land, as far as the fifteenth century. The summary, of course, is not nearly so "scientific" as Mr. Buckle's, but it is rather clever of its kind, and it sticks easily to the memory. Henry and his counsellors are discussing his projected expedition into France, and Henry is insisting on the necessity of leaving in England a sufficient defence against the Scots, who are sure to take advantage of his absence:

K. Henry. We do not mean the coursing
snatchers only,

But fear the main intendment of the Scot,
Who hath been still a giddy neighbour to us:
For you shall read that my great-grandfather
Never went with his forces into France,
But that the Scot on his unfurnished kingdom
Came pouring, like the tide into a breach,
With ample and brim fulness of his force;
Galling the gleaned land with hot assays;
Girding with grievous siege castles and towns;
That England, being empty of defence,
Hath shook, and trembled at the ill neighbour-
hood.

Canterbury. She hath been then more feared

than harmed, my liege:

For hear her but exampled by herself,-
When all her chivalry hath been in France,
And she a mourning widow of her nobles,
She hath herself not only well defended,
But taken, and impounded as a stray,
The king of Scots; whom she did send to
France,

To fill King Edward's fame with prisoner-kings,
And make your chronicle as rich with praise,
As is the ooze and bottom of the sea
With sunken wreck and sumless treasuries.
Westmoreland. But there's a saying, very old
and true:-

"If that you will France win,
Then with Scotland first begin:"
For, once the eagle England being in prey,
To her unguarded nest the weasel Scot
Comes sneaking, and so sucks her princely eggs,
Playing the mouse in absence of the cat,
To spoil and havoc more than he can eat.

Not only is this summary of old Scottish History in relation to England graphic and easily remembered; but it chances also to be true. Scotland in the fifteenth century was of some importance to England; but chiefly by way of impediment to what England would otherwise have been about, of annoyance left in the rear of England at home, when her face was turned to continental Europe and the rest of the transmarine world as the proper field

for her aggressive exploits.

England was the eagle, flying far and wide southwards for prey; Scotland the weasel, stealing meanwhile to the forsaken nest of the royal bird, and compelling her again and again prematurely to hurry back. There had been a time, indeed, when England had made the conquest of Scotland her main enterprise. But, having come off badly in that affair, she had acquiesced in the continued existence of her tough little partner in the island as apparently a necessary arrangement, and, though not forgetting her feud with the Scots, had made war with them only an episodical part of her activity, in the intervals and in the interest of her larger business. To Scotland, on the other hand, war with England was much more nearly the total substance of the collective national exertion. Not only did the memory of old wrong rankle; not only was the consciousness of being a Scot identified with the instinct of resistance to England and of repudiation of the English name; but, from the smaller dimensions of the country and from its geographical position, there was no mode of self-assertion for the Scottish nationality possible except through war with England. Stray Scots might distribute themselves over the Continent, scattering the thistle-down among the nations, and betaking themselves even there by preference to any service that was anti-English; but for the little country in the mass at home no career of action beyond itself was possible save that which an Englishman, talking to his sovereign, might be excused for describing as the career of a weasel towards its more lordly neighbour.

If, however, by the necessity of circumstances, one must be a weasel, one may at all events be a respectable and energetic weasel. Now Scotland in the fifteenth century may claim at least this amount of credit. Although her wars with England, since that great one which had secured her independence, had been but weasel-wars in comparison with those which England had waged on the transmarine area, they had kept

the nation electric and astir, and they were agencies in its peculiar education and its development for future ends. Not bad testimony to Scotland in this respect is borne by Froissart. There are passages also in Shakespeare in which he does retrospective justice to the Scotch during the time of their wars with England, and follows them into their native part of the island with that all-kindly glance which disregarded frontiers and found matter for liking everywhere. Naturally, however, it is to a Scottish poet that we should look for such a representation of the Scot at home as would bring out what was best in him and exhibit his weaselship in the most striking light. And so, at this time of day, there is no Englishman but will willingly complete his notion of the Scot of the fifteenth century by blending with the impressions of the foregoing passage from Shakespeare those of the following from Scott. The time is 1513; the scene is the neighbourhood of Edinburgh. The Scottish host is being marshalled there for its last fatal expedition into England, and the Englishman Marmion is looking on.

Nor less did Marmion's skilful view Glance every line and squadron through; And much he marvell'd one small land Could marshal forth such various band. The poet then goes on to describe the composition of this various army. There were the heavy-mailed chiefs-at-arms, on their great Flemish steeds, with their spears and battle-axes. There were the younger knights and squires, more lightly armed, on their practised chargers, which they made to wheel and curvet. There were the hardy burghers, on foot, without vizors, plumes, or crests, but with burnished corslets and shining gorgets, and armed with long pikes and twohanded swords, or with maces. Then follows the description of the main bulk of the army, in its three divisions of the Lowland Yeomen, the Borderers, and the Highlanders.

On foot the Yeoman, too, but dress'd
In his steel-jack, a swarthy vest,
With iron quilted well;

Each at his back (a slender store)
His forty days' provision bore,
As feudal statutes tell.

His arms were halbert, axe, or spear,
A cross-bow there, a hagbut here,
A dagger-knife and brand.
Sober he seem'd, and sad of cheer,
As loth to leave his cottage dear,

And march to foreign strand;
Or musing who would guide his steer
To till the fallow land.
Yet deem not in his thoughtful eye
Did aught of dastard terror lie;
More dreadful far his ire,
Than theirs who, scorning danger's name,
In eager mood to battle came,
Their valour like light straw on flame,
A fierce but fading fire.

Not so the Borderer :-bred to war,
He knew the battle's din afar,

And joyed to hear it swell.
His peaceful day was slothful ease;
Nor harp, nor pipe, his ear could please,
Like the loud slogan yell.

On active steed, with lance and blade,
The light-armed pricker plied his trade:
Let nobles fight for fame;

Let vassals follow where they lead,
Burghers to guard their townships bleed;
But war's the Borderer's game.
Their gain, their glory, their delight,
To sleep the day, maraud the night,
O'er mountain, moss, and moor.
Joyful to fight they took their way,
Scarce caring who might win the day;
Their booty was secure.

*

*

*

Next Marmion mark'd the Celtic race,
Of different language, form, and face,
A various race of man.
Just then the Chiefs their tribes array'd,
And wild and garish semblance made
The chequer'd trews and belted plaid;
And varying notes the war-pipes bray'd

To every varying clan.
Wild through their red or sable hair
Look'd out their eyes with savage stare
On Marmion as he pass'd.
Their legs above the knee were bare;
Their frame was sinewy, short, and spare,
And hardened to the blast.

Of taller race, the chiefs they own
Were by the eagle's plumage known.
The hunted red-deer's undress'd hide
Their hairy buskins well supplied;
The graceful bonnet deck'd their head;
Back from their shoulders hung the plaid;
A broadsword of unwieldy length,
A dagger proved for edge and strength,
A studded targe they wore,
And quivers, bows and shafts,—but oh!
Short was the shaft, and weak the bow,
To that which England bore.
The Isles-men carried at their backs
The ancient Danish battle-axe.
They raised a wild and wondering cry,
As with his guide rode Marmion by.

Loud were their clamouring tongues, as when
The clanging sea-fowl leave the fen;
And, with their cries discordant mix'd,
Grumbled and yell'd the pipes betwixt.

This is Scott's description of Scotland in the beginning of the sixteenth century, so far as it might be represented in the army which was about to march to Flodden, there to accomplish in blood and defeat the last act in the struggle between the two nations, merely as nations. Of course, neither is this description nearly so "scientific " as Mr. Buckle's. It is but the work of a poet, a colourist, a man of octosyllabics and of old rubbish palmed off as picturesque. But Scott did really know something about Scotland; and, though Mr. Buckle is quite entitled to say that it was not his part or intention to entertain his readers with any such mere description of old Scottish manners or costume or fighting-gear-that he did not give himself out as a Marmion riding along the ranks of the Scottish army and interested in the kind of military array that the barbaric little nation could muster forth, but only as a modern English philosopher looking back through the mist of years and applying himself, amid all that irrelevant confusion of bagpipes, clans, steel-jacks, corslets, Flemish steeds, &c., of which the world has had enough and more than enough from Scott and Company, to the one precise task of investigating the real mechanism of Scottish society, so as to express what was the cardinal fact in it-yet, in my humble opinion, he might have learnt something as to his task, or as to what data he might have to take into account in order to its satisfactory conclusion, from even such an unscientific bit of rhymed pseudo-history as the foregoing. For, in the first place, I miss in Mr. Buckle's account of the Scotch prior to the Reformation any adequate recognition of that which was perhaps, all in all, till then the most deep and massive fact in the national being-the relation of antagonism in which they stood to England, and their intense, ineradicable feeling of that relation. Whoever

knows anything of Scotland must know that the transmitted effects of this old antagonism from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century remain incorporate in the Scottish mind and mode of thinking to this day. Not only do they remain in some quarters in the disagreeable form of an ignis suppositus, burning, now and then, the feet of an Englishman, and making him hop, as he walks unwarily over the white ashes; but they remain, I believe, in a more subtle and transubstantiated form in the intellectual habit, the mental style and structure, of most Scotchmen as sucheven of those who live among Englishmen, and who would account it a shame and a vulgarity to utter a syllable of that Wallace and Bruce nonsense, as they would term it, in which their coarser compatriots wallow. I may refer to this matter again in speaking of Mr. Buckle's theory, later on in his volume, as to the peculiarity of the Scottish intellect in contrast with the English. Meanwhile it seems that his own philosophy should have taught him that the roots of such peculiarities in the intellect of nations may have to be sought for far back in their historical conditions, and so that, in investigating the Scottish character, he ought to have given larger attention to the martial relations of Scotland to England in the centuries preceding the Reformation than he has given. The chronic war with England which lasted through those centuries was part of the education of Scotland, as indeed it was, though much less, of England too; and as well omit the part of Hamlet from the play of that name, or all mention of Tell from Swiss history, or of Miltiades and Marathon from the history of Greece, as slur over, as Mr. Buckle has done, in a philosophical summary of Scottish history, those weasel-wars of the Scots which ended in Flodden. But, more than that, granting that Mr. Buckle's object was not so much to take account of the external pressure which moulded Scottish society as to describe the mechanism of that society, in whatever way determined, even then such a

bit of rich blotchwork from Scott or any other like poet might have taught him something. It might have taught him that his resolution of the whole science of old Scottish history into a mechanical problem of three bodies, or rather into a much simpler see-saw of two bodies, with a third bestriding the fulcrum, was, despite some truth and some convenience there might be in it, but a miserable rendering of life as it was in Scotland, or as it ever was, or ever could be, in any nation worth its salt. Dissolve, for example, that visionary army which Marmion saw through the community to which it belonged, and what do we behold as the Scotland of the beginning of the sixteenth century? Not a mere slab of slate, as in Mr. Buckle's account, with a symbol for clergy here, a symbol for nobles there, and a symbol for the king in a corner looking at both; but a real country, corrugated by a peculiar geology, clothed with a peculiar botany, and inhabited by a peculiar population of men, numbering perhaps about half a million in all, but diversely distributed, diversely occupied, and full, in every spot and fragment of it, of a thousand impulses, purposes, and singularities. There was a king; there were a score or two of great nobles; there was a clergy holding much of the wealth of the land, and headed by a few great prelates; there was a gentry or lesser baronage, of about a thousand lairds and heads of considerable families. Among these there were combinations and compositions of forces, varying from time to time, and constituting such means of formal government as the nation had. But there was a parliament of a sort, in which burghers also sat; there were law-courts; there was a rude commerce and industry; there were schools and universities; there was a whole life of ordinary household vicissitudes and struggles, in which men and women were reared, and through which the teachings and the ceremonies of Holy Mother Church, which had all in its grasp, ran like red threads in the more sombre web. There were the darker

superstitions of old Teutonic and Celtic heathenism still unsuppressed; there were crimes and ghastly deeds which spread terror through neighbourhoods, and passed into traditions of horror; and, from the top of society to its lowest depths, there was perhaps more than the average percentage of shrewd heads, fervid hearts, and tongues of ready rhetoric. Nay, there were the beginnings of art, architectural and decorative; printing had been introduced; and they were actually beginning, poor souls! to cultivate literature on their little oatmeal. Not only were there the old popular songs and ballads, and the old chronicles and uncouth epics, but men, tuneful and educated, here and there were beginning to speak of Phoebus and the month of May, and to write what might pass in any literature as real poems. Nor was it all done on oatmeal. Old Hector Boece, in Bellenden's translation, tells a different story. "Qhuare our eldaris had "sobriete, we have ebriete and dronkines; qhuare they had plente with suf

ficence, we have immoderat coursis "with superfluite, as he war maist noble "and honest that culd devore and swelly maist, and, be extreme diligence, serchis sa mony deligat coursis "that they provoke the stomok to ressave mair than it may sufficentlie "degest. And nocht allenarlie may "surfet dennar and sowper suffice us "above the temperance of oure eldaris, "bot als to continewe oure schamefull "voracite with duble dennars and

'pepill thereof; for, throw the immo"derat glutony, our wit and reason

ar sa blindit within the presoun of "the body, that it may have no know"ledge of hevinly thingis." Above all, the whole nation, whether those who fed on the oatmeal only, or those who regaled themselves on Boece's "delicius metis and winis," and used his "droggis and electuaris," swam and rioted in a sea of humour. There was laughter everywhere, rollick everywhere; everything that was said or done was dashed and edged with humour; indignation itself, murderous revenge itself, whatever was most earnest that man thought or felt, through all and round all played an element of demoniac mirth.

There was a jolly beggar, and a-beggin' he was boun',

And he took up his quarters into a landwart toun;

And we'll gang nae mair a-rovin', a-rovin' in the nicht,

And we'll gang nae mair a-rovin', boys,

let the moon shine ne'er sae bricht; And we'll gang nae mair a-rovin'.

When

This is the first stanza of a song written by a Scottish king, James V., whose life is said to have illustrated it; and there is much in it of the mood of his contemporary countrymen. the same king was on his death-bed, in 1542, news was brought to him that his wife had just borne him, not an heir, but an heiress, to his throne-the future Mary, Queen of Scots. "It cam wi' a lass, and it will gang wi' a lass," were the words of disappointment with which he received the news, referring to the way in which the crown had come into the Stuart line, through a female; and then, turning to the wall, he died in sulks. Humour in life; humour in death; humour in king, in priests, in people!

Into this little country, as into other countries of the north, came the Protestant Reformation. In all modern historical literature of any pretence to ability there is no such insipid hash, no such dish of chopped straw and cold water, as Mr. Buckle makes of this event of Scottish History, its causes, and its

give a slight sketch of the relation "which the nobles bore to the clergy in "the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, "and of the way in which their relative "position and their implacable hatred "of each other brought about the Re"formation. By this means we shall perceive that the great Protestant movement, which in other countries was democratic, was, in Scotland, "aristocratic. We shall also see that "in Scotland the Reformation, not "being the work of the people, has

66

never produced the effects which "might have been expected from it, "and which it did produce in England." Redeeming this promise in a special chapter, he carries his one pet fact of the antagonism between the Catholic clergy and the nobles, and the alliance of the Crown with the former, through the successive reigns of the Scottish Stuarts, from that of James I. (1406-1437) onwards to that of the above-mentioned James V. (1513-1542); holding it up, lamp-like, to illuminate the obscure labyrinth of Scottish history, as the purblind chroniclers present it, during those hundred and thirty-six years. As it flashes on recess after recess of the labyrinth, we have the continuity of things revealed to us in such phrases of emphasis as these culled here, for the sake of brevity of form, from the analytical table of contents :-"Early in the "fifteenth century the alliance between "the Crown and the Church against the "nobles became obvious." "The Crown, "in its efforts against the nobles, was "encouraged by the clergy; and, before "the middle of the fifteenth century, "the Church and the aristocracy were

completely estranged from each other." "In 1528 James V. escaped" [from the clutches of the nobles]; "the Crown "and the Church regained the ascendant,