MR. GRANT'S LIFE OF SIR GEORGE SINCLAIR.* IT was seriously
affirmed by Coleridge that in order to produce a total loss of memory, there is nothing so efficacious as devoting yourself exclusively to the reading of journals and periodicals. Unfortunately, Mr. Grant, who is lavishly communicative all through the present volume touching his own experiences on a variety of subjects—mpe.cially as editor of a "certain morning journal "- has not informed us whether he has ever met with any striking exemplification of Coleridge's dictum. But he writes as if the select circle for whose edification his biography is mainly intended were sadly afflicted with obliviousness and general nescience. Mr. Grant takes nothing for granted ; and seems to doubt the capacity of his readers to retain any single fact in clear consciousness beyond the duration of a few seconds. For example, we are told some dozen times in the course of the first few pages that Sir George Sinclair is " the subject of these memoirs" " The Religious Tendencies of the Times." London: Tinsley Brothers. 1870. spirits engendered by goose. and no amount of reiteration that George Sinclair was the son of Sir John Sinclair is sufficient to satisfy Mr. Grant's anxieties about the matter. In like manner, Mr. Grant has felt it his duty to remind the students of this biography in quite a little regiment of passages that George was the eldest son of John, that he succeeded his father in the baronetcy, and that on the death of his father he became Sir George. And all through this fearful and wonderful volume the same repetition reigns. That Mr. Charles Grant, for instance, became Lord Glenelg appears to Mr. James Grant a fact so difficult of apprehension, that Sidney Smith's "surgical operation" would scarcely suffice to lodge it safely in a human brain. A similar fearfulness lest the phenomena should fail to be sufficiently noted or impressive prevails touching the transmigration of the personal identities once known as H. Brougham, J. Hobhouse, Mandeville, and Stanley into the peers designated respectively Brougham, Broughton, Manchester, and Derby.
As the name of Lord Derby may not occur again in the course of this article, it may be advisable to allude here to a very interesting piece of information in connec- tionwith it with which Mr. Grant refreshes the spirits of his readers. His Lordship and Sir George were very good friends.. Well, as Christmas approached, Sir George would some- times from distant Caithness send Lord Derby a present of geese and whiskey, a very good combination, whiskey being the popular Scottish " Latin for goose."f On one occasion the moun- tain dew forwarded to his lordship was keenly relished, and Lord Derby, to show his appreciation 'of its high virtues, requested Sir George to purchase for him two dozen of the same quality, for which he promised to pay like an honest man. Now, an ordinary narrator would have left his readers in perilous doubt as to the pure fountain-head whence this brave liquor, "so highly ex- tolled " by Lord Derby, issued. But Mr. Grant is not an ordinary narrator.Judeed, his biography is quite sui generis, and accordingly,. with the intention, no doubt, of giving a heavenward impulse to the religious tendencies of the times, Mr. Grant carefully writes for our guidance " that it is due to the manufacturer of this whiskey to state that it was the product of Mr. Swanson, of the Garstoo Distillery, Caithneas." Think of that, Mr. Swanson, and like the immortal Captain Cattle, take a note of that, all ye readers of a "certain morning journal," of which Mr. Grant does not supply the name. Surely, " inspiring bold John Barleycorn " had never until now whispered to any of his votaries that the life of a most abstemious Christian gentleman could be made a vehicle for- advertising the virtues of a whiskey distillery.
Good, but not very great, Sir George Sinclair ! he certainly has had a quite unique kind of monument erected to his. memory ! Sir George was by long descent, by culture,. by many attractive social qualities, a gentleman in the grand old sense of the word. As a matter of course, he had the entrée of the best society in England, his acquaintance- ship ranging from the Scottish manse or English rectory to the Throne itself. William IV. and his excellent Queen were personal friends of this Scottish baronet and his wife, and it is. likely enough that the marriage of the Princess Adelaide of Meiningen with the Duke of Clarence was in some measure expedited through the instrumentality of Sir George, who had became acquainted with her in Germany. At all events, Sir George wrote many good words touching the character of the Princess Adelaide to the Duke of Clarence, and ultimately the Si nclairs were welcome guests both at Bushey Park and the Pavilion,. Brighton. Sir George, however, objected, as a sturdy Sabba- tarian, to dining with Royalty on Sunday, and on one occasion he- naturally enough made a good conversational protest against certain observations which had fallen at the dinner-table from the Sailor King respecting the " Evangelicals." But about all these matters Mr. Grant writes in the most grotesque hat-in-hand style. A real live "peer of the realm "—a phrase which is repeated in this volume till we are thoroughly sickened by it—is always to Mr. Grant an object to be spoken of with fear and trembling. But for a commoner, though a baronet, to hold his own with a royal duke or king implies a heroism before which Luther at Worms and Knox in the presence of Queen Mary become pallid and common-place personages ! If there was any necessity at all for a life of Sir George Sinclair, which may be doubted, he surely had friends enough, both male and female, any one of whom could have told us about him, the much that he knew, and t As an exorcism pronounced in Latta was hold to bo more potent for quelling the evil spirit than one uttered in English, and as the usquebaugh was held to be efficacious in laying certain unpleasant sensations consequent upon eating anserine Memoirs of Sir George Sinclair, Bart.. of Ulbster. By James Grant, author offlesh, whiskey came to be regarded as the Latin which could beet exorcise auy low , the little that he either said or did which belongs to the permanent interests of the world, without the extravagant glorification of his name that sounds, as from a heavy brass instrument, all through this volume. Sir George Sinclair was not a thinker. There was no" speculation " in his eyes. He was not, in any profound sense of the word, a statesman. In his earlier years, a Liberal of the Liberals, he became startled at his own shadow, and retreated to enroll himself among the Conservatives. But though, as Member for Caithness, he made clever speeches, especially one in 1828 on the distress of the country, with one or two really barbed " points" in it, they were never more than clever. And he himself was not only no king or leader of men, though he dis- tanced both Byron and Peel at Harrow ; but he had not the capacity requisite for even the post of a vigorous lieutenant, a function which rather suited his friend, Sir James Graham. Sir George had three superlative antipathies,—the Pope, Louis Philippe, and the present Emperor of the. French ; but indigna- tion, though it can make verses—and Sir George made very smart French verses indeed on the downfall of Charles X.—does not necessarily imply political capacity of a high order, and it is simply ludicrous to ascribe to him " enlightened statesmanship and transcendent eloquence."
Sir George Sinclair was a zealous friend of the Kirk, and was quite willing to forfeit the friendship of King William rather than surrender his advocacy of the Scottish Anti-Patronage Society, a fact which is very creditable to his simple sincerity, but that is all. Then he tried very hard to procure such a measure from the Government as would satisfy the Chalmers party and save the split in the Establishment. In this, as all the world knows, he failed ; and having failed, he preferred to remain "in the breaches" of the old Kirk, rather than join the Frees in their exodus. But eight years after the Disruption he had changed his thinking, and .amid considerable jubilations on the one side, and loud murmurings on the other, he proclaimed himself a Free-Church man. Surely there is no special proof of strength or insight, though there is nothing dishonourable to Sir George, in these phases of delay and final resolution to ally himself with the seceders. But if Mr. Grant extravagates in his discourse respecting Sir George's states- manship, his critical estimate of the baronet's English verse is of a kind for which our language supplies no adequate epithet. Sir George's family should strenuously insist on the suppression of all the jingling verses in the event of a second edition. They are maudlin imbecilities, all equally colourless and indistinct, and simply lacking in that plus quantity which makes all the difference in the world between tepid common-place and genuine .breathing song. Mr. Grant should have known that there are certain " remains " which should at once be handed over to the undertaker and sexton.
Sir George Sinclair, having been born in the old Canongate of Edinburgh, under the shadow of Holyrood, in 1790, was in 1816 married to Miss Camilla Manners, grand-daughter of the somewhat 'celebrated Countess of Dysart, and our readers will doubtless be interested in learning what account or description Mr. Grant gives us of the baronet's lady. It is deliciously bucolic, for this biogra- pher says of her, in language which carried us at once to the Islington Agricultural Hall, " She was as fine a specimen of a thorough lady"—we really read the phrase " thorough-bred " at .first—" as one would anywhere meet with ;" and it further is intimated that this " fine specimen" "made everyone at perfect case who was privileged to be in her society." What a comfort, .a heaven of undisturbed humanity !—and we venture to hope that this "fine specimen " herself was on all occasions equally at per- fect ease, a phrase which reminds us of one of Mr. Grant's happiest .announcements, in which he assures us that two friends, the Rev. _Mr. Howells of .Long Acre and the Rev. Harrington Evans, were "equally intimate." Of these two preachers we further read that they were both " original and experimental," but we question if in any of their original experiments on the facts of human nature they ever discovered such a reciprocity on one side as Mr. Grant's .quite original characterization implies.
This life of Sir George Sinclair may best be described as an omnibus crowded on knife-board and inside with celebrities of " high social position "—a phrase which the
printers must have had ready set up for incessant use in this volume—among whom poor Sir George is often buried quite
away out of sight. Joseph Hume is here improving a fat super- fluous cat, four in his house being one too many, off the face of the earth. Lord Lyndhurst is here a quite " converted character," a fact we are very glad to learn ; Lord Glenelg is here, awaking from a brown study of years, "like a resurrection from the dead ;" bishops and archbishops are here, by most wonderful
"coincidences," writing letters to Sir George on the self-same day, or on the very day on which they had written him a year before ; Lord Roden is here proclaiming each individual member of humanity to be " a lump of sin ;" Wilson Croker is here, arrayed in the natural history of the Quarterly, which Mr. Grant has made for him for the occasion, and publishing the amazing gospel that "the entire depravity of nzan and the eternal justice of God" had at last been happily " reconciled," a reconciliation which surely would mean that the throne of iniquity had fellowship with the Most High ! here, too, is the altogether chivalrous and able jurist M. Berryer, a great friend of Sir George, and one of the best behaved of the company ; and as time would fail to mention others, here is the Right Hon. Benjamin Disraeli, recommended to the special notice of any City merchant in want of a clerk ! For of this last celebrity Mr. Grant tells us, after giving us a great deal of solemn platitude touching Mr. Disraeli's signature, that " he writes an exceedingly fine hand, which would be highly prized in mercantile circles." It is difficult to say whether the English or the encomium of this sentence is the more to be admired ; but, in any case, who but Mr. Grant could have supplied us with the following quater- nity : able theologian, J. Wilson Croker ; writer of " poor stuff," A. Tennyson ; poet and statesman, George Sinclair ; successful competition-wallah in mercantile circles for a " fine hand," B. Disraeli ?
We had noted many passages in which Mr. Grant "improves the occasion " in a style which would do credit to Mr. Chadband himself, or in which he discourses of the ways of Providence in terms which indicate a curious "religious tendency" to substitute the stand-point of the cursing Psalms for the Christian faith, in the far-reaching discipline of that perfect Father who maketh His sun to arise on the evil and the good ; but our space is exhausted.
For Sir George Sinclair's memory we have a cordial respect. He was an upright, amiable, well-read man. He would have made an admirable parish priest, nay, possibly a decorous dean or bishop. His personal ministrations to the sick poor, of whom he would visit, as in Torquay, when sojourning there, not fewer than a hundred in one day, reveal a genuine Christian sympathy and benevolence, and claim our warmest admiration. Of theology, however, beyond the accepted traditions of the Rodens, he seems to have had no intuition ; we only incidentally learn that during his earlier years, when a student in Germany, and when, by the way, he was apprehended as a spy, and brought before the First Napoleon himself, he caught a glimpse of a freer world outside of the conventional dogmatic horizon ; but the bracing air of it did not suit him, and so he acquiesced finally in the "lump of sin" theory and the " reconciliation of the eternal justice of God with the entire depravity of man."
In conclusion, let us say of Sir George Sinclair, " Requiescat in pace." Dying in Edinburgh in 1868, in his seventy-eighth year, his remains were borne to Thurso Castle, the ancestral home, and were finally laid to rest in Harold's Tower, amid the tears of a devoted tenantry. The story of his life told in a simple manly way might have been to some readers an acceptable addition to our biogra- phical literature. Told as it has been by the present author, we can only express the hope that Mr. Matthew Arnold may never see it, as it might too seriously affect his aspirations after a compre- hensive Church of the future, and lead him to despair of the con- version of British Philistinism.
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