The Book-Hunter Part 1

The Book-Hunter.

by John Hill Burton.

CHAPTER I.

ABERDEEN.

_Parentage--Patons--Grandholm--Jersey--"Peninsular War"--School and schoolmasters--Flogging--College--Compet.i.tion for bursaries--Home life--Aunt and grand-aunt--Holiday rambles--Letter._

John Hill Burton, the subject of this notice, was born on the 22d of August 1809, in the Gallowgate of Aberdeen. He was wont to style himself, as in his childhood he had heard himself described, "The last of the Gallowgate bairns;" the Gallowgate being an old part of Aberdeen devoted chiefly to humble trade, no one, in modern times at least, even distantly connected with gentility living there.

His father, William Kinninmont Burton, is believed to have been an only son, and no kith or kin of his were ever seen or heard of by his children. The only relic of their father's family possessed by them is a somewhat interesting miniature on ivory, well painted in the old-fas.h.i.+oned style, representing a not beautiful lady in antique head-dress and costume, and marked on the back "Mary Burton." William Kinninmont Burton held a commission in the army, though he had not been originally intended for a military life. He was, it is supposed, engaged in trade in London when the military enthusiasm, excited by the idea of an invasion of Great Britain by Napoleon, fired him, like so many other young men, into taking up arms as a volunteer. In the end of last century he came to Aberdeen as a lieutenant in a regiment of "Fencibles," or some such volunteer t.i.tle, and there captivated the affections of a beautiful young lady, Miss Eliza Paton, a daughter of the laird of Grandholm, an estate four miles distant from Aberdeen. Of this lady and of her family a few words must be said.

So small was the value of land in Scotland in the beginning of the century, that it is safe to suppose the estate of Grandholm yielded less than one-third of its present rental. The circ.u.mstances and social position of the family were, besides, seriously lowered by the extraordinary character of the then laird. John Paton, grandfather of Dr Burton, was a man not devoid of talent, and of a strikingly handsome gentlemanly appearance and manner. He married, early in life, a beautiful Miss Lance, an Englishwoman, who, after bearing him ten children in about as many years, fell into a weak state of health, of mind as well as body. The laird nursed his wife devotedly for a long period of years, cheris.h.i.+ng her to the exclusion of all other persons or interests. His children he regarded as the enemies of his adored wife, and consequently of himself, and his conduct to them from first to last was little less than brutal. When the enfeebled wife at last died, the husband's grief verged on madness.

He would not allow her body to be buried in the ordinary manner, but caused a tomb to be erected in a wood near the house of Grandholm, where the corpse was placed in an open coffin, and where the bereaved husband could go daily to bewail his loss. The distracted mourner rejected all attentions from children, relatives, or friends, yet apparently dreaded being left alone, for he advertised for a male companion or keeper to bear him company. The writer has often heard Dr Burton amuse himself and his audience by describing the extraordinary varieties of struggling humanity who applied for the situation. Ultimately, it is believed, none of them was selected, and the laird fled from his natural home, and from that time till his death lived chiefly in London, leaving his large young family to take care of themselves as they best could.

The three sons went successively to India or other foreign parts, and died there, one of them leaving a son, whose family are the present possessors of Grandholm.

Of the seven daughters--several of whom were very handsome--two only were married, namely, Eliza, who became Mrs Burton, mother of the historiographer; and Margaret, who espoused rather late in life a Dr Brown, and continued as a widow to inhabit an old house belonging to the Grandholm family in Old Aberdeen till June 1879, when she died at the age of ninety-eight.

The young family, thus deserted by their natural protector, fell chiefly under the authority of his eldest daughter, Mary--said, of all his children, to most resemble the laird himself.

Among this lady's nephews and nieces there linger strange traditions of the violence of her temper, and of the intensity of her loves and hates.

It is hardly necessary to say that none of the females at least of the family received any particular education.

Mary was a woman of strong natural abilities, and of an excellent business faculty. She managed the very small resources left at her command with consummate skill, and in her later years made of Grandholm a hospitable, cheerful, old-fas.h.i.+oned home for those whom it pleased her to receive there. Her sister Eliza's marriage had not pleased her. There was much to justify her objection to it; William Burton, not then holding a commission, was entirely without pecuniary resources.

His strongest talent seems to have been for painting, and by such occupation as he could get in drawing and painting in London he was barely able to maintain himself. The old grandfather and his lieutenant, aunt Mary, have been described to the writer in the darkest colours as having constantly interposed between the true lovers, William Burton and his beloved Eliza Paton, who, in spite of all advice to the contrary, soon became his wife. What the laird of Grandholm and his daughter Mary did was no doubt done in the harshest manner, but their actions themselves seem hardly blamable. When William Burton found it impossible to maintain his wife in London, she was received again into her paternal home with her infant, William, John Hill Burton's elder brother. The wife, of course, earnestly and constantly desired to rejoin her husband.

The father and sister declined to facilitate her doing so by paying the expense of her return journey, concluding that if her husband was unable to meet that outlay, he was not in a position to maintain her beside himself.

After some six or eight years of mutual longing for each other's society, separated by the distance of London from Aberdeen, William Burton succeeded in exchanging his position in the Fencibles for a lieutenancy in a line regiment under orders for India. There also he went unaccompanied by his wife. After brief service in India he had to return home in ill health. Then at last the husband and wife were reunited; first to live together for a time in Aberdeen--afterwards to go with their two sons to Jersey.

The eldest son, William, ten years older than John, afterwards went into the Indian army, and died in India, leaving a son and daughter.

John Hill Burton's earliest recollections dated from his stay with his parents in garrison in Jersey. This must have been about the year 1811 or 1812, when he was therefore two or three years old. He used to say he remembered the relieving of guard in Jersey; that he had an infantine recollection of a military guard-room by night; and remembered a "Lady f.a.n.n.y," the wife, as he believed, of the colonel of the regiment, who showed some slight kindness towards him and other garrison children.

The greatest adventure of Dr Burton's unadventurous life occurred when he was returning with his parents from Jersey, in a troop-s.h.i.+p. The vessel was chased by a French privateer, and for some time the little family had reason to fear becoming inmates of a French prison. It was this incident which Dr Burton used in his later life to say ent.i.tled him to a.s.sert that he had been in the Peninsular War. The homeward journey from Jersey was to Aberdeen, which it is believed Lieutenant Burton and his family never left again till his death. His failing health obliged him to retire from active service on the half-pay of a lieutenant. His wife, from some writings to be hereafter mentioned, seems also to have enjoyed an allowance of 40 per annum from her father.

Besides William and John Hill, there were born in Aberdeen to William Burton and Eliza Paton three sons--two of whom died early, one of them being accidentally drowned in the Don at Grandholm--and one daughter.

The surviving brother of Dr Burton is a retired medical officer of the East India Company. The sister, Mary, remains unmarried.

The little household established in Aberdeen about the year 1812 knew the woes of failing health and narrow means, part of the latter doled out to them by an unwilling hand. Lieutenant Burton's health continued to decline till his death, about the year 1819. His son John was then ten years old, and had begun his school education.

His recollections of schools and schoolmasters were vivid and picturesque. The one schoolmaster--almost the only teacher--to whom he acknowledged any obligation, was James Melvin. To him, he was wont to say, he owed his good Scotch knowledge of Latin; and he delighted even till the end of his life in dwelling on Dr Melvin's methods of teaching, and on the fine spirit of generous emulation and eagerness for knowledge which inspired his pupils.

Both before and after the time of his studies under Dr Melvin he had experience of schoolmasters of a different type. The tales of flogging under these pedagogues were so absolutely sickening, that Dr Burton's family used to beg him to stop his narrations to spare their feelings.

He had beheld, though he had never undergone, the old-fas.h.i.+oned process of flogging by _heezing up_ the culprit on the back of the school-porter, so as to bring his bare back close to the master's lash.

The trembling victim, antic.i.p.ating such punishment, used to be sent to summon the porter. He frequently returned with a half-sobbing message, "Please, sir, _he says_ he's not in." The fiction did not lead to escape. Cromar was the name of the chief executioner in these scenes.

Detested by his pupils, he was a victim to every sort of petty persecution from them, so that cruelty acted and reacted between him and them. On one memorable occasion he flogged John Burton with such violence as to cause to himself an internal rupture.

The offence which led to this unmeasured punishment was "looking impudent!"--and the look of supposed impudence was produced by a temporarily swollen lip; but the swollen lip was the effect of a single combat with a schoolfellow; and fighting was so rife, and so severely repressed, that it appeared less dangerous to meet the consequences of the supposed impertinent face than those of the battle. The unfortunate pupil of course continued to grimace, and the wretched schoolmaster to flog, till the pupil streamed with blood, and the master sat down from sheer exhaustion and an injury from which he never recovered.

Before John Hill Burton had completed his course at the grammar school he gained a bursary by compet.i.tion, and began his studies at Marischal College. The open compet.i.tion for bursaries at Aberdeen was a subject on which he delighted to talk, often with tears of enthusiasm in his eyes. The entire impartiality, the complete openness of these compet.i.tions to the whole world, the spectacle of high learning freely offered to whoever could by merit earn it, seemed to Dr Burton, to his life's end, as fine a subject of contemplation as any the world could offer. During his last illness, a friend, who knew his strong interest in his Alma Mater, presented him with Mr M'Lean's 'Life at a Northern University.' He read it with the utmost delight, often reading pa.s.sages aloud with great emotion, on account of the vivid picture they presented of the scenes of his youth. It was a rough hard life that of an Aberdeen College student fifty or sixty years ago.

Mr M'Lean says of his fellow-students: "As the most of them came from the country--generally from the Highlands and Western Islands of Scotland--they brought with them all their native roughness and coa.r.s.eness of manners. The great majority of those who had spent their lives in town frequented the neighbouring university,[1] where the entrance and other examinations were not nearly so severe. In general, the great bulk of the students were far behind in good manners, and that polish which a large town always gives. Their secluded habits when at college, and their intercourse only with their own number, prevented any improvement in this matter. On the whole, their conduct in the cla.s.s, and their behaviour towards some of the professors, were anything but gentlemanly."[2]

[Footnote 1: Marischal College. Mr M'Lean's descriptions refer to King's; but the two colleges, close together, must have been pretty similar in their manners and customs even before they were, as they now are, formally united.]

[Footnote 2: Life in a Northern University. By Neil M'Lean, author of 'Memoirs of Marshal Keith,' 'Romance of the Seal and Whale Fis.h.i.+ng,'

&c., &c. Glasgow; John S. Marr & Sons: London; Simpkin, Marshall, & Co.

1874.]

Another quotation from Mr M'Lean may be allowed, as embodying the descriptions often given by Dr Burton of the motley crew of compet.i.tors for the scholars.h.i.+ps and bursaries dispensed by the university: "Gazing round the room, I noted that my compet.i.tors consisted of raw-boned red-haired Highlandmen, fresh from their native hills, with all their rusticity about them. All the northern counties had sent their quota to swell the number, and even the Orkney and Shetland Islands were represented. Many rosy-faced young fellows were also to be seen, who had left their country occupations for a little, and who, if unsuccessful"--_i.e._, in gaining a bursary--"would return to them, and work in their leisure hours at their favourite cla.s.sics until another compet.i.tion came round. Here and there were to be seen a few rather better dressed than the rest; whilst amongst the crowd the eye rested on many a studious, thin, cadaverous, hard-worked face, which made you look again, and feel in your heart that there sat a bursar. A more motley crowd, as respects age, dress, and features, could scarcely be found anywhere; and yet over all there was an intellectual, manly look, a look of innocence and unacquaintance with the low ways of the world."[3]

[Footnote 3: Life in a Northern University.]

Among this motley crowd John Hill Burton was no model student. He took his full share of the rough sport so well described in the 'Northern University'--wrenched off door-knockers and house-bells, transplanted sign-boards, &c. He was but a schoolboy in years when he left school for college, and his mother was frequently obliged to provide him with a private tutor, not so much to a.s.sist him in his studies as to keep him from idleness during his hours at home. Home was, during these years, for a time sad, and was always quiet. During his father's lifetime it was diversified by frequent changes of abode within a very narrow circuit.

The writer has seen some half-dozen small houses, in a rather unlovely suburb of Aberdeen, all within sight of each other, which had successively been inhabited by Lieutenant Burton and his family; the poor invalid craving for the real change which might have benefited his health, and seeking relief, instead, in constant change of house. Mrs Burton was ent.i.tled to an abode at Grandholm as well as her sisters, and the little family went there occasionally, at least after Lieutenant Burton's death. The place, which is a rather interesting one, filled a considerable s.p.a.ce in the affections of the children. Its inmates did not. Clearly sister Eliza never was forgiven for her unfortunate marriage. Affection for her husband and for his memory prevented her apologising for it, and her children were not of the sort to apologise for their existence. A series of petty slights, small unkindnesses, imbittered the mind of the poverty-stricken widow against her unmarried sisters, and her feeling was strongly inherited by her children.

A house in Old Aberdeen has been already mentioned as the abode of Mrs Margaret Brown, Dr Burton's last surviving aunt. This quaint old house had been purchased by Mrs Brown's grandmother, mother of the laird of Grandholm, and at the beginning of the century was inhabited by her maiden daughter Margaret, or, as she was oftener called, Peggy Paton.

This lady lived to the age of ninety, and at her death left her house and fortune to her niece and name-daughter, Margaret Paton (Mrs Brown), who in her turn adopted a grand-niece, the daughter already mentioned of Dr Burton's eldest brother, William,--the same who, having nursed her aged aunt till her death, in the last year of his life so tenderly ministered to her uncle, the subject of this notice.

The second in the line of female owners of the old house, Peggy Paton, was, for the outer world, what George Eliot calls "a charicter"--one of those distinguis.h.i.+ng features of country-town life which the march of improvement has swept away: a lady by birth, but owing little to schools or teachers, books or travel: a woman of strong natural understanding and some wit, who loved her nightly rubber at whist, could rap out an oath or a strong pleasantry, and whose quick estimates of men and things became proverbs with the younger generation.

For her inner circle Peggy Paton was a most motherly old maid. She it was who, when she found her niece Eliza _would_ marry Lieutenant Burton, mediated between father and daughter, and arranged matters as well as might be in an affair in which her good sense found much to disapprove, and her heart much to excuse. Not only to her niece Margaret, her adopted daughter, but also to her other nieces at Grandholm, motherless by death, and fatherless by desertion, did she fill a mother's part as far as these robust virgins would permit her. Sister Eliza's rough little children, or rougher great boys, always found kindness in the house in the Old Town, first in their grand-aunt's[4] time, and afterwards in that of her successor, Mrs Brown. David, Dr Burton's younger brother, was lovingly tended by them during part of the lingering illness of which he died, and the youngest of Eliza Paton's sons remained an inmate of Mrs Brown's house that he might continue his education in Aberdeen, when his mother removed to Edinburgh.

[Footnote 4: It may not be counted indelicate, as it refers to a period 120 years gone by, to mention that Peggy Paton once had a lover, and that this, her first lover, was no other than the son of that Moir of Stoneywood, whose correspondence is so frequently quoted in Dr Burton's 'History of Scotland.' The young man was Peggy's first cousin, the lairds of Grandholm and Stoneywood having married sisters--Mackenzie by name. The laird of Stoneywood is known to posterity by his ingenious achievement of ferrying the rebel army across the Dornoch Firth in small fis.h.i.+ng-boats collected by Stoneywood all along the coast. On the defeat of the Pretender, and the suppression of the insurrection in 1746, Stoneywood's estate was confiscated, and he fled to the Continent.

Family tradition adds that his escape was achieved by his disguising himself as a miller and swimming across the Don from Stoneywood to Grandholm, where the laird of Grandholm, who was of opposite politics, had removed the ferry-boat, and saw but did not denounce his kinsman.

The houses of Grandholm and Stoneywood are exactly opposite each other on the two sides of the Don. Mrs Moir of Stoneywood did not immediately follow her husband, but remained with her friends to bring up her children, among them Miss Peggy's lover, who, soon after his engagement to her, joined his father on the Continent and there died.]

For those who do not know Aberdeen, it may be proper to say that _Old_ Aberdeen is as entirely distinct from New Aberdeen as Edinburgh is from Leith--in a different way. The distance between them is somewhat greater, about two miles; and whereas New Aberdeen is a highly prosperous commercial city, as entirely devoid of beauty or interest as any city under the sun, Old Aberdeen is a sweet, still, little place, hardly more than a village in size, in appearance utterly unlike any other place in Scotland, resembling a little English cathedral town,--the towers and spires of college and cathedral beautifully seen through ancient trees from the windows of Miss Peggy Paton's old house, to which that managing lady added a wing, and which possessed a good flower and fruit garden, wherein grew plenty of gooseberries, ever Dr Burton's favourite fruit. His birthday, 22d August, was, during his mother's life, always celebrated by a family feast of them.

Such were the scenes and circ.u.mstances of Dr Burton's childhood and early youth. As he grew old enough to begin those long walks which to the end were the great pleasure of his life, he made acquaintance with the beautiful scenery of the Upper Dee and Don. In holiday time his mother used to give him a small sum of money, at most one pound, and allow him to travel as far as the amount would take him. His legs were almost always his only conveyance; throughout his life he entertained an aversion to either riding or driving. His temper was too impatient, too energetic, to allow him to enjoy progress without exertion. After railways existed he sometimes used them in aid of his walking power; but all horse vehicles were odious to him, partly by reason of an excessive tenderness for animals. He could not bear to see a horse whipped, or any living creature subjected to bodily pain.

Wonderful are the accounts the writer has heard of the duration of that holiday pound: how Dr Burton and sometimes a chosen companion would subsist day after day on twopence-worth of oatmeal, that by so doing they might travel the farther; or how, having improvidently finished their supply, they would walk some incredible distance without any food at all, till they reached either their home or the house of some friend.

In these holiday rambles Dr Burton made the acquaintance of several families either more or less related to him through his Grandholm kindred, or willing, in the old Scotch fas.h.i.+on, to extend hospitality to any wayfarer who needed it. In this way Dr Burton has described himself as the guest of Mrs Gordon at Abergeldie, who, as he said, made a request that when he came to visit her he would if possible arrive before midnight. Invercauld, Glenkindie, Tough, and many other country-houses, were visited in the same unceremonious way.

The letter here given was written to his mother during one of these holiday rambles, when its writer was about twenty, and describes some of the scenes of the wonderful flood of '29, so graphically described by Sir Thomas d.i.c.k Lauder. The Colonel H. was the son of Dr Burton's G.o.dfather, and a man of mature years at the time the Highlander and Dr Burton describe him as having "run away." The writer can offer no explanation of this rather amusing pa.s.sage in the letter: it might either be a mere joke or refer to some family quarrel of the Colonel's.

"LAKEFIELD, _8th September 1829_.

"MY DEAR MOTHER,--I have just arrived at Lakefield in the midst of determined and ceaseless rain. I expected of course to meet A.H.

here, but it seems he ran away the other day, and will by this time be in Aberdeen. He wrote to Mrs Grant from Elgin, but she has not yet heard of his arrival in Aberdeen.