BOOKS.
DR. ALEXANDER CARLYLE'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.* IT is told in Lockhart's Life of Scott that, talking one day of the countenances of poets, "Well," said Sir Waiter," the grandest demigod I ever saw was Dr. Carlyle, minister of Musselburgb, commonly called Jupiter Carlyle, from having sat more than once for the king of gods and men to Gavin Hamilton ; and a shrewd, clever old oath was he, no doubt, but no more a poet than his precentor." Of the same person it is related by the late Chief Commissioner Adam, in a work privately printed, that when he attended at St. James's Palace, as one of a mission on church affairs, "his portly figure, his fine expressive countenance, with an aquiline nose, his flowing silver locks, and the freshness of the colour of his face, made a prodigious impression upon the cour- tiers; but it was the soundness of his sense, his honourable prin- ciples, and his social qualities, unmixed with anything that de- tracted from, or unbecoming, the character of a clergyman, gave him his place among the worthies." It is to the autobiography of this fine manly, genial, wise "old earle," who was called in his day, "the preserver of the Church from fanaticism," that we have now to direct the attention of our readers.
Alexander Carlyle was born in 1722, at Prestonpans, of which parish his father was minister. The family were well connected, and their meanswere sufficient to afford the eldest son, Alexander, the advantages of a superior education, and the best social inter- course to be found in Scotland. The leading man of the parish and the friend and patron of the minister was James Erskine, of Grange, called by Scottish usage, Lord Grange. This man, who was one of the Supreme Judges, is notorious for the forcible ab- duction of his wife from his house in Edinburgh in the year 1732, to the desolate island of St. Kilda, where, or in the still more sa- vage island of Harris, she lived in the most wretched condition, until her death in 1745. The lady had inherited a most violent disposition from her father, Chiefly of Dairy, who shot Pre- sident Lockhart for havingt with a brother judge declared him bound to make an allowance to his wife and children, whom he had deserted and left to starve. Lady Grange was jea- lous of her husband, as she had good cause to be, and it is not improbable that she was privy to some political secrets of his, the disclosure of which might have put his neck in jeopardy. Her furious temper and termagant behaviour were so well known that perhaps he did not very much exaggerate in repre- senting her as a dangerous lunatic. At the same time, he pro- fessed the most passionate love for her, and easily persuaded her friends that she was tenderly eared for in a place of safety. "Except in conversation for a few weeks only, this enormous act, committed in the midst of the metropolis of Scotland by a person who had been Lord Justice Clerk, was not taken the least notice of by any of her own family, or by the King's Advocate or Solicitor, or any of the guardians of the laws. Two of her sons were grown up to manhood—her eldest daughter was the wife of the Earl of Kintore, who acquiesced in what they considered as a neces- sary act of justice for the preservation of their father's life. Nay, the second son was supposed to be one of the persons who came masked to the house, and carried her off in a chair to the place where she was set on horseback." Lord Grange was a fair complexioned, goodlooking man, an agreeable companion, of insinuating manners, an enthusiastic calvinist, and a no less ardent profligate. He and his associates alternated between religious exercises and debauchery, !pending their days in prayer and pious conversation, their nights in lewdness and revelling. "Some men," says Carlyle, "are of opinion that they could be equally sincere in both. I am apt to think that they were for human nature is capable of wonderful freaks. The natural casuistry of the passions grants dispen- sations with more facility than the Church of Rome." Carlyle is right, and the good man might have added with equal truth, that the most ardent fanaticism is quite compatible with a conscience so insensible to moral obligations as hardly to feel the need of any sophistical dispensations. Another of the elder Carlyle's parishioners was the celebrated Colonel Gardiner—" a very weak, honest, and brave man," our author calls him—who is known to Sir Walter Scott's readers as Waverley's colonel, and to the admirers of religious fiction as the subject of a miraculous conversion. Dr. Doddridge, the au- thor of this story, relates that in Paris, when Gardiner was wait- ing for midnight, to keep an assignation with a married woman, he carelessly opened a religious book which happened to be in his way, and became so absorbed in what he read that he let the ap- pointed hour pass, never saw his mistress more, became a serious good Christian, and remained so ever after. With the exception of the time of day at which Gardiner sat down to read, this is the true history of the event, divested of the supernatual embellish-
ments which have made it famous, and which are supplied by Doddridge in these words-
" Ho thought he saw an unusual blaze of light fall on the book while he was reading, which he at first imagined might happen by some accident in the candle. But lifting up his eyes, he apprehended, to his extreme amaze- ment, that there was before him, as it were suspended in the air, a visible representation of the Lord Jesus Christ upon the Cross, surrounded on all sides with a glory ; and was impressed as if a voice, or something equiva- lent to a voice, had come to him to this effect (for he was not confident as to the very. words), Oh, sinner ! did I suffer this for thee, and are these the returns?' But whether this were an audible voice, or only a strong int-
• Autobiography of the Rev. Dr. Alexander Carlyle, Minister of Inveresh. Containing Memorials of the Men and Events of his Time. Published by Black- wood and Sons. pression on his mind equally striking, he did not seem very confident; though. to the best of my remembrance, he rather judged it to be the former."
Like many another marvellous tale which the credulous have accepted implicitly, and for which psychologists have offered ra- tional but superfluous explanations, this part of the story turns out to be a pure fiction. Colonel Gardiner was- an egotist in con- versation—" very ostentatious," as Carlyle phrases it—and there was nothing he was fonder of talking about than his conversion. He gave a particular account of it to the elder Carlyle, and the son heard the story told by the convert himself, at least three or four times, to different sets of people, always without the least al- lusion to any supernatural occurrences. Always too he stated that the appointment had been, not for midnight, but for midday, and for this reason, that the lady's husband was a surgeon or apothecary, and the guilty pair chose a time of day when he was necessarily abroad about his business. This fact being established, out goes at once the miraculous blaze of light. Doddridge refers to the testimony of a Reverend Mr. Spears, as confirming his own version of the story in all its details. "This Mr. Spears," says Carlyle, "had been Lord Grange's chaplain, and I knew him to have no great regard to truth, when deviating from it suited his purpose ; at any rate, he was not a man to con- tradict Doddridge, who had most likely told him his story. It is remarkable that, though the Doctor had written down every 'thing exactly, and could take his oath, yet he had omitted to mark the day of the week on which the conversion happened, but, if not mistaken, thinks it was Sabbath. This aggravates the sin of the appointment, and hallows the conversion." Our author has given a detailed narrative of the affair of the Porteous mob, having been an eye witness of all but its sequel. He saw the escape of the condemned criminal Robertson from the Tolbooth church, in February. or March, 1736, the execution of his fellow prisoner Wilson, and the unprovoked slaughter of the spectators by order of Captain Porteous. It was on the 7th of September following that Porteous was dragged out of prison, and hanged on a dyer's pole at two o'clock in the morning. The suc- cess of a plot in the execution of which many persons were en- gaged for six hours in the neighbourhood of six companies of soldiers, argues a rare degree of skilful management and vigour, the more so as the event was not unexpected. Everybody was prepossessed with an idea that something extraordinary would take place that day, and it was an instance of this common di- rection of men's minds, that at Prestonpans nine miles from Edinburgh, Alexander Carlyle dreamed that he saw Captain Porteous hanged in the Grassmarket. None of the murderers were ever known, though the Government evinced extreme anxiety to discover them, and even took violent means for that purpose. Carlyle's personal reminiscences of the rebellion of 1745 are copious and valuable. Being a student in Edinburgh when it broke out, he joined a Volunteer corps for the defence of the city, but all measures of that kind being frustrated by the desertion of the dragoons, who ran away to Dunbar to meet Sir John Cope; and by the supineness or treachery of Provost Stuart. The Volun- teers were dismissed, and Carlyle hastened home to Prestonpan s on the night of the 16th of September. He found the officers there in a state of alarm, under the belief that the Highlanders were close at hand, and though he brought them news that this was not the ease, they could not overcome their fears. The next day, he went to the camp at Dunbar, and had an interview with Colonel Gardiner, whom he found pale and dejected. When Carlyle spoke to him of the very hasty retreat of the dragoons " A:foul flight," said he, " Sandie, and they have not recovered from their panic ; and I'll tell you in confidence that I have not above ten men in my regiment who I am certain will follow me. But we must give them battle now' and God's will be done!" His words were verified three days afterwards, when he charged at the head of only eleven followers, and fought on after he had received many wounds until he was brought down by one that was mortal. Carlyle applied for leave to serve in arms with Cope's men ; but the General preferred to employ him in recon- noitring the enemy. He beheld with surprise the blunders com- mitted by Cope, and their fatal consequences, and after the battle he had an opportunity of seeing the victorious army, being sent to its head-quarters on an errand of humanity. What he there no- tieed confirmed him in his belief" that nothing but the weakest and most unaccountable bad conduct on our part could have pos- sibly given them the victory„ . . . . for, at the best, the High- landers were at that time but a raw militia, who were not cow- ards." Fortunately, the political mistakes committed on the other side were sufficient to counterbalance all their good fortune. Carlyle testifies that two-thirds of the Lowland gentry, and almost all persons of lower condition would gladly have seen the film' of Stuart on the throne again, had their religion been secured; and he believes that the Lowlands as well as the Highlands would have risen for Charles Edward, if he had had the spirit to go to the High Church of Edinburgh, and take the sacrament, as his great uncle Charles II. took the Covenant.
In the autumn of 1745, Carlyle went to complete his studies at the University of Leyden, where he had John Wilkes and Charles Townshend for companions. Of both he has given characteristic traits, and his autobiography, from this period to its abrupt close at the year 1770 (he died in 1806), abounds with personal sketches and anecdotes of distinguished Scotehmen and others; prominent among whom are David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson,
Robertson, the historian, Home, the author of Douglas, and Smollett. His book, indeed, is everywhere full of curious and original information about the mauners of the times, and the lives of his contemporaries. One more specimen of this kind, taken almost at random, we add to those which have gone before. Colonel Alexander Dow, the translator of the Persian History of Hindostan, had been a schoolboy in Dunbar, and had found his way to the East Indies after running away from his appren- ticeship. Carlyle dined with him in London, and says of his host—" He was telling us that night, that when he had charge of the great Mogul, with two regiments under his command, at Delhi, he was tempted to dethrone the monarch, and mount the throne in his stead, which he saw he could easily have done. When I asked him what prevented him from yielding to the temptation, he gave me this memorable answer, that it was re- flecting on what his old schoolfellows at Dunbar would think of him for being guilty of such an action."
Previous page
