed, to any rational purpose, within it, would be as hard

and hopeless a task as ever was undertaken by man.

 

Thus the chances are, that though these poor innocents (and to have

beheld their rueful looks on their neglect and disappointment, would

have created bowels in a Turk, or made Burdett pity, if not love,

borough-mongers,) felt all the bitterness of the infliction, they

would profit nothing by the wholesome hint of the lesson,--just as in a

school, the blockheads get all the whipping, and none of the Latin.

 

Even as early as the levee day, those persons had found that they were

not in their proper element, and the discovery had become more plain

and palpable every day. Their first and fondest hopes were that each

would be made a peer; then they came down to baronets; next to simple

knights; and again each would have been pleased if the King had given

him a snuff-box,--or even, latterly, a pinch of snuff. But all that

the King gave was an Irish giving--he gave himself no trouble about

them; and the whole court, or, as tails were the fashion, the whole

royal tail, from the Right Honourable Robert Peel, Secretary of State

for the Home Department, to Sir Patrick Walker, Knight, Usher (not, as

some say, of the white feather,) but of the White Rod, followed at the

hinder parts of its royal master. Even with regard to the counties,

there were few of the men in office who met with much regard. A Scotch

lord-lieutenant has commonly a very capacious swallow himself; thus

whatever the minor officers happen to pick up is only at second hand

through him; and upon the occasion alluded to, a few wary wights who

gave themselves airs haughty and tyranic enough, while in their own

localities, might be seen twittering after the great man who made them,

just as Irish beggars twitter after a mail-coach. But hope is like the

sun, it ever rises the soonest, and sets the latest, upon the most

elevated point; and so, ere the last and lingering ray had gone down

upon the pinnacle of royalty, the middle men of Scotland and of the

Athens were dark as Erebus. Long before that feast of which they were

forbidden to eat, and that solitary honour to Provost Arbuthnot which

they were forbidden to witness, the greater part of the “bodies” had

taken their knapsacks and their departure.

 

For a day or two previous, they who one little week before had looked

down not only upon great merchants and little squires, but absolutely

upon the nobles of the land, might be found at the corners and

crossings of streets, begging a bow from the poorest of their townsmen.

 

On the morning preceding the pilgrimage, I took an early walk round

the Calton-Hill; and I cannot say that I ever met with a spectacle

more ludicrously pathetic than the chief magistrate of a royal burgh,

who sat in brown and stony meditation there. A large stone formed his

seat; and, but for his resemblance to human nature, and the chain of

office that was about his neck, I might have supposed that the seat

and the sitter were of the same senseless material. The north-east

wind swept coldly upon him, but he appeared to heed it not; as little

did he notice me, as I went close up to scan his singular appearance.

In shape, in size, and in colour, his face more resembled a brick than

any other similitude that I could find. One hand hung upon his knee and

held a snuff-box, by the inscription upon which I could perceive that

he had been a colonel of volunteers; while the other hand, arrested

in middle course, as it bore its load from the silver to the brazen

repository, was relaxed in its hold, and dropping upon the cravat

that with which he meant to powder the intellect. His speculationless

eye was directed across the blue Firth, and to the brown mountains,

among which I should presume he had his residence; and, heedless of

any passer by, he was taking up his Ecclesiastes like another Solomon:

“Deil’s i’ that King! could not he hae staid at hame, and let us

continue to tell him a’ abaut the countrie? We hae put ourselves to

nae sma’ fash an’ expense, and it has a’ come to a bonnie upshot. Our

business negleckit, half the siller cuinzied out a’ our ain pooches,

naething but lookit doon upon here; an’ a’ for the sake o’ bein’

taunted and worried by the folk at hame, for sax months at the least.”

Thus saying, he bounced up, buttoned his coat, trotted away to the

coach-office, and, instead of returning at the tails of four greys

as he had come, was fain to ride outside the stage-coach, and smuggle

himself into his burgh under cloud of night.

 

The rout soon became general: Glasgow, in great wrath, took her coach,

and her lamentation, and drove so furiously, that the cries of “make

way for the duke,” and “stop thief!” resounded alternately at the

hamlets and turnpike-gates; while the echo of the western city, emptied

as it still was of a great part of its inhabitants, was the most

dismal that can be imagined. Aberdeen tarried not the wheels of her

chariot, until she had reached her own Castle Street; where the answer

that she made to the many inquiries as to what she had gotten was,

“It wad nae mak ony body vera fat.” Nor was disappointment the only

misery against which they had to bear up. Perth got her head broken

by thrusting herself in the way at the peer’s ball. Poor Dundee got

her pocket picked at some place she did not mention. Inverness was put

on quarantine when she went home. Inverbernie found that during her

absence, a radical barber and breeches-maker had established himself

next door, and monopolized the whole custom; and, in short, every

one had a tale of woe, which, while it pleaded for pity, found only

derision.

 

Towards the close of the exhibition, a number even of the people seemed

to get heartily tired of the business; and notwithstanding all the

scramble that was made by those whose interest it was to preserve

appearances as much as possible, every succeeding act fell off in

interest, and, had George the Fourth remained in the Athens for but

one brief month, it is probable that the people of Scotland would have

returned to their own homes, and the Athenians to the worship of their

own idols.

 

 

THE PARTING.

 

“Adieu, Adieu, Adieu! remember me.--SHAKSPEARE.”

 

The streets of the Athens, which had been thinning of people ever since

the King’s arrival, were, on the morning of Friday the 30th of August,

the day on which he was to take his departure, as still and silent as

though the chariot-wheel of majesty had never been heard in them. The

constables, lacqueys, and laced porters at the gates of the Holyrood

had dwindled to a small and feeble remnant; no merry archer, in broad

bonnet of blue, and doublet of green tartan, demanded the pass-word,

with bent bow and pheon ready for the string; the foot of the casual

house-maid wakened the old and melancholy echo in its deserted halls;

and those apartments which were so recently gladdened by the gorgeous

train of the King, and made lovely and gay by the presence of all that

Scotland could boast of the fair and the noble, were in sure progress

to being as usual “furr’d round with mouldy damp and ropy slime,” over

which the faint recollection (for even then it was waxing faint,) that

the King had been there, “let fall a supernumerary horror,” which, to

those who during the King’s stay had been raised to office, and put on

the guise of courtiers, only served to make the night of his absence

“more irksome.” The cannon, which, for the previous fourteen days, had

ever and anon been pealing royal salutes, began to be dragged from the

heights of Salisbury Crags and the Calton Hill; and the royal standard

was taken down, leaving the bare widowed staff bleaching in the air.

The guns of the venerable castle too, had subsided into the common

office of chronicling the several holidays and anniversaries, as though

they had been a mere kalendar; the last booths and benches were in the

act of being pulled down; and, excepting in shop-keepers’ books, in the

blackening of a few houses in the illumination, and in the baronet’s

patent of Sir William Arbuthnot, and the knighthood of Raeburn, a

painter, and Fergusson, deputy-king of the Athenian beefeaters, the

Athens retained no external trace of the royal visit, even when the

royal cavalcade was barely escaping from the suburbs.

 

The people were intoxicated with its coming, and seemed for a time

to have dreamed; but the dream had melted away, and the interest

seemed to be measured exactly by the time that the King had to remain.

Every day it waxed less and less, till, on the day of his departure,

it had vanished altogether. I say this, of course, of the people

generally,--of those who, in their minds and their circumstances, are

independent, and not of them who basked in the sunshine of the court,

or had realities or hopes from the royal munificence. These, of course,

followed after the King to the last, and conveyed him to his barge, but

the people stood by with the most provoking indifference, and, to the

broadest hints that they should shout, returned only a few scattered

murmurs of approbation. They turned to each other, and talked of the

passing splendour as if it had been a common spectacle. At the same

time, the King himself, and not the mere pomp, was certainly the object

of their attention and solicitude. “Hech,” said the old bonneted sire

to his neighbour, as the King passed them rapidly on the beautiful

lawn at Hopetoun House, “Hech! an’ so that’s the real descendant

o’ Brunswick, wha preserved us the Declaration of Rights, and the

Protestant Succession, whilk allow ilka man, gentle and simple, to hae

the keepin’ o’ his ain body, and, what’s muckle better, o’ his ain saul

and conscience. God bless him, an’ keep him frae evil counsellors, and

sinfu’ neebours, for they say that the gryte fouk about Lunnon are no’

just what they should be.” Thus did the rustics hold converse with one

another; and it could not be expected that persons who had their minds

in tone for such remarks, could bawl and shout like the unreflecting

rabble, whose tongues, were it King George or King Crispin, would be equally loud.