THE frightful daubs which ornament our dining-rooms, doing duty as family portraits, owe their exist ence and position to one of the most universal of human principles. At first a spectator would be astonished at the prominent place occupied by the portentous visage of our grandfather, that vulgar countenance, that toddy-speckled nose, those maudlin eyes-Why, in Heaven's name, was Dick Tinto permitted to immortalise such degrading characteristics? and why does his wretched performance hold the place of honour over the mantelpiece, to be looked at, sneered at, scunnered at, by the best-natured of our friends? When he turns his attention to the other side of the room, and sees the perked-up countenance of our grandmother-the cap hiding the greater part of her forehead, the ruff burying the lower part of her chin, the short-waisted gown, and gorgeous-patterned India shawl our visitor is still further amazed at the reason of our rescuing those very commonplace presentments from the garret or the fire. The central figures are supported on all sides by other members of the family. Aunt Sibylla flares in yellow and gold; uncle Peter leans on an anchor, and defies the storms he is likely to meet in command of the Hopeful, East Indiaman; and over the sideboard, in a profusion of frill and hairpowder, is a dark, Rembrandtish, and rather indistinct representation of the great Æneas of our tribe, who founded our respectability on sugarcasks and rum. We don't admire these pictures as works of art; we don't cherish them as elevating to our pride of ancestry; but we have a very great attachment to them, failures and caricatures as they are, for they give us an idea of how our predecessors looked and dressed. They enable us to trace the genealogy of our own snub nose, and our eldest hope's squint; and it is easy to form an estimate of the tempers and manners of the originals from

the acquaintance we make with their outward forms. But when we ascend in the scale of wealth and position, the family galleries of our nobility must be pieces of silent history, perhaps as redolent of truth as the pages of our most brilliant authors. For the chief personages are not left alone, but, girt by many a baron bold, some of their own blood, and some of the equally noble races with whom they were brought into intimacy by politics or religion, they present a faithful image of the generation to which they belonged-hardfeatured, dark complexioned, firmhanded men like Strafford; or burly, wide-coated knights and gentlemen who admired Townshend more for introducing turnips into Norfolk, than Sir Robert Walpole for preserving the country from foreign and civil war. Yet in all our inspections of the effigies of past times, the words of Cowper are always in our mind

"Oh, that those lips had language!" The face, after all, is a poor index to the thought. A man may have the nose of the Duke of Wellington and the heart of Bobadil; a woman may have the brows of the chaste Diana and the life of Lady Mary. Let us hear what they said and did-tell us something about them, be it ever so little-"How lived, how loved, how died they?" And this accounts for the amazing twaddle we read in the catalogues of historic collections. Emulous of the sprawling artists, the anecdote-monger splashes in his facts here and here, without the least keeping or regard to harmony or proportion. Incidents are misplaced, characters are travestied or interchanged. Dick Turpin's ride to York is attributed to Prince Rupert the meanness of Elwes transferred to the Duke of Marlborough; the faultless honesty of downright Shippen thrust on Lord Bacon.

To remedy these defects, we turn to better authenticated statements,

Edinburgh: William Blackwood

and catch an occasional glimpse of real character in the events or sayings attributed to a particular man. But wit, and wisdom itself, is a very evanescent quality, unless all the circumstances which gave rise to it, and even the peculiarities of the people to whom it is addressed, are brought before us at the same time. Dr Johnson, always witty and always wise, was wise and witty in quite a different manner in his teadrinkings with Miss Williams and Robert Lovett, from that of the club and his rencontres with Goldsmith and Burke. We should probably see neither wisdom nor wit in his conversation with the blind old poetess and the quack, for we have no knowledge of the two personages which could enable us to judge of the appositeness of his repartee or advice. We only know that they were penniless and afflicted, and we therefore see their fitness to be the objects of commiseration and bounty. His charity becomes beautiful and intelligible when we see the excessive friendlessness and know the inexhaustible philanthropy of his great kind heart. With Burke or Goldsmith, on the other hand, the case is so essentially different that the

conversation owes all its charm to our intimacy with the parties engaged in it. After a blustering and inappropriate tirade from Oliver, we see the thunder gathering on the avenger's brow, we watch for the inevitable bolt, and when it strikes are only surprised at the thickness or divine temper of the victim's shield, which enables us to admire the force and dexterity of the blow without having to condole over broken bones or diminished self-satisfaction. The great art of Boswell was shown in grouping as much as in individual likeness. For an isolated figure, we repeat, either in anecdote or painting, tells us nothing. A thousand stories may be handed down from father to son, but as the journey lengthens the light decays. The accessories are left out, the local or chronological colouring is changed, and at last a tale that convulsed contemporary audiences with its humour, and recalled to the listeners the tones of voice and expressions of countenance, the ranks and qualities

of all the persons introduced, falls as dead upon succeeding ears as the impersonal jokes in Joe Miller, or the facetiæ of Cicero.

Every period, we suppose, appears to the men of it the most remarkable in the annals of time. They have had all their own adventures in it, and have been triumphant in lawsuits or successful in love, and have seen the greatest comet and heard the most eloquent preacher, or huzzaed the greatest general the world had hitherto produced. But as the golden years go on, the preacher turns out to be a very third-rate performer on the used out tightrope of prophecy and the end of all things, and the general is only a fit companion for Whitelock or Major Sturgeon. Unless as studies of human character, there are long tracts of national existence on which we look back and find all barren. A man born in the year of the Revolution heard nothing to break his slumbers till he was five-and-twenty years of age. Between the rebellions of '15 and '45 history has little to record. A few fussy, selfish, and utterly unprincipled individuals busied themselves about domestic politics, and coquetted with pretenders, or put on the guise of patriotism and a love of freedom; but the general current of English life was as slow as that of a Dutch canal. Squires and shopkeepers drank their beer and smoked their pipes and were quiet; and to us the two most prominent personages of a whole generation were a hump-backed little poet and a short-faced philosopher. We have more interest in Pope and Addison than in any of the commanders and politicians who loomed so large on the people who had no knowledge of perspective, and thought Richmond Hill, seen from the Thames, as high as the Alps.

It is not altogether because they wanted a sacred chronicler that that period and others we could name have sunk into comparative oblivion. We, who come after, weigh the merits of a generation by the effect we see it to have produced on its successors. A great generation is the one which, by its acts or sufferings, scatters the seeds of future harvests. For man is very ungrateful,

and judges only by effects. Garibaldi himself may sink into a Rienzi or even into a Walker, unless the edifice he has raised be found permanent and useful. If Italian unity is a failure, nobody, in twenty years from this time, will care for the most careful account of the great Liberator, for his letters or speeches; but if he has indeed inaugurated a new life for the classic land, and has succeeded in uniting a northern and Protestant love of liberty to the passion and poetry of the southern blood, no description will be too diffuse, no anecdote too unimportant, to be cherished as of great value, because revealing glimpses of an individual whose personal qualities have changed the destiny of nations, and impressed themselves, as we, perhaps, presumptuously hope, on the character of his countrymen. We should, therefore, not advise any of the enthusiastic worshippers of the present to give the world the benefit of their experience till time has stamped the current coin of praise and adulation with the marks of its solid value. Let them lay in their materials now. Let them photograph the active agents in this great movement-the squab features and warlike presence of the Sardinian King, and the portly form of Cavour; let them carefully represent Garibaldi surrounded by his friends, singing, haranguing, inspiring, or comforting, as the case may be; but here let them stop till the inexorable years have shown whether the end will form a fit conclusion to the glittering commencement--whether, in fact, the heroes are real heroes, working a real work; or stage heroes, with tin swords and tinsel crowns, raising unsubstantial thrones, and speaking only at the dictation of the prompter.

Our own country may appear, to the unobservant, to have had no period of excitement and change like the present uprising of the nations against their old regime. But a deeper inquirer sees as great an upheaving of thought and endeavour in Scotland, after the abortive effort to restore the ancient race of our kings, as any people can show at any time of their career. The old order changed almost imperceptibly, giving place to new. We had been a fractious,

discontented set of people, grumbling at the Union; grumbling at the wealth of England, though we were invited to share it; half savage still, through a persistent pride in retaining the feelings and fashions which had prevailed when other people's were as savage as ourselves; divided by religious animosities, tricked in many instances by our nobility, and sulkily settling down to our rude feasts and portentous debauches, to console ourselves for our national degradation and personal want of power. But gradually the scene changed. The national genius manifestly took a new direction. We left off talking seriously about a restoration of the Stuarts, and only sang delightful songs about bonnie Prince Charlie; but we buckled to the serious business of life. We produced a crop of philosophers, orators, wits, and statesmen, such as had never been dreamt of before. We became merchants and colonists, and scattered the glories of our northern pronunciation in all lands. We took possession of India and America, and the islands adjacent thereto; and having grown rich, adventurous, and famous wherever a bawbee was to be made, or a gallant achievement performed, we looked back through the checkered career of little more than forty years, and we saw at one end of it the young Chevalier with his mob of Highland gillies, and at the other, Hume, Robertson, and Robert Burns, in the maturity of their fame. Now, it is this transition period which engages the attention of the very remarkable man to whom we are indebted for the present work.

It was a period which furnished materials for a calm and leisurely survey, not like that other awakening of new thoughts which gloomed and lightened in the French Revolution, presenting such mixtures of the grotesque and grand, agitating men's minds with such alternations of hope and fear, and ending in such a cataclysm of all previous ideas, that description was impossible, because there was neither time nor opportunity for observation; and that mightiest of human movements must be content to go down to posterity shrouded in its own portentous shadows, as terrible and as indis

tinct as the spirit that passed before the face of Eliphaz. Glimpses may be caught at intervals of a Mirabeau or a Danton, but nobody was in a state to study them; and they owe their historical personality to the after-thoughts and dramatic imagination of the generation who knew them not. Now, here was a Scottish divine, calm-minded, clear-eyed, so fortunately placed that he could be a spectator of everything going on, with as commanding a view of the storms which seemed to fight against the Churches, and finally "to confound and swallow navigation up," as a watchman on the Eddystone Lighthouse, beholding from his safe eyrie the tackings and tumblings of a disordered fleet.

Alexander Carlyle was born in 1722, and died in 1805. He was present at the battle of Prestonpans, and the procession of Prince Charlie to Holyrood; he lived through the triumphs of Chatham and Wolfe, the glories of Duncan, Jervis, and Nelson, and saw the first establishment of Napoleon as Emperor of the French. His Memoirs, however, do not come down so far; but many of the persons commemorated in his sketches survived almost to our own day; and thus connect us by one link to the performers in the murder of Captain Porteous, and the strange histories of Lord Lovat and Lord Grange.

We have said the position of the author was eminently adapted for the study of passing events. His personal qualities were no less in his favour as an observer of life and manners. Polite and brilliant as a Marquis of Versailles, and handsome in face and form in a very remarkable degree, he did not bury his powers of entertainment and fascination in a country manse. His were not, indeed, the days when the gentry of the land still found it an honour to serve at the national altar, and retained the social position which the displaced Episcopalian establishment had secured to its ministers. A spirit, however, of mutual good-will occasionally existed between the adherents of the two forms of government, and we meet with a charming anecdote in the early part of the volume, where we are

told of his visit to the manse of "old Lundie of Saltoun, a pious and primitive old man, very respectful in his manners, and very kind. He had been bred an old Scotch Episcopalian, and was averse to the Confession of Faith; the presbytery showed lenity towards him, so he did not sign it to his dying day, for which reason he never could be a member of Assembly." Carlyle himself was of excellent family on both sides of the house, being descended by his father from the Lords Carlyle, and claiming kin through his mother with the Dukes of Hamilton, and having the claim allowed. His father and mother were not so remarkable in other respects as the parents of distinguished characters are generally represented; the truth being, that the abilities attributed to the progenitors owe their existence to the affection and youthful admiration of the child. We have known the surviving parents of illustrious men, and found them as dull as if their progeny were very ordinary persons, but who will come out in the memoirs of the poct, orator, or statesman, as among the wisest and best of mankind. Partly to this elevating influence of filial love we may attribute the description of his mother. "My mother was a person of superior understanding, of à calm and firm temper, of an elegant and reflecting mind; and, considering she was the eldest of seven daughters and three sons of a country clergyman, near Dumfries, and was born in 1700, she had received an education, and improved by it, far beyond what could have been expected. Good sense, however, and dignity of conduct were her chief attributes. The effect of this was, she was as much respected as my father was beloved."

It will scarcely be believed that this dignity of manner and respect of all her neighbours was maintainedon an income of seventy pounds ayear. There were no complaints of poverty, though the family was increasing; and when the stipend was augmented by the hard exertions of two of the law lords, who not only voted for the increase as heritors of the parish, but actually left the judg ment-seat and pleaded the clergy

man's cause in person, the hospitalities of the manse seem to have been liberal and constant, the expenses of all the family regulated on a very generous scale, and society with the highest of the gentry maintained on equal terms. Yet the result of the augmentation and the friendly eloquence of two Judges of the Court of Session, raised the gross income to only a hundred and forty pounds. "Living was wonderfully cheap, even in Edinburgh, in those days," says the author, with a sigh at the rise of prices in his later time. "There were ordinaries for young gentlemen, at fourpence a-head, for a very good dinner of broth and beef, and a roast and potatoes every day. with fish three or four times a-week, and all the small-beer that was called for till the cloth was removed."

Fourpences must have been very scarce, or beef and broth very abundant, to account for this excessively moderate tariff. By dint of the peace and plenty pervading the minister's house, young Alexander grew up in health and happiness, a fine sprightly intelligent little fellow, with humour and observation far beyond his years. Whether it was a stroke of humour or a knowledge of character which prompted him to the first display of his powers of oratory, we are not told; but it looks like one of the jocular achievements of his maturer days, for it consisted of his mounting a tombstone, and reading to a dozen old women, who had not found room in the church, the whole of the Song of Solomon! This was a fortunate exercise of his eloquence, for one of the old ladies, enchanted probably with the utterly incomprehensible English accent in which the love passages were given (for he had been taught the true pronunciation by an aunt who had been settled some years in London), exclaimed "Ye'll be minister of Prestonpans yersel' some day." "No, no," said the boy, "not Prestonpans; yon's my kirk," and pointed to the tapering spire of Inveresk. The answer lay hidden in the old women's hearts, but when many years had passed, and his presentation to that living was violently opposed by the inhabitants, on the plea of his being too young and volatile for the

charge, the survivors of the audience in Prestonpans churchyard remembered the prophetic saying, and spread the report of it so potently from house to house, that it reconciled the parishioners to their youthful minister, whom they looked on with respect as their foreordained and divinely announced instructor.

One of the law lords who had pleaded for the augmentation of the minister's stipend was the famous Lord Grange, a brother of the still more notorious Earl of Mar; and the principal heritor, at whose expense the increase was to be made, was a certain Morison of Prestongrange. These two are the first specimens from the portrait-gallery of the worthies of Prestonpans, and we doubt whether livelier likenesses are to be found in Miss Mitford's Our Village or the familiar sketches of Miss Austen.

"The two great men of the parish, however, were Morison of Prestongrange, the patron, and the Honourable James Erskine of Grange, one of the Supreme Judges. The first was elected Member

of Parliament for East-Lothian in the first Parliament of Great Britain, al

though the celebrated Andrew Fletcher

of Saltoun was the other candidate. But Government took part with Morison, and Fletcher had only nine votes. Morison had been very rich, but had suffered himself to be stripped by the famous gambler of those times, Colonel Charteris, whom I once saw with him in church, when I was five or six years of age; and being fully impressed with the popular opinion that he was a wizard, who had a fascinating power, I never whole service, believing that I should be once took my eyes off him during the

a dead man the moment I did. This Colonel Charteris was of a very ancient family in Dumfriesshire, the first of whom, being one of the followers of Robert Bruce, had acquired a great estate, a small part of which is still in the family. The colonel had been other

wise well-connected, for he was cousingerman to Sir Francis Kinloch, and, when a boy, was educated with him at the vil

lage school. Many stories were told of him, which would never have been heard

of had he not afterwards been so much

celebrated in the annals of infamy. He was a great profligate, no doubt, but there have been as bad men and greater