PART I.

Ir may have been remarked by many besides myself what a deal of writing there has been of late about the Scottish character-its merits and defects; its peculiarities, more especially, in contrast with the English. Neither the writers in the leading journal nor the Saturday Reviewers seem able to keep their hands off the topic. Besides the running fire of references to it in the midst of other things, there is every now and then, in these quarters, an express dissertation on Scotticism and the Scotch. Whether the Scotch have humour, and, if so, of what kind it is, and wherein it differs from English wit; whether there is a type of intellect that can be called distinctively Scottish, and, if so, how it has arisen and what has been the worth of its manifestations; whether, in our national literature, the Scotch have always been but hodmen and secondrates, interspersed in a succession of grander Englishmen, or whether, granting that the English stream, prior to its junction with the Scottish, was much the more full and broad, one might not yet fairly maintain that the mountainstream did deliver into its sister, at the time of their junction, some small characteristic accumulation of moment, and that, since that time, an unexpectedly large proportion of the blended waters

1 History of Civilization in England. By Henry Thomas Buckle. Volume the Second. London: Parker, Son and Bourn. 1861.

No. 21.-VOL. IV.

has consisted in the swollen flood from the hills; how much of the good and how much of the bad in the Scottish mind has been caused by the Scottish theology; whether almost every really eminent Scotchman for a century past has not been a recreant from the Kirk; whether there is or can be such a thing as free thought, except profoundly under the rose, within six miles of Dr. Candlish; and whether in all the earth there is such another city as Glasgow for the theological use of sulphur combined with the physiological use of alcohol-on these and other forms of the same question not a day passes without something new or old being said in print. The odd thing is that, with so many stirring matters to think of, people should be hammering away so busily at this somewhat abstract topic of the intellectual differences between the Scotch and the English. Partly it may be because there have been so many racy books of Scottish biography and Scottish history of late to furnish texts for the discussion; partly it may be because the Scotch themselves raised a controversy recently about the Scottish Lion and the rights of the Thistle, which has naturally provoked a reaction; but then, as these causes are themselves effects, the explanation of the phenomenon is still to seek. It cannot be for nothing that so much speculative effort has recently been expended in this direction. Something must be in the air on the subject which will one day precipi

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tate itself. What that is only Zadkiel knows; but little wonder that some over-patriotic Scots should meantime see a latent compliment to their country in this excess of literary attention to it, even though the form is often that of sarcasm and banter.

All recent dissertations about Scotland and Scotticism, however, have been but trifles compared with that which Mr. Buckle has just sent forth. Here the speculation is systematized, expanded, and brought to a head. Mr. Buckle, indeed, has not been provoked into the inquiry by any of the little irritationscaused, let us say, by passing exhibitions of Scottish self-conceit that have provoked others into it. He walks into the Scotch as a philosopher out on a tour of grave and extensive research. He takes up the subject because it lies before him as part of the plan of a most comprehensive work. Having, in his first volume, laid down certain general principles towards an intended History of Civilization in England, and taken a partial survey of French History by way of introduction, he now, in this volume, presents us, still by way of introduction, with surveys of Spanish History and Scottish History, intimating that these are to be followed by similar surveys of German History and the History of the United States of America, and that then the Introduction will be complete, and he will be free to enter on his main subject with all the side-lights collected in his previous expatiations over so many various regions. Fortunately, the interest of the volumes already published does not depend much on the possibility that the vast plan of which they form a part will ever be accomplished. This was true of the first volume; but it is even more true of the second-which, if it does not propound so many straggling assertions of a general kind challenging philosophic debate, is certainly more compact as a literary performance. Here we have Spain and Scotland bound together, the one in about a hundred and fifty pages, and the other in about four hundred and fifty, and held up to the gaze of all men

for comparison and contrast. What they will say in Spain about the Spanish part of the volume, it may not be easy to surmise; but in Scotland, about the Scottish part of it, there will be some guashing of teeth. It is long since any hand has taken such a grip of the thistle; it is long since the fierce little land has received such a rouser. Not, by any means, that it is all onslaught. On the contrary, here the Scottish zealots for nationality may have, if they like, a most effective counterblast by an Englishman to recent English assertions that Scottish nationality is now all moonshine, and that the relations of Scotland to England are now only those of a province-of a bigger Lancashire, or Yorkshire. The entire drift of Mr. Buckle's dissertation is that the Scotch retain, as the result of the conditions in which they are and through which they have passed, a most marked individuality-that the Scottish mind or mode of thought is, in some respects, the direct antithesis of the English, and has, for that very reason, been able to perform, for the now united nation, certain remarkable and even splendid services, in contemplating which all generous and candid Englishmen are bound to cry "Bravo," and may do well to cry "Encore." If any of the Scotch want such backing, here they may have it; and, the next time any English blockhead maintains that the rose is now the one botanical symbol for Great Britain, and that the thistle is extinct, they may heave Mr. Buckle's book at that block's head. But, farther, even what of the book does consist of onslaught will not be universally ill-received in Scotland. Whether Mr. Buckle knows the fact or not, there is no part of Her Majesty's dominions in which his delineations of what he considers Scottish characteristics will have been received with so much glee by a considerable part of the population. There is not on the earth a people so addicted to laughing at themselves as the Scotch; and, though a good many of them get very angry when a stranger raises the laugh,

there are others who do not do so, but will take the materials for their self-satire from any quarter. In an old Scottish song, referring to one of the enterprises of the Scotch for the compulsory enlightenment of their English. neighbours on a point in dispute, the Blue Bonnets are represented as marching south with these words for their marching chorus

"That the haill warld may see

That there's nane in the richt but we
O' the auld Scottish nation."

It cannot be denied that even now, in anything they do, the Scotch are apt to be found singing the same song of their unique infallibility among the nations; but, just as the song-writer saw the humour of the thing in his day, so his successors do in this, and there is many a Scot who will raise his voice in the chorus, and feel his nerves thrill as he does so with a kind of belief in its truth, and who, the next moment, will be ready to die with laughter at the thought that he and others should have been making such fools of themselves. To all such Mr. Buckle's book will afford as much amusement as offence; besides which, as Mr. Buckle ought to know, there is, throughout Scotland, a large number of educated persons, including even some clergymen, to whom his book, or, at all events, parts of it, will come only as a reinforcement in aid of views which they have long been entertaining and urging. As soon as the book appeared, indeed, some of the leading Scottish newspapers hastened, with all the delight people usually feel in being able to say, "We told you so," to circulate among their readers the most blistering extracts from it.

matter.

But whether the Scotch like Mr. Buckle's estimate of them and of their history is a comparatively insignificant The real question is whether and how far the estimate is true. Has this able and popular writer put forth, with respect to the Scottish nation, an account which Englishmen and others may safely accept as accurate; or has he, with all his pains, produced only a

wretched caricature, and so done injury both to the people he misrepresents and to those who may receive the misrepresentation and proceed upon it; or has he, as able and popular writers will sometimes do, put forth, on a complex subject, a quantity of mingled truth and error, of real information and of ludicrous ignorance, of useful invective against what deserves invective, and of speech about certain men and things of the past which must be characterized as flippant and impertinent even from him, and which cannot become common without impairing the tone of the general mind, robbing it of all sympathy with the highest in human history, and shrivelling it to an ignoble and disgusting sharpness? At a time when book follows book, and each wave of impressions gives place rapidly to the next, it is not every dissertation respecting which it would be worth while to ask such questions; but Mr. Buckle is a writer of no ordinary mark and reputation, and his subject in the part of the present volume to which we have been referring is one the contemporary bearings of which are neither few nor unimportant.

The

At the outset of his dissertation, Mr. Buckle, with a praiseworthy desire that his readers shall from the very first understand what he is to be about, lays down that general thesis or proposition respecting the Scotch which his dissertation is to prove and illustrate. thesis is expressed most distinctly and formally in the Analytical Table of Contents prefixed to the volume, as follows:"The Scotch unite liberality in politics "with illiberality in religion. This is the "largest and most important fact in their "history; and the rest of the volume will "be occupied in investigating its causes."

acquainted with the Scotch and their history might not at once agree with him before reading a word more of his treatise. Thus to say that "liberality in politics" has been a characteristic of the Scotch may mean several things. It may mean that the Scotch as a nation have been always characterized by a readiness to produce and admit the most advanced ideas in matters of civil organization and government and to square their public polity in accordance with them that their institutions have always been of the kind popularly called liberal, as having involved, relatively to other countries at the same time, both the greatest amount of equal justice and freedom to all ranks and classes, and the greatest power of action in the body of the citizens to make political changes. In this sense I do not know that any Scotchman would claim superiority for his country, or would think of putting it on a par with England-any Scotchman, at least, who knows anything of Scottish History in comparison with English; who recollects what the old Scottish constitution was, at a time when the English constitution had shaped itself fundamentally as it now is; or who has ever realized to himself that extraordinary Dundas despotism, or government by one absolute minister acting through a handful of place-holders, under which Scotland lay bound hand and foot beside a comparatively free England within the memory of persons now living, under which the most moderate Whiggism was a crime watched by the police, and under which (so rich may be the conditions of individual nurture even in a despotism) Scotland yet contrived to be cheery enough and to breed an unusual number of her best and bravest men. hardly be, therefore, in this sense that Mr. Buckle means that the Scotch have been "liberal in politics." They may be "liberal" in this sense now; they may always have had “liberal" thinkers in this sense among them; but "liberality in politics" in this sense is not the exact epithet of praise that one would

It can

to them from a survey of their

history in contrast with that of England. What Mr. Buckle means by saying that the Scotch have been liberal in politics seems rather to be that they have always been characterized by a collective spirit of resistance to tyranny, by an insurrectionary spirit, or, which is the same thing in his language, by a spirit of beautiful disloyalty to any secular authority placed over them. That this is chiefly his meaning appears from various passages, but especially from one in which he notes absence of loyalty as a virtue-for such it is in his philosophy-in which the Scotch have far excelled the English. Compared with the Scotch, he says, the English must be pronounced "a meek and submissive people." Now, besides that this is a somewhat strained and unnatural meaning of the phrase "liberality in politics"-besides that the phrase "impatience in politics," or the like, would better express the virtue here ascribed to the Scotch-it would only be within certain limitations, much more precise than Mr. Buckle attempts, that any one knowing the Scotch and their history could hear this virtue ascribed to them without astonishment. What a patient people the Scotch are in politics, how deferential they are to anything calling itself authority, or even to mere use and wont, might be proved not only by such historical instances as have been cited, but by present facts. The Scotch at this day put up with exercises of civil authority which would rouse the most stolid English neighbourhood; whereas in England a sturdy yeoman will almost always be found to stand up for a public right of way against duke or earl and to spend his last shilling in contesting it, such a case is rare in Scotland; on the Scottish bench language is used towards individuals and respecting the press which no English judge would dare to use; you could positively, I believe, stop a Scotch ballad-singer or bill-sticker in the street by simply going up to him and saying that a gentleman-you would not require to be more particular-had forbidden ballad-singing or bill-sticking till that day fortnight. "Superstitious