The Mackays, or sons of Y, were nominally supporters of the Lord of Sutherland, but just as frequently were to be found opposing him. At one time we find that the Earl made a proposal to the Earl of Caithness" for suppressing of Mackay;" but this particular chieftain was quite an irrepressible element, and by playing skilfully on the prejudices of both parties he managed to bring them both to grief. It is very amusing to read of the meetings for reconciliation and pacification which were frequently held, and which not unfrequently resulted in the reconciler and pacifier falling upon both parties, sword in hand, and leaving matters in a doubly complicated state. In 1395, the Lord of the Isles held a meeting of this sort at Dingwall, to reconcile Nicolas of Sutherland with his enemy Y Mackay of Far and his son Donald Mackay, in a matter of "divers slaughters and spoils committed on either syd." The chief result of this was, that in the castle of Dingwall, Nicolas and Y Mackay "fell at some hot reasoning and altercation anent these particulars then in controversie betweine them, and being incensed in anger one against another upon the repetition of by-past injuries, with some reproachful words, he (that is Nicolas) killed Y Mackay and his sone Donald with his owne hands, and hardlie escaping from the followers and servants, he returned home with all speid into Sutherland, the yeir of God 1395." There is something very fine in the idea of the Earl's "reproachful words." Not in anger but in sorrow he did it with his own hand. Even the presence of 66 a common enemy was no security against disputes, as the battle of Culloden notably illustrates. Down to very late years we find sudden accidents" happening in Sutherland when parties who have any dispute between them chance to meet. From words they fall to blows, till one or more of them is slain, and then the relatives of the deceased strive to get the survivors of the opposite side proclaimed "the King's rebels." At best, however, the killing of men seems to have been regarded only as a misdemeanour; and even the clergy were not entirely exempt from being involved in these quarrels. In the sixteenth century, William and Thomas Paipe, two ministers at Dornoch, had a dispute with a certain John Macphail, who they thought had unseasonably asked them for drink, and who, in return to their threats, thrust an arrow, with a broad forked head, into the arm of the Rev. Mr Thomas. This was bad enough, but it was not all; for, meeting shortly afterwards in no less sacred a place than the churchyard, "they fell a-quarrelling, and from quarrelling to feighting;" the result being that one was killed, and the other two were left lying nearly dead. Like other Highlanders, and even more than some others, the men of Sutherland were prompt and eager in taking revenge, without much regard to place, time, age, cause, or person. They were also very apt to think themselves slighted-very suspicious in every way; and believing that the chief end of their neighbour was to injure them, made it their chief end to destroy him. There is a tombstone near Durness, bearing the date of 1619, which states that "Donald Mac Murchie heir lyes lo; vas ill to his friend and var to his fo; true to his maister in veind and vo." This must have been a delightful character to have had for a near neighbour; but he was a character by no means rare in the times in which he lived; and it is said that to this day the Gaelic population of Sutherland is not entirely free from his defects. The scenery on the east coast of Sutherland is in some places wild and grand indeed, while everywhere the traveller may enjoy a sense of great solitariness, or be oppressed by it, according as his disposition may dictate. A predecessor in this Magazine has spoken of "the howling wilderness" of the Gualin, but he would have been still more entitled to use the phrase had circumstances led him, as they did me, to ride through it at midnight in a storm of wind and hail. Though the inn at Rhiconich is small, it is well conducted, and the fishing in its vicinity may well tempt the angler to remain there for a few days. Down on the way to Kinlochbervie the Sutherland cottars may be seen in their most primitive state. At Scourie, the mighty cliffs of Handa are still white with seafowl, and re-echo the thunder of the Atlantic waves. The precipices which rise abruptly over the saltwater stream of Kyle Sku are unsurpassed in wild grandeur in the British Islands; and, after winding beneath the frowning gloomy front of Coinag, Loch Assynt smiles sweetly under a thin veil of golden mist. Alas, however, it is much pleasanter to wander through that scenery than to write about it-to dream vaguely of its past heroes than definitely to reproduce them! Would it, I wonder, have been any more interesting to have been a Scandinavian sea-king, or Macbride of the buck-tooth, or Nicolas Earl of Sutherland, or Y Mackay of Far, or even Donald Mac Murchie, than to ride, or shoot, or write in the present day? Were the hands of Jarl Sigurd never soiled with pitch, nor his heart sick with the incessant recurrence of tedious cares? Was the world really any more heroic or glorious to the fiercest son of Y who perished in battle, and whose bones lie deep down beside the white pine-trees in the black morass, than it is to the red-headed gamekeeper who shows that the race of Sutherland strong men has not altogether passed away? Was that life of the past any more worth living than this we lead? Was that a paradise behind? is yon a heaven before? Is the stone to be kept for ever rolling, and the thirst for ever unslaked? Out of the darkness of the grave we summon the dead that we may live their past lives free from earthly conditions; into the darkness of the grave our thoughts wander, that they may breathe the pure air of a prefigured but undiscovered heaven. 248 Charles the Bold. [Feb. CHARLES THE BOLD. We think highly, but not very highly, of these two volumes of Mr Kirk. The events, which are often of an exciting and dramatic character, are narrated in a style which is generally pleasing, or which only occasionally offends; contemporary chronicles appear to have been ransacked for details which might bring the past epoch vividly before us; and we have presented to us another of those lively and graphic pictures of the middle ages, in which the literatures both of France and England have lately abounded. Nor are the higher qualities of the historian-critical acumen and philosophic generalisation-altogether wanting; but in these our author does not appear to us to be eminent. If to be critical is to be sceptical, he can occasionally be critical enough: he passes we know not what wholesale censure on the old chroniclers of English history; but this spirit of scepticism comes and goes in a somewhat capricious manner, and in cases where we have naturally looked for some critical investigation we have not found it. The reader may in such cases be told that the explanation he desired was not attainable by the historian himself, who had no other alternative than to narrate just what he found in the record, or to be silent altogether. On that other faculty of the historian, the ability to reason well on events-to see them as parts of some great whole-to form, in fact, great historical generalisations-the intelligent reader will form a more independent and decisive judgment, and we suspect that he will not, on this ground, close the book with a very high appreciation of Mr Kirk. There is an effort to be original in his remarks, which does not always succeed. When he enters into dis cussions on some general topic, the page is more attractive on the first perusal than on the second; it grows obscurer under examination; position, which appeared at first to we have to fall back on the old safe be successfully attacked. In short, there had been in Mr Kirk's work we cannot but express a wish that a less apparent striving after effect that his style of writing had been and the credit of originality, and more simple and less prolix. of Burgundy is not worth narratThat the life of Charles the Bold ing, and narrating with all the careful research and cautious criticism which distinguish the modern historian, who will venture to assert? This Duke of Burgundy, with his love of pomp, with a certain thin sentiment of honour, and with a terrible atrocity at the bottom of his heart, might be selected as a typical figure of the knightly tyrant so rife test with Louis XI. of France gives in the middle ages. And his conance which in itself it would not to his reign a meaning and importpossess. gundy had been detached from the The great fief of Burcrown by the unfortunate but magnanimous John-magnanimous at surrender of himself as prisoner, least in one act of his life, in his in obedience to his given word, to the King of England. John gave it, by his testament, as an appanage ceeding Dukes of Burgundy had agto his younger brother. The sucgrandised themselves by subsequent acquisitions, especially by the rich towns of Flanders, and for a moment it hung in the balance whether the Duke of Burgundy, renouncing his allegiance to the crown of France, should convert his dukedom into an independent kingdom, or whether the great fief should revert to the crown, and be consoli History of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy.' By John Foster Kirk. Two volumes octavo. John Murray, London, dated with the French dominions. There are reasons good enough why the history of Charles of Burgundy should be told; but why exaggerate the importance of the man, or of the epoch in which he lived, by representing this conflict with the King of France as the conflict between feudalism on the one hand, and monarchy (as understood in modern Europe) on the other? It was the conflict, says Mr Kirk, of "opposite principles;" Charles and Louis were "essentially men of different eras." It was the modern polity of Europe in contest with feudalism. All this is needless exaggeration and mere confusion. The battle against feudalism was fought in every country of Europe, and extended over many reigns. It was not more especially fought by Louis XI., than by one of his most distinguished predecessors, Philip Augustus. Every monarch who contended for the power of the throne and the consolidation of his territory was contending against feudalism, inasmuch as this monarchical power was the foundation of a new European polity. Louis XI. governed by the old feudal machinery, and one sees not how he could have done otherwise; he displaces one chief or duke by another, in whom he thinks he can better confide, nor does he always choose very skilfully. As M. Sismondi takes the pains to point out, his struggle is against the princes of the blood, and not against feudality. It is a very simple reason which Mr Kirk gives for arraying his "principles" against each other, that the nobility as a body were at one time seen in opposition to Louis; the personal conduct of Louis towards his nobility being quite sufficient cause for a general feeling of animosity and distrust; not to say that the feudal monarch was always in antagonism to his nobility. It was the normal state of things: he was always either subjected by them, or struggling to reduce them to subjection. On this subject of monarchy Mr Kirk enters into some elaborate discussions, in which we trace the constant effort to say something novel, but from which we rise with the sense of a fatigued unprofitable attention. It is a remark very generally made by our historians, that the circumstance of the institution of a standing army being introduced into England (owing to its insular position) later than in most countries on the Continent, gave to the English people the opportunity of fairly contesting for their liberties when the period came for such a contest. This remark Mr Kirk undertakes, with great formality, to dispute. He is compelled-very unwillingly, he says-to enter the lists with Hallam and Macaulay; and proceeds to lash himself into a strain of turbid eloquence upon the subject. He points triumphantly to the well-known fact, that royalty became absolute in Spain and France, and almost absolute in England, without the aid of standing armies. Most assuredly neither Hallam nor Macaulay had overlooked so striking a fact as this. When the power of a warlike and turbulent nobility had retired from the field, who was there to call Majesty to account? An uneducated people may be, and frequently are, aroused to sudden outbreaks of violence and rebellion, but in general all they want is to be governed with some show of equity. The mass of mankind, in all early or rude periods, desire nothing but to be well governed: it is a later experience that teaches them that, in order to be well governed, they must have some share in the government, some constitutional control over their governors. The people of England under the Tudors had not become alive to this necessity. When experience had taught them the lesson, and they had to contend against the Stuarts for a participation, through their representatives, in the government, it was surely a fortunate circumstance that the Crown was not supported by a standing army; that is, by armed men bound to the Crown by the mere tie of military discipline. When the day of struggle came between the King and the Parliament, the King had to throw himself for support on his own party in the nation. It was a fair struggle between loyalty and liberty. The King was the head of one faction, the Parliament of the other. The nation fought out its own battle, Loyalist and Roundhead fairly pitted against each other. If Charles had possessed any considerable standing army, the battle would have been most unequal. This is all that our historians have remarked. No one has ventured to say that if the standing army of Charles had been as large as that of any then raised upon the Continent, there would have been no struggle whatever. Mr Kirk contrives, à propos of this very obvious and inoffensive remark, to put himself into a state of indignation not at all favourable to his own clearness of thought. He supposes that certain historians have reduced the whole question of political liberty, the whole problem of the various developments of European monarchies, to the one point--the institution or the non-institution of a standing army-and therefore he thus breaks out: "If these views be correct, the history of the principal European states, with a single exception, during several past centuries, and for as long a period in the future as the same state of things shall prevail, will hereafter deserve to be blotted from record, or to be remembered only with horror and dismay as that of long ages of withering barbarism, destitute of progress or development-a reign of brute force as exceptional, if aught can be considered as exceptional, to the general plan of human destiny as those brief intervals in Grecian and Italian history, when tyrants, encompassed by their armed satellites, bade defiance to the hate, and exacted obedience from the fear, of unwilling subjects-intervals that might be thought to exemplify the evanescent nature of all governments attempting to dispense with the assent of the governed."-(Vol. ii. p. 335.) Then follow many pages of mere confusion of thought and wild, angry oratory, such as may be expected when vigorous writers will set up a man of straw and tilt furiously at it. We hasten to say, however, that this first quotation we have had occasion to make affords no fair specimen of the style or manner of Mr Kirk. It is chiefly in his second volume that he indulges in prolix discussions, and a polemic strain which is anything but felicitous. When he confines himself to his narrative, which he does pretty steadily during the first volume, he is an agreeable writer, though somewhat too verbose. It is in his second volume that we have to complain of a loose, tedious, and controversial manner. This is in every respect to be regretted, for it is not only in itself a trial to the reader's patience, but it fills space which might have been so much better occupied. With due condensation, and by avoiding some needless digressions, Mr Kirk might have given us the life of Charles the Bold in the two volumes before us, instead of which the story is half told, and we have to wait for a third volume to complete it. We of course expect that one who re-writes a history which has been already told has some new views to put forth, and a biographer is at once presumed to have for his very object to set his hero before us in some novel aspect. It would be the exception to the rule if Mr Kirk did not give us some new reading of the character of to receive whatever novelty of this Charles the Bold. We are ready kind he has to reveal. Where is the meaning, therefore-what is the necessity-of a long digression, introduced, too, midway in his narrative, to defend or apologise for this novelty of view? He has but to unfold his historical discoveries -we are all eager to hear them. He surely never for a moment feared that our attention would be turned away from them by such novelty as they might possess. Is not novelty the great source of attraction? |