This William Scott had a son William, who on the first of September, 1716, was bound apprentice for seven years to a coalfitter in Newcastle, with a fee of 57.,—and whose indenture of apprenticeship is the first written muniment of a family destined to such distinction. The boy is here described as "son of William Scott of Sandgate, yeoman. This is not at all inconsistent with the representation that he had become a keel-owner, for "yeoman" did not necessarily mean, as we now understand it, "the cultivator of his own little farm," but simply meant "a householder of too poor estate to allow of his designation either as a gentleman or merchant, yet raised above the ranks of servile drudgery." The Scotts of Sandgate well exemplify the quaint definition which the venerable Fuller gives of this class: "The good yeoman is a gentleman in ore, whom the next age may see refined; and is the wax, capable of a gentle impression when the Prince shall stamp it.' William, the younger, showed great prudence, steadiness, and shrewdness; and when out of his apprenticeship, becoming himself "a fitter,” and commencing with the "keels" he inherited from his father, amassed considerable substance. To swell his profits, he is said at one time to have kept a sort of public-house, near the Quay at Newcastle, for the purpose of supplying his own keelmen with their liquor, on the principle of the truck system. He afterwards became a large ship-owner, and engaged in the maritime insurance then in vogue, called "bottomry." By "servitude" he was entitled to the freedom of the town of Newcastle, which he took up on the 25th of August, 1724; and on the 7th of September, in the same year, he was admitted into the "Hoastmans' Company" which his sons used to observe was the most reputable in the whole corporation. He seems by his industry and frugality to have risen to high consideration among the trading community of his native town, although he mixed little in society, and read no books except his Bible and his ledger. He [AUG. 18, 1740.] married the daughter of Mr. Atkinson of Newcastle, a woman who was And cleads us a', frae head to feet, And buys our parritch meal. The boatie rows, the boatie rows, And happy be the lot of a' That wish the boatie speed." One stanza is particularly touching: "When Jamie vow'd he would be mine, And wan frae me my heart, O! muckle lighter grew my creel! He swore we'd never part. The boatie rows, the boatie rows, The boatie rows fu' weel, And muckle lighter is the lađe 1 "Creel" is the basket in which the Scottish poissardes carry fish on their backs to market. * Surtees, p. 3. the model of all the domestic virtues, and of such superior understanding that to her is traced the extraordinary talent which distinguished her two sons, William and John,-Lord Stowell and Lord Eldon. Their destiny was materially influenced by the chivalrous effort, in the year 1745, to restore the House of Stuart to the [A. D. 1745.] throne. If Prince Charles and his gallant band had not crossed the Border, William would never have been a Fellow of University College, Oxford, and in all probability John never would have been Lord Chancellor of Great Britain. Although William's birth certainly took place in the county of Durham instead of Northumberland from the advance of the rebel army to the Tyne, there are two representations of the circumstances attending his mother's flight previous to this event. According to the more romantic story, Mrs. Scott, dreading the violence of the Highlanders, about whom the most frightful rumours were spread,― when they approached Newcastle, resolved to hide herself in the country; but she found all the gates shut and fortified, and egress strictly interdicted to all persons of every degree; whereupon, although very near her confinement, she caused herself to be hoisted over the wall in a large basket and descended safely to the water-side; there a boat, lying in readiness to receive her, conveyed her to Heworth, a village distant only about four miles from Newcastle, but on the right bank of the Tyne. Here she was delivered the same night of twins, William [OCT. 1745.] and Barbara.--But the following is the account of the affair by Mrs. Foster, a grand-daughter of Mrs. Scott, from whom she says she had heard it hundreds of times:-"My grandmother Scott being with child in the year of the rebellion 1745, it was deemed more prudent for her to be confined at my grandfather's country house at Heworth than in the town of Newcastle. She was therefore attended at Heworth by a midwife, who delivered her of a male infant (afterwards Lord Stowell;) but some difficulty arising in the birth of the second child, a man on horseback was despatched to Whickham for Dr. Askew, a medical practitioner of considerable eminence at that time. Dr. Askew not being at home, the man proceeded to Newcastle for Mr. Hallowel. When Mr. Hallowel reached the town gate, it was, on account of the Rebellion, closed for the night; and further delay becoming serious,instead of waiting until permission was procured from the mayor for his egress, he was let down from the top of the town wall, on the south side, and proceeded immediately to Heworth, where he [A. D. 1751.] delivered my grandmother."* After the retreat of the Chevalier from Derby, by the western side of the island, she returned to her husband's house in Love Lane, Newcastle, and there, in 1751, on the 4th of June, the birth-day of George III., she produced her son John, the future Chancellor, who was likewise accompanied by a twin sister, and was baptized along with her at All Saints' Church on the 4th day of July following. Love Lane is a narrow passage between two streets-in Scotland called a "wynd,"--and in *Letter to the present Earl of Eldon, 14th June, 1840.-Twiss, i. 23. Newcastle a "chare," the lower extremity being there called the "chare-foot ;" and Lord Eldon, who had always genuine delight in referring to native localities, used to amuse the Chancery Bar by declaring that "he ought not to complain of a small and inconvenient Court, as he was born in a chare foot.' * I find nothing remarkable related of our Chancellor's infancy-nor any omen of his future greatness--except that he showed he was born with the faculty of always lighting on his legs. His elder sister, Barbara, used to relate that "during one of their mother's confinements Master Jackey being in her room in a go-cart, the nurse quitted her for something that was wanted, leaving the door open; away went Mr. Jackey after her, tumbling down a whole flight of steps, go-cart and all; but though his mamma, who was unable to get out of bed to stop him, got a dreadful fright, he took no harm, and was found standing bolt upright in the passage below." He was taught to read by a master whom I suspect to have been a Scotsman, from his being called Dominie Warden, and his mode of muffling the consonants," in which I was myself initiated. But the success in life of both brothers is mainly to be ascribed to the admirable instruction they received from the Rev. Mr. Moises, master of the Free Grammar School at Newcastle,-under whom they laid in a large stock of classical learning, and accquired a habit of steady application, enabling them to overcome every difficulty which they had afterwards to encounter. [1760-1765.] The only thing that could be said against this zealous teacher was, that he was too much accustomed to mix his conversation with grave appeals to his conscience and his God-setting an example which at least one of his pupils very sedulously followed. We have a striking illustration of "the boy being the father of the man," in an authentic account of the difference between the two brothers in their Sunday evening performances: "When asked to give an account of the sermon, their father's weekly custom, William would repeat a sort of digest of the general argument-a condensed summary of what he had heard; John, on the other hand, would recapitulate the minutiæ of the discourse, and reiterate the very phrase of the preacher. He showed a memory the most complete and exact, but failed in giving the whole scope and clear general view of the sermon, embodied in half the number of words by the elder brother." Lawyers immediately conceive themselves first delighted with a judgment of Lord Stowell, in * Mr. Twiss tells a story, that "at the Newcastle Assizes, in a case where a witness swore that at a certain time he saw three men come out of the foot of a chare, the Judge, who tried the indictment, recommended it to the jury to take no notice of this evidence, as being obviously that of an insane person. The foreman of the jury, however, restored the credit of the witness, by explaining that the chare from whose foot the three men had been seen to issue was not an article of furniture, but a 'narrow street." " Vol. i. p. 25. † According to this mode of teaching the alphabet, a vowel is placed before, instead of after, the consonants. Townsend's Life of Lord Stowell. Robinson's Reports, and then toiling through one of Lord Eldon, in Vesey, junior. Although we know that John Scott, under Mr. Moises, was extremely diligent and well-behaved, and a prodigious favourite with his master,— when an ex-Chancellor, he used to relate anecdotes of his boyish days which would rather represent him as having been a pickle. "I remember," he said, "my father coming to my bed-side to accuse Henry* and me of robbing an orchard, of which some one had come to complain. Now my coat was lying by my bed with its pockets full of apples, and I had hid some more under the bed-clothes, when I heard my father on the stairs, and I was at that moment suffering intolerable torture from those I had eaten. Yet I had the audacity to deny the fact. We were twice flogged for it, once by my father, and once by the schoolmaster. I do not know how it was, but we always considered robbing an orchard-boxing the fox,' as we called it-as an honourable exploit. I remember once being carried before a magistrate for robbing an orchard. There were three of us, and the magistrate acted upon what I think was rather a curious law, for he fined our fathers each thirty shillings for our offence. We did not care for that, but then they did: so my father flogged me, and then sent a message to Moises, and Moises flogged me again." He used to relate, likewise, how he was flogged for going without leave to Chester-le-Street, a place eight miles off, to buy "short-cake,” for which the place was famous, and staying away a whole night-and again for the offence of playing truant three days from the writing-school, aggravated by a declaration to his father that he had been there punctually every day ;t-how he possessed the art of blowing out the candles in the shops, and escaping detection;--and how, having lost his hat in a scuffle, his father made him go three months bare-headed, except on Sundays. He gave a very entertaining account of the manner in which his father applied the taws, or ferula, in the family, till this instrument of punishment was stolen by the children; and of the distinguished manner in which he danced hornpipes at the annual Christmas ball given by his father to the keelmen. But, above all, he dwelt with complacency on his early gallantry: "I believe," he would say, "no shoemaker ever helped to put on more ladies' shoes than I have done. At the dancing-school the young ladies always brought their dancing-shoes with them, and we deemed it a proper piece of etiquette to assist the pretty girls in putting them on. In those days, girls of the best families wore white stockings only on the Sundays, and one week day, which was a sort of public day; on the other days they wore blue Doncaster woollen hose, with white tags. We used, early on the Sunday mornings, to steal flowers from the gardeps in the neighbourhood, and then we presented them to our sweethearts. Oh! those were happy days-we * Henry was another brother, who succeeded to his father's business. † Yet he wrote a most beautiful hand, which he retained to extreme old age. The taws were preserved by Henry; and, after the father's death, were produced annually when the brothers met at Newcastle, and talked over, with glee and triumph, the exploit of stealing them. were always in love."-It might be presumed that he had peculiar pleasure in helping the sweet Elizabeth Surtees to put on her dancing-shoes, and that he presented to her the most beautiful flowers: but this was not the fact; for he had not yet seen his destined bride. In the midst of these wild pranks, which he took pleasure in exaggerating in his old age, he made great progress in his studies, and, while yet in his fifteenth year, he was not only a good classical scholar, but he was pretty well exercised in English composition-often so sadly neglected. He would afterwards occasionally regret that he had not had the advantage of being at Eton or Westminster. Talking of his illustrious class-fellow, Lord Collingwood, he once said, "We were placed at that school because neither his father nor mine could afford to place us elsewhere;" but he related that George III. expressing his surprise how a naval officer could write so excellent a despatch as that which contained Collingwood's account of the battle of Trafalgar, his Majesty suddenly added, "I forgot that he was educated under Moises." And it is pleasing to think that Lord Eldon always retained a grateful and affectionate recollection of the High School of Newcastle. At the commencement of his "Anecdote Book," written by him for the amusement of his grandson, he says: "The head-master was that eminent scholar and most excellent man, the Rev. Mr. Moises. I shall hold his memory in the utmost veneration whilst I continue to exist.' -In one of the last judgments which he delivered in the Court of Chancery, respecting a grammar school, he observed, "I remember that when I had the benefit of an education at one of those grammar schools, the boys were headed by their venerable master to church constantly upon Sundays, and that part of the duty of a master of a grammar school was, in those days, as much attended to as teaching the scholars what else they ought there to acquire."-Jack Scott did not hold the Great Seal more than two days before he gladdened the heart of his old preceptor by appointing him one of his chaplains, and he afterwards pressed upon him high preferment in the Church, which was modestly declined.-Finally, several years after the death of Mr. Moises, Lord Eldon wrote the following very amiable letter to the Rev. J. Brewster, of Egglescliff, in Durham, who had been a class-fellow, and had sent him the copy of a Memoir, which he had privately printed, of their beloved preceptor: "DEAR SIR, "Lincoln's Inn Hall, Wednesday, Aug. 20, 1825.”* "Pardon me if my engagements have made me too dilatory in acknowledging your kindness in sending me your Memoir of the late Master of the Grammar School in which we were both educated. It has highly gratified me to find that the public are in possession of such a record of that excellent person's merits and worth. I feel the obligation * By the kindness of my friend, Mr. W. E. Surtees, I am in possesssion of a copy of this interesting memoir. Not only Lord Eldon and Lord Stowell, but Lord Collingwood, and several other very distinguished Northumbrians, were flogged into greatness by Moises. When the master of a public school is at once a fine scholar and an enthusiast in teaching, he is one of the most useful, and ought to be one of the most respected, members of society. |