Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character by Edward Bannerman Ramsay

E >> Edward Bannerman Ramsay >> Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Reminiscences_ (Second Series, 1861). Introduction.

[2] May 10, 1810.

[3] Some account of his dealings among the Methodists may be found in
the _Sunday Magazine_, January 1865, edited by the Rev. Dr. Guthrie. The
paper is titled "Reminiscences of a West of England Curacy."

[4] This was a favourite quotation of Ramsay's, who was amused with the
remark of Withering's or Woodward's botany, repeated in his letters for
long after:--"The organ at St. John's gives universal satisfaction--a
great ornament to our ponds and ditches."

[5] Mrs. Forbes, the sister and aunt of so many Burnetts and Ramsays,
lived the latter part of her life at Banchory Lodge, in the middle of
that "Deeside" country, where the future Dean spent many of his happy
holidays, and learned much of the peculiar ways of that peculiar people.
There were no two ladies in Scotland more esteemed and beloved than the
Dean's aunts on both sides--Mrs. Russell, his aunt and mine, living in
widowhood at Blackhall, and Mrs. Forbes at Banchory Lodge, three miles
apart, on the opposite banks of Dee. Mrs. Forbes died 1st February 1838.

[6] His dwelling near Frome.

II.

The Dean was passionately fond of Deeside. Let me indulge myself in
looking back upon that district such as he knew it, such as I remember
it sixty years ago.

The natural features of Deeside are not changed. The noble river pours
down its brown flood as of old, hurrying from its wooded rocky
highlands. On the prettiest part of its bank stands Crathes, the finest
of Aberdeenshire castles, the immemorial seat of the Burnetts, where
Edward Ramsay, himself a Burnett, was received with all the love of
kindred, as well as the hearty respect for his sacred profession. I
daresay Crathes was not to him quite what I remember it. But we were of
different professions and habits. I will say nothing of the chief sport
of Dee, its salmon-fishing. However fascinating, the rod is a silent
companion, and wants the jovial merriment, shout and halloo, that give
life and cheerfulness to the sport of the hunter. My recollection of
Deeside is in its autumn decking, and shows me old Sir Robert and my
lady, two gentle daughters and four tall stalwart sons--they might have
sat for a group of Osbaldistones to the great painter Walter Scott. I
will not describe the interior of the old house, partly because it was
changing, and every change appeared to me for the worse; but no one
would forget the old hall, where Kneller's picture of Bishop Burnett
still looks down on his modern cousins and their hospitality. It was a
frank and cordial hospitality, of which the genial old bishop would
have approved. The viands were homely almost to affectation. Every day
saw on that board a noble joint of boiled beef, not to the exclusion of
lighter kickshaws; but the beef was indispensable, just as the _bouilli_
still is in some provinces of France. Claret was there in plenty--too
plentiful perhaps; but surely the "braw drink" was well bestowed, for
with it came the droll story, the playful attack and ready retort, the
cheerful laugh--always good humour. A dinner at Crathes was what the
then baronet, old Sir Robert, would call the "best of good company."

Another part of the house I well remember--the place, half gun-room,
half servant's hall--where we prepared for sport in the morning, and
brought the day's bag home at night. Prominent figures there were two
brothers Stevenson, Willie and Jamie, known for twenty miles round as
the "fox-hunters," known to us, after the southern sporting slang had
been brought among us by our neighbour Captain Barclay, as
"Pad-the-hoof" and "Flash-the-muzzle[7]" The fox-hunting was on foot,
but let no mounted hunter sneer. The haunts of the game were continuous
woods and bogs, hard to ride and from which no fox could be forced to
break. "Pad-the-hoof" looked no ignoble sportsman as he cheered his
great slow-hounds through the thicket, and his halloo rang from the
wood of Trustach to the craigs of Ashintillie. Both were armed, but
"Flash" took less charge of the hounds than seeing to death the fox, the
enemy of all, including the roe, which recent plantations had raised
into an enemy. I must say nothing on foot or wing came amiss to
Flash-the-muzzle's gun. Hares and rabbits, not then the pest of the
country, swelled our bag. We had a moderate number of black game, and
the fox-hunters were somewhat astonished to find that we of the gentry
set much store by woodcock, which bulked so little in the day's sport.
The fox-hunter brothers had the run of the servants' hall at Crathes,
and they were said to have consumed fabulous numbers of kitchen pokers,
which required to be heated red-hot to give the jugs of ale of their
evening draught the right temperature and flavour. That was a
free-living community. The gentlemen of the house were too much
gentlemen to stand upon their dignity, and all, from the baronet
downwards, had the thorough appreciation of Deeside humour. It was there
that the Dean learned his stories of "Boatie" and other worthies of the
river-side. Boatie himself was Abernethy, the ferryman of Dee below
Blackhall; he hauled his boat across the river by a rope made fast at
both ends. Once, in a heavy water, the rope gave way, and Boatie in his
little craft was whirled down the raging river and got ashore with much
difficulty. It was after this, when boasting of his valiant exertions,
that Mrs. Russell put him in mind of the gratitude he owed to Providence
for his escape, and was answered as the Dean himself tells us in his
_Reminiscences_. Another of the water-side worthies, "Saunders Paul,"
was nominally the keeper of the public-house at Invercannie, where the
water of Cannie falls into Dee. It was the alehouse of the country, but
frequented much more by the gentry than by the commons. It was there
that Mr. Maule in his young days, not yet Lord Panmure, led the riots
and drank his claret, while Saunders capped him glass for glass with
whisky and kept the company in a roar with Deeside stories. Old
Saunders--I remember him like yesterday--was not a mere drunken sot or a
Boniface of the hostelry. He had lived a long lifetime among men who did
not care to be toadied, and there was a freedom and ready wit in the old
man that pleased everybody who was worth pleasing. Above all, there was
the Deeside humour which made his stories popular, and brought them to
the ear of our Dean.

That was the left side--the Crathes bank of Dee. Across the river was
the somewhat dilapidated fortalice of Tilquhillie, the seat of an
ancient and decayed branch of the Douglases. The last laird who dwelt
there lived in the traditions of Deeside as own brother to the Laird of
Ellangowan in Scott's romance. Ramsay has put him well on canvas. Who
does not remember his dying instructions to his son and his grieve?--"Be
ye aye stickin' in a tree, Johnny; it will be growin' when ye are
sleepin'!" while he cautions the grieve, "Now mind that black park; it
never gied me onything, ne'er gie onything to it."

In the days when the Dean knew that Water-side the fortalice was
uninhabited, and I think not habitable for gentlefolks; but down on the
haugh below, and close to the river in a pretty garden-cottage, dwelt
the old Lady Tilquhillie, with her son the sheriff of the county, George
Douglas, whom a few Edinburgh men may yet remember as the man of wit and
pleasure about town, the _beau_ of the Parliament House--at home a kind
hospitable gentleman, looking down a little upon the rough humours that
pleased his neighbours. The old lady--I think she was a Dutch woman, or
from the Cape of Good Hope--and her old servant, Sandy M'Canch,
furnished the Dean with many a bit of Deeside life and humour; and are
they not written in the _Reminiscences!_

Higher up the river were two houses where the Dean was much
beloved--Banchory Lodge, his uncle General Burnett's, where also lived
his dear aunt, the widowed Mrs. Forbes; and Blackhall, where, in the
time I have in my mind, lived his aunt, Mrs. Russell, the widow of my
uncle Francis Russell, a woman of many sorrows, but whose sweet voice
and silver laugh brought joy into the house even amidst sickness and
sorrow[8]. She had not the Deeside language, but she and her sister Lady
Ramsay, Yorkshire women, and educated in the city of York, helped to
give the Dean that curious northern English talk which he mixed
pleasantly with the language of Angus and Mearns that he loved so well;
and he inherited from the Bannermans the sweet voice, so valuable an
inheritance to a preacher.

I have gone over less than a dozen miles of the valley of the Dee, which
was the Dean's Deeside. I think the manners and popular thought, as well
as the language of that little district, were peculiar, and fitted to
catch the attention of an eager student of human nature and character.
Deeside, in its wider acceptance, of course includes the great city at
its mouth, and the picturesque mountains of Mar near the source of the
river, where the Queen has now set her mark of favour on the land. I beg
to distinguish Deeside--the Dean's Deeside--lying between these. The
city of Aberdeen, with its trade and manufacture and wealth, with its
University and schools, and some tradition of the antique metropolis,
has established, as she had good right, habits and language of her own,
not to be mistaken, but almost confined to her own walls. On the other
hand, the mountains of Mar, where lie the springs of the Dee, where
tower Lochnagar and Benmacdhui, are inhabited by a race of shepherds and
hunters, speaking a different language, differing in manners from the
Dean's friends, who dwelt from the Hill of Fair to Ashintillie, where
hardly a Gaelic name occurs among the peasantry.

The little cluster of mansions which I have mentioned lies, I think,
wholly within the parish of Banchory-Ternan. Following the river down
from that parish, the next place of any importance is the old
manor-house of Durris, some half-dozen miles lower, and on the right
bank of the river. It is a place of some interest to lawyers for having
given rise to one of the leading cases on the law of entail, which
settled points that had formerly been doubtful, all in favour of the
strict entail. The victim in that case, ejected by the heir of entail,
was John Innes, who had sold his property in Moray to invest the produce
in the great barony of Durris. The new tenant, believing himself almost
proprietor, built a comfortable house under the walls of the old castle,
and in that house was born the writer of these notes. I do not feel
myself severed by any disgusts from the country of my youth where I
spent my best years, or at least the years of most enjoyment. It was
then a wild moor, with some natural beauty, a picturesque den leading
from the house to the noble river, wooded with native birch and scrubby
oak, with some tall larches and magnificent horse-chestnuts, and even a
few immemorial Spanish chestnuts planted by the old Peterboroughs, now
all gone. Along that river bank were some of the broadest haughs with
which I am acquainted, and some of the best salmon streams, then woods
and sheep pastures and a dozen miles of heather hills--up to
Cairn-monearn and Kerloach--giving the best grouse-shooting in the
country. It is in truth a charming water-side even in the eyes of a
critical old man, or of a tourist in search of the picturesque; but for
a boy who lived there, shot, and fished there, while all the houses
round were the dwellings of cousins and friends, while game was not yet
let for hire, it was a place to win that boy's heart, and I loved it
very heartily. We were the nearest neighbours on one side of that
cluster of residences of the Burnetts and Douglases and Russells which I
have tried to describe. We were all very good friends, and thus the Dean
and I were early acquainted.

I have said little of the Dean's ancestors, merely named the Burnetts
and Bannermans. Indeed I would guard against loading my memoir of the
Dean with anything like mere pedigree. I take no interest in his
ancestry, except in so far as they may have given a character--so far as
he may have inherited his personal qualities from them. I will not dwell
then upon Alexander de Burnard, who had his charter from Robert the
Bruce of the Deeside lands which his descendants still hold, nor even on
the first Lairds of Leys. When the Reformation blazed over Scotland, the
Baron of Leys and his kindred favoured and led the party that supported
the new faith; but, even in that iconoclastic age, two of them are found
protesting against the destruction of religious places at Aberdeen. One,
Gilbert Burnett (he was grand-uncle of the Bishop of Sarum), enjoyed
considerable reputation abroad for certain philosophical writings. He
was Professor of Philosophy, first at Basle and afterwards at Montauban,
and a general synod of the French Protestants desired that his works
should be printed at the expense of the synod. These _Dissertationes
Ethicae_ were accordingly published at Leyden in 1649; but his death
prevented his other writings from being published. Two brothers of the
same generation, Thomas and Duncan, settled in England as physicians,
and seem to have been men of literary eminence. Pedigrees of both are to
be found in the Herald's Visitations of Essex and Norfolk. Duncan,
Thomas, and Gilbert, are all noticed by Sir Thomas Middleton among the
"Learned Men and Writers of Aberdeen;" and Duncan is noted as a holy,
good, and learned man. In the stirring times of the Covenants, Sir
Thomas Burnett of Leys, Baronet, though an adherent of the Huntlys,
embraced the Covenant from conscientious motives against his political
instincts and associations. And ever afterwards we find him firm in the
principles of the Covenant, yet advising peaceful and moderate counsels;
and when Montrose, after his conversion to the royal cause, passed
through Aberdeenshire, harrying the lands of the leading Covenanters, he
supped one day at Crathes, excepted and protected Sir Thomas Burnett and
his son-in-law, Sir William Forbes of Monymusk, in the general
denunciation of the Puritans. We find Sir Thomas repeatedly a
commissioner for visiting the University of Aberdeen, and in his later
years he endowed three bursaries at King's College, his own _alma
mater_. Jamesone has painted him with a thoughtful and refined, but
earnest and manly face. The baronet's brother, James Burnett of
Craigmyle, was of the same character. No less earnest and staunch than
his brother in his adherence to his principles--he ever figures as a
peace-maker and enemy of bloodshed. He is described by the parson of
Rothiemay, an unsuspected testimony, as a "gentleman of great wisdom,
and one who favoured the King though he dwelt among the Covenanters, and
was loved and respected by all." Is it not plain that the temperance and
moderation descended in the blood of the Burnetts?

Thomas Burnett of Kemnay, grandson of Craigmyle, is known in a sphere
where few Scotsmen had entered. He was a courtier of that remarkable
little court of the Electress Sophia of Hanover, where he became the
friend of the philosopher Leibnitz, correspondent of the poet Dryden,
and his letters are full of curious gossip on the most various
subjects--theology, philosophy, literature, including poetry and the
small talk of the day. He was greatly employed and trusted by the
Electress Sophia. His son George was noted as an agriculturist, and his
grandson, Alexander Burnett of Kemnay (by a daughter of Sir Alexander
Burnett of Leys), was long British Secretary of embassy at Berlin, and
attended Frederick the Great in the campaigns of the Seven Years' War;
remaining at the Prussian Court as Charge d'Affaires after Sir Andrew
Mitchell's death.

James, third son of Craigmyle the Covenanter, married a daughter of the
family of Irvine of Monboddo, a scion of the house of Drum, and having
so acquired that barony, he transmitted it to his descendants, of whom
the most famous was his great-grandson, James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, a
Judge of the Court of Session, an eminent lawyer, and a man of rare
accomplishments, with some whimsical peculiarities. In a treatise on the
origin and progress of language, he was the first seriously to assert
the descent of mankind from the monkey, and that the human race were
originally furnished with tails! That and a hundred other whimsies were
mixed up with a great deal of learning then very rare, and with a
philosophy that dealt in free and daring speculation, of which the world
was not yet worthy.

The first baronet of Leys, besides his brother James of Craigmyle, had
yet another brother, Robert Burnett of Crimond, an eminent advocate,
very learned, and of high moral and religious principle. Though his wife
was a sister of Johnstone of Warriston, he himself, unlike his two
brothers, was an opponent of the Covenant, for which he went into exile
until the Restoration, when he was made a Judge of the Court of Session
as Lord Crimond. He had three sons by the Warriston lady. His eldest,
Sir Thomas Burnett, was physician to royalty from Charles II to Queen
Anne. The third was Gilbert, Bishop of Salisbury, of whom it is not my
intention to give any detailed account. His brilliant talents and great
influence made him many friends, and even more enemies. History is
beginning to do justice to his character without concealing his
weaknesses. He seems to have been more honest than was the fashion
in his time.

Such is the little gathering of family history, for the accuracy of
which I am chiefly indebted to my kind friend the Lord Lyon--himself a
Burnett. Perhaps I should apologise for saying even the little I have
said of the Dean's pedigree; but while I press into my service the
country of his birth and breeding, and the local peculiarities amongst
which his life was spent, as possibly having some influence on his
character, I could not resist the wish to show another element, drawn
from his ancestry, that went to the forming of that character. Was not
our Dean a worthy representative of Puritan leaders who refused to go
into the violence of the Covenant--of the Bishop of unreproached life,
who read the Thirty-nine Articles with an unconcealed desire to include
conscientious Dissenters--of many peaceful gentlemen on the banks of the
Dee, who mixed a happy playful humour with a catholic reverence for that
Christianity which he could recognise in other sects, though
preferring his own?

FOOTNOTES:

[7] The present generation of Burnetts think that those slang names were
invented by Barclay, but I knew him well, and venture to doubt his
humorous powers. In the midst of "sporting" and violent excitement he
was serious in talk, as became the descendant of the old Quakers.

[8] Mrs. Russell had lost her two sons by a strange fatality--both were
drowned, the elder, Lockhart, while skating at Bath, about 1805-6,
James, the younger, in crossing the river Dee in a boat rowed by
himself in 1827.

III.

Edward Ramsay left Somersetshire amidst the general regrets of his
parishioners and neighbours, and entered on his Edinburgh career 1st
January 1824. The journal which I am now using has not hitherto spoken
much of the differing opinions of his brother clergymen, although there
is sometimes a clergyman noted as "very low," and elsewhere, one branded
as a "concealed Papist." But in Edinburgh--it is vain to conceal
it--every profession must be broken into parties. He found Edinburgh, or
rather I should say the Episcopal Church in Edinburgh, then
theologically divided between the Evangelicals, headed by the Rev.
Edward Craig and the old-fashioned Churchmen, the rather moral school,
of which Mr. Alison was the distinguished ornament. Mr. Ramsay went to
St. George's Chapel, York Place, as Mr. Shannon's curate, in the
beginning of 1824, and remained doing that duty for two and a half
years. He then went to St. Paul's, Carrubber's Close, where he laboured
for a year.

In 1825 Ramsay "toiled on" with sermons and wrote a series on the
Articles. "A great improvement," he says, "must have taken place in
Edinburgh, for unquestionably the sermons I then got credit for we
should all think little of now[9]." In 1826 he left Mr. Shannon's
chapel, and took the single charge of the quaint old chapel of St.
Paul's, Carrubber's Close. Amongst the events recorded of the year was
the acquaintance he made by officiating at the funeral of Lady Scott,
Sir Walter's wife. In 1827 he mentions a change, "a considerable move to
me, which, under God, has been a good one." He closed with an offer of
the curacy of St. John's, under Bishop Sandford, when he was
thirty-seven years of age. In spring he was ill, and went to visit his
old place and friends in Somerset.--"Interesting, very: received at my
old curacy of Buckland with much joy, and on the whole enjoyed my
visit." At Whitsunday 1827 he came home to enter on St. John's with
Bishop Sandford, being thus half of 1827 in Carrubber's Close and half
in St. John's. I was in Edinburgh then, and can well remember what
general favour accompanied Mr. Ramsay in church and society. Perhaps he
was not prepared for the vehemence of church dissensions among us. I do
not think there was at that time so bitter war between churchmen of the
same profession in England, but the Episcopal Church, of whatever
section, had made great progress then in Scotland. Its fine liturgy, and
more decorous ceremonial, had attracted some. Many of the heads of
country families round Edinburgh have been educated in England, and many
of them have married in England--both circumstances tending to keep up
their attachment to the Episcopal Church; and in their houses the
scholarly, accomplished, agreeable clergyman of the Episcopal Church was
a welcome guest, as well as an adviser and influential friend.

In summer of 1827 the journal tells us his brother Marmaduke paid him a
visit. "We read some Italian--I got a notion of Dante."

At the commencement of 1829 he enters in his journal--"This was a most
important year indeed, the year of my marriage; and what event has been
to me so joyful, so full of interesting recollections?" He tells that in
the summer a visitor came to Scotland--a friend of Lady Dalhousie, and
recommended by her to Lady Robert Kerr, at whose house they met. The
lady was Isabella Cochrane, of the well-known Canadian family; writing
in 1844 he says--"Fifteen years of close acquaintance with that lady
have taught me the best commentary upon the Scripture declaration that a
'virtuous woman is a crown to her husband.' I need not say more than
that I believe I owe mainly to her (under Providence) my comfort,
success and position here. But let this suffice. None but myself can
know my full obligations." Next year begins--"As 1829 gave me a wife,
1830 gave me a church, for on the 14th January Bishop Sandford died, and
the whole charge was offered to me, which I undertook for three years
without a curate--i.e. without a man-curate, for a most effective
assistant I had in dearest Isabella, who wrote to my dictation many a
weary hour."

Except a little parcel of letters touching the negotiation with Bishop
Skinner, and the Aberdeen congregation in 1822, I find no letters of
Ramsay till he wrote to one of the dear old friends at Frome announcing
a visit with his wife.

Mr. RAMSAY to Miss STUART SHEPPARD, Fromefield, Frome,
Somerset.

7 Albany Court, London, 9th June [1831].

My dear Stuart, I have been in such a whirl and such a
turmoil since I came here that I have hardly had time to
collect my scattered thoughts to write you a line. I have
seen much and heard much, but shall not attempt to give you
any account _now_, as I hope (please God) we shall meet ere
long. Mrs. Ramsay's brother-in-law, the Bishop of Nova
Scotia, is here--he preached the annual sermon for the
anniversary meeting of the Charity Children in St. Paul's. I
went as his chaplain, but of this more hereafter. He has been
very urgent upon us to protract our stay here through all
next week, but I have resisted his importunities, as I am
really desirous of taking as much time as I can at Frome. We
accordingly fix Tuesday for leaving London. We stay that day
at Windsor with a friend, come to Winchester, Romsey,
Salisbury, on Wednesday, and on Thursday the 16th, I hope to
see you all in health and comfort. Dear Stuart, I shall be
happy, really happy, to be amongst you once more. It is to me
like coming _home_. Do not wait dinner or make any
arrangements, because our hour of arrival is uncertain. We
may be detained till the evening seeing sights. Mrs. E.B.R.
eats nothing (literally), and I daresay your common dinner
may furnish _me_ with a meal. Mrs. Ramsay desires kindest
love; she is not looking well, and I hope, after the racket
here, she will improve upon Frome quiet. God bless you.--Your
affectionate

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34