XIV.

It is, however, time that we should say a few words about Sanin.

Firstly: he was not at all bad-looking. He was tall and well-proportioned, had pleasant though somewhat irregular features, kind, small blue eyes, golden hair, and a pink and white complexion. But what charmed one most about him, was his childlike gayety, his trusting, frank, though, at first sight, not brilliant expression - an expression which, in former days, was stamped on all the scions of noble families, sons in the image of their fathers," good young noblemen's sons, born and educated in our wild semi-steppe countries; with a hesitating step, a lisping voice, and an innocent smile-in one word, with freshness and health, and with a softness, a delicate softness pervading his whole nature-such was Sanin in appearance. In the second place, he was no simpleton, but had contrived to pick up some knowledge here and there, and in spite of his travels abroad, he was still entirely unspoilt; the excitement that was prevailing amongst the youth of that period was but little known to him. Of late years, our literature, after fruitless attempts in search of “new characters," has produced novel specimens in the form of young men bent on appearing fresh fresh as Flensburg oysters imported to Russia. Sanin did not resemble them. If we must indeed liken him to any thing, let it rather be to a young apple-tree newly planted in our rich gardens-or, better still, to a pampered, smooth, thick-legged, delicate, three-year-old horse, formerly belong ing to a gentleman's stud, and who was now being driven with a curb. . . . Those who came across Sanin at a later period, when life's trials and troubles had fallen heavily on him, and all his youthful ardor had long since died out of him, saw him as a very different man.

The following day, Sanin was still lying in bed, when Emile, in his holiday dress, with a small cane in his hand, and smelling strongly of pomatum, rushed into his room and told him that Herr Klüber would arNEW SERIES.-VOL. XVIII., No. 4

rive instantly with a carriage, that the weather promised to be wonderfully fine, that they had finished all their preparations, but that their mother could not join them, owing to another bad headache. He hurried Sanin, declaring there was not a moment to be lost. And it was true; Herr Klüber found Sanin still busily occupied with his toilet. He knocked at the door, entered, bowed, said he was quite ready to wait for him any time-and sat down, leaning elegantly on his hat, which he placed on his knees. The good-looking clerk had dressed himself in his best, and had scented himself to such an extent that every movement of his was accompanied by a strong aromatic whiff. He had arrived in a large open carriage or landau, drawn by a couple of strong, full-grown, but by no means handsome-looking horses. In a quarter of an hour's time, Sanin, Klüber, and Emile dashed up triumphantly to the door of the confectioneryshop in this very identical carriage. Frau Roselli firmly refused to be of the party; Gemma wished to remain at home with her mother, but the latter would not hear of such a thing.

"I do not require any one," said the old lady in an assuring voice. "I shall go to sleep. I should have sent Pantaleone with you; but if I did that, there would be no one to serve in the shop."

66

May we take Tartaglia ?" asked Emile.

"Of course you may."

Tartaglia immediately struggled up joyfully on to the box, and seated himself there with an air of contentment; one could see that he was used to the elevated position he occupied. Gemma had put on a large straw hat with brown ribbons; it was bent down in front, shading her face as far as her lips, which were as blooming and as fresh as the delicate petals of a rose, while her teeth gleamed white and pure as a child's. She placed herself on the back seat, next to Sanin; Klüber and Emile sat opposite. opposite. Frau Lenore's pale face appeared at the window; Gemma waved her handkerchief to her, and they started off.

29

(TO BE CONTINUED.)

This ex post facto prophecy applies with special force to Falkland in England, and

in Scotland to Montrose. "The noblest of all the Cavaliers," Montrose has been called; "an accomplished, gallant-hearted, splendid man; what one may call the Hero-Cavalier." In the crowd of striking figures that occupy the stage of the Revolution, there is no one so romantically brilliant as Montrose; no one so picturesquely relieved against other figures that move amid the sad and stormful grandeurs of the time. Those contrasted types of character which have been so well marked in Scottish history as to arrest the attention of Europe,-the cold, cautious, forecasting type, the impetuous and perfervid type,-were never so finely opposed as in the persons of the deep-thoughted, melancholy Argyle, and the impulsive and intrepid Montrose.

James Graham, fifth Earl and first Marquis of Montrose, was born in 1612, in one of his father's castles, near the town of that name. The Grahams were among the most ancient and honorable families of Scotland. Tradition talks of a Graham scaling, in the cause of old Caledonia, the Roman wall between Forth and Clyde, and with clearer accents of a Graham who was the trustiest and best-beloved of the friends of Wallace,

Mente manuque potens, et Vallæ fidus
Achates,"-

who sleeps, beneath a stone bearing this inscription, in the old Church of Falkirk, near the field on which he fell. History, taking up the tale from tradition, informs us that one ancestor of Montrose died, sword in hand, at Flodden, and another at Pinkie. His grandfather was High Treasurer to James I.; then Chancellor; finally Viceroy of Scotland. His father was President of Council, and in 1604 and 1606 carried the great Seal as one of the foremost nobles of Scotland in the Parlia

ments held at Perth, when the nobility rode in state. This Lord, who in his youth was hot and headstrong, had subsided, long before the birth of his son James, into a quiet country gentleman, vigilantly managing his estates. He was possessed of great baronies in the counties of Perth, Stirling, Dumbarton, and Forfar, and had exact

ideas as to the number of oxen to his ploughs, of puncheons of wine in his cel lars, of sacks of corn in his granaries. He was an inveterate smoker, perpetually investing in tobacco and tobacco-pipes, a circumstance which has attracted notice from the sensitive dislike with which his son shrank from the slightest smell of tobacco.

Lord James, as from his infancy he was called, was the only son in a family of six. Margaret, the eldest of his sisters, was married to Lord Napier of Merchiston, son of the discoverer of logarithms; and the brother-in-law, a man of parts and character, exerted a great influence on Montrose in his youth. Two of his sisters appear to have been younger than himself. He must have been a beautiful boy. The pride of his father, the pet of his mother and elder sisters, the heir to an exalted title and broad lands, he was likely to feel himself from childhood an important personage, and to have any seeds of ostentation, vanity, and wilfulness which might be sown in his nature somewhat perilously fostered.

His boyhood was favorable in an eminent degree to the generous and chivalrous virtues. We can fancy him scampering on his pony over the wide green spaces of the old Scottish landscape, when roads were still few, and the way from one of his father's castles to another would be by the drove roads, or across the sward and the heather. Travelling, even of ladies and children, was then almost universally performed on horseback. Lord James had two ponies expressly his own, and we hear of his fencing-swords and his bow. At Glasgow, whither he proceeded to study at twelve years of age, under the charge of a tutor named William Forrett, he continued to ride, tence, and practise archery. He was attended by a valet and

two young pages of his own feudal following, Willy and Mungo Graham. He had a suit of green camlet, with embroidered cloak, and his two pages were dressed in red. He and Forrett rode out together, Lord James on a white horse. Among Among his books was the History of Geoffrey de Bouillon, and one of his favorite volumes was Raleigh's History of the World. The establishment was supplied with "manchets," the white bread of the period, and oatcake and herrings were important items in the commissariat. These particulars, gleaned by Mr. Mark Napier from memoranda made by Forrett, enable us to realize with vividenss the life of the boy Montrose in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, when the Clyde was still a silvery river glancing by the quiet town that clustered round the old Cathedral of Glasgow.

From Glasgow we trace him to St. Andrews, where he matriculated in the University a few months before his father's death. He was fourteen when the shrewd and experienced Earl, whose predominance might have kept him beneficially in the shade, and exercised an influence to chasten and concentrate his faculties, was laid in the family vault. From this time Montrose appears to have been very much lord of himself. His was a mind of that order which peculiarly required, to develop its utmost strength, all that wise men mean by discipline. To develop its utmost strength; not necessarily to develop its utmost beauty and natural grace and splendor. There was no malice, or guile, or cross-grained self-will, or obstinate badness

of

any kind in young Montrose. He accepted, with open-hearted welcome, the influence of Forrett, of Napier, of every worthy friend or teacher, winning and retaining through life their ardent affection. The poetry, the romance, of his nature bloomed out in frank luxuriance. But the gravity and earnest strength, the patient thoughtfulness, thoroughness, and the habit of comprehensible intellectual vision, which are indispensable to men who not only play a brilliant part in great revolutions, but regulate and mould them, were never his; and we cannot be sure that, under the authority of a sagacious, affectionate, and determined father, he might not have attained them. There is no sign that, at college, he engaged seriously in study. He became probably a fluent Latinist, which no man

with any pretensions to education could then fail to be; he was fond of Cæsar, whose Commentaries he is said to have carried with him in his campaigns; and he loved all books of chivalrous adventure; but we hear of no study that imposed self-denial, or required severe application. He was a distinguished golf-player and archer. There being now no heir, in the direct line, to the earldom and estates, he was counselled by his friends to marry early, and when only seventeen led to the altar Magdalene Carnegie, daughter of the Earl of Southesk. He was already the father of two boys when, on attaining his majority, he started on his Continental travels in 1633.

For three years he remained abroad, in France and Italy. He made himself, say his panegyrists, "perfect in the academies;" learned " as much mathematics as is required for a soldier" (rather less probably than Count Moltke might prescribe); conversed with celebrities, political and erudite; and devoted himself by preference to the study of great men. Doubtless these were years of eager observation, of eager and rapid acquisition. He seems to have already impressed a wide circle. with the idea of his superiority, and he was prone to accept the highest estimate which his flatterers formed of him.

Returning from the Continent in 1636, he presented himself at Court. Charles received him coldly, and he was hurt. There is no need to believe with Mr. Napier that the Marquis of Hamilton elaborately plotted to prevent his acquiring influence with the King. Clarendon's remark respecting Charles, that he “did not love strangers nor very confident men," accounts for what happened. A dash of ostentation and self-confidence was conspicuously present in Montrose; and, as his sister Catherine was known to be at this time lurking in London in an adulterous connection with her brother-in-law, it may have occurred to the King that it would be not unbecoming in the young gentleman to carry less sail.

In Scotland he found himself a person of consequence. He was in the front rank of the nobility, his estates were large, his connection extensive; and there was a general persuasion that he was capable of great things. It was of high importance to secure such a man to the popular cause, and Montrose was not indisposed to throw himself into the movement.

The

scheme of Thorough, in its two branches of enslavement in Church and State, had been applied to the Scottish Parliament and to the Scottish Church. Mr. Brodie, whose valuable work on our Constitutional History has been, perhaps, too much thrown into the shade by Hallam, points out the grasping arbitrariness with which, in his visit to Scotland in 1636, Charles laid his hand upon the civil as well as the religious liberties of Scotland. On returning from his travels in 1636, Montrose becanie convinced that both were in danger, and with all that was best in the intelligence and most fervent in the religion of Scotland, he prepared for their defence. Against Thorough the National Covenant of 1638 was Scotland's protest. It corresponds, in its essential meaning, though not in time, to the impeachment of Strafford by the Commons of England. In each instance the respective nations may be pronounced unanimous. Clarendon acted with Hampden and Pym against Strafford; Montrose put his name to the National Covenant as well as Argyle, and sat upon the same Table, or, as we should now say, managing committee of Covenanting Nobles with Lothian and Rothes. Baillie says that the Covenanters found it difficult to "guide" him; but this arose in the earlier stages of the business, not because his Covenanting zeal was in defect, but because he would do things in a high-handed, and what appeared to them an imprudently open way. The The Tables, for examples, had looked after the Presbyterial elections to the Glasgow Assembly of 1638 with a particularity savoring rather of paternal government on the modern Imperial type than of a government extemporized for the purpose of vindicating, as one chief thing, the freedom of Presbyteries in Scotland. This fact turned up inopportunely in the Assembly itself, through the awkwardness of a clerk, who blurted out the name of the man whom one of the Presbyteries had been instructed by the Edinburgh Tables to return. The Rev. David Dickson endeavored to explain, hinting that the name in question had been sent down to the Presbytery through negligence. Montrose would not countenance even so much of pious guile. He started to his feet, put aside canny David's explanation, and declared that the Tables would stand to every jot of what they had written. He

had no secretiveness in his nature, and could do nothing by halves. He was at this time a resolute and even an enthusi astic Covenanter.

Partly, perhaps, with a view to humor. ing and leading him, partly, also, because they knew that he was at heart true to the cause, the Covenanters named him Generalissimo of the army which proceeded to Aberdeen in the beginning of 1639, to check the Marquis of Huntley, who was in arms in the royal interest, and to chastise the anti-Covenanting town. He was accompanied by General Alexander Leslie, nominally his Adjutant, really his in ́structor. Montrose took his first practical lessons in war with the aptitude of genius born for the field. The Aberdonians and the Gordons felt the weight of his hand, and the Royalists in the north-east of Scotland were effectually quelled; but even while enforcing the Covenant at the sword-point, he proclaimed that his zeal for the religious liberties of Scotland was not more honest than his allegiance to his Sovereign; and there sprung up and gradually strengthened in him the idea that Argyle and his party were pressing matters too far, that enough had been conceded by Charles, and that the day was drawing near when it would be necessary to make a stand for the Monarchy.

In point of fact, sincere as was the Covenanting zeal of Montrose, it was never so fervent as in some of the Covenanters. He was a religious man, but his religion was a very different thing from that of Cromwell, Vane, or Argyle. With them religion was an impassioned energy of spiritual enthusiasm; with him it was the devout and reverent loyalty with which a noble nature regards the Sovereign of the universe. If the main current of tendency in those years was religious,—if the main factor in world-history was religious earnestness,-the circumstance that Montrose was not a supremely religious man, would account for his having played a glittering rather than a great part in the Revolution. Cardinal de Retz's compliment gives the reason why it was impossible for him to be a Scottish Cromwell. Cardinal de Retz pronounced him "the solitary being who ever realized to his mind the image of those heroes whom the world sees only in the biographies of Plutarch." A Plutarchian hero was out of date in the age of the Puritans. Montrose aspired to

emulate the deeds of Cæsar and Alexander. Cromwell sought the Lord in the Psalms of David. Add to this that, in comparison with Argyle and the best heads in the party, Montrose was deficient in judgment, in experience, in thorough apprehension of the organic facts of the revolution. His lack of judgment is demonstrated by his entire misconception of the views of Argyle and Hamilton. He took up the notion that these men aimed at sovereignty. This, as the sequel proved, was an hallucination. When Charles I. was struck down and not yet beheaded, Hamilton did not attempt to set the Scottish crown on his own head, but lost his life in an effort to replace it and that of England on the head of Charles. When Charles I. was dead, Argyle did not seize the throne of Scotland, which would have been a hopeful enough enterprize, but staked all on a hopeless attempt to regain for Charles II. the throne for Charles I. The motives of Argyle's conduct, at the period when his path diverged from that of Montrose, are sufficiently clear. Well acquainted with the character of the king, with the policy and projects of Laud and Strafford, with the wrongs of the English Puritans and their estimate of the danger threatening the liberties of the nation, he knew that it would be puerile simplicity to accept the professions of Charles as an adequate guarantee of what Scotland required and demanded. Montrose, ardent in his devotion to his country as Argyle, had never conferred with Hampden, never imbibed from the English Puritans their invincible distrust of Charles.

There was much also in the character of Montrose to predispose him to that lofty but somewhat vague idealization of authority, that enthusiasm for the representative of a long line of kings, that reverence for the established order of things, and that partly aristocratic, partly feminine shrinking from the coarser and cruder associations of democracy, which constitute the poetry of modern Toryism. Mr. Mark Napier has printed an essay by Montrose, brief but of singular interest, in which his conception of kingly authority and popular freedom, and of the relation between the two, is set forth with as much lucidity as is common in writings of that generation, and with a certain stateliness and pomp of expression which, taken along with the touches of poetry occurring

in Montrose's verse, prove that, in altered circumstances, he might have been a remarkable writer. The value or valuelessness of the piece in respect of political philosophy may be gauged by the fact that Montrose has not grasped the central idea of politics in modern times, to wit, representation. The truth that sovereignty resides in the people, and that kingship is a delegation from the people, which was then beginning to make itself felt as a power in world-history, and was firmly apprehended by Hampden, Cromwell, Pym, and Vane, has no place in Montrose's essay. The notion of royal authority as something distinct, balanced against national right or freedom,-a notion which has bewildered political fanciers, down to the days of Mr. Disraeli-is what he fundamentally goes upon. "The king's prerogative," he says, "and the subject's privilege are so far from incompatibility, that the one can never stand unless supported by the other. For the sovereign being strong, and in full possession of his lawful power and prerogative, is able to protect his subjects from oppression, and maintain their liberties entire; otherwise not. On the other side, a people, enjoying freely their just liberties and privileges maintaineth the prince's honor and prerogative out of the great affection they carry towards him; which is the greatest strength against foreign invasion, or intestine insurrection, that a prince can possibly be possessed with." He speaks of "the oppression and tyranny of subjects, the most fierce, insatiable, and insupportable tyranny in the world." He is prepared to go lengths in submission to the

prince" which show that he never kindled into sympathy with the high, proud and free spirit of the English Puritans, never got beyond the figment of indefeasible right in an anointed king. Subjects, he declares, "in wisdom and duty are obliged to tolerate the vices of the prince as they do storms and tempests, and other natural evils which are compensated with better times succeeding." Here were the germs of a Royalism as enthusiastic as could be found among the young lords and swashbucklers who were now beginning to cluster round Charles at Whitehall.

With Montrose, in his political speculations or dreams, were associated Napier of Merchiston, Sir George Stirling of Keir, and Sir Archibald Stewart of Blackhall. These had "occasion to meet often" in