John Stuart Blackie: Scottish Scholar and Patriot 9780748628193

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John Stuart Blackie Scottish Scholar and Patriot

Stuart Wallace

Edinburgh University Press

© Stuart Wallace, 2006 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wilts A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN-10 0 7486 1185 1 (hardback) ISBN-13 978 0 7486 1185 0 The right of Stuart Wallace to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

v

List of Illustrations

vii

Abbreviations

ix

Introduction

1

1 Youth

11

2 Experience

40

3 Struggle

74

4 The Blackie Case

99

5 ‘The Pro’

127

6 ‘Vivat Blackieas!!!’

160

7 ‘A Cup of Tea with Homer’

182

8 ‘Professor of Things in General’

218

9 ‘The Southrons’

243

10 ‘Friend of the Crofter’

264

11 Emeritus

300

Epilogue. ‘Tonald Shaw’

322

Sources and Bibliography

325

Index

335

For Paola

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many friends and former colleagues have helped in the making of this book. Without Robert Anderson’s encouragement I would not have started the research, and without his own work on Scottish education it would have been far more difficult. Chris Stray provided help at a later stage, generously responding to calls on his Greek and on his extensive knowledge of the world of nineteenth-century classicists. Ewen Cameron invited me to present Blackie to his honours class, while Martin Rackwitz carefully deciphered nineteenth-century German handwriting (with the assistance of Klaus Peter), translated letters and identified quotations. Both shared their extensive knowledge of the Highlands, as did Andrew Newby. Alex Murdoch has encouraged me over many years. Neil Christie and Karoline McLean regularly asked after ‘old Blackie’, as of an aged and perhaps fictional relative. If I have not been able to answer Nicholas Phillipson’s question, ‘What happened to the Scottish Enlightenment?’, I hope that I have, nonetheless, provided answers to different ones. For permission to quote from Blackie letters I am grateful to Sandy Malcolm, Archibald Stirling of Keir, the Bodleian Library, the British Library, the British School at Athens, Brown University Library, Edinburgh University Library, Leeds University Library, Liverpool University Library, the Mitchell Library, National Archives of Scotland and National Library of Scotland. Copies of Blackie letters were also provided by the Aberdeen City Art Gallery, Armstrong Browning Library, Birmingham Central Library, Bishopsgate Institute, Dunedin Public Library, Edinburgh Central Library, Flintshire Record Office, Huntingdon Library, Macmillan Archives (Reading University), Nashville State Library, National Library of Wales, New York Public Library, Pierpont Morgan Library, Public Record Office, Royal College of Physicians, Royal Institution, Tennyson Research Centre (Lincoln), and the following university libraries: Cambridge, Duke, Durham, Glasgow, Harvard (Houghton Library), Imperial College, Iowa, Kentucky, London, Manchester (John Rylands Library), North

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Carolina, Nottingham, St Andrews, Strathclyde, Texas (Austin), Trinity College Dublin, Trinity College (Cambridge), University College London, Yale (Beinecke). For information on specific points I thank: Morag Allan, Kerr Borthwick, Iain G. Brown, Constantine Buhayer, Michael Bury, Margaret Campbell, Tristram Clarke, Elizabeth Cumming, Eileen Curran, Peter Freshwater, John Higgitt, Joan Hussey, August Imholtz, Philip Kelley, David Levy, Heather Lindauer, Ian MacDougall, Stefan Manz, Roddy Simpson, Brian Smith, David Southern, Willie Thomson, Annie Tindley and Susan Woodburn. Peter Bell’s Ministers of the Church of Scotland 1560–1929: An Index to the Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanæ (2004) proved invaluable, as did Alan Hunter’s expertise on Scottish railways and steamers. Murray Simpson, Mick Morris and the Edinburgh book trade (Bert Barrott, Peter Bell, Peter Galinsky, Gus McLean, Elizabeth Strong) provided me with Blackieana. Eddie Fenwick’s Second-hand and Antiquarian Bookshops in Scotland guided the chase further afield. The Edinburgh Public Library (Edinburgh Room), Edinburgh University Library (Tricia Boyd), Hamilton Reference Library (David Young), the Mitchell Library (Nerys Tunnicliffe), National Library of Scotland (Sally Harrower) and David Levy provided illustrations. Most research was carried out in the North Reading Room of the NLS where Kenneth Dunn, Olive Geddes, Sally Harrower, Sheila McKenzie, Colm McLaughlin, Michael Nix, Alec O’Hara, George Stanley, Yvonne Carroll and others offered friendly and expert assistance. The aroma of haggis wafting in through the ventilation ducts from the adjacent Advocate’s Library on Friday 6 February 2004 (a late Burns Supper), provided a fitting climax to my work there. John Brown, Alan Hunter, Murray Simpson and Chris Stray read a first draft, Desmond Ryan the near final one. Their combined efforts in the pursuit of error, typographical, orthographical, and conceptual, are much appreciated, but I take full responsibility for what remains. I am grateful to the Ruth Ratcliff Fund, and the Moray Endowment for financial assistance. John Davey, James Dale and Roda Morrison of Edinburgh University Press, and Susan Milligan, have been helpful editors. I should have liked to have shown this book to the Rev. Donald Macrae, one of a generation of Gaelic speakers who knew the name of Blackie, but sadly he died just before it was completed. Paola Tinagli has read the book with a discriminating eye. To her go my special thanks. Stuart Wallace Florence, August 2005

ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1

Blackie flying north from Rome, watched by the muse of love poetry, Erato, and by Cupid, 1831. Unidentified German artist (MS 2657 f. 22, National Library of Scotland).

Fig. 2

Blackie in 1835. Bust by Alexander Handyside Ritchie (Letters of John Stuart Blackie).

Fig. 3

Blackie at thirty-five (1844) (Strand Magazine, March 1892).

Fig. 4

Caricature of Blackie from the third issue of an Edinburgh student magazine circulated in manuscript form, ‘The Ventilator’, February 1864 (Edinburgh University Library, E.90.89).

Fig. 5

Eliza Blackie in 1869 (Letters of John Stuart Blackie).

Fig. 6

Sketch of Blackie lecturing by his brother-in-law, R. S. Wyld (Strand Magazine, March 1892).

Fig. 7

Blackie at sixty-eight photographed for the Dublin University Magazine, April 1876 (National Library of Scotland).

Fig. 8

Cover of Celtic Chair Galop, music by F. W. Allwood (Edinburgh University Library).

Fig. 9

Drawing by John Francis Campbell of Blackie blown away by the explosion of ‘Celtic Unity’, from a letter of 17 August 1876 (National Library of Scotland, MS 2632 ff. 123–4).

Fig. 10 Blackie handing over to S. H. Butcher, his successor as Professor of Greek at Edinburgh. Etching by William Hole in Quasi Cursores (1884) (Edinburgh Public Library).

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John Stuart Blackie

Fig. 11 Cover of The Crofter magazine, June 1885 (Edinburgh University Library). Fig. 12 Cover of the first number of the Great Scot magazine, October 1889 (Edinburgh Public Library). Fig. 13 An elderly Blackie in an unidentified studio photograph (National Library of Scotland, MS 2621 facing f. 1). Fig. 14 Blackie in his study at 9 Douglas Crescent, Edinburgh (Strand Magazine, March 1892). Fig. 15 Sketch of Blackie in Margaret Smith’s letter to her mother, 5 December 1892 (Mitchell Library, Glasgow, TD1/953). Fig. 16 Advertisement for the ‘Royal Drooko Umbrella’, Glasgow and Lanarkshire Illustrated, 1904 (Hamilton Reference Library).

ABBREVIATIONS

AIESU

Association for the Improvement and Extension of the Scottish Universities (1853) AJ Aberdeen Journal BL British Library BM Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine BSA British School at Athens CM The Classical Museum CR Contemporary Review DNB Dictionary of National Biography DUM Dublin University Magazine EIS Educational Institute of Scotland (1847) ELJ Edinburgh Literary Journal; or, Weekly Register of Criticism and Belles Lettres ER Edinburgh Review EUL Edinburgh University Library FJNS Family Journal for the North of Scotland FQR Foreign Quarterly Review FM Fraser’s Magazine FR Fortnightly Review GCA Glasgow City Archives GW Good Words HLLRA Highland Land Law Reform Association (1882/3) Kennedy H. A. Kennedy, Professor Blackie: His Sayings and Doings (1895) Letters The Letters of John Stuart Blackie to his Wife (1909) LUL Liverpool University Library MM Macmillan’s Magazine

x

Museum NAS NAVSR NBR NC NEA NLS Notes NUL PP PRO PRSE RSA RSCHS SEJ SGM SHR SHRA SR Stoddart TLS TM TRHS TRSE UEJ VS WIVP WR WS

John Stuart Blackie The Museum: A Quarterly Magazine of Education, Literature and Science National Archives of Scotland National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights (1853) North British Review Nineteenth Century National Education Association (1850) National Library of Scotland Notes of a Life by John Stuart Blackie (1910) Nottingham University Library Past and Present Public Record Office Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Royal Scottish Academy Records of the Scottish Church History Society Scottish Educational and Literary Journal Scottish Geographical Magazine Scottish Historical Review Scottish Home Rule Association (1886) Scottish Review Anna M. Stoddart, John Stuart Blackie: A Biography (rev. edn 1896) Times Literary Supplement Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh University of Edinburgh Journal Victorian Studies Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals 1824–1900, ed. Walter Houghton (1966–89) Westminster Review Writer to the Signet

INTRODUCTION 1 John Stuart Blackie was one of the most prominent figures on the Scottish intellectual scene during the second half of the nineteenth century. For the English he was the individual who best represented ‘Scottishness’. What he was for the Scots was more complex, but arguably he provided them with a set of reference points associated with the landscape and the culture of Victorian Scotland. Blackie was born on 28 July 1809, the day that Arthur Wellesley defeated the French at Talavera and earned the title Duke of Wellington, and died on 2 March 1895, the year in which Wilhelm Roentgen discovered X-rays and H.G. Wells published The Time Machine. His early years coincided with what has been called ‘the Golden Age of Scottish literature’. As a former student noted shortly after Blackie’s death: When he first saw the light, Scott had 22 years of life in him. When he went to the University, Carlyle was beginning to be a great name. He was still a young man while Thomas Campbell, James Hogg, Jeffrey, Cockburn and Chalmers were in their prime, so that his death removes one of the few remaining links which connect our day with that of the literary giants of the first half of the century.1

By the time that Blackie settled permanently in Edinburgh in 1852, the ‘golden age’ had long passed. It was no longer the case that a Scottish writer’s ‘reputation in his own country’ would make him ‘a person of more or less distinction in London’, but now rather that ‘his reception in England and its capital’ was a prerequisite for success in Scotland, as the poet W. E. Aytoun discovered when ‘Edinburgh began to think much of him’ only after he had given his lectures in London on ballad poetry.2 Aytoun had an Edinburgh University chair, but for writers without an assured (if small) income of this kind, a move south was often the choice, following Carlyle who left Edinburgh in 1834. That Blackie could seriously be regarded as the successor to Aytoun’s fatherin-law John Wilson (‘Christopher North’), who had dominated the Edinburgh literary scene from the death of Scott in 1832 until his own

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death in 1854, is evidence of how depleted it had become. As The English Illustrated Magazine later put it, ‘the Scottish literary world resides in London somewhere between Hampstead and St John’s Wood on the one hand and Lincoln’s Inn Fields on the other’. The University and Courts of Session prevented Edinburgh ‘from sinking into the category of mere provincial town’, but the number of ‘prominent Scottish literary men’ resident in the city could be counted on ‘the fingers of one hand’. The result of this ‘Londonisation’ was a ‘certain rigidity in Edinburgh society’, dominated as it was by clergymen, lawyers and doctors.3 Blackie was a Scottish university professor for over forty years, first in Aberdeen (1841–52) and then in Edinburgh (1852–82), but he was also a public figure on a British stage. Later in life he would playfully refer to the fact that he had been born in the same year as those other ‘great Victorians’, Gladstone (whose family was Scottish) and Tennyson. If he did not add the name of Darwin, it was probably due to his lack of sympathy with the ‘scientific thought’ of his age (another sign of how far we are from Enlightenment Scotland), and his inability to understand someone who was his complete antithesis, a retiring scholar who nevertheless exercised a profound influence on the world in which he lived. Blackie craved attention, and to the extent that ‘Professor Blackie’ became a celebrity he got it, providing a splash of colour on the London scene. After his death he slipped from public remembrance, an object lesson in the danger of early fame. How many nineteenth-century ‘Scots worthies’ are now remembered even in Scotland? Blackie lived long enough to see a second Royal Commission on Crofting (1892), the first National Mod in Oban (1892), and the absorption of the Scottish Labour Party into the Independent Labour Party (1894). The first two events were linked to aspects of the Scottish Highlands which were the focus of Blackie’s energies for the last twenty years of his life, the last was a reflection of political struggles in the industrial Lowlands which were of little interest to him, but which were to be increasingly important even before the First World War. In 1914, when Blackie had been dead some nineteen years, he was still remembered as a leading figure from a previous generation; after the war he seemed a figure from a remote past. Well before his death preparations were in hand for an ‘official’ biography to be written by a family friend, the daughter of Thomas Tod Stoddart, ‘the angling poet’ of the Scottish Borders.4 Anna M. Stoddart’s John Stuart Blackie: A Biography was published in two volumes shortly after Blackie’s death, with a cheaper one-volume

Introduction

3

edition published in 1896.5 One of Blackie’s nephews produced a ‘biographical sketch’, Professor Blackie: His Sayings and Doings (1895), whose minor indiscretions upset Blackie’s widow,6 and in the same year the Rev. John G. Duncan edited a collection of memoirs and obituaries entitled The Life of Professor John Stuart Blackie, the Most Distinguished Scotsman of the Day. Another nephew, who was Blackie’s literary executor,7 edited The Selected Poems (1896), The Letters of John Stuart Blackie to His Wife (1909), a book of reflections entitled The Day-Book of John Stuart Blackie (1901), and Notes of a Life (1910) from an unfinished manuscript autobiography. These books, with the half dozen of Blackie’s which were still in print, ensured that for almost twenty years after his death his name continued to appear in the bookshops and literary reviews. Then came the First World War to sweep away much of the world, and many of the values which he and other Victorians had embodied. Little was written on Blackie until Donald Carswell’s collective biography Brother Scots (1927), which subjected Blackie and others to the kind of treatment which Lytton Strachey had meted out to Florence Nightingale, Cardinal Manning, Dr Arnold and General Gordon in Eminent Victorians (1918). The market for debunking biography was a limited one in Scotland, however, and after Carswell’s book little was written about Blackie. More recently he has appeared as one of a group of reformers in studies of Scottish university education,8 and has regularly been given a walk-on role as ‘champion of the crofters’ in works on nineteenth-century Highland history.9 It would be easy to treat Blackie as Carswell did, since his behaviour and writing provide an abundance of material for caricature. If a one-man show could be written about that ‘pawky raconteur’ Henry Cockburn,10 then it would not be difficult to create another called ‘Blackie’. Increasingly in later life he played the role of ‘Professor Blackie’, with the variant of ‘the Scotch Professor’ for the ‘Southrons’ beyond the Tweed. Twice a day during the university session, Edinburgh was treated to the sight of Blackie walking from his home in the New Town to his classroom in the Old Town, and back again: walking down Princes Street, with firm step and alert carriage; the figure straight as an arrow; the close black surtout falling down to the knees of his wide shepherd tartan trousers; the dark plaid loosely crossed over his shoulder, carelessly held with his left hand, while the right grasped the famous ‘kail runt’; the clear-cut Grecian face overshadowed by the broad-brimmed soft felt hat, from beneath which his silver hair escaped

4

John Stuart Blackie in a flood over his shoulders; and as he passed along swinging his stick, and crooning like a bagpipe . . . the most unobservant felt that here there was an original.11

In the summer he would be writing the next book at his holiday cottage in Altnacraig looking out over the Sound of Kerrera, or off on a walking tour in the Highlands, or lecturing in London, Newcastle, Manchester, Tobermory, or anywhere else he could find an audience. ‘Watch him as he struts up and down a lecture platform, giving out his sharp, witty, egotistical sayings, and keeping the audience in a roar,’ wrote a Glasgow journalist in 1877. ‘Observe him as he postures, plaid on shoulder, on the quay at Oban , full of alert attention and vivacious action.’12 In this biography, the focus is shifted more onto Blackie’s earlier years. The older Blackie was flamboyant, but also dogmatic, repetitious and complacent, a colourful fish in the small Scottish pond. The younger Blackie was more troubled, and more open to the ideas of some of the leading figures in the intellectual life of early nineteenthcentury Europe. Blackie was a mixture of eccentricity, self-caricature, attention-seeking, but also deep seriousness. Despite his Glasgow origins, and Aberdeen upbringing, he was not a typical Lowland Scot of the kind described by John Betjeman: ‘Hard, logical, calmly energetic, they are the reverse of the flibbertigibbets.’13 Blackie was intuitive rather than logical, excitable rather than calm, and he had his ‘flibbertigibbet’ side. His ‘sunny’ optimism reminds one a little of Harold Skimpole, though Blackie was neither a dilettante nor a sponger. He was typically Victorian in his sense of work, duty, and in his belief in Britain’s ‘manifest destiny’ in the world, and typically Scottish in his belief that the English were a softer and less satisfactory version of his fellow-countrymen. Religion and work were central to Blackie’s life. His Christianity in his adult years, unusually for Victorian Scotland, was unsectarian, but his view of work was more conventional. Like Carlyle, he believed that ‘the meaning of life is WORK’. Late in life he described ‘the notion that there is any absolute bliss in rest’ as ‘a sickly idea’, ‘more like the lazy dream of a water-lily in a slimy pool at midday than the thought of a human being’.14 He periodically wore himself out by overwork (‘flogging’ was a favourite term), a habit he never lost. His early years were marked by bouts of despondency, provoked by a sense of inadequacy in the face of an unyielding Presbyterian culture, but some of this he was able to jettison as an adult. Marriage at the age of thirty-two to

Introduction

5

Eliza Wyld, a distant cousin, provided the emotional ballast that he had earlier lacked. The marriage was a happy one, though on Eliza’s side (much less well documented than Blackie’s) one senses the frustrations of an intelligent woman living in the shadow of a ‘public figure’. Blackie’s incessant activity, the mountain of lectures, articles and books, the travel (what he called his ‘vagabondage’) to every corner of the British Isles,15 to many parts of Europe, and even to Egypt, but not to North America (in 1877 he turned down the chance of a lecture tour), were the result of his extraordinary energy, but also of his wife’s supporting (and at times restraining) presence. She was ‘prim, practical, a stickler for propriety alike in word and manner’, he was the enfant terrible.16 The cost for her, perhaps, was recurring bouts of depression. A large number of his letters to her survive, but very few of hers, and none to Blackie. A nephew described her as ‘diffident and retiring, almost morbid in her lack of self-assertion’, ‘full of spiritual enthusiasms’, with ‘a keen overstrained sympathy for real and imagined sufferings’ – what Blackie termed her ‘pious apprehensions’ – but also ‘a woman of liberal culture, keen insight, and trenchant criticism’.17 She ‘was always admitted by the family to have the most rapid (and at school the most retentive) brain and distinguished personality’, one of her brothers noted: Her husband always called her, from the Greek, Mrs. Oke, or the swift one, and even now, when she has reached the age of 84, it is a marvel to see how easily she masters all difficulties and with what rapid strides she can in five minutes, after the dishevelling of her drawing-room caused by a cluster of visitors just departed, put everything back into its place, and then throw herself into her easy chair and devour the contents of some book she may be engaged upon.18

Her knowledge of German was good enough for one of Blackie’s literary friends to suggest that she should translate either Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, or J. D. Passavant’s Rafael von Urbino for Bohn’s Library, but nothing came of this. She corresponded on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem ‘Aurora Leigh’ with Carlyle’s brother, a translator of Dante. Much later there is a letter to a nephew on George Meredith’s novel Ordeal of Richard Feverel, which she considered ‘a work of great genius’ flawed by lapses of ‘taste’.19 These are tantalising glimpses of an intelligent woman who did not ‘mix freely in the world’, and who was married to ‘a man of action’, ‘rather unsympathetic with weakness’ – perhaps not an ideal combination.20 Blackie clearly valued her opinion, and his letters to her describe the

6

John Stuart Blackie

people he meets and discuss the intellectual issues of the day. Her close female friends included Lucy Smith, a translator of German prose and verse,21 and the well-known traveller Isabella Bird.22 The Blackies had no children – one might say that Blackie himself was enough of a handful – but they brought up the sons of one of Blackie’s halfbrothers, and in old age were looked after by the son of one of his halfsisters. Family ties were important in the reasonably comfortable middle-class world to which the Blackies belonged. There was a network of cousins and other relatives by blood or marriage, stretching to England, North America and the British Empire. Blackie was not part of an ‘intellectual aristocracy’ as described by Noel Annan,23 though he could count Scott’s son-in-law and biographer John Gibson Lockhart amongst his cousins.24 Eliza Blackie was related by marriage to the international lawyer James Lorimer (the architect Robert Lorimer and the painter J. H. Lorimer were his sons),25 and her younger relatives included the philologist Henry Cecil Wyld,26 and (more distantly) the writer Catherine Carswell.27 The neo-Hegelian philosopher David George Ritchie was a distant younger cousin of both Blackies.28 Some idea of Blackie’s wide range of contacts amongst leading political and literary figures, in the drawing rooms of London, as well as the country houses of the Scottish aristocracy, can be gauged from his nephew’s introduction to the volume of Blackie’s Letters. The familiar names are those of Carlyle, Ruskin, Browning, Kingsley, Arnold, Tennyson and Gladstone, the preponderance of literary figures reminding us that Blackie’s reputation rested on his literary output as well as his activity as a university professor. He was a prolific poet of indifferent talent, now rarely mentioned in modern histories of Scottish literature.29 It is difficult to disagree with the judgement made in 1903 that ‘there was more feeling for nature and for poetry in the little finger of John Campbell Shairp . . . than in the whole of Mr. Blackie’s composition’, especially when we remember that Shairp himself was only a minor writer.30 Little attention, therefore, has been given to this aspect of Blackie’s literary career, though his verse (at least half a dozen published volumes)31 was popular, and was selected for anthologies at least up until the time of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (1912) and The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse (1917).32 The last example must have had Blackie turning in his grave since he always described himself as a ‘perfervid Scot’, and it is this aspect of his literary output which has kept his name alive. Examples of his polemical writing on

Introduction

7

the Scottish Highlands, some of it in verse, appear in recent dictionaries of quotations.33 Less well known are his verse translations from German, Greek and Gaelic which are evidence of that fascination with other cultures, so characteristic of the Victorians. Blackie’s nephew later described him as ‘German in training, Greek in spirit, and cosmopolitan in sympathy’, omitting Gaelic perhaps because it still had not won parity of esteem.34 As a young man, Blackie approached ancient Greece through immersion in German scholarship; later in life he treated Gaelic as seriously (and some would say as inaccurately) as he had Greek, and devoted much energy to establishing the linguistic line of descent of the former from the latter. Germany also coloured his ideas on politics, university education, Gaelic culture, and religion. Like Carlyle, he revered Goethe as ‘a great teacher’, but came more to admire Bismarck as a man of action. Blackie saw himself as Carlyle’s successor as an interpreter of German culture, but he ‘lacked Carlyle’s clarity’ even if he ‘adopted Carlyle’s mannerism’.35 His distrust of what he termed the ‘utilitarian’ values of political and economic liberalism owed something to his fellow-Scot, but also to the direct influence of the German ‘historical school’. Blackie’s tolerant brand of Christianity may have had its roots in the Scottish Moderate tradition, but it was immeasurably strengthened by German liberal theology. The Prussian diplomat and scholar Baron Bunsen, whose circle Blackie joined when he was in Rome, was an influence second only to Carlyle in providing him with ‘a religion to live by’. For a young man intellectually and emotionally liberated by the experience of another culture, nineteenthcentury Scotland was a restricting and inhospitable place. Blackie protested publicly against the test of Presbyterian orthodoxy required of Scottish university professors and school teachers, and in the process acquired the reputation for holding dangerous opinions. Luckily, he enjoyed controversy, and could turn this to his advantage. The role of intellectual gadfly was perfect for him in his Edinburgh years. In 1869, when he was sixty, he began writing an autobiography as an exercise ‘in the great work of self-knowledge’. It was surely no coincidence that three years earlier Carlyle had begun his Reminiscences, but there any resemblance ends. It is difficult to imagine Blackie, ‘the Happy Warrior’ as he was sometimes called, rising from his bath one morning and asking, as Carlyle did, ‘What the devil then am I? After all these eighty years I know nothing at all about it.’36 In old age Blackie basked in the title of ‘greatest living Scotsman’, the accolade accorded to Thomas Chalmers half a century

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earlier. After his death he was called ‘the last great Scotsman’, a tribute which had been previously paid to Sir Walter Scott, but which was of much older vintage.37 This now seems excessive and the implicit comparison a little odd, though at the time it signalled a degree of cultural anxiety. Ultime Scotorum he was not, but Blackie undoubtedly was ‘an original’, and this seems reason enough for a biography. Notes (Fuller citation of works by Blackie is given in the bibliography.) 1. J. G. Duncan (ed.), The Life of Professor John Stuart Blackie, the Most Distinguished Scotsman of the Day (Glasgow: John J. Rae, 1895), pp. 41–2. 2. F. Espinasse, Literary Recollections and Sketches (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1893), pp. 401–2. 3. Quoted in Duncan (ed.), Life of Professor Blackie, pp. 242–4. A. H., ‘Literary Edinburgh of To-Day’, The Sketch, VIII, 97 (5 December 1894), 5. David Masson, John Skelton, Walter C. Smith and Alexander Anderson were the other four. 4. NLS MS 2638 f. 231, MS 2642 ff. 104–6. A. S. Walker (ed.), Letters of John Stuart Blackie to his Wife with a Few Earlier Ones to his Parents (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1909), p. 392 (hereafter Letters). 5. Anna M. Stoddart, John Stuart Blackie: A Biography, rev. edn (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1896) (hereafter Stoddart), the edition used here. Stoddart (1840–1911) taught in girls’ schools before becoming a biographer. 6. H. A. Kennedy, Professor Blackie: His Saying and Doings (London: James Clarke, 1895) (hereafter Kennedy). Howard Angus Kennedy (1861–1938), son of Blackie’s sister Helen, worked as a journalist in Britain and Canada. NLS MS 4627 ff. 18–20 gives Eliza Blackie’s reaction to his book. 7. Dr Archibald Stodart Walker (1869–1934), son of Blackie’s half-sister Jemima, inherited Blackie’s library, and bequeathed Blackie’s papers to the National Library of Scotland. 8. R. D. Anderson, Education and Opportunity in Victorian Scotland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), esp. pp. 54–62. G. E. Davie, The Democratic Intellect, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1964), pp. 232–43. 9. E. Richards, History of the Highland Clearances, Volume I (London: Croom Helm, 1982) uses pithy quotations from Blackie’s Altavona to introduce chapters. 10. K. Miller, Cockburn’s Millennium (London: Duckworth, 1975), p. 4.

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11. Duncan (ed.), Life of Professor Blackie, p. 107. Kail runt: walking-stick made from a kale stump. 12. ‘Men You Know, No. 235’, The Bailie, X, 235 (18 April 1877), 2. 13. John Betjeman, First and Last Loves (London: John Murray, 1952), p. 21. 14. Lay Sermons (1881), p. 225. 15. Early in life Blackie vowed to visit a new district of Scotland every year, and generally managed to do this. 16. H. Lucy, ‘Sixty Years in the Wilderness. More Passages by the Way. V. Professor Blackie’, Cornhill Magazine, N. S. XXXII, 188 (February 1912), 260. 17. A. S. Walker, ‘Introduction’ to Letters, pp. 4–5. 18. G. Wyld, Notes of My Life (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1903), p. 10. 19. NLS MS 2622 ff. 104, 112 (Theodore Martin). MS 2624 f. 238 (J. A. Carlyle). MS 2642 f. 50. 20. Walker, ‘Introduction’ to Letters, pp. 4–5. R. S. Wyld, Memoir of James Wyld of Gilston and his Family (Edinburgh: for private circulation, 1889), p. 254. 21. Lucy Caroline Smith (1818–81) was married to William Smith, a contributor to Blackwood’s Magazine 1839–72. 22. Isabella Lucy Bird (1831–1904) wrote on travels in the Rockies, Hawaii, Japan, Persia, Kurdistan and Tibet. In 1881 she married Blackie’s doctor, John Bishop. 23. ‘The Intellectual Aristocracy’, in J. H. Plumb (ed.), Studies in Social History: A Tribute to G. M. Trevelyan (London: Longmans, 1955), pp. 241–87. 24. Lockhart (1794–1854), joint-founder of Blackwood’s Magazine, editor of the Quarterly Review 1825–53. 25. Lorimer (1818–90), Professor of Public Law at Edinburgh 1862, married Eliza’s cousin, Hannah Stodart. 26. Wyld (1870–1945), Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford from 1920, was a nephew. 27. Carswell (1879–1946) described the Wyld sisters (her great-aunts) and Blackie in Lying Awake (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1997), p. 154. 28. Ritchie (1853–1903), Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, St Andrews 1894–1903. His mother was a Stodart. 29. M. Lindsay, History of Scottish Literature (London: Robert Hale, 1977), p. 300, calls Blackie ‘no poet’. 30. J. H. Millar, Literary History of Scotland (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1903), p. 609. Shairp (1819–85), Professor of Latin 1861–72, and from 1868 Principal of United College, St Andrews, Professor of Poetry at Oxford 1877, 1887. 31. Lays and Legends of Ancient Greece (1857), Lyrical Poems (1860), Musa Burschicosa (1869), Lays of the Highlands and Islands (1872),

10

32.

33.

34. 35.

36.

37.

John Stuart Blackie Songs of Religion and Life (1876), The Wise Men of Greece (1877), Messis Vitae (1886), A Song of Heroes (1890). Also in W. Macneile Dixon (ed.), Edinburgh Book of Scottish Verse 1300–1900 (1910), J. Gunn (ed.), The Orkney Book (1909), E. A. Sharp (ed.), Lyra Celtica (1896), G. Douglas, Contemporary Scottish Verse (1893), W. J. Kaye, Leading Poets of Scotland From Early Times (1891), R. Borland, Yarrow: Its Poets and Poetry (1890), A. G. Murdoch (ed.), The Scottish Poets Recent and Living (1883). A. Cran and J. Robertson (eds), Dictionary of Scottish Quotations (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1996), D. Ross (ed.), Scottish Quotations (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2001). A. S. Walker in Notes of a Life, by John Stuart Blackie (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1910), p. vi (hereafter Notes). W. E. Houghton, E. R. Houghton and J. H. Slingerland (eds), Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals 1824–1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966), II, p. 133 (hereafter WIVP). Quoted in I. Origo, A Measure of Love (London: Jonathan Cape, 1957), p. 7. ‘How then can we presume to become historians and biographers? The quest, surely, is doomed to failure even before it has begun,’ sobering words from Origo, a fine biographer. First used to describe John Graham of Claverhouse, ‘Bonnie Dundee’ (1649–89).

1 YOUTH 1 John Stuart Blackie was born in Charlotte Street, Glasgow, on 28 July 1809. He was the second child of Alexander Blackie, the son of a Kelso grocer and wine merchant, and of Helen Stodart, the eldest daughter of a Hamilton architect. ‘My father’, Blackie later wrote, ‘was a man of great vigour, both mental and bodily; made mainly for action and enjoyment, but with a discursive habit of thought, a turn for philosophical speculation, and freedom from all narrow ideas. He sang a good song, was the life of every party where he appeared, and would have been much the better of [sic] being in a larger sphere than as an Aberdeen banker.’1 Alexander’s mother, Alison Stuart, had made a runaway marriage with a distant cousin, John Blackie (as John Stuart Blackie would later do with Eliza Wyld). After the birth of Alexander, the marriage began to fail, John Blackie died, and Alison Blackie went to live with her brother, a Kelso doctor. She died shortly afterwards, and Archibald Stuart brought up Alexander and his older sister Helen. After attending Kelso Grammar School, Alexander began working, from the age of fourteen, first as a handloom weaver, then in trade as a dry-salter and oilman, and finally in the Kelso branch of the Bank of Scotland. He then moved to Glasgow to work in the Glasgow Bank, staying with relatives of his mother, the family of John Gibson Lockhart. Helen Stodart and her younger sisters Marion and Margaret had each been adopted by different relatives after the early deaths in 1790 of their parents, William Stodart and Christian Naismith. From the age of seven Helen Stodart was raised by a maternal uncle, ‘a man of ability, loving Greek, Latin, and French, and having some taste for research’. She became a ‘great reader’ in this ‘congenial atmosphere’, but ‘she was not fond of dress, and rather eschewed society, which interfered with her reading and distracted her thoughts.’ When she and Alexander Blackie married on 7 July 1807, they were both of roughly the same age (twenty-three or twenty-four), but very different in character. Alexander was outgoing and ‘possessed of a fitful

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energy’;2 Helen was described by cousins as ‘very good looking and sprightly & elegant in her manner & ways, exceedingly amiable & gentle & tender-hearted – too much so they thought for her husband whom they considered rather quick in temper & dogmatic’.3 The marriage to Helen Stodart produced ten children, five of whom reached maturity. The eldest, Christina, was born in May 1808, followed in July 1809 by John Stuart (named after Alexander Blackie’s childhood companion), Alison Stuart (May 1811), Alexander Gibson Weld (1814), William (1815), Archibald (1816), Alexander junior (1817), Marion and James Hamilton (1819). Four children (Alison, Alexander Gibson, William and Archibald) died in infancy or early childhood. Helen Blackie died in 1822 just after the birth of her tenth child, Helen Stodart. Alexander junior died in 1824 at the age of seven. James, who was described as ‘remarkably handsome of the pure Grecian type’, died later at sea in his early twenties ‘falling from the mast which he had volunteered to reef’.4 By the standards of an early nineteenth-century middle-class family, these deaths in infancy and childhood were not exceptional. ‘To ensure two surviving children a married couple could expect to have five or six births.’5 Childhood mortality only began to decline after 1870, infant mortality after 1900, and maternal mortality slightly later. ‘We were brought up to remember that death was an essential part of life, and must be faced without fear,’ was Elizabeth Haldane’s comment on her Scottish childhood in the 1860s,6 and it was the same for Blackie several decades earlier. Blackie’s childhood seems to have been happy. He was particularly close to his sisters, for whom he coined pet names, ‘Kit’ (Christina), ‘Fish’ (Marion), and ‘Podler’ or ‘Dodle’ (Helen). His mother was loving, but as her eldest daughter observed, ‘was a very quiet, timid person, silent and reserved, and certainly not demonstrative to her children’. In 1815, when she had three children living and had buried two, Helen Blackie wrote in her journal, ‘I have been sadly kept down . . . with a small family, fully as large as I am able to manage, having not much ability that way.’ After the birth of three more children and the death of another two, she wrote: ‘As to my own method with children, I have nothing to boast of. The task is difficult. Some people have a natural turn for it, which I am afraid is not the case with me.’ It was difficult to cope with the demands of a family, as further comments from the journal suggest. ‘We have enough to make ourselves and friends comfortable, and a little to give away to the Bible Society. . . . But I have got so many to provide for that I myself am always the last

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to be considered.’ ‘I have so much to sew, and such a bustle in the house, that I have little quiet for reading, although I attempt it sometimes.’ ‘My grand aim in all my domestic economy is to preserve my temper unruffled if possible! I would wish to be as little impressed with domestic trifles as possible.’ This last comment her nephew H.A. Kennedy termed ‘an optimism of the deliberately-aimed-at sort, like that which her son so happily achieved’,7 rather glossing over the very different expectations placed on men and women in the home. He was quite accurate, however, in his estimation of Blackie who, after marriage, was able to escape the ties of domesticity in his own home. In Blackie’s childhood ‘the angel of the house’ (in Kennedy’s paraphrase of Coventry Patmore) was Helen Blackie’s unmarried sister Marion (‘Menie’), who helped manage the household. When her sister died, she took over the task of caring for the six young children. Blackie coined various pet names for her as well – ‘Toodum’, ‘Toodi’, ‘Tooderite’ or ‘Tudorite’, all inspired by the Hittite Tidal (Tudhaliyas), ‘king of nations’ from Genesis 14: 1, and by his great affection for her. When Alexander Blackie married again, she stayed on ‘and lived not only to comfort her brother-in-law when for a second time he was left a widower [in 1847], but to see her youngest niece a grandmother, and her eldest nephew an old man.’8 Marion Stodart never married, and outlived her older sister by sixty-two years, dying in 1883, in her ninety-ninth year. To support a family of ten children born between 1808 and 1821, or at least the six who survived into childhood (and, as we shall see, a second family of five born between 1829 and 1836, plus two stepsons), was no small task for a man like Alexander Blackie. He could count on support from a network of relations, but after that he had to rely on his own resources. His appointment in 1812, before he was twenty, as the first Aberdeen ‘agent’ of the Commercial Bank of Glasgow, was a stroke of luck. At a time of some uncertainty in banking – and Glasgow banking ‘was a much more challenging affair than in Edinburgh’9 – the Commercial Bank prospered. The Blackie family continued to grow, and this put pressure on Alexander, as he confided to his friend and superior in the Bank in April 1818: I’m glad to see that Mrs Paul has got another minnow on the hook, my wife is also fishing, but there will be no sport before next Whit Sunday. I’ve got so many brats now that I despair of ever being able to afford any of them an Edinburgh education however much I should wish it – we can’t get everything we desire . . .10

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Perhaps for this reason too, and despite some talk of ‘laying up a little money to purchase a villa’, Alexander Blackie continued to live in the centre of town, ‘in a strangely-situated house, with its front on Marischal Street and its side several storeys lower on Virginia Street, one road being carried over the other by a bridge’. It was surrounded by the buildings of the port and commercial area, ‘not the clean granite of the newer town, but black with the dust of countless coal carts passing up from the wharf’. Water was fetched from the top of the street, and, in the early years at least, socialising was kept to a minimum, partly for reasons of expense, but also because Helen Blackie disliked it, being ‘bitter bad at speaking’. ‘We live very retired’ she wrote in her journal. ‘The people in this town visit in a very ceremonious style, which neither Mr. Blackie nor I like; and so we are not obliged to cultivate many friends.’ ‘I have not that enlightened society which my imagination pictures, but I have independence, which of all things I enjoy. I am not obliged to receive idle and insipid visitors that I do not care for.’ ‘There is no music amongst us, little entertainment of any kind but eating and drinking; I mean dinner parties. From tea till supper the never-failing entertainment is cards. Then toddy commences, which lasts till twelve or one.’ Alexander Blackie revelled in this conviviality, and (notwithstanding his wife’s strictures) was described as ‘a singer of rattling songs, with “a great flow of spirits”, “a ready tongue”, “full of jokes and fun”, “very famous at talking nonsense” ’, all descriptions that later fitted his eldest son perfectly, but he was also ‘a keen man of business’.11 He held his position with the Commercial Bank for over thirty years, long enough to see his eldest son appointed to the chair of Humanity at Marischal College in 1839. By this time he had been widowed, remarried and started another family. The character of Alexander Blackie’s second wife was very different from that of the first, but such that Blackie would later refer to her as ‘my beloved stepmother’. Margaret Miller was the daughter of a West India merchant in Glasgow, but at the time of her marriage to Alexander Blackie in July 1825, was the widow of an army officer, Captain Paterson, with two sons of her own. Five more children resulted from her second marriage: Gregory Watt (‘the Pope’) in 1829, Archibald Gibson (‘Mr Pecker’) in 1830, George Stodart and Jemima Elizabeth in 1834, and Agnes Miller Gibson in 1836. Margaret Blackie had spent much of her childhood with her maternal grandfather, the inventor James Watt, at his family seat at Aston Hall near Birmingham, and was used to rather more than Aberdeen could offer.

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She was a warmer but intellectually more limited woman than Blackie’s mother. Many years later Blackie’s wife wrote that ‘she brought stupidity & Disease into the family.’ ‘It has been as if a Destiny of misfortune had been the inheritance of every member of the descendants. No wickedness came through her, but waste, stupidity, fertility of the lower type & great disease.’12 What might this have been? The comment about ‘fertility’ might simply be a reference to the fact that, while only one of Alexander Blackie’s children by his first marriage (Helen) had issue, all the children of the second marriage did so. ‘Waste, stupidity’ and ‘great disease’, however, may indicate a more serious problem, not obvious to the outsider. Perhaps it was something to do with the death in 1868, at the age of thirty-nine on the isle of Jersey, of Blackie’s half-brother Gregory, who had worked as an actormanager under the name G.W. Blake. Blackie and his wife took over the care of his sons, ‘two rather neglected orphans’,13 and later references to their mother (Gregory’s second wife), seem to suggest that she was not in a condition to assume responsibility for them. George, the other half-brother, made a name for himself as a medical man in the United States, fought for the South in the Civil War, and married the daughter of a Confederate colonel in Tennessee.14 A half-sister, Jemima, married a Fife builder, David Walker, and later moved to Cheshire. She nursed Blackie in his final illness, and then stayed on in Edinburgh as a companion to Blackie’s widow. Her younger son, John, migrated to Sydney for health reasons, and eventually become Moderator-General of the Presbyterian Church of Australia 1918–20. Her eldest son, Alexander Stodart Walker, an Edinburgh doctor and minor literary figure, looked after Blackie in his final years. Blackie was extremely proud of his family connection with the Covenanters through the family of his maternal grandmother, Christian Naismith. There were also links with Jacobitism through his own paternal grandmother, Alison Stuart, but a ‘stern Presbyterianism’ was common to both families. Alexander Blackie, however, seemed to take a more relaxed approach to religion. As a young man he had ‘vexed his cousins with bold questioning of the minor observances and with untoward whistling on the Sabbath-day’. Helen Blackie, ‘a far more serious thinker’ than her husband, ‘and too profound for him either to sympathise with or to understand’, was pious but not extreme. She had ‘discarded that mental aestheticism’ so common within Scottish Presbyterianism, perhaps more than had her sister Marion, who was described as ‘very doctrinal, but a Moderate’. ‘I have always thought much reading of books of Divinity rather weakened and

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overwhelmed the mind than strengthened and ennobled it,’ Helen wrote in one of her letters.15 Nevertheless, even this non-doctrinal Christianity sometimes incurred her husband’s disapproval. The local ‘Methodist Parson’, ‘a very good kind of man in his own way’, Alexander Blackie informed a friend, ‘has been cramming my wife’s hands with religious books’. One of these ‘so disgusted’ him that he ‘desired no more such might be allowed to enter the house’: I find no pleasure in reading of the agonies of mind into which poor infants from 3 to 12 years of age are thrown by the instruction of wrongheaded Methodists. I would have child[re]n fall in love with religion for its own beauties. The religion which is the trick of terrors must be a bad one – a child at such a tender age has not capacity sufficient to form proper notions of the things which he sees & handles. What absurd & impious notions must he then form of the unseen & all merciful ruler of the Universe, where he may scarcely smile without having thundered in his ears the threats of eternal damnation! I may be wrong but such teachers don’t appear to me to be taught of God . . .16

Blackie thus grew up in an environment where ‘Sabbath observance was serious without being severe, and earnest without being disagreeable’,17 which helps to explain his own approach to Christianity later in life. Unconventional by the standards of Victorian Scotland, Blackie was inwardly devout, but in ‘externals’ he often deliberately aimed to shock. The first signs of this were apparent even in the child. ‘You were then a boy, but already a terrible boy, being an enemy of every form of cant and conventionality,’ wrote a German friend who had stayed with the Blackies.18 Christina Blackie remembered her younger brother John as ‘noisy & turbulent in the nursery but never cross’, and always ‘the favourite’ in the home. ‘I was a little girl & little was expected from girls in our family’ (this despite the intellectual capabilities of their mother). Blackie thus enjoyed certain freedoms his sister did not have, but, at the same time, an ambitious father clearly expected much of his eldest son. Blackie had difficulty learning to read, it ran so counter to ‘his love of play & hatred of lessons’. ‘He could not bear to look at a book up to 8 years of age. He did not even know the Alphabet.’ Christina’s account continues: He had great difficulty in learning the catechism & hymns by heart, & the only feat in that way that to my knowledge he performed was learning the 19th Psalm in metre. John was fond of spouting screeds from Shakespeare, which he must have picked up from hearsay, & used to be perched upon the nursery drawers haranguing the nurses & young children. . . . His mind tended very much to theatrical amusements. He had the garret filled

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with playbills & it was one of our mutual interests to stand at the window of our home: to watch the people entering the theatre opposite our house wishing all the time that it might enter into our Father’s mind to take us to the play. He was also fond of the Circus & the Yearly Fares, but he did not take to golfing or any athletic sports.

Nor to dancing or playing the violin, the latter despite his great love of singing later in life.19 By the standards of the time, when the theatre was still regarded with suspicion, Alexander Blackie was clearly a liberal man. The ‘curious mixture of childish & manly qualities’ in his son, the love of the dramatic, the desire, above all else, to perform in public, whether on the platform, or from the lectern or pulpit, was to be a dominant feature of Blackie’s adult personality. Many children improvise discourses, few have the opportunity to carry this juvenile activity into later life as much as Blackie did. Christina was clearly a clever child and discovered an aptitude for French, but it was her younger brother who was expected to study Latin after he had mastered reading. A tutor was engaged, ‘but after a short trial Latin was postponed for another year’. When Blackie was nine, his father began to refresh his own schoolboy knowledge of the language, partly to encourage his sons, and partly for his own personal satisfaction. As he explained to a friend: I learned Latin 25 years ago, as other boys learn it at the schools, but since then (till very lately) I had paid almost no attention to the language. I have a number of boys who will shortly require the assistance of some person in their studies & as I have some time to spare here I did not see how I could more profitably fill it than by fitting myself for usefulness in my own family. Beside the rewards which the study of any language & particularly such an elegant & copious one as the Latin throws into the mind, is certainly deserving of the labour though great which it demands to attain a knowledge of it. I daresay many of my friends would laugh at a fellow who would plague himself 4 or 5 hours about the right translation of a single line of Virgil, but let them laugh ‘Velle suum cuique est’. I find a pleasure in the thing & must confess that when I was in the way of being more in the world than I am now, I always experienced a disagreeable emptiness of mind after having spent my evenings at a card table amongst a parcel of simpering women or in the corner of a coffee room among fusty politicians.20

Shortly afterwards, with other local bankers, professional men and merchants, he established a private academy in Aberdeen’s Netherkirkgate, where ‘the mind might be cultivated and the manners not neglected’. Here the Rev. Peter Merson taught Blackie and the others in the Junior class ‘the elements of Latin along with English

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grammar & writing’ in a manner calculated to encourage even the most reluctant pupil, as another of ‘Merson’s scholars’ later remembered: I must have been about eight years old when I went to that school & Blackie was probably a year or two my senior. . . . [We] were throughout in the same class consisting probably of some 12 or 14 youngsters. . . . Mr Merson . . . was an admirable trainer in Latin on a plan of his own which anticipated the system that became general in other schools a while after. After each class was firstly well grounded in Latin grammar and in some or other of the easier Latin classics, we were called up & quickly put through our passages by the Master. Questions testing the accuracy of our acquirements in what we had been studying were rapidly put by him first to . . . the one at the head of the class who was expected to answer promptly & clearly: if he didn’t or if the answer was unsatisfactory it was put to the rest of us & so on, the first successful respondent being forthwith placed at the head; & the process was continued until the whole position of the boys was not infrequently reversed. I have a distinct remembrance of how this discipline stimulated our brains memory & quickness of parts: & here I can safely say that Blackie & another were facile principes, he on the whole displaying the most smartness versatility & good grounding in Latin. We had perfect fair play from Merson who had no favourites & was rigidly impartial.21

This was what came to be known as the ‘intellectual’ method of instruction, the use of question and answer to ensure better attention and greater understanding in pupils, instead of the ‘older forms of rote-learning and declamation’. It worked very well with the young Blackie because, as he himself observed many years later, he had ‘an ambitious impulse that did not like to be second where there was a fair chance of being first’.22 This ‘early instinct’ remained with him for the rest of his life. In the autumn of 1819, we have another impression of Blackie, now ten years old, on a visit to his cousin, Robert Stodart Wyld, whose younger sister Eliza he would some twenty years later marry. Back in Edinburgh after ‘two months of cold & informal instruction in Latin’ at the Moravian school at Fulneck near Leeds, Robert was faced with the prospect of Edinburgh High School, where Latin and Greek were taught ‘from nine in the morning till three in the afternoon, with the relief of an hour devoted to writing and arithmetic & the acquisition of tables of weights & measures’. Blackie, a year younger, was held up as an example of private study: very shortly thereafter I remember hearing loud & unwonted sounds proceeding from the little library adjoining the dining room. . . . I opened the

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door to see what was going on, and there . . . sat . . . a thin little boy, with one foot crossed over the other knee pouring [sic] over Ruddiman’s Rudiments of the Latin Tongue. He was learning the rules of syntax and that not from the English column, where the rule stood in the vernacular, but actually from the column where it was given in the Latin, and the Latin rule the wee boy was then & there shouting aloud with all his might, & repeating again & again partly to enjoy it the more but so to fix it the better on his memory. The[re] was this sonorous one verba comparandi, Dandi, Narandi et Auferendi regunt accusativum cum dativo.23

Throughout his life, Blackie retained this habit of speaking aloud nearly everything he either read or wrote. This childhood experience also seems to have determined his view of the teaching of languages, including classical languages, that they were best taught by encouraging students to speak them. Blackie spent three years at Merson’s Academy, which closed in 1822 or 1823, a few years after he left. It was one of the numerous and often short-lived private ‘subscription schools’, sometimes called ‘adventure schools’ (if established as profit-making ventures), which existed without official support. In 1818 such institutions taught about half of the school population in Scotland, and had about 40 per cent more pupils than did the parochial and burgh schools.24 Some, like Merson’s Academy, and the later, larger, and more successful Edinburgh Academy (1824), were established by middle-class parents to provide a ‘modern’ education for their sons in a more exclusive environment than that provided by the local burgh school. More provided an elementary education for the children of poorer parents, especially in the West of Scotland, where the existing legal minimum of one parochial school for each parish and one burgh school for each town (funded by a local rate on landed property) was inadequate in the face of rapid population growth. In Aberdeen the pressure of social and economic change was less intense. Though its population more than doubled between 1801 and 1841, from 27,600 to 63,000, Glasgow’s more than tripled. Aberdeen remained more ‘homogeneous’ compared to other Scottish cities, drawing its migrants from its immediate rural hinterland, and more compact, its geographical boundaries changing only slightly in the same period. Its population of 43,821 in 1821 included a relatively conspicuous middle-class element, professional as well as mercantile. Being the port and distribution centre for the North of Scotland it had an active local banking system, of which Alexander Blackie was part. Its two universities, King’s College and Marischal College (amalgamated only in 1860),

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‘maintained a tradition of intellectual activity and independence and a considerable professional population of divines, lawyers, doctors and teachers’.25 Aberdeen in the first half of the nineteenth century had a stronger tradition of schooling funded by public bodies (churches, charities, endowment trusts, as well as the town council), and ‘wider public provision for classical training’, than other Scottish cities.26 Blackie was fortunate to have a father willing and able to pay for private schooling with an enlightened teacher. Had he taken his chances amidst ‘rough manners’ of the Grammar School, he might not have progressed so quickly, but he still would have received a sound grounding in Latin. Like other schools in the North-East it had a close relationship with the local universities.27 Indeed, Aberdeen, and the North-East in general, offered the closest approximation to that ‘ideal form’ of Scottish education so often celebrated in the nineteenth century – the parish schools in the countryside and burgh schools in the towns, both offering to all regardless of class the same preparation for university. The ‘university subjects’, Latin and Mathematics, but rarely Greek (it was not taught at Merson’s Academy nor the Grammar School), were taught in schools where most pupils were still at the elementary level, rather than in separate ‘secondary’ schools (a term commonly used only from the 1860s). This was ‘the most distinctive feature of Scottish education’, and its concomitant was the early age of entry to university. Blackie was not exceptional in entering Marischal College in 1821 at the age of twelve years and three months. Twelve was in fact the average age of entry at Marischal in the early nineteenth century; at King’s College it was fourteen; at Edinburgh and Glasgow between thirteen and fifteen. The most famous example of this phenomenon is provided by the young Thomas Carlyle, in 1809 aged thirteen, walking from Dumfriesshire to Edinburgh ‘to enter on the classic life of the impoverished student, living in lodgings, sending his laundry home by carrier and receiving supplies of oatmeal in return, and making what sense he could of the lectures’. Blackie was anything but the ‘impoverished student’ or ‘lad of parts’ later celebrated by him and by many other Scots, but he did benefit (as did other sons of middle-class families in the North-East) from the large number of bursaries at the two Aberdeen universities, though he later resigned his in favour of a poor student. About one-third of Aberdeen students were bursars (134 at King’s, 106 at Marischal), receiving between £5 and £20 a year. The annual bursary competition in October was open to all-comers, and was ‘based almost entirely on Latin prose composition’. It attracted

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the sons of labourers, artisans and small farmers, as well as the sons of businessmen, merchants and middle-class professionals, and shaped the teaching of the burgh and parochial schools which they attended. The schoolmasters, often from humble origins, were themselves mostly Aberdeen University graduates, ‘and from the 1830s their quality was maintained by an important charitable endowment, the Dick bequest’. Low class fees at Scottish universities (two to three guineas per class or about £10 for the full curriculum) also ensured that they were accessible to students from a wide range of social backgrounds.28 The university session at Marischal began in early November and lasted until late March of the following year. As at St Andrews (though not at Glasgow and Edinburgh), Arts students were recognisable by their distinctive dress: the red gowns of the ‘Colliginers’, as they were called by the townspeople, made the streets of Aberdeen picturesque. The bright new gowns of the freshmen or first year’s students, marked them out for persecution by their seniors; and it was considered desirable to get the velvet collars ink-stained and the sleeves and body toned down in colour as soon as possible. The fourth year’s students, or ‘Magistrands’, were easily recognized by the superior tatteredness and discoloration of their scarlet garb. It was only the Arts students, who may have numbered about two hundred and fifty in all, that wore this flaring costume; . . . students of . . . Law, Medicine, and Theology . . . wore no peculiar dress. In general the four faculties had little inter-connexion, the students of each attending their own set of professors in their own part of the college.29

In November 1821 Blackie joined the junior or ‘first’ Greek class with eighty to ninety fellow students, many ‘a year or two older’ than himself. This must have been a rather daunting experience for a boy used to being top pupil in a class of ten at Merson’s academy. For the first two years it ‘completely quenched’ his earlier ‘ambitious impulse’, and it was only in his third year in the Natural Philosophy (that is, Physics) class that, as he later put it, ‘I . . . asserted what I suppose was my natural place’ by taking third prize. In the second year Blackie’s Greek class had dwindled to fifty or sixty.30 Students at Marischal, as at other Scottish universities, paid the fee for each class in cash to the professor at the beginning of the session, and received a certificate of attendance at its end. As there were no restrictions on entry to lectures (the usual method of teaching), this meant that the six subjects of study could be taken individually, or not at all, as the student decided or could afford. The exception to this were the students intending to

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study Divinity, always the largest group at King’s and Marischal. They needed to show attendance at all main Arts courses, and thus followed the fixed curriculum. At Marischal this consisted of Greek in the first two years. Latin was taught ‘in a desultory manner’ in year one by the Professor of Natural History, until the appointment of a lecturer in 1826,31 since it was assumed that students had been well taught in local schools. Civil History with Natural History (a combination peculiar to Marischal) came in year two, Mathematics and Natural Philosophy in year three, and finally Logic combined with Moral Philosophy (taught by the same professor, another Marischal peculiarity) in year four. Of the Marischal curriculum, Blackie had little to say, other than that the Greek class ‘contained nothing above the elementary routine of a school’.32 The only professor he mentioned in his autobiography was William Knight (1786–1844), a native Aberdonian who had recently come from the Academical Institution in Belfast to take up the chair of Natural Philosophy at Marischal, which he held for over twenty years (1822–44). Blackie described his lectures ‘very instructive’, an assessment confirmed by another student who judged them ‘carefully prepared’, ‘singularly lucid’, ‘and, for students at our stage, rich in a new sort of interest’: We had glimpses of new wonders of knowledge, and of a kind of activity of mind different from that exhibited either in classical erudition or in mathematical problems, and dealing with Nature herself on a larger scale. We first came to have a notion of what thinking or speculating might be. And then, passing from such preliminary matter, Knight led us in a leisurely and orderly manner through successive divisions of his course.

The lectures were supplemented by the means of practical experiments, and by encouraging the fifty to sixty students to use ‘standard books’ from the class library to prepare their weekly essays. Knight’s ‘deficiency’ lay in ‘the shallowness of his mathematics’: His course was one rather of rich and descriptive information than of mathematical investigation and demonstration. He introduced formulae and calculations now and then, but his lectures were rather like an exceedingly interesting and well-arranged scientific encyclopaedia for moderately mathematical readers.

Knight stood out from the other Marischal professors as ‘a man of far more than average ability’, with something of ‘the lurking Mephistopheles’ in him,33 an independent thinker who added some colour to the small and rather conservative college community, not

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least because had been a school chum of George Gordon, the future Lord Byron, at Aberdeen Grammar School. Blackie did not enrol for his fourth year of study at Marischal College (1824/5), probably for personal reasons. His father ‘had hardly emerged from the shadow’ of the death of his first wife in 1821. ‘He was more solitary than before, and spent his leisure in his study, where he read, and pored over drawers of plaster-of-Paris casts which came from abroad.’ Time was also spent working with a tiny furnace in his room, producing little metal replicas of his favourite medallions to give to friends. Only his favourite eldest son seems to have been able to draw him out of himself.34 In 1824 Blackie’s younger brother Alexander junior died. He ‘had been ailing for some time’, but it still hit hard. The deaths of other brothers and sisters had occurred when Blackie was too young to feel their ‘full significance’, but the death of his favourite Sandy at the age of seven, and then, soon afterwards, the death of a close friend of his father, seriously affected the fifteen year-old. The friend was a young advocate, ‘a fine, wellgrown, full-blown, jovial-looking man, not above thirty’, a frequent visitor to the Blackie home, who ‘encountering wet sheets . . . at some country inn’, caught cold and died of ‘consumption’. This ‘thunderbolt’ precipitated an emotional crisis, causing Blackie to dwell increasingly on matters of life and death. As he later recalled: Religion became to me the all-important question, and the salvation of my soul the only business worth attending to. I devoted myself to religious books and religious exercises with an intensity and a persistency which I afterwards found to be a fundamental element in my character. I rose at five o’clock in the morning, and pored over Boston’s ‘Fourfold State’, and other books of the severe old Calvinistic school. . . . The effect they had on me was to produce a profound impression of the worthlessness and vanity of all secular affairs, and to fix my attention on the other world, and on religion as a special training for it. The common amusements of the world – such as dancing, card-playing, theatre-going, singing many songs, and the reading of novels or amusing books – seemed to me particularly sinful. I concluded that all who had a wish for such things could be under no serious concern for their souls: that like moths and butterflies they saw only what was before their eyes, and had not had their inner sight opened to the great Heaven which shone above them and the dread Hell which yawned beneath them.

‘Had I lived in a Catholic country at that time,’ he added, ‘I should infallibly have become a monk.’35 Instead, he asked his father to release him from the Aberdeen lawyer’s office, where he had been

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learning the profession for six months, to allow him to complete his Arts course in Edinburgh. Blackie had decided to study to become a minister of the Church of Scotland, something his mother had always wanted. Two years’ study of Logic and Moral Philosophy, and further work on his Greek, would enable him to enter Divinity Hall in Aberdeen. In October 1824 Blackie and his elder sister Christina were at Ladhope, near Galashiels, staying with their father’s sister Helen. She had married a lawyer, Archibald Gibson, and looked after his two youngest sons by his first wife. Here Blackie’s ‘delicate stomach’ began to improve. ‘They say I am looking far more stout and healthy than when I first came out, though they were all much surprised at my “thin bit” arms’, he wrote to his father: There is a continual smile on the face of the individuals here. Every morning and every evening they shake hands together, and for the most part salute with a kiss. Indeed, Aunt Gibson, kisses me more than twice a day, and has for me almost a mother’s love.36

There was affection, but also intense religiosity. Blackie’s step-cousins, Archibald and William Gibson, shared his ‘serious turn of mind’. Archibald, almost fifteen years older than Blackie, became an important influence on him, looked to equally for advice on academic study and on religious devotions. Later, sending Blackie ‘a little book’ on which he ‘set the highest value’, with biblical passages marked for study, Archibald recommended that his step-cousin follow his own practice of transcribing these from ‘the English version of the Polyglot Bible’. It would be ‘a Herculean undertaking’, but it would ‘amply repay the time spent on it’ – in Archibald’s case rising at five every morning, and devoting ‘an hour or more’ to the task.37 This idea of being ‘born again’ through education, reading the Bible, private prayer and contemplation was characteristic of Presbyterianism in the first half of the nineteenth century.38 Blackie later remembered one of his devotional books emphasising that it was ‘an indispensable point of Christian experience, that a man should be able to point out a moment in his life when he passed into the new state’, and he worried that he could not find this in his own experience: I was in desperation at the discovery. I had not been properly regenerated, and therefore should be infallibly damned. I worked myself into a perfect fever with these conceptions. I fell upon my knees at my bedside – I have now the picture vividly before me – and with burning tears besought God to confer on me the conscious sensation of a full and perfect new birth.

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Anxious to ‘prove the reality’ of his faith in ‘good works’, Blackie ‘sought the company of peculiarly pious persons’ when he moved into Edinburgh early in 1825, and visited the slums of Edinburgh’s Old Town: I remember visiting one pale-faced emaciated man in a high storey in the Cowgate, and another in a low cellar at the corner of Bristo Street. I read the Scriptures and prayed with these poor dying creatures, and perhaps gave them some physical help, though this certainly was not the main object of my visit, as I had little in my power, being only sixteen or seventeen years of age, and having no large supply of pocket-money.

Had he been ‘four or five years older’, Blackie wrote, he might have given himself altogether ‘to home mission work of this kind’, ‘for I considered that religion principally consisted in such work, and I was, above all things, anxious to be religious.’39 Not surprisingly, there is no mention of this religious crisis in Blackie’s letters to his father, whose only concern was that his son might overtax his strength ‘by too close study’.40 Some months later Blackie moved to Edinburgh to board with one of his Tweedside cousins, a Mrs Blackie, a widow with two sons (the elder one a journalist), who had settled at 16 Hart Street in the New Town. The homes of cousins on his mother’s side were also open to him: James and Marion Wyld (the parents of his future wife Eliza) at Bonnington Bank in Leith, and John and Charlotte Gibson at 23 Lynedoch Place in the West End. Blackie’s elder sister Christina was attending Miss Lee’s boarding school in the New Town, and there were various family friends to visit. This network of relations and acquaintances meant that Blackie was not isolated, even though he was away from home, an important consideration given the emotional intensity of his ‘soul-concern’.41 In 1825 we find him writing more optimistically about his spiritual ‘regeneration’ to a freshman friend from Banffshire: I have made a discovery lately which from its vast importance I hasten to communicate to you Viz – ‘that except a man be born again he cannot enter the kingdom of heaven’. John III that is to say, that unless he be changed in his whole nature – so that instead of devoting his affections to the world and its vanities, he places them on God, and makes his service his delight – he cannot ever be approved of by God, but will be justly condemned. I have also discovered that the favour of God is life and his loving kindness is better than life: that the gracious and good God who preserves us day after day, and lavishes on us so much mercy, ought certainly to be loved ‘with all our heart, and all our minds, and with all our strength’: surely his service should be our delight. But my dear Alexander, truly as I do believe these all important truths, I find it very difficult to practise

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them in the world – and I fear there are many who never think of practising them at all; and when I recollect how fearfully I have lived for many years in habitual want of the love of God in my heart, I stand convicted before my Maker, and cannot say any thing to excuse myself. Being then, my dear Alexr., firmly impressed with the truth of these things, I feel anxious to communicate them to you, that you also may be aware of the importance and extent of them – and that both of us may henceforth be more active together in living to the glory of God – and more diligent in the perusal of the Scriptures which are able to make us wise and happy and good. Farewell at present – and if you have any thing more to say to me on this important subject, I will be glad to see you, God willing, any night after tea, at No. 16 Hart Street.42

The final comment reminds us that religion, like the extended family, afforded opportunities for social contact, a not insignificant consideration in a city three times the size of Aberdeen. Blackie was one of 2,000 or more students at the University of Edinburgh, perhaps twice that number, if we include the nonmatriculated medical students (many of them non-Scottish) attending classes for brief periods. He was not in any sense part of a student community, and the University was not a visible presence in the city. His cousin John Gibson Lockhart, who had been a student in Glasgow, Oxford and Edinburgh, had noted in 1819 ‘the smallness of attention attracted to the University of Edinburgh’, compared to Oxford and Cambridge. ‘The academical buildings, instead of forming the bulk and centre of every prospect – instead of shooting up towers and domes and battlements in every direction, far above . . . the common dwellings of the citizens’, were ‘piled together in one rather obscure corner of a splendid city, which would be scarcely less splendid than it is’ if ‘they were removed altogether from its precincts’. ‘I rather think, that a well-educated stranger, who had no previous knowledge that an university had its seat in this place . . . might sojourn in Edinburgh for many weeks, without making the discovery for himself.’ All this, despite the number of students, and professors, some of whom would be considered by ‘whatever European university . . . the most illustrious of its ornaments’. The rebuilding of the University had begun again in 1817, after its suspension during the war with France, but impressive neo-classical architecture was not what was lacking, according to Lockhart: The members of the university do not reside . . . within the walls of colleges; they go once or twice every day . . . to hear a discourse pronounced by one of their professors; but, beyond this, they have little connection of

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any kind with the locale of the academical buildings; and it follows very naturally, that they feel themselves to have comparatively a very slight connection with academical life. They live in their father’s houses . . . or they inhabit lodgings in whatever part of the city they please; and they dine alone or together, just as it suits them; they are never compelled to think of each other beyond the brief space of the day in which they are seated in the same lecture-room.

What Lockhart described was a common feature of Scottish universities in the nineteenth century, but it was most marked in Edinburgh, where students had little sense of belonging either to the University or the city.43 The chapel was the focus of college life at Oxford and Cambridge, but there was no equivalent at either Edinburgh or Glasgow, which were non-collegiate universities. There was still in the 1820s some attempt to enforce attendance at chapel at the University of St Andrews, and at King’s College, Aberdeen, but Scottish universities did not insist on the religious conformity of their students, as did the two English universities. Other ‘corporate’ elements, like common residence and dining, had also disappeared by the 1820s. In Edinburgh, the rebuilding of the University, both in the original plan of Robert Adam and Principal William Robertson in the late eighteenth century, and in the much scaled-down version of William Playfair completed in 1832, did not include a chapel. By the time Blackie arrived in Edinburgh in 1825, the Anatomy theatre, Divinity classrooms and Natural History museum had been completed, and the new library was in the process of construction, but that aspect of student life described by Lockhart, of ‘persons thinking and living in a way so independent of each other, and so dispersed among the crowds of a city such as Edinburgh’, continued to be the case. ‘In Edinburgh and Glasgow, students were left to make what they would of their university education, and this was seen as a virtue and a test of character.’44 Over the summer of 1824 Blackie had prepared for his Edinburgh Greek class (the ‘second’, or more advanced one) by closely studying John Gillies’ History of Greece (1786). Charles Rollin’s Histoire Ancienne (1730–8) he intended to read through, simply ‘to carry on the train till I come to the history of Alexander’s successors, of whom I know little or nothing’, he told his father, not mentioning that it had been one of the ‘profane’ books discarded in the first flush of religious zeal in Aberdeen.45 After this there is no reference to the Greek class, where Blackie would have been one of up to 200 students, nor to its professor, George Dunbar. He had been appointed in 1806, and was still in post when he died in 1852, a lengthy tenure, but not

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uncommon in Scottish universities, where professors held their chairs for life, ‘even when age or incapacity had impaired their usefulness’. Since there were no pensions, a ‘substitute’, assistant or even ‘joint professor’, would be appointed to do the real work of the chair for years for a small salary. This was not the case with Dunbar, who continued to conduct the class himself. D. B. Horn’s judgement that he was one of the few ‘accomplished teachers’ at a time when most Edinburgh professors were ‘not usually regarded as great teachers’, leaves much unsaid about Dunbar and about the University. The report of the 1826 Royal Commission on Scottish Universities was less than glowing: ‘The Greek Class, upon the whole, seems to be conducted with much efficiency, and . . . does not seem to admit of any essential improvement.’46 Lockhart, however, had identified the underlying problem caused by the early age of entry to university, in particular for Greek, which in Edinburgh was taught only at the High School. Faced with large classes of students who had little or no knowledge of the language, the professors of Greek and Latin were reduced to the level of ‘schoolmasters in the strictest sense of the word’, ‘their time . . . spent in laying the very lowest part of the foundation, on which a superstructure of erudition must be reared’. There was ‘no need either of depth or of elegance’ in the teaching, and certainly none for it to be undertaken by a ‘profound and accomplished scholar’. After two years the students – ‘these Boys’ Lockhart called them – before they ‘have learned Latin enough to be able to read any Latin author with facility, and before they have learned Greek enough to enable them to understand thoroughly any one line in any one Greek book in existence’ were ‘handed over to the Professor of Logic, Rhetoric, and Belles-Lettres’. This was a problem common to all Scottish universities, not one peculiar to Edinburgh. The Commissioners recognised this, and accordingly proposed the introduction of an entrance examination in Latin and Greek, which would ‘enable the first Greek class in the University to commence nearly at the point where at present it concludes’.47 This proposal was acted on some sixty years later, as the result of the efforts of Blackie and other university reformers. Dunbar was an effective but uninspired teacher, working within a system which did nothing to encourage scholarship, let alone a more interesting approach to teaching classical languages. A student who encountered him in November 1834 later described him as ‘an industrious pedagogue, who repelled me from Greek literature’.48 Another recalled the ritual of paying the three guinea fee at the beginning of the session, after which ‘Dunbar’s first question was always, “Have you got ma’ Grammar?” and his

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second, “Have you got ma’ Dictionary?” ’ The students were informed ‘that the possession of these books was essential to [their] progress’, and Dunbar received a useful supplement to his income.49 The other class in Blackie’s first year at Edinburgh was Logic, taught by David Ritchie, who was ‘more illustrious on the curlingpond than in the professorial chair’, according to one student. Another said that he simply ‘read his predecessors’ lectures’,50 but the subject at least captured Blackie’s attention, as he explained to his father: I should have written you before this – it would not be a proper excuse to tell you that I was writing an Essay – had it not been the prize essay – which I know you would wish me to write – Dr Ritchie has got it today – I have been writing continually at it, on Saturday, Monday, and part of today – So that this added to sitting up till 12 o’clock last night, and the want of a regular walk for three days, has made my head and hand so tired, that I can neither make a proper pen or write properly or with any spirit, when it is made – You will excuse me on this score then. I hope you will not interpret this however as a rule for my general mode of life – my business is very seldom so urgent, as to keep me at such close work.

The essay ‘On Consignment & Mathematical Evidence’ won third prize in March 1825, the second prize going to the young James Ferrier, later the distinguished Professor of Moral Philosophy at St Andrews 1845–64.51 There is no evidence that Blackie joined any of the student debating societies, where he might also have competed with others in exercising the skills acquired in the Logic classroom, although the number and variety of such societies were a matter of concern to some professors as a distraction to students from their studies. Nor is there any reason to suppose that Blackie neglected academic work to indulge in the kind of ‘nightly drinking-bouts’ described in A Modern Athens (1825),52 although some of his fellow students must have been regulars at the brothels and taverns of the Old Town. He was not living unsupervised in lodgings, and his visits to the crowded tenements and narrow closes which bordered the university buildings were probably as he described them, simply undertaken in the company of other city missionaries. ‘From the common snares of the world, the devil, and the flesh, I was kept free. They had not the slightest attraction for me,’ he wrote many years later. A combination of personal piety and hard work probably ensured that Blackie continued to live ‘in an atmosphere of purity, and in a nest of innocence’.53 Over the long summer vacation (Scottish professors taught over a six-month session until 1908), Blackie was again in Aberdeen, but by November 1825 he had returned to Edinburgh for the 1825–6

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session. In a letter to his father setting out his course of study, he again made no mention of religious anxieties, instead explaining why it was ‘impossible . . . to take out a degree this winter’ as his father had hoped. The University of Edinburgh Arts curriculum contained seven subjects, instead of the six of other Scottish universities. The additional subject, Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres (elsewhere taught as a part of Logic), had classes at the same hour as Moral Philosophy, and thus had to be left for the following year. ‘Since things are so, how am I to make the best of the present session?’ Additional private tuition and private study would be necessary, and would have to be paid for. ‘My studies for the winter would be as follows’, he told his father, in which I am very considerably versed: Greek and Latin – at home and in conjunction with W. Gibson quite new to me: Moral Philosophy – lecture from 12 to 1 – & reading at home in which I am considerably versed: Mathematics – private class, Natural Philosophy – at home – and whatever may be wanting after this winter, to complete my Philosophical studies (as Rhetoric will be for one part) – will engage my attention next summer – so that next winter I ought to be ready to attend the Divinity Hall. This is a comprehensive prospectus - but in every scheme I would wish to feel my utter dependence, for its future prosecution or success, on the providence of God and on my kind parents from whom I receive every thing.

These last words drew from Alexander Blackie another five pounds for the additional expenses, but also the injunction to his son, ‘I am counting on you getting a prize.’54 Blackie did not win another prize at Edinburgh. As he later put it, ‘my piety had overwhelmed me’. ‘I distinctly remember being so possessed by religious fears, and distracted by pious perplexities, that I only wrote one essay during the whole winter session of the Moral Philosophy class.’ John Wilson was the most famous Edinburgh professor of the day, better known under his literary alias ‘Christopher North’, the driving force behind Blackwood’s Magazine along with Lockhart. His appointment to the Moral Philosophy chair had been political (he was a Tory but no philosopher), but he held it for over thirty years from 1820 until his retirement in 1851. ‘Glorious John’ was a man of commanding physical presence with a dramatic lecturing style: His way was to come in from his ante-room with a large bundle of ragged papers of all sorts and sizes (many of them old folio letters, with postage

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marks and torn marks of the seals visible on them, and others, scraps of about the size of a visiting card), and, throwing these down on the desk before him, either to begin reading from them, or sometimes, having apparently failed to find what he wanted uppermost, and having also felt in vain in his waistcoat pockets for something likely to answer the question, to gaze wildly for a moment or two out at a side-window, and then, having caught some thread or hint from the Tron Church steeple, to begin evolving what seemed an extempore discourse. . . . The voice and mode of delivery were also singular. It was not so much reading or speaking as a kind of continuous musical chaunt, beginning in a low hollow tone, and swelling out wonderfully in passages of eloquence, but still always with a sepulchral quality in it – a moaning sough as of a wind from the tombs, partly blowing along and partly muffling the purely intellectual meaning.55

To an experienced lecturer like R.W. Emerson, Wilson’s style later seemed as ‘heavy as a speaking ox’. ‘He foamed at the mouth with physical exertion, and not a ray of wit or thought,’ he wrote after hearing Wilson.56 Yet students were enthusiastic, and Blackie was overwhelmed by Wilson’s theatrical manner and ‘wild and yellowhaired appearance’ – at Marischal grey had been the academic tone. He completed only one essay, and thus was not allowed to compete for the class prize. On his ‘class card’ Wilson wrote that Blackie had been ‘a regular and attentive student’ and had written ‘a metaphysical essay showing excellent abilities’, entitled ‘On the Question: are conception and memory distinct powers of the mind’. The end-of-session interview was painful, as Blackie’s piety ‘had not altogether smothered . . . [his] intellectual ambition’, and he left the professor’s room in tears.57 This was his final class at Edinburgh, apart from attendance at the Chemistry lectures of Thomas Charles Hope, another longserving professor, called ‘the showman in the other corner’ by his colleague, the Professor of Natural Philosophy John Leslie. This was truly a case of the pot calling the kettle black, since Leslie was reported in November 1832 to have dyed his hair ‘blue, purple, yellow or all colours of the rainbow at once’ to make a scientific point, or perhaps simply to scandalise the ladies (these were public lectures).58 Edinburgh professors at this time were either public performers or academic failures. The Rev. Andrew Brown, Professor of Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres (whose classes Blackie decided not to attend), fell into the latter category. The 1826 Royal Commission found that under him the large classes of his predecessor ‘had shrunk to about thirty students’, and that neither essays nor regular attendance were required.

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Brown was immersed in writing his ‘History of North America’ (it sits in the University Library still awaiting a publisher). He owed his appointment to Prince William (the future William IV), who had appreciated his ‘fine taste and literary acquirements’ during a long sea voyage from Nova Scotia to Scotland, though he was the second choice for the chair. A young Edinburgh advocate with literary leanings, Walter Scott, had previously turned it down.59 It was no great loss to Blackie’s education when he left Edinburgh in the summer term of 1826. Alexander Blackie came to Edinburgh to collect his son, and together they returned to Aberdeen by steamer from Leith. His elder sister Christina noticed how his earlier exuberance had been replaced by a ‘serious turn of mind’, which Blackie explained to his Aunt Marion as a consequence of conscious self-restraint: Such . . . is my temper & character, that, though never well regulated, it is generally best when kept low; that is what you call ‘restraining too much the natural fire of youth’: but I seem to require this discipline in some degree to make me do any good.60

Blackie now devoted himself to the four-years course required of candidates for the ministry in the Church of Scotland. His piety, however, was to be sorely tested by the prevailing tone of Divinity teaching at Aberdeen. ‘Nowhere in Scotland was there such a vast stone bed of uninterrupted Moderatism’ as in Aberdeen,61 and nothing was less likely to appeal to a young man in the full flush of religious enthusiasm. This was also the case at other Scottish Divinity halls, and indeed within the entire upper echelon of the established church. Fervent ‘enthusiasm’ was distrusted by the Moderate party, which had dominated the Church of Scotland from the 1750s, and which by the 1820s was engaged in a bitter struggle with the Evangelicals that would lead to the triumph of the latter in 1834. The Divinity professors who taught Blackie in Aberdeen reflected these two currents. Duncan Mearns, Professor of Divinity at King’s College, had publicly criticised the ideas of Thomas Chalmers, the leader of the Evangelical party. Dr William Laurence Brown of Marischal College was a Latinist of some note, a former Professor of Philosophy and Church History at the University of Utrecht, and a leading Evangelical.62 Both men were established scholars, especially Brown, who had been educated at Utrecht as well as the University of St Andrews, and had ‘acquired there that familiar habit of thinking and speaking in elegant Latin’. Blackie sought to emulate this, with some success, being the only student in the class able to respond in Latin to Brown’s Socratic

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style of teaching. This confirmed Blackie’s earlier preference for learning a language by speaking it: The mere receptive operation of reading I instinctively converted into a gymnastic of thinking and speaking: and I remember distinctly that, after reading several chapters of my favourite author Cicero, I used to spout his phrases, and form them on the spot into new sentences of my own, which, to fix them more vividly in my mind, I scrawled out upon the broad white wooden mantelpiece of the room where I studied.

Brown also introduced him to the Church Fathers, which Blackie later described as ‘one of the most important steps in setting the mind free from partial and local rites of Christian truth’. For Mearns, however, he felt an antipathy which was obvious over forty years later in his description of quite a type of the shrewd, calculating Gamaliel; without passion or poetry or genial inspiration, or geniality of any kind; but very strong in the peculiarly Scottish virtue of sense. His lectures were grave, weighty, and serious; and if they were more like a platter of cold pottage than a bottle of champagne, we had the consolation of knowing that pottage, even when cold, was the more salubrious and nutritious. I do not think he exercised any influence on my mind, for his manner was rather repellent to students . . . I only learned from him that it was a grand thing in the world to be grave, sober, and judicious, even though accompanied with a little sullenness.

Much more influential was his father’s intimate friend, Dr Patrick Forbes, Professor of Chemistry and Humanity at King’s College, familiarly known as ‘Old Prosody’. Not formally one of Blackie’s teachers, Forbes was ‘a man of that emphatic type which could not fail to make a strong impression on a moody and musing young man’. There was a certain similarity between the characters of the older and the younger man. Blackie’s sketch of Forbes could (leaving aside the antipathy towards the Evangelicals) be a description of Blackie himself when in his combative prime: He was decidedly dogmatic in his attitude and bellicose in his utterance – he seemed to think with a cudgel in his hand, and never differed from a person without considering it his duty to knock him down. He was a good hater, but without viciousness. The strong but, at the same time, bland contempt with which he denounced ‘that madman Tom Chalmers’, or that other ‘ass’ or ‘idiot’ of the Evangelical party, has impressed itself with indelible characters on my imagination. He held no opinions by halves. His Moderatism went the length of denouncing not only street-preaching

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and suchlike ebullitions of irregular enthusiasm, but even Sunday-schools, as the pests of Society and the taint of the Church.

Even though this was ‘directly opposed’ to Blackie’s ‘way of thinking and feeling’, he still felt ‘a certain respect’ for Forbes, as much for his scientific as for his theological learning. It was Forbes who advised the young Blackie to discard Thomas Boston’s Body of Divinity, a standard exposition of Calvinist theology, in favour of an interleaved copy of the Greek New Testament. Blackie began to write his own comments in Latin on the blank leaves, ‘the only true method of scientific and philosophical investigation’.63 Blackie was later to write that at this time his ‘own tendencies were still decidedly Evangelical’, and that he ‘had no natural kinship with the Moderates’, ‘men whom I suspected of being Socinian or something more’. This is also suggested by the title of one of his student essays, ‘Some Remarks on the Question whether Hell Torments are Eternal’. Yet it was in ‘the borderlands’ between theology and science that he was ‘touched by Moderate influence’. His father’s friends ‘were chiefly of the Moderate party’.64 One of them was Dr Alexander Forsyth, minister of Belhelvie, inventor of the percussion-cap in firearms, and like all Moderates ‘more remarkable for acuteness than for fervour’. On walks in the countryside north of Aberdeen, he guided the young Blackie in the close observation of nature, and in his laboratory in the manse at Belhelvie, instructed him on the new developments in the physical and geological sciences. Far from undermining his religious faith, these were reconciled with Scripture after the manner of William Paley’s Evidences of Christianity (1794), which Blackie ‘had read and digested’. Forsyth also had refined literary tastes: ‘I think I never saw him reading anything but “The Edinburgh Review” or “The Philosophical Journal”,’ Blackie wrote.65 Blackie also had literary ambitions, writing papers for the Literary Society in Aberdeen on subjects such as Xenophon, the Stoics, Socrates and Hume’s Essay on Miracles. By comparison with the genteel and scholarly Forbes, Forsyth, and even Mearns, the Evangelicals seemed lacking in ‘talent and culture’, Brown perhaps an exception. ‘Some were too stern, and some were too stupid, and none of them had any savour of philosophy, of poetry, or intellectual culture.’ Amongst his fellow Divinity students there were many who ‘appeared afterwards on the stage of the Free Church as hot and strong Evangelicals’, but Blackie also found their ‘sort of assurance . . . most remote from my character’. ‘I half envied the men who had it, half feared them. Their

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presence always me feel uncomfortable. They appeared so much more zealous than I was.’ In short, Blackie found himself even more unsettled than he had been in Edinburgh: All these three years of theological study at Aberdeen I visited no sick persons and taught no Sabbath-schools. I had no separate sphere of moral and religious activity, and still I was remarkably moral and religious. This suspension of the aggressive element in my moral nature evidently arose from the fact that I was far from clear in the intellectual region. I was groping blindly and feeling tenderly. I was turning over fundamental principles, doubting, investigating, and building up, so far as I could. How could I preach to others what I did not know with an assured conviction myself? In fact, there grew up in my nature, along with an ardent desire to do good, a large capacity for doubting. I was imperious in my moral position, but diffident in my theological creed.

The result of all this was that Blackie became progressively more isolated, his ‘religious life’ confined to ‘devout reading of the Scriptures’ and ‘private prayer’, with ‘daily review’ and ‘a weekly prospectus, made regularly on Sunday night’ to consider any shortcomings. ‘The fundamental virtue of my character became, from its unchecked dominance, a great vice. I acted altogether from within.’ ‘I did not easily adapt myself to the ways of other people. I was king in my own world.’ As if to signal this, he developed the habit, when ‘in the company of other people’, of singing or humming to himself, which ‘much displeased’ his father (parents of modern adolescents may sympathise). This ‘most unsocial and ill-mannered usage’, Blackie later explained as arising ‘naturally from the incapacity which I then had of throwing myself easily and joyfully into any schemes which did not originate with myself’.66 Alexander Blackie thus deserves credit for the care he took with his eldest son while for three years he studied Divinity at Aberdeen (1826–9). It was also his ‘watchful kindness’ which enabled Blackie to study and travel in Germany and Italy over the next two years, giving him a chance to mature emotionally and intellectually. Patrick Forbes’ suggestion that Blackie should accompany his own sons to the University of Göttingen had aroused some apprehensions amongst the female members of the Blackie household. ‘Was not Germany . . . the home of rationalism, and might not the sound Calvinism with which he had been inoculated suffer some dire change which might lead him dear knows where?’ Alexander Blackie, however, gladly accepted the offer. For his eldest son to stay on in Scotland, awaiting a call to the ministry, was too uncertain a prospect for the banker. Thomas Chalmers was expressing a common

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middle-class anxiety when in 1827 he estimated that ‘there were 700 divinity students, but only thirty vacancies to fill every year’, and that all the medicine and the law were also ‘greatly overstocked’. If this was the case, two years abroad might be the best solution to the problem of what to do with a nineteen-year-old who ‘had nearly completed the course of theological study required for ministers . . . of the Church of Scotland’, but who ‘was too young for preaching’.67 Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Notes, p. 2. Stoddart, pp. 3–6. NLS MS 2638 f. 191 (emphasis in original). NLS MS 2638 f. 231. J. F. C. Harrison, The Early Victorians 1832–1851 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), p. 3. Elizabeth Haldane, From One Century to Another . . . Reminiscences (London: Alexander Maclehose, 1937), p. 43. Kennedy, pp. 9–11. The journal does not survive. NLS MS 2638 f. 231. Kennedy, pp. 12–13. S. and O. Checkland, Industry and Ethos: Scotland 1832–1914 (London: Edward Arnold, 1984), p. 42. To Robert Paul. NLS MS 2621 f. 7. NLS MS 2621 f. 5. Kennedy, pp. 7–9. NLS MS 2629 ff. 217–20, MS 2638 f. 231. Margaret Blackie died in 1847. National Library of Wales L 5418 [1872]. Eliza wrote: ‘They are average specimens of their species, absurd but affectionate & one of them even tender to me.’ W. B. Atkinson, A Biographical Dictionary of Contemporary American Physicians and Surgeons, 2nd edition (Philadelphia: D. G. Brinton, 1880), p.646. NLS MS 2629 f. 245. Biographical sketch, Tennessee State Library and Archives II-H-1 Acc.no.46. G. S. Blackie died in 1881. Stoddart, pp. 3–4, 17. Kennedy, pp. 9, 5–6. NLS MS 2621 f. 7. Methodists and other non-Presbyterian sects adopted predestination and other elements of Calvinist theology to gain Scottish adherents. Blackie, ‘The Chief Educative Influences of My Life’, Pupil Teacher’s Monthly (February 1888), NLS ABS 9.203.01. Cf. Notes, p. 11. William Cartan. NLS MS 2632 f. 78. NLS MS 2642 ff. 42, 44 (emphasis in original). NLS MS 2642 f. 44, MS 2621 f. 7. The quotation ‘Every man as he likes’, Persius, Satires 5. 53. John Webster. NLS MS 2638 f. 234. NLS MS 2642 f. 44. Stoddart, p. 8.

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22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

37

Merson later taught mathematics and natural philosophy at Elgin Academy. Notes, pp. 3–4. D. J. Withrington, Going to School (Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland, 1997), p. 44. NLS MS 2635 f. 96. D. J. Withrington, ‘Schooling, literacy and society’ in T. M. Devine and R. Mitchison (eds), People and Society in Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988), I, p. 177. L. J. Saunders, Scottish Democracy 1815–1840 (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1950), p. 130. D. J. Withrington, ‘Aberdeen since 1794: as place and as community’ in T. Brotherstone and D. J. Withrington (eds), The City and its Worlds (Glasgow: Cruithne Press, 1996), pp. 19–20. Later at the High School David Masson described ‘a four or five year’s drilling in Latin, five hours every day, save in the single vacation month of July’, with the addition now of a little Greek. Masson, Memories of Two Cities (Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier, 1911), p. 239. R. D. Anderson, Education and Opportunity in Victorian Scotland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 3–4, 6, 9–10, 29, 47–8, 142. Masson, Memories, pp. 240–5. Masson, Memories, pp. 276–7. Students in first year were bajans, in second year semis, in third year tertians. Notes, pp. 9–10. A. Bain, ‘Latin teaching in the pre-Union colleges’, Daily Free Press [Aberdeen], 28 April 1890. P. J. Anderson, Fasti Academiae Mariscallanae Aberdonensis (Aberdeen: New Spalding Club, 1889), I, p. 520 n. From 1818 John Stuart (professor 1782–1827) employed deputies to teach the Greek class (for 1820–2, Robert Reid). Notes, p. 10. Masson, Memories, pp. 289–93 (emphasis in the original). Blackie’s student essays ‘On the Union of Flexible Fibres’, ‘On Hydraulic Machines’, ‘Machines for Raising Weights’ are in NLS MS 2655 ff. 76–83. Stoddart, p. 15. Notes, pp.10–12. The advocate was probably Charles Donaldson, who died in April 1824. Quoted in Kennedy, pp. 25–6 (emphasis in original). NLS MS 2621 f. 21. C. G. Brown, The Social History of Religion in Scotland since 1730 (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 138. Notes, pp. 13–14. NLS MS 2621 f. 13. Stoddart, pp. 19–21. To Alexander Dunbar. NLS MS 2621 f. 29 (emphasis in original).

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43. J. G. Lockhart, Peter’s Letters to His Kinfolk [1819], ed. W. Ruddick (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1977), p. 48. The Tory Lockhart was bound to criticise a university supported by the Whig Edinburgh Review. 44. D. B. Horn, A Short History of the University of Edinburgh 1556–1889 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967), pp. 121–30. Anderson, Education and Opportunity, p. 35. 45. NLS MS 2621 f. 15. Notes, pp. 11–12. 46. R. D. Anderson, ‘Scottish university professors, 1800–1939: profile of an elite’, Scottish Economic and Social History, VII (1987), 29. Horn, Short History, p. 115. The 1831 Report quoted in G. Macdonald, ‘Presidential address. The Classics in Scotland: a retrospect’, Proceedings of the Classical Association of Scotland 1935/7, p. 24. 47. Lockhart, Peter’s Letters, p. 50. The 1831 Report quoted in Anderson, Education and Opportunity, p. 43. 48. A. C. Fraser, Biographia Philosophica: A Retrospect (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1904), p. 45. 49. W. S. Dalgleish, 20 November 1896, in J. D. T. Hall (ed.), The Tounis College (Edinburgh: Friends of Edinburgh University Library, 1985), p. 203. 50. D. K. and C. J. Guthrie (eds), Autobiography of Thomas Guthrie D. D. (London: Isbister, 1874), I, p. 52. The Life of Sir Robert Christison, Bart. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1885), I, p. 45. Ritchie (1763–1844) was professor for twenty-eight years (1808–36), minister of St Andrews church, and Moderator 1814. 51. NLS MS 2621 f. 17, MS 2655 f.1 (the essay). A. Thomson, Ferrier of St Andrews (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985), p. 9. 52. ‘A Modern Greek’, The Modern Athens (London: Knight and Lacey, 1825) pp. 284–9 (p. 285). The author was a London-based Scottish journalist, Robert Mudie. 53. Notes, p. 16. Contributions to Aberdeen student societies are in NLS MS 2655, 2656. None for Edinburgh survive. 54. NLS MS 2621 ff. 25, 27. 55. Masson, Memories, pp. 108–9 (for the years 1839–42). Wilson (1785–1854) had been appointed instead of the better-qualified Sir William Hamilton (a Whig), who nevertheless often attended Wilson’s lectures. 56. 13 February 1848, M.M. Sealts (ed.), Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 1973), X, p. 564. 57. NLS MS 2621 f. 31 (Wilson), MS 2655 f. 9 (Blackie’s essay). Notes, p. 15. Kennedy, pp. 23, 26–8. Stoddart, pp. 22–3. 58. S. Shapin, ‘Brewster and the Edinburgh career in Science’ in A. D. Morrison-Low and J. R. R. Christie (eds), ‘Martyr of Science’ Sir

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59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

39

David Brewster 1781–1868 (Edinburgh: Royal Scottish Museum, 1981), p. 17. Hope (1799–1843), Professor of Chemistry 1766–1843. Leslie (1766–1832), Professor of Mathematics 1806 (an appointment bitterly opposed by Moderates), then Natural Philosophy 1819. He published important research on heat and was knighted in 1832. D. Talbot Rice with P. McIntyre, University Portraits (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1954), p. 24. H. W. Meikle, ‘The Chair of Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres in the University of Edinburgh’, UEJ, XIII, 2 (Autumn 1845), 95–7. Brown (1763–1834), son of a Paisley weaver, was professor 1801–34. NLS MS 2621 f. 32 (emphasis in original). Masson, Memories, p. 216. Mearns (1779–1852), professor from 1816, Moderator 1821. Brown (1755–1830), Marischal Principal from 1796. Notes, pp. 17–25. Forbes (1776–1847), professor from 1817. Gamaliel, a Pharisee Doctor of Laws. Notes, pp. 28–9. NLS MS 2655 f. 43 (the essay). Socinian: antiTrinitarianism, from which developed Unitarianism. Notes, pp. 29–31. Forsyth (1769–1843) invented the detonating principle in firearms in 1807, and was given a government pension after refusing to sell the secret to Napoleon for £20,000. Notes, pp. 33–6. Draft essays and lectures 1826–9, NLS MS 2655 ff. 17–47, and MS 2656 ff. 1–179. Notes, p. 37. Stoddart, p. 34. Anderson, Education and Opportunity, p. 40. Chalmers (1780–1847), then Professor of Moral Philosophy at St Andrews (1823–8), later Professor of Divinity at Edinburgh 1828–43, leader of the Disruption and Professor of Divinity at New College 1843.

2 EXPERIENCE 1 Blackie’s travels on the Continent took place at a time when the Grand Tour, that essential part of the education of young aristocrats in the eighteenth century, had not fully recovered from the interruption of the Napoleonic Wars, but well before it had been replaced by the new era of Thomas Cook’s ‘Great Circular Tour’ for the middle classes which used the new technology of steamers and railways.1 He travelled by coach or wagon over roads which varied greatly in quality, his journey ending in Rome, which was still the essential destination for every educated man. The two years of travel and study in Germany and Italy, Blackie later wrote, were ‘in respect of training-power . . . the most important event in my life’. ‘Scotland is a small country and apt to be somewhat narrow and rigid in its type of thought. My jacket specially required a little widening.’2 To this acquirement of culture in a general sense was added the more concentrated and specific element of study at a German university, which offered the kind of education impossible to find in Scotland, and probably in England as well at this time. In the nineteenth century a large number of young Britons (by one estimate some 9,000), and an even greater number of Americans, travelled to German-speaking Europe to learn the language, attend lectures by leading scholars, and towards the end of the century to undertake research for a Ph.D. degree.3 Scottish names certainly appear in German university records long before this, in fact as early as 1419. There was also a long tradition of Scottish students studying elsewhere on the Continent: Paris and Orléans in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; Paris, Louvain and Geneva in the fifteenth and sixteenth; Leyden, Groningen and Utrecht in the seventeenth and eighteenth. In terms of sheer numbers, however, the great age of student migration starts in the 1820s (students of theology, like Blackie, being among the first to travel), and is ended by the outbreak of war in 1914. Amongst the universities in Germany most favoured by the British and Americans were Göttingen and Berlin, the two chosen by Alexander Blackie for his son. Each university represented a successive phase in

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a wide-ranging pedagogical reform movement, which, by the midnineteenth century, would elevate German universities to a position of pre-eminence in the world of learning. Göttingen, established in 1734, had rapidly become a leading centre of Neuhumanismus, an approach to philology which rejected the old mechanistic teaching of Latin and Greek still dominant in Scotland, and which sought ‘a more total and meaningful contact with the classical sources’. From the 1770s the largest group amongst foreign students at Göttingen was British (previously it had been Swedish), and this continued to be the case until Americans began to arrive in large numbers from the middle decades of the nineteenth century onwards. There was a special relationship between the university and the British Crown, broken only by the accession of Victoria in 1837. George II as Duke of Hanover had founded the university and was its first rector. George III also took an interest, and, though he did not visit the university, he sent his three sons to be educated there. Göttingen was, like Heidelberg, a ‘fashionable’ place to study, as evidenced by the high percentage of aristocrats amongst the German students,4 most notably Otto von Bismarck, who arrived in 1830 to study law, a year after Blackie had departed for Berlin. Blackie began his journey to Göttingen in mid-April 1829. He left Aberdeen with the two sons of Patrick Forbes, Francis and John,5 and travelled to Edinburgh. Stormy weather prevented the departure of the packet which was to take them from Leith to Hamburg, but the tenday delay gave Blackie time to obtain addresses for contacts on the Continent. Henry Glassford Bell, editor of the Edinburgh Literary Journal and a friend of his father,6 took Blackie to see John Wilson, whom they found ‘in all the charms of dishabille and literary confusion’. He was dressed in ‘a large night-gown destitute of buttons’, Blackie wrote, ‘his beard seems several days’ growth; he has no neckcloth; and sits at a table, on which his snuff is spread and ready for use, unencumbered by any box or other enclosure’. Wilson had ‘no continental connections’, but, an Edinburgh lawyer, Thomas Weir, produced five letters of introduction, including two to individuals in Rome.7 The weather still presented problems for sailing vessels, the most common means of crossing the North Sea, and on departure from Leith on 23 April, the tiny packet had to shelter for yet another day at Burntisland ‘amongst a little fleet of wind-bound vessels’, as the easterly gale continued to blow. Blackie struck up an acquaintance with one of the five passengers, a Hamburg merchant who provided a further letter of introduction to friends in Dresden, as well as an

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opportunity to practise the few basic German phrases he had learnt. The next day they sailed out beyond St Abb’s Head into the easterly gale, and began a slow and extremely uncomfortable crossing, reaching the mouth of the Elbe by 30 April. Here the shifting sand banks added further perils, until the river pilot had guided the boat into Hamburg. After a week in the city, Blackie and his companions began their journey southwards to Göttingen in the afternoon of 6 May, in ‘a lumbering German diligence’ called a ‘Schnell Wagen or Fly’.8 For the first thirty miles this slowly ‘trundled’ across the Lüneburger Heath, and then with better roads travelled more rapidly towards Hanover, which was reached at ten o’clock at night on 7 May. The hundred-mile journey between Hamburg and Hanover had taken over thirty hours, but with a little German, some French, and more Latin, Blackie was able to pass the time conversing with a party of young German students also making their way to Göttingen. After two nights in Hanover, it took another day to complete the fifty miles to Göttingen, arriving on the evening of Saturday 9 May.9 No account of Blackie’s first impressions of Göttingen has survived. Heinrich Heine had remarked sourly of that ‘Damned Hole – Göttingen’, ‘famous for its sausages and its university’, that it was ‘pleasing to look at if you have turned your back’. He had left under a cloud, expelled for six months for a threatened duel in January 1821, and delayed his return until January 1824, when the need to take his law degree became pressing.10 Blackie was arriving in the first flush of enthusiasm, bent on acquiring a good knowledge of the German language, so that his first impressions were more likely to have been like those of another student, published in 1831 in the Edinburgh Literary Journal: A high mound of earth, planted with linden-trees, surrounds the town, so that only the roofs of the highest houses can be seen. But two tall church towers raise their heads aloft – the one as like as may be a pepper-box, the other bearing a striking resemblance to a boot-jack. Behind her rises rather abruptly an inconsiderable treeless hill. All around her stretch level and verdant meadows, through which the Leine winds silently, studded here and there with inconsiderable thickets. The sun was just setting, and his last level rays gave a golden tinge to the rich meadows – every blade of grass, yet gemmed with drops from the shower which had just passed over, presented a thousand tiny rainbows. . . . After passing the gate, we drove through a labyrinth of ill-paved streets, with mean-looking houses on either hand. The trottoirs [pavements] are narrow, and interrupted every ten yards by trapdoors, affording access to the cellars. These are generally

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left open for the accommodation of the Burschen when returning from an evening carouse. The fineness of the evening had lured all the students from their apartments, and they were passing and re-passing in parties of three or five, each company conversing in low tones within itself, and carefully giving way on the proper side as they passed one another. The favourite dress was a surtout of dark-brown or green, and very wide sadcoloured trousers. But their caps, and tassels of their pipes, were all the colours of the rainbow.11

The colour of caps and pipe tassels, as Blackie would discover, signified membership of one of the Burschenschaft or student fraternities. The ‘proper side’ of the pavement meant passing to ‘the righthand side’ of an approaching pedestrian, leaving them with the street kerb (instead of the wall as in Britain). This Gossenrecht, or right of the gutter, was strictly adhered to in the small, rule-bound world of Göttingen students. To ignore it was to invite a duel with sabres, an aspect of German student life much commented on by foreigners,12 and no doubt a source of anxiety to the Blackie household in Aberdeen. Since the publication in 1824 of A Tour in Germany by the Edinburgh advocate John Russell, descriptions of duelling or even revolutionary activity by students at the universities of Göttingen and Jena had become familiar to British readers.13 It was all very different from Edinburgh. Göttingen was a small town dominated by its university, far more than was St Andrews. Walking down a street, it seemed that from nearly every window, above the shops at street-level young men were lounging, smoking from their long pipes; others were walking below; some with pipes in their hands, but not smoking, were sauntering about with their arms around round one-another’s necks; some with portfolios under their arms, were hurrying on with a more business-like pace; many dressed in frock-coats, buckskin breeches, and jack-boots; and all with . . . caps on their heads. . . . Young men in open carriages, with double seats . . . and some on horse-back, were occasionally passing, but always at foot-pace: every now and then, one of the walkers, or riders, would stop under a window, and either converse with the occupants of it, or, if it were empty, would by shouting out a name, generally bring the tenant of the room thither.

‘Trades-people’ (‘philistines’ in student slang) were ‘distinguishable’ by their wearing hats, and by a ‘timidly deferential manner’. Most let rooms, though normally to one or two students at a time.14 After a few days at an inn the three Aberdonians found lodgings large enough to accommodate them.

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Blackie’s letters home sought to reassure his father that he was acting with ‘Aberdeen caution and sharp-sightedness’ with regard to cost. They had ‘two bedrooms and a fine large sitting-room with tables, benches, chairs, sofas, chests of drawers, sideboard, and stove’, and were waited on by ‘a sonsy German damsel’, who was at their command ‘for all reasonable services’ and was ‘a tolerable medium for acquiring some knowledge of the German tongue’. All this ‘until Michaelmas next for 81⁄2 louis d’ors for lodgings – something more than £7’. Dinner was ‘soup, two or three kinds of vegetables, two kinds of flesh, and some sweet dessert, all of excellent quality’, for ‘sixpence or rather less daily’. The only ‘superfluities’ were beer and tobacco: Whatever they may be reckoned in Aberdeen, they are the next thing to necessaries here. For who could feel himself at home in Germany who did not smoke . . . ? Besides . . . you cannot have much intercourse with students unless you can both partake of their canister and have one at home when they come to visit you. The necessity of tobacco being once granted, that of beer follows of course. Beer must be united to tobacco in order to complete the earthly paradise of a German student.

Blackie also sought to allay his father’s anxiety that three young Scotsmen living together would not quickly learn German. Not only did they study the language ‘six or eight hours every day’, but the house rule was that at meal-time conversation in English was forbidden, on pain of a two pfennig fine.15 To his Aunt Marion, Blackie described their studies in more detail: we have kept ourselves very much at home and worked hard at German – and . . . at German alone – since we came to Göttingen. For excepting our regular morning exercise – the reading of the Scriptures in Greek – the whole of the day is occupied with the study of German. In the forenoon we have three or four hours of common study, when the same book is read and each one reads his part in succession. After dinner (which is here at 12 o’clock), and in the evening, each one studies what he pleases separately. But as yet it has been entirely German. From three to five days weekly we hear a German lecture on Modern History; once a week from 6 to 7, a lecture on the Fine Arts.

Their German reading was at first ‘confined to translations of Walter Scott’s romances’, but they soon took up Schiller, the traditional choice for those learning German, and ‘read two comedies and one tragedy’ during the ‘hour of general study’. As a reward for all this hard work, Blackie had also gone to a Kommers meeting where large quantities of beer were drunk, though, he was careful to add to his

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aunt, such ‘drinking clubs, however, seldom go to the length of intoxication.’ It ‘had lasted only two hours, and had no other effect than to make the students sing and create a prodigious noise on the streets as they returned to their lodgings’.16 Beer-drinking, smoking and duelling gave German student life a bohemian character which coloured accounts by foreign visitors. According to Russell, Göttingen students also seemed to regard it as their duty to keep the local ‘lying-in hospital’ well supplied with expectant mothers, though amongst the female servants of the town, ‘laundresses in particular’, there was ‘little innocence to debauch’. Blackie’s ‘sonsy German damsel’ may thus have aroused further anxieties in Aberdeen, not lessened by Russell’s comment that Göttingen was no worse than ‘its sister universities’.17 The problem was just more obvious because it was a small town, bursting at the seams. A visitor might see ‘scores of students; some with the unkempt torpid look of a late beer-debauch, some with the saucy port of sword-skilled quarrellers, and all busy keeping their pipes on fire’, and think the worst. ‘A hundred or two of such [might] give the small town an aspect of dangerous idleness’, but there was also a ‘thousand . . . eagerly gathering into their portfolios the sentences of a dozen lecturers, or silently bracing themselves by solitary study for the ordeal through which each must pass to reach his chosen vocation’.18 Blackie greatly admired the ability of the German student to mix hard work with as much beer and tobacco as possible. Edinburgh had its student debating societies in the 1820s, but they had less of the combative spirit and less of the conviviality of German ‘drinking and song clubs’, to which he later paid tribute in Musa Burschicosa: A Book of Songs for Students and University Men (1869). Brawling and duelling between members of the sixteen Landsmannschaften (student societies with membership determined by place of origin) were a feature of Göttingen life. On the other hand, student political activity animated by a spirit of liberal nationalism in opposition to the conservative particularism of the rulers of the various German states, seemed to be absent. Jena University had retained a certain notoriety because of the murder in 1819 of the dramatist and police spy Kotzebue by the Jena student Karl Sand, but the student ferment which had led to the founding of the Allgemeine Deutsche Burschenshaft at Wartburg in 1817 had been suppressed following the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819. Göttingen students had taken part in the Wartburg Festival, and had ‘discarded hair-cutters, and well-made coats, but the spirit evaporated more speedily than elsewhere’, and was dealt with more firmly by the

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authorities.19 Yet, at about the time Blackie was travelling through Germany on his return journey to Scotland in September 1831, Göttingen students were again involved in political disturbances which led to the granting of a liberal constitution in Hanover, as in other German states. At the Hambach Festival in May of the following year the black-red-gold banner of the nationally-minded Burschenschaft was again seen, as some 30,000 men (many of them students) drank a toast to Lafayette, revolutionary hero in the United States and France, and pledged themselves to the struggle for a united and republican Germany. British (and American) students, like Blackie, were not likely to have been aware of this undercurrent of revolutionary thinking, which would lead Göttingen and Heidelberg students to stage an unsuccessful putsch in Frankfurt in 1833,20 though Blackie did encounter more broadly liberal views in the lectures of the Göttingen historians Arnold Heeren (an admirer of Thomas Paine) and Friedrich Saalfeld. Both men spoke English, Saalfeld fluently, and they invited the young Scot into their homes.21 Compared to Edinburgh, Göttingen in the 1820s had more professors, fewer students, a fuller range of courses, and was a wealthier university. In 1824 there were forty-five full professors, supplemented by the same number of Privatdocenten (lecturers), to teach just over 1,500 matriculated students. Edinburgh had some twenty-nine professors to teach 2,000 matriculated students. The Arts faculty at Edinburgh was smaller than the equivalent ‘Philosophy’ faculty of Göttingen, which had twenty-one full professors, teaching fifty-five separate courses, with more than this number again of professors in the ‘professional’ faculties of Theology, Law and Medicine. Göttingen professors lectured two or three times daily, five days a week, in their own homes or in hired rooms, with some classes beginning before breakfast (university lecture rooms were only provided later in the century). The session covered a full ten months (not the five to six months of a Scottish university), with two terms, from Easter to Michaelmas, and from Michaelmas to Easter. Saalfeld suggested the Göttingen climate – ‘eight months of winter and four of summer’ – was the reason Göttingen possessed ‘a more laboured set of professors and students than any other university’, even by German standards of ‘laboriousness and perseverance’. ‘Labour in his particular science is the great enjoyment of a German professor’s life,’ Blackie wrote home: And during the session each professor reads three or four hours every day – before which how many of the Edinburgh learned heads must be ashamed, I do not exactly know. But I should think that he who reads only

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five hours a-week for five months a-year must be considered a very idle man when compared with him who reads some twenty hours a-week for ten months a-year.22

As Edinburgh’s weather was little different to Göttingen’s, a climatic explanation may be ruled out, as can a pecuniary one. German professors worked longer, but were paid less. Russell had estimated that a Scottish professor ‘received four times the money’ of a German one. When he informed a Professor of Law at Jena that his equivalent at Edinburgh might earn, in addition to his salary, ‘the fees of a body of three hundred students at four guineas a-head, for five month’s labour’, the astonished response had been ‘O das gesegnete Völklein! What a blessed flock!’23 Göttingen had many foreign students, most of whom (like Blackie) intended to stay only a few months. They were attracted by the range of teaching, and the cheapness of living and studying in Germany. In 1824 a course of lectures cost a louis d’or, about a third of the Scottish class fee, and Russell calculated that, ‘living as a respectable Bursche’, a student could ‘enjoy, for half the money, the same education he could command in Scotland’. The practice of ‘strangers’ being given seats nearest to the lecturer or professor was well established, but as Blackie found, it was ‘not difficult . . . to make the acquaintance with many who would be very willing to speak nothing but English’. Scott and Shakespeare were ‘almost as well, sometimes better known than in Scotland’.24 Edinburgh University Library had been almost impossible to use for years because of the building of Old College, but at Göttingen matriculated students could borrow books from a library equal in size to that of the British Museum. It had perhaps the best collection of English literature and history on the Continent, and the university bookstore stocked all the latest publications at English prices.25 With the Forbes brothers, Blackie matriculated in the Philosophy faculty on 18 May 1829,26 and began to attend lectures. Like a good German student, he would have sat listening attentively (the younger Scottish students were like rowdy schoolboys), with a portfolio to hold his notes and an inkhorn armed with a sharp iron spike, to fix it to the wooden desk. ‘Of course, I did not understand a single word at first’, he later wrote: but by regular attendance and diligent use of the lecturer’s ‘Handbook’, accompanied by a systematic study of the language under an accomplished private teacher, I very soon began to see the light in the darkness; and got a startling revelation of the superiority of this method of studying a living

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language, to the scholastic methods by which the learned languages are taught in our great classical schools. In four months I was able to understand every spoken discourse, to converse without embarrassment, to read the most difficult German classics, and to write the language with grammatical accuracy and a pretty copious vocabulary.27

He attended only one full course of lectures – at 3 p.m., five times a week, he heard Heeren, ‘a very pleasant, fluent-talking old gentleman, somewhat in the style of Lord Palmerston’, on ‘the “Staaten system”, or political system of Europe from the Reformation downwards’.28 Apart from this, he followed the example of other foreign students and sampled ‘an occasional lecture by the general right of “hospitising” ’, which belonged to all students. He also met other leading professors, most of them Anglophiles, and many of them English-speakers, when their homes were open on Sundays to students. Amongst these was Blumenbach, pioneer in the study of Natural History, renowned for his jokes during lectures, his thick Swabian accent, and for the death-mask of Robert the Bruce in his study, a gift from Sir William Hamilton, later Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh.29 Blackie also attended the crowded public lectures of Hausmann, the leading mineralogist, who had recently returned from a scientific tour through Western Europe greatly impressed by ‘the state of art and manufactures’ in Britain. In the 1820s there was much admiration for Britain’s economic progress under a constitutional monarchy of a kind unknown in German states before the 1830s (and rare before 1848). Something of this fascination with Britain was conveyed in Blackie’s description of the manner in which the ‘astonished’ student audience would ‘gape and stare’ as Hausmann narrated ‘the wonderful celerity of our coaches, the immense operations in our coal mines, the astonishing splendour of the London gas illumination, the wonderful effects of the steam-engine, the intricacy and exquisite workmanship and inventive power displayed in our machinery’.30 The classical philologist Christoph Mitscherlich, on the other hand, spoke no English, but was as fluent in Latin as in German. Presumably he and Blackie conversed in a mixture of the latter two languages as he showed the young man the colony of sixty beehives he kept behind his house.31 However, the professor who ‘made the most vivid and lasting impression’ was the classical philologist and archaeologist, Karl Otfried Müller. As Blackie remembered many years later: I recollect calling upon him and finding him in his study in the middle of a grand circum of quartos and folios in all languages. He was a tall, blond,

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blue-eyed, open, cheerful, intelligent, fine-looking fellow, and moved about with all the litheness of a young tiger; but the elasticity of his bodily motions were in no wise connected with any mere skirmishing quality of mind. In mental calibre he was as massive as he was limber: he could drag after him a whole train of heavy artillery, with no more labour than it costs a common man to move his finger.

Just over thirty years old, Müller was one of the youngest professors and a man of rare promise. No one amongst German classicists, Blackie felt, ‘had a more rich, graceful, and various sweep of living erudition’.32 His own practice of lecturing on classical art and archaeology in his Greek class, many years later at Edinburgh, probably owed something to the example of Müller forty years earlier. Of the other leading professors in the early nineteenth century, the economic historian Sartorius, the historian and critic Bouterwek, and the historian and orientalist Eichhorn, whose work had revolutionised biblical criticism, had all died in the two years before Blackie arrived,33 but Göttingen still had a considerable reputation in History. The professors generally enjoyed ‘considerably more freedom of expression than those at other German institutions’,34 but Göttingen was no longer what it had been during the first seventy years of its existence – ‘the most important German university’. At the beginning of the 1820s, ‘things had clearly changed and the glory of Karl Friedrich Gauss or the attraction of Karl Otfried Müller were not enough to lend lustre to a university which seemed to have lost its old energy.’35 The modern intellectual spirit of Germany in the 1820s was to be found elsewhere, especially in Berlin. The expulsion in 1837 of the ‘Göttingen Seven’, the professors who refused to sign an oath of loyalty to the new King of Hanover in protest against his revocation of the 1833 constitution,36 thus came at the end of a period of slow decline, rather than initiating it. There is nothing to suggest that the twenty-year-old Blackie was aware of these changes, although a few years later a young American student informed his parents that it was ‘not worth one’s while to remain long at Göttingen because most of the Professors who were ornaments of the University’ were ‘dead or decayed’.37 For Blackie, however, Göttingen still seemed a paragon of academic virtue, compared to ‘the meagre routine of the Scottish Universities’. Many years later he recalled how with reference to our Scottish system of education, the scales fell from my eyes very soon after I arrived at Göttingen. I perceived that at Marischal College they had degraded the university pretty much into a school: that

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they drilled boys when they ought to have been stimulating young men: that our academical system was prominently puerile, and our standard of attainment lamentably low. I burned with indignation when I thought of these things, and from that moment became a University Reformer.38

In this vein, while still at Göttingen, Blackie published his first article, criticising the neglect of the German language in Britain, with some harsh words for Scottish universities: in philology and biblical criticism, as ‘every Scotch grammarian and divine’ could testify, German universities had ‘such a constellation of bright names, that before them all our literati must hide their diminished heads’.39 Preparing this article for publication, attending lectures and private German lessons, going regularly to church (travelling beyond Göttingen in search of a good sermon),40 visiting the houses of professors on Sunday afternoons, with some beer-drinking at Kneipen, though not romantic dalliance (he informed his stepmother), left little time for correspondence. ‘If you should at times receive my letters at longer intervals than a fortnight . . . I hope you will never consider that any misfortune has happened to me’, he wrote to his father: That I have studied myself to skin and bone over musty old German books; that I have drowned myself in the bathing-place; that I have fallen over some steep precipice or lost myself in some forest; that I have become disorderly, and having made riots in the streets have been thrown into prison or expelled [from] the University; that I have offended some of the students, and as a punishment therefore have got my nose or cheek cut off in a duel; or finally, that some such inundation of the Leine had taken place as has recently visited the Dee and Don, and hurried me down extra-post to the mouth of the Elbe. I humbly petition that these and all such black thoughts may not be admitted till at least four weeks have passed between my letters.41

His health, however, had suffered in Göttingen’s wet summer, and Alexander Blackie considered sending his son to the south of France as a cure for a persistent head cold. Blackie pleaded successfully to prolong his stay in Germany, and promised to transfer to the University of Berlin for the winter semester, though winter in the Prussian capital would not be much warmer than Göttingen. He proposed a walking tour in the Harz mountains as a way of clearing his ‘stuffed head’, and on 18 September set out with the two Forbes brothers. They inspected the mines at Clausthal and Goslar, climbed the Brocken as Goethe had done in 1777, then visited Martin Luther’s birthplace at Eisleben, the university town of Halle, the book fair at Leipzig, and Dresden with its

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famous picture-galleries. Here Blackie turned back westwards through the Tharandt valley to Freiberg, Chemnitz, Altenburg, Zeitz, Jena and Weimar, where he paid silent homage to Goethe outside his house, ‘being too modest to intrude upon the god’. Then he travelled on to Erfurt, Gotha, Eisenach (visiting the castle where Luther translated the Bible), Witzenhausen, and finally back to Göttingen on 26 October. This was a journey of over 500 miles, though not all of it was on foot. Four days later Blackie said his farewells to the Forbes brothers and left by coach for Berlin, arriving early in the morning of 2 November. The 200-mile journey, via Eisleben and Wittenberg (affording another opportunity to pay homage to the ‘undaunted Martin Luther’), had taken thirty-six hours.42 Berlin was a complete contrast to Göttingen. ‘There is no city that breathes less the spirit of antiquity than Berlin,’ a Scottish visitor observed in 1831. ‘It looks indeed more like a town which belongs to the new than the old world – to America, rather than to Europe.’ Its character derived from that fact that it was a planned capital, ‘called into existence by one great architectural necromancer’, Frederick the Great. It had a population of just under 230,000, but the central squares and avenues looked ‘generally dull and deserted’: It seems like a city that has outgrown its population, or whose inhabitants have left their homes for a season to avoid some expected pestilence. There is a monotony about some of the finest streets of this capital, arising from their great length and breadth, and from the uniformity and similarity of the buildings, that is very apt to make a stranger sigh for alleys less straight or splendid. . . . I could not help thinking, that the noisy excitement of even the most crooked and dirty lane in Hamburgh, was preferable to the comparative stillness of one of the most celebrated streets in the world.

The crowded Unter den Linden offered a contrast to the stillness of the Friedrichstrasse, however. Here the numerous Weinstuben, Bierkellern, coffee-houses, confectioners’ restaurants, and estaminets were evidence of a lifestyle more like that of Paris than London. This, rather than the relatively closed world of the Burschenschaft, was the milieu in which foreign students mixed with their German counterparts. An idle Berliner, in fact, may be said to spend the half of his time in a coffee, wine, or beer-house; while even the man of business feels it his duty to visit some one or other of them, at least once a day. In the morning . . . [they] afford to the stranger and foreigner, most convenient places for breakfasting; in the forenoon, they become the lounge of the soldier and the politician; in the afternoon, they are the general resort of all who can afford a cup of tea or coffee, a bottle of Weissbier, or a glass

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of Kaltschale; and in the evening, they offer a place of reunion for men of pleasure, of literature, or of art – for those who wish a game at billiards or bowls, of cards or dominoes, or who, after coming from the theatre, are desirous of winding up some business of the day with some stomachsoothing elixir.43

This was a large city, with a garrison of 20,000 soldiers, but an orderly one, a view confirmed by John Russell, who noted as well that there was not ‘in Germany a better behaved or more effective university than Berlin’.44 The ‘Athens on the Spree’, as it became known, had been established in 1810 to replace the University of Halle, which Prussia had lost to Napoleon’s new Kingdom of Westphalia. Initially government control was tight. Two and a half of the central precincts of Berlin were designated a ‘university quarter’, ‘undesirable elements’ ejected, and a ‘housing bureau’ established ‘to steer students towards respectable lodgings’. This was in marked contrast to the laissez-faire approach to such matters in Edinburgh. The success of the policy led to an easing of government supervision of professors, initially more obvious than at (pre-1837) Göttingen, and within a few years censorship was lifted. The university statutes of 1816 thus were able to embody the ideas of reformers who argued that the state should support higher education, not in a narrowly utilitarian way, but as learning pursued for its own sake. ‘The union of teaching and research, the unity of knowledge embodied in the philosophical faculty, the ideal of Bildung, of individual self-development through scholarship and science, the freedom of the professor and student’, were ideas attractive to German professors who, while technically civil servants, came to aspire to the status of an autonomous academic profession.45 Berlin thus became a model for other German universities (and in the last quarter of the century, for universities in other countries). The reality was that, just as Göttingen had been established to meet the needs of a medium-sized German state and its landed aristocracy in the mid-eighteenth century, so the new Friedrich-WilhelmsUniversität served the needs of a rather larger German state for a ‘service class’, particularly since Prussia had greatly expanded in size as the result of territory awarded to it after the defeat of Napoleon. There had been misgivings about the wisdom of locating a new university in the centre of the Prussian capital. ‘Good God! Wolf, only think of how many bastards you will have every year!’, Baron von Stein had exclaimed to Friedrich August Wolf. ‘Almost as many, I dare say . . . as they have in Leipzig,’ replied the aged classical scholar, who had ‘emigrated’ from Halle to help establish a new university in Berlin.

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Thus, despite residual doubts about the danger to young men posed by ‘the crowds of worthless women in the capital’ (this was, after all, a garrison town), Stein gave his support to the scheme.46 Within a few years foreign visitors were remarking on the beneficial effect on student behaviour of the culture of a capital city. At ‘the enlightened and liberal seminary of Berlin’, the rude and filthy habits peculiar to the Burschenschaft of many of the smaller German universities, have given way before the more elegant modes and manners of a capital. The academic freedom which exhibits itself in small towns, by means of drinking, smoking, squabbling, and duelling, and which gives an air of importance to those who indulge in such pastimes, when contrasted with a set of sober shopkeepers, is totally lost amid the uncontrolled and varied pastimes of such a city as this.

Berlin became known as an Arbeitsuniversität or, as the young philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach wrote in 1824, ‘other universities are truly taverns compared with this local workhouse’. Housed in the slightly dilapidated former palace of Prince Henry of Prussia, it had in 1831 forty-five ‘regular’ and thirty-five ‘extraordinary’ professors, thirty ‘private teachers’, and 1,600 to 1,700 students, at least 400 of them foreigners. It became the leading university in Prussia, attracting leading scholars (a generation later, the ‘call to Berlin’ became even more difficult to resist). The ever-expanding student population was ‘disproportionately mature’, because Berlin was favoured by those in their final semesters of study.47 It also became the most popular German university for American students (50 per cent studied here between 1815 and 1914), and probably for the British as well.48 Blackie was attracted also by what Berlin had to offer in the form of theatre and the opera, as well as sermons – Göttingen had been short of all three. Actors, as well as preachers, helped him perfect his German, he reassured his aunt: Time was when I would have thought it heresy to join the two classes of men together, but, thank God, I am no longer so blind to my own interest. The theatre, therefore, I visit as regularly as the church. I go conscientiously whenever a fine piece of Goethe, Schiller, Kotzebue, or any other bright constellation of literary stars which has of late shone over Germany, is brought on stage. By this means I make, in the easiest and the most evinced manner, an acquaintance with those classical works which constitute the riches of that language . . . and gain at the same time a correct and elegant pronunciation.

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For sermons, Blackie chose the ‘celebrated theologian and pulpit orator’, Friedrich Schleiermacher, a Berlin professor whose opinions were such that even ‘the old wives in the Glasgow churches’, ‘in all the squeamishness of Evangelicality, could find no particular objection’. With his German also much improved by reading Goethe’s Faust with a German friend, Blackie could now profit from the high level of classical scholarship in Berlin. ‘My father will also be glad to hear that I am pursuing with great zeal my Grecian studies,’ he wrote to his aunt. ‘I have made the acquaintance of a young clear-headed German theologian, or rather philologian, who visits me four times a-week, before whom I translate Homer in German.’ In the classes of Boeckh he read Tacitus, in those of Schleiermacher the Epistle to the Corinthians. For modern history there were lectures by Raumer (to whom he had a letter of introduction from Saalfeld) and von Ranke, in church history lectures by Neander. Blackie thus heard most of the leading scholars of the day, such was the array of talent in Berlin (the only notable names missing from his list were those of the Sanskrit scholar Franz Bopp, the lawyer Karl Friedrich von Savigny, and the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel). To all this was added ‘two hours a-week for fencing, and two hours a-week with an Italian master’, plus Sunday visits to the homes of professors. Boeckh in particular made a great impression. He was the very antithesis of the ‘dry, spiritless pedant’, Blackie wrote, perhaps with Aberdeen professors in mind: Who would imagine that the same person who has had patience enough to grope his way through 20,000 old books and manuscripts; who has published the ‘Corpus Inscriptionum’ . . . a most Herculean labour, – who would imagine that this man at his parties would amuse his friends with the most laughable stories, and by reading strange pieces out of Smollett or some other novel writer.49

‘Scotch theology’ and theologians were also found wanting, in comparison to ‘the great Neander’. Though ‘not such a character as Boeckh’, who was ‘full of life, fun, and anecdote’, Neander impressed the young Scotsman with the broadness of his views. At one of his Sunday afternoon parties, Blackie wrote, we had a long discussion on the method of spending the Sunday, in which it was decided that, though the Scotch method was in many respects extremely beneficial to the moral character of the people, yet that it sprung from narrow Judaizing views, which are foreign to the spirit of Christianity. . . .[W]hat can be more silly, nay, more pernicious, than what we tell our children. ‘This is Sunday, dinna sing; dinna sing, this is the

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Lord’s day.’ What effect can this have but to connect Sunday and gloom together in a manner most unfavourable to religion?

Viewed at close quarters, ‘German theology’ seemed far from the sceptical and rationalist bogey ‘Neology’ conjured up by English and Scottish conservatives, which was such a source of apprehension to his aunt.50 ‘Don’t imagine I am living among a parcel of infidels,’ he reassured his elder sister ‘Kit’: If I were a German, and in making a cursory trip through Scotland should pick up all the absurdities in religion which I there saw, – if I should pick up all the extreme and distorted shades of Moderatism, Evangelicism [sic], Hamiltonianism, Quakerism, Malanism, &c; if from the writings of the Scottish theologians I should select the most moral effusions of Blair, the uncouth Calvinistic bigotry of Boston, the imaginative reveries of Chalmers, the Billingsgate invective of Thomson, the stiff frigidity of –, you may imagine to yourself any Moderate you please, – and then patch up all these monsters – not forgetting the millennial ravings of Irving – and make one picture of them, and hold it up to my countrymen the Germans, exclaiming, ‘Behold Presbyterian Theology!!!’ what would you think of such conduct?51

This reference to ‘my countrymen the Germans’ is evidence of the strong attachment to Germany, one of the most characteristic features of Blackie throughout his life. His ‘jacket’ had indeed been widened, emotionally as well as intellectually, as his father had intended. Many years later Blackie suggested that his ‘life at Berlin no less than at Göttingen was that of a quiet, plodding, unpretending student’. ‘The meditative element in me was too strong to court any sort of racket, while the Evangelical element unequivocally proclaimed that “the world lieth in wickedness”.’ The ‘less one had to do with it, beyond what was pure and profitable, the better’. His letters at the time, however, suggest a happier and more sociable young man than he had been in Edinburgh. Alexander Blackie had wanted him to find a room in one of the professors’ houses, as was possible in smaller university towns, but this was not the practice in Berlin. After three days in an inn, Blackie had found lodgings in Leusen Strasse for not more than thirty shillings a month. ‘I find myself very comfortable and happy here,’ he later told Kit: I am my own master and my own housekeeper. . . . Now, I may allow that that there is sometimes a little confusion in the room, – Greek, Latin, English, German, French, Italian books of all sorts and characters lying tumbled above one another, – sometimes, perhaps, too much dust on the

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tables, but beyond this I allow nothing, and assert that my housekeeping, is a good housekeeping. I live quite à l’allemagne – breakfast, or coffee and rolls between 7 and 8 o’clock, dinner at 1 or 2 at a restaurant; hear lectures all the forenoon; read; receive or pay visits in the evening. I am German from tip to toe, seldom hear an English word, and can rejoice and weep, declaim and rhapsodize, in German as readily as in English. Goethe and Schiller, Lessing and Herder, are more familiar to me than my own poets. . . . I have, I hope, shaken off some of the student’s dust in my travels. I have given up my old composure, and do not live so much alone as formerly. I have also thought it necessary to know something of other things besides Latin, and have along with hard study of Greek – in which I would like to be a Professor – exercised myself in skating, fencing, and playing the guitar. 52

To his aunt, Blackie confessed the attractions of young ‘German ladies’. Visits to the daughter of a Berlin merchant, to whom he had a letter of introduction, left Blackie with ‘a certain, strange, unaccountable, confused, half-trembling feeling’, and left the young lady Minna Doering, and her friend, with copies of the Edinburgh Literary Journal containing Blackie’s first venture into print. ‘Whether this feeling had any connection with the ominous name of the lady – for Minna in German signifies Love – I also am too inexperienced in these matters to be able to decide,’ he told his aunt. Some months later he sought to reassure his stepmother on the subject of ‘German ladies’. ‘You and Miss Stodart may keep your minds quite at ease about anything else but liking their society. My ideal of female perfection is so high that it would be very difficult to satisfy my demands.’ Besides, there was also Aurora von Held, whom he admired ‘even more than Minna’: first, because her features do not express alone softness and modesty, but dignity also, and elegance and grace; secondly, because she has more fire in her eyes and is more animated in her conversation. She was in bed when I arrived at the house, having lately been very ill, but now almost recovered. However, when her mother told her that I wished to faire congé, she soon appeared in all the loveliness of deshabillé.

Unfortunately for Blackie’s new interest in ‘deshabillé’ – so much more becoming than ‘blond head-dresses and gigot-of-mutton satin sleeves’ ladies wore to the theatre – this meeting was in fact to say farewell. Alexander Blackie had planned that his son should go south to Rome for three months, followed by three months in Switzerland and Belgium for the autumn, with a return to Berlin for the winter term of 1830. Preparations for the journey meant a tearful leave-taking of

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Aurora, Blackie ‘sobbing out a repeated “Lebewohl” ’, and pressing ‘a neat edition of Thomson’s “Seasons” ’ on her as a present, just as earlier in the day he had left Minna with ‘a small book . . . in remembrance of Scotland and Scotsmen’.53 A few months earlier Blackie had attempted a summing up of the effects on him of his year abroad. In response to his father’s queries, hard-headed (as one might expect of an Aberdeen banker), but mixed with a little parental day-dreaming, Blackie wrote: ‘I am extremely sorry that I should be obliged to write anything which should diminish the reality of these splendid castles the erection of which seems to employ so much of your evening hours. . . . The flattering prospects you hold out in your letters sometimes serve to awaken my ambitions and stir my energies, but sometimes they force the tear of melancholy to trickle down my cheek. I will conceal nothing from you.’ The idea of a career in the Church of Scotland had not survived the impact of German theology. ‘You know I was never a hot Calvinist since ever I began to think for myself. . . . I have often doubted if the free spirit in which I have been accustomed to study theology will terminate in a sufficient agreement of opinion with the Articles of our Church to enable me to subscribe.’ The Law would require ‘immense patience and many years of study’. On the other hand, there was ‘a good chance’ of securing a university chair in ‘Ancient or Modern Languages’ as the result of a year studying German, Italian, French, Latin and Greek – ‘and thus I will never disappoint my father’s expectations’. This ambition (expressed also in a letter to his sister) was the fruit of new confidence, of which Blackie himself was very aware. A year away from the family home had changed him from being a ‘person . . . naturally of a weak, pliant, and irresolute disposition, timid and retiring, averse to the noise and bustle of busy life’: My being sent abroad made me sensible of my awkwardness in active life. . . . You often told me that it was ridiculous for a person to lock himself up in his study and never see mankind. But of all human souls mine was the worse formed to follow such an advice. Abstracted through a course of years from taking an interest in the affairs that went on around me, accustomed – which custom, though not begun, was cherished and nourished by my residence with Archie Gibson in Edinburgh – accustomed to a sort of internal meditation or rather dreaming, I felt no interest in the subjects with which it was most natural I should be acquainted. Beyond the page[s] of Cicero and the Greek New Testament, I had very little knowledge. . . . But as soon as I came to the Continent and had intercourse with

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men; was obliged to speak with them as a man if I could not be neglected and overlooked in society; O then I felt the nothingness and emptiness of my mind; deeply then did I feel the corrupting influence of continual poring, the stagnating power of the unnatural course of confinement to which I had subjected myself.

German Gemütlichkeit had softened the rough edges of Blackie’s Scottishness, and ‘a good spice of Blackie ambition’ had done the rest. ‘I shall continue in the same course till I am able to speak on all common subjects with facility and adroitness’, he told his father, ‘on politics with men, on polite literature with gentlemen, on theology and philology with the learned, on music, theatres, sentimentality, and love with the ladies!!!!!’54 Now Italy was to give the final polish. The two Forbes brothers joined Blackie in Berlin, and together they set out by coach for Italy on 25 March 1830, on the first stage of their journey. At Dresden they stopped for some days to see the picture-galleries, before proceeding to Prague, and then Vienna, which they reached in time for the Easter ceremonies in the first week of April. At one of these, in the crowded St Stephen’s Cathedral, Blackie was robbed of his pocket-book containing a letter of credit for a large sum of money, enough to carry him to Rome and cover his expenses there for two months. After some anxiety, not least that his father might use this as a reason to recall him to Aberdeen, it became clear that the letter would be useless without his signature, and Alexander Blackie proved willing to provide his son with new funds. After twelve days in Vienna, the three friends travelled on through the Carinthian and Styrian highlands ‘at the rate of about fifty miles a-day, spending the nights at the ordinary stages’. At Laibach (Ljubljana), a hundred miles north-east of Trieste, they stopped for two days to see the grotto of Adelsberg (Postojna), with its ‘aspect of a titanic cathedral’. Leaving Carniola, they took another three days to travel to Trieste . Here they rested before proceeding to Venice, where they stayed a week. This journey of some 700 miles had taken them through three countries – southwards from Berlin through the Kingdom of Prussia, a shorter leg through the Kingdom of Saxony to Dresden, and then a long journey through the Austrian Empire to reach its two seaports, Trieste and Venice. At the Po river they crossed into Papal territory, and travelled on another 300 miles to Bologna and Ancona, arriving in Rome in mid-May 1830. The whole journey had taken nearly two months, and friendship with the Forbes brothers had been sorely tested by their reluctance to travel more slowly. Blackie had wanted to stay longer in the more interesting places, in the tradition of the Grand Tour, but the

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brothers, ‘as sound Calvinists and practical Aberdonians’, had little interest in ‘foreign sights’ and simply wished to get to Rome as quickly as possible.55 Once in Rome, Blackie rented two comfortable rooms in the Via Due Macelli, close to the Piazza di Spagna. He dined every day at a trattoria, and took his coffee, not at the English Coffee House (preferred by the English traveller), but at the nearby Caffè Greco, much frequented by foreign artists and intellectuals. The presence of Germans amongst its clientele was the attraction for Blackie, though not for the composer Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, whose Letters from Italy and Switzerland (1830) described the cafe: It is a small dark room, about eight yards square, where you may smoke on one side, but not on the other; round this they sit on benches, with sombrero hats on their heads, and huge mastiffs beside them; their cheeks and throats, and the whole of their faces covered with hair, puffing fearful clouds of smoke . . . and saying rude things to each other, while the mastiffs provide for a due distribution of vermin. A neckcloth or a coat would be here quite innovations; spectacles hide any portion of the face left visible by the beard; and so they drink their coffee, and talk of Titian and Pordenone.56

As well as mixing with the Germans, Blackie had letters of introduction to two English artists resident in Rome, the painter Joseph Severn and the sculptor John Gibson. These gained him admittance to artistic circles in the city, and later a visit to the studio of the noted Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen to view his statue of Byron. He met other resident English artists, like the sculptor Richard Wyatt,57 as well as his Edinburgh friend Henry Glassford Bell, ‘the cleverest fellow I know’, in Rome with his brother, the architect Jonathan Anderson Bell.58 As a response to moving in these circles, he began to take drawing lessons, ‘for to be in Italy without being able to draw is the same thing as to be in water, and not be able to swim’.59 Letters home, describing the antiquities of Rome were illustrated by ‘neat little pen-and-ink sketches’. Blackie now began to formulate the idea of staying on in Rome over the winter to devote himself to classical studies. At the end of June he wrote to his father requesting permission, prefacing the letter with his own translation of verses from Horace, his father’s favourite poet. While he waited for a reply from Aberdeen, Blackie took the opportunity to make a trip to Naples to view the principal art collections and antiquities. He travelled south by carriage in the company of the wife and daughters of the German pastor in Rome. At Gaeta they stopped and wandered in the grounds of Cicero’s villa at Formia. He

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spent a month in Naples with other German friends, also visiting Herculaneum, Pompeii, Ischia, and (in the agreeable company of the German ladies) Capri. He spent his final week in Naples ‘collecting minerals, engravings, casts, and coins for his father’. He had found the experience unforgettable. ‘I have visited all the marvellous regions celebrated in the 6th book of Virgil and the 10th book of the “Odyssey” ’, he wrote to his father: Naples has kept me so long within its enchanted neighbourhood that I have been here a month without thinking of returning to Rome. What makes Naples agreeable to me is the ever-smiling face of nature – the sort of wild original savageness which distinguishes the customs and manners of the great mob which flood the streets, the varied and singular antiquities which are everywhere seen in a land sung by Virgil and Homer, and colonised by the polished Greeks, so afterwards the abode of the magnificent and luxurious Romans.60

The contrast between former splendour and present-day degradation was the abiding impression for Blackie, as for other travellers. ‘Not from what Italy is, so much as from what it was, and from the remains of what it was, do strangers crowd in such streams to Rome and Naples’, he later wrote from the Locanda della Sibilla at Tivoli outside Rome, ‘a capital place’ which cost not ‘above two shillings a-day!!! lodging and all included!’, and then, with a certain grim satisfaction, he noted: It would seem that Providence was punishing the present Italians for the sins of their fathers; that the Romans are now suffering a poverty and a misery they formerly, as the Robbers of the world and pillagers of mankind, made others to suffer on such an extensive scale. Boast as thou wilt, thou scarlet-clad whore of Babylon, thy day is gone; thy land is at present in a great degree of waste, and uncultivated like the desert of Sahara; thy towns are half in ruins, and full of dirt, stench, and malaria; thy people are poor as rats, and from top to toe more miserable than the lowest Irishmen who beg on the streets of Glasgow and Greenock.

After his return to Rome in the heat of mid-August, he had found the city unbearable. Comfortably lodged at Tivoli, on a ridge to the east of the city, he spent a fortnight in the company of two German artists. He visited Hadrian’s villa, and then set off on a walking tour, following in the footsteps of Horace and Virgil and covering on average twenty-four miles a day. He would start at sunrise and walk until sunset, resting during the hotter hours for dinner and siesta. Olevano, where he met English artists, and Subiaco, were his bases for walking

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tours, over the southern range of the Sabine Mountains to Lake Fucino, and down into the Ciociaria as far as Alatri, always with Etruscan or Roman remains in mind. The famous Benedictine monasteries at Subiaco were of little interest since they belonged to a culture which he found largely repellent.61 Catholicism, the next ‘most potent of living influences’ in Italy after art and architecture, both attracted and repelled Blackie. Years later, he still remembered being at first ‘sympathetically drawn’ to its forms of worship. ‘I used to listen with the most devout sympathy to the Ave Maria, sung every evening before the image of the Virgin in some consecrated street corner, and the echoes of the vesper melody. . . . I even used to join sometimes in the regular Catholic worship, not having any objections to bow to the Host, unless by doing so I should be supposed to give a formal adherence to Popery’. He ‘seriously entertained, for the space of two days, the notion that Romanism might after all be the true form of Christianity’, but once he set his ‘reasoning faculty to work seriously, . . . these sentimental imaginations disappeared in floating clouds’. A ‘pious Christian in the Romish fashion’ might be ‘as good and often better than a pious Christian under the Scottish form: but for a reasonable man to be a Christian at all’ was ‘a great deal more easy in Edinburgh than in Rome’. It ‘was only by sentiment that I bridged over for a short season the immense gulf that lies between an Italian Roman Catholic and a Presbyterian Scot’, he wrote, before concluding that ‘the Popish system’ was ‘a monstrous combination of devout stupidity, tasteless mummery, and sacerdotal selfishness’. 62 Apart from this, ‘Italy and the Italians generally . . . made decidedly no impression’ on Blackie. He lived with an Italian family (he had moved in October 1830 to Via Ripetta), but found that, there was no power in Italy that could lay firm hold on such a serious thinking Scot as I was: Scot to the backbone, and under the abiding influence of continued doses of Germanism, which would only tend to draw me farther and farther from the bright externalities of a Southern life.

He had become fluent in the Italian language, and was ‘a passionate admirer of Dante and Ariosto among the ancients, Leopardi, Foscolo, Monti &c, among the moderns’, but beyond this, Italian had nothing to offer someone whose ‘heart was already preoccupied by the Germans’, even if the ‘lofty moral purpose’ of Dante satisfied ‘the earnestness’ of his own ‘moral nature’: The world with which I was specially occupied was the world of thoughts within my own soul, which I was anxious to humanise and to unify, and

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in this task I had to struggle into clearness by the help of the Bible and the Germans. But to any questions that I had to put the Italian oracles were altogether dumb: I made no intimate acquaintance among that people. I was possessed by a feeling that a vast gulf divided them from me, which it was impossible to overbridge. The Germans had laid hold of me firmly in Göttingen and Berlin; and they kept that hold naturally in Rome.63

Blackie had letters of introductions from Neander and Boeckh in Berlin to the leading German classical scholars in Rome. Now, with permission from his father to extend his stay, he was able to plan a year of intensive study under expert German guidance. Amongst the expatriate scholars in Rome to whom Blackie later acknowledged a debt, were the Hanoverian attaché August Kestner, and the Oxford-educated Rev. Robert Finch, both of whom had opened their libraries to the young Scot.64 When Blackie returned to Rome from his walking tour in early October, he found that Finch had died of a fever, and that another German acquaintance, who was also pursuing classical studies in Rome to prepare himself for an academic career, had succumbed to the same disease. This seems to have plunged him into a recurrence of the depression he had suffered six years earlier in Aberdeen. An English artist friend (Thomas Roods) came to the rescue and carried him off on another walking tour, this time the Alban Hills and the Volscian Mountains (Monti Lepini) to the south-east of Rome. Covering twenty to twenty-five miles a day, they passed through Velletri, Cori, Norba, Ninfa and Segni, before skirting the Pontine marshes to Civita Lavinia (Lanuvio), Nemi, Palazzuola, and returning east of Lake Albano to Marino. By the third week of October Blackie was back in Rome, ‘health, spirits, and energy completely restored’, ready to start work. In a letter to his aunt (29 November) he described a typical day: I rise about seven and after reading a chapter of the Bible, and composing a prayer out of it, I go and make my breakfast, which consists simply of a cup of coffee and bread. Till midday I read in the Minerva Library. Then I come home, and after lunching, study and draw. After drawing till about three o’clock in the afternoon, I go every second day to my drawing-master, with whom I remain an hour and a half, then stroll about till five, when I go to the restaurateur and meet my friends and dine. After dinner I either read at home or go to the German pastor’s, where there is German society, and where we have rational discourse on all subjects, religious and worldly. These parties generally end with a chapter of the Bible and a prayer. On Sundays I go to the German church, take a walk, read Klopstock and the Bible, and in the evening visit the Prussian Ambassador, who on these

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evenings has the most beautiful sacred music. I have also a general invitation to his week-day evening parties, as well as to those given by the Duchess of Torlonia, where I see all the beauties of Rome, a sight worth all the musty antiquarian and Latin books that were ever written.65

The ‘beauties of Rome’ at the celebrated evening receptions of the Duchessa had obviously made an impression, but so had the Prussian ambassador, the Chevalier Bunsen. Blackie had a letter of introduction to him from Neander, and on meeting Bunsen found him to be ‘a polite gentleman, a deep antiquarian, a profound theologian, and a delicate connoisseur in works of art’.66 Bunsen was married to the English heiress Frances Waddington, and his family was equally at home in English or German culture, something of an ideal state for Blackie. ‘I spent Xmas Day in Bunsen’s family’, he told his father, ‘and was quite charmed with his and her many excellences.’67 Later Blackie described Bunsen as ‘the most potent educative force ever brought to bear upon me’: He was the first type of a complete well-rounded and well-balanced manhood that I had met with; curious in learning without being abstruse; expert in business without being absorbed; poetical without being dreamy; emotional without being sentimental; religious without being scrupulous; theological without being damnatory. To have seen such a man, was to know what a noble thing humanity is when realised in its full equipment.

Blackie later (inaccurately) described Bunsen’s origins as like those of ‘a poor Scotch scholar’, ‘sprung from nothing; the son of a petty crofter in the pettiest state of Germany’, and this heightened his admiration.68 Bunsen was important in calming the religious anxieties which continued to plague Blackie. His kind of Christianity, ‘a bright union of geniality, scholarship, and piety’, at the time seemed ‘altogether unintelligible to my narrow Scotch nature’, Blackie wrote later: In the midst of the bright Italian summers I still found myself seized by occasional fits of wandering into regions of black bog and dreary mist, from which I, with great difficulty made my escape. I had recurrent fits of deep melancholy, knowing neither whence they came nor whither they went, and in the background of which some vexed religious questions, the spawn of Scotch Calvinism, were sure to be looming.

Staying with the Bunsens at Frascati in August 1831, he found himself called upon to give an account of his religious views which ended in his breaking down in tears, as Bunsen took him to task for ‘boggling among dark theological questions of no practical value’. If the

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‘peculiar doctrines’ of Christianity seemed ‘utterly inexplicable and full of contradictions’, as he told his aunt (presumably to her alarm), this left only ‘the ethical part of the religion’ as a guide to conduct. The ‘old moorings’ which had bound Blackie to ‘any form of Christian conviction known in Scotland’ were slowly loosening, but he was still in search of ‘a religion to live by’.69 Blackie was also in search of a field of study to make his own. His restlessness had led him in many directions, as he explained to his sister Kit (in a postscript to a long poem entitled ‘The Monk’s Sermon and the Devil’s Annotations: a Satire on Catholicism’): You see I am verse-mad. But you know I am subject to various kinds of madness, and of frequent recurrence. In Aberdeen I got first religious-mad. Then I got Latin-mad. In Berlin I got woman-mad. Now I am verse-mad, and am fast getting antiquarian-mad. . . . I have no more command over my whims and fancies than a hen-pecked husband has over his wife. . . . [F]or a month and a half I was haunted by the drawing madness, and sketch anything living or dead I could set my eyes upon.70

In February 1831, he took some lessons from a ‘Greek scholar’ in the modern language, ‘hardly in anything different from the Ancient’, and considered travelling to Athens, but he was reluctant ‘to ask another favour from a father who has already treated me much better than I deserve’.71 Instead, under the influence of Bunsen especially, his mind turned more and more to classical archaeology. The German archaeologist, Eduard Gerhard, to whom he had an introduction from Boeckh, offered to assist him.72 In May 1831 he took Blackie on ‘a tour through the Ancient Etruria’, with a visit to the important tombs at Vulci which he had helped discover in 1828. This was the period of ‘Etruscomania’ in Europe, and Blackie took the opportunity to submit a short article to the Edinburgh Literary Review describing his tour.73 He was extremely fortunate to have as his guide one of the leading figures in the ‘galaxy of archaeologists . . . congregated around Bunsen’. Gerhard was pioneer of a new scientific archaeology (as distinct from antiquarianism) which claimed equal status with philology, while using its findings, much as Karl Otfried Müller was doing with the study of classical mythology.74 Bunsen was the third in a line of Prussian diplomatic representatives in Rome who were notable scholars – Wilhelm von Humboldt (1802–8), the founder of the University of Berlin, Barthold Niebuhr (1816–23), the great Roman historian, and, finally, Niebuhr’s former pupil and secretary, Christian Bunsen (1823–38). Roman archaeology was dominated by

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Germans, and Bunsen was instrumental in the establishment in 1828 of the Istituto di Corrispondenza Archaeologica, which was ‘conceived as an international organisation and charged with the regular publication of the most notable archaeological discoveries’. It was initially housed in the Prussian mission, with Gerhard as its administrator, and produced a range of publications very much in the modern academic manner.75 It was in the Institute’s Annali for 1831 that Blackie published his first serious scholarly article, ‘Intorno un sarcofago rinvenuto nella Vigna Amendola sulla via Appia’, ‘an exposition’ of a bas-relief depicting a battle between Romans and Germans on a newly discovered sarcophagus, written first in Latin, then rewritten in Italian on the suggestion of Gerhard and Bunsen. Blackie proudly informed his father that Gerhard had suggested that this would place him ‘side-by-side amongst the first literati in Europe, since no production of pert, prattling, shallow young wits’ could ‘possibly find place’ in the Annali. He had been particularly fortunate in having been taken up by Gerhard, though it is clear from what Bunsen wrote to Alexander Blackie, when requesting that he extend his son’s stay in Rome so that he could finish his research, that he had impressed the Germans with his ‘acquirements’, ‘pure zeal for the cultivation of his mind’ and ‘excellent qualities of heart’. Gerhard would later support Blackie’s appointment to university chairs in Aberdeen and Edinburgh, and F. G. Welcker, one of Bunsen’s circle and another exponent of what Gerhard termed ‘philological archaeology’,76 also corresponded with the young Scot. As we shall see, the chances of pursuing a career as a classical archaeologist in Britain were limited, however. Even in the 1840s there was only one university chair, compared to ten in Germany, and the idea of archaeology as ‘the natural complement’ of philology was completely unknown in the Scottish universities, and neglected at Oxford and Cambridge.77 While Blackie was becoming ever more involved in German archaeological scholarship in Rome, that rather neglected world of ‘Italy and Italians’ threatened to intervene. Pope Pius VIII died at the end of November 1830, and the papacy remained vacant for over two months, leaving a power vacuum. There was unrest in the papal territories of Romagna and the Marche, and by late January 1831 Bologna, Ancona, Forlì and Ravenna were in the hands of rebels. Rome still seemed relatively unaffected, as Blackie reassured his family: The truth is that the residence of the Pope and the high ecclesiastics, the splendour of continually recurring religious ceremonies, and the

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wide-stretching influence of the never-sleeping priest, keep a great part of the Romans in firm and constant attachment to the existing government. The higher classes find it in their interest to support the powers that be, of whatever sort they are, and the lower classes are so uninstructed as to consider rebellion against the Pope as equivalent to rebellion against God. Thus there only remain a few of the well-educated middle classes who are at all inclined to favour the party of the Bolognese.

Two weeks later Blackie was again able to reassure his family that ‘the frail vessel of Babylonian superstition’ had ‘weathered yet again the dangerous storm of the Interregnum’: In Rome there cannot be any commotion. It is beyond the possibility of things. Therefore I pray Miss Stodart, not to imagine that she sees the bloody head of her nephew stuck on the summit of one of the Roman obelisks, with the inscription written in French and in English and in Italian, ‘Behold the head of a democrat’!!78

Yet family concern was understandable. The overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy in Paris in July 1830 had unleashed a political chain-reaction in other parts of Europe. In several German states and Swiss cantons liberal constitutions were granted in response to public discontent. In Belgium a full-scale revolt against Dutch rule had broken out, leading to a new independent state by the end of the year. The proposal by Tsar Nicholas I to crush the French and Belgian revolutions in turn provoked a rebellion by his Polish subjects, though this was to be suppressed the following year. In the Italian peninsula the Carbonari, a secret society dedicated to the overthrow of unconstitutional rulers, had been active for a decade, particularly in the South. In February 1831 there were revolutionary disturbances in the small duchies of Parma and Modena, and in nearby Romagna and the Marche a provisional revolutionary government was established. It took intervention by Austrian troops in March to restore the duchies to their rulers, and the two papal provinces to Rome. The French had also intervened, partly to keep an eye on the Austrians, and they occupied the port of Ancona as long as the Austrian troops remained in Bologna – until 1838. In Rome several Carbonari had been executed in 1825, and in December 1830 fears of a Bonapartist conspiracy led to the exiling of the young Louis Napoleon, later to be Napoleon III of France, but there was no revolution. The fragility of the political situation was obvious, and Blackie was certainly more aware than he had been in Göttingen of political tensions beneath the surface, not least because he found difficulty in travelling south of Rome. On his

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trip to Naples in June 1830 he had been delayed for three days at Gaeta by the Bourbon police seeking to intercept someone by the name of Blacker, ‘a carbonaro English captain’. In August his passport again attracted the attention of the police at Celano, after he had crossed into the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies on an expedition to view antiquities at Fucino, where the Torlonia had estates.79 Blackie finally left Rome in early September 1831. He had obtained ‘regular certificates’ from ‘the Archaeological Society’ and from ‘several learned men’ testifying to his ‘classical attainments and knowledge of the German language and literature’, but, more importantly, he had experienced at first hand the way in which German scholarship was transforming the world of learning. His last letter to his father, on the eve of his departure, suggests that there had also been time for a little romantic dalliance: To-morrow I leave Rome. . . . I set off on foot with a German painter to Florence, and from thence through Venice and Milan to Munich. . . . I leave Rome with a heavy heart, not because of the antiquities, for I have got tired of them, but because of the friends I hold so dear and because –, I am really in love with –, What? O the rogue! Yes, I always knew Italy was a demoralising country! Did you Miss B.? So it is; but I have been more in company with Germans in Rome than with Italians; and as to Clotilde – sweet, dignified, amiable Clotilde Baldassari – I protest before gods and men I never got more than a squeeze of the hand from her since I came here. But that is the very reason why I am so desperately in love with her; because a woman without moral dignity – hear, ye flirts, and give ear, ye coquettes – is not worth – a straw. As to Clotilde, She is not pretty – more like Juno she Than Venus, shines in female dignity. And in her darting eyes not vile desire, But rays of intellectual light inspire.

Clotilde was one of his landlady’s daughters, ‘lively and bright, as Italian girls, compared with Scotch are wont to be’ – ‘it was not the prettiest one, but the wittiest one that took my fancy’,80 Blackie remembered many years later, intelligence being a quality he admired in women throughout his life. Blackie set off northwards on his homeward journey. With their knapsacks, and ‘dressed in white Italian summer suits, which could be washed’, the travellers passed through Perugia, and stopped at Chiusi to view Etruscan remains. It took nine days to walk the 250 miles to Florence where they arrived on 11 September. Local peasants sometimes refused lodgings, fearing that the travellers ‘might be burglars or

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escaped malefactors’, but Blackie was favourably impressed by what he saw of the condition of the Tuscan peasantry compared to those in the countryside around Rome. In a letter to his father from Florence, he also extolled the virtues of the local system of sharecropping, ‘contrasted . . . with the state of heavily rented farmers in Scotland’, a point he was again to make some fifty years later in his book The Scottish Highlanders and the Land Laws (1885). At Florence the travellers stopped for ten days to visit galleries and view the city, and then walked the next 150 miles to Venice, by way of Bologna. Blackie proudly reported home that ‘their whole march from Rome had not cost them more than two shillings a-day’. In Venice they had the good fortune to meet a ‘Bosnian Kutscher’, in search of passengers for his coach for the return journey to Munich, who was willing to accept twelve florins a head as the price for a week’s travel, bed and board at inns on the way included. Blackie passed the time during the six-day coach journey, via the Tyrol and Innsbruck, reading Shelley’s ‘Queen Mab’, which had been lent to him by an English fellow-passenger (who had paid the full seventy florins for the journey). This induced him ‘to make a Pythagoras vow of eating no animal food. But this vegetarian enthusiasm lasted only a fortnight.’ After a few days ‘visiting the pictures and antiquities’ of Munich, Blackie left his friend Thilenius and continued on foot through Augsburg, Wurzburg and Frankfurt in the company of another young German bound for the University of Bonn. Bunsen had advised further study there in the winter term, and had provided a letter of introduction to the classical philologist Christian Brandis, but on his arrival in Bonn Blackie found a letter from his father ‘sharply reprimanding him for his dilatory return’. This was ‘a reminder that his years of liberty were coming to a close’, and that his father would now expect him to make his way in the world. He promised to leave Bonn in ten days (time enough to meet Brandis), justifying his slow return on foot as a way of saving his father money. He also, in effect, set out his terms (intellectually speaking) for a return to Scotland: My powers I now feel in their full development; conscious strength now urges on to a certain goal my former weak and languid efforts. . . . There is a directing power within that cannot be contented with childish game. . . . [But] I am conscious of two handicaps. My speculations are too theoretical – too little sobered by practice and practical application. Secondly, I have the misfortune to entertain ideas on most subjects quite contrary to those generally received. . . . To one who measures everything not from practical experience of what really exists, but from a priori

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conclusions of what should exist, the world seems one mass not only of absurdity and confusion, but of selfishness and duplicity – the most hateful species of crime. I am more governed by poetical feeling than is good for me. I want too many reformations. I have no mercy for existing conditions, however custom may have rendered them, if they only be contrary to the eternal propriety and harmony of things.81 Notes 1. Cook organised an excursion to the Paris Exhibition in 1855, his first ‘Great Circular Tour of the Continent’ in 1856. 2. Notes, p. 37. 3. E. Ashby, ‘The future of the nineteenth-century idea of the University’, Minerva, VI (1967–8), 4. K. H. Jarausch, ‘American students in Germany, 1815–1914: the structure of German and U.S. matriculants at Göttingen University’ in H. Geitz, J. Heideking and J. Herbst (eds), German Influences on Education in the United States to 1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 195. 4. F. K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, 2nd edn (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1990), p. 18. G. M. Stewart, ‘British students at the University of Göttingen in the eighteenth century’, German Life and Letters, XXX, 1 (1979–80), 25. K. H. Jarausch, Students, Society, and Politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 86. 5. John Forbes (1802–99), headmaster of Donaldson’s Hospital 1850–70, Professor of Hebrew at Aberdeen 1870–87. Francis Forbes (1804–55), later a missionary in Demerara. 6. Henry Glassford Bell (1803–74), founder-editor of Edinburgh Literary Journal 1828–31, advocate 1832, Sheriff-substitute of Lanarkshire 1839, Sheriff-principal of Glasgow 1867. 7. Letters, p. 27. 8. The Schnellpost, derided by the English as ‘snail post’, was more comfortable than the English mail coach, holding six passengers inside, three outside, with better security for baggage, at the rear and underneath, under charge of a conductor. 9. Stoddart, pp. 34–6. 10. E. B. Ashton’s translation of extracts from the Harzreise, in H. Kesten (ed.), Heinrich Heine: Works of Prose (London: Secker & Warburg, 1943), pp. 36–43, 299. Heine matriculated in October 1820. 11. Anon., ‘Reminiscences of a German Student’, ELJ, VI, 141 (23 July 1831), 57. 12. Cf. ‘Recollections of a Göttingen Student’, New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, XXVI (1829), 519–22, XXVIII (1830), 12–20, 145–54, 245–54, 340–8, 423–35, XXIX (1830), 117–20. D. F. S. Scott,

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13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

John Stuart Blackie ‘An English impression of Göttingen in the year 1823’, Durham University Journal, XLVII (N.S. XVI), 2 (March 1955), 68–74, identifies the author as Thomas James Arnold (?1804–77). J. Russell, A Tour in Germany, and Some of the Southern Provinces of the Austrian Empire, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Constable, 1824), in 1828 repr. in ‘Constable’s Miscellany’ series, the edition used here. Russell (?1797–1846) also edited the Annual Register. ‘Recollections of a Göttingen Student’, 521. Russell estimated there were 1,096 rooms for 1,255 students in 1821, with only six rooms vacant: Tour, I, p. 261. St Andrews had fewer than 300 students. Letters, pp. 28–9. ‘Sonsy’, Scots for buxom. Ibid., pp. 29–30. Middle-class Edinburgh ‘still dined at four o’clock, and supped lightly at nine’ (Stoddart, p. 112). A breakfast was traditional, from the 1830s as a hot meal. Cooked lunch at midday developed as the dinner-hour got later. Russell, Tour, I, pp. 255–7. Anon., ‘Göttingen in 1824’, Putnam’s Magazine, VIII, 48 (December 1856), 601. Russell, Tour, I, p. 261. Nor of the anti-semitism which probably caused the expulsion of Heine from the Burschenschaft in November 1820. Letters, pp. 32–4. Arnold Ludwig Hermann Heeren (1760–1842), Professor of History. Friedrich Saalfield (1785–1834), Professor of Political Economy and History. Anon., ‘Göttingen in 1824’, 599, 605–7. Letters, pp. 32–3. Anon., ‘Göttingen in 1824’, 597–8. Russell, Tour, I, pp. 96–7, 104. Anon., ‘Göttingen in 1824’, 596–7, 601. Russell, Tour, I, p. 96. Letters, p. 30. Göttingen had 200,000 volumes in 1802, with on average 2,000 added each year. L. Marino, I maestri della Germania Göttingen 1770–1820 (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), p. 9. By the 1820s it thus equalled the British Museum library (227,000 volumes) and was four times the size of Edinburgh University Library. G. von Selle, Die Matrikel der Georg-August-Universität zu Göttingen 1734–1837 (Hildesheim and Leipzig: August Lax, 1937), pp. 823–4. ‘Recollections of a Göttingen Student’, 148. Notes, pp. 38–9. The private tutor was a Professor Bode. Letters, pp. 33–5. In 1829 Heeren established the highly successful series Geschichte der europäischen Staaten. Letters, pp. 31–2. Anon., ‘Reminiscences of a German Student’, 111–12. Anon., ‘Göttingen in 1824’, 596. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), Professor of Medicine and Anatomy from 1776. Hamilton had visited in 1817 and 1820. Letters, p. 36. Johann Ludwig Friedrich Hausmann (1782–1859).

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31. Ibid., pp. 31–4. Christoph Wilhelm Mitscherlich (1760–1854). 32. Notes, pp. 41–2. Karl Otfried Müller (1797–1840). 33. Georg Sartorius (1765–1828). Friedrich Bouterwek (1766–1828). Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752–1827). 34. C. E. McClelland, The German Historians and England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 16. 35. Marino, Maestri della Germania, p. 6. Gauss (1777–1855), an important figure in the history of theoretical and applied mathematics, Director of the Göttingen observatory and Professor of Astronomy. 36. The seven professors were Wilhelm Albrecht, Heinrich Ewald, Georg Gottfried Gervinus, Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, and William Weber. King Ernst Augustus (1771–1851) was the fifth son of George III and alumnus of Göttingen. 37. G. W. Curtis (ed.), The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley (London: John Murray, 1889), I, p. 25. Motley was a student at Göttingen 1832–3. 38. Notes, pp. 40–1. 39. ELJ, II, 41 (22 August 1829), 163–6 (signed ‘J. S. B. Göttingen, 17th July, 1829’). 40. Blackie was surprised that only one in twelve Göttingen students, and even fewer of the professors, attended church even occasionally. Stoddart, p. 42. 41. Letters, pp. 31, 35 (emphasis in original). 42. Notes, pp. 42–3. Stoddart, pp. 42–7. 43. J. Strange, Germany in MDCCCXXXI (London: John Macrone, 1836), I, pp. 194–6, 247–9, 256, 259–60. Kaltschale, the favourite drink of Berliners, was iced beer with sugar, lemon, biscuit, rum and currants. 44. Russell, Tour, II, p. 61. 45. C. E. McClelland, ‘ “To live for Science”: ideals and realities at the University of Berlin’ in T. Bender (ed.), The University and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 188–9. Ringer, Decline of the German Mandarins, pp. 23–5. R.D. Anderson, ‘Before and after Humboldt: European Universities between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, History Of Higher Education Annual, XX (2000), 10. 46. Russell, Tour, II, p. 59. Wolf (1759–1824), leading Homer scholar, professor at Halle 1783–1806. The reforms of Heinrich Friedrich Carl Stein (1757–1831) from 1807 were the basis of the modern Prussian state. 47. Strange, Germany, I, pp. 298–300. Feuerbach quoted in McClelland, ‘To live for Science’, p. 188, where the number of students in 1830 is given as around 2,000, ‘a high point not to be reached again permanently until the 1870s’ (p. 191). 48. Jarausch, ‘American students in Germany, 1815–1914’, p. 196. Göttingen was the second most popular university.

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49. Letters, pp. 38–41. Kennedy, p. 40. Friedrich Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834), Professor of Theology. August Boeckh (1785–1867), Professor of Classical Philology. Friedrich Ludwig Georg von Raumer (1781–1873), Professor of Political Science. Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), Professor of History. Johannes August Wilhelm Neander (1789–1850), Professor of Church History. 50. Letters, pp. 42–4. The criticism of Neology or Rationalist theology in The State of Protestant Religion in Germany (1825), by an Anglican High Churchman (H. J. Rose), had confirmed the suspicions of Blackie’s aunt and elder sister. 51. Ibid., pp. 42–4. Hugh Blair (1718–1800), Professor of Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres at Edinburgh. Thomas Boston (1676–1732), leading Calvinist theologian. Andrew Thomson (1779–1831) was leader of the Scottish Evangelicals, Thomas Chalmers his successor. Edward Irving (1792–1834) was convicted of heresy by the London Presbytery in 1830. 52. Notes, p. 44. Letters, p. 45. Stoddart, pp. 47–8. 53. Stoddart, p. 57. Letters, pp. 40, 50–3. 54. Letters, pp. 45–50. 55. Stoddart, pp. 62–5. 56. Quoted in J. Varriano, Rome: A Literary Companion (London: John Murray, 1991), p. 140. 57. Stoddart, pp. 60–5. Notes, pp. 52–5. Letters, p. 58. Joseph Severn (1793–1879), Keats’ companion in Rome in 1821. He stayed until 1841, then returned as British consul 1861–72. John Gibson (1790–1866) had been a pupil of Canova and Thorvaldsen in 1817. Richard James Wyatt (1795–1850) settled in Rome in 1821. Thorvaldsen (1770–1844). 58. Letters, p. 65. Jonathan Bell (1809–65), later an Edinburgh architect and Secretary of the Association for the Promotion of the Fine Arts in Scotland. 59. Ibid., pp. 53–4. 60. Stoddart, pp. 66, 68–71. Letters, pp. 53–4. 61. Letters, pp. 54–5. Stoddart, pp. 72–3. One of the artists was the Munich painter Eduard Schaller (1802–48). 62. Notes, pp. 57–8. An early letter to his aunt, now lost, was ‘full of fever and fury and fret against Vaticanism and all its ways’. Letters, p. 53 (editor’s note). 63. Letters, p. 69. Notes, pp. 52, 58–60. 64. Letters, p. 67. Georg August Christoph Kestner (1777–1853), son of Charlotte Kestner (née Buff), on whom Goethe modelled Lotte in Werther. Finch (1783–1830), an English antiquary, had lived mostly abroad. 65. Quoted in Stoddart, pp. 75–6. The Biblioteca Casanatense until 1870 was part of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803), a highly regarded German religious poet. Duchess Anna

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66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76.

77. 78.

79. 80.

81.

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Maria, the widow of Giovanni Torlonia, 1st Duke of Bracciano (1754–1829), was an important patron of the arts. C. Popi, ‘La nobiltà del censo: i Torlonia e Roma’, in Maestà di Roma da Napoleone all’unità d’Italia (Rome: Electa, 2003), pp. 406–10. Letters, p. 55. Ibid., pp. 58, 60. ‘Chief Educative Influences of My Life’, Pupil Teacher’s Monthly, February 1888. NBR, (N.S. IX), 96 (June 1868), 435, 438. Christian Karl Josias von Bunsen (1791–1860), son of a retired soldier in the Principality of Waldeck, worked in the Prussian embassy in Rome 1818–38 (from 1823 as resident minister), and was Prussian ambassador in London 1842–54. A classical scholar, theologian, moderate liberal and anglophile. Notes, pp. 63–4. Letters, p. 72. Letters, p. 56. Ibid., p. 65. Friedrich Wilhelm Eduard Gerhard (1795–1867), from 1834 Director of the Archaeological Museum, Berlin. Notes, p. 61. ‘Etruscan Antiquities: A Letter from Rome’ [signed ‘A Scotchman in Rome, Rome 12 May 1831’], ELJ, V, 135 (11 June 1831), 372–4. Marino, Maestri della Germania, pp. 254–5. A. Schnapp, Discovery of the Past (London: British Museum Press, 1996), pp. 305–6. Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker (1784–1868), professor successively at Giessen, Göttingen and Bonn (where Karl Marx heard him lecture on Greek and Roman mythology). Notes, pp. 61–2. Letters, pp. 67–9. Schnapp, Discovery of the Past, p. 308. Letters, p. 59, 64–5. Pius VIII’s short pontificate (31 March 1829–30 November 1830) followed that of the reactionary Leo XII (1823–9). He was succeeded by Gregory XVI on 2 February 1831. Stoddart, pp. 69–70, 73–4. Letters, pp. 72–3 (the name is wrongly given as Clothilda Baldaviari). Notes, p. 68. Clotilde later taught Latin to English ladies in Rome (NLS MS 2624 f. 268). Cf. Blackie to Robert Wyld, 15 March 1832, Clementina Baldassari (Clotilde’s mother) to Blackie, March 1833, NLS MS 2621 ff. 56, 62. Stoddart, pp. 86–9. Notes, pp. 68–9. Letters, pp. 73–5. For E. Thilenius, see NLS MS 2621 f. 54. Christian August Brandis (1790–1867), professor at Bonn and biographer of B. G. Niebuhr.

3 STRUGGLE 1 Blackie arrived in London at the beginning of November 1831, still clad in his white summer suit. He had with him letters of introduction to leading literary and political figures in the capital, which his father had sent to him in Bonn. Alexander Blackie made the long journey south from Aberdeen, eager to greet the eldest son he had not seen for two and a half years. In his last letter home Blackie had warned that ‘instead of being able to flatter statesmen, priests, and professors in order to get into place’, now his ‘opinions for the most part . . . [were] such as would disgust all such people at the first interview’,1 but views which might have caused offence in Aberdeen were unlikely to do so in London. Blackie spent a week being taken by his father to call on Scots living in the capital who could ‘perhaps be of use to a rising young man’, Joseph Hume (Radical MP for Aberdeen Burghs, and former Rector of Marischal College), John Gibson Lockhart (editor of the Quarterly Review), William Jerdan (editor of the Literary Gazette),2 and Lord Brougham (one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review). Blackie father and son also spent an hour in Highgate with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘an old, infirm, downbent man’, but discovered that he had lost interest in German philosophy since his visit to Göttingen in 1799, now ‘finding perfect satisfaction in the first chapter of the Gospel of John’. Jerdan, a Kelso man like Alexander Blackie, was encouraging, but Lockhart, though a cousin by marriage, was ‘cold and distant’. He was known for this, but perhaps he also sensed Blackie’s youthful radicalism (the Quarterly was Tory). The breakfast with Brougham was more productive, and led to later meetings at Belhelvie, nine miles north of Aberdeen, when the Lord Chancellor visited his cousin Dr Forsyth, Blackie’s old mentor. Brougham had been appointed to this office in the Whig government of Earl Grey in November 1830. Though he was something of a political outsider, starting out as an Edinburgh advocate with a second career in literary journalism, he reached the highest position in the world of Westminster politics. Blackie was fascinated by his

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‘wonderful combination of toughness and nobility’, ‘as restless as a little Frenchman, as massive as a German’. Brougham was a progressive Whig who combined unprincipled careerism with a commitment to humanitarian causes (anti-slavery, popular education), and to parliamentary reform, on which he campaigned in Aberdeen in 1832. On this occasion Alexander Blackie spoke at a great reform demonstration on the city’s Broad Hill, and Blackie himself made his first public speech, ‘fervid and hasty and violent’, at the reform banquet in the Assembly Hall: My words came rushing through my throat, like a number of disorderly persons pushing through the narrow entrance to the pit on a benefit night at the theatre. . . . No doubt the violent hurry which I displayed was partly from fervour of temperament, but partly also from the embarrassment which I felt in opening my mouth before a large audience of persons much my superior in years and experience.3

He was followed on the platform by Brougham, regarded as one of the great orators of his age – reason enough to feel inadequate, though Blackie confessed to being ‘not the least embarrassed’ once he was fully launched into his speech, and indeed went on to make hundreds in his lifetime on every conceivable topic. Blackie’s youthful enthusiasm for reform came more from the prevailing mood of the times – what he called ‘an infection in the atmosphere’ – than from any great interest in politics, though throughout the 1830s he continued to profess ‘most unbounded confidence in . . . Brougham’s attachment to the People and to the cause of human improvement’.4 He celebrated in verse Daniel O’Connell’s campaign against the payment of tithes by the Catholic majority to support a Protestant Church of Ireland, and satirised the ‘No-Popery’ outcry stirred up by the Tories.5 O’Connell had won the right to sit in parliament for British and Irish Catholics (and for English Catholics to vote) in 1829, and was now campaigning for Irish home rule. He drew a crowd of 200,000 on Glasgow Green when he toured the West of Scotland in 1835, but at Westminster he was regarded as a dangerous demagogue. Alexander Blackie was more involved in the detail of local politics, and was intimate with leading Aberdeen Liberals, like Alexander Bannerman, the local MP between 1832 and 1847.6 Politics in the city were dominated by two families: the Tory Haddens held control before the electoral reforms of 1832 and the municipal reform of 1833, which introduced a narrow property-based franchise; the Whig-Liberal Blaikies provided most of the Lord Provosts between

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1833 and 1855. With control of the burgh went the dispensing of patronage, and the reform campaign of the Whigs before 1833 was motivated, in part, by their resentment at having been excluded from this system.7 The Bannermans were close allies of the Blaikies on the town council, but having a member of the family as MP for the new parliamentary burgh of Aberdeen (created in 1832) also gave them access to patronage at Westminster, since there was a Liberal government in office for most of the period between November 1830 and August 1841. Blackie thus had the advantage of connection, through his father, to a powerful local politician, though this was offset by the handicap of being tainted with German scepticism. On his return to Scotland it was clear that Blackie’s religious ideas were well beyond what would be acceptable in a Church of Scotland minister. ‘My heart and my life were extremely Evangelical, and the study of the Scriptures for practical purposes never intermitted,’ he later wrote, ‘but my speculations were always becoming more liberal, and my creed less definite.’ Once he had returned to Aberdeen from his week in London, the question of a future career had to be decided. His father suggested ‘an immediate escape from a troublesome perplexity’ by offering Blackie £100 a year for three years, while he trained as a lawyer (the career originally intended for him), a solution which might also allow him to ‘work at German and Greek in leisure hours’. During the six months or more he spent with his family, he devoted himself to Greek, including reading the whole of Euripides. ‘Having no fear of cram before my eyes, and not wishing to be bothered with minute thorny remarks of meagre grammarians, my classical reading was all cursorisch as the Germans call it,’ he later wrote. When he wished, he could consult private scholars like Robert Abercromby of Forglen and Dr Francis Adams of Banchory, the latter an expert in the history of Greek medicine. Blackie recognised that he was not, nor wanted to be, a scholar like Adams. ‘With him Greek was everything; with me it was only one among many things, and at that time decidedly subordinate to German. He had a great respect for learning merely as learning; I had none.’ However, despite Adams’ ‘somewhat dry and ungraceful manner’, Blackie admired his ‘wonderful fervour of soul, and . . . tenacity of purpose truly Scottish’. They agreed on the miserable standard of Greek teaching in Scottish universities, but on religion Adams was far more of a sceptic, being ‘decidedly hostile . . . to all Christian creeds and churches’.8 Blackie’s other friend at Banchory (some seventeen miles from Aberdeen) was the local minister, William Anderson. He was ‘not an accurate scholar in the English sense of the word’ (like

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Adams), but more to Blackie’s taste, had a ‘range of view . . . much wider than that of most English scholars’. Anderson filled the role of the absent Baron Bunsen. He encouraged the young man’s literary aspirations, and introduced him to comparative philology (‘from him I heard the word ‘Sanscrit’ for the first time’). His interest in ‘what was going on in the great world of wider thought and research’ represented by Coleridge and others, provided a taste of German idealist philosophy. Blackie was also attracted by Anderson’s ability to combine ‘the broadest philosophical views with the kindliest human sympathies and purest Evangelical zeal’, a quality which had been absent in the Aberdeen clergy of his youth. The minister steered a middle course ‘between the two extremes of the sturdy old Moderate, unimpassioned and unpoetical, and the hot Evangelical, without toleration and without knowledge’, a rare feat in the 1830s, and, one might add, virtually impossible in 1843, when Anderson withdrew from the established church, but did not subscribe to the new Free Church.9 In Spring 1832 Blackie left for Edinburgh to start his legal education. He found lodgings with a Mrs Russell at 100 Lauriston Place, later moving to 32 Dublin Street and then 35 York Place in the New Town. William Anderson anxiously followed the progress of his young friend, knowing that he had no real interest in the law. He wrote to Blackie in November to encourage him, offering advice both spiritual and practical: I sincerely hope the knot is tied, which will never be loosed, unless by what you call an inevitable fate – I, Providence – so that it may not be said in your biography (and I doubt not if you adhere to the pursuits of knowledge & virtue you will yet have a biographer), ‘in 1832, he resolved upon devoting himself to law as a profession, but soon gave up the pursuit &c’. You may yet be the Lord Advocate, and I, grown stiff with age, may be your humble suitor for a Hebrew Professorship in Abdn. Or St Andrews! But, without joke, I am glad you have fixed upon what opens to you, a career of honourable and useful employment. . . . You will experience I doubt not that man fulfils the conditions of a happy existence only when employed in the duties of life, public & domestic. And though the latter, the pleasant labours of the parlour fireside, cannot yet be yours, for some time, yet such enjoyments are before you in prospect, and perhaps, it would be wise not to be too sanguine, nor too specific in one’s anticipations of them. Let not Helen B. glide too often before the eye of your fancy, if indeed her pale face has not been already displaced, by some bright & sparkling daughter of Edinb. But . . . supposing your heart & your head had every worldly object upon which the powers of humanity are fitted to exercise themselves, still,

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believe me (you will find it true), there would exist an aching void which only the supernatural, the perfect & the infinite, God and heaven could fill. Tho’ I scarce expect that you and I shall ever be at one on religious matters, yet I cannot help expressing my great anxiety, that on the creed, scanty as it may be, which you allow, you should lay hold. . . . I know you are of a too generous nature to be severely angry with me for this hint.10

How different from Bunsen, whose bluntness had reduced Blackie to tears in Rome, though he too had acted from a concern at his young friend’s difficulties with the Presbyterian ‘creed’. These would surface again in 1839, at the time of Blackie’s appointment to a chair at Marischal College, but for the moment they had to be laid to one side while he devoted himself to his legal studies. There was no compulsion to attend ‘preparatory’ classes at Edinburgh University,11 so instead he bought copies of Bell’s Commentaries of the Laws of Scotland, and Erskine’s Institute of the Law of Scotland and Principles of the Law of Scotland, and proceeded to cram. ‘I was like a man making a treatise on mineralogy without ever having seen a mineral. Being utterly ignorant of business and business transactions, I could not comprehend what all the talk was about’ – perhaps an odd comment from a banker’s son. In the end, he asked his father to get him into a lawyer’s office, where he slowly began to learn the practical aspects.12 The remainder of his education came from membership of two debating societies. The Speculative Society, where Blackie’s hero Lord Brougham had shone as an orator, and where earlier David Hume and Adam Smith had been members, provided a forum for debate on the public issues of the day, and a solid grounding in history. Here Blackie practised his skills as a speaker in front of graduates and fellow students, many of whom went on to make names for themselves in public life.13 The Juridical Society, by contrast, was a launching-pad for the careers of men whose ‘whole style of thinking and speaking, whose whole attitude, seemed to mark them out for lawyers’ – ‘the mere professional lawyers’, as Blackie termed them, conscious of the ‘gulf’ that separated him from their world. Several of Blackie’s contemporaries in the Juridical rose to important legal office, while others remained ‘in an inferior provincial position’ for want of political or personal connections. Blackie had little interest in party politics, and even less in the law. Without any knowledge of court practice, the ‘forms of process’ (writs, pleadings, etc.), in particular, were ‘a sore vexation’ to him: Where I could find neither human interest nor speculative reason, my mind refused to act. . . . My head refused to act without my heart, so I was utterly unfit for the study of law; and what I did, being against the grain,

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was gained with difficulty, lost with ease. . . .The things that were most necessary for a young advocate to know were precisely those of which I knew nothing.14

Nevertheless, he passed the examination, submitted his dissertation,15 and paid the £200 fee which admitted him (on 1 July 1834) to the Faculty of Advocates, and gave him the right to practise at the Scottish Bar. The Faculty was a privileged corporation of 400 to 500 men, only some 300 of whom were active as lawyers. Many used their membership (which entitled them to use an excellent library) as a ‘stepping-stone’ to a career in journalism, literature or politics, a trend reinforced by the shortage of briefs in the 1830s. The rate of litigation and the growth in the number of lawyers had both slowed by 1832, and the local economic situation in the 1830s was unpromising. In 1833 the town council was declared bankrupt, after nearly a decade of financial difficulties. ‘Edinburgh is at present almost a mass of insolvency,’ Henry Cockburn wrote in April 1835: Trade, except in one or two branches, has left Leith, our port; its docks are bankrupt; our college has not a shilling; our Writers to the Signet are getting so destitute that it is not easy to see how they can maintain their library and general establishment; the Faculty of Advocates is in a similar condition, but further gone.16

Compared to Scottish medical graduates, many of whom had successful careers south of the Border,17 very few Scottish lawyers entered English law through one of the Inns of Court in London – Brougham and his fellow Lord Chancellors Thomas Erskine and John Campbell being notable exceptions. The Scots legal profession maintained its social status, but it was a small world which offered relatively few opportunities to make an adequate living.18 Amongst Blackie’s fellow advocates, William Spalding (a fellow student at Marischal) wrote on Shakespeare in the Edinburgh Review, while W. E. Aytoun and Theodore Martin made their reputations as joint-authors of the Bon Gaultier Ballads (1845), a collection of witty parodies.19 One of Blackie’s ‘most intimate legal friends’, William Smellie, became Advocate-General in South Australia,20 another, John William Semple, became Solicitor-General in St Lucia in the West Indies.21 One of his letters, addressed to ‘My Dearest Damned Drunken Drivelling Blackie’, and signed ‘Yrs. – Ever Groggily, I. Kant’, gives us a glimpse of the raffish side to the life of the young bachelor advocates. ‘Somebody told me that Horn has the small-pox,’ Semple wrote. ‘Let him sing a Te Deum that tis’nt Great Pox which for anything I know

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might just as easily have been the case.’22 Jonathan Bell wrote, ‘as I do not, like Stodart go whoring three times a week, I must have some other sort of dissipation’,23 which, as far as we know, was Blackie’s choice as well. Perhaps the law courts were no longer ‘crowded with starving, drunken or bogus lawyers’ (in Karl Miller’s memorable phrase), but the evenings passed in serious drinking. ‘We can imagine the shout that went round the table when Blackie rose to sing:– GIVE A FEE A New Song For A Young Barrister’ to the air ‘Buy a Broom’, or lawyers at the Juridical Society in the 1834–5 session, listening tipsily to ‘A Song of Good Fellows’, with a verse devoted to: The B-keye, strange jumble of nonsense and sense, A thing half song, half sermon; I believe that the fellow is made of good stuff, But his noddle is muddled with German. Our wits he’d fain daze with his big foreign phrase, His cant of ‘immutable reason’; To bray like an ass, while for gods they would pass, With your German savans is no treason.

Blackie’s cousin Robert Stodart Wyld, another underemployed Edinburgh advocate, was a frequent companion at these suppers, and at smaller gatherings where ‘a dish of oysters’ or ‘a ‘rizzared haddie’ and a tumbler of toddy formed the time-honoured fare’.24 Wyld had not long returned from his own ‘Grand Tour’ of the Continent in 1832, following an itinerary suggested by Blackie, a winter’s study of law with Savigny in Berlin, then time in Venice, Florence and Rome. In Rome, Wyld had mixed with artists, mostly German, as Blackie had done, and had stayed with Clementina Baldassari, Blackie’s former landlady. Together he and Blackie made a walking tour, in the summer of 1836, ‘along the southern shores of the Firth of Forth by Tantallon & Berwick . . . coming home by Kelso, Jedburgh, Melrose’, with Blackie in ‘house slippers’ for the last part of the journey between Galashiels and Dalkeith because his shoes had worn out.25 This was on the scale of Blackie’s wanderings in the Roman campagna, as was an excursion over two weeks in July 1837, with another advocate friend, Robert Horn. Arriving in Linlithgow by coach, they set off on foot to visit the famous Carron Company ironworks, but also Bannockburn, Stirling and other sites associated with William Wallace (a lifelong passion for Blackie). Then they followed the Forth and Teith rivers to Blair Drummond and Doune (with a visit to the castle), before turning back eastwards to Dunblane, Blairlogie, Tillicoultry (climbing Ben

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Cleugh once the rain had cleared), Kinross and Dunfermline, where they caught the steamer back to Edinburgh.26 Many of Blackie’s intimate friends were to be found amongst young painters, like George Harvey and David Octavius Hill, because, as he later put it, ‘I hated the intellectual captiousness and would-be cleverness too commonly exhibited among young lawyers, in such a small and essentially legal place as Edinburgh’.27 He also mixed with medical and scientific men, like Edward Forbes, George Wilson, Samuel Brown and John Brown, the last better known as the author of Rab and his Friends (1859) and Horae Subsecivae (1858–61). Together they founded the Oineromathic Society,28 where wine was quaffed. All of these societies, and many of the suppers, were masculine affairs. Blackie’s romantic attachments were confined to verses addressed to young ladies, and hinted at in letters to his sister Kit, who was something of a confidante.29 By the rules of bourgeois society it could not be otherwise. What William Anderson had termed ‘the pleasant labours of the parlour fireside’ would not be his until he had demonstrated that he could earn a modest competency, and Blackie held few briefs during his five years as an advocate. Many years later a friend, who had been a reporter for the Aberdeen Herald, recalled Blackie’s ‘racy speeches’ on his debut as a circuit lawyer before two Lords of Justiciary in Aberdeen. ‘You had no mercy on the indictment and I think you bamboozled the jury if you did not carry your case.’30 In 1835 Blackie was asked to defend two local Liberals charged with ‘mobbing and rioting’, and won an acquittal for one and a reduced sentence for the other, much to the approval of the local Liberal press.31 Yet his fees were ‘almost null’, and the feeling of being unfitted for the law were stronger than ever. ‘I have still very serious doubts whether there are not certain natural defects in my mind, which, along with the peculiarities of a self-conducted education, must for ever prevent me from rising to eminence at the Bar’, he wrote to his father in August 1836: When to this I add the want of toughness in my physical constitution, and the overbalance of fire and feeling in my temperament, I am justified in not entertaining any very sanguine hopes of my future success. But these anticipations of the future have of course nothing to do with my present duty, and I hope I shall be able to work on, notwithstanding the discouraging feelings that sometimes arise within me, as happily, and as laboriously, as if I were in my own natural province, man and morals. The slowness with which the law enters into my stupid head is quite humiliating and the speed with which it gets out again is quite remarkable. I always feel like a man

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on a tight rope: conscious that he is not on terra firma, and watchful every minute lest some invisible wind should whisk him off his feet.

The prospects for paying clients were not good in ‘the Edinburgh Courts where little or nothing was doing’, but he was anxious to be independent: Don’t trouble yourself about getting me employed at the approaching Appeal registration Courts in Aberdeen. I will take business if it is offered me, but it is a severe ordeal for a young man, and I should think it safer to look for a year or two till I can come out with a manly confidence. This also keep from the ladies! – for they will not understand it. Every mother will have her son to be a star of the first magnitude, and insist upon him scaling the Heavens before he is able to creep upon the Earth.

On one thing he could reassure his father. He had little money (the haddocks and cotton stockings sent to him in Edinburgh by his stepmother were thus very welcome), but he had just earned £10 for an article in the Foreign Quarterly Review, and expected to make £16 from another.32 Its preparation had kept him from attending the courts in Roxburgh, but there was ‘no fear of Bankruptcy’. ‘Perhaps in a year or two, if things go well, I may be able to make £100 a year by literature without interfering at all with my Law-studies, or what is of much more consequence, my health.’33 In his first year of literary journalism (1835) Blackie actually managed to earn £97, ‘the greatest sum’ he ever made ‘in the same space of time by intellectual work’. Being ‘excluded’ from ‘political writing’ by a ‘habit of mind, which took up political questions only from their philosophical side, and utterly ignored party questions and party combinations’,34 he concentrated on translations of German poetry, and on reviewing German history and literature in the Dublin University Magazine, Foreign Quarterly Review (London), Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Edinburgh was still an important centre of publishing, though about to enter a period of decline. Its literary reviews had been established in the highly charged atmosphere of early nineteenth-century party politics. The Whig Edinburgh Review (1802), the Tory Blackwood’s Magazine (1817), and the Whig-Liberal Tait’s Magazine (1832), served a British and not just Scottish readership.35 The London-based periodicals often had a Scottish connection. The Tory Quarterly Review (1809) was published by John Murray, originally McMurray. From 1825 it was edited by an émigré Scot (J. G. Lockhart), as was the New Monthly Magazine (1814) until 1830 (Thomas Campbell).

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Fraser’s Magazine (1830) was modelled on the early Blackwood’s, while the Westminster Review (1824), which represented radical Utilitarianism, was closely associated with James Mill, whose son John Stuart Mill was editor in the late 1830s, assisted by the Aberdonian John Robertson.36 Harsh partisan reviewing by anonymous contributors characterised the early years, leading to several lawsuits and at least one duel. By the 1830s the more turbulent times had passed, though reviewing could still be fierce. In the early 1830s the New Monthly Magazine had a circulation of 5,000, the Foreign Quarterly Review roughly the same, Blackwood’s and Fraser’s circulations of over 8,000, and the Edinburgh and Quarterly between 9,000 and 10,000, though these were small compared with the cheaper and more ‘popular’ Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal (1832), which reached a British audience of 50,000 at the end of its first year.37 There was a living to be made out of literary journalism, but competition was fierce. In the rather specialised field of reviewing German literature for the quarterlies and monthlies, there were already experienced figures at work, like William Taylor, as well as a younger generation (Blackie’s contemporaries), several of whom, like Abraham Hayward or John Sterling, Carlyle’s friend, had also lived for a time in Germany.38 Blackwood’s reviewers probably received between £10 and £15 per sheet (depending on their literary clout), less than the £20 to £25 of the Edinburgh and Quarterly. For poems Blackie was paid £1 to £2, again much less than the £1,000 paid by the Edinburgh Review in its heyday to distinguished contributors,39 but he came close to ruining his relationship with Blackwood’s almost from the start. He had pressed Robert Blackwood to print his review of Eckermann’s Gespräche mit Goethe (1836), a book which had created a stir in Germany, ‘before any of the other Magazines or Reviews get hold of it’. Blackwood had agreed, and then discovered that Blackie had already published a review of Eckermann in the rival Foreign Quarterly Review. Worse still, the de facto editor of Blackwood’s, John Wilson, Blackie’s old professor and a powerful figure on the Edinburgh literary scene, had taken some of Blackie’s phrases in the review to refer to himself. ‘The Professor you may be sure was in an infernal rage,’ Robert Blackwood informed his brother: It contains without question the most impudent attack on the Professor I ever saw. It says Goethe had not the rolling eyes [and] irregular gait supposed to be the marks of Poetic Genius, talks of certain heroes of the reviewing world performing their tasks at a stretch that they thereafter gobble with more enjoyment their pigeon pie & swallow their flowing

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goblets of oporto. ‘To such spasmodic fits of alternate intellect & brutality Goethe was a stranger.’ The article also charges the Magazine . . . by allusion with party spirit in reviewing poetry &c.

What Blackie wrote may have been largely true (including the characterisation of Wilson), but it was unwise for a Blackwood’s reviewer to write it, even anonymously (his style was unmistakeable), in a rival journal. Blackie admitted that ‘some peculiarities’ of Wilson had been ‘hovering’ in his ‘imagination’, but claimed he had been attacking reviewers in general, rather than Wilson in particular: For myself I have learned two lessons which I might have learned long ago had I been sufficiently attentive to hints that some kind friends gave me. I have learned to consider with what association of ideas I may use now in writing, but also what association other persons will naturally read them. The other lesson I have learned is that ‘the tongue though a little member worketh much evil’ and that not only when it intends to throw out poison, but often . . . when it merrily delights itself in displaying its power of volubility.40

It was a mess very much of Blackie’s making, the first of many throughout his life caused by rash words on a public platform, or carelessness in print. Blackie withdrew from reviewing for Blackwood’s for the next four years, at some financial sacrifice to himself. He continued to write for the Foreign Quarterly Review and Tait’s Magazine,41 but he had soured his relationship with two important people – Robert Blackwood, the publisher of his translation of Goethe’s Faust, and John Wilson, the man largely responsible for its publication. Blackwood had published Blackie’s verse translation of Part One of Faust in February 1834, following the success of Abraham Hayward’s prose version the previous year. It had been well received by some London reviewers, though this was perhaps a testament more to their lack of familiarity with the original than to the skills of the translator.42 The Blackie household was in no doubt as to its merits, and a young sculptor, a family friend, had been commissioned to produce a portrait bust of the new translator of Goethe.43 In Edinburgh, a German friend praised the translation,44 as did John Wilson, who judged it ‘by far the most spirited & vigorous Faust I have ever seen’, one which would do its author ‘great credit’,45 but Coleridge’s nephew described Blackie’s translation as ‘deformed throughout by provincial licences’.46 The Athenaeum’s critic was equally damning, condemning Blackie’s rather free translation as an ‘irreverent tampering’ with the text ‘to give increased poetical power to the whole’. ‘It would never

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have been dreamed of by any one who could feel and translate Goethe.’47 Blackie had sent copies to two of his Berlin professors, to Lord Brougham,48 and to Thomas Carlyle. A favourable judgement from Carlyle was particularly important, since he was the translator of Wilhelm Meister, a copy of which he had sent to Goethe in 1824, initiating a warm correspondence and the occasional exchange of books and gifts – including a ‘magnificent Scotch bonnet, with its thistle’ for Goethe’s daughter-in-law Ottilie.49 Carlyle’s response to ‘the welcome present’ of Blackie’s Faust had been encouraging, though he admitted that he had not time for ‘patient comparison with the original’ – perhaps a way of avoiding judgement on the quality of the translation. For Blackie’s preface and prose notes, Carlyle expressed ‘great commendation’. ‘There is a spirit of openness, of free recognition and appropriation which I love much, which I reckon far more precious than any speciality of talent or acquired skill.’50 Was this last comment double-edged, as has been claimed, a ‘sardonic sneer . . . of which the victim was blissfully unconscious’?51 A few years later, in a letter to Emerson, Carlyle described Blackie as ‘a frothy, semiconfused disciple of mine and other men’s’ who ‘carries more sail than ballast’,52 and over the following years he seems sometimes to have been irritated by him. Yet the two men continued for forty years to exchange letters from time to time (with regular visits from Blackie to Carlyle), and Carlyle wrote a testimonial for Blackie when he applied for the chair of Greek at Edinburgh in 1851. On the merits of Blackie’s translation, modern critical judgements have been mixed.53 More than forty years after its appearance, Blackie himself judged it ‘a juvenile performance, which had done the best service of which it was capable, by teaching me my ignorance’. Its ‘principal fault’ was its failure to reproduce ‘the easy natural grace’ of the original, a ‘deficiency [which] arose . . . partly from want of experience in the dextrous use of poetical expression, partly from the habit of clinging too closely to the words of the original, which is the natural vice of a young and conscientious translator.’54 The last point, curiously suggesting the opposite of what his critics considered its greatest fault – over-free, rather than over-literal, treatment of the original – is nonetheless typical of Blackie’s later unshakeable confidence in his poetic talent. The Faust translation was the first substantial piece of work by an ambitious young man, as Carlyle’s Wilhelm Meister had been ten years earlier. The difference was that Blackie was twenty-five, while Carlyle had been twenty-nine and immensely more talented. Carlyle had also been largely responsible for a new surge of interest in Goethe, which

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Blackie and others now sought to exploit. W. E. Aytoun, settled at Aschaffenburg in Bavaria for a winter’s study, considered publishing his own translation, but with four others (including Blackie’s) announced or published, he decided not to proceed. In all, at least ten translations of Faust appeared in the decade following the poet’s death in 1832.55 On the merits of these attempts, or indeed any, to present his greatest work to a foreign audience, we should perhaps leave the last word with Goethe. In 1827 he had written to Carlyle, ‘Whatever one might say about the inadequacy of translation, it remains one of the most important and praiseworthy activities in the general traffic among nations.’56 In 1836 Blackie published one other Goethe translation, the short play Das Jahrmarktfest zu Plundersweilern,57 and then nothing more until his completely revised edition of Faust in 1880, and his anthology The Wisdom of Goethe in 1883. This 1836 translation has been judged by a modern scholar ‘a very creditable achievement by a young foreigner with a comparatively short experience of German language and literature, especially in consideration of the particular difficulties of the subject-matter and language of this play’. Characteristically, Blackie had chosen ‘one of the less accessible works of Goethe’, once again reflecting confidence (perhaps overconfidence) in his abilities, and as with Faust, something of the original was also lost because of ‘certain limitations’ in his approach ‘arising from his moral and religious background’.58 Goethe’s reputation in Britain during his lifetime had generally been one of ‘respect, tinged with hostile criticism on moral grounds’ – Coleridge, a great admirer, found Goethe wanting on grounds of ‘irreligion and immorality’. Carlyle, who more than anyone else was responsible for the growing interest in Goethe, made the poet far more palatable to the British reader by presenting him as ‘the Teacher and exemplar of his age’. ‘Goethe was to him the perfect type, the man who had attained to a harmony of mind and soul, who had, after coming to grips with the spiritual problems of life, achieved the highest wisdom.’ His view of Goethe as an ethical and spiritual guide (set out in various articles between 1822 and 1832), was taken up by a younger generation who had lost their faith in traditional Christianity. It mattered little that ‘Goethe was not the apostle of renunciation in the ascetic, repressive sense that Carlyle imagined’, this reinterpretation allowed his British (and American) readers to draw ‘comfort and hope from a faith and philosophy’ with which Goethe ‘would have had little sympathy’.59 Though he had encountered Faust first in Berlin (reading the text with the help of a

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German friend), and had seen Goethe performed on stage there, Blackie very much followed Carlyle in emphasising the ethical over the literary merits of his work. ‘What it was that drew me so powerfully towards Goethe at this period I do not find it quite easy to explain,’ Blackie wrote later: Certainly the mere juvenile sympathy with the serious problems of life, touched with such grace in the greatest of German dramas, may have had something to do with the matter; unquestionably also, the thorough Germanism of the work must have laid powerful hold of me, steeped as I then was both in the popular and the academic life of Germany. But there was something deeper and of a more moral nature that bound me to Goethe. . . . In Goethe I found the reverse of Byron, and this, I presume was what attracted me. . . . The phrase Das Gleichgewicht der Seele, the equilibrium of the soul . . . seemed to me the great secret of his quiet, weighty, manly, and yet womanly inspiration; and this equilibrium of soul was what I had long been struggling after in my own dim way, and which I seemed to catch a glimpse of among all my German guides, who were then supreme with me, chiefly in Goethe.

Like Carlyle, Blackie found in Goethe ‘that perfect mental peace’ for which he yearned, something preferable to ‘a certain uncomfortable element of struggle’ which Schiller evoked, though the latter had provided his first taste of German literature in Göttingen. The Byron of ‘Manfred’ or ‘Don Juan’ had nothing to offer, apart from a ‘negative philosophy’ which ‘repelled’ Blackie. ‘What I sought from poetry was not mere amusement or a pleasant exercise of the imagination, but wisdom, culture, harmony – Bildung, as the Germans call it.’ He recalled ‘sitting on one of the hills near Tusculum with Childe Harold in my hands’ – it would have been August 1831 – and asking himself: What was the use of a poet who, with the highest sweep of his muse, instead of a song of happiness and a hymn of triumph, could only stir my brain into a seething-pot of volcanic smoke and fireworks; grand and sublime, no doubt, as a mere spectacle, but perilous as a near neighbour, and for everyday use quite unprofitable.

‘I flung him away once and for ever’, was the response, Blackie in typical fashion exceeding Carlyle’s injunction to ‘Close thy Byron and open thy Goethe.’60 This distaste for Byron was not surprising in a serious-minded young Scot, given Blackie’s moral scruples, the influence of Carlyle, and the gradual decline in Byron’s reputation in the early nineteenth century. For Carlyle, however, Byron remained a writer whose work

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was still worth reading (even if he had never achieved ‘the Everlasting Yea’), along with Scott, one of his favourite authors. For Blackie Byron’s moral blemishes obscured the possibility of literary appreciation. He was an example of ‘a brilliant sort of badness’, ‘a great poet’ who never seriously attempted ‘to behave like a reasonable being and a gentleman’. ‘His life . . . with all its genius, and fits of occasional sublimity, . . . on the whole, a terrible failure, and a great warning to all who are willing to take a lesson.’ This, from Blackie’s later bestseller On Self-Culture (1874),61 was typical of the nineteenth-century tendency to judge art in terms of personal morality, as was Blackie’s description of Goethe as ‘the model of a perfectly wise and virtuous man’.62 So too with Wordsworth, who for a time ‘took the place of Goethe’ after Blackie had published his Faust translation. Goethe was temporarily found wanting because of his belief that art was ‘the chief end of life’, and because he had ‘revealed one of the most significant elements of his moral constitution when he said he felt “a horror at such characters as Coriolanus and Martin Luther!” ’ The latter were ‘men of that bold, practical stamp, and fervid moral stuff’, like ‘the Apostle Paul’, ‘Dr Chalmers, and Dr Thomas Guthrie’,63 and ‘special favourites’ of Blackie. ‘For my moral culture I found Wordsworth more profitable,’ he wrote, and so Goethe was (temporarily) despatched. Then Blackie discovered that ‘the great Laker . . . was narrow and one-sided, and infected strongly with that moral egotism that no persons can escape who live mainly from within, and who see nothing in nature or art without impressing on it their own engrossing idiosyncrasy’ – a judgement similar to Carlyle’s – and ‘after a while’ he ‘was obliged to discard him’. Like Browning, he also disliked the later Wordsworth’s conservatism (‘he sympathised with man rather than with men’), and like Tennyson, his didacticism (‘too much of a preacher for my idea of a wise poet’). In all this there is something of the same intellectual restlessness Blackie had shown in Rome, perhaps also signs of a shift in literary taste as a younger generation found romantic poetry too remote from their concerns. ‘I aimed at universal love and comprehensive toleration, and was repelled by the essential injustice of denunciatory preaching and exclusive doctrines of all kinds,’ Blackie wrote. With this ‘inherent tendency’, he returned to Goethe, ‘a less pure moralist and less powerful preacher than Wordsworth’, but ‘in every way a richer, wider, greater, and more significant man’.64 G. H. Lewes, no less of an admirer, had suggested in his Life of Goethe (1855) that the poet’s liaison with Charlotte von Stein had been ‘more than platonic’, but, as he told Blackie, he had

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‘been forced to keep that part in a subdued light because the British public would have gone into fits’ at Goethe’s ‘open avowal’ in his correspondence. Blackie would have none of this.65 He continued to commend Goethe, despite ‘a few peccadillos’, ‘like Solomon and Robert Burns’. He was ‘a good man’, who had saved him ‘from the wallowing mud-pool of Byronic cynicism’ and ‘the political, philosophical, poetical vagaries . . . moving the youth of this country to all kinds of absurdities’. This was Blackie typically playing to the gallery, at festivities in Edinburgh to mark the eightieth birthday of the German Emperor William I in 1877, and rather overlooking the fact that a very different kind of Germany from Goethe’s was being celebrated.66 Although he left Germany in 1830, and did not return again until 1851, Blackie’s writing during this twenty-year interval continued to focus on German themes. His translations of ‘Burschen Melodies’ in Tait’s Magazine67 revealed strong sympathy with liberal nationalism in German universities. For readers of the liberal Westminster Review he analysed the ‘monarchico-aristocratico-bureaucratic reaction’ in Prussia, where the state was more ‘efficient’, but the population lacked ‘political education’.68 He also reviewed German publications on history and literature in other periodicals. His choices showed ‘a startling variety and catholicity of taste and appreciation’69 – Klopstock, Schiller, Knebel, Lessing, Jean Paul, Uhland, as well as Goethe70 – though with a clear preference for a literature that was ‘healthy’, ‘masculine’ and ‘national’ (together with their antonyms, words which often recurred in his writing). ‘The true artist is a patriot,’ Blackie wrote, but in the work of the older Goethe, with its ‘state of contemplative quietism and passionless scepticism’, he found ‘something weak and effeminate’, even ‘a choking atmosphere of Toryism’.71 Lessing, by contrast, was ‘altogether free from every sort of philosophical or aesthetical mannerism’, and was ‘the beau-ideal of manliness’, a ‘poet of reality, and of living, acting nature’.72 The literary memoirs of Rahel, ‘the German de Staël’, were praised for their ‘manly, straight-forward, healthy, English character’,73 and Knebel’s verse for the absence of ‘that mistiness of feeling and wateriness of sentiment . . . characteristic of the romantic school in Germany’.74 Uhland won approval for his ballads (though they were judged inferior to the Scottish), and for his ability to combine art and politics, but was condemned for ‘a certain air of weak consumptiveness’ in his verse, with ‘not a little childish trifling, decking-out of pretty nothings, sheer shilly-shally, unadulterated namby-pamby’. Yet this was as nothing compared to the ‘whining and

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whimpering in verse’ of another Swabian romantic, which had Blackie almost at a loss for words – quite an achievement: Twaddle is too good for them; they are sheer and absolute drivel. . . . We declare, once and for all an unmitigated hostility to this truly German madness. Away with these substanceless shadows of existence! These misty, bodiless anticipations of an undefined something, and a definite nothing! These abortive imps of an unstable fancy, begotten between the wish to be everything, and the incapacity to be anything! Give us solid earth-based poetic existence, that can bear to be looked upon by sunlight . . . no day-walking dream – but a flesh-and-blood reality of life, weighty with all the mass of earthly being, but pregnant also and buoyed with something which is nothing less than divine.75

The heartiness, mixed with not a little philistinism, was characteristically Blackie, though he was also capable of shrewd observation, as in an article on ‘Traits and Tendencies in German Literature’, which won the praise of John Stuart Mill. In this, Blackie argued against all ‘attempts to explain literature out of literature alone’, tracing the ‘disease’ of sentimentalism, for example, to ‘the influence of the state and of public life on German literature’.76 Similarly, ‘the mystic babble of the romantic school’ could be explained as a reaction to ‘an outward world of action . . . governed by . . . (in Prussia at least) . . . the beau ideal of wise despotism’. The British, with their ‘instinctive aversion to metaphysics in any shape’, were ill-equipped to understand any of this: we are the most excellent mechanics in things spiritual – we build railroads to heaven, and bind down the unfathomable mysteries of God by an act of Parliament. But the Germans have looked deeper into this matter. True it is that too much learning hath made not a few of them mad; but, that some of them understand the philosophy of Christianity better than we do, there can be no doubt.77

Interesting though this was, Blackie was simply repeating in a minor key the note Carlyle had sounded a decade earlier. By now, he had a modicum of literary fame, enough to be parodied by the gifted Irish satirist William Maginn,78 but had not found in his writing his own distinctive note, and still had no financial security. In April 1837, a year after his break with Blackwood, Blackie was again at a low point. In a letter to his sister Kit he excused his failure to write home: I have lately been very much disappointed with myself, and the great superficial halfness of my own attachments. I feel too great a disproportion

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between my ideas of what should be done, and what I am doing – so that, finding enough perhaps more than enough – to do at home; I am not much given to hunt after the news and gossip of the day. I hope this crisis will soon be over. I believe I have sincerely resolved to do or die, and Death would certainly be more desirable than the state of halfness and uncertainty in which I at present exist. I have made an irrevocable vow to be nothing by halves – and I long with an unquenchable longing to escape from my present state of intellectual minority.79

The following March there still seemed no end in sight to this ‘state of intellectual minority’ for the twenty-nine-year-old Blackie. He wrote to his friend Smellie once again expressing his ‘great misgivings’ about the law, and asking for ‘a sincere answer’ to the following questions: I. Whether you think there is any thing in my character, my habit of mind, my natural capacities that renders it almost a hopeless affair with me even to attempt being a good lawyer. II. Or whether my deficiencies are as sufficiently explicable on the theory of want of training in practical matters? . . . III. If you think my defects not incurable can you suggest any means by which they can be remedied? . . . You may easily conceive how important a thing this is for me to have this matter cleared up. I would rather be a schoolmaster . . . tho I hate the trade. . . . Therefore, as you love me, be honest, and say whatever you think is the truth.80

Escape from uncertainty was about to come from one of those combinations of good fortune, intelligent calculation and hard work which characterised Blackie’s adult life. The Professor of Moral Philosophy at Marischal was approaching retirement, and Blackie had considered putting himself forward as a candidate. He had been dissuaded by the Principal, a friend of his father’s, because of doubts about his religious views, and he had decided to pursue his academic ambitions in another way. ‘I had anticipated all this difficulty about theology,’ he told his father: and this is the reason why for some years I have been driving so hard at Greek, not because I prefer languages to philosophy or poetry, far from it, but because I wished to secure freedom of thought in certain matters where I was afraid of coming into collision with the Church. Perhaps my particular opinions may be wrong . . . but if I am to right myself, I must have room to tack and retack as I please.81

In his writing for the Foreign Quarterly Review he now decided to shift the focus from German literature. ‘I am very busy,’ he wrote to

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his father in December 1838, ‘not with Law as you may presume, but Greek’: And I have got deeper into the subject of Greek metres and Greek music on which I intend to be very eloquent in the April No. of the F.Q.R. If I make out this matter according to my present idea I think I should make a decided hit. On this subject the English possess merely a very fragmentary and imperfect, the Scotch no knowledge at all, so that I shall have every chance of getting a name as a scholar if I bring out my thing striking hard. Sir William Hamilton sympathizes with me warmly and urges me to proceed in developing the philosophy of metres especially as applicable to the Greek plays. Do not suppose that I am here wandering from my translation of Aeschylus: it is merely a part of the subject, and one which if executed well, will secure my end in a much more speedy and easy way than the immediate publication of the translation, which, besides other things might bring me into expense. The essay on Greek metres will on the contrary cost nothing, 40 or 50 pages in the F.Q.R. will pay well: and I shall have three dozen copies thrown off for circulation here and in Germany.

Aberdonian canniness notwithstanding, Blackie still had to ask his father for £30 instead of £25 to cover the ‘considerable expense in securing all the recent books on the subject of metres’. ‘I feel considerably ashamed in making this request of you, as you have been far too liberal to me already, but after I get over this matter, I am determined to take a decided course.’ Everything depended on what he termed ‘the University affair’. If this failed, he would have to settle for ‘a long pull and a strong pull’ with the law, supplemented by ‘fagwork from booksellers in the literary way . . . something that is sure to pay, and then I shall agitate with Gerhard for some situation as Librarian or otherwise in Germany’.82 He began gathering testimonials from friends and former colleagues, which might also be used should another opportunity present itself at Marischal College. Notes 1. Letters, p. 74. 2. Notes, p. 70. Hume (1777–1855), MP for Aberdeen Burghs 1818–30, Middlesex 1830–7, Kilkenny 1837–41, and for his birthplace, Montrose 1842–55. Jerdan (1782–1869), editor of the Literary Gazette 1817–60 (proprietor from 1843). 3. Kennedy, p. 50. Notes, pp. 70–3. Henry Peter Brougham (1778–1868), a founder of the Edinburgh Review 1802, University College London 1828, and the Penny Magazine 1832. A reforming Lord Chancellor

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6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

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1830–4. Inventor of the two-wheeled (later four-wheeled) closed carriage named after him. Retired to Cannes, where he died. TM, IX (N.S. V), 49 (January 1838), 2. Cf. Notes, pp. 208–14. See press-cuttings of the verses ‘For A’ That an’ A’ That (a new Song dedicated to DANIEL O’CONNELL, Esq. The saviour of his Country’ (June 1836), ‘Royal Dan and the Gospel of No-Popery’ (n.d.), and ‘The Conservatives’ Lament’ (September 1836), NLS, ABS 9.203.01. O’Connell (1775–1847) was an MP at Westminster from 1830. Alexander Blackie was a free trader and ‘one of the few prominent Aberdonians who showed themselves on the platform with Cobden’, Kennedy, p. 50. M. Dyer, ‘Aberdeen into Parliament: Elections and Representative, 1832–1865’, in T. Brotherstone and D. J. Withrington (eds), The City and its Worlds (Glasgow: Cruithne Press, 1996) pp. 171–5. Bannerman (1788–1864), retired as MP 1847, was knighted in 1851, and was a colonial Governor (Prince Edward Island, the Bahamas, Newfoundland). He married Carlyle’s first love, Margaret Gordon. Notes, pp. 48, 74–7, 114. Adams (1796–1861), physician and translator of Paulus Ægineta, Hippocrates and Aretæus. Ibid., pp. 77–9. Anderson (d. 1870), minister at Banchory until 1843, helped Cosmo Innes compile Origines Parochiales Scotiae 1851–5, professor at the government college in Agra, India, retired to London in 1866 to pursue a literary career. 5 November 1832, NLS MS 2621 f. 60 (emphasis in original). Most law students worked as law clerks and were free to attend classes only in the afternoons. Notes, pp. 79, 83–5. Blackie worked in the office of W. Alexander WS. Edward Horsman (1807–76), chief secretary for Ireland 1855–7. James Moncreiff (1811–95), Lord Advocate for most of 1851–69, Lord Justice Clerk 1869–88, Dean of the Faculty of Advocates 1858–69, baronet 1871. A Free Churchman. Archibald Campbell Swinton (1812–90) Professor of Civil Law at Edinburgh 1852–72. Cf. NLS MS 2621 f. 87. Notes, pp. 85–95. Disputio Juridica Ad Lib. IV Tit.III Digest (1834). NLS MS 2644 f. 4. A. Thomson, Ferrier of St Andrews (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985), pp. 36–7. J. C. Williams, ‘Edinburgh Politics 1832–1852’, Ph.D. thesis (Edinburgh University, 1972), p. 35 n.13. Cockburn quoted in J. G. Fyfe (ed.), Scottish Diaries and Memoirs 1746–1843 (Stirling: Eneas Mackay, 1942), pp. 374–5. Cockburn (1779–1854), Whig lawyer and journalist, Solicitor-General for Scotland 1830–4. Almost 95 per cent of British doctors with medical degrees 1800–50 had been educated in Scotland. K. Robbins, Nineteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 151. London medical schools started teaching in 1821.

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18. L. Brockliss, ‘The professions and national identity’, in L. Brockliss and D. Eastwood (eds), A Union of Multiple Identities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 13, 19. Erskine, Chancellor 1806–7, Campbell 1859–61. 19. Spalding (1809–59), Professor of Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres at Edinburgh 1840–5, and Logic at St Andrews 1845–69. William Edmonstoune Aytoun (1813–65) succeeded his father-in-law John Wilson as mainstay of Blackwood’s Magazine, and followed Spalding in the Edinburgh chair 1845–65 (NLS MS 4896 f. 3 gives Blackie’s testimonial for him, May 1845). He had a considerable reputation as a poet and satirist. Martin (1816–1909), playwright, translator and literary critic, was later official biographer of Prince Albert, and was knighted 1880. 20. Smellie (sometimes given as Smillie), appointed Advocate-General in South Australia 1840, but was considered by many a failure. He died on sick leave in Paris in 1852. D. Pike, Paradise of Dissent: South Australia 1829–1857, 2nd edn (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1967), pp. 236–7, 244, 255, 423. 21. Anon., ‘Göttingen in 1824’, Putnam’s Magazine, VIII, 48 (December 1856), 602–3. A. C. Fraser, Biographia Philosophica: A Retrospect (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1904), p. 58. Semple attended Göttingen a few years before Blackie, and translated Kant’s Metaphysik der Sitten (1836). He died in St Lucia in 1842. 22. Undated [?1835 or 1836], NLS MS 2643 f. 145. Robert Horn (1810–78), Vice-Dean (1874), then Dean (1876), of the Faculty of Advocates, and first to catalogue its library. He married the heiress to a Glasgow commercial fortune, and indulged his passion for collecting art. A close friend of Ruskin. See W. Dwyer, ‘Ruskin to the “Elusive” Mr Horn: An Unpublished Letter from a Neglected Friendship’, Victorian Newsletter, 78 (Fall 1990), 14–18. 23. NLS MS 2621 f. 66. ‘Stodart’ was either John Riddle Stodart, or George Stodart, relatives of the future Eliza Blackie. 24. K. Miller, Cockburn’s Millennium (London: Duckworth, 1975), p. 79. Kennedy, p. 53. Stoddart, pp. 110–12. ‘Rizzared haddie’ is dried haddock. 25. NLS MS 2621 f. 56 and MS 2635 f. 96. W. B. Scott, Memoir of David Scott, R.S.A. (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1850), p. 89. Wyld (1808–93) never earned more than £100 a year as an advocate. He inherited a distillery in 1842, became provost of Queensferry (1861), wrote two books on the nature of perception, and retired to the Riviera. 26. NLS MS 2645 ff. 235–6. Stoddart, pp. 113–14. 27. Notes, p. 100. Harvey (1806–76), an early member of the Royal Scottish Academy (president 1864–76, knighted 1864). Hill (1802–70) founded the Edinburgh Art Union, was secretary to the Scottish Society of the Arts and the RSA. With Robert Adamson, he was a pioneer of calotype photography in the 1840s.

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28. Ibid., p. 107. Forbes (1815–54), a leading naturalist and professor in London at King’s College, the Geology Museum and School of Mines; Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh 1853–4. Wilson (1818–59), Professor of Technology at Edinburgh from 1855. Samuel Brown (1817–56) discovered the atomic composition of bodies, gave his name to ‘Brownian movement’, but never held a university post. All studied medicine at Edinburgh, but only Samuel Brown’s cousin, John Brown (1810–82), practised as a physician. 29. See the poems ‘To Gianetta’ and ‘To —’ (1836, 1837) in NLS MS 2650 ff. 28–30, probably addressed to the Janet Weir mentioned in NLS MS 2621 f. 58. 30. NLS MS 2633 f. 7 (J. H. Wilson, later a Congregational minister and secretary of the Home Missionary Society). 31. Kennedy, pp. 48–53. 32. FQR, XVII, 34 (July 1836), 253–71; XVIII, 35 (October 1836), 1–30. 33. NLS MS 2621 f. 79. Blackie added some advice on the law relating to provision for children of first and second marriages. Alexander Blackie now had eleven children from two marriages. 34. Notes, pp. 114–16. 35. Of Tait’s 4,000 print run, 2,800 were sent to London. M. W. Hyde, ‘The role of “Our Scottish Readers” in the history of Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine’, Victorian Periodicals Review, XIV, 4 (Winter 1981), 136. 36. London also had the Athenaeum (1828), for the ‘scholarly’ reader, the Spectator (1828), which combined news with reviews, Metropolitan Magazine (1831) and Bentley’s Miscellany (1837), both with a more ‘popular’ appeal. 37. R. D. Altick, The English Common Reader (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1957), pp. 335, 392–3. The Edinburgh and Quarterly cost 6s. an issue, the New Monthly 3s. 6d., Blackwood’s, Tait’s, and Fraser’s 2s. 6d., Chamber’s 31⁄2d. 38. Taylor (1765–1836) had visited Germany in 1781, Hayward (1801–84) in 1831, Sterling (1806–44) in 1833. John Rutter Chorley (1807–67) was another experienced reviewer of German and other foreign literature. 39. J. Shattock, ‘Problems of parentage: the North British Review and the Free Church of Scotland’, in J. Shattock and M. Wolff (eds), The Victorian Periodical Press (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982), p. 159. Blackwood’s notes on payments to Blackie on verso of NLS MS 4048 f. 61. 40. FQR, XVIII, 35 (October 1836), 1–30. NLS MS 4042 ff. 125, 76 (emphasis in originals). Cf. NLS MS 4042 ff. 68, 70, 72, 74, and MS 3005 ff. 149, 151, 152, 154. Alexander (1806–45) and Robert Blackwood (1808–52). 41. He unsuccessfully submitted at least one article to the Westminster Review. See F. Mineka (ed.), Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill 1812–1848 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1963), p. 342.

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42. Favourable: Literary Gazette XVIII, 900 and 901 (19 April and 26 April 1834), 273–5, 295–6; Metropolitan Magazine IX, 4 (April 1834), 105; Monthly Review N.S. I, 4 (March 1834), 564; WR, XXV (N.S. III), 2 (July 1836), 366. Less favourable: Dublin Review, IX, 18 (November 1840), 485–6; DUM, VII (March 1836), 278–88; BM, XLVII, 292 (February 1840), 234–5 (James Ferrier); FQR, XXV, 49 (April 1840), 92, 97n. 43. NLS MS 2621 f. 92. See Fig. 2. Alexander Handyside Ritchie (1804–73) had studied under Thorwaldsen in Rome 1829. 44. NLS MS 2621 f. 96. Gustav Kombst (1806–46), a political refugee who taught German in Edinburgh. 45. NLS MS 2621 f. 65. He was also encouraged by Sir William Hamilton and George Moir, translator of Schiller. 46. Quarterly Review, LII, 103 (August 1834), 20. Henry Nelson Coleridge, literary executor for his uncle, knew that Coleridge had declined £100 from Murray the publisher to translate Faust. 47. John Rutter Chorley, Athenaeum, VII, 349 (5 July 1834), 501. 48. Thomson, Ferrier, p. 41. Brougham MS 47,106, University College, London. 49. M. von Herzfeld and C. M Sym, Letters from Goethe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1957), pp. 459, 479, 480–2, 485–8, 496–7, 501–2, 525–6. 50. Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1977), VII, pp. 135–7. 51. A. H. Millar, ‘John Stuart Blackie’, SR, XXVII, 1 (January 1896), 22. 52. 7 November 1838, Collected Letters of . . . Carlyle (1985), X, pp. 212–13. 53. B. Q. Morgan, German Literature in Translation 1481–1927 2nd rev. edn (New York: Scarecrow Press, 1965), p. 163, calls it ‘weak, petty and banal’ with ‘ bad rhymes and verse’. W. H. Bruford, ‘Goethe’s reputation in England since 1832’, in W. Rose (ed.), Essays on Goethe (London: Cassell, 1949), p. 195, judges it ‘the best of the early verse translations except for Shelley’s magnificent fragments’. 54. ‘Preface’ to Faust: A Tragedy, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1880), pp. vii–ix. Blackie considered Theodore Martin’s translation of Faust Parts One and Two (1865–6) superior to his own. 55. H. W. Meikle, ‘The Chair of Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres in the University of Edinburgh’, UEJ, XIII, 2 (Autumn 1945), 101. Hayward’s 1833 Faust Part One was followed by another three translations in 1834 (including Blackie’s), one in 1835, one in 1838, three in 1839, and one in 1840, with translations of Part Two in 1838 and 1839. Many were reprinted several times in revised editions. 56. 20 July 1827, Herzfeld and Sym, Letters from Goethe, p. 481. 57. DUM, VIII, 47 (November 1836), 524–34.

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58. J. Hennig, ‘John Stuart Blackie’s translation of Goethe’s Jahrmarktsfest zu Plundersweilern’, Modern Language Quarterly, VIII (1947), 93–4, 100. A final scene was omitted ‘in deference to religious feeling that ought to be respected’. 59. W. Rose, ‘Goethe’s Reputation in England during his Lifetime’, Essays on Goethe, pp. 144, 161, 173, 179–84. Bruford, ibid., p. 189. ‘Boehn’s Standard Library’ published 14 volumes of Goethe’s works in translation 1848–90. 60. Notes, pp. 80–2. Sartor Resartus, Book II, chapter 9. Byron and Goethe actually admired each other’s work. 61. On Self-Culture (1874), p. 58. Cf. ‘Preliminary’ to Blackie’s Faust, pp. xliv–xlvi. 62. The Wisdom of Goethe (1883), p. lxxxiii. Blackie’s introductory ‘Estimate of the Character of Goethe’ is a detailed defence of Goethe’s love affairs, though he found it hard to excuse Goethe’s ‘Roman Elegies’ with their heroine, ‘a pretty Roman girl, lightly picked up in a . . . osteria’ (p. lxiii). Cf. NLS MS 2634 f. 69. 63. Thomas Guthrie (1803–73), founder of the ‘ragged schools’ and, with Chalmers, a leader of the Disruption of 1843. 64. Notes, pp. 82–3. For Carlyle on Wordsworth, see his Reminiscences [1881] (London: J. M. Dent, 1972), p. 357. 65. G. S. Haight (ed.), Letters of George Eliot (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), VIII, p. 147. Cf. Blackie, Wisdom of Goethe, p. lii. 66. Edinburgh Courant, 23 March 1877, p. 6 e–f. 67. TM, X (N.S. VI), 72 (December 1839), 797–804; XI (N.S. VII), 76, 79, 82 (April, July, October 1840), 258–63, 409–22, 666–72; XII (N.S. VIII), 86 (February 1841), 69–77. Blackie wrote an introduction to each instalment. 68. WR, XXXVII, 1 (January 1842), 134–70, also reviewed works by Gustav Kombst. 69. F. Ewen, The Prestige of Schiller in England 1788–1859 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), p. 179. 70. Karl Ludwig von Knebel (1744–1834), poet and translator. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81), dramatist, writer on aesthetics and theology. Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825), novelist and humorist, known as Jean Paul. Johann Ludwig Uhland (1787–1862), poet, philologist, literary historian, member of the1848 German Parliament. 71. TM, VIII (N.S. IV), 39 (March 1837), 164–5. Blackie did not approve of ‘the mad pranks’ of Heine and ‘Young Germany’. 72. FQR, XXV, 50 (July 1840), 235. 73. Blackie compared her to Carlyle. FQR, XXVII, 53 (April 1841), 71 (emphasis in the original). The salon of Rahel Varnhagen von Ense (1771–1833) was the focus of Berlin literary life, 1819–33. 74. FQR, XX, 40 (January 1838), 226, 240.

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75. TM, XV (N.S. XI), 126 (June 1844), 367–8. FQR, XIX, 38 (July 1837), 301–2, 307, 312, 335–6 (emphasis in original). The other Swabian poet was Justinus Kerner (1786–1862). 76. BM, L, 310 (August 1841), 143, 156–7. Mineka (ed.), Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill, p. 484. 77. FQR, XX, 40 (January 1838), 226, 240. FQR, XIX, 38 (July 1837), 297. 78. ‘Epistles to the Literati No. VI: Blackie to Yorke’, FM, XII, 68 (August 1835), 136. Maginn (1793–1842), a leading contributor to Blackwood’s, founder of Fraser’s Magazine, was a brilliant linguist with a weakness for drink. 79. NLS MS 2621 f. 87 (emphasis in original). He characteristically added verses ‘On Contentment’. 80. NLS MS 2621 f. 94 (emphasis in original). 81. NLS MS 2621 f. 98. 82. NLS MS 2621 f. 102 (emphasis in original). Cf. Blackie’s article, FQR, XXIII, 46 (July 1839), 241–94.

4 THE BLACKIE CASE 1 Marischal was the only Scottish university not to have a chair of Humanity, though in 1826 it had appointed James Melvin, the Rector of Aberdeen Grammar School, to a lectureship. In purely scholarly terms Melvin was the obvious choice for any new chair of Humanity. He had a wide knowledge of classical and medieval Latin literature, in which he was an avid book-collector, particularly editions of Horace, ‘having, he once told a friend, a copy of Horace for every day in the year’. No opportunity to add to his collection was missed – in 1829 Blackie too had been recruited to purchase more books ‘at a cheap rate on the Continent’.1 Only after his death in 1853 was Melvin properly seen as ‘the most accomplished Latinist of his day’, the last in a line of Scottish scholars which included Buchanan, Johnston and Ruddiman.2 In 1839 his reputation was as a teacher of Latin, but at the Grammar School, where he was known affectionately as ‘grim Pluto’, he had introduced Greek grammar, and used the Greek New Testament, as Blackie would later do at Edinburgh. His own Latin grammar, published in 1822, was used ‘from the lower classes upwards’ to supplement Ruddiman’s classic Rudiments of the Latin Tongue (1714), which the young Blackie had used. The ‘Melvinian morsels in the little critical footnotes’ testified to his curiosa diligentia. ‘Accuracy to the last and minutest word read, and the nicest shade of distinction between two apparent synonyms, was what he studied and insisted on’, though he would also ‘convey all sorts of minute pieces of elucidative historical and biographical information’, ‘little bits of knowledge, for example, about the Roman calendar, the Roman wines and the ways of drinking them’. His approach was ‘strictly philological’ and detailed (‘seldom more than a page a day’ of Cæsar, Livy, Virgil, Horace, or the psalms of Buchanan), but he would ‘linger with real ecstasy’ over any ‘passage of peculiar beauty of thought, expression or sound’, ‘repeating it again and again with something of a tremble of excitement in his grave voice’. This degree of concentration on Latin prose composition (with the addition of versification for the classes at Marischal) was

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unusual in Scottish schooling (though not in English), and was unknown at King’s College, Aberdeen. Melvin’s ‘versions’ were considered of a quality to merit publishing them posthumously as Latin Exercises (1857).3 Blackie’s later disparaging comment was that Melvin had ‘narrowed his views down to version-making, and as a version-maker he lived and died’. ‘Melvin was a more minute and accurate grammarian,’ but Blackie felt himself to be superior ‘in respect of general scholarship, literary accomplishment, and knowledge of the world’, adding that ‘good schoolmasters did not necessarily make good professors’. ‘The fact of the matter was that Melvin had damaged himself even as a scholar, by schoolmastering too much,’4 a judgement very much in keeping with Blackie’s insistence that Scottish universities should raise the level of first-year teaching from that of the school. Yet it would be unjust to present Melvin simply as an Aberdonian Casaubon, incapable of completing his Latin dictionary, and stuck in an outdated form of scholarship about to be superseded by the new learning from Germany. In 1839 he was only forty-five years old (Blackie was just thirty). He had not had Blackie’s advantages (Melvin was the son of poor parents, a true ‘lad of parts’), and he had the misfortune to be associated with the ‘King’s College Tories’ at a time when a Whig government controlled patronage. Blackie, a young man with no reputation as a classical scholar though with testimonials from influential persons, was appointed instead to the chair of Humanity – the result of a piece of ‘private enterprise’ by his father, using his close friendship with Alexander Bannerman, who had the ear of certain ministers in government. ‘The history of the University may be searched in vain for a more atrocious job,’ was the withering judgement of the radical Liberal Alexander Bain in 1890, that is, within Blackie’s lifetime. The absence of a contest between candidates ‘was a disgrace to everybody concerned’, and, had there been one, it would have been ‘very difficult’ for the government not to appoint James Melvin.5 Blackie’s appointment was a ‘job’, but only a more blatant example of a well-established practice. Appointment to university chairs (‘patronage’) had been a particular concern of the 1826 ‘Royal Commission of Inquiry into the state of the Universities of Scotland’. In Scotland the Crown was patron in a large number of cases (twenty-five of seventy-two chairs in the five universities in 1800), but at Glasgow, St Andrews and King’s College even more chairs were filled by the professors themselves, or at Edinburgh by the town council. In 1835 Alexander Bannerman, Aberdeen’s Liberal MP, introduced a private member’s bill for

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university reform in Aberdeen, which proposed to transfer patronage from the professors to a University Court, presided over by a rector and ‘representing wider interests and public opinion’. This was enough to arouse the opposition of the Church of Scotland, which saw its ability to influence appointments being placed at risk, but other clauses dealt with the thorny issue of the fusion of King’s College and Marischal, very much on the latter’s terms. This ensured even wider resistance by a coalition of King’s College professors and alumni, northern landowners, parochial schoolmasters and country clergy. It was defeated, as was Lord Melbourne’s shorter more general bill (1836) to reform all Scottish universities along the lines recommended in the Royal Commission’s report.6 Over the next twenty years, until the reform of patronage was finally adopted in the Universities (Scotland) Act of 1858, reformers talked of the need to check the tendency towards nepotism inherent in professorial control of appointments to university chairs, but ‘in crown appointments, the exercise of patronage on political lines was taken for granted’.7 Thus the manner in which Blackie obtained the Marischal chair was not exceptional in a society which still worked through patronage and family connection. As Blackie wrote many years later, Bannerman ‘could not be expected to make a new situation for the purpose of rewarding a political opponent’.8 It was criticised as a ‘Whig job’ by the Tories, but they could wait for a turn in political fortunes similar to that from which the Whigs had profited with the passing of the Tory ‘Melville interest’ in Scotland in1827.9 The news of Blackie’s appointment on 1 May 1839 was also conveniently overshadowed by other political events. The ‘General Convention of the Industrious Classes’ had opened in London on 4 February, to prepare a charter demanding democratic rights for working men. This was presented to parliament on 13 May.10 In the meantime, the government had already begun preparing plans to use the military against the Chartists, as indeed happened during the riots in Birmingham in July (the Convention moved there in late May). In Jamaica, unrest amongst former slaves (freed in 1834) had led the government to propose, in early April, the suspension for five years of ‘constitutional rule’ by the former slave-owners. When this was carried by only five votes on 6 May, Melbourne resigned as Prime Minister the following day, precipitating a week of uncertainty, known to history as ‘the Bedchamber Crisis’,11 before returning to office on 13 May. For the citizens of Aberdeen, however, the failure in parliament of the Harbour Bill on 1 May, was probably the piece

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of political news which most effectively buried the announcement of Blackie’s appointment. On 11 May, when it was still uncertain whether the Whigs would return to office, Bannerman wrote to Alexander Blackie: You will have seen the extraordinary occurrences of the last few days, after these mad Radicals had done the deed & as our College report was not ready to be presented till Monday, I thought whether anything could be done for John. Not a moment was to be lost, I wrote to Lord John Russell to do me a personal favour. He sent my letter to the Queen who gave her commands to attend to my wishes. Some inquiries were made & difficulties stood in the way which I am ignorant of, but your son I am informed has been appointed Regius Professor of Humanity in Marischal College. This is all I could do, & if he does not like it he may resign.

Five days later, in response to an anxious enquiry, Bannerman wrote again to Alexander Blackie: The Queen having once expressed her pleasure about your son’s appointment all the Tories in the world cannot prevent it were they in power to morrow. The matter of salary is one which I have afterwards to fight when Governmt. considers our report & no Govt. can refuse it, but I could not under the present circumstance fix the sum, without involving him & myself in difficulties which might at the time have defeated my object.12

These letters give a sense of the way in which Crown patronage was exercised in relation to Scottish universities. Appointments were made by the Home Office (hence Bannerman’s reference to Russell, the Home Secretary) on the advice of the Lord Advocate, after representations from MPs and other influential figures. In Blackie’s case the process seems to have been very discreet, with Bannerman simply dealing with the new Lord Advocate, Andrew Rutherfurd (appointed 19 April 1839), with whom he had developed a good working relationship when Rutherfurd was Solicitor-General for Scotland.13 Blackie may have lacked Melvin’s experience as a teacher, but he did not lack influential supporters. Certificates in Favour of J. S. Blackie, Esq. Advocate Corresponding member of the Archaeological Institute, Rome, printed the important testimonials. One in Latin from his former mentor F. W. E. Gerhard, was evidence of time spent in Rome with classical scholars in the circle of Bunsen, as well as of Blackie’s new interest in translating Aeschylus.14 Blackie’s work translating and reviewing German literature was covered in testimonials from J. W. Semple, George Moir and other ‘literary advocates’.15 John Campbell Colquhoun, Sheriff-Depute of Dunbartonshire and a former

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student at Göttingen (1802), John Hope, Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, and Lord Cunninghame, the judge who in 1841 would rule in favour of Blackie in his dispute with the Presbytery of Aberdeen, attested to his time spent as an advocate, and to the excellence of the Latin in his dissertation for the Faculty.16 The most important testimonial was that from Sir William Hamilton, the recently appointed Professor of Logic at Edinburgh. He had made his reputation, as a university reformer (something which counted with the government) and as a philosopher, with a series of articles in the Edinburgh Review between 1829 and 1836. Hamilton had visited Germany in 1817 and 1820, and could speak with authority on German universities, as he could (critically) on Oxford (as a Balliol man and an Oxford M.A.), and on Scottish universities.17 He had known Blackie since the early 1830s, when he had encouraged him to publish his translation of Faust, and was the key figure connecting those who could testify to Blackie’s knowledge of German literature (Colquhoun and Semple had both translated Kant, Moir had translated Schiller). There was also an important testimonial from the editor of the Foreign Quarterly Review,18 identifying Blackie as the author of a long anonymous article in the January 1839 issue, which had introduced British readers to an important new edition of Aeschylus’ Eumenides (1833–6) by Karl Otfried Müller, the young professor who had so impressed Blackie in Göttingen, and to assessments of his work by the leading German philologists, Gottfried Hermann and Franz Volkmar Fritzsche.19 Blackie had written this while waiting to hear whether the government would establish a chair at Marischal. The article was ‘sketchy and hurried’, he told his father, but would ‘excite considerable attention, as it is an attack on the whole school of English scholars’. It gave the impression that its author was not just a competent teacher of Latin, but a scholar in touch with the latest developments in Germany, which had been largely ignored in England. The ‘besetting sin of English scholarship’ was ‘an overweening pride, and an ignorant self-satisfaction’, while ‘Scottish labours in the classical field’ had ‘on the whole gained more’ than they had lost ‘by their distance from the centre of Porsonian infallibility’,20 were sentiments which must have struck a chord with Aberdonians stung by the criticism of the standard of classical scholarship north of the Border. Ironically however, the most notable critics had been two Scots: Byron in 1809 with his quip about ‘paltry Pillans’ of the Edinburgh Review, and Lockhart in 1819 with his criticism of ‘the few short and hasty months in which the young gentlemen of Scotland go through the ceremonious quackery which

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they are pleased to call learning Greek’.21 The novelist Thomas Love Peacock had some more fun at the expense of the Edinburgh reviewers in Crochet Castle (1831),22 which appeared in the same year as the report of the 1826 Royal Commission, also critical of the weaknesses of Scottish classical education. The following year there was a ‘bitterly contemptuous attack’ in the Westminster Review, in the form of an anonymous article entitled ‘Greek Literature in Scotland’,23 which accused the professors of Greek at Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews of preferring to earn a higher fee income from their large ‘junior’ classes (the students who came to university with little or no Greek) to the alternative of insisting on higher standards. ‘These gentlemen should recollect that they were not placed in their present high offices merely to fill their own pockets, but to promote the best interests of the country, by training its useful citizens.’ These were harsh words, with the Edinburgh professor, George Dunbar, coming in for particularly rough treatment. His Greek–English lexicon was described as displaying ‘surprising ignorance of the English language’, ‘an absolute ignorance of the first principles of grammar’, and Dunbar himself as seemingly ‘unwilling to forgo any opportunity of a mistake’.24 In later years Blackie would also be involved in heated controversies surrounding the teaching of Greek, but for the moment he had to turn his attention to how he could square his religious views with the Presbytery of Aberdeen. Until 1853 all newly appointed professors at Scottish universities, and until 1861 all parochial and burgh schoolmasters, were formally required to subscribe to the Westminster Confession (1645–7), the definitive statement of Presbyterian faith. This religious test had been used after 1690 to exclude Catholics, Episcopalians and Anglicans from university chairs in Scotland. By the late eighteenth century it was not consistently applied against the last two groups, but was beginning to be used against Dissenters, as well as Catholics. However, no test was applied to students, such as was the practice at Oxford or Cambridge, where Catholics and Dissenters were effectively excluded by the requirement to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. Scots could pride themselves on the fact that their universities welcomed as students young men of all creeds (women were still excluded). It was said of the University of Edinburgh in 1845, that ‘a Jew might there be a master of arts or a doctor of medicine’, though at this date he still could not be elected to parliament.25 On the other hand, the Church of Scotland still retained the power to influence the choice of professors, even though at Glasgow subscription for

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non-theological chairs had come to be ‘regarded as a formality which raised no issues of conscience’. No one challenged Daniel Sandford, Professor of Greek at Glasgow 1821–38, when he made no secret of rejecting Presbyterianism in favour of Episcopalianism (his father was Bishop of Edinburgh). At Edinburgh the test had virtually fallen into disuse, allowing the appointment of an Anglican clergyman as Professor of Mathematics in 1838.26 Yet it remained a statutory requirement, and even in lax Edinburgh, two years earlier, the presbytery had let it be known that an English candidate for the chair of Logic was ineligible on religious grounds.27 At St Andrews and Aberdeen the situation was less ambiguous, and the test was applied more consistently. The ‘clerical’ flavour of the Scottish professoriate was reinforced by the fact that chairs outside the divinity faculty, especially in Aberdeen and St Andrews, were not infrequently held by ministers, or by individuals with a degree in divinity or a license to preach, while professors of Divinity were always Church of Scotland ministers, and university principals usually so. Indeed, ‘in a Presbyterian church, without bishops or cathedrals, professorships were the only permanent offices above parish level’, and thus attractive to ministers,28 while the fact that a divinity chair (or principalship) yielded a lower income than other chairs meant that it was only practical to hold it with a ministerial salary. All of this rather belied the claim (made by reformers like Blackie) that while the two ancient English universities were ‘clerical’, the Scottish universities were not. True, they were not ‘ecclesiastical institutions’ or ‘seminaries’ to the same degree (until 1871 all college fellows at Oxford and Cambridge were in holy orders). Nor were they ‘residential’; Scottish students were left largely to their own devices outside the classroom, including religious observance, if any. There was no compulsory ‘chapel’ as in Oxford and Cambridge colleges, though Blackie thought this was something worth introducing, especially for younger students, or those who could not ‘produce certificates from their parents and guardians that they attend divine worship elsewhere’.29 There was a thinly attended ‘college service’ at Glasgow, but there was no chapel at Edinburgh, something deplored even by a reformer like Hamilton. On the other hand, lectures in Scottish universities often opened with a prayer, and Blackie always began his Greek classes at Edinburgh by reading from the Greek New Testament. The Arts course in Scottish universities met the requirement of the Church of Scotland to prepare future ministers to enter one of the divinity halls attached to each university, just as the curriculum at Oxford and Cambridge was designed to educate clergymen for the

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Church of England. At Aberdeen those intending to become ministers constituted the largest group within the student body - in the 1850s, 48 per cent of all those graduating in the medical and arts faculties at King’s, and 40 per cent at Marischal.30 Defenders of the existing system argued that here lay the most important reason for retaining the test – that abolition would ‘add terrible power to the progress of infidelity’, and that ‘the proper operation and benefits of a National Church’ could ‘never be secured unless the Church be recognised and maintained as an Educational as well as a Devotional Institute’.31 As an argument, this was little different from that used by the Church of England to defend its educational privileges at Oxford and Cambridge against Whig or Liberal reformers from the 1790s onwards. In the early nineteenth century the Church of Scotland, like the Church of England, watched the rapid growth in the number of Protestant Dissenters with anxiety, especially when they campaigned in favour of the separation of church and state – the so-called ‘voluntary principle’, from which came the term ‘Voluntary’, often applied to Scottish Dissenters.32 In Scotland there were further complications. As well as the contest between supporters of the established church and those who advocated its disestablishment, there was a power struggle within the Church of Scotland between Moderates and Evangelicals. This had begun as a difference over the best means of meeting the threat of Dissent, Evangelicals arguing for a reformed and more popular church, but by the early 1830s the dispute focused on the right of a lay patron to insist on the acceptance by a parish of his candidate for minister. This right the Evangelicals contested, arguing that the principles of the religious settlement of 1690 had been ‘usurped’ by the restoration of lay patronage in 1712, while the Moderates, with their stronger links to the landowning class, sought to defend the status quo. The religious test had also been established in 1690, but this was an existing ecclesiastical right which Moderates and Evangelicals united to defend. More clearly than with lay patronage (an issue which divided), the test was seen as an issue with a constitutional dimension: the act of 1690 had been confirmed by an Act of Security passed by the Scottish Parliament in 1706, and could thus be deemed ‘an essential part of the treaty of Union’ of 1707. To abolish the test would endanger the ‘security of the Protestant religion’, or so argued supporters of the establishment principle (whether Moderate or Evangelical) against their Voluntarist opponents.33 The situation would become far more complicated with the Disruption of 1843, when a large number of Evangelicals seceded

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from the Church of Scotland. Thereafter, the test which had been first used against Catholics from 1690, then against Dissenters from the 1790s, would also be deployed by the Moderates remaining in the Church of Scotland against the Evangelicals who had left to establish a new Free Church. Blackie was thus fortunate in being installed as a Marischal professor two years before the Disruption raised the sectarian temperature of Scotland. He also had the advantage of not being clearly identified with either the Moderate or the Evangelical party. In fact, had he not decided to go public with his reservations, Blackie might have been just another professor subscribing to the Confession ‘in the most general and vague manner possible’, ‘adopting Dr Paley’s view’ ‘that Articles of Faith’ were ‘merely articles of peace’: or considering the whole, belike, as a piece of humbug, a mere ceremonial act at best, a general expression of respect, a taking off the hat and bowing of the head in passing . . . to the respectable presbyters in Scotland; a pious homage, a poetical subscriber might say, to the Manses of the worthy old Covenanters.

In other words, subscription, not according to the law, but ‘according to the sensibility or the hardihood of individual consciences’.34 But Blackie was not one for expressions of respect, and with his conscientious scruples, he soon found himself at the centre of public controversy. The letter announcing Blackie had been ‘nominated, presented and appointed’ to the chair of Humanity was published on 1 May 1839.35 In June Melvin’s old pupils met at the Lemon Tree Tavern to organise a testimonial dinner to mark his retirement after thirteen years as lecturer at Marischal.36 A few days later, on 2 July, Blackie presented himself at the East Church session house to have his signature to the Confession of Faith witnessed by the Presbytery of Aberdeen.37 He signed, and, after waiting some time to receive the customary certificate, decided to make the following declaration: I wish it to be distinctly understood, and I request that the Clerk be ordered to put it on record, that I have subscribed to this Confession of Faith not as my private Confession of Faith, nor as a Churchman learned in Theology, but in my public professional capacity, and in reference to University offices and duties merely. I am a warm friend of the Church of Scotland, and I have been accustomed to worship according to the Presbyterian faith, and will continue to do so; but I am not sufficiently learned in Theology to be able to decide on many articles of the Confession of Faith.

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When a presbytery member (later to be one of Blackie’s colleagues at Marischal) retorted that he should have said all this before signing, adding that they ‘had nothing to do with any gentleman’s reservations’, Blackie replied: I have no reservations – I make a public declaration – and I do so for the sake of the Presbytery as well as for the vindication of my own liberty of conscience. If the Presbytery is dissatisfied with my declaration, they are now at liberty to bring an action against me, on my own confession, and eject me. As to the matter of record, if my declaration does not appear on the Presbytery’s books, it will appear in the public papers and that is all I want.

The presbytery refused to put anything on record, apart from the fact that Blackie had subscribed, and gave Blackie his signed certificate. This was how it was reported in the local press, much to Blackie’s dissatisfaction. Three days later, he wrote to the Aberdeen Constitutional, enclosing his declaration, and underlining his wish to ‘repudiate anything like mental reservation’. His letter ended with the words, ‘I give fair warning to all concerned. I hold that, in law, a non-theological Professor is not subject to the spiritual jurisdiction of the Church. He signs the articles as articles of peace only.’38 The Constitutional, scenting a good story, published, not just the declaration which Blackie had provided, but the whole letter complete with the ‘fair warning to all concerned’. Perhaps this was the origin of Blackie’s lifelong complaint that journalists were always reporting every word he uttered, however ill-considered, though in this case he had not made it clear which portions of his letter were not to be printed. Blackie dashed off another letter to a rival newspaper, complaining that the Constitutional had ‘no authority’ to publish what ‘was a private letter’, but only to print his declaration: The rest of the letter was never intended for the public eye, and so far, particularly as the concluding paragraph may in any wise seem to affect and modify the sense of the words in the body of the letter [the declaration], I hereby publicly disclaim them. I did not weigh their meaning nicely when I wrote them – they are certainly not free from ambiguity, but, whatever interpretation they may bear they must be upheld as pro non scripto. I deem it beyond my power, as a man of honour, to alter or modify in any way the phraseology of the declaration I thought it my duty to make before the Revd. Presbytery.39

Blackie was no anti-clerical. The last thing he wanted to do was to appear to offer ‘open insult to the Church’, but he stood by his

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declaration.40 Some members of the presbytery wished to pass over the matter ‘as lightly as possible’, hoping that Blackie ‘would have allowed the affair to pass away’, but he clearly was not having this. Nor were other presbytery members, who called an emergency meeting (12 August) to ask that Blackie’s certificate should be recalled if he failed ‘unqualifiedly’ to profess the Confession of Faith. A sign that their mood had changed came when one minister observed that, unless this were done, ‘German Neology, Popery, Socinianism, and Infidelity would soon be openly taught’ in Scottish universities.41 The presbytery next met in early September. After normal business (which included the subscription of another newly appointed Marischal professor), it adjourned to the West Church when it turned to discuss Blackie, because of the ‘crowded state’ of the meeting-place, St Mary’s Chapel.42 This intense public interest was a sign that he had succeeded in attracting attention to his case, though Blackie must have known that any legal process was bound to be lengthy. Two of Alexander Blackie’s friends on the presbytery, Patrick Forbes (whose sons had travelled to Germany with Blackie) and Alexander Forsyth, argued that Blackie was guilty more ‘of foolishness than an overt act against the jurisdiction of the Church’, and they tried to get the matter referred to the Synod where it might safely have been buried by other business, but there was no support for this. As leading Moderates their views were suspect to the Evangelicals on the presbytery. A large NonIntrusionist meeting had taken place at the East Church session house on 28 August, and the Evangelicals were stronger in Aberdeen than in any other Scottish city.43 Presbytery members were also annoyed (and the public, no doubt, disappointed) by the fact that Blackie had declined the summons to appear in person to explain himself, and was represented instead by a leading businessman and lawyer, Alexander Anderson, known for his ‘ruthless’ methods.44 Anderson presented another letter in which Blackie reiterated his position, and which denied the presbytery had ‘the legal right of interfering’, or of suspending or withdrawing the certificate once issued, if subscription had been made according to ‘the requisition of the law’. The advice from lawyers, including Blackie’s friend Robert Horn,45 was that the presbytery’s ‘powers’ were ‘merely ministerial’. Nevertheless, Blackie repeated that he was ‘a sincere friend’ of the Church, and expressed a ‘wish to bring the matter to an amicable issue’. ‘I am most unwilling to raise questions of power and jurisdiction,’ he wrote, though this is just what the presbytery considered he had done. It had withdrawn his certificate pro tempore on 12 August, and now it informed Marischal

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College that Blackie had not signed ‘in conformity with the terms of the Act of Parliament’.46 Accordingly, on 30 September when he appeared before the Senatus, it declined to set a date for his admission as a professor. Over the next five weeks, Marischal’s legal position was confirmed by opinion of counsel, and then by the Dean of the Faculty of Advocates and the Solicitor-General. Undaunted by this, and perhaps goaded by the news that Melvin had been reappointed to teach the Humanity classes during the ensuing winter, Blackie brought ‘a summons of declarator’ against the Senatus on 31 December 1839, with the intention of having the Court of Session in Edinburgh order his admission without delay. The case was heard on 20 February 1840 before Lord Ordinary Cunninghame. The Senatus sought to protect itself by saying that it regarded the presbytery as the principal defender, a role the latter body was more than ready to accept. A year later (18 February 1841) Cunninghame by interlocutor confirmed the view of Blackie’s legal advisors. The statutory role of the Presbytery was merely ‘the ministerial duty’ of witnessing that a ‘genuine copy of the Confession of Faith’ was ‘subscribed without alteration’. It was ‘not entitled to put any subordinate question’ to Blackie, nor to pay ‘attention to verbal explanations afterwards given’, and certainly ‘not entitled to enter appearance in the present action’. The presbytery comprehensively rebuffed, the case collapsed, each party paying its expenses. The presbytery did not delete their recall of certificate, but the Senatus now ignored it, and Blackie was formally admitted as professor (on the basis of the original certificate) on 3 July 1841,47 two years almost to the day from when he had signed the Confession of Faith. His admission as professor also coincided with the electoral defeat of the Whig-Liberal administration which had appointed him. After some months of uncertainty, Melbourne resigned at the end of August 1841. For the next six years patronage was in the hands of the Conservatives under Peel. Aberdonians could follow the ‘Blackie Case’ in their newspapers, though they were more likely to be reading about the immensely complicated ‘Strathbogie Case’, which had come before the Court of Session on 26 December. This was the last of three cases between November 1837 and February 1840, in which the Court (and in one case, also the House of Lords) acted to protect the right of lay patrons to ‘present’ ministers to parishes in the Church of Scotland. The Crown controlled about one-third of patronages (about the same proportion as it did of university chairs); the remainder were owned by the landed aristocracy or local lairds, with a few in the gift of town

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councils. In 1834 the Evangelical party had used its new dominance in the Church’s General Assembly to pass a Veto Act, allowing the male heads of family in a parish to veto a patron’s presentation (i.e. the Non-Intrusionist position). Over the next five years, there were few disputes since both patrons and local congregations acted with restraint. Only ten presentees were vetoed between 1834 and 1839, but problems arose when any one of these decided to appeal his case from the ecclesiastical to the civil courts, as happened in Auchterarder and Lethendy in Perthshire. At Marnoch, in Aberdeenshire, the Moderate presbytery of Strathbogie obeyed the Court of Session ruling to accept the ‘intruded’ minister, and then found itself suspended by a General Assembly, which contended that in spiritual matters the Church owed no allegiance to the state. By contrast, the judges ruled, ‘that because the ordination of ministers or enforcement of ecclesiastical discipline might affect civil rights, the state therefore had authority over those spiritual functions’. To them it seemed logical that a church whose privileges (like those of the Church of England) had been established by statute could not be ‘outside the civil law, nor could it encroach on civil rights as defined by the state’.48 The Blackie Case touched on these issues. The presbytery’s request that he not be admitted as a professor was certainly an encroachment on his right, not just to employment, but to the full possession of what was then regarded as a ‘freehold’, a university chair with life tenure and the right to levy fees in return for the performance of specified duties. Lord Cunninghame also defined the legal boundaries of the presbytery’s competence: it administered subscription by professors, but thereafter it could not interfere in what was now a civil matter (a professor’s relations with the Senatus). Church control of appointments to non-theological university chairs had thus been refuted by a judicial decision, though another twelve years were to pass before this was confirmed by statute in the Universities (Scotland) Act of 1853.49 After this date the religious test remained for theological chairs (Divinity, Church History, Biblical Criticism and Hebrew) and most university principalships (except for Marischal, and United College in St Andrews), but in other cases it was substituted by a declaration, to be signed by a new professor, that he would not ‘directly or indirectly, . . . teach or inculcate any Opinions opposed to the Divine Authority of the Holy Scriptures, or to the Westminster Confession of Faith’, nor do anything ‘to the Prejudice or Subversion of the Church of Scotland’ or its ‘Doctrines and Privileges’. An undertaking not to challenge the Church (of the kind that Blackie had indeed

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made),50 rather than the earlier formal subscription to its basic beliefs, thus remained in place for non-theological professors until the last decade of the nineteenth century, and for theological professors well into the twentieth.51 In his judgment Lord Cunninghame had observed that it was impossible for anyone to read a page of the Confession of Faith ‘without perceiving that there is much in it that most men are not qualified to judge of’.52 More recently, two church historians have described it as less ‘a statement of working faith’ for the Church of Scotland in the nineteenth century, and ‘more like a ball and chain which had been attached for so long that it was taken for granted’. ‘If by some strange chance all the copies of the Westminster Confession had disappeared it would be totally impossible to reconstruct the barest outline of it from Victorian sermons.’53 Nevertheless, it was still in place as the doctrinal basis of Scottish Presbyterianism, and this was the root of the problem for Blackie. He was required to subscribe to a document which he described as ‘essentially narrow, exclusive, uncharitable, and unchristian’, as one might expect of ‘a creed manufactured by the clerical adherents of the Long Parliament in 1643’. Some clauses no longer made sense, others were objectionable in the light of ‘the changing spirit of the age, and the varying practice of successive generations’, particularly the following: I. That it is the duty of the Civil Magistrate not only not to tolerate, but to employ his authority in suppressing all religions and sects and opinions that on the standard of the Confession are to be viewed as Heretical & False. (Confession ch. xxiii D.3) II. That children dying in infancy with the exception of some that are Elect pass with the rest of the Reprobate into Eternal fire. (Confession ch. x D.3) III. That the Heathen world, the vast majority of mankind, though unavoidably ignorant of the religion of Christ, and, in consequence of that very ignorance is universally & without exception doomed to everlasting torture. (Confession ch. x. D.4)54

To challenge these publicly would have meant passing well beyond the relatively clear-cut legal issues, and for the moment Blackie’s protest remained a private matter with a few trusted friends. When, in 1841, he sent Sir William Hamilton a printed copy of the papers for his appeal to the Court of Session, Blackie wrote on a blank leaf some twenty lines in German (with several underlined) from the ‘Student Scene’ in Part One of Goethe’s Faust. In his own translation, the passage offers a commentary on the pitfalls of embarking on a study of theology, and on the particular features of his own case. In

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theology, it is safer to follow one authority, rather than trust to your own independent judgement, Mephistopheles advises the student: I have no wish to lead you astray. As to this science, ’tis so hard t’ eschew The false way, and hit upon the true, And so much hidden poison lurks within, That’s scarce distinguished from the medicine. Methinks that here ’twere safest done That you should listen but to one, And jurare in verba magistri Is the best maxim to assist ye. Upon the whole, I counsel thee To stick to words as much as may be, For such will still the surest way be Into the temple of certainty.

And when the student asks, ‘But surely every word must have a meaning’, Mephistopheles replies: Yes, but we must not probe too anxiously its meaning; For, just when our ideas fail us, A well-coined word may best avail us. Words are best weapons in disputing, In system-building and uprooting, To words most men will swear, though mean they ne’er so little, From words one cannot filch a single tittle.55

Blackie had subscribed to the letter, if not the spirit, of the Confession, and the law had protected him. The ‘Blackie Case’ later would be seen as the opening shot in the campaign against religious tests in Scotland, but in 1841 Blackie could count on little public support. Robert Horn wrote from Edinburgh: I found that your cautious friends here were afraid of appearing to crow over the Prebty., and many of them I fear were mean enough to wish to wait a little to see how you were to succeed before they committed themselves. Don’t be annoyed at finding by far the greater numbers of those you call your ‘friends’ so mean as to act upon such poltroon principles.56

Not surprisingly, for the first few years Blackie did not pursue the wider issues of academic freedom, and concentrated instead on establishing himself in his new chair. On appointment to the Marischal chair Blackie had taken lodgings in King Street, Aberdeen, but then returned to Edinburgh to fight his case before the Court of Session. He was without salary and student

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fees, and hence more dependent than ever on literary journalism. In January 1839 he had written to Robert Blackwood asking for ‘the renewal of our literary connection’, and offering Blackwood’s Magazine the first instalment of his translations from Aeschylus (Seven Against Thebes). By November he was seeking less exalted work to provide some money: ‘By benefit of clergy’ I am now far from my Latin trammels. . . . My translation of Aeschylus is nearly finished & could be ready for the press in a short time. I wish to publish it with you because you have got a high name for classicality, and the Tories generally (though I hate the Oxonians) understand more about Greek than the Whigs. When I made the proposal to you some months ago I had the Professorship in my eye, & was prepared to publish for the sake of doing a small thing for Scottish scholarship, whatever might be the wit. But now my Sasine has sunk into a mere equus seianus and I cannot afford to write any thing at present, unless it be some thing sure to sell.

Between July and December 1840 Blackie published three long reviews of German travel books and historical memoirs in Blackwood’s, and was soon writing to Alexander Blackwood requesting payment: ‘I perceive with sorrow that my purse is empty, or at least will be so to morrow when I pay my tailor’s bill. I am obliged to live from hand to mouth at present.’ There was a similar letter to William Tait, the proprietor of Tait’s Magazine.57 Blackie must have felt he had returned to the insecure years of literary hack work. Over the next five years he continued to write on German literature in the Foreign Quarterly Review and Blackwood’s Magazine, with his poetry also appearing in the latter. His translations of ‘Burschen Melodies’ appeared between 1839 and 1841 in Tait’s Magazine, for which he also wrote articles on the more ‘delicate’ subject of Scottish church politics. ‘Mr Blackie is a very clever man and learned I doubt not,’ Tait told his literary editor, ‘but he is in a state of great excitement about his own case. I hope you will help to keep him from writing anything that would do himself harm, although it might not hurt us.’ In 1845 Tait set the relationship on a more secure footing by inviting Blackie to ‘fill about 8 or 10 of my large pages every month, with a review of one book and Short Notices for the Literary register’.58 By this time Blackie had his professorial salary, but this was welcome additional income, especially since he now had a wife. On 19 April 1842, just over a year after being admitted as professor, he had married his cousin Eliza Helen Wyld. We know little of Blackie’s romantic attachments in Edinburgh before 1841, apart from a couple of poems probably addressed to Janet

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Weir. Then, early in 1841, he ‘fell violently in love’ (the phrase is that of his usually demure official biographer) with Mary Johnstone. He had met her twice – once without speaking, and ‘a second time with five minutes’ ordinary talk’. Blackie wrote over thirty poems between February and July 1841, on mail coaches and in various places between Edinburgh and Aberdeen. The following from February is a fair sample of the quality of the verse: O tempt me not with thy ripe fruit, And still forbid to snatch; But let me in to thy fair soul, And gently lift the latch.

As soon as he had permission to call on her, Blackie proposed marriage. Mary’s rejection seemed definitive: It would be injustice to you to say ‘I love you’ as that is a passion I never felt in my life: that I esteem you I admit but I do not think your happiness would be gained by an union with me. If I understood you aright you would expect as much affection (perhaps more) than you gave – the woman you marry must love you passionately, in mediocrity of affection you would miss that communion of souls which you are capable of enjoying. I would fain make myself understood but as I never thought of this before I find it extremely difficult to make myself intelligible. There are many things in the family which you would have known had I understood you sooner. My oldest brother is insane & has for many years been in a lunatic asylum. Consumption & scrofulous complaints have been in this family & they may be in my blood although I am not aware of it – besides we are poor.

Ignoring these impediments, before which many a young man would have faltered, Blackie pressed for a ‘trial’ period. Mary found additional reasons for refusal: Taking time to consider would be added injustice to you – as placing a person on their guard is the surest way to prevent it ever ripening, it would be expecting a plant to grow when you were pulling it up by the roots to mark its progress – besides it would place us both in a situation from which there was no honourable retreat & if we did not love one another our after lives would be miserable. You are mistaken if you think I care for money more than as a necessary article in this busy world. Let us meet as friends, until you can do so it would be better to avoid one another, when you feel as a friend you will always be welcome.

Still Blackie pressed, asking for a decision to be delayed until after he was admitted as professor. Mary’s answer left no room for doubt:

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‘I think that the trial short as it has been must prove conclusive. . . . Although I fully appreciate your many excellent & amiable qualities, & daily see more of them in you, still each day increases my dislike to a nearer relationship, my heart seems to rise up against you’.59 This was her last letter to Blackie. Throughout this infatuation Blackie had sought the advice of his cousin Eliza Wyld (their mothers were both Stodarts), whom he had known since childhood (she was almost ten years younger than him). Later he had been a regular visitor to the Wyld family home at Bonnington Bank when he was a student in Edinburgh, and Eliza’s brother Robert had been Blackie’s companion at suppers and on walking tours when they had been fellow advocates in Edinburgh. For the way in which romance now blossomed between Blackie and Eliza during the summer of 1841, we have only the account presented by his official biographer Anna M. Stoddart. Here his ‘deep dejection’ is swiftly ‘wiped away’ by the ‘soft hand of his gentle cousin’, leaving him ‘with “a new song in his mouth’’ ’, and leaving Eliza with his present to her of Wordsworth’s poetry in six volumes. When the Wylds left Edinburgh at the end of July for their estate at Gilston in the East Neuk of Fife, Eliza went south to stay with relatives, where Blackie was also a favourite of the family. He improvised a visit to an old friend, the minister at Innerleithen, and found the opportunity one evening, when Eliza was ‘at home alone, beguiling her solitude with a song’, to propose to her. In early August, ten days after Mary’s last letter rejecting him, Blackie wrote to his younger sister Marion: My dear fish! Here we are amidst the fresh green hills, and the broad sloping braes of Pictorial Peeblesshire enjoying ourselves as we best may. The Minister’s hospitality you may be assured does not fail; and then we have ELIZA, my very particular friend, whom you in your wisdom I perceive have destined to be my WIFE. To tell you the plain truth I have long been fond of Eliza: and more strange things have happened than that she – notwithstanding the romantic adventure of my noble MARY – should be Mrs Blackie yet. However, she is invited to visit us soon as possible – and you shall be able to judge for yourself as to her amiability and accomplishments. She has ‘foundation’ and is substantial enough – only she is an inch too tall for me; and is, if anything too silent and Podleresque in her nature for me. MARY could talk like a steam-engine. ELIZA cannot do that. However she is honest & true and natural and healthy and cheerful – & that you know with me is every thing. She has HEART – and there is no question but she likes me beyond the common. But marriage you know is peculiar.

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The final injunction to ‘keep this letter to yourself; at all counts what I say about ELIZA’, suggests that Blackie had not yet written to James Wyld, asking for his daughter’s hand. This was to be denied (though the Blackies approved), and Eliza was ordered to return to her family, where she found ‘father, mother, and brothers in arms against her engagement, and all September she bore much upbraiding’. The chief objection was to ‘the wild, mad, abrupt, harum-scarum Blackie manner’ on which Blackie (in Edinburgh to prepare his lectures for Marischal College) later found himself being lectured by Eliza’s brother Robert. As for the university chair, Blackie wrote to Eliza, ‘I am to go to the Devil, Professorship and all, in six months, your father thinks.’60 James Wyld was the son of the owner of the Valleyfield paper mill at Penicuik, near Edinburgh, and had started out in business as a wine merchant in Leith. In 1803 he had married Marion Stodart, the daughter of a member of the well-known London firm of pianofortemakers who had retired to Ormiston Hill in West Lothian. In 1810 James Wyld and other merchants established the Commercial Bank of Edinburgh, of which he remained a director for forty years. He was thus an important man locally, and was appointed Deputy Lieutenant of the City and County of Edinburgh. Two of his nieces married into the Bannerman family of Manchester businessmen, and a cousin a member of the Liverpool merchant family the Gladstones, thus providing links with two future Liberal Prime Ministers, William Ewart Gladstone and Henry Campbell-Bannerman.61 In 1824 James Wyld bought Gilston House in Fife, and on retiring from business in 1832, he invested all of his money in improving the 1,300-acre estate. Blackie was a regular visitor there, and at the house at 32 Royal Terrace in Edinburgh’s New Town. Unfortunately, the income from the Gilston estate yielded only one-third of what Wyld had earned from business, and he had some difficulty in providing for and educating his twelve surviving children (of the fifteen born), and in maintaining two households, complete with tutor, governess and eight servants, not to mention the large number of visitors that a local dignitary was expected to entertain. He ‘drank a lot of port wine’, one of his sons wrote, while Marion Wyld, when the anxieties became too pressing, would ‘wander in the woods’, and then ‘seclude herself in her bedroom . . . reading William Law’s Mystical Theology’.62 The financial pressures may explain why all but two of James Wyld’s sons made their way in the world outside Scotland, either in the Indian army or in the colonies, and perhaps also why only two of the five daughters married. All the Wylds were tall like their father, the males

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over six foot, the daughters averaging five foot eight inches. Within the family Eliza was distinguished by the quality which later led Blackie to bestow the nickname ‘Oke’, from the Greek for swift or hawk-like. Her brother Robert wrote of her: Everything she does is done with lightning speed, or not at all. Whatever she may take a fancy to, she will learn quickly, but she is ever impatient of what requires laborious application. Her quick apprehension enables her to see into a great variety of subjects, and sometimes before others have had time to wilder over more than a few pages; but then she must have a desire and curiosity to know, otherwise she will haply [sic] not bestow five minutes on the subject. Like Jack Falstaff, she will do nothing by compulsion. . . . [S]he often forms her opinions in a moment, and it is not easy to induce her to reconsider them, or to weigh the arguments that may be brought in their defence.63

This was rather like Blackie, though in other respects they were opposites. She was tall, reserved, and rather serious; he was short, extrovert and waggish. ‘O my bonnie lassie,’ he once wrote to her, ‘’tis an offence indeed that I am small and that you are huge! But never mind that. There must have been true Love at the bottom, or we would never have got over such a gross and glaring impropriety.’ His ‘cheerfulness’ (Mary Johnstone had noted it even as she was rejecting him) was something which he rated highly, but two cheerful people in a marriage might be one too many. The ‘Blackie manner’ required a counter-weight or ballast (the metaphor was usually nautical): ‘you shall be my anchor to keep me fast, my root, my centre, my “foundation” for I am whimsical, a little at times and require an Eliza’, Blackie wrote in an early love letter, adding: Tell your father that I am a queer fellow in some things, but not a bad fellow at all, and with some sense too I hope, I will not allow him to catechise me, but you may as much as you please.

Eliza was invited to ‘preach away on MANNERS’, while Blackie started composing new verses. One described his new ‘chaste love’ in the form of an answer to her question: ‘And dost thou love me truly, even so, And with so fervid fire, as thou didst MARY?’ ELIZA, I will coolly answer – No! For with our years our tunes and tunings vary.64

Tact was clearly not part of the ‘Blackie manner’, so it was just as well that Eliza had been forbidden to receive his letters by this time. James

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Wyld had invoked the scriptural authority of Numbers 30:2–5, particularly the last which underscored a father’s hold over a daughter. Blackie was left to explain matters to his ‘lady confidante’, Eliza’s aunt, Mrs J. R. Stodart: I perceive that I have gained a prize in Eliza above what I hoped. I call her warm-hearted, faithful, sensible and intelligent. I will now change that last word, & make it intellectual; for she certainly says clever things, and thinks nimbly upon paper – though she be large and slow & unwieldy a little in the use of that subtle instrument the tongue.

And later, less gallantly, in a note advising the despatch of some Finnan haddocks from his Aunt Marion: ‘The gift is symbolical in a way. Dear E. has something in her – as you know – HUGE, and one might say almost, UNWIELDY – (don’t shew her this the darling little pet!) - just like a large Findon haddock on a dumpling.’65 Perhaps a small Eliza would not have held her own against the opposition of her father, mother and two of her sisters, without suitors of their own, Blackie noted – the oldest, Isabella, he called ‘the PYTHONESS’. James Wyld openly doubted whether Blackie could support ‘two families’ – the children from the second marriage of Alexander Blackie (who seemed to be ailing and would soon retire from the bank), as well as Eliza. This was not opposition on the grounds of his religious opinions, which he could have respected, but simply a father with an ‘eye to money and rank’: ’Tis a bleak calumny to say I am boyish and undignified and unsteady. I am very grave, very solemn, very grand & can indulge a joke too without injury. . . . My sister tells me that she has received a note from my dear lassie in which the good laird is said to have threatened dis-inheritance and so forth. Fudge! – Fudge! – Fudge! . . . it never entered into my mind for a single moment to ask whether the excellent gentleman was willing to give his daughter a penny or a pound. . . . Papas always say this before the thing is done, and never do it afterwards. So much for my feelings as to the disinheritance!!!! – ELIZA herself cares not a straw for it.66

Parental opposition, thwarted love, jealous sisters, threats of disinheritance, letters secretly sent – ‘Do not make the packet too bulky. A single Queen’s head must do, so ordered also that my hand may not possibly be seen through the envelope’67 – these were the ingredients of a Victorian romance. Years later it would be said that Eliza Wyld made ‘a runaway marriage’ with Blackie. The truth was that she ran out of patience with her family and simply left Gilston early one morning in late October

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1841, with 4s. 6d. in her purse, and walked the six or seven miles to Leven, passing the farm labourers going to work in her father’s fields. She caught an early boat to Leith, where she took a cab to the home of Blackie’s ‘lady confidante’ in Drummond Place in Edinburgh’s New Town, her determination measured by the fact that ‘before that morning she had never been outside the demesne of Gilston unaccompanied by a maid’. She stayed with the Stodarts until February 1842, refusing to return to Gilston as long as her correspondence with Blackie was forbidden, and told her parents that she considered herself irrevocably pledged to marry him, something he had long urged her to do.68 In early November Blackie moved into a cottage at 67 Dee Street in New Aberdeen, which had been found and furnished for him by his Aunt Marion. Here two of his sisters kept him company until he married, Christina conversing with him in Latin over breakfast, Helen keeping house so that ‘Hans’ or ‘the Prof.’ (soon shortened to ‘Pro’) could concentrate on his academic duties. Except for his years on the Continent, he had always been surrounded by adoring females. He was in a buoyant mood when he wrote to his ‘lady confidante’: Here you have me now Vivitur completa, King in my own wee house, and something in the outward material world at last! I only want – you know what – my dear ELIZA here to make me quite comfortable sitting beside me, as I am reclining on the sofa after dinner enjoying the otium cum dignitate quite after the manner of the ancients. I have the happiness to inform you that I have delivered my introductory lectures to both classes with great éclat, and also that I have commenced the common jog-trot of the business, and had not been half an hour on the pedagogic stage before I felt myself quite at home among the truly young pedants, as if I had been truly born with a birch grove on my brow. In short I have had a fair start, have fronted and overcome all difficulties, made a brilliant debut and am a made man in the Professorial line, if I please.

To the duties of the professor would soon be added the ‘pleasant labours of the parlour fireside’, or perhaps we should say, the ministrations of a dutiful wife, since Blackie’s view of marriage was that of ‘separate spheres’ for the male and female partners. ‘I wish to have you beside me daily and hourly to soothe and refresh me with your gentle womanhood,’ he told Eliza. ‘You cannot conceive, darling, how we men are rubbed and fretted with ungracious toil till the very soft grain of our natures looks hard and frosted.’69 This was to be a long and happy marriage, even if Blackie liked to think of himself as a rebel against all convention. ‘My marriage with Eliza, I consider as

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the base of my serious operations,’ Blackie wrote two months later, adding (with the usual nautical metaphor), ‘I shall be a leaf tossed in the waters idly, till I am anchored and compassed by her.’ This restlessness he dealt with by working harder, then, just before his marriage, by taking an eight-day walking tour from Aberdeen, via Banchory and Braemar, to Coupar-Angus (a leisurely 100 miles), where he caught a coach to Edinburgh. The wedding took place on 19 April 1842 at seven in the evening (as was the custom in Edinburgh), in the presence of Sir William Hamilton, Lord Cunninghame, and friends from his advocate days (Theodore Martin, Robert Horn, D. O. Hill, John Brown and George Harvey), as well as family members. The newly-weds took a ten-day holiday at Mid Calder, near Edinburgh, before returning to Aberdeen by coach for 30 April and the start of the summer term at Marischal College.70 Notes 1. NLS MS 2621 f. 46. Aberdeen University Library holds Melvin’s collection. 2. The DNB’s description. Melvin (1795–1853), master, then 1826 Rector of the Grammar School. George Buchanan (1506–82), Arthur Johnston (1587–1641), and Thomas Ruddiman (1674–1757). 3. D. Masson, Memories of Two Cities (Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier, 1911) pp. 249–66 (first published 1864–5). I. M. Harrower, John Forbes White (Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1918), pp. 19–23. G. Macdonald, ‘Presidential address. The Classics in Scotland: a retrospect’, Proceedings of the Classical Association of Scotland, 1935/7, pp. 15, 25. Masson (M. A. 1839) was taught by Melvin at Marischal, White (M. A. 1841) by Blackie. 4. Notes, pp. 119–20 (written in 1869). 5. A. Bain, ‘Latin teaching in the pre-Union colleges’, Daily Free Press [Aberdeen], 28 April 1890, p. 2. Bain (1818–1903), Professor of Logic and English at Aberdeen 1860–81, Rector 1890, had been taught by Melvin. He graduated from Marischal in 1840. 6. D. J. Withrington, ‘The “mysterious” road to Union: the making of the new University of Aberdeen, 1858–60’, Aberdeen University Review, LV, 2, no. 190 (Autumn 1999), 147–8. R. D. Anderson, Education and Opportunity in Victorian Scotland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 51–3. 7. R. D. Anderson, ‘Scottish university professors, 1800–1939: profile of an elite’, Scottish Economic and Social History, VII (1987), 29–30. Anderson, Education and Opportunity, pp. 36–40, 49–51. Melbourne’s 1836 bill envisaged the powers of appointment exercised by professors passing to the Crown.

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8. Notes, p. 118. 9. The political machine created by Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville, and continued by other members of the family, which effectively managed Scottish politics through patronage on behalf of Tory governments from 1775 to 1827. 10. Including manhood suffrage, vote by ballot, abolition of the property qualification for MPs, payment of MPs, equal electoral districts, annual parliaments - all of which were rejected by Parliament on 12 July. 11. From a dispute with the Tory leader Peel over the political sympathies of Queen Victoria’s Ladies of the Household. 12. NLS MS 2621 ff. 125, 127 (emphasis in original). 13. NLS MS 9686 ff. 204, 215, 268, 286. Little mention is made of Blackie’s chair in Bannerman’s letters to Rutherfurd (1791–1854), Lord Advocate 1839–41, 1846–51. 14. Most testimonials are in NLS MS 2621 ff. 100–22 and MS 2644 f. 6. 15. Moir (1800–70), Professor of Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres at Edinburgh 1835–40, translator of Schiller, later Sheriff of Ross and Cromarty 1855, and Stirlingshire 1859. Also George Brodie (?1786–1867), Historiographer Royal of Scotland 1836, and William Barclay Turnbull (1811–63), advocate, architect, antiquary. 16. Colquhoun (1785–1854) wrote on mesmerism and was a Sheriff-Depute 1815–54. Hope (1794–1858), Solicitor-General of Scotland 1822, Dean of Faculty 1830, and Lord Justice Clerk 1841–58. John Cunninghame (1782–1854), Solicitor-General 1835 and a law lord from 1837. There were also testimonials from Alexander Monteith (Sheriff of Fife) and Andrew Dick (Sheriff-Substitute, Bute). 17. Hamilton (1788–1856), Professor of Civil History 1821–36, then Logic 1836–56, at Edinburgh. 18. Benjamin Edward Pote (1795/6–1862), editor of the FQR 1838–40. 19. FQR, XXII, 44 (January 1839), 407–41. Johann Gottfried Jakob Hermann (1772–1848), professor at Leipzig; Fritzsche (1806–87), professor at Rostock. 20. 11 December 1838, NLS MS 2621 f. 102 (emphasis in original). FQR, XXII, 44 (January 1839), 407, 430. Richard Porson (1759–1808), the greatest English classicist of his age, lost his Cambridge fellowship by refusing to take holy orders, and lived in poverty in London (the income from his Regius chair of Greek at Cambridge was only £40 p.a.). Blackie cited the work of his friend Dr Francis Adams of Banchory as an example of Scottish classical scholarship. 21. Byron, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, line 360 (for Pillans, see below, n.23). J. G. Lockhart, Peter’s Letters to this Kinsfolk [1819] ed. W. Ruddick (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1977), p. 52 (emphasis in original). 22. ‘They [the Edinburgh Review] have never allowed their own profound

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24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

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ignorance of any thing (Greek, for instance) to throw even an air of hesitation into their oracular decision on the matter’ (the Rev. Dr Follett in chapter IV). Macdonald, ‘Presidential address’, p. 18 suggests the author was an Edinburgh classicist: James Pillans, Professor of Latin, or William Veitch, a private tutor, or John Williams, Rector of the Edinburgh Academy. WIVP vol. 4 suggests Blackie, but the style of the article is not his. WR, XVI, 31 (January 1832), 107, 91–5. Thomas Macaulay (MP for Edinburgh 1839–47, 1852–6) quoted in S. Wallace, ‘“ The First Blast of the Trumpet”: John Stuart Blackie and the struggle against University Tests in Scotland, 1839–53’, History of Universities, XVI, 1 (2000), 155. Jews were first admitted to the Commons in 1858, to the Lords in 1885. Anderson, Education and Opportunity, p. 53. Sandford (1798–1838) was a prominent Tory (knighted 1830) and MP for Paisley 1834–5. Philip Kelland (1808–79), a former Oxford tutor (hence ordained), was the first Englishman with an entirely English education to hold an Edinburgh chair (Mathematics). W. Robertson, The Church and the Universities of Scotland: Their Historical and Necessary Connection (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1853), pp. 47–8. Isaac Taylor (1757–1865), regarded by some as the greatest theologian after Coleridge, but a Dissenter, lost narrowly to Sir William Hamilton. Anderson, ‘Scottish university professors’, 41. David Brewster, appointed Principal of St Andrews in 1838, was a licentiate but not ordained. All but one of his successors were laymen. Edinburgh had clerical principals until 1859, Glasgow until 1907, Aberdeen until 1935. TM, XIV (N.S. X), 117 (September 1843), 580. Blackie, On the Subscription to Articles of Faith (1843), p. 26. D. B. Horn, A Short History of the University of Edinburgh 1556–1889 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967), p. 130. Anderson, Education and Opportunity, pp. 34, 78. Robertson, The Church and the Universities, pp. 21, 24. In Scotland the term ‘Dissenter’ covered Baptists, Congregationalists, but also independent Presbyterians, most of whom were members of the United Secession Church (1820). By 1830 at least a third of Scots were Dissenters. The Rev. John Murray, an Evangelical member of the Aberdeen Presbytery, in the proceedings against Blackie. AJ, 14 August 1839, p. 3b–c. Blackie, On Subscription, pp. 1, 24, 32, 27. William Paley (1743–1805), author of Evidences of Christianity (1794) and Natural Theology (1802), had offered this advice to English Dissenters. Printed in P. J. Anderson, Fasti Academiae Mariscallanae Aberdonensis (Aberdeen: New Spalding Club, 1889), I, pp. 520–1.

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36. The testimonial dinner and presentation of a silver tea service took place in November. AJ, 12 and 19 June 1839, p. 2g and p. 2e, and 20 November 1839, p. 2a. 37. Marischal’s charter stipulated signature before the presbytery; other universities permitted signing before the Senatus, since professors were assumed to be presbytery members. 38. Quoted in Anderson, Fasti, I, pp. 521–2. Cf. NLS MS 2644 ff. 8, 10, 11. The future colleague was the Rev. R. J. Pirie. 39. AJ, 10 July 1839, p. 3d. Pro non scripto: as not written. 40. Notes, p. 123. In this the second letter goes unmentioned, and Blackie is more the fearless crusader. 41. AJ, 14 August 1839, p. 3b–c. The more moderate voice was Pirie’s, the more extreme the Rev. John Murray. 42. AJ, 4 September 1839, p. 2e. The subscribing professor was John Macrobin (Medicine). 43. D. J. Withrington, ‘Aberdeen since 1794: as place and as community’, in T. Brotherstone and D. J. Withrington (eds), The City and its Worlds (Glasgow: Cruithne Press, 1996), pp. 14–15. Non-Intrusionists opposed a lay patron’s right to ‘intrude’ a minister on an unwilling parish. Most Evangelicals adopted this position; Moderates took the opposite (Intrusionist) stance. 44. A. A. MacLaren, ‘The liberal professions within the Scottish class structure 1760–1860: a comparative study of Aberdeen clergymen, doctors and lawyers’, in T. M. Devine (ed.), Scottish Elites (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1994), p. 96 n.33. 45. Cf. drafts of Blackie’s letter to the presbytery, notes and legal advice. NLS MS 2644 ff. 14, 18, 23, 26, 30, 73, 75. 46. Handwritten transcripts of proceedings, NLS MS 2644 ff. 42, 48. Pro tempore: temporarily. 47. AJ, 6 November 1839, p. 3c. Anderson, Fasti, I, p. 522. A. Taylor Innes, The Law of the Creeds in Scotland (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1867), pp. 158–61. In Scots law, ‘summons of declarator’ is an action to have a legal right declared; an ‘interlocutor’ is a court order. 48. S. J. Brown, ‘The Ten Years’ Conflict and the Disruption of 1843’, in S. J. Brown and M. Fry (eds), Scotland in the Age of Disruption (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), pp. 10–15. 49. Anderson, ‘Scottish university professors’, 28. MacLaren, ‘The liberal professions’, p. 83. 50. See his holograph declaration and draft in NLS MS 2644 ff. 8, 11. 51. Quoted in Anderson, Fasti, I, pp. 522–3. The test was removed for all principals in 1858–9, for schoolteachers in 1861. The substitute declaration was removed for non-theological chairs in 1889, for theological chairs in 1932. The declaration was ‘eminently absurd’ according to Alexander Taylor Innes, a Voluntarist in favour of full disestablishment,

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55.

56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61.

62.

63. 64. 65.

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but a legal expert. ‘University Tests in Scotland’, Juridical Review, IV, 4 (1892), 306 (where the dating is strangely confused). Innes, Law of Creeds, pp. 160–1. A. L. Drummond and J. Bulloch, The Church in Victorian Scotland 1843–1874 (Edinburgh: St Andrews Press, 1975), p. 301. Blackie, On Subscription, p. 20. NLS MS 2644 ff. 8, 77 (emphasis in original). These are repeated in more detail in f. 70, along with objections to the necessity of believing it ‘wrong and sinful’ for ‘a Protestant man . . . to marry a Papist’, and in the identification of ‘the Roman Pope’ with ‘the Man of Sin spoken of in II Thess. v.3’. Lines 1983 to 2000 (with Blackie’s emphasis), in Reclaiming Note for the Presbytery of Aberdeen Compearers; In the Action of Declarator at the Instance of John Stuart Blackie Esq., Advocate, designing himself Regius Professor of Humanity Elect in the Marischal College of Aberdeen Against the Senatus Academicus of the said Marischal College, and Others, n.p., [1841], p. 12 (copy in Glasgow University Library, Bc. 17-y.8). The translation is Blackie’s 1834 version (pp. 79–80) which is slightly different from the 1880 one. NLS MS 2621 f. 189 (emphasis in original). NLS MS 4048 ff. 61, 63, 65, MS 4050 f. 97, MS 3713 f. 106. The horse of Seius had brought misfortune. NLS MS 3713 f. 100, MS 2622 f. 14. Stoddart, p. 133. Blackie’s poems are in NLS MS 2650 ff. 67–71 and MS 2652 (‘Mary 1841’), letters from Mary and her mother in MS 2621 ff. 142–50. Mary burnt his letters, much to his indignation. For Janet Weir, above chapter 3 n.29. Stoddart, pp. 133–5. NLS MS 2621 f. 152 (emphasis in original). Letters, p. 81. James Wyld (1776–1860) was a close neighbour of Thomas Gladstone (uncle of W. E. Gladstone) when he was a merchant in Leith. Both families originated from the upper wards of Lanarkshire and intermarried. Mary Wyld married Henry Bannerman, who left a life interest in his estate to a nephew Henry Campbell, on condition that he adopt the surname Bannerman. G. Wyld, Notes of My Life (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1903), pp. 2, 5–6. George Wyld (1821–190?), a London physician, homeopath and spiritualist, founder-member of the Liberal Unionist party, for twenty years a director of the London District Railway. R. S. Wyld, Memoir of James Wyld of Gilston and His Family (Edinburgh: for private circulation, 1889), pp. 250–1. Letters, pp. 80–2, 101 (emphasis in original). Poem, 13 September 1841, in ‘Eliza 1841–2’, NLS MS 2650 f. 74. NLS MS 2621 ff. 167, 201 (emphasis in original). Jemima Henrietta Brown (d. 1871) was married to John Riddle Stodart WS (1792–1865),

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69. 70.

John Stuart Blackie the rejected suitor, in 1818, of Jane Welsh. Thirty years later he resumed his romantic interest. See E. B. Chalmers, ‘Mrs Carlyle’s letters to John Stodart’, TLS, no. 3617 (25 June 1971), pp. 739–41. NLS MS 2621, ff. 154, 167, 179, 185. Letters, p. 85 (emphasis in originals). NLS MS 2621 f. 161 (emphasis in original). J. Crichton-Browne, Victorian Jottings from an Old Commonplace Book (London: Etchells & Macdonald, 1926), p. 183. Glasgow Herald, 14 November 1908, p. 6g. Letters, p. 91 n.1. Stoddart, p. 138. NLS MS 2621 f. 185 (emphasis in original). Letters, pp. 92–3. Vivitur completa: a complete life. Otium cum dignitate: leisure with dignity. NLS MS 2621 f. 204. Letters, pp. 100–4. Glasgow Herald, 14 November 1908, p. 6g. Stoddart, pp. 145–7.

5 ‘THE PRO’ 1 Just before he began teaching his first Humanity class in November 1841, Blackie asked his friend Robert Horn what he remembered of his time as a student in Daniel Sandford’s junior Greek class at Glasgow. ‘You will probably laugh at my minuteness,’ wrote Horn, ‘but . . . I think it is in small matters that you are most likely to require information,’ and then proceeded to give a detailed description of a classroom regime which included student monitors (‘censors’) to call the register, fines for lateness, absence or misconduct, regular classroom exercises (parsing, scansion and composition), examinations (written and verbal), homework, and a ‘liberal’ dispensation of class prizes, funded in part by the student fines. This tidy system of rewards and punishments, however, would have been ‘of little avail’ without an ‘authoritative manner’, Horn added. Sandford was ‘frank and cordial and indulgent to mere stupidity’, while keeping ‘the most rigid discipline’. ‘His eye was always alert, and a single glance of indignation was sufficient to scatter the least unruliness or inattention that might have got up in a corner,’ but he could also ‘carry the hearts of the dullest clods with him’ in his ‘real enjoyment of the beauty of a passage’. Although Sandford was a better scholar than Dunbar, he too had been doing a schoolmaster’s job. Only with the senior students was the atmosphere less that of the schoolroom: no examinations, exercises or prizes, just intensive study of one text, and one long essay ‘given out at the end of the session for the vacation’. This class met much less frequently, leaving the burden of teaching with the junior class, as would also be the case for Blackie at Marischal. ‘If you can get them to open their mouths, cram it in, without fear either of the swallowing or the digesting,’ was Horn’s advice,1 but after four months’ teaching Blackie decided that he did not wish to be ‘a second Sandford’, and announced that he had embarked on ‘the grand & the master stroke of pedagogy’, ‘my experiment of talking Latin’. He could take advantage of the fact that (unlike Greek) most students came to university well prepared, and might by the end of the second

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session at Marischal be ‘able not only to speak but [also] to think in Latin’. If they had previously been taught at the grammar school, they thus got the best of both worlds, as Blackie’s favourite pupil later remembered: To supplement the minute verbal accuracy of Melvin we now got the fuller freedom of Blackie, and were encouraged to use the language in speech, even in thought. The stiffness of our translations from Latin gave place to better English, though no evasion of meaning of the text was allowed and a ‘crib’ was speedily detected. To read copiously, to master the spirit of an author, to connect it with the thought of other literatures, Greek, Italian, German, or English, was his aim in guiding our work. From him we got some idea of philology, of history, and of geography, in their widest sense. Doubtless many students left his class without large additions to their knowledge of Latin, but those who took advantage of his inspiring teaching have admitted that he was the most stimulating of professors.

Blackie’s approach was perfectly adapted to supplement Melvin’s intensive one, though what worked for Latin in Aberdeen, would work less well when he later taught Greek in Edinburgh. The idea that he could be little more than a schoolmaster with the junior class ran counter to Blackie’s experience of German universities, just as the time working under Gerhard in Rome gave him the idea of using drawings and engravings, and illustrations to introduce classical archaeology: Looking at a drawing of the Apollo Belvedere or the Discobolus on the walls, he would describe it and its history in free, flowing Latin, and gradually encourage us to stand up in the class, first more or less on his own lines, and afterwards by giving us another statue to be described in our own words, correcting errors at the close.2

Blackie also started a ‘class library’ funded by ‘voluntary contributions from the Students, and Professor, and the friends of Classical learning in the North’, to cover classical literature, but also ‘History, Biography, Geography, Voyages and English Literature’.3 With the junior class he read Horace, at first getting through fifty lines in an hour, but by February 1842 up to 150. He also taught his ‘boys’ crochets and quavers in order ‘to sing Horace to the tune of Maggie Lauder’. For his senior students he ordered an edited version of Ovid’s Fasti, with ‘a few obscenities clipped out’. Cicero’s Pro Milone was preferred to Tacitus as his classes were ‘rather youthful for so severe an author’. He also used William Ramsay’s Elementary Treatise of Latin Prosody (1839), a selection of readings by the Professor of Humanity at Glasgow, but then had the idea of trying to

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use more recent Latin sources. J. H. Newman’s Hymni Ecclesiae (1838) was out of print, so he began collecting materials for his own anthology of ‘the best Lyric compositions in the Latin tongue from Catullus down to the present time’. Lyra Latina was never published.4 At Marischal Blackie was like a breath of fresh air in the musty atmosphere of the college, even if the story that he once stood on his head in front of a class is probably apocryphal. There were continual disturbances in his class during the first session, the students having been ‘accustomed to be governed, both at school and at university, on the repressive system’. ‘My principle was that boys and men could be governed and should be governed mainly by love, with fear only as an extreme resort in the background,’ he later wrote. ‘I wished to combine the authority of a master with the familiarity of a friend, which is not easy.’ The ‘boys’ had taken advantage of what they saw as laxity, and he was forced finally to resort to traditional sanctions, including inflicting five or six pounds in fines. His appointment had gone ‘much against the grain with certain old fogies’ who disapproved of his methods, and were certainly not above encouraging Blackie’s students to misbehave. Blackie wrote to his ‘lady confidante’: they seem to have banded themselves together to look on me at first as a boy, & to treat as if I were their tenant. They were not long however of finding that they had to do with a MAN and a PROUD one, fond of battling too, if they will force it. I have now with a stroke or two, I hope, forced them to RESPECT me; and with a little TACT I should soon be able to manage them as completely as they hoped to be able to manage me.5

The teaching of the other professors at Marischal had not greatly changed since Blackie’s student days there twenty years earlier. New degree regulations had been introduced in 1825 (though still with oral rather than written exams) to pre-empt criticism by the Royal Commission of 1826,6 but W. G. Blaikie, a student just prior to Blackie’s arrival, felt that he had ‘sustained irreparable damage from the state of the college’ (the new arts building was not completed until 1844), and from the ‘wretched inefficiency’ of the teaching.7 In 1839 the professors in the Arts faculty, with its 250 students, included William Knight who had taught Blackie, though he was not the worst offender, despite his having held the chair of Natural Philosophy for twenty years (his teaching being outdated even in the 1830s).8 James Davidson had been Professor of Civil and Natural History since 1811, and taught ‘five months’ drivel about miscellaneous matters’, according to another student, who remembered only one ‘gleam of light’, ‘a

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long account . . . of the draining of Blair Drummond Moss’. ‘While he was lecturing, snatches of song would sometimes come from an inscrutable part of the room, captivating additional voices, till the whole class was in chorus.’ George Glennie had been Professor of Moral Philosophy since 1796, but kept better order in his class, though his teaching consisted of little more than ‘diluted dictations’ from James Beattie (his wife’s uncle and his predecessor) and Thomas Reid. Students ‘used frequently to disappear during the lecture into the dark hollow space underneath the rising tiers of benches, and there hold their secret club meetings with bottled porter and mutton pies, bobbing up now and then to see all was right, and the Moral Philosophy going on as usual’. Both Davidson and Glennie delegated their teaching to ‘deputies’, a common practice with elderly professors, in the absence of provision for retirement pensions. The deputy in Moral Philosophy, Alexander Bain, rashly made some ‘innovations’ to the teaching, and was dismissed in 1844. Though he was then employed as Knight’s deputy, doubts about his religious orthodoxy were a barrier to advancement in Aberdeen, and he moved to London where he made a name for himself in the new field of psychology.9 Dr Robert James Brown, the Professor of Greek from 1827, had been dubbed ‘Dorian’ by the students because he was ‘continually talking about the Doric’ (in this case the Greek dialect, not the speech of Aberdeenshire), while Dr John Cruikshank, the Professor of Mathematics from 1817, was popularly known as ‘Homo’ for reasons no one could remember. Both kept order in their classes and were good teachers in the old-fashioned way, but they were in no sense scholars.10 Cruikshank was a ‘lad of parts’, the son of a small tenant farmer and handloom weaver; ‘Greek Brown’ was named thus to distinguish him from his father, a former Principal of Marischal, William Laurence Brown, who had taught Blackie in the 1820s. Like several other professors, Brown was also minister of an Aberdeen parish (in his case Greyfriars), a practice which the Royal Commission of 1826–31 wished to see ended, but which continued until the 1850s. The only one of Blackie’s colleagues known outside the North-East of Scotland was Thomas Clark, Professor of Chemistry 1833–60. Called ‘Hotblast’ by his students, his reputation had not been made with a blast furnace, but in the more prosaic realms of water softening – he had invented the soap-test for discovering the hardness of water, and a process for dealing with it. His predecessor, who had grown up in the era before the Davy revolution, would defend the older view of the subject, with the words, ‘There’s a man the name of Davy who is now

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telling us that this is all wrong. He’s a troublesome man Mr Davy, but we’ll bide a wee, till we see.’11 This could have been the motto of another of Blackie’s colleagues, Daniel Dewar, Principal of Marischal and Professor of Church History from 1832 until the union with King’s in 1860. He was ‘“ the foremost and most fearless speaker” amongst the Evangelicals, but was the most notorious of the fencesitters after the Disruption’. He chose to remain with the established church, and thereafter ‘was regarded with contempt by both sides and he never preached in any city church after 1843’. Several of the Marischal professors joined the Free Church in 1843, and in at least one case (the Professor of Medicine, John Macrobin) there was some apprehension that this would affect his university post. ‘Greek Brown’ was a prominent Free Churchman, and became Free Church moderator in 1846.12 Other professors were elders of the established church: William Macgillivray, appointed in 1841 to the chair of Natural History (now shorn of Civil History) – a great improvement on his predecessor13 – and William Pirrie, Professor of Surgery from 1839.14 In 1843 a new Professor of Divinity and Church History was appointed – none other than William Robinson Pirie, a leading Moderate and member of the presbytery which had crossed swords with Blackie in 1839.15 The Marischal professoriate was thus divided along sectarian lines in the heated religious atmosphere of the 1840s, and some of the bitterness probably spilled over into relations between colleagues. Blackie was sympathetic to Free Churchmen, though he did not join the Free Church. On 18 May 1843 he had joined the seceders as they ‘marched down . . . from St Andrew’s Church in George Street to their place of reconstitution in the Oil Gas Company’s Buildings’ in Canonmills in Edinburgh.16 He was known as the man who had defied the Presbytery of Aberdeen, yet the proceedings against him in 1839 had been pursued most energetically, not by Moderates, but by Evangelicals, most of whom joined the Free Church in 1843. In 1839 it had been an Evangelical who had spoken darkly of ‘infidel & Socinian & Popish professors being thrust on the Universities’, asking his presbytery colleagues, ‘What mischief might one professor avowedly heterodox produce among the youth of the country?’ Just over three and a half years later, the same Rev. John Murray seceded from the established church,17 as did all fifteen of the ministers in Aberdeen (in Edinburgh and Glasgow only two-thirds did so) with perhaps half of their congregations. New ‘free’ churches were quickly established. Parochial schoolmasters who ‘seceded’ may have found

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it difficult to find new employment, though ‘there were not the wholesale dismissals or resignations . . . which have often been assumed’.18 The same held for university professors, who would have been difficult to dismiss anyway, though pressure could be applied, as it was in the case of the eminent scientist Sir David Brewster. Blackie devoted the first of his pamphlets on Scottish education, On the Subscription to Articles of Faith (1843), to a passionate defence of Brewster’s rights against the Senatus and local presbytery, ‘the ecclesiastical and academical bigots of St Andrews’, who, together with Moderates in the Church of Scotland General Assembly (‘a guard of Protestant Dominicans’), had initiated legal proceedings to remove him from the principalship of United College, St Andrews. Brewster was quite capable of giving as good as he got,19 and he managed to retain his post, though appointment as Principal of Edinburgh University in 1859 freed him from an awkward situation. The same was true for the Rev. John Fleming, Professor of Natural Philosophy at King’s College, Aberdeen, with whom Blackie held ‘private conclaves twice a-day to chuckle over the perplexities of the Moderates’. In 1845 he was invited to take up the chair of Natural Science at the Free Church’s New College in Edinburgh.20 Blackie was quick to seize on the irony in persecuting Free Churchmen, ‘staunch true-blue brother Presbyterians’ who believed in the very principles which the religious test had been designed to protect, but he was unusual in showing a similar concern for Dissenters and Catholics. It mattered little if a professor were ‘an Episcopalian, or a Congregationalist, or a Papist’, they should ‘not be denied the privilege always enjoyed by Dissenting students in Scotland’. ‘I would open the Universities unconditionally to all, and prefer a learned Papist much within or without the University walls to an ignorant Protestant.’21 The Free Church ‘martyrs’ were much talked of, but Blackie knew of other less prominent cases of discrimination, like that of his friends the Wilson brothers, who as Congregationalists found academic posts in Scottish universities virtually closed to them before 1853.22 Blackie was also well aware of the irony in his defending Brewster’s liberty of conscience, when it had been Evangelicals who had been foremost before 1843 in demanding ‘that the signing of the Confession should involve assent to all its theological statements’. After the Disruption the majority of Evangelicals who joined the Free Church found themselves excluded from the academical chairs by the self-same pentagram that had stood in my way . . . . The very same persons who were eager to exclude me on account of my theological heterodoxy, now

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found themselves excluded by their own ecclesiastical schism. The bit which they had been accustomed to put into other people’s mouths, now galled in their own – ‘the case being altered, that altered the case’.23

Free churchmen were divided. Some opposed any weakening of the religious element within the universities, arguing instead for ‘a substitute test framed so as to be acceptable to the Free Church’. Others (like Brewster) joined the Dissenters in pressing for its abolition on the grounds of liberty of conscience, as did Blackie. Tests were ‘un-English’ and ‘inconsistent with fair play’, he wrote, but they were also injurious to universities: Have the Universities of Scotland no rights? no liberties? Are the distinguished men who hold seats in these institutions to be answerable for their creed and public conduct to a jealous Presbyterian inquisition? . . . If the office-bearers of these respectable national institutions will not altogether be degraded and enslaved, and reduced like parochial schoolmasters, to a corporation of mere clerical dependents, let them rise as a body and protest against . . . a monstrous conspiracy of Popish Presbyterians.

Blackie’s comparison of Brewster’s situation with the case of the seven Göttingen professors dismissed in 1837 for refusing to sign a loyalty oath to King Ernst Augustus after he abrogated Hanover’s constitution, may have struck some of his readers as exaggerated – surely Britain was a constitutional monarchy, not a despotism? But they could identify with his battle-cry, ‘I give my voice for academical freedom – absolute freedom,’ as the passionate utterance of a homegrown rebel. Over 150 years later we might take the German comparison more seriously, in the sense that Blackie was staking a claim, perhaps the first by a Scottish professor, for Lehrfreiheit.24 Post-Disruption Scotland was stony ground for the idea of a ‘Free University’. Blackie’s suggestion that the planned Free Church college in Edinburgh (later New College) might be converted into a ‘a separate literary and scientific College . . . founded on the broad and deep principles of humanity and fraternity’, and open to Dissenters as well as Free Churchmen, was widely ignored. Free Church leaders were interested only in a theological college which might assist in the process of reform within the national church, and in the re-imposition of religious uniformity. Moderate leaders, demoralised by the scale of the Disruption, were even less sympathetic to ideas of religious pluralism, and were committed to a last-ditch defence of the test against ‘infidel professors’. No wonder the comment attributed to Daniel O’Connell, that ‘the Scotch are the most priest-ridden people in Europe’, was often

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quoted by Blackie in these years, especially on the subject of elementary schooling where religious sectarianism exercised a tight grip for twenty years after the Disruption.25 Blackie had been initially optimistic about the possibility of creating a national non-sectarian system of schooling in Scotland. The publication of Scotland: A HalfEducated Nation, both in the Quantity and the Quality of her Educational Institutions (1834) had caused much soul-searching because of its claim that only one in twelve Scots children were being schooled. It appeared that Scotland had fallen behind Prussia, France, the north-eastern United States, and, worst of all, England. In fact, if non-parochial schools (44 per cent of the total) were included, the figure was one in nine, within the target for English school attendance set by Lord Brougham in 1818, but the more alarming figure was widely accepted by Scots, including Blackie. He hoped that with the return to power of the Whigs under Lord John Russell in June 1846, reform would again be on the agenda,26 and in Education in Scotland: An Appeal to the Scottish People on the Improvement of their Scholastic and Academical Institutions (1846) proposed that Voluntaries and Free Churchmen should co-operate over education. This would leave ‘the self-isolated Establishment’ in charge of existing parochial schools, but in time ‘the endowed sect, which calls itself the NATIONAL CHURCH’, might also agree to join a successful nondenominational system. Its structure was to be modelled on the post1845 Poor Law in Scotland, with supervision of the new schools in the hands of locally elected parochial boards. These would levy a rate for their maintenance, and a national supervisory board would organise inspection. The rest of the pamphlet Blackie devoted to the plight of the parochial schoolmaster, whose salary Blackie proposed to raise from the ‘niggardly’ £34 (less in the Highlands) to £100. Instead of ‘systematically stunting and starving’ them, they should be regarded as a national asset with the esprit de corps of the Prussian schoolmaster: I am a schoolmaster myself, and I magnify my vocation; and I am ready to prove that it requires as high talents, and much higher moral excellence to superintend an army of boys with minds opening to all the treasures of observation, and all the mysteries of reflection, than to march a battalion of British bull-dogs against an armed phalanx of Sikhs and Afghans, or to sit in judgement on an idle vagrant or a worthless woman for stealing a pocket-handkerchief, or the purloining of a silk cravat.

It was a position ‘of vastly more importance’ than ‘the superintendent of the police, or the procurator fiscal in a town’, ‘inasmuch as the

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schoolmaster’s function is anticipatory and creative of good, while the minister of the law can only check and curtail the exuberance of evil’.27 Three years later Blackie was much less optimistic about reform. Any proposal ‘for national education on the so called secular principles’, he wrote to a fellow-reformer, would: meet with the decided opposition (1) of the men of the Establishment, (2) of the bigoted which, I fear, is the stronger section of the Free Church; to which must be added (3) the vis inertiae of all those, who are so immersed in their commercial or other business as to be perfectly indifferent to all sections of social progress.

Only the Voluntaries, and ‘enlightened thinkers and liberal politicians of all classes who are independent of clerical influence’, supported reform. University professors would offer no help: I think the same reasons that would induce the majority of them not to stir the Test question, will keep them quiet on the Parochial school question, & that a fortiori. I shall be most happy to find that I am wrong in all this – but my whole experience of the feelings of the Scottish people in regard to education amounts to this, that they will either follow their clergymen in this matter, or let it alone.28

It was a depressing picture, confirmed by the collapse of the new National Education Association of Scotland (1850) over the question of whether to advocate fully secular schooling on the lines practised in Holland, Prussia or Massachusetts. For the next six years every attempt to exclude religion from Scottish classrooms (with parliamentary bills almost every year between 1850 and 1856) was defeated by the combined efforts of the Church of Scotland and the ‘lairdocracy’.29 Progress on university reform was also blocked. Blackie was its ‘most devoted and most prominent advocate’ in Aberdeen,30 and could count on the assistance of Marischal graduates, like Alexander Kilgour, a reforming Aberdeen medical man whose energies were otherwise devoted to night soil and cesspools, and Alexander Bain.31 However, Bain soon moved to London and into the orbit of John Stuart Mill, and Blackie failed to gain the backing of the Lord Advocate for a bill for the ‘fusion’ of Marischal with King’s College. The cry of ‘the Church in danger’ raised against the measures of 1835–6 had made the government reluctant to act, and Bannerman ceased to be the local MP in 1847. Blackie had the support of Lord Cockburn, but Francis Jeffrey was reluctant to take up the issue in the Edinburgh Review on the grounds that reform in Aberdeen was too ‘local and narrow a topic to interest the readers . . . South of the Tay’.

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He also felt that Blackie’s ‘tone’ was ‘too vituperative and contemptuous’, his more general proposals ‘hopeless and impracticable’, and likely to be seen as ‘a mere outbreak of Scotch greediness and forwardness’.32 Blackie, nevertheless, published them in 1846 in two pamphlets, the previously noted Education in Scotland, and A Letter to the Citizens of Aberdeen on the Improvement of their Academical Institutions. Apart from his suggestion for ‘a supreme board of education in Edinburgh’ to act as a ‘court of arbitration in all academical matters’, including patronage, the other proposals were to be repeated many times over the next forty years – new chairs in ‘modern’ subjects (English Literature, History, Modern Languages, Natural Science), better professorial stipends, scholarships for tutors to assist professors with large classes (Greek and Latin, the experimental sciences, Mathematics), a longer (eight-month) university session, the reorganisation of university administration (under a rectorial court) and endowments – but the key proposal was the one which Thomas Chalmers had made to the 1826 Royal Commission, to improve the quality of education prior to university. The ‘superfluity of small bursaries’, and the absence ‘in many districts of Scotland’ of ‘good Gymnasia, or upper schools’ such as existed in Germany, encouraged ‘raw and untutored lads of all descriptions, without any effective check in the shape of an entrance examination’, to be ‘drafted immediately from the meagre parochial school into the first Humanity and first Greek classes where they expect and demand that the Professor shall perform the office of upper schoolmaster’: To discourse curiously on the merits of Latin poets and philosophers, to discuss profoundly the more critical points of Roman history, and the philosophy of Niebuhr, before such a motley assortment of raw boys as constitute a majority of the Humanity classes in a Scotch university, were mere insanity.33

This was fiercely contested by those who argued that ‘cheap learning’ was the ‘birthright’ of ‘Scottish youth’, and that Blackie’s aim was to transform their universities into a ‘hot-bed or hot-house for the special raising of . . . learned men’, as in England and Germany34 – in a nutshell, the argument which was so often to be raised against university reform in later years. The intellectual limitations of teaching at Marischal were another source of dissatisfaction. Blackie had to give up any attempt at his ‘favourite branch of study’, classical archaeology. ‘Within the University no person ever talked to me on any subject of scholarly

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interest,’ he wrote later. For the merchants and men of business in the town the effect of university education had ‘been rather to sharpen their intelligence than to inspire them with a literary or scientific taste’, and in the county ‘the only real scholar’ was his old friend Dr Francis Adams.35 There were also financial problems. Professors in Aberdeen and St Andrews were generally paid less than their colleagues in Edinburgh and Glasgow, though Classics chairs were more lucrative than those in other Arts subjects, or in Divinity, Medicine and Law, where the professor was assumed to have additional professional income. The salary attached to Blackie’s chair was £200 per annum, but fees were set at less than the two guineas per student that he might have expected as an Arts professor at Marischal, let alone the three guineas charged in Edinburgh and Glasgow. After successive appeals from Blackie, the Senatus increased the fees in 1841, 1842 and 1848, but with each increase added extra teaching: the three guinea fee for the junior class in 1848 was double the fee in 1841, but the time spent in the classroom had doubled as well.36 To Aberdonian frugality was added the general problem of lower fee income in the 1840s. This was a period of depression in the British economy, especially for the textile industry, which was the principal manufacturing activity in Aberdeen. There were closures of smaller textile mills and shipbuilding yards from 1837 onwards, ‘the local economy staggered from one financial crisis to another in the 1840s, each crisis becoming more severe’, ending in almost total collapse of the textile industry in 1848. Large-scale investment outside the North-East was badly affected by the bursting of the ‘railway bubble’ in 1847, and defaults on unsecured loans to the Illinois Investment Company for land purchase nearly brought down the North of Scotland Bank in the same year. It was just as well that Blackie was no longer financially dependent on his father (in 1845 Alexander Blackie retired from the bank to Darnick, near Melrose), but his fee income had suffered because enrolments at Scottish universities were generally lower in the 1840s than in the 1820s. Marischal, the ‘town’s college’, had always drawn its students from the Aberdeen bourgeoisie, and consequently suffered more than King’s College, which was linked more to the country clergy and landowners of the North-East.37 Blackie thus had at least one self-interested reason for his advocacy of university reform: My class of the first year which used to number 60, 70, or 80 is this year only 39!!! – nor will matters be mended much I fear till there be a union of the Universities. I had moreover a hard battle to fight on my first arrival here for a small increase to my fees, which yet are not what they ought to

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be when compared with the others. But I have now mastered my ground & taken my position and shall be able to put matters on a proper footing next year . . . . For the present session I reckon that my fees will not amount to above 80 guineas – a very paltry affair! – next year they should amount to 120 or 130. The £400 which I guaranteed to ELIZA will only be made up by my pen.38

Another £40 or £50 earned from writing was essential, especially since his salary and fees were paid in arrears in January. Throughout his time at Marischal, Blackie’s income including fees was ‘scarcely £350 a-year’, barely sufficient ‘to keep a house’, ‘ to see company, to buy books, to publish books that did not pay, and to practise Continental touring’, and much less than the £500 which he proposed as a ‘by no means immodest’ emolument for a professor in Aberdeen or St Andrews (£800 at Edinburgh).39 ‘I am not in the least surprised at your finding like all other young housekeepers that there are gaps innumerable to swallow up one’s income,’ his friend Robert Horn wrote, but advised Blackie to continue paying at least the minimum £12. 12s. 6d. to ‘the Widow’s Fund’, ‘the best Insurance you can make’, there being no ‘retiring allowance’ or pension for professors.40 At the end of the session the Blackies moved to 113 High Street in Old Aberdeen, a quieter area, which Blackie waggishly nicknamed Parthenopolis because of the large number of ‘maiden ladies old and young’. For £30 a year they got a house with a 30-foot-long sitting room where Blackie ‘could march from end to end, while he rolled out the lines of strophe and antistrophe from “Agamemnon” or “The Eumenides” ’. Perhaps Old Aberdeen’s ‘many tea-drinkings and junketings, cheery and informal’, as reported by Anna M. Stoddart, provided some respite from this for Eliza and the other female members of the Blackie household (her sister Janet Wyld and Blackie’s sister Helen lived with them for some years), but life with the relentlessly cheerful and constantly active ‘Pro’ must have been wearying at times. Indeed, there was something of the small boy shouting aloud his Latin exercises in Robert Wyld’s description of his brother-in-law: when at home, literally never quiet, except when asleep – even when he is shut up in his study, his voice echoes through the house, every sentence he frames being repeated and repeated several times before it is committed to paper. This constant, exuberant energy, and it may be, his possessing a nature somewhat unsympathetic with weakness, suffering, or misfortune, may at times be fatiguing to a constant companion who is delicate.

The other side of the cheerfulness was what Stoddart calls ‘a fit of the old dejection’,41 which still struck from time to time. As in Blackie’s

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younger years, religion was involved, though now the source of attraction was Unitarianism with its social gospel of tolerance and reform. During his time at Marischal Blackie’s religious views developed further in the direction of a rational and non-doctrinal Christianity, and this he believed made it increasingly difficult to fulfil the pledge he had given in 1839 to be ‘a sincere friend’ to the Church of Scotland. If there were no change, he told Eliza: ’tis plain that I must in that case resign the Professorship and become altogether a literary man. You know I do not hold my situation unconditionally – only so long as I have no active religious convictions that would lead me to declare decidedly against the Calvinistic Presbyterian Church at present established in . . . Scotland. From the restless and ever-surging character of my mind, and from that instinctive love of TRUTH . . . , it is more than probable that I . . . may find myself placed in a condition of decided hostility to Presbyterianism, and then of course the Professorship goes.

Eliza Blackie’s reply to this rather alarming news must have been less than welcoming, for his next letter sought to reassure: You do me an injustice . . . in supposing that I hold in any esteem the fame that can be got by writing in reviews, or that I care for fame at all in comparison to Truth. I wish to be honest: I wish to be free. Think more nobly of me, O Toke! Meanwhile don’t vex your soul about contingencies and possibilities of any kind. They are in the hands of God; man’s duty [is] with the present. Be sure I will make no such decision on such an important matter as the resignation of the Professorship. Nothing will force me to go out of a sphere of useful activity upon the broad sea of speculation but the Imperious cry of Conscience, and the kingly dictate of Reason. But I must prepare for the worst.

This would be if Brewster were ejected from St Andrews, as part of a purge of Free Churchmen, in which case Blackie felt that he would have no choice but to resign as well. ‘I . . . would much rather walk out and take my chance with so many noble men than stay here to wear the gilded chains of office and grow fat upon subserviency,’ he told Eliza.42 His old friend William Anderson, who was on the point of resigning as a minister of the Church of Scotland, advised caution. ‘I do not consider you bound either in honor or in conscience to relinquish your situation, provided you can be content to remain passive towards the Established Presbyn. Church.’ ‘To unsettle young minds’

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on points of principle would be ‘cruel, & beyond your duty, whatever your private sentiments may be’. The ‘irksomeness . . . at not being free to express all your opinions, tho’ quite free, to think & form them, is a part of the discipline of Providence’. In other words, he advised Blackie to follow Paley’s view of subscription as signing ‘articles of peace’. The religious test would soon be abolished, Anderson suggested, though in the end it lasted another ten years, as did Blackie’s feeling of being placed in an untenable position. He was clearly attracted to Unitarianism during this period, not surprisingly given its close links with Presbyterianism, especially in England. Blackie does not seem to have met the leading Unitarian, James Martineau, until 1859, when he heard him preach in Aberdeen, and, as he told Eliza, ‘“ revealed” to him, and kissed him because he is good’, but throughout the 1840s he was giving Anderson much concern. Late in 1846, before the start of another university session (Blackie’s sixth at Marischal), he wrote to Blackie: Don’t become an Unitarian nor profess yourself so, if you are a ‘sincere & consistent rationalist’. For that would be only to change one false uneasy position for another, in which I totally disbelieve you would ever find that which you call ‘moral rest’. I can understand Rationalism. Its Bible has 3 good leaves, tho’ it wants the fourth of the Orthodox; but an Unitarianism which believes that God has interfered with the established laws of the Universe to reveal in Christianity only that which might be known without any special revelation has no fourth leaf. I cannot harmonize it with my reason at all. Profess Theism at once, & be honest & work on & out your own way! . . . Milton in his old age went to no Church, Carlyle sympathizes & holds communion with the great men of all churches as well he may, even from his own rationalistic principles. . . . You of all men are not forced to profess your belief in a creed you abhor, or to do what your conscience condemns, but only to be silent, and it is your duty to be so for you are not called to speak. . . . I do not think you at liberty to denude yourself of the physical comforts of such a situation without Mrs Blackie’s consent. You are but half a person; & even if she was willing, still you have to consider what is really best for her.43

Blackie followed this advice from a man he described as ‘the only Evangelical minister I ever knew who seemed to understand Toleration’, but staying ‘silent’ was difficult. ‘My whole moral nature rebels against such narrowness and want of generosity,’ he wrote to Eliza in May 1844 apropos of another instance of intolerance, this time on the part of Free Churchmen. ‘The more deep impression I receive

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daily of the divinity of the moral truth contained in the Gospel, the more indifferent do I become to theological systems, creeds, and Churches of all kinds.’44 These were sentiments which might be expressed in Aberdeen’s one Unitarian chapel, but not within the walls of Marischal College. Blackie’s response to despondency was, as ever, ceaseless activity. ‘Up and be doing! Busy, busy! Ever cheerful and vigorous. Up and be doing!’, he had sermonised Eliza when relations with her family had been at their most difficult. Now the disappointments of life in Aberdeen were met with another burst of doing. ‘Have I not told you before,’ IZA, will you not understand that Rest and Repose at any time are not things for me? If you talk to me any more about that I will send you Frederick Schlegel’s works to study’: what the little Pro wants is not one thing that can be found in your bosom, but three things that can be found only in the wide world, and on horseback at full gallop . . . 1. A great cause 2. A great battle 3. A great victory. . . . Give me these three things, and then we shall preach our gospel of Rest and build our house of Repose, and kick every busy little devil out of the house because we are old and wish to Die Quietly!! Nay, but I missed the main thing. . . . 4. A grand inspiration!

Eliza studied her German, and took refuge in illness at Gilston. ‘After so much drugging and bleeding you must feel weak,’ Blackie wrote, but then added that this was better than ‘the freezing of the nobler aspirations’.45 He was at this point writing his defence of ‘the Free Church Professors’ and toying with idea of resigning his chair at Marischal – Gilston was the last place he wanted to be. He also planned ‘a historical opus magnum – “Germania Liberata: Napoleon in 1813” ’, which he hoped would enable him to ‘leave Aberdeen for ever’. ‘It will require inspiration and enormous reading,’ he told Eliza. ‘You are quite right to warn me of being too sanguine, but I think I see a glimpse of redemption at length from my many woes.’ ‘All day I am out in the libraries, learning more in an hour here than in a month in Aberdeen,’ he reported from Edinburgh in September 1844. ‘I have schemed half a dozen new articles. It is only Aberdeen that makes me stupid and paralyses all my powers.’ The following July Blackie drove himself hard on his German researches, fortified against Aberdeen by ‘a vow of total abstinence’. ‘The four black bottles stand

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accordingly where you left them, as sentinels at the door,’ he wrote to Eliza, who was feeling poorly in Peebles: no ‘porter’ has entered the house since you left; water has been drunk instead of beer; only two spoonfuls of tea have been used instead of three, also cream as a luxury has been discontinued, and there has been one sago and one fish dinner!! . . . I nourish the pious hope to get through this month with five pounds! and next month with as little, so that we may go to Germany next year.46

The planned ‘historical epos in four books’ never appeared, though Blackie accumulated sufficient materials for a string of articles on this period of German history. In August he relaxed with a walking tour of Roman sites in Scotland, ‘a necessary prelude’ to lectures for the following session at Marischal. A visit to his father near Melrose, and another walking tour of the Tweed valley in September, used up excess energy before he joined Eliza in the ‘Castle of Indolence’ at Gilston. In December 1845 Blackie wrote to Augusta Wyld, Eliza’s older sister who had become a regular correspondent, ‘Eliza is well and almost vigorous; I see no more blue devils about her, and hope that she sees them as little,’ suggesting that his wife had been suffering from depression. We can only speculate as to the cause, though Blackie was in no doubt about the cure: ‘she is now an active deaconess of the church, an office which I have long desired to see her clad withal: for it is good to be zealously affected in a good thing.’47 ‘Up and be doing!’ Late in 1846 Blackie gave a course of eight evening lectures at the Mechanics’ Institute in Aberdeen on Education. Tickets priced at 3d. or 6d. for single lectures, 1s. 6d. or 2s. 6d. for the whole course, suggested that the audience would (as was usual) be drawn mainly from the trading and mercantile classes, rather than the artisan or ‘mechanical’.48 In April 1847 Blackie gave six evening lectures on Education at the new Edinburgh Philosophical Institution to a more select audience, which included his publisher William Blackwood, his friend Dr John Brown, his old teacher John Wilson (president of the ‘Philosophical’), Alexander Blackie, and J. R. Stodart (the last two holding the office of vice-president in these years). Blackie had developed his own extempore style of lecturing and was in no doubt about his success. ‘After the first night the slight feeling of perplexity at addressing a newer and a higher audience altogether left me,’ he told Eliza: On the second night I was quite elastic and buoyant, and managed to keep my audience for an hour and a quarter in a state not merely of delighted attention but of manifest exhilaration and glee. On the third night I was

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more serious, but without the least feeling of labouring or oppression, and I kept them chained, without flagging, for an hour and a half.

Blackie’s elation was understandable; he had at last ‘arrived’ in the capital. He lectured from the same platform shortly afterwards occupied by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the eminent American essayist and poet. In April 1848 he was invited again to lecture at ‘the Philosophical’, this time on ‘Ancient Rome’, a series which he also presented in Glasgow on alternate evenings. This burst of activity had a price – severe headaches which continued ‘throughout the summer’49 – but he now had the means by which he could escape from Aberdeen. While in Edinburgh he had read his Aeschylus translation to W. E. Aytoun, the new Professor of Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres. He had been working on it intermittently since 1837, but with an initial spurt of activity in the late 1830s, and again in the 1840s. Aytoun praised it, but, as a poet, recommended rhymed choruses for the Agamemnon. This would mean yet more work, Blackie warned Eliza. ‘I am very anxious to get it finished for an early throw at an Edinburgh Chair, for which I would then have a fair chance.’ His contributions in the 1840s to the Aberdeen Philosophical Society (a body more on a level with Edinburgh’s Royal Society than ‘the Philosophical’) also indicated what would be his scholarly interests in the future: Aeschylus, Homer, Plato, Greek poetry, translation, the modern Greek language, Roman agrarian law. The ground was being laid for an Edinburgh professorship even more thoroughly than it had been for the Humanity chair at Marischal.50 A visit in May 1848 to London, and in mid-June to Oxford (his first), enabled him to make his first contact with leading classical scholars like Connop Thirlwall, Francis William Newman and Benjamin Jowett. All three were supporters of university reform, and (in varying degrees) liberal in their views, theological and political, but Blackie particularly liked Newman, the younger brother of the notable (and recent) convert to Catholicism, John Henry Newman. F. W. Newman had resigned his Balliol fellowship in 1830 in protest against the requirement to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles, and believed that ‘learning’ was ‘valuable only in so far as’ it could ‘be made to bear on the grand interests of a progressive humanity’, views which Blackie could appreciate. Newman’s unorthodoxy extended to his way of dressing – ‘in winter his cloak was a rug with a hole in the centre’ – something which Blackie later matched with his plaid. Oxford had less to offer. Even if ‘very delightful,’ and superior to German university towns in

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‘architectural display’, it lacked their intellectual resources. ‘One can hardly be surprised to find Toryism of all kinds, political and ecclesiastical,’ he told Eliza (who joined him there later), ‘the real wonder is that Puseyism should be such a modern growth in such a place, and that all are not Papists.’51 London was, and remained, ‘this modern Babylon’, though Blackie returned almost every summer to utter his disapproval of it. On this occasion he ‘took tea’ with Carlyle, and found him ‘really a notable monster’: to be respected for the many noble thoughts he has elaborated and the words of wisdom which he has flung abroad to bear divine seed among foolish-hearted men; but I can’t help thinking, face to face in a small parlour he is rather a bore: and I fancy all prophets (or many) are best exhibited in the pulpit or in the wilderness. A few grand moral instincts burn so intensely in the hearts of these men that they have no room for any thing else: they do not receive indeed at all or appropriate from without: but they rush out from their smoking sanctuary with a flaming sword in their hand, and whosoever follows them not and fights is accounted a heretic. Really I never heard in so short a space of time so much awful sweeping denunciation against this poor world lying in wickedness, as I did last night from Teufeldröckh’s prophetic parlour, No. 5 Cheyne Row Chelsea. Scottish and English Universities, British Houses of Parliament, orthodox theologies, Mrs Fry, Railroads, and Free Trade were all shaken out and sifted under the category of SHAM or CANT – while Oliver Cromwell and his Ironsides, and the Old Covenanters who sang psalms and handled fishes on Dunse Moor were held up to admiration, as the only heroes that had been born in this country for the last two hundred years.52

With some minor changes, this might have been a description of Blackie in later years. His religious views were similar to Carlyle’s, though less bleak (the Sage of Chelsea could never be called ‘cheerful’) and more attached to the external forms of Scottish Presbyterianism (including establishment). After hearing a rousing speech at the Free Church assembly in Edinburgh in 1847 (he had previously ‘attended the “Stabby” Assembly in the forenoon’), Blackie wrote to Eliza, ‘I felt how much of the missionary spirit lay combined in my own soul, for which I had never been able to find either a worthy object or a convenient outlet.’ The same night he ‘supped with’ W. E. Aytoun and Theodore Martin, friends from his advocate days. ‘The more scientifically we scanned what is called Christianity in this country, the more completely we despised it’, he wrote.53 These meetings with friends who had moved on to greater things – Aytoun had his chair in Edinburgh, Martin was a parliamentary

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solicitor in London, where he was also making a literary reputation – reminded Blackie of what he was missing in a small and rather isolated northern city. Until the railway arrived in Aberdeen in 1850, it was quicker to travel the 150 miles to Edinburgh by sea than by land, though the passage down the east coast could be extremely stormy.54 Blackie’s health was also beginning to suffer under the strain of work, and perhaps also of travel in vacation or in the intervals between terms. He suffered an attack of dysentery, which he blamed on his ‘habit of standing all day teaching and writing with a huge cold window behind my desk’, and during the winter of 1848–9 was forced ‘to intermit’ his academic work. ‘Tell your worthy Hans from me, that if he means to do great things hereafter he must rest now,’ Theodore Martin wrote to Eliza in February 1849. ‘No soil can go on yielding white crops for ever.’ By April Blackie had recovered, but was still so weak that he ‘could not ascend a short street without faintness’. Various doctors in Edinburgh were consulted, but Eliza, who had ‘a prejudice against the medical profession’ based on unhappy experience, persuaded him to try a water-cure.55 He spent the following May and June at Dr Rowland East’s hydropathic hotel in Dunoon on the Firth of Clyde, and was converted from initial scepticism to enthusiasm for ‘that admirable water treatment’, which gave ‘firmness to flabby muscles, rubicundity to a sallow complexion, clearness to a clouded brain, steadiness to shaken nerves’.56 Hydrotherapy, the use of cold water internally and externally to regulate the body, and to treat nervous illnesses, had been first introduced to England in 1841 as an alternative to drugs and bleeding. Despite the opposition of medical men, it immediately became popular with the public – Bulwer Lytton and Tennyson were notable early enthusiasts. The regime of cold baths and tightly wrapping the patient in wet sheets, together with rest, a simple diet, abstinence from alcohol, fresh air and regular exercise, seemed to work wonders for what Blackie called his ‘Slough of Despond’, perhaps because he came to it as something of a Spartan. ‘East is a good fellow; a wag, a bit of a reader, a free thinker, altogether a piece of character; and Mrs East is an excellent housemother,’ wrote one of Blackie’s friends who had taken his advice and gone to Dunoon. ‘I like them both well enough, but I don’t like their cold house, their lukewarm tea & milk, their cold boiled eggs, their carelessly cooked meats, their queer company of watery lunatics, their horrid hard beds, their common room, and their &c &c.’ The ‘water discipline’, though, was ‘capital’.57 Blackie was an enthusiast, and thus a propagandist for hydrotherapy. ‘We . . . rise every morning at six o’clock, and jump into

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a trough of cold water immediately after we jump out of bed, and drink four tumblers of the same ‘best beverage’ . . . cold from the hillside, before breakfast,’ he wrote in one of a series of letters to the Aberdeen Herald. These were immediately republished as a pamphlet, The Water Cure in Scotland (1849), which ran to a second edition and was instrumental in promoting the treatment in Scotland as a ‘rest cure’ for stress. He sent copies to his friends, but got a mixed response.58 The dyspeptic Carlyle replied that the ‘inner man’ was ‘too tumultuous for the outer (who is but a lean fellow . . .)’. ‘Happy he who is not lean, if not stupid; next happy is he who is of feline fibre, more or less, and can content himself with the inevitable.’ Edward Forbes, a confirmed ‘wine-bibber & cayenne pepper sucker’, admitted to having ‘very much the feeling of the druggist in Molière’s play, who would rather be killed by a regular physician than cured by an empirical practitioner’, but promised to send a copy to his friend Darwin, who had returned from ‘the water cure at Malvern’, six months previously, ‘a new, regenerated, vigorous, unsqueamish man ready to grapple with any intellectual labours’.59 Dunoon, however, had the advantage of ‘emphatically mountain air – Highland air . . . , if laden with an occasional gusty blast or two of sudden showers so much the better’, and was ideally suited to Blackie’s passion for ‘walking tours’ – a mere eighty miles north and you could ‘find yourself sipping tea in the island-sheltered bay of Oban’, ready next morning for ‘the basaltic columns of Staffa, or even . . . the steep top of Ben Nevis’. Since he had scaled Ben Nevis in 1847, Blackie settled for Ben Cruachan, from whose summit he wrote (in pencil) to Eliza, staying with her family at Gilston, ‘I am very hydropathic – drink only water, milk or tea – change my compass among the hillside tenants and walk all day without feeling tired next morning.’ The pattern was to be the same in 1850: a hydropathic holiday in July, followed by a bracing walking tour (in this case Glen Massan, Holy Loch, a circuit of the coast of Arran, with an ascent of Goatfell), before joining Eliza at Beverley in Yorkshire, where his sister Marion lived, in September. These Highland walking holidays had begun in 1847 when he had visited Dingwall, Inverness, Fort William, Ballachulish and Glencoe, carrying the manuscript of his Aeschylus translation in his baggage.60 The publication in June 1850 of The Lyrical Dramas of Aeschylus involved considerable sacrifice, perhaps more for Eliza than for Blackie, used as he was to ‘vagabondizing’. Carlyle had found a reputable London publisher, J. W. Parker, who agreed to take it on condition that Blackie paid the costs of £160. This necessitated giving up the

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house in the pleasant ‘Parthenopolis’ of Old Aberdeen, and selling the furniture, before the Blackies went on holiday in the summer of 1850. When they returned to Aberdeen in October, they rented two rooms in Union Street near Marischal College, to the scandal of some of Blackie’s colleagues,61 but at least his translation had appeared in a handsome two-volume edition with a dedication to Bunsen and Gerhard, ‘the friends of his youth and the directors of his early studies’. Another old friend, F. G. Welcker, an expert on Greek poetry and religion, provided much needed information on the state of Aeschylus scholarship in Germany. His Die Aeschylesische Trilogie (1824) was cited in Blackie’s footnotes, and there was also a fulsome tribute to another early influence, Karl Otfried Müller, whose edition of the Eumenides (1833–4) with a German translation Blackie considered the work of ‘a master’. Müller’s addition of a ‘comprehensive dissertation’, instead of the fragmentary notes of previous editions of Greek texts, was the model for Blackie. His twenty-eight-page essay, ‘On the Genius and Character of the Greek Tragedy’, a biographical sketch of Aeschylus, introductions and notes to each of the plays (some 160 pages of the latter), together constituted over a third of the book. Whether he also managed to equal Müller’s full and complete sympathy with the text, is more doubtful; as Carlyle had implied in the case of Blackie’s Faust, the scholarly notes would probably be of more lasting value than the translation.62 Nevertheless, Blackie was keen to win approval of fellow poets and translators. He left a copy in London for Elizabeth Barrett Browning, an earlier translator of Prometheus Bound (1833).63 We do not have a record of her impressions, though we have those of the author of the most enduring of all nineteenth-century translations: Edward Fitzgerald considered Blackie’s Agamemnon ‘a Blundering Business’.64 Leigh Hunt, however, wrote that he was ‘fulltilt, or rather full-tumbling, amidst those billows of song which you have set rolling and foaming, and harmoniously conflicting and disclosing their almost too dazzling treasures of expression and imagery’. ‘I should say that your version is right masculine and Aeschylean, strong, musical, conscious of the atmosphere of mystery and terror which it breathes in, and in all respects deeply feeling.’ Approval indeed from an influential figure in London literary circles. Carlyle grumbled against the use of verse: ‘I have also dipped here and there into the rhythmic matter; find it spirited and lively to a high degree, and indeed replete with ingenuity and talent; the grimmer is my protest against your having gone into song at all with the business.’ He had recommended the English translation of the Hebrew Bible as an example to

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follow, and his younger brother John Aitken Carlyle, author of a recent prose translation of Dante’s Inferno (1849), had also advised ‘very strongly’ against verse: it seems to me quite impossible to give an effectual version, in English verse, of these old poets, & the public has little or no taste remaining for any attempt at such a version. Alfred Tennyson is a very good Greek scholar, & you will perhaps allow that he can make our language do as much in verse as any person now living, & yet he says a translation in verse is not possible, & has long talked of making one in prose himself, beginning with Euripides. I think verse has become questionable, if not hateful, to all serious readers in our times who really wish to know what the old poets did say. . . . My brother . . . bids me say that he quite agrees with Tennyson, & has often talked with him on the subject, & believes that the thing wanted is a good racy prose version, with such rhythm as the circumstances of the case will permit.65

Not even the judgement of England’s greatest poet, within a few months to follow Wordsworth as Poet Laureate, had dissuaded Blackie. ‘I believe that if Alfred Tennyson were to give the world a translation of the Iliad in the measure of Locksley Hall, he would cut Pope out of the market of the million, even at this eleventh hour,’ he wrote in the preface to his Aeschylus. A ‘good prose translation’ was always ‘preferable . . . to a poetical translation so elegantly defaced as that of Pope’, but there was ‘no reason’ to ‘despair of producing poetical versions of the Classics’ which were ‘at once graceful as English compositions, and characteristic as productions of the Greek and Roman mind’. Unlike Faust, where Blackie’s translation competed with several others, there had been no verse translation of the complete works of Aeschylus since Robert Potter’s in 1777, though since 1824 there had been several versions of the Agamemnon and Prometheus Bound, almost all in verse.66 There remained the question of what rhythmical form to adopt. When Blackie started working on Aeschylus in 1838, he had been ‘strongly against the use of rhyme in translations from the antique’. In the early 1840s he had thrown off ‘the shackles of rhyme’ when translating from Latin odes by Horace, and had used blank verse as Milton had done before him. In this he was influenced by the example of German translations of Greek metre which aimed to be ‘as much as possible a fac-simile of its prototype’, generally representing ‘the exact rhythmical form of the original’, whether current in German or not, and rejecting ‘the entirely modern embellishment of rhyme’.67 Amongst Blackie’s literary friends only William Bell Macdonald, a medical man

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turned classical scholar, favoured the experiment – though it was said he could translate a Scottish song into German, Latin, Greek or Hebrew, and probably Coptic as well, since he was one of a handful of experts. William Spalding felt ‘the experiment of discarding Rhyme’ had not succeeded. ‘One of your metres – seemingly an endeavour to make an English Horatian measure – jars upon my ear like an ungreased cart-wheel,’ he told Blackie. Theodore Martin, a skilled classical translator, was kinder, but wondered whether they had the ‘concinnity . . . of their originals’. For Robert Horn ‘the want of rhyme’ was not the problem. ‘I think the fetter of rhyme spoils your verse . . . you are like a jolly tar that can’t move at ease under the constraint of braces.’ It was rather that Blackie lacked ‘several essentials that go to make a Horace’: Grace, delicate tact and sensibility, quiet ease and elegance, art, refined perception of character, in short the more delicate and finer qualities of feeling and intellect. (I speak of course comparatively.) Your vein I think is decidedly Carlylean, Coleridgean, Shelleyean, Schillerian, – Blackian, – but not Horatian.

The translations were ‘plainly a hasty pudding, got up hurriedly and done as task work’. How could it have been otherwise? The very idea of any man intending to say that within four or five months he shall marry a wife write and spout lectures on German literature, squib any articles in Tait &c and translate the whole odes of Horace into English poetry, is in my mind a piece of most ludicrous presumption. Burns himself would have laughed at any man who should have proposed such a task to him, even though he had nothing else to attend to. And probably he is the only poet in our language capable of transfusing Horace.

Horn had the cool appraising eye of an Edinburgh lawyer, but he knew his friend. Blackie, for once, heeded the advice, and returned to Aeschylus, to which Horn had felt he was more suited ‘in vigour and exuberant fertility, rather than in exquisite gemmy polish and brilliancy’. Aytoun’s suggestion of rhymed choruses for the Agamemnon added to Martin’s strictures against his Horatian odes, ‘too hard and prosaic in their structure’68 – advice from friends who both enjoyed public success with their verse – proved decisive. Blackie was ‘a jolly jack tar’, but one who could never resist the urge to versify. The time seemed ripe for poetic translation: Coleridge, Southey, Shelley and others had left the legacy of ‘a degree of rhythmical culture’ which had not existed hitherto.69 Blackie was also aware that amongst English scholars there was a ‘lively and occasionally acrimonious debate on

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classical prosody and translation’, which also raised questions about the extent to which Oxford and Cambridge exercised a deadening effect on British cultural and intellectual life, something which he too had been saying, perhaps to no great effect, from the isolation of Aberdeen. Connop Thirlwall, Julius Hare, and other reformers in Cambridge in the early 1830s, had established the Philological Museum, a journal devoted to broadening classical scholarship in the University ‘beyond the reigning concern with linguistic minutiae’. Its successor, the Classical Museum (1843–50), provided a forum for Blackie’s articles,70 ‘On the Rhythmical Declamation of the Ancients’, ‘On the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus’, and ‘On the Theology of Homer’ (all three originally lectures to the Aberdeen Philosophical Institution) as well as some translations from Horace and Aeschylus, and an article entitled ‘A Few Remarks on English Hexameters’.71 The latter was a contribution to a debate sparked by ‘a new interest and essentially musical understanding of the hexameter as a series of “isochronous intervals” between accents’, intervals which could be ‘filled with words or pauses’ and which could ‘span written lineendings’. Arthur Hugh Clough had experimented with this in his poem The Bothie of Tober-Na-Vuolich (1848), a recreation of his experiences the previous summer on an Oxford reading party in the Highlands, and he had also contributed an article, ‘Illustrations of Latin Lyrical Metres’ to the 1848 volume of the Classical Museum. His reaction to Blackie’s Aeschylus was approving: ‘You seem to me so far as the first glances allow me to judge, to combine exactness & freedom in the just proportions.’72 Over the course of a decade Blackie had thus completely reversed his views on poetical translation. The ‘German idea of a FACSIMILE in all respects corresponding to the original’ now seemed ‘impossible’. Instead, he had chosen a middle course between this, and the opposite extreme of ‘a poetical translation so elegantly defaced as that of Pope’: he adhered literally to the Greek only when he could ‘do so intelligibly and gracefully’, but otherwise responded poetically to the musical rhythm of Greek metre.73 Blackie’s approach to the musical scansion of Greek metre must have raised a few eyebrows amongst more conservative classicists. The ‘ancient hexameter was, strictly speaking, march-time’ (no doubt practised in his sitting room in Old Aberdeen), but the English hexameter was ‘rather jig-time, or waltz-time’, and would not be appropriate for translating Homer. Hence the suggestion of ‘the trochaic measure of fifteen syllables, so felicitously employed by Mr Tennyson’, and hence, too, the ‘licence’ Blackie allowed himself in using ‘lyrical

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language’ when translating the plays of Aeschylus, with the exception of Prometheus Bound. Why should the translator be denied ‘that rhythmical freedom’ which the original author had enjoyed? Or, as he saucily put it, ‘rhyming men will have their whim’, though there was another more serious reason.74 Years earlier, citing the advice to Goethe from a musician friend ‘to recite Greek verses instead of reading them; to scan by his ear, and not by his eye’, Blackie had noted of Pindar and Aeschylus, ‘We know that their verses were made to be sung, and have indeed no character, no significancy, no existence apart from music.’ English scholars had largely ignored this, and had ‘slavishly followed’ the ‘absurdities’ of the ‘Porsonian school’, with its ‘system of uniform scansion for the reading’: By the help of the grammarians and metricians, language was divorced from music, and literature from life. . . . [B]y . . . submitting poetry to their eyes rather than their ears, by reading themselves stupid, as many learned men in modern times have done after them – they invented that perverse scansion of the elegiac verse which . . . they gave . . . the name of Pentameter. . . . Rhythm is the inspiring and informing plastic soul in all metres; and whoever attempts to separate the one from the other, and erect it into a separate science, attempts to construct a world without a God. This mad attempt, however, the ancient grammarians made; and not they only but the modern prosodians, many of whom . . . have a sacred horror of the word rhythm . . . nothing makes them fume and fret so sublimely as the bare idea of numbering the measures, instead of counting the syllables of poetry.

It would be better if music were ‘universally cultivated in . . . schools and universities, and . . . young men be taught to chaunt the Greek choruses to some manly and solemn airs adapted by experienced composers’,75 something the older Blackie was always ready to do before startled classicists or admiring young ladies. This view of Greek poetry as ‘song’ was also underlined by the title he chose for his Aeschylus. Describing them as ‘lyrical dramas’, instead of ‘tragedy’, avoided ‘importing a host of modern associations’, and allowed Greek theatre before Aristotle to be treated in terms of ‘what it was to the ancient Greeks, sitting in the open air, on their wooden bench, or on their seat hewn from native rock, with the merry Bacchic echoes in their ears’. It was ‘SACRED OPERA, not TRAGEDY’, and had begun ‘as song’ in honour of Dionysius or Bacchus, and developed as a form which ‘was lyrical, and not at all dramatic or tragic, in the modern sense of these words’. Music, a chanted chorus, and dance,

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were all ‘an essential part of the lyrical element’. This could not be understood ‘by Greek words and glossaries alone’; ‘a living sympathy with dance and song’ were necessary for ‘an organic reconstruction of the choral chants’, and only the Germans had attempted this, perhaps because: Music . . . of the highest kind (as we see in the German music) has something solemn and contemplative in its very nature. . . . [T]he Dionysiac odes, in their earliest state, though substantially drinking songs, were, like the German Burschen songs of the same nature, interpenetrated throughout with a deep and solemn feeling of religion; at least the element of the ludicrous and sportive mimicry was early separated from the nobler part, and relegated into the region of comedy and farce.76

‘Our sober British, stern Protestant and precise Presbyterian notions, make it very difficult for us to realize this peculiarity,’ Blackie told his readers, but Aeschylus could not be ‘charged with impiety or irreligion’: Our modern Puritans, who look upon the door of a theatre (according to the phrase of a famous Edinburgh preacher) as the gate of hell, might take any one of these seven plays . . . , and with the simple addition of a few Bible designations for Heathen ones, find, so far as moral and religious doctrine is concerned, that, with the smallest possible exercise of the pruning knife, they might be exhibited in a Christian Church, and made to serve the purposes of practical piety, as many a sermon.

Blackie was making a serious point in his usual knockabout way. To treat ancient Greek theatre as a living form (in much the way that he treated the classical language), suggesting parallels with ‘Hindoo drama’, medieval mystery plays and ‘the sacred dramas of Metastasio’, or, as on another occasion, consulting an actress friend famous for her Antigone in an English stage version, were signs of a mind which had been opened to new lines of approach by contact with German scholarship. Blackie, however, was enough of a Victorian, to pass over ‘what a fearful mire of brutishness the fervent worship of Dionysius might plunge its votaries’, and to minimise the possibility of religious scepticism. ‘The seriousness of a poetic mind like that of Aeschylus is, at all times, naturally inclined to faith,’ perhaps as much a comment on Victorian Scotland as on ancient Greece.77 At this time Blackie was reading Phases of Faith (1850), ‘by far the most notable book’ of ‘the present age’ (a judgement shared, amongst others, by George Eliot), in which F. W. Newman traced his spiritual

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journey from Anglican orthodoxy to a point just short of Unitarianism. This had begun in the early 1830s, at the very point when Blackie believed that he too had started to question traditional Presbyterian theology, ‘though I wanted courage, partly for my own sake, but more for the sake of others, to look the matter fairly in the face’. Twenty years later, it was obvious that ‘a great spiritual battle’ was in progress: and that as Christianity is crystallised in a shape where it is necessarily at war with intellectual progress, and the moral sensibility of the age, there is no choice for me but to raise the old banner of Humanity and do the best service I can under that. This of course includes Christianity, and admits its inception, purged from apostolic glosses and ecclesiastical distortions. As matters now stand, I have seen too plainly for years that Christianity is made to exclude and sometimes to smother Humanity. As such, I for one can have nothing to do with it.78

The question now was whether such a non-doctrinal Christianity was not too radical to alarm the town councillors of Edinburgh. Blackie was in the city in early August 1850, visiting his father, but also attending prize-giving at the Edinburgh Academy (a ‘too solemn and sermonising address’ from a former headmaster of Rugby), and being the guest of honour at the High School club dinner (the Lord Provost in the chair). He dined with old friends, some of them Edinburgh professors, and mixed with the great and the good at a meeting of the British Association, where he also met the poet-scholar Alexander Rhizos Rhangabes, with whom he conversed in modern Greek, initiating a long friendship. All of this ‘bustle’ was related to Eliza in Beverley, but the matter which must have been uppermost in Blackie’s mind was the likelihood that the chair of Greek at Edinburgh would soon be vacant. George Dunbar was over seventy-five years of age, and had been professor since 1806. The odds were that before long Blackie would be canvassing the town councillors, and the Lord Provost, who exercised the right to appoint professors to over twothirds of Edinburgh University chairs.79 Notes 1. NLS MS 2621 f. 162 (emphasis in original). Cf. ff. 135, 138. For F. W. Newman’s suggestions on textbooks, NLS MS 9814 f. 113. 2. NLS MS 2621 f. 191, MS 2642 f. 57 (emphasis in original). Notes, pp. 134–8. John Forbes White (at Marischal 1843–7), quoted in Kennedy, pp. 68–9. Stoddart, p. 377. I. M. Harrower, John Forbes White (Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1918), p. 24.

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3. Advertisement in FJNS, VII (12 December 1846), p. 112. 4. Letters, pp. 97, 100 (11 January, 13 February 1842). NLS MS 4068 f. 115. NLS Dep. 341/98 no. 109. On Lyra Latina, Dyce MS Ch. XII, pp. 394, 405 (transcript), Aberdeen City Art Gallery, and Blackie to J. W. Parker, 11 September 1848, Pierpont Morgan Library. Ramsay (1806–65), a German-educated university reformer, was professor 1831–63. 5. D. T. Holmes, Literary Tours in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1909), p. 56. NLS MS 2621 f. 191 (emphasis in original). Notes, pp. 130–2. 6. R. D. Anderson, Education and Opportunity in Victorian Scotland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 42–3. 7. NLS MS 2624 f. 311. Blaikie (1820–99), Professor of Apologetics and Pastoral Theology, New College 1868–97. 8. Knight was succeeded by David Gray (professor 1845–56). 9. D. Masson, Memories of Two Cities (Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier, 1911), pp. 281–3 (for the years 1835–9). N. L. Walker (ed.), William Garden Blaikie: An Autobiography (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1901), pp. 44–5 (for the years 1833–7). Glennie used deputies from 1840 until his death in 1845, Davidson from 1838 to 1841. 10. N. N. MacLean, Life at a Northern University (Aberdeen: Rosemount Press, 1917), p. 27 (and note by William Keith Leask p. 346). Masson, Memories, pp. 284–6. Both retired in 1860 when Marischal joined with King’s College. Brown died in 1872, Cruikshank in 1875. 11. Walker (ed.), William Garden Blaikie, pp. 44–5 (emphasis in the original). Clark (1801–67) retired in 1860. His predecessor was George French, professor 1793–1833. 12. A. A. MacLaren, Religion and Social Class (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 116 n. 4, 221, 227, 242. MacLean, Life at a Northern University, p. 346. Dewar (1788–1867), Professor of Moral Philosophy at King’s College, Aberdeen 1814–19, minister of Tron church, Glasgow 1819–32. Macrobin was professor 1839–75. 13. Macgillivray (1796–1852), assistant and secretary to Robert Jameson (Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh) 1823–31, conservator of the Royal College of Surgeons’ Museum in Edinburgh 1831–41. At Marischal he completed his life’s work, A History of British Birds (1838–52). 14. Pirrie (1807–82), appointed in 1839, continued in his chair after the union with King’s in 1860. 15. Pirie (1804–85), minister of Dyce 1830–43, and Moderator 1864. Professor until 1885, Principal in 1876. 16. Notes, p. 293. He appears (no. 68 of 450) in his friend D. O. Hill’s group portrait (1866) of this First Free Church General Assembly in Edinburgh, where the ‘act of separation’ was signed. 17. NLS MS 2644 f. 48. The Rev. John Murray (1784–1861), after 1843 minister of North Free Church.

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18. D. J. Withrington, ‘Adrift among the reefs of conflicting ideals? Education and the Free Church, 1843–55’, in S. J. Brown and M. Fry (eds), Scotland in the Age of Disruption (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), p. 81. A. L. Drummond and J. Bulloch, The Church in Victorian Scotland 1843–1874 (Edinburgh: St Andrews Press, 1975), pp. 93–4 19. On Subscription, pp. 24, 29. His chief opponent was George Cook, Professor of Moral Philosophy at St Andrews 1829–45, leader of the Moderates in the General Assembly. Brewster’s revenge was to stop Cook’s son becoming professor. NAS A56/48 (28 June 1854). 20. Letters, p. 111. NLS MS 2622 f. 39. Fleming (1785–1857) had been professor at King’s College since 1833. 21. On Subscription, pp. 24, 27. 22. George Wilson was unable to apply for a chair at Glasgow. Daniel Wilson (1816–92) became Professor of History and English Literature at Toronto in 1853, University President 1881, and founded Canada’s national education system. 23. Drummond and Bulloch, The Church in Victorian Scotland, p. 95. Notes, pp. 124–5. ‘The pentagram stands in your way!’ – Faust to Mephistopheles. 24. On Subscription, pp. 26, 28, 29. Withrington, ‘Adrift among the reefs’, p. 88. Lehrfreiheit: freedom of instruction. For the Göttingen seven, see above, chapter 2 n. 36. 25. On Subscription, pp. 16, 35. Blackie letters to the Lancashire Association 1847–50, Manchester Central Library, M136/2/3/342–6. Drummond and Bulloch, The Church in Victorian Scotland, pp. 93–4. R. D. Anderson, Education and the Scottish People 1750–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 50. O’Connell’s Letter to Lord Cloncurry (1837) actually says this of ‘the English’. 26. TM, XV (N.S. XI), 128–9 (August–September 1844), 516. D. J. Withrington, ‘“ Scotland a half-educated nation” in 1834? Reliable critique or persuasive polemic?’ in W. M. Humes and H. M. Paterson (eds), Scottish Culture and Scottish Education (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1983), pp. 66–74. Its author, George Lewis, was a Free Church minister, secretary of the Glasgow Educational Society, and a relative by marriage of Eliza Blackie. 27. Blackie, Education in Scotland, pp. 4–10. Anderson, Education and the Scottish People, pp. 51–3. I. G. C. Hutchison, A Political History of Scotland 1832–1924 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986), p. 71. NEA members included Brewster, Hamilton, James Pillans, the phrenologist George Combe, Alexander Russel of The Scotsman, the historian J. H. Burton, and Duncan MacLaren, a leading Voluntary. Cf. NLS MS 7390 f. 544. 28. To J. H. Burton, NLS MS 9394 f. 68 (emphasis in original). John Hill

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Burton (1809–81), Historiographer-Royal, Secretary to the Scottish Prison Board 1854–81. Vis inertiae: inertness. 29. J. D. Myers, ‘Scottish Nationalism and the antecedents of the 1872 Education Act’, Scottish Educational Studies, IV, 2 (November 1972), 77–86. In parliament a minority of Scottish MPs defeated the bills with the help of Irish MPs, English Dissenters and Tories. 30. A. Anderson, Five Letters to the Editor of the ‘Banner’ on Free Church Education with Special Reference to the North of Scotland and the Aberdeen Universities (Aberdeen: George Cornwall, 1845), pp. 27–8. 31. Kilgour submitted detailed evidence to Edwin Chadwick’s Sanitary Commission. R. Tyzack, ‘“ No Mean City?” The growth of civic consciousness in Aberdeen with particular reference to the work of the Police Commissioners’, in T. Brotherstone and D. J. Withrington (eds), The City and its Worlds (Glasgow: Cruithne Press, 1996), pp. 155–7. 32. ‘Civis’ in AJ, 14 October 1846, p. 3f. NLS MS 9713 f. 280. Letters from Cockburn, NLS MS 2622 ff. 60, 69, 80, 83. Jeffrey to Cockburn, NLS Adv. MS 9.1.11 f. 71 (emphasis in original). Jeffrey (1773–1850) edited the Edinburgh Review 1803–29, was Lord Advocate 1830–34, and Rector of Glasgow University 1820 and 1823. 33. Education in Scotland, pp. 10–11, 15. NLS MS 2622 f. 56. Anderson, Education and Opportunity, pp. 40–1. 34. AJ, 18 March 1846, p. 2c. 35. Notes, pp. 128–9. 36. NLS MS 9686 f. 290. P. J. Anderson, Fasti Academiae Mariscallanae Aberdonensis (Aberdeen: New Spalding Club, 1889), I, p. 520n. Melvin’s fees of 1 guinea for the junior class and 10s. 6d. for the senior, were raised for Blackie to £1. 11s. 6d. and 15s. in 1841, to 2 guineas and 1 guinea in 1842, and to 3 guineas for the junior in 1848. Melvin taught the juniors for three-quarters of an hour, six days a week, and the seniors for one hour, three days a week. For the junior class this was increased in 1841 to six hours a week, in 1842 to eight hours, in 1848 to twelve hours, when the senior class became optional. Melvin’s salary had been £80, but his salary as High School rector was £250. A. Bain, ‘Latin teaching in the pre-Union colleges’, Daily Free Press [Aberdeen], 28 April 1890. Masson, Memories of Two Cities, p. 253. 37. R. D. Anderson, ‘Scottish university professors, 1800–1939: profile of an elite’, Scottish Economic and Social History, VII (1987), 35. MacLaren, Religion and Social Class, p. 21. C. Lee, ‘Aberdeen 1800–2000: the evolution of the urban economy’ in Brotherstone and Withrington, The City and its Worlds, pp. 213–17. 38. To Mrs J. R. Stodart. NLS MS 2621 f. 191 (emphasis in original). 39. Notes, p. 152. Blackie, Education in Scotland, p. 14. Though enough to pay a cook and housemaid wages of £8 and £6 year, respectively, plus

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£2 ‘tea money’. L. I. Lumsden (ed.), Memories of Aberdeen a Hundred Years Ago (Aberdeen: William Smith, 1927), p. 28. NLS MS 2621 f. 231. The first pension scheme was introduced in 1858. Stoddart, pp. 150–1. R. S. Wyld, Memoir of James Wyld of Gilston and His Family (Edinburgh: for private circulation, 1889), p. 254. Parthenopolis: city of the virgins. Letters, pp. 105–7, 109–11 (emphasis in original). 2 May 1843, 23 October 1846, NLS MS 2621 f. 243, MS 2622 f. 62 (emphasis in originals). Letters, p. 143. Milton held Unitarian views. Carlyle followed the ethic of Evangelical Christianity shorn of its doctrinal forms. Martineau (1805–1900) taught at Manchester New College. Letters, p. 112. Ibid., pp. 95, 108–9, 111 (emphasis in original). NLS MS 2621 ff. 239, 241, MS 2622 ff. 11, 58. Letters, pp. 113, 115–16. Stoddart, p. 154. NLS MS 2622 f. 45. Syllabus of a Course of Lectures on Education by Professor Blackie of Marischal College, n.p., n.d. FJNS, V, (14 Nov. 1846), p. 80. For Blackie’s view of education as a broad, child-based activity, not narrowly scholastic, see, FJNS I, II, III, VI, VII (4 August, 2 and 16 October, 28 November, 12 December 1846) pp. 3–4, 19–20, 34–5, 81–2, 97–8. W. A. Miller, The ‘Philosophical’: A Short History of the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution (Edinburgh: C. J. Cousland & Sons 1949), pp. 9–10. Stoddart, pp. 160–1. Letters, pp. 119, 124. For Blackie’s explanation of his lecturing technique, see Notes, pp. 141–7. Letters, p. 118. Transactions of Aberdeen Philosophical Society, II (1892), xxiii–xxxi. Letters, pp. 122–3, 126 (the latter misdated as 1847). Thirlwall (1797–1875), translator of Schleiermacher and Niebuhr, from 1840 Bishop of St David’s. Newman (1805–97), Professor of Latin at University College London 1840–63. Jowett (1817–93), Fellow, Tutor, and (1870) Master of Balliol. Professor of Greek at Oxford 1882–6. On Newman’s attire, see U. C. Knoepflmacher, ‘Introduction’ to Newman, Phases Of Faith (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1970), p. 9. To Augusta Wyld. NLS MS 2622 f. 88 (emphasis in original). Letters, pp. 120–1, 112. Stoddart, p. 153. See NLS MS 2622 f. 41. Notes, p. 149. NLS MS 2622 f. 104. Blackie, ‘Convalescence written by a hydropathic patient while under treatment, Dunoon 29 May 1849’, NLS MS 2622 f. 118. Notes, pp. 150–1. East had been an Anglican clergyman in Newcastle. His hotel (1846) was one of the first Scottish ‘hydros’ using the techniques of Vincenz Priessnitz (1799–1851), a Silesian farmer.

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57. Samuel Brown. NLS MS 2622 f. 148 (cf. ff. 125, 127). 58. The Water Cure in Scotland (1849), pp. 5, 11. 59. Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), XXIV, pp. 156–7. NLS MS 2622 f. 129. R. Metcalfe, The Rise and Progress of Hydropathy in England and Scotland (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1906), p. 158. Carlyle tried the treatment in 1851. J. D. Hirst, ‘Hydropathy in England 1840–70’, Medical History, XXV, 3 (July 1981), 277. 60. Blackie, Water Cure, p. 42. NLS MS 2622 ff. 120, 77, MS 4087 f. 243. Stoddart, pp. 160–1, 165, 171–2. 61. Stoddart, p. 166. Eliza had been ‘in an expectant state’ in 1849, but had presumably miscarried. NLS MS 2622 f. 119. 62. NLS MS 2622 f. 116. The Lyrical Dramas of Aeschylus (1850), II, p. 182. FQR, XXII, 44 (January 1839), 431–40. 63. P. N. Heydon and P. Kelley (eds), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Letters to Mrs David Ogilvy 1849–1861 (London: John Murray, 1973), pp. 30–1. Her 1833 translation is not listed in Blackie’s Aeschylus, and she had declined his request to see her revised version (published in her Poems 1850). P. Kelley and S. Lewis (eds), The Brownings’ Letters (Winfield: Wedgestone Press, 1992), X, p. 249. 64. A. M. and A. B. Terhune (eds), Letters of Edward Fitzgerald (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), II, p. 767. Fitzgerald (1809–83) translated six plays by Calderon (1856) and the quatrains of Omar Khayya-m (1859), described by G. K. Chesterton as ‘much too good to be a good translation’. 65. Hunt quoted in Stoddart, p. 167. Collected Letters of . . . Carlyle (1997), XXV, pp. 96–7, XXIV, pp. 23–4. NLS MS 2622 f. 140 (J. A. Carlyle). 66. Blackie, Lyrical Dramas, I, ix–xii. Alexander Pope’s verse translations of the Iliad (1715–20) and Odyssey (1725–6) were far from the original. Verse translations of the Agamemnon appeared in 1824, 1831, 1832, 1846, 1848, and of Prometheus in 1832, 1833, 1836, 1846 (two); prose translations of the plays in 1840 and 1849. 67. Montrose Standard, 20 May 1842, p. 4, and CM, II (1845), 287. Letters, p. 94. NLS MS 4058, f. 108. 68. NLS MS 2621 ff. 208, 210, 212, 218, 226, and MS 2644 f. 83 (emphasis in originals). Letters, p. 118. Macdonald (1807–62) had been a naval surgeon in the Mediterranean, before inheriting the estate of Rammerscales and devoting himself to scholarship. Aytoun had published Lays of the Scottish Cavalier (1848) to great acclaim. 69. Blackie, Lyrical Dramas, I, pp. ix–x. Notes, pp. 139–40. 70. J. P. Phelan, ‘Radical metre: the English hexameter in Clough’s Bothie of Toper-Na-Fuosich’, Review of English Studies, N. S. L, 198 (1999), 167, 173. C. Stray, Classics Transformed (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

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78. 79.

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1998), p. 62. Hare (1795–1855), Fellow of Trinity College, with Thirlwall translated Niebuhr’s history of Rome 1828–32. CM, I (1844), 338–69, II (1845) 287–90, IV (1847), 319–30,VI (1849), 432–63, V (1848) 1–41, VII (1850), 97–104 and 414–58 The more important are reprinted in Blackie, Horae Hellenicae (1874). Phelan, ‘Radical metre’, 166–71. NLS MS 2622 f. 152. Clough (1819–61) lost his religious faith, resigned an Oriel fellowship, and left Oxford in 1848 to become a schools examiner. He died in Florence. Blackie, Lyrical Dramas, I, pp. vi–vii, ix. Cf. his reviews of English and German translations of Aeschylus (mostly in verse), CM, IV (1847), 336–44, and VI (1849), 432–63. CM, IV (1847), 324. Lyrical Dramas, I, pp. xiv–xvi. Lancelot Shadwell had made a complete hexameter translation of the Iliad in 1844. FQR, XXII, 44 (January 1839), 410–11. FQR, XXIII, 46 (July 1839), 244–5, 251, 261–2, 268–9 (a review of works on Greek metre by August Boeckh, Gottfried Hermann and August Apel). Lyrical Dramas, I, pp. xxi, xxiv, xli, xlvi–xlvii (emphasis in original). FQR, XXIV, 48 (January 1840), 253–4. Blackie followed Schlegel in dismissing Euripides as ‘a helpless dramatic blunderer’ (248), a comment worthy to stand with Macaulay’s on Xenophon: ‘below the lowest trash of the English circulating library’. Lyrical Dramas, I, pp. xxxviii–xlviii. NLS MS 2643 f. 83. Helena Saville Faucit (1817–98), regarded as Fanny Kemble’s successor, married Theodore Martin in 1851, and continued to act on stage until 1871. Letters, p. 112 (misplaced with letters from 1843). Ibid., pp. 126–8. Rhangabes or Rangabé (1809–92), Professor of Archaeology at Athens, later Minister of the Interior, ambassador, and a leading literary figure. Married Sir Walter Scott’s god-daughter, Caroline Skene. F. M. F. Skene, ‘A Noble Life’, Argosy, LXV, 1 (January 1898), 1–17.

6 ‘VIVAT BLACKIEAS!!!’ 1 The process by which Blackie ‘won’ the Edinburgh chair of Greek illustrates yet another side of nineteenth-century university ‘patronage’ – not the party political ‘jobbery’ of Crown appointments, but rather the bitter religious sectarianism of Edinburgh municipal politics, which affected the two-thirds of the university chairs where the town council was patron. Dunbar, it was said, owed his to the support of a Lord Provost, and much the same could be said of Blackie, who won his chair on the casting vote of another Lord Provost, though in the different context of a reformed electoral system. Before 1833 Edinburgh town council was a self-perpetuating ‘corporation’; after Scottish burgh reform it was elected every three years (in November) on the ‘£10 household franchise’ – that is, by adult males with a minimum of one year’s residence, whose properties (owned or rented) were of £10 rental value. This prosperous middle-class electorate, under five per cent of Edinburgh’s population (less in other Scottish cities), was overwhelmingly Liberal, but deeply divided over religious issues, which dominated local politics after 1843. In Aberdeen Alexander Bannerman, a non-Presbyterian Dissenter, did not stand for re-election in 1847, because he found it increasingly difficult to satisfy the conflicting demands of the Voluntaries (or Dissenters), the Free Church and the Church of Scotland. In the same year the Whig historian Thomas Babington Macaulay was defeated in the Edinburgh seat he had held since 1839, largely over religious issues. He had offended Evangelicals in 1841 by opposing the use of the parochial veto against ‘intruded’ ministers, and Free Churchmen in 1845 by voting for a government grant to the Roman Catholic college at Maynooth.1 The Voluntaries and Evangelicals, who had fought each other so bitterly over the issue of church establishment (and by implication over government aid to schools) as recently as the municipal elections of 1840, and the parliamentary elections of 1841, united in the mid-forties to provide a challenge to the dominant Whig-Moderate group of professional men (particularly lawyers) which ran Edinburgh. That this

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tactical alliance of former enemies lasted beyond the Disruption (when most Evangelicals joined the Free Church), and operated against Macaulay in 1847, was largely due to another Dissenter, Duncan McLaren. He was a ‘lad of parts’, the son of a small farmer in Dunbartonshire, who came to Edinburgh (much of the city’s growth was from inward migration), served an apprenticeship, and in 1824 opened a drapery and dry goods business in the High Street. Ten years later he was elected to the newly reformed town council, and rose, via the city treasurership (1837), to be Lord Provost between 1851 and 1854, the first Voluntary to hold this post. A founder of the Scottish Central Board for Vindicating the Rights of Dissenters (1834), and of the Scottish Anti-Corn Law League from the late 1830s (the two bodies were closely linked), McLaren was an ally of the Quaker John Bright, leader of English radical Liberalism, and married Bright’s sister Priscilla in 1848 after the death of his second wife. Canny investment in banking and railways made him a wealthy man, able to set himself up in style in a Newington mansion. He was called ‘the Gradgrind of Edinburgh’ (not, it seems, a severe criticism north of the Tweed), because of his unrelenting and dogmatic laissez-faire Liberalism,2 but to his political opponents he was ‘Snake the Draper’, the inveterate political schemer. His Free Church partners distrusted him almost as much as his old enemies in the Church of Scotland. When the Voluntary-Free Church alliance broke down, allowing Macaulay to regain his Edinburgh parliamentary seat in July 1852, McLaren finished third in the contest to be one of the city’s two MPs (Glasgow being the only other Scottish city with two seats). This was McLaren’s first attempt to get to Westminster. Voting in municipal and parliamentary elections was thus determined by religious allegiance, complicated by tensions between the old ‘Whig oligarchy’ and lowermiddle-class ‘shopocracy’, a social distinction which did not coincide exactly with religious allegiance. This only changed in the mid-1860s with the agitation for political reform, which provided a secular issue strong enough to allow McLaren to rebuild his coalition of religious sectarians and middle-class radicals, and to launch his career in Westminster politics.3 By then Blackie was on the opposite side of the political fence, as an opponent of the extension of the franchise. In the 1850s, however, the moving force in Edinburgh politics was religion, more specifically Presbyterianism, which in its three main (and competing) institutional forms was the faith of a good three quarters of the city’s churchgoing population, and a constriction on the liberty of the (sizeable) non churchgoing minority.4

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The religious battleground of post-Disruption Scotland made the Edinburgh chair an uncertain prospect. Blackie’s friend George Wilson, a Congregationalist who had been excluded from academic posts worthy of his talents as a chemist, offered ‘a word of advice’. ‘I have watched University elections here for the last 16 years and understand the process better than many a Chemical one,’ he wrote to Blackie shortly after the death of Dunbar on 6 December 1851: 1st. get as many good testimonials as possible; the more from the Germans and other Outlanders the better. . . . A German is worth a dozen Englishmen. 2d. Come home at Christmas, or as soon as possible and visit every Councillor. Without testimonials it is useless standing, but they only place you in the race. Canvassing the Electors carries every chair. . . . 3d. Get as many zealous friends as possible to watch your interests here: if possible organise a Committee. Dr John Brown, if he will work, could do a great deal . . . 4th. Commit yourself to nothing in your introductory letter, affecting politics, religion or parties of any kind. Every Election M.P. or Movement has a Cry. The Cry in such a case as yours is uttered by the rivals. A Man’s chance of a Chair depends as much on his Rivals’ abilities as on his own. . . . For a season, each Candidate will publish testimonials showing him to be an extraordinary genius in every possible respect. By and large testimonials will run short, and the friends of each Candidate will take to discovering what the weak points of the rivals are. Anything will do; and however honourable Candidates themselves are, their friends will stick at little. . . . What your faults are, you will by & by learn. The ‘Water Cure’ pamphlet will be hunted through for anything that can damage you. Don’t therefore volunteer opinions on contested matters. You will be called to account soon enough. So frank & outspoken a man as you will not be tremendously acceptable I fear, to Pillans & many of the other Old Slow Coaches of the University. You won’t imagine I am bidding you be a hypocrite. God forbid I should tempt you to be one iota less honest & open than you are; but if you try for the Greek Chair don’t throw away your chance by thinking of non-Greek matters before you are asked. Your Rivals will compel enough of this & if, as I hope, you are made Professor, you will have opportunity of proclaiming your views on all things. Active friends here to watch the Rivals are essential.5

This was a shrewd analysis of Blackie, and of the degree to which a contest for a university chair in Edinburgh was part of municipal politics. There was still an academic element, however. Wilson’s first point suggests that he knew that Blackie had spent the summer of 1851 in Germany, his first visit in twenty years. With his half-brother

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George, Eliza, and her youngest sister Janet, Blackie had travelled to Bonn, and there renewed his friendship with Bunsen, meeting also the university’s three great classicists, Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, Carl August Brandis and Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl. He also encountered Jacob Bernays, a brilliant young protégé of Bunsen’s, whose later academic career would be blighted by anti-Semitic prejudice. Leaving the rest of the party in the Thuringian spa town of Liebenstein, which predictably depressed him with its ‘endless idleness and aimless prattle’, Blackie had then set out in late July on foot for Gotha, via Inselberg, Ruhla, and Eisenach. Next he had ‘tramped to Halle where he lingered some days’, meeting Emil Roediger, the Semitic scholar and Max Duncker, the classical historian. The ‘broad-breasted Neptunian figure’ of Duncker had been very much to Blackie’s taste: a first-rate scholar (his Geschichte des Altertums Blackie rated ‘one of the best historical works’ produced in Germany), but also an active liberal nationalist who had sat in the famous ‘professors’ parliament’ at Frankfurt in 1848, and who was now a member of the Prussian Chamber of Deputies. Blackie had then circled back to Liebenstein, with a stop to interview yet another Professor of Greek at Jena, and some literary sightseeing in Weimar.6 The result of this walking tour of over 230 miles was a reinvigorated Blackie with a set of useful contacts, most of which were to provide him with testimonials for perusal by Edinburgh town councillors.7 Blackie also had the advantage of friends and family in Edinburgh to work on his behalf (Wilson’s third point). Eliza’s uncle John Riddle Stodart, and her cousin George Tweedie Stodart, began lobbying their fellow lawyers and working the Wyld family network on Blackie’s behalf. Eliza wrote to her Manchester cousins, the Bannermans, to get them to intercede with Duncan McLaren.8 Blackie’s friends among the ‘literary advocates’ also began to organise themselves to support a candidate who was one of their own. In Edinburgh, professional men, and lawyers in particular, exercised much influence, far more than in Glasgow and most other British cities. This was a consequence not just of Scotland’s separate legal system and its Presbyterianism (church affairs providing much work for lawyers), but also of Edinburgh’s growing importance as a financial centre. Banking, life assurance, insurance and investment provided employment for new categories of white-collar work, with lawyers getting some of the richest pickings.9 Robert Horn formed a committee to lobby the town councillors, composed of Blackie’s old friends with one or two new admirers, like Thomas Knox, who was unusual in being neither a

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lawyer nor a professional man, but a hosier with a business in Hanover Street. Daniel Wilson (brother of George Wilson), who was himself pursuing the prospect of a professorship in Toronto, organised the printing of testimonials. These were issued in four parts, with a fifth containing extracts from the most important ones.10 Apart from the six in Latin from German scholars, there was a testimonial from Carlyle underlining Blackie’s ‘thoroughly modern’ scholarship, and citing his Aeschylus as evidence that he was ‘well acquainted with Continental improvements’. His judgement on Blackie the man was also accurate: ‘in all things he means sincerely; is of hopeful, rapid nature, very fearless, very kindly, without ill humour and without guile’. Privately, Carlyle considered Blackie ‘a cheerful hopeful, looseflowing, loud-talking soul, whom in many points I could rather like: but he has no true seriousness; and he is one of those too who are “at ease in Zion” ’.11 A letter from Francis Newman testified to Blackie’s ‘peculiar sympathy with the Greek mind’ and his ability to incite ‘young minds to vigorous study’, though Newman was aware that in Edinburgh his unorthodox religious views might be damaging.12 Probably more to the taste of Edinburgh councillors were the letters and testimonials from half a dozen Scottish professors of Greek or Latin, several classical masters in Aberdeenshire schools, three university principals, Blackie’s Marischal colleagues, Marischal graduates, and parents or guardians of his former students. There were also testimonials from Congregationalist, United Presbyterian and Free Church ministers and professors, plus a letter of support from the Rev. John Murray, Blackie’s old adversary on the Aberdeen Presbytery in 1839, but only two from two Church of Scotland ministers, a balance which reflected the Free Church and Dissenting majority on Edinburgh town council. Sir William Hamilton declined to provide a testimonial because of his ties of friendship to at least three other candidates, but he allowed his testimonial for the Marischal chair to be used again.13 A testimonial from Sir David Brewster reminded the councillors, who had ‘themselves laboured in the same great cause’, of Blackie’s struggle in Aberdeen: It was by the honest avowal which he made when called upon to sign the obnoxious Tests, and the moral courage which he displayed in resisting the warped powers of an ecclesiastical court that the guardianship of the Tests was wrested from the Church and placed by law in the hands of Professors and University Patrons where it still remains a blot on the Statute Book, a remnant of more than Popish intolerance, and a stain upon the reputation of those who may venture to exercise it.14

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Though very much in the spirit of what Blackie himself had written ten years earlier, this section was omitted when the testimonial was printed, perhaps on the advice of Edinburgh friends. Presenting him as a compromise candidate, not formally attached to any religious party, was the safest course in a situation where voting would be less on the academic merits of the candidates, and more along sectarian lines. The fate of Blackie’s friend, the metaphysician James Ferrier, testified to that. He failed to win the Edinburgh chairs of Moral Philosophy in 1850, and of Logic in 1856, largely because he was identified as the Church of Scotland candidate. Religion was as important in the 1850s as it had been in Aberdeen thirteen years previously, though now the situation was far more complicated, especially if voting went beyond a first round. There was also a history of friction between the town council and the University Senatus. Twice in the previous five years the councillors had chosen candidates with Free Church affiliations, only to find themselves facing legal difficulties. In 1847 the Rev. Charles McDouall was prevented from taking up the chair of Hebrew because of an interdict from the Presbytery of Edinburgh.15 In 1850 Patrick Campbell Macdougall, Professor of Logic and Moral Philosophy at New College in Edinburgh, was offered the chair of Moral Philosophy at the university, in a deal designed by the town council to save the Free Church money (the New College chair would be abolished), and to boost university enrolments. The election was delayed until June 1852 to allow MacDougall to publish his philosophical papers, but was then blocked by the Senatus. MacDougall taught his university class, but could only be formally inducted after the abolition of the religious test in 1853.16 Hebrew was a ‘theological’ chair, and Moral Philosophy was a subject studied by candidates for the Church of Scotland ministry, as was Greek, so that the caution of Blackie’s friends was understandable. Blackie had actually written a testimonial in support of McDouall in 1847; now, five years later, he found himself competing against him for the Edinburgh Greek chair. McDouall was again the Free Church candidate, although in the early stages of the contest the Rectors of Edinburgh’s two leading schools seemed to pose more of a threat to Blackie. ‘Your most formidable rival will be Schmitz to whom before Dunbar’s death some of the Council were looking as his successor,’ George Wilson wrote in December 1851. ‘Hannah will have the Episcopalian Professors & Party to a man. Things will go thus.’17 Leonhard Schmitz’s strongest card was that the councillors had appointed him Rector of Edinburgh High School, and had asked him

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to teach the university Greek class after Dunbar’s death. He had an insider’s knowledge of German classical scholarship, but this was trumped by Blackie’s German testimonials, his success at Marischal, and by his ready wit, as the following story about their canvassing of a councillor suggests: Blackie did all the talking, while Schmitz fell into the background. . . . [O]ne of the Councillors, who was a drysalter to trade, and a U.P. [United Presbyterian] elder by profession, startled Blackie with the question, ‘But tell me, Mr Blackie, are ye a jined member o’ ony body?’ Probably the worthy Councillor had heard of Blackie’s leanings to German rationalism, and of his difficulties in Aberdeen in the matter of the religious test. But Blackie was equal to the occasion, and he did not hesitate to make a good foil of his friend. So he said, ‘Well, at all events, I am as good a Presbyterian as my friend Schmitz, and much more of a Christian.’ Schmitz was an Episcopalian, if anything.18

Schmitz dropped out after the first ballot, as did the Rev. John Hannah, Rector of the Edinburgh Academy (1847–54), and Bonamy Price, a former mathematics master at Rugby and ‘favourite colleague’ of Thomas Arnold. In 1849 both Hannah and Price had unsuccessfully sought the headmastership of Rugby, which had been held for seven years by a Scottish Episcopalian, A. C. Tait. Three years later they found being neither Presbyterian nor Scottish was a distinct disadvantage when it came to an Edinburgh chair. Hannah had been a leading science and logic tutor, Price later made a name for himself as an economist, and both were Oxford reformers, but they probably misjudged the situation in Edinburgh.19 Daniel Wilson gleefully reported Price’s discomfiture when his praise for ‘the liberal system of management of Rugby and other English Educational Institutions’ was met by a councillor, ‘a somewhat obtuse looking Bootmaker’, remarking that ‘it did not look very like it when Professor Blackie was refused admission’.20 Of Price, a colleague later remarked that his conversation was ‘like a gentle brook that flowed on for ever and went on rippling, even though a mountain fell in it’ – but not, it seems, when faced with stories about the larger than life Blackie. Hannah was said by another colleague to have a ‘sinister style, reserving himself and sneering at you’.21 Both descriptions go some way towards explaining why Edinburgh councillors did not warm to these Oxford men. Perhaps the feeling was mutual. Hannah’s biographer remarks that he was ‘not in the least disappointed’ at his failure, delicately adding, ‘there were several reasons which, after a time, made him not unwilling to leave Edinburgh’. Price had his doubts as well, telling his backer

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amongst the Edinburgh professors, ‘If things had gone otherwise in Scotland I should have been in a fine stew now. I have no regrets about the issue.’22 Other contenders had not even made it as far as the first ballot, most notably the headmaster of Harrow, C. J. Vaughan, whose career was to be ruined a few years later by an affair with one of his pupils.23 The Rev. William Veitch, a private scholar whose Greek Verbs Irregular and Defective (1848) had made him known to Continental scholars, was also unsuccessful, though in this case his name was to return to haunt Blackie in the small world of Edinburgh classical scholarship.24 By the end of February the contest had narrowed to Blackie, McDouall and ‘Dictionary Smith’. Dr William Smith was the author of the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1842) and the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography (1849), and was to produce (with his brother) four more large reference works, evidence of an intellectual energy which could find no outlet at Oxford and Cambridge, since both were Dissenters.25 The Englishman Smith became the ‘Voluntarist’ candidate, much to the disgust of the Blackie camp which had thought it could count on McLaren. Blackie and McLaren had interests in common, like nondenominational schooling (both were members of the National Education Association), but Blackie shared neither McLaren’s utilitarianism (a damning term in Blackie’s political vocabulary), nor his Cobdenite pacifism (McLaren organised a campaign in Edinburgh to avert the Crimean War), nor his views on drink, the other great issue in Scottish municipal politics.26 The calculation, however, was that McLaren, who once again had become the political enemy of Free Churchmen, would support Blackie as a means of blocking McDouall, but this held only until Smith entered the field. There was a suspicion that McLaren had actually encouraged Smith’s candidature, but his failure to publicly declare a preference, Daniel Wilson reported, meant that members of ‘the Sapient Council’ who normally followed him ‘like a flock of geese’, were now ‘left like sheep without a shepherd, and run wandering over the mountains of vanity’: We have gone in couples over the whole Council, representing you, with an apology for your absence; and a hope that we would be able to man your interests. But such a set of wiseacres! You have seen the men. One of them very composedly told me that he thought Aeschylus was a work that had been greatly overrated!!!!!! What could be said to such an argument, from such a source? I did not ask the honest man if he had read the Book, or even seen its outside. His own outside was answer enough for that.

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Another councillor, ‘in jail not many months ago as a martyr for conscience sake, in the matter of the Annuity Tax’, showed ‘the sincerity of his conscientious principles’ by threatening to invoke the religious test against Blackie. Gritting his teeth in the face of bigotry, and with an Edinburgh professional man’s distaste for those ‘in trade’, Wilson continued to lobby ‘the Sapient fraternity’: We have secured a few good first votes, a few good second votes, and sundry more third votes, besides those who are unpledged to any body; and we will not throw up so long as there is an inch of ground to battle upon. But betting on a horse can be nothing to this, for the men don’t know their own minds for twenty-four hours together, and it must be said some of our rivals are not over scrupulous in their tactics.27

In this situation, Blackie’s friends were uncertain whether to advise him to stay away from Edinburgh, or to take the risk of letting him personally canvass councillors again. In the end it was left to ‘Mrs Professor’. Eliza persuaded Blackie to remain in Aberdeen, though questions were still raised in Edinburgh about his ‘eccentricity’, and what one Councillor called ‘some dangerous German views on religion’. ‘There is much prejudice against you,’ another friend wrote: It was only yesterday that I had to defend you from the charge of infidelity, which I found to originate in a supposed sneer at the Mosaic account of creation, in one of your lectures at the Philosophical Institution. Then the old affair with the Aberdeen Presbytery sticks in the throats of sticklers for the test . . . and generally there is an unfavourable impression as to your possession of that subdued tone of mind . . . which is supposed to be requisite in a teacher & guide of youth. I know you too well to doubt your taking it in good part, a hint from me on this subject; & therefore I shall continue to say that you would please such people better by smoothing down a little occasional impetuosity that is apt to amount to extravagance of manner.

Even Blackie’s habit of ‘pacing backwards and forwards during lectures was enough to raise the eye-brows of the more sober-minded’.28 Any fondness for display had to be curbed, at least until the election was over. ‘You need (seriously) be under no apprehension about Plaids & such things,’ advised a sympathiser amongst the Edinburgh professors, ‘still, as you have contrived to establish a Character for eccentricity it is as well to avoid all outward signals thereof’.29 The plaid-shawl had originally been borrowed from Eliza to cover a threadbare surtout, which was all that the income of a Marischal professor allowed, but it had become Blackie’s trademark. The unstarched shirt

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collar ‘turned down à la Byron’ was probably copied from his old teacher John Wilson,30 but an Edinburgh professor was now expected to cultivate a different style. The councillors did not seek another showman like Wilson, who had retired in 1851 on a Civil List pension, but a figure more suited to post-Disruption Edinburgh. Perhaps to counterbalance awkward questions of respectability and style, Blackie emphasised his Scottishness, though his friends were more cautious. ‘I plead guilty to the charge . . . of having a Scotch heart,’ Daniel Wilson told him, but the difficulty in raising public support for a National Museum of Antiquities had convinced him that ‘Scottish Nationality’ was ‘a blunted weapon’. McDouall was also Scottish, and indeed was Edinburgh born and educated, perhaps the reason that references to Blackie as the ‘Scotch’ candidate were cut from the testimonial of John Hunter of Craigcrook.31 Despite this, Blackie played the Scottish card whenever the opportunity arose. In January 1852 he wrote to the publisher John Blackwood, who had strongly backed Ferrier’s candidature two years earlier: Sandford is out of the game – and I hope there is nothing now to hinder you from crying out with the true os rotundum of a Scotchman – Vivat Blackieas!!!! Will you sacrifice me to an English Independent, to a Whig schoolmaster, to a Free Church gambler after Hebrew sorts – me, not only a translator, but the translator (by your own testimony) of Aeschylus, a genuine Caledonian with a ‘perfervidum ingenium’ – and – a contributor to the Maga.32

Sandford, the eldest son of the late Professor of Greek at Glasgow, was an ‘Oxford Scot’ who did not even make it to the first ballot. The ‘Whig schoolmaster’ (Hannah) was eliminated, along with Price and Schmitz, after the first ballot, since none of them received the agreed minimum of five votes. Blackie got just the minimum, and made it to the second ballot with the ‘Free Church gambler’ (McDouall) and the ‘English Independent’ (Smith). The latter was eliminated in the second ballot, and a third on 2 March narrowly elected Blackie, on the casting vote of McLaren as Provost. Whether the ‘national issue’ weighed more heavily with Edinburgh councillors than religion is doubtful. In the first ballot ‘English’ candidates received over half the votes, in the second ballot the one remaining (Smith) was eliminated, and in the third ballot the contest was between two Scots, McDouall and Blackie. James Ferrier spoke for many of Blackie’s friends when he wrote, ‘It would have been very mortifying to the feelings of all patriotic Scotchmen if an alien had carried off the prize,’ but the

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calculations about the way individual councillors would vote were always made in terms of their religious affiliations. McLaren was certainly not immune to considerations of nationality (a year later he joined the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights), but in 1852 he voted along religious sectarian lines.33 There was nothing unusual in this: the ‘religious issue’ decided the contest for several Edinburgh chairs after 1843, and continued to do so even after the abolition of the religious test in 1853. The Blackie camp had considered the possibility that a charge of heresy might be raised against their candidate during the campaign, as it had against John Goodsir in 1846,34 and after the election Blackie was apprehensive that someone would insist on the religious test. ‘Do not resign from your present Professorship till you are fully inducted & in possession of the new one,’ advised a sympathetic colleague, Robert Lee, who had his own problems with the Edinburgh Presbytery: Get an extract of your having taken the test before . . . , & feel it in your pocket & have it for all contingencies. I do not think that even the Court would hold that having subscribed before you should afterwards be exempted. But my opinion is such a thing will not be mentioned. I think it improbable that any member of the Senatus shd. even think of doing so – not even the Principal: & I don’t think any member of the T. Council wd. want to do so.35

As predicted, the Principal, the Rev. John Lee, made no attempt to intervene, perhaps because the parliamentary campaign to abolish the religious test had now built up a head of steam.36 In the end the only test which Blackie faced was one on his linguistic knowledge, posed by ‘that bluff old radical Professor Dick’ who had a book in Greek which no scholars could decipher. The remaining worry in the Blackie camp was that their successful candidate would now do or say something ill-considered. The lawyers at Parliament House were concerned that Blackie would ‘commence too hurriedly with . . . reforms in the Greek class’, and other friends feared in his forthcoming lectures on the ‘Literature of Ancient Greece’ at the Philosophical Institution he might ‘blubber out some hasty offensive words & leave a bad impression. For God’s sake be on your guard on this point, for you will be in the mouths of every body,’ Blackie’s father wrote. John Williams, former Rector of the Edinburgh Academy, worried that ‘the peculiar cast’ of Blackie’s mind, and his ‘Germanism’, would make him forget that ‘the Greek Chair . . . was intended to exemplify and realize the past and not to allow its occupant to deal with visionary

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schemes either of the present or the future’. After all this advice from friends and family, it must have been a relief to receive a message from Dr Rowland East, inviting him ‘to have a go at hydrotherapy to prepare . . . for the labours of the session’.37 After the election in March Blackie came to Edinburgh to see McLaren and other councillors, and then returned in April 1852 to give his lectures on ‘The Literature of Ancient Greece’. He left Aberdeen with few regrets after what he termed his ‘ten years pilgrimage in this waste wilderness which does not even howl, but only surrounds one with an infinite dreariness’.38 He was not really to visit the granite city again for another thirty-six years, and for the remainder of his life made his home in Edinburgh. In May, after his installation as professor, Blackie travelled south with Eliza to Cambridge, where they stayed with Macmillan the publisher while Blackie discussed ideas for new books. In July the Blackies together sampled ‘the premier water Cure establishment’ in England, at Ben Rhydding, near Otley in Yorkshire.39 On their return to Edinburgh, they took up residence at 43 Castle Street, where they lived until 1860. Edinburgh promised a larger and more stimulating group of colleagues, and a richer cultural and intellectual scene than Aberdeen, though it was not ‘the modern Athens’ that it had once claimed to be. During the 1830s and 1840s the battle between Moderates and Evangelicals, and then between the Established and Free Churches, seemed to leave little space for anything else. In this sense the Disruption has rightly been called ‘the most important domestic event in Scotland during the nineteenth century’, and Edinburgh was its epicentre. Every detail seemed a matter of obsessive interest to churchgoing Scots, though one imagines non-Presbyterians (especially the growing Catholic minority) felt excused, as did non-Scots. ‘The Tweed is a water at least as wide as the Atlantic,’ the editor of the North British Review was told in 1857 by an English Dissenter sympathetic to the Free Church, accurately describing the lack of interest south of the Border in a dispute over church patronage and discipline.40 The North British had been established in 1844 in response to the Disruption, and to the fact that the Edinburgh Review had long ago ceased to be what its title implied. It had strong Free Church connections in its proprietor, publisher and early editors, but tried to avoid narrow sectarianism. The idea of attracting a readership throughout Britain, by employing professional reviewers from the ranks of the ‘literary advocates’ of Edinburgh and from further afield, however, led to a steady fall in its sales in Scotland. What interested Scottish readers did not interest readers south of

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the Border, and vice versa. Nor was the Disruption much understood by Protestants in Continental Europe, where theology for the past forty years had been influenced by Schleiermacher and German Romanticism. This was more than matched by the fact that ‘Scotland, even more than England, was practically immune to these tendencies.’ Blackie had attended lectures by Schleiermacher in Berlin in 1829, but a quarter of a century later most Scottish divines (Established and Free Church) still regarded ‘German theology’ with hostility, if they thought about it at all. In the midst of all this, the longest-serving editor of the North British, the Rev. Alexander Campbell Fraser, steered a careful course, fending off a takeover bid by Free Church hard-liners in October 1850, but also watering down any support from his reviewers for the new German-influenced biblical criticism in Oxford. Blackie was sympathetic to its Whig-Liberal political tone, ‘anti-establishment, whether Edinburgh, Canterbury or Rome’, ‘antiTractarian . . . , and, of course, anti-Roman Catholic’, but he contributed relatively few articles, probably because he was thought to be too controversial.41 Fraser was an ordained Free Church minister and Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at New College (1846–56). Like MacDougall in 1852, he was able to move to an Edinburgh chair, in his case succeeding Hamilton as Professor of Logic in 1856. From the 1850s philosophy at Edinburgh University was thus in the hands of Free Church clergymen who had little to contribute, apart from competency in teaching and administration. Of MacDougall’s Papers on Literary and Philosophical Subjects (1852) Blackie noted: ‘His silences are about a page long: and rise above one another always, like the phrases in the finale of an Italian opera. He never speaks without sounding trumpets,’ an apt description for the empty rhetoric of John Wilson’s successor. When MacDougall retired in 1867, he was followed in the chair of Moral Philosophy by Henry Calderwood, a United Presbyterian minister in a similar mould. Fraser was a better philosopher, but in no way the equal of James Ferrier, his opponent for the chair in 1856.42 Bitter religious rivalries underlay this contest, as well as those in 1852 and 1868, even more than they had for Blackie’s chair, and in each case the strongest of the unsuccessful candidates was in some way identified with German philosophy.43 Fraser resigned his chair in 1891, while Calderwood continued to teach his watery brand of Scottish Common Sense philosophy until 1897, holding back the tide of Oxford ‘neo-Hegelianism’ which had reached Glasgow three decades earlier with the appointment to university chairs of the Caird brothers.44

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The ‘provincialisation’ of Scottish intellectual life after 1843,45 was matched by the deadening effect of Evangelical religion on middleclass behaviour. French visitors were much struck by ‘the solemn boredom’ of the deserted streets, closed shops and impossibility of eating out on Sunday, one writing that ‘compared with Edinburgh, a Sunday in London is positively agreeable’.46 ‘The town is as still as if it were midnight. Whoever opposes himself to the fanatical humour would run a great risk of being affronted,’ Thomas Macaulay wrote on Sunday 31 October 1852, suggesting the sort of local reaction to visitors which the poet Shelley had experienced in 1811. Macaulay had reason to know the bitter religious rivalries of local politics, having only just regained his Edinburgh parliamentary seat, and, as the grandson of a Highland minister, he knew the grimmer side of Presbyterianism.47 An English journalist who came north to work on Chambers’ Journal in 1858, was warned by a colleague, a Greenock man who had spent time outside Scotland, that Edinburgh society was like the local tipple whisky toddy, ‘a little stiff’. In its official form ‘the Sabbatarian yoke’ meant restrictions on Sunday trains (none between Edinburgh and Glasgow until 1865), and the absence of Sunday post (despite a campaign by The Scotsman), while as a code of respectability it required householders to keep their blinds drawn on Sunday. To disregard it was to invite severe criticism, though there were Edinburgh intellectuals, like Blackie’s friend John Hill Burton, who defended this ‘fetish-worship’ on the grounds that a ‘national prejudice was always worthy of respect’.48 Blackie had learnt differently in Germany, and he found as little to defend in the ‘mummery’ of the Scottish Sunday, as in Presbyterian opposition to the theatre, which he regarded as ‘the pulpit of the people’.49 One of his closest friends in the established church after 1843, the Rev. Norman MacLeod, was a notable opponent of what he (and Blackie) termed the ‘Pharisaical’ attitudes which kept Edinburgh’s Botanic Gardens closed on Sunday until 1889.50 There were limits, however, within which an Edinburgh professor was expected to remain. A university chair conferred considerable social status, even if the income derived from its tenure was failing to keep pace with middle-class expectations and the cost of living. The income from the Moral Philosophy chair was £600, and McDougall had only managed because ‘he had a rich wife (who made a Professor’s chair a sine qua non of their marriage) & one daughter’, one of Blackie’s colleagues told him. A decent house cost around £130, ‘life insurance for a man who has no means, say only £70’. This was ‘£200

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off his £600 before he begins to live, & I leave you to judge whether any man with a family can be expected to live on £400 in Edinburgh now.’ There were worse cases, like the English chair which was ‘barely worth £300, salary and fees included’.51 The salary attached to the Greek chair was £87 (as for Humanity), but there were more students than at Marischal. Greek was compulsory for all students taking an Arts degree (after 1892 Latin could be substituted), and the number of Arts students increased over the years.52 Blackie taught between 230 and 240 students in three groups: an elementary class (80 to 100 students) for two hours a day; more advanced students for one hour a day. These were the ‘public’ classes, which he was bound to teach, but in addition there was a ‘private’ class (instituted by Dunbar) where only about half the students paid fees. Here something like ‘high academical teaching’ could be attempted, though Blackie estimated that ‘at least two-thirds’ of these students were ‘ill-prepared’ or ‘unripe’. His ‘public’ teaching effectively occupied him from ten to twelve in the morning, and from one to three in the afternoon, with the lunch hour often taken up with marking classroom exercises and extensive preparation for the second class. The ‘private’ class met outside these hours, but added only £40 to £50 to his income. Apart from this class, most of the teaching was at an elementary level, and left him with ‘neither leisure nor strength’ for consulting the library or for a course of lectures on ‘the higher philology’.53 His proposal for a tutorship to prepare students for the entrance examination (introduced after Dunbar’s death) was accepted by the councillors, but there was some difficulty in finding a suitable candidate. James Pillans acidly remarked, ‘there are no Greek scholars in Edinburgh. Dunbar unmade all that Hannah made!’, but finally James Donaldson, a former Aberdeen pupil of Blackie’s was appointed for two years at a salary of £100. He had studied in Germany, and agreed with Blackie’s method of teaching and his views on the pronunciation of Greek.54 The entrance examination was ‘very lenient’, however, largely because Glasgow had not introduced one, and Blackie wished to avoid losing students to his major competitor.55 The councillors also cannily reduced student fees for the third class (from four guineas to three), abolished a five shilling supplement on the fees for the other two, and ceased the practice of paying the professor’s house-rent (£35). Together these deductions came to the roughly the same figure as Donaldson’s salary, which thus, in effect, was being taken from the income of the Greek chair – the very solution the Royal Commission had proposed in 1831 for funding Greek and Latin tutorships at Glasgow and Edinburgh. In 1857 Blackie petitioned

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the councillors, pointing out that since his appointment his income had ‘never been much above £600’, more than at Marischal, higher than the median for Scottish university professors (£465 in 1861), but only the minimum Blackie considered desirable. He rather optimistically proposed they raise it to a level ‘at the very least equal to that of the Sheriff-Substitute of the county’. This would have more than the £1,000 to £1,200 enjoyed by Dunbar in his heyday, before the Edinburgh Academy and High School began to teach Greek. Even the £800 which Dunbar earned in his final years would have been better than the existing situation, but the councillors were reluctant to act.56 Blackie also ruffled some feathers with his introductory lecture, Classical Literature in its Relation to the Nineteenth Century and Scottish University Education, which he ‘made on the principle of speaking out’. ‘Perhaps the Edinburgh people do not understand that, but they will learn,’ he told Eliza, whom he ‘requested to bring very sober nerves with her, and not get alarmed at everything’ when she read it. Blackie’s lecture was a patriotic cri de coeur for Scottish scholars to prove, with help from their ‘Teutonic brethren, as the recognised high priests of philology’, that Sydney Smith’s celebrated dismissal of Greek scholarship in Scotland was now outdated: A half-starved hound will win the race before an overfed spaniel. So may we, Greek starvelings here on the Firth of Forth, yet get the start of those sleek Hellenists on the banks of Cam and Isis, if we only rouse our mettle properly and do our best.

This call on Scottish ‘self-reliance’, on what Blackie termed ‘our own uncorrupted Northern pith and on the PERFERVIDUM INGENIUM SCOTORUM’,57 probably struck a chord with the Edinburgh citizens (the lecture was a public one), though the fact that he was to repeat it endlessly over the next forty years, rather suggests it was of limited effect. The same might be said of what Blackie called ‘an erudite piece’ on ‘The Pronunciation of Greek Accent and Quantity’, which drew on almost a decade of reflection on the subject. In this Blackie argued that, while ‘the Scottish pronunciation and the English were alike founded on a historical tradition standing on no firm philological basis’, in ‘vocalisation’, on which ‘the music of the language’ mainly depended, the Scots ‘were mainly in the right, while the English happened to be altogether in the wrong’. On the other hand, both had wrongly substituted ‘Latin accentuation’ for ‘the real Greek accents, which were carefully printed on every word of every Greek book by a continuous

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tradition from the Alexandrine grammarians’.58 The situation was undoubtedly more complicated than Blackie implied (there being, for example, more than one ‘English’ form of pronunciation), but he felt the teaching at Edinburgh provided an opportunity to be ‘an innovator’. He told a friend: My present intentions are to read Homer and Lucian in the first class; Herodotus and Euripides in the second; Aeschylus & Demosthenes in the third. I mean also to give a regular course of lectures on Greek Literature . . . ; and publicly to read to the students some such work not commonly read; the first book of Pausanias perhaps, which contains much matter for interesting, topographical, historical, and mythological comment. I also mean to pronounce both by quantity & accent, and to use both the Scotch and the modern Greek pronunciation.59

Blackie was also preparing more general lectures on ‘The Vocation of the Student’, ‘Moral Culture’, and ‘Bodily Exercise’, which later formed the basis of his bestselling ‘Vade Mecum for Young Men and Students’, On Self-Culture (1874). Like the aged Turnvater Jahn, he believed in the importance of physical exercise, and admired the ‘modern Prussians’ who, ‘like the ancient Greeks’, understood ‘the value of military drill’.60 True to form, Blackie had decided that the role of an Edinburgh professor was to stir things up, though there was no doubting his sense of good fortune in having landed the chair. As with the Marischal professorship, he held it ad vitam aut culpam, with a six-month session leaving ample time for research and writing, but there was no doubt that a chair at Edinburgh carried more prestige. As he put it many years later: ‘Edinburgh was headquarters to a man who was too much of a Scot to wish for any advancement out of Scotland, and too long trained in auto-didactic freedom to fit easily into educational machinery besouth the Tweed.’61 Notes 1. Robert Candlish and the Free Church Education Committee fiercely opposed the Maynooth grant. Macaulay (1800–59) was defeated by Charles Cowan, a Valleyfield paper manufacturer, fervent Free Churchman, and self-styled ‘Radical’. 2. J. C. Williams, ‘Edinburgh Politics 1832–1852’, Ph.D. thesis (Edinburgh University, 1972), p. 110. McLaren (1800–86), an Edinburgh MP 1865–81, favoured temperance, franchise reform, and Scots and Irish Home Rule, but not trade unions, factory reform or a more generous Poor Law.

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3. G. Morton, Unionist-Nationalism (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1999), pp. 101–9, describes the complex pattern of voting in 1852 in Edinburgh, where each voter had two votes. 4. In 1851 over 75 per cent of Edinburgh churchgoers attended Church of Scotland, Free Church or United Presbyterian services; 10 per cent Reformed Presbyterian, Congregationalist or Baptist; 5 per cent Episcopalian; 5 per cent Catholic; 2 per cent Methodist. Just over 60 per cent of all Scots attended church. Cf. discussion of these figures in C. G. Brown, The Social History of Religion in Scotland since 1730 (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 19, 61. 5. NLS MS 2622 f. 203 (emphasis in original). James Pillans (1778–1864), Professor of Latin at Edinburgh 1820–63. 6. NLS MS 4952 f. 195. Stoddart, pp. 177–9. Notes, pp. 154–5. Ritschl (1806–76) moved in 1865 to Leipzig, followed by his pupil Friedrich Nietzsche. Roediger (1801–74) and Maximilian Wolfgang Duncker (1811–86) had chairs at Halle, but Bernays (1824–81) had to wait until 1866 for a professorship extraordinarius at Bonn. 7. NLS MS 2622 f. 205, 202, 233, 242, 247, 255–6 (testimonials from Bunsen, Gerhard, Brandis, Bernays, Ritschl). The Aeschylus scholar G. F. Schoemann failed to provide one, but his pupil, Allwill Baier (Professor of Theology at Greifswald) did. MS 2623 ff. 17, 24. 8. NLS MS 2622 f. 283. NUL N Mc 1/54/2. 9. Professional employment (1:8 adult males) was more than double the UK average and triple the figure for Glasgow. R. Rodger, The Transformation of Edinburgh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 7, 12–13, 18. 10. NLS MS 2623 ff. 74, 79, 83, 98, 104. Testimonials in Favour of John Stuart Blackie, Esq. Advocate, Professor of Humanity in Marischal College, Aberdeen, Corresponding Member of the Archaeological Institute, Rome. First, Second, and Third Series, and Additional Series. Extracts from the Testimonials of John Stuart Blackie, Esq., Professor of Latin Literature at Marischal College, Aberdeen. 11. Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (1998), XXVI, pp. 228, 259 (testimonial), and XXIX, p. 174 n.6 (emphasis in original). 12. NLS MS 2622 f. 188, MS 9814 f. 113. 13. NLS MS 2622 f. 197. Cf. MS 2644 f. 87 (John Hunter). 14. NLS MS 2622 ff. 221, 248. 15. McDouall (1813–83), Professor of Latin (1849–50), then Greek (1850–70), teaching also Sanskrit and Hindi (1859–60), at Queen’s College, Belfast, which had no religious test. Horn confuses him with MacDougall in A Short History of the University of Edinburgh 1556–1889 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967), p. 152. 16. McDougall (1806–67), professor at New College from 1844. NLS MS 2623 f. 315. S. Wallace ‘ “The First Blast of the Trumpet”: John Stuart

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18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

John Stuart Blackie Blackie and the struggle against University Tests in Scotland, 1839–53’, History of Universities, XVI, 1 (2000), 176 n.50. A. Thomson, Ferrier of St Andrews (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985), pp. 75–6. NLS MS 2622 f. 203. Schmitz (1807–99), studied under Niebuhr at Bonn (Ph. D. 1841), and had helped establish the Classical Museum. Tutor to the Prince of Wales 1859 and Duke of Edinburgh 1862–3, Rector of Edinburgh High School 1845–66, Principal of International College, London, 1866–74. W. S. Dalgleish, in J. D. T. Hall (ed.), The Tounis College (Edinburgh: Friends of Edinburgh University Library, 1985), pp. 202–3. The United Presbyterian Church (1847) resulted from the fusion of the United Secession and Relief churches. Hannah (1818–88), Fellow of Lincoln College Oxford 1841–4, and Warden of Glenalmond College 1854–70. Price (1807–88) was a master at Rugby 1832–50, and Professor of Political Economy at Oxford 1868–88. NLS MS 2623 f. 135. The headmaster of Rugby had turned down Blackie’s request to visit the Greek classes. L. R. Farnell, quoted in A.J. Engel, From Clergyman to Don (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 134 (cf. pp. 30–3). Mark Pattison, quoted in V. H. H. Green, Oxford Common Room (London: Edward Arnold, 1957), p. 305 (and p. 132). J. H. Overton, John Hannah (London: Rivingtons, 1890), p. 58. NLS Dep. 208 Box 17 (A. C. Fraser). Charles John Vaughan (1816–97), a reforming headmaster of Harrow 1844–59, resigned when threatened with exposure. See P. Grosskurth, John Addington Symonds (London: Longmans, 1964), pp. 30–40. For more on Veitch (1794–1885), see below, chapter 7. William Smith (1813–93) edited the Quarterly Review 1867–93, and was knighted in 1892. His brother was the ancient historian Philip Smith (1817–85). B. A. degrees were opened to Dissenters in 1854 (Oxford) and 1856 (Cambridge), higher degrees and college fellowships only after 1871. McLaren was ‘a short pledge man not using liquor himself but . . . feeling unable to ban it from his table’. T. C. Smout, A Century of the Scottish People 1830–1950 (Glasgow: Collins, 1986), p. 140. NLS MS 2623 f. 155. In Edinburgh and Montrose an annuity tax on property was levied in support of the established church. Opposed by Free Churchmen and Dissenters, it was abolished in 1860. L. M. Macara. NLS MS 2623 ff. 1, 15, 18, 32, 38, 74, 143 (emphasis in originals). NUL N Mc 1/56/1. NLS MS 2623 f. 77 (Robert Lee). Notes, p. 159. J. G. Duncan (ed.), The Life of Professor John Stuart

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33.

34. 35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

40.

41.

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Blackie, the Most Distinguished Scotsman of the Day (Glasgow: John J. Rae, 1895), pp. 120–1. J. B. S[utherland], Random Recollections And Impressions (Edinburgh: privately printed, 1903), p. 85. Blackie’s literary hero Jean Paul Richter had also asked his mother for ‘over shirts’ with open collars ‘à la Hamlet’ so that his bare throat could be seen. BM, LXII, 381 (July 1847), 36. NLS MS 2623 f. 135, MS 2644 f. 87. Hunter (1801–69) was Auditor of the Edinburgh Court of Session 1849–66. 14 January 1852, NLS MS 4097 f. 136 (emphasis in original). Francis Richard John Sandford (1824–93), an Oxford first in literae humaniores (1846), worked in the Education Office 1848–68, 1870–84, and became a peer in 1891. John Blackwood (1818–79) had edited BM since 1845 and from 1852 ran the whole publishing firm. Os rotundum: ‘wellturned utterance’; perfervidum ingenium : ‘most ardent genius’. NLS MS 2623 f. 272 (emphasis in original). 1st ballot: Smith 9, McDouall 8, Blackie 5, Hannah 3, Price 4, Schmitz 3. 2nd : Smith 9, McDouall 11, Blackie 11. 3rd : Blackie 16, McDouall 16. NLS MS 2623 f. 38. Goodsir (1814–67), Professor of Anatomy 1846–67. NLS MS 2623 f. 285 (emphasis in original). Lee (1804–68), Professor of Biblical Criticism 1847–68 and minister of Old Greyfriars, was censured by the Presbytery for introducing stained glass, an organ and kneeling at prayer. NLS MS 3447 ff. 180, 190. Bills were introduced in 1851, 1852 and (successfully) in 1853. NAS AD56/48. Lee (1779–1859) was the last of the clerical principals at Edinburgh (1840–59), and Professor of Divinity (1843–59). NLS MS 2623 ff. 312, 240, 253. Thomas Dick (1774–1857), author of scientific and devotional works. John Williams (1792–1858), a reforming Rector 1824–47, Archdeacon of Cardigan 1833, great Welsh and classical scholar. Facsimile of letter in Kennedy, p. 106. Stoddart, pp. 189–91. R. Metcalfe, The Rise and Progress of Hydropathy in England and Scotland (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1906), p. 196 and chapter 8. Alexander (1818–96) and Daniel (1813–57) Macmillan started their publishing house in Cambridge in 1844. S. J. Brown and M. Fry (eds), Scotland in the Age of Disruption (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), p. viii. Isaac Taylor, quoted in J. Shattock, ‘Problems of parentage: the North British Review and the Free Church of Scotland’, in J. Shattock and M. Wolff (eds), TheVictorian Periodical Press (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982), p. 155. F. Voges, ‘The Disruption and church life on the mainland of Europe’, in

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44.

45. 46.

47.

48.

49. 50.

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52. 53. 54.

John Stuart Blackie Brown and Fry (eds), Scotland in the Age of Disruption, p. 168. Shattock, ‘problems of parentage’, pp. 147–58. NLS MS 2623 f. 330. Fraser (1819–1914) was less harshly sectarian than Calderwood (1830–97), always willing to compromise, except with his arch-rival Ferrier. James Ferrier in 1852 and 1856. In 1868, James Hutchison Stirling (1820–1909), author of The Secret of Hegel (1865), and the nonHegelian Robert Flint (1838–1910), Ferrier’s successor at St Andrews (1864–76), well-versed in French and German philosophy, but like Ferrier identified with the Church of Scotland. John Caird (1820–98), Professor of Theology 1862 and Principal 1873 at Glasgow. Edward Caird (1835–1908), Professor of Moral Philosophy 1866–93, then Master of Balliol College 1893–1907. G. E. Davie, The Democratic Intellect, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1964), p. 287 (and chapters 13–14 generally). J. Verne, Backwards To Britain (Edinburgh: Chambers, 1992), pp. 109–10. H. Taine, Notes on England (London: Thames and Hudson, 1957), p. 283. Verne visited in 1859, Taine in the early 1860s. G. O. Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), II, pp. 260–1. On Shelley, see R. Masson (ed.), In Praise of Edinburgh (London: Constable, 1912), pp. 197–8. C. J. A. Robertson, ‘Early Scottish railways and the observance of the sabbath’, SHR, LV, 164 (October 1978), 165–7. J. Payn, Some Literary Recollections (London: Smith, Elder, 1884), pp. 137–9, 146–7, 175. Payn (1830–98) left Edinburgh in 1861, defeated by the climate. He was editor of Chamber’s Journal 1858–74, and the Cornhill Magazine 1883–96. Letters, p. 129. NLS MS 2643 f. 127. Professor Blackie on the Relations of the Church and the Theatre (Edinburgh: Theatre Royal, 1877). R. D. Brackenridge, ‘The “Sabbath War” of 1865–66: the shaking of the foundations’, RSCHS, XVI, 1 (1966), 27–34. MacLeod (1812–72), one of the few Evangelicals who did not secede in 1843, a leading Glasgow minister, and chaplain to the Queen 1851–72. Editor of Good Words, 1860–72, to which Blackie contributed articles and poems. NLS MS 2628 f. 153, MS 2624 f. 172 (J. Lorimer, W. E. Aytoun). R. D. Anderson, ‘Scottish university professors, 1800–1939: profile of an elite’, Scottish Economic and Social History, VII (1987), 36. In 1844–5 482 Arts students (plus 56 Divinity, 148 Law, 370 Medicine), in 1861–2 623, in 1876–7 894. On the Advancement of Learning in Scotland (1855), pp. 50–1. To The . . . Town Council of Edinburgh (1857), p. 8. NLS MS 2623 f. 330. Letters, pp. 128–9. Donaldson (1831–1915), a ‘lad of parts’, climbed the Scottish educational ladder to be Principal at St Andrews, and a knighthood. Studied Classics, Theology and Psychology at Berlin 1850–1.

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55. Horn, Short History, p. 164. In 1855–6, after extra tuition and deferment until February of the entrance examination (based on ‘any one book of the Anabasis or any one of the Gospels’), only three students out of eighteen were finally rejected. 56. To the . . . Town-Council of Edinburgh, pp. 13–14. In Midlothian (and Lanarkshire) the Sheriff earned £1,700; most other counties, under £600 (NLS MS 2624 f. 172). Anderson, ‘Scottish university professors’, 35. 57. Letters, pp. 128–9. Blackie, Classical Literature (1852), pp. 23–4. ‘Greek has never yet marched in great force beyond the Tweed’ (Sydney Smith). George Buchanan (1506–82), the great Scottish humanist, spoke of Scotorum praefervida ingenia. 58. The Pronunciation of Greek (1852). Notes, pp. 163–5. CM, I (1844), 338–69. 59. C. Stray, Classics Transformed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 131–2. To William Mure, NLS MS 4952 f. 260. By 1855 the curriculum was: Xenophon, Cebes, Apollodorus, Aesop, Aelian, Homer in the first class; Diodorus, Euripides, Herodotus, Plutarch in the second; Pindar, Aeschylus, Plato, Aristotle in the third. Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, II, 4 (March 1855), 35n. 60. On Self-Culture, p. 43. Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778–1852) had advocated gymnastics to inspire Prussian patriotism against Napoleon. 61. Notes, p. 157.

7 ‘A CUP OF TEA WITH HOMER’ 1 ‘The language of Homer is not dead’, ‘a language lives as long as a people lives’, Blackie wrote in his essay The Pronunciation of Greek (1852), producing extracts from a Greek newspaper of 31 December 1851 to make his point. ‘Those who doubt what I say in this matter, had best go to Athens and see,’ which is just what Blackie did at the end of his first session at Edinburgh.1 He left Eliza with the task of furnishing the flat in Castle Street, and on 18 April 1853 embarked at Leith for Hamburg. From here he travelled by rail to Berlin and then to Vienna, which he reached on 23 April. ‘The railways are admirably managed!’, he wrote to Eliza. ‘Everything is done for you in the most quiet, orderly, systematic way, without bustle, without confusion, and without danger. The Germans are in all things a most quiet and gentle and deliberate people.’ On Sunday in Vienna he heard the younger Johann Strauss playing his father’s music in the Volksgarten, and reflected on why he saw ‘no drunk people in the streets’. The answer seemed to lie in the absence of Sabbatarian prohibitions on pleasure. ‘Why should people get drunk who can get an amusement equally cheap, more lasting, and less pernicious at every street-corner?’ There was also national character to consider: ‘getting drunk is too violent an amusement for such a regular smoke-muser and coffee-sipper as the German. Whatever his pleasure be, it certainly does not consist in that state of violent excitement which so essentially belongs to our British intoxication.’ From Vienna he travelled ‘by diligence’ (as he had twenty years earlier) through Styria, Carinthia and Carniola, to Trieste, where he took a steamer. There were stops at Corfu, Cephalonia and Xanthe, and he arrived in Athens a week later on 4 May. Blackie’s lodgings were in University Street, in the airy upper part of the city, and cost just over five pounds a month, meals included. From a window there was a view of the Parthenon, and from the garden behind the house, shaded by vines, one could see ‘honeyed Hymettus’, and ‘the famous mountain Lycabetus, which

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overhangs Athens as Arthur’s Seat does Edinburgh’, he wrote to Eliza: Add to all this, that in my immediate neighbourhood are the streets of Hippocrates and Aristides, Sophocles and Euripides, and you imagine that to a classical man no strange lodging could be more familiar. I am both at home here and not at home in a manner that considerably disturbs me, so that as yet I scarcely know where I am nor how to feel, and am habitually overpowered by a pleasant sort of discomfort which I should find it difficult to explain. But every new situation makes me feel uncomfortable at first, so I shall just sit quietly in the broad sun that shines here – I speak allegorically.

‘Allegorically’, of course, since Blackie was the last person to ‘sit quietly’. He climbed Lycabetus, but otherwise his routine was not strenuous by his standards. He would take a morning walk of two hours, ‘surveying some part of the ground sacred to classical scholars’, breakfast at nine on coffee, omelettes, bread and sheep’s butter, then study modern Greek and topography for the rest of the forenoon. At three he would dine – soup, fish, roast, salad and oranges, and in the cool of the early evening visit ‘some scene of classic interest’, and drop into a ‘coffee-house’ to ‘observe the public idlesse of the Greeks’, before returning to prepare himself for dinner with the British ambassador, the Prussian ambassador (who had read his Aeschylus translation), or some other ‘public function’. It was rather like his time in Rome twenty-five years earlier, though now there was a circle of Scottish friends: George Finlay, who had found him his lodgings, James Clyde, a fellow-enthusiast for modern Greek, and Caroline Skene, the goddaughter of Sir Walter Scott and wife of Alexander Rhangabes, professor at the University of Athens.2 He visited Eleusis, ‘the birthplace of Aeschylus and the seat of the famous mysteries of Ceres’, and Mount Pentelicus, which had provided marble for the sculptors Phidias and Praxiteles. He exchanged the ‘accustomed plaid’ for a white linen suit, and joined Clyde on a trip to Argos, Corinth and Nauplia. In late May there was a twenty-day expedition to Thermopylae, Plataea, Orchomenus, Thebes, Delphi and Parnassus, in the company of Rhangabes and some English classicists. ‘The continued riding on horseback – thirty miles a day – in the great heat was very trying.’ Sleeping and breakfasting in the open (they carried ‘a small kitchen’), rising at dawn to make the most of the light, they travelled slowly towards Parnassus via Lake Copais (not at all like Loch Tay, Blackie noted), Levadia, from which they walked one evening to Chaeronea,

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the birthplace of Plutarch, and Dauleia. They rested at Arachova, a village 3,000 feet above sea level, ‘as high as Ben Cruachan’ but surrounded by vines and cornfields. ‘How small our mightiest Bens look when contrasted with this classic Parnassós,’ Blackie wrote to Eliza, adding ‘please accent the last syllable!’ For the final ascent they switched to mules. Afterwards they shared a meal of goat’s cheese with local shepherds, avoiding the local wine which was ‘villainously manufactured, and poisoned with resin taken from the fir-trees’, and slept in the open ‘in greatcoats, mantles, and capotes’ on a carpet stretched over ‘branches of spruce-fir’. Nearly forty years later Captain Meryon of the Polyphemus discovered that the guardian at Delphi still had ‘some ragged sheets of paper’ containing Blackie’s description of his visit and of ‘how he spent a night with the shepherds on Parnassus’.3 Apart from a few individuals like Rhangabes, Blackie’s contact with the Greeks was limited. Like many other travellers, he was much taken with their ‘strikingly dramatic character’. The varied and picturesque costumes, the ‘noble and kingly gait’, the contour of their features . . . often so fine, the expression of the face now blithe and generous, grand and open, now dark, and scowling and savage, – the whole so lively, so easy, natural, and unconstrained, that, to a person just slipt from the leading-strings of cold Edinburgh proprieties and etiquettes, the sensation of strange, rich naturalness was magical. Many of the men whom I see give a living idea of a Homeric Agamemnon or Ajax, while others are like the murderers in ‘Macbeth’ or ‘Richard’ and a great deal more ferocious – cut-throat faces, and yet not without a certain rude grandeur of their own which our English town-bred murderers never have.’4

The Greeks probably found Blackie equally strange. On a later visit, one of his fellow travellers witnessed Blackie’s demonstration of his theory that by returning to a pitch accent ancient Greek would be made ‘quite easily intelligible’ to modern Greeks. From some steps in the marketplace he was declaiming in a loud voice ‘a passage from Homer modified according to his view’. A crowd soon gathered round, on the outskirts of which one ‘modern Greek’ was heard to ask, ‘What is the meaning of this?’ to which another replied, ‘Oh! it’s only a crazy old Scotchman saying his prayers!’ There is a similar story about a speech by Gladstone to ‘the elite of Athens’, who listened in ‘respectful and wondering silence . . . ‘with an expression like Mrs Todgers’,5 an anecdote Blackie must have relished as one in the eye for Oxford pronunciation of Greek which he so disliked. In January 1831 he had taken lessons in Rome from a Greek student, and became convinced that

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modern Greek was closer to the ancient language than Italian was to Latin. ‘Greek was and is one unbroken living language, and ought to be taught as such,’ became his watchword. He took every opportunity to converse in modern Greek, or Romaic as he often called it, and recommended the same practice to all students. ‘Two hundred pounds ayear will scarcely cover a course of academical study at Cambridge; fifty pounds will do the whole business at Athens’6 – the origin of his proposal for a Greek travelling scholarship, which was still occupying him forty years later. The Greeks, whatever they may have felt about elderly British philhellenes speaking their language, grew to appreciate Blackie’s campaign which seemed to point a via media between ‘Atticists’ and ‘Vulgarists’ in the debate on reform of modern Greek, that is, between supporters of the literary language and the advocates of the common spoken language (demotic).7 When Blackie died there were obituaries in Greek newspapers for one who, while not the greatest of classicists, ‘had entered more thoroughly into their habits of thought and modes of speech than many scholars who visited Greece more often or sojourned there longer’.8 This was a generous estimate. Blackie shared the view of many philhellenes that the modern Greeks were ‘a thoroughly degenerate race’, though, ‘notwithstanding the brigands’, he was a little more optimistic than his friend Finlay: For the state of Greece as you describe it, my heart bleeds. The regeneration or rather recreation of a nation for centuries dispersed and demoralized, is the most difficult political problem that I know. Thank heavens that I was born neither a Greek, nor a Jew – to look back upon so brilliant a past and forward into so blank and dark a future!9

Religion, as usual, was his blind-spot. The Orthodox Church, ‘to the eye of a sober Protestant’ looked ‘even more intolerable’ than Catholicism, ‘its sensuous appeals . . . more vulgar, and its skill in elevating spiritual grossness . . . much inferior’, its music ‘crude’ and ‘ungraceful’, ‘so much more like the utterance of a snoring pig than of a waking and a reasonable man’. Yet, even more than ‘the outward and sensuous trickery’, it was the absence of anything like a Presbyterian sermon which appalled him. The ‘ceremonial element’, ‘characteristic of pure heathenism’, had ‘altogether overshadowed, and almost absorbed the intellectual and moral’. Orthodoxy might be for the Greek ‘the great bond of his nationality’, but Blackie carefully avoided making a comparison between this and the similar role of Presbyterianism for the Scots. The Greek church was ‘what they call in Scotland, Erastian’, and thus unworthy of comparison with the Kirk.10

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Blackie left Athens in early July 1853. He had been in Greece for two months. ‘A little living experience of this kind is worth libraries of learning,’ he wrote, ‘to me at least, who never had any great capacity for folios.’ Only one thing was missing for Blackie: ‘My spiritual steam is low, and though I have several times attempted to write verses in this land so full of poetical temptation, I cannot succeed.’ Perhaps it was the heat, which had made him quite ill towards the end of his stay. After leaving Athens he spent some days at Xante, reading Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh, before continuing his journey north by steamer to Trieste. From here he travelled by rail to Vienna, and then by steamer on the Danube to Linz. At Munich he visited the Glyptothek to see Greek antiquities, at Bonn he called on his friend Brandis. Back in Edinburgh, Blackie donned his plaid and set out with Eliza for the bracing island of Arran.11 Work which he had begun some years previously on a translation of Homer was set aside, and he started to plan his opening lecture for the new university session, ‘On the Living Language of the Greeks’. This repeated more forcefully the points made the previous year in his pamphlet The Pronunciation of Greek: that of all European languages, Greek had ‘maintained itself for the longest period with the least amount of change’, that ‘the bastard pronunciation of the language . . . now practised at Oxford and Cambridge’ was like the French which the English tourists inflicted on Parisian hotel-keepers, and that ‘the perverse practice of pronouncing Greek with Latin accents’ was the fault of ‘the pedantry of English prosodians, the stupidity of English schoolmasters, and the carelessness of English professors’. This had bred a certain ‘contempt’ in the scholarly traveller: These men will work themselves into learned raptures over the lid of an old stone-coffin, or the shaftless capital of some petty shrine bearing the gross symbols of some beastly Priapus; dead remnants of the worthless dead enchant them: but for living men and women; for a gipsy-eyed Castrian brunette washing clothes in the bath of the old prophetess of Delphi; for a sun-burnt shepherd boy piping his simple reed, and watching his summer flocks beneath the snow-wreathed peaks of Parnassus . . . all this moves them not beyond the sentimental glance of the moment.

More could be learnt in two days from a Greek newspaper, or from the modern historian Tricoupis, than from the pages of Thucydides in a month. ‘Have a respect for Marathon; but remember also Missolonghi,’ he told his young audience. ‘Study Greek as men, with all the mass of your living manhood. Your mere scholar is a puny

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creature. I wish to make none such.’12 Even if Edinburgh students were less than enthusiastic about the prospect of additional classes taught by Greek native-speakers, there was a lively debate in the columns of the Scottish Educational Journal.13 There was also one notable convert to his idea of teaching Greek as a ‘living language’. John Ruskin was in Edinburgh at this time to give four lectures at the Philosophical Institute, later published as Lectures on Architecture and Painting (1854). He was already well known as the champion of the Pre-Raphaelites, and as the author of Stones of Venice (1851) and of Modern Painters, the first two volumes of which (1843, 1846) had been reissued in 1851 bearing his name for the first time. Blackie was probably in the large audience which heard the first lecture, ‘Architecture’, on 1 November 1853; they certainly met shortly thereafter. ‘Professor Blackie, [is] a thoroughly original, daring, enthusiastic, amiable, eccentric, masterly fellow’, the thirty-four-year-old Ruskin told his father: He has taught me more Greek in an hour than I learnt at Oxford in six months, having studied the living language. I am in a great state of delight at knowing for the first time in my life that it is a living one. The Professor gave me to-day a Greek newspaper, about a week old, printed at Athens, and in good old Attic Greek hardly differing in a syllable from the language of Alcibiades, except in its subject-matter.

Thanking Blackie for a copy of The Living Language of the Greeks, Ruskin wrote, ‘I most heartily admire & agree with every word of your lecture – and consider myself to have been first taught Greek in Edinburgh.’ Blackie’s Aeschylus he judged ‘quite perfect’, though he doubted that his new admiration for Greek would stretch as far as classical architecture – he had just recommended the replacement of ‘the common Greek portico’ at New Town front doors by ‘the pure old Gothic porch’, as a means of countering the east wind.14 This was Ruskin’s one and only Edinburgh lecture. His budding friendship with Blackie seems to have got lost in the break-up of his marriage (annulled in 1855). In 1860 some ‘beastliness’ in Blackwood’s Magazine on his Elements of Drawing further soured his view of Edinburgh. He refused an invitation from the ‘Philosophical’ in 1884 to return to the city, but two years later took up his old correspondence with Blackie in reply to an enquiry about his views on political economy.15 Over the years Blackie won some support for his views on pronunciation and on using modern Greek in teaching the classical language, though F. W. Newman was probably correct in predicting (in 1853)

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that it would ‘take 50 years at least to persuade the English’ to accept the idea of learning Greek ‘by talking’. Mark Pattison called Oxford pronunciation ‘preposterous’, and told Blackie, ‘I am ashamed of myself whenever I come near a foreign university man.’16 Forty years later the historian E. A. Freeman still claimed to be ‘the only man in Oxford who does sound Greek so that a Greek could understand’.17 Friedrich Max Müller also offered encouragement, but none of these men had the power to change Oxford ways.18 Cambridge classicists conceded that their pronunciation was far from the original, and that the Scots had ‘the advantage . . . in the mode of rendering the vowel sounds’, but doubted whether it was ‘worth-while where certainty is unattainable to supersede a pronunciation which habit has rendered familiar to our ears by another which may chance to be almost equally distant from the true one.’19 ‘I agree with much of your criticism’, wrote W. H. Thompson, ‘but regret that your patriotism shd. have made it necessary for you to flagellate the poor English scholars. Well, we have tough hides, & are content to wait until you shew us better things.’20 Outside the two ancient universities, there was support for Blackie from gentlemen-classicists, like the novelist Charles Kingsley (enthusiastic) or the poet Alfred Tennyson (less so),21 and from those who had lived in Greece, like the Irish peer Viscount Strangford, George Finlay or E. M. Geldart. As a young man Strangford had been an attaché in Constantinople, was fluent in Hindi, Persian, Arabic and Turkish, as well as modern Greek, and knew better than Blackie the difficulties of reconciling ‘modern Greek phonesis’ (a corrupted form of the ancient language), entrenched Oxford prejudices, and the mountain of German philological research.22 The most exotic figure in the Blackie camp was the French St Simonian and friend of John Stuart Mill, Gustave d’Eichthal, who advocated the teaching of Greek as a living language, using modern pronunciation, to further its use as ‘the lingua franca of statesmen and scientists’ and as the common language of the Austrian Empire.23 The English, in general were resistant to change, however, and from time to time, Blackie would explode, as in a letter of February 1872 to one of his former students: I would have the schoolmasters of England soundly flogged, not only for their vile pronunciation of Greek, but for a great want of sense, and a violation of all educational principles in their treatment of linguistic pupils. There is neither philosophy, nor poetry nor policy in their method – and as far as Nature, they have long ago kicked her out of the schools, where she dare not show her face without being taught by a set of ignorant pedants.24

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On other occasions Blackie was unable to resist the urge to write to newspapers. In February 1880, Richard Jebb, Professor of Greek at Glasgow, opened his morning Scotsman to find a long letter lambasting him for ‘a most absurd and unreasonable practice’ in the teaching of Greek, and generally labouring under ‘a great confusion of ideas’. Blackie had taken umbrage at what he considered Jebb’s failure to acknowledge his prior claim in the use of modern Greek. Jebb countered that Blackie criticised English methods ‘in language of remarkable strength’, but had ‘never given us any distinct notion of that true method which Professor Blackie, and he alone possesses’.25 Two years later Blackie was again in Oxford lecturing on Greek pronunciation and accent, but won few converts. ‘Oxford men are generally best persuaded by being left alone, at all events in their own den,’ one of them wrote. ‘They are naturally argumentative, & take the opposite point of view to that which it is attempted to instil into them.’26 A subtler approach could work, as William Ross Hardie demonstrated at Balliol in 1892, where he taught a Greek that was ‘simple, pronounceable and intelligible to the ear’. ‘I always endeavour to make the accent audible in pronouncing Greek,’ he wrote to Blackie. ‘I quote, read or recite Greek as much as possible, and I frequently teach composition orally, by . . . choosing by chance a piece of English and working out a version of it by common suggestion and discussion.’ This was Blackie’s method, which Hardie had learnt in his Edinburgh Greek class.27 Blackie continued to lecture the Oxford dons, but after his last visit in May 1893 he admitted defeat: ‘it is utterly in vain to talk reasonably here in the matter of Greek or Latin pronunciation: they are case hardened in ignorance, prejudice, and pedantry.’ Cambridge, though, was ‘more open to nature and common-sense’.28 Blackie’s campaign in favour of ‘Italianising’ Latin pronunciation in England was more successful. After an opening shot in the columns of The Athenaeum in December 1868,29 he visited English public schools in the following spring, during intervals in a water cure in Surrey. At Harrow he enjoyed the school songs in Latin. At Eton, he approved of the Latin teaching in that ‘elegant and refined seat of taste, learning and conservatism’. At Bradfield, he arrived ‘clad in a plaid shawl and carrying a huge staff’, and caused some amusement by asking a college servant for his boots in Latin. The headmaster of Rugby was guarded in his response to the idea of conversational exercises, but Blackie was invited to lecture on the teaching of Latin and Greek at the College of Preceptors in London.30 He also won the support of Matthew Arnold who, four years previously in Germany, had seen at first hand the

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conversational method for teaching ‘the highest class of a gymnasium’. With Latin, Blackie was pushing at an open door. Tennyson was known to be a supporter of Italianised pronunciation,31 and a debate amongst classical scholars was already under way. H. A. J. Munro, an English-educated Scot, began using it from 1869 in his lectures as Professor of Latin at Cambridge, and was followed by Jebb, again acting in his role as public orator. The older and newer forms existed side-by-side for many years, causing some confusion and keeping debate alive.32 Blackie must have relished this long-delayed revenge for the imposition of English pronunciation of Latin at the Edinburgh Academy in the 1820s, against the protests of Sir Walter Scott and other ‘proprietors’ of the school. This had been part of a drive by a Welsh headmaster (John Williams), assisted by his (Scottish) teaching staff, to bring classical education north of the Border into line with the best English public schools, thus diminishing the attraction of an Eton or Winchester to Scottish parents. The difference between pronouncing curator as curahtor (Scots) or curaytor (English), or the decision whether to pronounce Cicero with a soft ‘C’ (Scots) or a ‘K’ (English), was bound up with hard-fought issues of national identity, as well as the aesthetic and philological considerations of scholars.33 The philosophy of Plato was another battleground, though here Blackie was in tune with the dominant conservative strand in the midcentury ‘Platonic revival’ in Britain. His ‘Plato’ appeared in 1857 in Edinburgh Essays, a collection of papers by university professors and alumni, intended as a northern response to the parallel series of Oxford Essays and Cambridge Essays which had been published annually since 1855. Previous British neglect of Plato Blackie explained as due in part to ‘the very vastness, comprehensiveness, and many-sided variety of his intellect’. Reading him was to approach ‘some mighty broad-based’ mountain, ‘like our Scottish Benmuich-dhui’; his ‘most interesting dialogues’ often seemed ‘to lead nowhere, and end, like Highland roads, in a bog’. Another reason was that the ‘the Greek mind, or at least a great part of it’, would ‘always remain a mystery to the English mind’. ‘Our genius has a most real, concrete, and altogether terrestrial tendency,’ Blackie wrote. ‘Between Plato and the English nation there is in fact a gulf which cannot be passed; any more than that greater gulf can be passed which lies between the sphere of English notions and the world of German speculation . . . Platonic philosophy and Christian faith, in their grand outlines, characteristic tendencies, and indwelling spirit were identical’, but this ‘door’ to Plato had been used much less than in Germany. English scholars and theologians ‘were alike

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deficient in the philosophical element’, apart from the few ‘with Puseyistic or Rationalising tendencies’. In Scotland the weakness of Greek scholarship, and the dominance of the philosophy of ‘common sense’, were additional obstacles.34 Despite ‘a certain high kinship and brotherhood’ between Platonism and Calvinism, John Knox’s injunction that the student of Greek in a Scottish university should read Plato as well as the New Testament had largely been ignored. By 1861, when Blackie published his article ‘Plato and Christianity’,35 signs of the new interest were more obvious, though from two widely divergent philosophical and political starting-points. One came from Oxford, in the form of the High Church Anglicanism of William Sewell’s Introduction to the Dialogues of Plato (1841), which reintroduced Plato in university teaching, and later in the liberal Anglicanism of Benjamin Jowett’s four-volume Dialogues of Plato (1871), which became the standard translation.36 The other approach was to be found in the writings of the London banker and Liberal MP, George Grote, a self-educated classical scholar, and one of the founders of the ‘godless’ University College London.37 Grote’s twelve-volume History of Greece (1846–56), and his three-volume Plato and the Other Companions of Socrates (1865), appealed to radical liberals like John Nichol, Professor of English at Glasgow, and the Cambridge philosopher, Henry Sidgwick, but to few university classicists.38 The Oxford Platonists (and Blackie) felt that Grote viewed Plato through the distorting lens of Benthamite utilitarianism, though their Plato, the ‘father of Idealism’ (Blackie’s description), was equally shaped by present-day concerns – in their case, the desire to bolster ‘Christianity or transcendental doctrines’ against the inroads of ‘utilitarian morality, positivist epistemology, and scientific naturalism’. This transference of contemporary political and religious anxieties onto classical antiquity was characteristic of the Victorians. Scholarly debates could take on a fierce tone which is otherwise difficult to explain, used as we are to seeing the world of classical scholarship as a remote and calm backwater. To educated men in the nineteenth century classical philosophy seemed to provide a key to solving current problems, and they lined up according to their conservative and religious (Sewell, Jowett), or democratic and secular (Grote) views.39 When ‘the old foundations of thought are being shaken all beneath us, and must be laid anew’, Blackie wrote three years after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, ‘Plato, like a great engineer, where tunnels are to be made, was sure to be called for’: we must either hand ourselves over bodily to J. R. McCulloch, August Comte, and Charles Darwin, or trim our wings for the old ideal flight

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under the eagle-captainship of Plato, there is no neutrality possible in such matters. Let us eye the alternative coolly, and make the choice with a wise deliberation. Mind or matter; central plastic force, or circumferential accident; wise choice, or blind law; Plato or Mr Buckle.

Much as he disliked High Church Anglicanism (‘Puseyism’), and often disparaged Oxford scholarship, Blackie considered Sewell’s Dialogues of Plato to be ‘a book glowing with great truths’. By contrast, Grote’s account of Plato and the Sophists he felt was ‘completely marred’ by a ‘violent polemical attitude’. ‘I know the man for a partisan, and a democrat,’ Blackie wrote of Grote. In this he was echoing Jowett, with whom he shared a reputation for religious unorthodoxy. Jowett had faced a charge of heresy (later dismissed) before an Oxford University Court in 1862, his ‘crime’ being to argue that the Bible should be read as Plato was, by using the techniques of textual criticism developed in German universities. Blackie would have agreed with this approach, though his own reading of Plato lacked the softer edges of Jowett’s liberal Anglicanism. Stripped to its essentials, Blackie wrote, Platonism is, in fact, a sort of well-compacted Calvinism of reason, while Calvinism might with equal truth be designated a Platonism of the will. Divine reason and divine decrees differ only as thought differs from purpose. They are equally necessary and eternal, immutable, stern, inflexible, inexorable. Hence the lofty position and the high attitude which both Plato and Calvin assume with regard to the world and its ways, with regard to the multitude and the opinions of the multitude. They are both extremely one-sided in their ideas, and terribly despotic in their way of avowing them; and rightly so, because the highest truths in morals and theology, like the axioms of mathematics, admit of no compromise, and can tolerate no contradiction. 40

This Presbyterian Plato was just one of the many created by the Victorians, as a bulwark against materialism, religious scepticism and political radicalism. Blackie lacked Jowett’s philosophical cast of mind. He had as little interest in what he termed ‘the grey limbo of Hegel’s Berlin philosophy’, which Jowett passed on to his Oxford pupils along with Greek philosophy, as he had in the ‘great quantity of ingenious twaddle’ which he felt Schleiermacher had ‘perpetrated’ in his writing on Plato, although he was willing to contribute (along with Jowett) to the fund for a monument for the centenary of Hegel’s birth.41 Blackie’s approach to Plato was also very much his own. ‘I brought Platonism with me from the cradle, and did not require to go to Greece in search of it,’ he later wrote. His one book on ‘aesthetical philosophy’, On Beauty: Three

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Discourses (1858), was a reaction to ‘associationism’, the philosophical theory which held that beauty depended on individual associations and thus existed ‘only in the mind of the beholder’.42 The continued popularity in Scotland of this ‘aesthetical scepticism’ was evidence that the Scots were different – ‘in many respects . . . a very utilitarian, a very vulgar, and a very Gothic race’. To the ‘materializing influences of the love of money, natural to a mercantile people’ (which might be found amongst the English), was added ‘the harshness of mind’ engendered by an ‘extreme form of naked Protestantism’. Together they perpetuated a ‘hostility to all faith in the Divine order of things in the visible world’, an ‘unnatural divorce between Beauty and Faith’: Our whole soul was possessed by an intensely glowing, darkly smoking religious passion. Our dogma was stern. Our character was grave. We had proclaimed a divorce between religion and the fine arts, for no better reason than because their marriage had been celebrated by the Pope. Artistical beauty was to us, therefore, either only a pretty decorative trifle, or nothing at all. . . . We were, moreover, a very practical and a very utilitarian people. If we were zealous church-goers and catechisers on Sunday, we were equally intent on shop-keeping, and money-making, and toddydrinking on Monday. In these functions we had exhausted our capacity: we had no room for the Beautiful.

Material progress and religious convictions, allied to a rather arid version of Scottish ‘common sense’ philosophy which was ‘decidedly Lockian’ [sic] and thus ‘anti-aesthetic and anti-artistic’, had produced ‘bigoted hostility’ and a ‘boorish indifference to all the softening influences and the graceful witcheries of the Fine Arts’. This ‘Caledonian revival of old Attic sophistry roused my moral indignation,’ Blackie wrote, ‘and with my head full of ‘pictures, statues, churches, and other beautiful objects’ seen in Germany and Italy, ‘I naturally began to speculate on the subject of Beauty generally’. On Beauty also owed something to German discussion of Aesthetica (a term first used in this context a century earlier), to the writings of Ruskin (especially Modern Painters), and perhaps even more to the experience at first hand of classical art and architecture. Blackie’s ‘main purpose’ in writing the book was ‘to show that the judgement of the Greeks with regard to what we now . . . call ‘matters of taste’, was far more noble and true than that which prevails in many quarters among us moderns’. ‘Beauty was the great national inspiring idea of the Greek people’, ‘a divine thing, and worthy of a certain reverent admiration, akin to worship, as much as genius is felt to be by us’, he wrote, though his comparison of monuments to ‘the poetic genius’ of Scott and Burns

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with the temple erected by the people of Segesta to honour Philip, son of Butacides, ‘for no other reason than that he was the most handsome man of his age’, probably won him few converts in Presbyterian Scotland.43 On Beauty sold few copies. Blackie’s refreshing approach to ‘the philosophy of taste’, treating ‘congruity’ in female fashion as seriously as in poetic theory, may have struck readers as frivolous, though, as ever, Blackie was making a serious point. Associationist criticism of ‘the incongruity . . . between Homer’s metaphors and the imagination of the modern gentleman’ had caught his attention because he was engaged on a translation of the Iliad. ‘Any work of the poetic art can be scientifically estimated only when read in the same spirit in which it was written,’44 a response which foreshadowed one of the central themes in his approach to the great epic poet. To Homer, ‘the Greek of Greeks’ in Ruskin’s phrase, Blackie devoted much of his energies as a classicist. The Iliad and the Odyssey had tested the skills of translators (most notably George Chapman and Alexander Pope), while the ‘Homeric problem’ had intrigued classical scholars, including a former Principal of Marischal College. Thomas Blackwell’s Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735) was notable for the prominence it gave to ‘Homer’s character as a minstrel not as a literary poet’,45 and this Blackie considered an anticipation, not only of the great German scholar F. A. Wolf, but also of his own work. Blackie’s first article, ‘On the Theology of Homer’, appeared in 1850,46 and at the same time he began a translation of the Iliad. The trip to Greece in 1853, and investigation of modern Greek ballads, suggested a new line of approach;47 an article on Homer in the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1856 enabled him to set out his thoughts on ‘the Homer problem’. Grote was again the target of criticism for having ‘imported . . . rampant historical scepticism’ from Germany. Following the work of Wolf in 1795, most German scholars had come to question the unity of Homeric authorship, and ‘some of the more wild of that sect’ had ‘even gone as far as to deny the existence of such a man as Homer altogether’.48 Such ideas, labelled ‘Wolfian’, even if they did not derive from Wolf, were largely ignored in Britain until the appearance in 1846 of the first volume of Grote’s History of Greece. Coleridge (privately) and Carlyle (publicly) accepted the idea of the multiple authorship of the Iliad, but this was unusual and explicable in terms of their relationship with German culture. F. W. Newman and Matthew Arnold, despite their differences over the best way to translate Homer, were united in disregarding or attacking the work of Grote. The most fervent partisan of the anti-Grote cause was

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W. E. Gladstone, most notably in the three volumes of his Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age (1858). Gladstone fiercely defended the idea of an individual author writing about historical events not too far removed in time from his own age, a position which a German scholar later dismissed as treating Homer ‘as if he were a war correspondent’.49 While he agreed with Gladstone on the organic unity of the Iliad (with Homer as the author), and the historical reality of the personalities and events described, Blackie had a different view of the process of poetic composition. ‘Homer did not make his materials, but received them’ from ‘the rich materials of popular traditionary song’: the little wholes which he had to recast and organize into a great whole, existed already in the minds and in the mouths of the people whom he addressed, just as the Romaic ballads that arose out of the war of independence in 1821–7 exist in the minds and mouths of Hellenes of the present day, waiting for some Homer . . . to fuse them into a great epos of Missolonghi.

In the same way ‘an epic poem of Caledonian loyalty’ might be made out of Jacobite songs, or ‘a grander epos still, called “The Fall of Napoleon” ’ from ‘the war songs composed by Körner and others in the great German rising of 1813’. In the case of the Iliad there was ‘the fusing and formative influence of a great poetic mind’, but also the prodigious ‘memory of the minstrels’ in an oral culture to explain ‘the transmission of Homeric poems without the help of written manuscripts’. The ‘intimate relation’ between poet and audience was like that ‘between the writers of leading articles in . . . the Times and the public to whom their daily appeals are addressed’. Wolf was praised for recognising the ‘essentially popular and national character of the poems’, but the ‘lay theory’ of Karl Lachmann, who resolved ‘the Iliad into an aggregate of separate ballads, implying no common authorship on the grounds of alleged inconsistencies’, Blackie rejected as ‘a sort of chronic insanity’. Grote, even if he considered ‘the extreme Wolfian theory quite untenable’, was criticised for his ‘wild scheme of resolving the Iliad into two distinct parts’ (an original Achilleid, and later additions) as a way of explaining the elements of unity and inconsistency in the text.50 Just before the article appeared, Blackie wrote to a friend, ‘Grote though much more reasonable than the Germans, requires a distinct castigation. He understands history but not legend,’ The ‘castigation’ must have seemed light by Blackie’s standards, since another friend wrote, ‘your [Britannica] article is the least Blackie-ish in its style, & the most subdued & simply argumentative of any of

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your productions I have read. It might have come from the most unimaginative & unhilarious plodder in the Greek world.’51 By late 1857 Blackie had translated fifteen of the twenty-four books, and seemed well pleased with the results.52 His year had settled into the routine of university work for six months, and the rest of the year devoted to his Homeric labours, with a summer break divided between academic and literary circles (London, Oxford and Cambridge) and the countryside (the Lake District and Scotland). In 1860 he took a water cure in Surrey with Edward Wickstead Lane, an Edinburgh doctor who had moved to the more lucrative pastures of hydropathy in the south of England.53 There Blackie relaxed with a copy of The Origin of Species (Darwin was another patient), going out to dine at Pembroke Lodge near Windsor with the Foreign Secretary, Lord John Russell, ‘a little, well-plucked, quietly smirking mannie’. From Russell’s son, Viscount Amberley, he learnt ‘a new game called Croquet – a sort of petty French golf on a small green’, deriving guilty pleasure from playing it on a Sunday.54 After visits to London, Blackie returned to Edinburgh in September, where Eliza had organised the move from Castle Street to 24 Hill Street, still within the New Town. This was to be the Blackies’ home for the next twenty-one years, cheek by jowl with lawyers’ offices, a French teacher and a ‘Professor of Dancing’. The following year (1861), once the university session had ended, Blackie worked on Homer and then travelled south to take another water cure and make ‘literary’ and family visits. He called on George Eliot and G. H. Lewes, who had recently returned to London from Florence (research for Romola), but found neither of them well. Blackie knew Lewes through their mutual friend Schmitz (Lewes’ son was a pupil at Edinburgh High School), but his acquaintance with the author of Adam Bede was more recent. The novelist was suffering a moment of ‘paralysing diffidence’, and Blackie’s kind words and a copy of his Lyrical Poems were appreciated.55 He later interrupted his stay at Dr Lane’s establishment at Sudbrooke Park, for another ‘literary’ visit. He took a train to Eversley, near Reading, where he found Charles Kingsley sitting alone over the remains of his dinner, in a down-bent, musing way. On my apparition, up he started immediately, and with an emphatic shake of the hand called out, ‘Blackie!’ I sat down and helped him to drain a bottle of Burgundy. He had been out fishing all day, and was glowing in the face like a tropical copper sky.

Kingsley’s brother Henry arrived in the evening, and they ‘all smoked, and drank tea, and talked’, no doubt about Homer. A dispute between

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Kingsley’s two friends Matthew Arnold and F. W. Newman had placed Kingsley in an awkward position. Blackie was determined to enter into the controversy, rushing in ‘like a mad whirlwind, with verse as frantic as his talk’, as Kingsley later described it.56 Arnold’s On Translating Homer (1861) had attacked Newman’s translation of the Iliad (1856) for using a form which Newman had invented to reflect what he considered the ‘direct, popular, forcible, quaint, flowing, garrulous’ quality of the original verse, something ‘similar to the old English ballad’. Blackie claimed a middle position between the two antagonists, agreeing that Newman was ‘not a poet’, that the translation was ‘a mistake’ and the metre (allegedly that of ‘Yankee Doodle’) ‘ridiculous’, but maintaining that even in Newman’s ‘blunders’ there was ‘something suggestive’, namely that the Iliad had been written as ‘popular poetry’. Like Newman, he regarded Homer as a ‘popular minstrel, who addressed his narrative songs to the ear of the masses for their amusement’, ‘not a . . . modern poetic man of genius, who addresses his epos to the cultivated understanding and the polished taste of the reading public’, as Arnold claimed. Even the Germans, who might ‘incline not a little to the extreme of a certain stiff daguerreotype fidelity’ in translation, at least appreciated this, and gave ‘the true thing’. ‘They give you Homer without a pipe in his mouth; whereas, Homer’s heroes in English hands, have hitherto been made to assume the garb and the gait of that most perfect of all well-bred animals – an English gentleman.’ Arnold was also guilty of ‘flinging Frederick Augustus Wolf and the German ballad-theory altogether overboard’, instead of just rejecting ‘the “no Homer” extravagance of the ultra-Wolfians’. Blackie was still fired up by the controversy when he met his Greek class for the new session in November 1861, and his inaugural lecture devoted some space to ‘the important question at issue between Professors Arnold and Newman on the point whether Homer ought to be translated into English in hexameter verse, or in some native English measure’. A decision largely depended on recognising that ‘the hexameter verse of Homer’ was to ‘be sung, or at least chanted, to produce upon our ears the same effect that it produced on the original Greek hearers’. ‘An English hexameter’, ‘however well constructed, will want the vocal soul of the antique’, giving ‘a light trip, or an ungraceful hobble, instead of . . . a weighty and majestic march’.57 Arnold’s reply was the magisterial rebuke of an Oxford Professor of Poetry. ‘I see that Professor Blackie proposes a compromise,’ he wrote: he suggests that those who say Homer’s poetry is pure ballad-poetry, and those who deny that it is ballad-poetry at all, should split the difference

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between them; that it should be agreed that Homer’s poems are ballads a little, but not so much as some have said. I am very sensible to the courtesy of the terms in which Mr Blackie invites me to this compromise; but I cannot, I am sorry to say, accept it; I cannot allow that Homer’s poetry is ballad-poetry at all. A want of capacity for sustained nobleness seems to me inherent in the ballad-form when employed for epic poetry. . . . [A] great poet, having to deliver a narrative very weighty and serious, instinctively shrinks from the ballad-form as from a form not commensurate with his subject-matter, a form too narrow and shallow for it.58

This was a reprimand for Blackie having ended his review with a specimen of Homer in ballad measure (in answer to Arnold’s specimen translation in hexameters). The reply seemed to Blackie ‘partial and unfair’, and the poetic taste of ‘the sensitive professor’ (Arnold) ‘over fastidious’. Privately, Blackie considered Arnold’s lectures ‘clever but impertinent, & the conclusion . . . on hexameters – ridiculous’. Arnold described Blackie to his sister as ‘an animated, pleasant man, with a liking for all sorts of things that are excellent’, but with ‘an esprit as confused and hoity toity as possible, and as capable of translating Homer as of making the Apollo Belvedere’.59 Blackie spent May 1862 in London, June in central Scotland examining school pupils, walking from one small town to another, and then making a more comprehensive walking tour of the area. The following summer he was pursuing his new enthusiasm for Gaelic in the Highlands.60 Only in April and May 1864 did he again spend any length of time in the south of England. He had been invited to lecture at the Royal Institution in London,61 and was able to publicise his Homer translation, and meet literary men. One was the rising star Herbert Spencer, whom he found ‘logical without being angular’, another was Grote, ‘quite the dignified Englishman, but quite agreeable and polite’. He also called on one of Grote’s leading opponents, Connop Thirlwall. ‘I think I committed an impropriety by putting my hand in a friendly way on his knees while I was arguing, but do not know,’ he confessed to Eliza. In the evening he read part of his Homer before ‘an assemblage of London literary notables’.62 A few days later he breakfasted with Gladstone in Carlton Terrace (beginning a ritual that was to be repeated on later London visits), and ‘exploded emphatically about the English pronunciation of Latin and Greek’ in front of the guest of honour William Whewell, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, much to the enjoyment of a fellow Scot, the Lord Advocate James Moncreiff. ‘I am sure I was not impertinent, only decidedly and distinctly explosive,’ Blackie told Eliza.63 We do not

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know what Mr Gladstone thought (Blackie felt he agreed with him on pronunciation), but on another occasion he put Blackie firmly in his place when in his excitement he jumped out of his chair to contradict him on Homer: Gladstone made no movement of any kind, but his outer eyelids expanded like those of a bird of prey when it is making ready to paralyse the nervous system of a prospective victim. That baleful glare was concentrated for a full minute upon Blackie, whose tongue stumbled. He flushed and looked confused and sank back speechless into his chair.64

Blackie also travelled to the Isle of Wight to see his other coeval, Alfred Tennyson (like Blackie and Gladstone, born in 1809). The Poet Laureate had been ‘translating bits of Homer in blank verse’, and he and Blackie seemed to make a good impression on each other. ‘We like the good, kind, wild man,’ Tennyson wrote in his journal. ‘The Professor sings “The Genie with the Crooked Horn” and approves of our new carpet with its silver stars.’ Blackie was much struck by the poet’s appearance, ‘head Jovian: eye dark: face fresh: black flowing locks, like a Spanish ship captain or a captain of Italian brigands’, and later by his recently published Enoch Arden.65 A visit to Oxford, most notable for a meeting with the Radical politician John Bright, completed Blackie’s southern tour.66 Back in Edinburgh he worked on the critical apparatus to his Homer. ‘My own translation has been finished for three years, but I am to publish a complete commentary and large prolegomena, which will make altogether four volumes, after the fashion of Rawlinson’s Herodotus,’ he told a fellow labourer in the field.67 The problem was to find a publisher for such a large work. John Murray were publishing another translation (Lord Derby’s), Longman and Macmillan turned him down, Chapman and Hall would only publish the translation in two volumes without the notes and commentary, and this Blackie refused. He travelled to London in May 1865, but made no progress. He made a disappointing visit to Cambridge where the classical dons refused to admit him to their lectures, ‘either for their own sakes or for the sake of the students’. He met ‘the Misses Thackeray! broad-faced like their father and therefore no beauties’. Dining at Trinity College he found ‘there was a small flow of claret and no flow of soul’, and was horrified to be told that he ‘looked more like an American than anything else’. He also met Frederick Apthorp Paley, ‘a meagre sort of dried up fellow’ whose wife was ‘much more like a man than he is to a man’. Paley was also engaged on a translation of the Iliad, though not, he reassured, one

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which would compete with Blackie’s. Apprehension about competing publications was also probably the reason for an anxious enquiry to Tennyson.68 The translation was tested on trusted old friends, like Theodore Martin, John Hunter, and George Craik, and in July or August 1865, after being turned down by Macmillan, Longmans and Murray, the Edinburgh publishers Edmonston and Douglas agreed to issue the work in four volumes, on condition that Blackie met any financial losses.69 Homer and the Iliad appeared late in 1866 with a dedication to F. G. Welcker, George Finlay and W. G. Clark,70 and a graceful tribute in the preface to William Smith, Blackie’s old adversary in 1852. The book was aimed at ‘a popular, not an academic audience’. Blackie defined his ideal reader as ‘the English gentleman of culture and intelligence’, though the use of examples from Scottish Reformation and Covenanting history to underscore points in his argument suggest a Scottish reader.71 The first volume of Blackie’s ‘Homeric Dissertations’ ran to over 400 pages, ‘The Iliad in English Verse’ in volumes two and three to well over 800, and the fourth volume of ‘Notes Philological and Archaeological’ to another 451 pages. The dissertations were ‘a vehicle in which I transport my reader into a foreign country’, Blackie wrote in his preface, the notes ‘the local guide or cicerone, who directs his eye to the curiosities as they emerge, and gives such information as an intelligent traveller may naturally demand’. He claimed ‘a middle position between the German sceptics, and the English dogmatists represented by Gladstone’, but in fact devoted far more time to what he termed the ‘fruitless learning’ of the Germans, and to scoring points at the expense of Wolf and Grote. Neither of them held an extreme position (both allowed the possibility of one author for a large part of the Iliad, though in different ways), so that Blackie’s use of the term ‘Wolfian theory’ muddied the waters. This was particularly so with Grote, who followed Gottfried Hermann’s idea of a poem with later accretions rather than Wolf’s suggestion that writers in the sixth century BC had created a unified text from the disjointed original – as ‘Macpherson manufactures Ossian’ in Blackie’s damning phrase. More damaging still was the charge that Wolf’s ‘literary scepticism with regard to Homer’ was an ‘essentially negative exercise like atheist criticism of Christianity’. For Blackie, questioning the organic unity of the Iliad was akin to doubting St John’s Gospel, and ‘the Wolfians’ were ‘engaged in a perverse attempt closely analogous to that meagre method of explaining the world without a God’. His description of the Iliad and the Odyssey

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as ‘a sort of secular Bible’ underlined the fact that the debate clearly went far beyond differences of opinion over a classical text. There was in Blackie’s approach something of the hearty anti-intellectualism of his old teacher John Wilson, whose dictum he quoted approvingly: ‘Some believe in twenty Homers; I believe in one. Nature is not so lavish of her great poets.’ This impatience with German textual scholarship was strange in someone who owed so much to Germany, but Blackie’s commitment to the ‘aesthetic unity’ of the Iliad was very typical of British scholars in the anti-Grote camp. Less usual was the role in the creation of the Iliad accorded to ‘the historical reality of early popular tradition’. Blackie devoted much attention to comparison with popular ballads and popular epic from other cultures, Indian, Persian, Teutonic, Norse, Spanish, to the Arthurian cycle, and to Macpherson’s Ossian, in subject-matter ‘as ancient and historical as its literary form is modern and factitious’.72 Much of this was original, but the book did not sell, and Blackie lost some £200 in the venture. Lord Derby’s blank verse translation of the Iliad had appeared two years earlier, and Blackie believed that English prejudice had been at work. ‘Greek from Scotland, in whatever shape, is never looked on with great favour in England,’ he wrote later: I feel morally certain that if I had been Lord Derby and Lord Derby had been Professor Blackie, the literary outcome of the two publications would have been exactly reversed. He would still have been in the first edition, and I should have been in the sixth.73

Derby was a leading politician (already twice Prime Minister, and soon to be for a third time), but he was also an accomplished classical scholar, his translation cost less, and he had got in first – all good reasons for Blackie’s ‘literary failure’. In the longer run, the interpretation which Blackie, Gladstone and other British scholars had defended so strongly, was slowly eroded, firstly with the publication of The Problem of the Homeric Poems (1878) by Aberdeen classicist William Duguid Geddes, and then more definitively with Jebb’s Homer: An Introduction (1887).74 ‘By the close of the century Grote’s concept of an original core to the Iliad (the actual elements of which remained in dispute) which was later expanded upon, interpolated into, and finally written down in the sixth century BC, had become orthodox opinion.’ The extremes of ‘lay-theory’ (the Homeric poems as the work of minstrel poets over many centuries), or of a ‘unitarian’ interpretation (an individual Homer as the sole author) were both now rejected by professional scholars. Blackie continued to resist,75

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but his labours in the Homeric vineyard seemed as outdated as those of Gladstone. In 1906 Blackie’s Aeschylus translation was reissued in the ‘Everyman’s Library’, and remained in print until the Second World War.76 It was overshadowed by Gilbert Murray’s verse translation (1920–39), and from1956 Everyman used the version by G. M. Cookson (1922). The four stout volumes of Homer and the Iliad, on the other hand, sank almost without trace. They were too ‘Victorian’ to bear re-examination after the First World War, when a modified ‘unitarian’ interpretation, with Homer placed at the end of an oral tradition, again surfaced.77 During his lifetime, Blackie made a reputation for himself as the most colourful of British classicists, perhaps not a great feat in a rather sober profession. His habit of declaiming Greek (as he had shouted aloud Latin as a small boy) was well known. A visitor to Hill Street in the winter of 1868–9 described sitting with Mrs Blackie ‘quietly in the front drawing-room waiting for tea’, when ‘from the back room strange sounds came, shouts and exclamations’, which were explained as ‘only the Pro over his Greek’. Shortly afterwards he joined the ladies ‘in odd but very comfortable attire, a long dressing-gown to keep him warm and a broad straw hat to shade his eyes from the gas’. Blackie was also well known for illustrating his theory ‘that all Greek poetry was originally a part of music’ by singing the verse, and would do this even on the grandest occasions: Once at the Duke of Argyll’s at a very smart and fashionable party when all the young ladies and gentlemen were flirting together, and everybody was deeply engaged in conversation, there suddenly arose at the far end of the room a quavering voice that chanted aloud a kind of dirge in a minor key. This was dear old Blackie who was trying to illustrate in what fashion the ‘Iliad’ and the ‘Odyssey’ originally reached Grecian ears.78

When Blackie had lectured on ‘The Music of Speech in Greek and Latin’ at the Royal Institution in May 1867, Helena Faucit, the actress wife of his old friend Theodore Martin, conceived the idea of arranging a meeting between Blackie and Robert Browning, whom she had known for many years. ‘He is always fresh and clever, like a rough day in summer, full of fresh breezes, but somewhat fatiguing to the nerves,’ she wrote of Blackie, but her prediction that they would ‘assimilate’ – ‘they are both good men and true, and will turn the corners gently’ – proved correct. ‘He received me with the greatest frankness, having known me of old from the Aeschylean correspondence I had with Elizabeth Barrett Browning,’ Blackie wrote to Eliza. Browning was ‘an

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active, soldier-like, direct, rather stout little man – a fine contrast to the meditative ponderosity of Tennyson. The person and attitude in each case is a perfect index to the movement of the poetry.’ The poet showed Blackie his wife’s Greek books ‘all scratched over with commentary’, and told him about The Ring and the Book, on which he had been working for three years. Blackie was much amused by ‘a tame owl with black staring eyes’ which Browning kept in his study, and a friendship was initiated, based on their attachment to Carlyle and their love of Greek. Sometimes they managed to lunch together when Blackie was in London, otherwise they exchanged publications.79 Browning was three years younger than Blackie and, after being neglected by the critics during his time in Italy, was now acclaimed as one of the few great poets of the century, and a leading literary figure in London, where he had moved in 1861. This did not prevent Blackie giving his fellow poet advice, especially on translation from Greek. ‘I consider a literal & rhythmical translation of poetry, as a thing aesthetically perverse, which should not be attempted,’ he informed Browning after he had received a copy of his translation of Agamemnon (1877): If a literal translation is wanted, let it be done in prose; but even to literal prose I object on aesthetical ground[s], because without a certain freedom & grace of movement a prose period as the ancients constructed them, cannot be produced. My principle of translation is to bring the wholeness in matter or in manner as characteristic; beyond this I say ‘the letter killeth and the spirit maketh alive’.

On the flyleaf of the presentation copy Blackie was more direct: Like a lame ass that dances with the Graces Moves Browning here, not with his native paces.

In a letter to Gladstone he remarked of Browning’s translation, ‘Never yet did the Muse dance gracefully in fetters. Is it not like eating thistles and munching grain?’ He ‘loves me as a brother’, Blackie remarked on another occasion, but ‘I wish his manner was as easy and natural in his book, as it is at his luncheon-table’.80 Browning was considered a ‘difficult’ poet, and Blackie was anything but that – his verse was written to be ‘healthy’ and ‘manly’, ‘bright’ and ‘breezy’ – but they shared a similar outlook on life. What Thomas Hardy called ‘the literary puzzle of the 19th century’, was how Browning’s ‘smug Christian optimism worthy of a dissenting grocer’ found a place ‘inside a man who was so vast a seer and feeler’.81 In Blackie’s case, the poetry and the man were more of one piece.

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Blackie’s gift to Browning in 1877 was a copy of his Wise Men of Greece, a series of ‘dramatic dialogues’ in verse, illustrating the ideas of eight pre-Socratic philosophers, together with those of Socrates and Plato. It was published by Macmillan, as was his conversational primer Greek and English Dialogues (1871), and Horae Hellenicae (1874) which reprinted Blackie’s scholarly articles and lectures, ranging from contributions to the Classical Museum a quarter of a century earlier, to more recent papers delivered to the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Institution in London. The book was dedicated to Gladstone, whose ‘genial labours’ in classical studies were acknowledged in the preface, while Grote’s equally large contribution was dismissed as ‘incompetent’ because of ‘the unpoetical character of his mind, and the negative philosophy which he professed’. Grote was ‘acting more like a German than an Englishman’ in his defence of the Sophists of the fifth century against the charge of ‘immoral teaching . . . of a negative and destructive character’, and of something worse, presumably, in his inclusion of Socrates amongst their number. It was this which most upset British classicists more accustomed to viewing the Athenian philosopher as a teacher second only to Jesus.82 When Blackie wrote about the Sophists as ‘the real atheists or agnostics among the Greeks in the age before Epicurus’, what he really had in mind were the ‘modern sophists, Hume, Bentham, the Mills, Bain, Grote’.83 Blackie was once quoted as saying that his aim with the Greek class ‘was not to cram their heads with “grammar, and such nonsense”, but to teach them to sit down “and drink a cup of tea with Homer” ’.84 This was in marked contrast to the approach of his colleague James Pillans, Professor of Humanity until 1863. Students later remembered Pillans as ‘no more than a superior kind of schoolmaster’. Like Sandford, he ran his class room with monitors (‘inspectors’), and like Melvin, he valued precision and elegance, rather than breadth of knowledge. ‘We were called up to read and translate passages from Livy and Horace,’ wrote one student from the early 1850s, ‘just as we had been called up in the High School by his successor there, Dr Schmitz, but with fewer demands on our philological knowledge, and with less feeling for literature.’ Another, who had previously attended Rugby, ‘confessed that the standard was not equal to what I had left behind at an English Public School’. Pillans’ ten years as Rector of Edinburgh High School (1810–20) had shaped his approach to teaching, just as Byron’s ‘paltry Pillans’ jibe had given him a cross to bear for the rest of his life. He was, however, a more effective teacher than his colleague Dunbar, and for Greek at Edinburgh the

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arrival of Blackie meant a completely different approach. ‘It was like passing from a dull morass to the elastic footing and the free atmosphere of the heathery hills’, wrote a student who had been taught by both men. ‘We did not acquire much more knowledge of Greek, but we were inspired with much more enthusiasm; and, whatever we might think of his powers as a systematic teacher, we could not but love the man.’ Pillans and Blackie were both small men, but while Pillans was reserved, Blackie’s ‘handsome and picturesque presence’, and his ‘perfervid and eccentric manners’, caught the imagination of students. If ‘one learned little Greek in his classroom, one at least had the opportunity of picking up a good deal of Gaelic, and not a little Scottish poetry’, another student remembered. Of the time devoted to Greek, a large part ‘was spent in the inculcation of the modern Greek pronunciation, in place of what he denounced as the stupid usage of the English universities’.85 There were lectures twice a week on Greek literature, philology, archaeology, but also on subjects only remotely connected with the study of Greek, like ‘The Present Position and Prospects of Learning in Scotland’ or ‘The Church and the Theatre’.86 In the early years at least, Blackie was willing to experiment with the teaching. ‘I am always knocking out new quarry, and making new experiments in the pedagogic art,’ he wrote in 1855. ‘I have read two halves a week on Aristotle’s Politics with great success. . . . I have also succeeded in introducing Greek conversations with my first class. I have had no tutor to help me which occasions a great waste of power.’87 After two years the post had lapsed, and there were also tensions between Pillans and Blackie. The older man had not been a Blackie supporter in 1852, he had opposed the introduction of an entrance examination for the junior Greek class, and he had convinced Senatus in 1855 that an examination at the beginning of the second year would be better for both Greek and Latin. Blackie was able to persuade the councillors to continue with the existing entrance examination, and to appoint another tutor for two years. When this post again lapsed in 1857, he won the support of Senatus to press for tutors or assistants for Greek, Humanity and Mathematics. This was a small step in the direction of raising teaching standards, though in the process Blackie rashly claimed that the Faculty of Arts had ‘descended to the lowest grade of a school’, and that ‘the proper work of the University in some of the classes is not done at all’. Pillans took this as directed personally at him, though he was no simple educational reactionary. He regularly visited Scotland’s parochial schools, and had first-hand experience of education in France, Switzerland, Prussia and

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Ireland. Like Blackie, he was a supporter of secular schooling, and, even more than Blackie, an admirer of the Prussian system of compulsory education. He had enlightened ideas of the teaching of classical languages, raised the standard of Latin teaching at Edinburgh, and was a pioneer in the development of ‘class libraries’ for students,88 but he lacked Blackie’s drive as a self-publicist and published little apart from textbooks. Pillans’ successor in the Latin chair, William Young Sellar, was more of a scholar, but as a ‘Balliol Scot’ was not to Blackie’s taste. Their relationship was completely soured in 1882 when Blackie publicly attacked Sellar’s father, who had played a leading role in the ‘Sutherland Clearances’,89 but it had never been very close. Blackie’s efforts ‘to destroy formality, and if possible to make everything, even prosody itself, look light and airy’, seemed to Sellar or Jebb sloppy and unscholarly. ‘In the class-room there exists between the professor and his pupils that sort of cordial and deferential intercourse which marks the intimacy of older and younger comrades,’ wrote an admiring journalist in 1868,90 but Blackie’s approach was hardly designed to meet the needs of the diligent student in search of philological information, let alone ‘the unfortunate pass man, cramming for a degree’: For the minutiae of textual criticism he had no stomach, but give him a word, a passage, a stray allusion which brought the poet or the philosopher to the top, and there was no more text-book for him. It might be a dissertation on the unity of the Homeric poems, or current views about myths, or the Platonic theory of the beautiful – even so far-fetched a subject as Scottish song or the Hebrew Devil was not beyond the sweep of his observation. Once the Professor got on his hobby horse, the hour sped away. Searching observations, apt quotations, ransacked from all quarters, illuminated his conversation.91

There was a great difference between the ‘culture and knowledge’ of the ‘courteous’ but ‘distant’ Sellar, and the rather slapdash methods of the ‘versatile, erratic, witty and vivacious’ Blackie. He was just ‘too erratic in his methods to be an adequate teacher’, even if ‘a man of imagination’ and ‘always interesting’, R. B. Haldane wrote many years later.92 Yet Haldane owed his introduction to German idealist philosophy (of which he later became a prominent exponent) to Blackie, who, having heard Rudolf Hermann Lotze lecture on ‘The Philosophy of Religion’ at Göttingen in 1871, had then persuaded Haldane’s parents to allow him to go there to study.93 Blackie provided similar introductions to German scholars for other Edinburgh students in the 1870s,94 encouraging them to go and sample the rich

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research culture of German universities. This was perhaps his most valuable contribution as an Edinburgh professor. The disorder in Blackie’s classes was legendary,95 provoked sometimes by Blackie himself, at other times by the frustration of the pass men. It was just one of the reasons for the public criticism (and some abuse) which he received. In December 1861 he attracted the attentions of the Edinburgh Evening Courant with his addresses on education and his criticism of Scottish universities, or as the editor James Hannay put it, his ‘running about delivering harangues on nearly every subject of popular interest’. Blackie responded in kind – the phrase ‘Anglican puppy’ was used – and a full-scale row was soon under way.96 Hannay was a Scot with a colourful past in the Royal Navy, and a liking for satirical journalism at the expense of his fellow countrymen, especially those with Liberal political leanings, like John Tulloch of St Andrews (‘Principal Jubbles’), but his special target was Blackie.97 A few years later Hannay decided to champion the claims of the Rev. William Veitch to be Edinburgh’s leading Greek scholar. Veitch, one of Blackie’s rivals in 1852, had made his reputation with Greek Verbs Irregular and Defective (1848) first published in Edinburgh, and then taken up by the Clarendon Press in Oxford, where it was reissued three times between 1866 and 1887. For the 1866 edition the Press had addressed the proofs to ‘Professor Veitch’ of Edinburgh, the opening for which Hannay was waiting. He published an epigram, ‘The Two Edinburgh Professors’: The courteous Oxford, kind to our renown, Assumes two Greek Professors in our town. The Chair divided all may find who seek, One man’s Professor, – t’other knows the Greek.98

Hannay probably exaggerated Veitch’s powers as a classical scholar, though his testimonials in 1852 had included those of Professors Poppo of Frankfurt and Dindorf of Leipzig, as well as Scottish classicists, and Oxford entrusted him with the revision of Liddell and Scott’s Lexicon, the standard authority.99 After Hannay left for London in 1864, Veitch quietly carried on with his life as a bachelor scholar and private tutor, noted for his taciturnity and ‘his powers as an imbiber of whisky toddy’, a description somewhat at odds with the ‘skilled raconteur’ of sporting stories in the Dictionary of National Biography.100 Questions about Blackie’s scholarship continued to be asked over the next twenty years, especially in Glasgow, where less deference was paid to Edinburgh professors. ‘He is as prickly as the

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emblematic thistle of his native land . . . light-headed as an autumn thistle,’ wrote a Glasgow journalist in 1877: That perfervid feeling, which belongs by right, as it were, to the Scot – that narrowness of mind which condemns everybody and everything opposed to itself – that surface scholarship so characteristic of Scottish culture, where could these several traits be found in such completeness as in the distinguished occupant of the Greek chair in Edinburgh?101

For the thirty years that Blackie was professor in Edinburgh, the Greek chair at the University of Glasgow was occupied by distinguished scholars. Sandford’s successor, Edmund Law Lushington (1838–75), was not the type to publicly question Blackie’s credentials. ‘He is a quiet man and speaks little, and thinks not, like David, with a sword in his hand’, Blackie wrote. ‘He is rather a sponge which you must squeeze before there is a flow.’102 Lushington had displeased Blackie by opposing the idea of an entrance examination for Greek, while his successor Jebb (1875–89) had his own reasons to feel annoyed about Blackie’s ‘harangues’. Both were from Trinity College, Cambridge, and when another Trinity man was appointed in 1882 to succeed Blackie, Jebb was heard to say, ‘Thank heaven Butcher is in Edinburgh’, and not just for reasons of their friendship. Blackie must have felt that his old enemies had taken their revenge, especially since Samuel Henry Butcher had come to the Edinburgh Greek chair after a successful career as an Oxford college tutor. Butcher treated his predecessor politely, but privately expressed doubts about his scholarship, confiding to a colleague that a paper by Blackie on ‘The Philosophy of Language’ for the Royal Society of Edinburgh was ‘a rambling production’ with no ‘central or guiding principle’ and ‘a certain amount of bad philology’, though there was bound to be difficulty in ‘following the movements of a genius so erratic’.103 He too was finally exasperated by Blackie’s continued attacks on the teaching of classics in Scotland. ‘I have been plagued by Blackie lately,’ he wrote to a friend in 1887: He tried hard to make me join his Hellenic Society which exists, he says, for the purpose of studying the ‘Higher Greek’, or ‘human Greek without any regard to grammar’. Some years ago I went once or twice & discovered that its sole object is to make nonsense of the Classics & to crown Blackie with wreaths at a Symposium & to drink his health. Recently Blackie’s attacks on the study of Greek, & on its existing representatives in Scotland have become increasingly violent as he found a diminishing audience. So I wrote frankly to him a fortnight ago telling him that our

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views differ so widely that there is no use in attempting to conceal it; that he depreciates and ridicules the study, & tolerates it only as an adjunct or ornament of the supper table. That if the serious study of Greek deserves to be denounced, it is not worth cultivating it as a social luxury; & a good deal more, politely expressed, but not obscure even to me so blinded with vanity as is this G. O. M. of Scotch classics. So now I am free!104

After he retired in 1882 Blackie clearly had more opportunity to make a nuisance of himself, but in Edinburgh he was regarded like a much-loved monument whose less pleasing features could be overlooked. At the tercentenary celebrations of the University of Edinburgh in April 1884 he was a distinguished professor emeritus, though the sumptuous volume published to celebrate the event recounted the words of ‘a learned Grecian of Cambridge’, ‘He’s a wonderful man, Blackie; ’tis a pity that he knows so little Greek’, which was taken to be evidence of the professor’s ‘versatility and . . . irrepressible vitality’.105 To ask serious questions about Blackie’s knowledge of Greek, as a local teacher did at a meeting of the Educational Institute of Scotland in 1887, came to be regarded by the citizens of Edinburgh as a serious lapse of good manners.106 Blackie was now an Edinburgh institution, perhaps a national one as well. ‘Lately I was told that Blackie – one does not say Mr Cromwell – is no longer Professor of Greek in Edinburgh University,’ J. M. Barrie wrote in 1889. ‘What nonsense some people talk. As if Blackie were not part of the building.’107 Later, stories would be told of how ‘in the dense Australian bush, hundreds of miles distant from nearest civilisation’, ‘a shingle-splitter, who had seen better days, but whom the demon drink had reduced from the status of a scholar to that of a waif and a pariah’, on hearing that his camp-fire companion ‘hailed from Edinburgh, . . . cried “Man, how’s old Blackie?” ’. Or, five hundred feet below ground in the ‘Prince Imperial’ mine in the Thames goldfield in New Zealand, how ‘a humble miner’, who nevertheless was an Edinburgh M. A., asked, ‘ “I say, mate, were you under good old Blackie in Edinburgh?” ’ 108 Notes 1. Pronunciation of Greek, pp. 72–5. 2. Letters, pp. 132–5. Finlay (1790–1875), friend of Byron, fought for Greece, settled in Athens, wrote A History of Greece (1844–61). Clyde, author of Romaic and Ancient Greek (1855) and Greek Syntax (1861), classical master at the Edinburgh Academy 1861–78. For Rhangabes and Caroline Skene, see above, Chapter 5 n. 79.

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3. Letters, pp. 132–3. Stoddart, pp. 194–6. NLS MS 2638 f. 147. BM, LXXIV, 457 (November 1853), 571–2. 4. Letters, p. 133. Stoddart, p. 194. 5. J. Crichton-Browne, Victorian Jottings from an Old Commonplace Book (London: Etchells & Macdonald, 1926), pp. 182–3 (on Blackie). NLS MS 2640 f. 73 (on Gladstone). 6. Letters, pp. 64, 128. NLS Acc. 11549. Lyrical Dramas of Aeschylus, p. xxiv. NBR, XX, 39 (November 1853), 160. Pronunciation of Greek, pp. 7, 28, 46, 50, 78–83. 7. NLS MS 2640 f. 49. NLS MS 2639 ff. 53, 63. SEJ, II, 17 (February 1854), 197–201. By the 1850s the via media of Korais, katharevousa, was linguistically ossified, leading to a new attack by advocates of demotic in the 1870s. 8. Joannes Gennadius. The Times, 17 March 1895, NLS MS 2640 ff. 153–61. 9. BSA B6 [Q.9 16–17]. NLS MS 2624 ff. 31, 51. 10. WR, LXII (N.S. VI), 122 (October 1854), 350–72. BM, LXXIV, 457 (November 1853), 581–2. Yet Orthodoxy was ‘less corrupt, and far more open to amelioration’ than Catholicism. ‘Erastian’: a church subordinated to secular power. 11. Stoddart, pp. 196–7. 12. On the Living Language of the Greeks (1853), pp. 12–27. BM, LXXVI, 466 (August 1854), 119–34. 13. SEJ, II, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23 (February, March, April, May, June, August 1854), 196–203, 275–7, 304–9, 370–4, 416–20, 618–19. Cf. Glasgow Herald, 19 January 1863, p. 4f. 14. Quoted in E. T. Cook, Life of John Ruskin (London: George Allen, 1911), I, p. 324. NLS MS 2643 f. 136 and 2624 f. 15 (emphasis in originals). For the lecture, see R. Masson (ed.), In Praise of Edinburgh (London: Constable, 1912), p. 251, J.D. Hunt, The Wider Sea: A Life of John Ruskin (London: J. M. Dent, 1982), pp. 229–30. For Blackie on the New Town, see NLS MS 2626 f. 136. 15. NLS MS 3706 f. 1, MS 2636 f. 145A, MS 2643 f. 134. W. A. Miller, The ‘Philosophical’: A Short History of the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution (Edinburgh: C. J. Cousland & Sons, 1949), p. 13. Blackie’s unpublished lecture ‘Ruskin’ (20 June 1878) is in NLS Acc. 9333. 16. NLS MS 2624 f. 11, MS 2626 f. 142. 17. NLS MS 2637 f. 175, MS 2638 f. 263 (emphasis in original). Pattison (1813–84), Rector (1861) of Lincoln College. Edward Augustus Freeman (1823–92), Professor of History at Oxford, 1884–92. 18. NLS MS 2633 f. 178, MS 2637 f. 98, MS 2638 f. 120. Max Müller (1823–1900), Oxford Professor of Modern Languages (1854–68), then of Comparative Philology (1868–1900), but failed to win the chair of Sanskrit 1860.

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19. NLS MS 2642 ff. 147, 168 (W. G. Clark, E. M. Cope). A. P. Stanley (ed.), Connop Thirlwall (London: Richard Bentley, 1881), p. 193. 20. NLS MS 2627 f. 29, MS 2628 f. 206. Thompson (1810–86), Professor of Greek at Cambridge 1853–66, Master of Trinity 1866–86. In 1870 the University Orator (R. Jebb) used the visit of a Greek Orthodox bishop to obtain permission from the University Senate to use reformed pronunciation. C. Stray, Classics Transformed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 131–2. 21. NLS MS 2627 f. 11., MS 2626 f. 67. Kingsley (see below n. 56) had met Blackie on his first visit to Edinburgh in February 1854. 22. NLS MS 2626 ff. 148, 221, MS 2627 f. 46, MS 2629 f. 181. Percy Smythe (1826–69) 8th Viscount Strangford, educated at Merton College, attaché in Constantinople 1845–57, writer on philology. Edmund Geldart (1844–85) lived in Athens until 1868 and wrote on the modern Greek language. A Unitarian, he disappeared on a voyage to Dieppe. 23. NLS MS 2627 f. 35A. F. Mineka and D. N. Lindley (eds), Later Letters of John Stuart Mill 1849–73 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), pp. 1045, 1054. B. M. Ratcliffe and W. H. Chaloner (eds), A French Sociologist Looks at Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), pp. 146–7. 24. EUL Gen. 1733. Robert James Muir (1847–1917) had also been a Ferguson scholar at Magdalen, and was a schools inspector. 25. C. Jebb, Life and Letters of Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907), pp. 222–5. NAS GD 433/2/ 445/27–9. Jebb (1841–1905), Charterhouse and Trinity (Fellow 1863), Professor of Greek at Glasgow 1875, at Cambridge 1889–1905, Conservative MP for Cambridge University 1891–1905, knighted 1900, O. M. 1905. A close friend of Tennyson. Blackie’s introduction to E. Vincent and T. G. Dickson, Handbook to Modern Greek (1880) gave only the broadest indication of his approach. 26. NLS MS 2638 f. 46 (H. F. Tozer had travelled extensively in Greece). 27. NLS MS 2639 f. 147. Hardie (1862–1916), fellow and tutor of Balliol 1884–95, Edinburgh Professor of Humanity from 1895. Other ‘Blackie Scots’ at Oxford were J. W. Mackail and John Burnet (see below, chapter 9 nn.13–14). 28. Letters, p. 395. Oxford appointed its first lecturer in modern Greek in 1895. Platon Soterios Drakoules wrote to Blackie, but never met him. In 1910 he returned to Greece to take up socialism and vegetarianism. NLS MS 2640 ff. 131, 205–6. 29. Athenaeum, No. 2146 (12 December 1868), 797. 30. Henry Hayman (Bradfield, Rugby), F. W. Farrar (Harrow), Oscar Browning (Eton) supported Blackie over Latin pronunciation, but Frederick Temple (Rugby) was lukewarm. Letters, pp. 173, 176–7. NLS MS 2629 ff. 9, 37, 24, 28, MS 2642 ff. 217–20.

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J. Blackie, Bradfield 1850–1975 (Bradfield: St Andrew’s College, 1975), p. 59. 31. Letters, p. 173 n.1 (1869). C. Y. Lang and E. F. Shannon (eds), Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), II, p. 461 (1867). 32. NLS MS 2628 f. 206. Stray, Classics Transformed, pp. 126–31. Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro (1819–95), Shrewsbury and Trinity (Fellow 1843), Professor of Latin 1869–72. 33. M. Magnusson, The Clacken and the Slate (London: Collins, 1974), pp. 112–19. A. Geikie, Scottish Reminiscences (Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1904), p. 104. Notes and Queries, Ser. 7, XII (12 September 1891), 209. 34. Edinburgh Essays (1857), pp. v, 1–11. At Cambridge Plato had ‘never been altogether forgotten’ (p. 6) and was taught in the 1820s (at Oxford only after 1847). 35. NBR, XXXV, 70 (November 1861), 366–8. 36. Sewell (1804–74), Fellow, then Dean, of Merton College, Oxford, Professor of Moral Philosophy 1839–41, founder of St Peter’s College, Radley 1847. After 1862 lived abroad to avoid his creditors. 37. Grote (1794–1871), City of London MP 1832–41, after which he left the family banking business to devote himself to classical studies. At University College he endowed chairs and was active in administration. Declined a peerage. 38. NLS MS 2643 f. 110. Trinity College, Cambridge, Add. MS c. 93[37]. Nichol (1833–94), educated at Glasgow and Balliol, professor at Glasgow 1862–89, friend of Kossuth and Mazzini. Sidgwick (1838–1900), Fellow of Trinity 1859–69, Cambridge professor 1883–1900. 39. F. M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 369–75, and ‘Antiquity in Victorian Contexts’, Browning Institute Studies, X (1982), 7. K. Demetriou, ‘George Grote and the Platonic Revival in Victorian Britain’, Quaderni di storia, XXIV, 47 (January – June 1998), 17–59. 40. NBR, XXXV, 70 (November 1861), 367–9. Edinburgh Essays, pp. 7 n.1, 18, 20. NLS MS 2643 f. 22, MS 2626 f. 179, MS 2643 f. 20. BSA B6 [Q.9 16–17]. G. Faber, Jowett (London: Faber and Faber 1957), pp. 266–72. For Puseyism, Jowett and Buckle, see below, Chapter 9. 41. NBR, XXXV, 70 (November 1861), 373. Trinity College Cambridge, Add MS a.201.35. Other subscribers to the Hegel monument were the Oxford Hegelian T. H. Green, the Cambridge Platonist W. H. Thompson, and Blackie’s friend Dr John Brown. A. H. Stirling, James Hutchison Stirling (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1912), p. 220. 42. Associationism was popularised by Archibald Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790), and Francis Jeffrey’s Edinburgh

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Review articles (reprinted 1844 and 1853). Blackie rightly predicted that the publication of Hamilton’s papers (issued 1859–61) would show he dissented from Associationism. 43. On Beauty (1858), pp. vii–xii, 1–6, 116–17, 155–71, 58. Notes, pp. pp. 186–8. Cf. CR, XLIII, 6 (June 1883), 813–30. 44. On Beauty, p. 58. 45. Homer and the Iliad (1866), I, p. 112 n.1. Blackwell (1701–57), Professor of Greek 1723, Principal 1748. 46. CM, VII (1850), 414–58, repr. in Horae Hellenicae. 47. NLS MS 2624 ff. 1, 42, MS 4954 ff. 83, 147. NBR, XX, 39 (November 1853), 135–60. National Review, I (1857), 292–4, 392–4. 48. Vol. XI (1856), p. 596. 49. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, quoted in E. R. Dodds, ‘Homer’, in M. Platnauer (ed.), Fifty Years of Classical Scholarship (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954), p. 10. On Gladstone, Turner, Greek Heritage, pp. 159–77. 50. ‘Homer’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, pp. 600–3. Karl Konrad Friedrich Wilhelm Lachman (1793–1851) argued that the Iliad was composed of sixteen independent lays then enlarged and interpolated (thus also termed Kleinlieder Theorie). 51. NLS Dep. 208 Box 13. NLS MS 2624 f. 198. BSA B9.Bh.171. 52. Harvard Library bms AM 1172. NLS MS 2624 f. 308. 53. Lane (1823–89) practised at Moor Park (Farnham), then at Sudbrooke Park (Richmond), finally in Harley Street. Blackie was a patient in 1854, and again in 1860, a gap perhaps due to a sexual scandal involving Lane. T. Sato, ‘E. W. Lane’s Hydropathic Establishment at Moor Park’, Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Studies, X, 1 (April 1978), 45–59. 54. Letters, pp. 144–52. Russell (1792–1878) had attended Edinburgh University. Prime Minister 1846–52, created Earl 1861. Amberley (1842–76) and his wife Kate (d. 1874) became close friends of Blackie’s. 55. Beinecke Library MS Vault Section II. G. S. Haight (ed.), Letters of George Eliot (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), III, p. 246. M. Harris and J. Johnston (eds), Journals of George Eliot (Cambridge: University Press, 1997), pp. 83, 97. R. Ashton, G.H. Lewes: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 208. G. S. Haight, George Eliot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 349. 56. Letters, pp. 147–8. Kingsley to T. P. Tindale, 22 August 1861, Brown University Library MS 52.149. Both Kingsleys, Charles (1819–73) and Henry (1830–76), were novelists. Charles was also Professor of Modern History at Cambridge 1861–9. 57. MM, IV, 22 (August 1861), 269–73. Homer and the Iliad, I, p. 147 n.1. Edinburgh Evening Courant, 7 November 1861, p. 4. 58. ‘On Translating Homer: Last Words’ (1862) in R. H. Super (ed.),

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Matthew Arnold on the Classical Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), pp. 207–8. 59. Homer and the Iliad, I, pp. 410 n.1, 411–12. Blackie to Ichabod Wright, 26 November [1864], MS 19c Wright, Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library. C. Y. Lang (ed.), Letters of Matthew Arnold (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), I, p. 465 (1859). 60. Stoddart, pp. 225–9. NLS MS 2625 f. 264, MS 2626 f. 38. 61. ‘On the Spartan Constitution and the Laws of Lycurgus’ (22 April), repr. in Horae Hellenicae, and two lectures on Homer (26, 28 April 1864). 62. Letters, pp. 148–9. Spencer (1820–1903), railway engineer turned journalist, author of Social Statics (1850), Principles of Psychology (1855), was working on his System of Synthetic Philosophy (1862–93). 63. Letters, p. 150. Whewell (1794–1866), Cambridge Professor of Mineralogy 1828–32, then of Moral Theology 1838–55, Master of Trinity 1841, Vice-chancellor 1855. Blackie first met Gladstone (MP for Midlothian 1880–95) in Edinburgh on 13 December 1859. They read each other’s books and corresponded mostly on classical matters. 64. Sir Joseph Boehm quoted in P. Magnus, Gladstone (London: John Murray, 1954), p. 275. 65. Lang and Shannon, Letters of Tennyson, III, pp. 366–7 and n.1. Tennyson Research Centre, MS 3272, 3270. 66. R. A. J. Walling (ed.), Diaries of John Bright (London: Cassell, 1930), p. 280. Letters, p. 152. Bright (1811–89), MP 1843–89, active in the Anti-Corn Law League, and the Peace Society. 67. I.C. Wright, as in n.59 above. Wright (1795–1871), a former Oxford don, translated Dante (1833–40) and Homer (1859–64). Arnold (advocate of the hexameter) criticised his use of blank verse. 68. NLS MS 2626 ff. 205, 295. Lang and Shannon, Letters of Tennyson, II, pp. 410–11. Paley (1815–88) had resigned his fellowship, converted to Catholicism and acted as tutor to wealthy Catholic families, before returning to Cambridge. 69. NLS MS 2626 ff. 112, 119, 124, 202, 233, 243, 235, 238, 301–3. George Lillie Craik (1798–1866), Professor of History and English at Belfast 1849–66. 70. Clark (1821–78), Fellow of Trinity 1844–73, founder-editor of Journal of Philology, Shakespeare scholar. 71. Homer And The Iliad, I, pp. 76–7, 100–1, 34–6. The Covenanter ‘martyrs’ and (inevitably) John Knox. 72. Ibid., I, pp. viii, 187, 200, 209, 215–16, 246–8, 334–7, 387, 48–63, 69. Turner, Greek Heritage, pp. 142–4, 178–9. 73. Notes, pp. 185–6. Edward Stanley (1799–1869), 14th Earl of Derby

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1851, Prime Minister 1852, 1858–9, 1866–8, but he preferred horseracing to political office. 74. Turner, Greek Heritage, pp. 138–9. Blackie defended the ‘unitarian’ view against Geddes. See CR, XXXVIII, 2, 3 (August, September 1880), 280–9, 518–20, NLS MS 2633 ff. 65, 74. Geddes (1828–1900), educated at King’s College, Aberdeen, where he became Professor of Greek 1855. A founder-member of Blackie’s Hellenic Society (1850), he wrote a Greek epigram for him when he left Aberdeen in 1852. 75. Dodds, ‘Homer, pp. 1–2. Turner, Greek Heritage, p. 144. The Scot Andrew Lang also remained one of the few unitarians. 76. Volume no. 62, with an introduction by Ernest Rhys. 77. Dodds, ‘Homer’, pp. 8–13. J. E. Sandys, though, felt the dissertations were still ‘well worthy of perusal’. History of Classical Scholarship, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), III, p. 428. 78. Homer and the Iliad, I, p. 396 n.1. L. Lumsden, Yellow Leaves (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1933), p. 42. A. Lyall, Life of the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava (London: John Murray, 1905), II, p. 287. Bodleian Library Dep. 728 f. 251 (Sir William Harcourt). 79. T. Martin, Helena Faucit (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1900), p. 286. Letters, p. 160 (and pp. 223, 305, 335, 357, 366). Faucit first met Browning in May 1837, playing Lucy in his Strafford. She was leading actress in A Blot in the Scutcheon, and Colombe’s Birthday. 80. Copy of Agamemnon in Armstrong Browning Library. Baylor Bulletin, XXXVII (September 1934), 73. BL Add. MS 44107 f. 404. NLS MS 2637 f. 237 (emphasis in original). 81. Quoted in B. Miller, Robert Browning (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1958), p. 173. 82. Blackie, Horae Hellenicae, pp. 198, 200, 277. For the views of Grote, Jowett, Blackie and the Edinburgh Principal Alexander Grant, see Turner, Greek Heritage, chapter 6. 83. The Wise Men of Greece (1877), p. xiv. 84. J. G. Duncan (ed.), The Life of Professor John Stuart Blackie the Most Distinguished Scotsman of the Day (Glasgow: John J. Rae, 1895), p. 62. 85. W.S. Dalgleish in J. D. T. Hall (ed.), The Tounis College (Edinburgh: Friends of Edinburgh University Library, 1985), pp. 202–4 (1851–5). C. Stewart, Haud Immemor (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1901), p. 46 (from 1859). W. Coldstream, ‘Reminiscences of student days in Edinburgh’, UEJ, II, 2 (1927), 44 (1857–9). 86. Edinburgh Evening Courant, 6 November 1860, pp. 2, 4. Notes, pp. 329–35. 87. NLS MS 1890 f. 119 (emphasis in original). 88. NUL N Mc 1/50. NLS 2643 f. 125 (1856). Pillans, ‘How to Improve the Preliminary Stages of Classical Education’, Museum, I, 3 (April 1861),

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14–20. D. B. Horn, A. Short History of the University of Edinburgh 1556–1889 (Edinburgh University Press, 1967), pp. 164, 194, 201. James Clyde was Greek tutor 1855–7. 89. Sellar (1825–90), educated at Glasgow and Balliol (Snell Exhibitioner). Fellow of Oriel 1848, Professor of Greek, St Andrews, 1859–63, Professor of Latin, Edinburgh, 1863–90. For Blackie on Patrick Sellar, see below, Chapter 10. 90. [John Blaikie], The Old Times and the New (London: Chapman and Hall, 1868), p. 100. 91. Duncan (ed.), Life of Professor Blackie, pp. 62, 67 (cf. pp. 195–6, 215–16). 92. R. M. Ferguson, My College Days (Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1887), pp. 56–7. R. B. Haldane, An Autobiography (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1929), pp. 6, 11–12. 93. Dark Blue, II, 8 (October 1871), 194. NLS MS 2631 ff. 132, 103, 225, and MS 5901 f. 6. Haldane (1856–1928), army minister 1906–12, Lord Chancellor 1912–15, 1924, Viscount 1911, O. M. 1915. Philosopher, educational and army reformer. Lotze (1817–81). 94. John Marshall (Halle). Thomas Walker (Berlin). Thomas Kirkup, Robert Douglas Clark, Thomas D. Anderson, William Peterson (Göttingen). Thomas Gilray (Heidelberg). See NLS MS 2629 ff. 69, 89, 240, 246, 253, 255, 309 and MS 2632 ff. 86, 127. Most of these men went on to academic careers. 95. Gavin Ogilvie [J. M. Barrie], An Edinburgh Eleven, 3rd edn (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1896), pp. 32–4 (from British Weekly Extras no. 3, 1889). Duncan (ed.), Life of Professor Blackie, p. 195. 96. Edinburgh Evening Courant, 5, 31 December 1861, p. 2. F. Espinasse, Literary Recollections and Sketches (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1893), pp. 313–14, 327. 97. J. Hannay, Characters and Criticisms (Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo, 1865), p. 218. Tulloch (1823–86), Professor of Theology and Principal of St Mary’s College, St Andrews 1854–86. 98. Ibid., p. 204. Cf. ‘Hint to a Quack’, ‘Blogg on Classics’, pp. 101, 213. Hannay (1827–73) served in the RN 1840–5 until dismissed by courtmartial (later quashed). Worked in journalism 1845–68 (editor of the Edinburgh Courant and Evening Courant 1855–64). British consul, Barcelona 1869. 99. Testimonials of the Rev. William Veitch D. D. as Candidate for the Professorship of Greek in the University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: 1852). Wilhelm Dindorf (1802–83). Ernst Friedrich Poppo (1794–1866). William Pyper and George Ferguson (professors of Humanity at St Andrews and Aberdeen) also wrote testimonials. 100. Espinasse, Literary Recollections, pp. 335–6. 101. ‘Men You Know – No. 235’, The Bailie, X, 235 (18 April 1877), 1.

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102. Letters, p. 154. Lushington (1811–93) was married to Tennyson’s sister Cecilia. 103. Jebb, Life and Letters, p. 244. Stoddart, pp. 395–9. EUL MS Gen. 2169/29 (emphasis in original). NLS MS 2636 f. 208. 104. NAS GD 433/2/280 20–1 (emphasis in original). Butcher (1850–1910), son of an Irish bishop, professor at Edinburgh 1882–1903, Unionist MP for Cambridge University 1906. G. O. M.: ‘Grand Old Man’, nickname for Gladstone. 105. Quasi Cursores Portraits (Edinburgh: T. & A. Constable, 1884), p. 49. 106. Scotsman, 8 November 1886, p. 6 f – g. 107. Ogilvie [J. M. Barrie], An Edinburgh Eleven, p. 27. 108. Quoted in Kennedy, pp. 310–11.

8 ‘PROFESSOR OF THINGS IN GENERAL’ 1 Edinburgh councillors probably assumed that in ‘electing’ Blackie they were getting the next best thing to a German professor (minus dangerous notions like ‘Neology’), but what they got was a public performer in the John Wilson mould. ‘In my time he wore a brown wig, which was so manifestly artificial that we used sometimes to imagine that it was coming off, and speculated on what the professor would be like without it,’ Archibald Geikie, a student from the 1850s, remembered. Later Blackie ‘allowed his own white hair to grow long, and with his clean-shaven face, his broad soft felt hat, and his brown plaid over his shoulders, he became by far the most picturesque figure in the Edinburgh of his time.’ The plaid and soft collar were already in place during Blackie’s time in Aberdeen, but the hat and the hair were the details added during his first Edinburgh years. There was ‘a good deal of external resemblance’ to the German historian Mommsen, but Blackie ‘was distinguished from his more typical continental brethren by the boisterous exuberance of his spirits’. Whether in the classroom, or at gatherings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, ‘after eloquent talk he would eventually be unable to remain seated, but would start up and march around the room, gesticulating and singing a verse of some Scottish song, or one of his own patriotic ditties’.1 At the end of Blackie’s university career, in the early 1880s, we find another student describing the same ‘neat, spare figure dressed in black; the keen, handsome face; the white hair and broad-brimmed black soft hat; the checked plaid over one shoulder and the handsome eighteenth-century cane that he carried in place of a walking-stick’. The Blackie myth was created early, and lived up to for thirty years, over forty, if we count a decade or more of retirement. ‘Blackie was certainly eccentric, but not wholly unconscious, I think, in his eccentricity,’ wrote the same student, who was the son of one of Blackie’s colleagues: I remember one day when we were all in the garden, a new maid we had rushed out of the house in terror and cried out to my mother that there

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was a mad man in the drawing-room. When she had opened the front door Blackie pushed past her without a word, walked into the drawing-room, and sitting down on the floor began pulling the books out of a bookcase, singing the while at the top of his voice. He had, I may say, a most attractive singing voice and sang a Scottish song excellently well. One of the established and recognised customs was that, when in the mood, at a dinner-party he would rise from his seat and kiss all the ladies present, and then return to his chair and resume his dinner.

In the classroom ‘students adored him and yet laughed at him. He encouraged liberties and then suddenly would flash into a rage and dismiss the whole class, and refuse to meet them until they apologised.’ He ‘was an education and an inspiration to the raw country lads who knew nothing beyond their village school and village farm. He opened visions of culture, of beauty, of poetry to the boys,’ but one did not come to Blackie to learn Greek. ‘Like Professor Teufelsdröckh in Sartor Resartus, he should have been appointed Professor of Things in General.’2 In Edinburgh a professor was a man of importance, something which seemed odd to the English. ‘What struck me as a curious feature of Edinburgh society was the extraordinary respect paid to professors of all sorts, though they were almost as numerous as colonels in the United States,’ wrote an Englishman who worked in Edinburgh in the 1850s. ‘In England we seldom speak of them (except in such cases as that of Professor Holloway) as professors, and still more rarely address them by that title.’ His readers would have caught the reference to the well-known vendor of quack remedies.3 When Thackeray arrived to deliver his lectures on ‘The Four Georges’ in November 1856, Blackie was one of the literary notables who were invited to meet the great man. Thackeray enjoyed the hospitality of the Blackwood brothers, ‘sitting jovially together night after night over bottle after bottle of the most prodigious Good Claret’, but he offended many in his large Edinburgh audience with sympathetic references to Mary, Queen of Scots.4 Blackie was also no admirer of Mary, and later made the following rather slighting estimate of Thackeray: When I see young men lolling on sofas, and grinning over these sorry caricatures of humanity with which the pages of Thackeray and other popular novelists are filled, I often wonder what sort of human life can be expected to grow up from that early habit of learning to sneer, or at best, to be amused, at an age when seriousness and devout admiration are the only seeds out of which any future nobleness can be expected to grow. For myself, I honestly confess that I could never learn anything from Thackeray;

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there is a certain feeble amiability even about his best characters, which, if it is free of the depressing influence of his bad ones, is certainly anything but bracing.

Blackie, like many Victorians, wanted morality in his novels, but he may also have been paying back Thackeray for a joking reference he had made to the contest for the Edinburgh Greek chair in 1852.5 Though ready to make fun at the expense of others, Blackie always took himself seriously – perhaps the reason why, as a close friend noted, he could not laugh. ‘His nearest approach was an explosive splutter and hiss that was anything but pleasant.’6 He felt more at ease with the ‘genial sympathy’ of Leigh Hunt, first encountered in spring 1858, than with the difficult Carlyle who ‘would talk, talk, talk and never give one a chance to contradict his assertions’: His poor wife used to sit there and never speak. I was in his room this particular Sunday, and his wife particularly wanted to say something. But there was not the smallest chance. I got up, took hold of him, and giving him a good shaking, cried, ‘Let your wife speak, you monster!’; but for all that he wouldn’t.

Relations between ‘blethering Blackie’ and the philosopher of silence had never been smooth, though Carlyle seems to have warmed more to Blackie when he visited Edinburgh a few months before his election as university rector in 1865. He reported to his wife: ‘Yester night we sat an hour with Blackie & Wife: good souls really; the wife especially and very fond of one another.’7 Perhaps Eliza’s restraining presence made all the difference. The following summer (1859) the Blackies avoided London, which they found too hot in the summer, and spent June at Ambleside and July at Borrowdale in the Lake District. Verses amongst Blackie’s papers suggest either a fleeting attraction to one of his fellow holidaymakers, or perhaps that he was simply limbering up for the publication of his volume of Lyrical Poems (1860).8 They returned to Edinburgh in August, and Blackie then travelled to Aberdeen for a meeting of the British Association in mid-September. At one of the ‘Red Lion’ dinners of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society he sang one of his songs, and astonished the sixty-strong male company ‘in coming from one end of the long room to the other in order to enfold George Wilson in a loving embrace’. Blackie’s brother-in-law noted his habit of ‘innocently kissing’ on the cheek old friends, like Wilson, ‘all women, old and young, plain or beautiful, who received his remarks with approval’, and ‘men who expressed opinions he approved of’. What he did with

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women ‘who expressed opinions’ we are not told, but we know that Millais received Blackie’s embrace ‘with the composure of a superior Englishman’. The journalist Henry Lucy found being kissed ‘momentarily disconcerting’, but this was on a crowded Oban Pier.9 There was in Blackie a healthy disregard for the conventions of the English-speaking world, and a touch of literary bohemianism appropriate to a poet. The long vacation of the Scottish university offered ample opportunities for poet-professors, of which Scotland had a sufficient number for the series ‘Our Modern Poets’ in the St James’s Magazine to devote two articles to ‘The Scotch Professors’. Included was the following estimate: ‘There is a light-heartedness and a buoyancy about all that Professor Blackie writes. He is always face to face with the reader, genial, impulsive, wayward, and amiable. . . . One is carried away by his singular confidential address and rare good nature, and it is impossible to differ from him at the moment, except by quiet mental reservation.’10 This was in 1876, after he had published four books of poetry, but Blackie was convinced of his talent even after publication of his first, Lays and Legends of Ancient Greece, With Other Poems (1857). This contained poetry written in Greece, Italy and Germany, as well as the ‘Braemar Ballads’, fruit of a summer holiday in 1856. ‘Marching alone down the glens and up the mountains, his faculties quickened by movement in the fresh and heathersweetened air, he covered much ground in his wanderings. As he walked he sang and shouted his lays into shape,’ his biographer writes. This does not promise well for the verse, and the critics ‘found fault with their torrent of troubled verbiage’.11 Blackie had worked hard at gaining a literary reputation, and naturally found it difficult to deal with criticism. A reviewer in Fraser’s Magazine in 1860 noted of Blackie’s boasted ease in writing verse: Seeing how rapidly the machine works, and how abundant the supply of raw material is, we acknowledge with thankfulness the comparative lightness of the infliction. Mr Blackie has been merciful. He publishes a volume of poems on the average once a year. We have no doubt he can write just such another once a week.

It cannot have pleased Blackie that his ‘obstreperous and burlesque muse’ was being compared unfavourably with the young William Morris’ Defence of Guenevere (1858), which rang ‘like true metal’, and the Poems Before Congress (1860) of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘a true poet’. Worse still, it seemed that it was an Edinburgh critic who had made these comments.12

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The Edinburgh town councillors may not have realised they were getting a poet-professor, but they can have had no doubt that Blackie was a committed university reformer. In 1848 he had written a series of articles for The Scotsman attacking the teaching of professors Dunbar and Pillans at Edinburgh, and provoked something of a pamphlet war.13 At the same time, from Aberdeen, Blackie had sought to interest Glasgow professors in ‘a uniform system of Entrance Examinations, and also of University honours’ in Arts. This generated less controversy, but came to nothing. After Blackie moved to Edinburgh in 1852, any chance of co-operation on this front was destroyed by his outspoken criticism of the elementary level of classics teaching at Glasgow.14 Throughout the 1850s Scottish universities carried on lobbying government separately, for building grants or for new chairs, because they had always done so, and because they were in competition with each other for students. Blackie continued to criticise this as an unsatisfactory state of affairs in a relatively poor country like Scotland. His visit to Greece in 1853 had shown him what ‘a country, in many respects, so wretched and so miserably peopled’, could do in the educational field. The structure of the new University of Athens, like the new Greek monarchy, had been imported from Germany, though the university turned out to be far more durable than King Otho, who was to be deposed in a coup in 1862. Comparisons with the ‘Athens of the North’ were inevitable, and were generally not in Edinburgh’s favour. Athens had thirty-six professors for its 500 students, the most important subjects having several chairs, while Edinburgh had thirty professors for twice the number. Edinburgh had poorly endowed chairs of History and Belles-Lettres, while Athens had five or six. The absence of ‘efficient teachers of national history and national literature’ in the other Scottish universities, Blackie termed ‘a disgrace to a people professing civilisation’.15 He enlarged on these criticisms in his ‘open letter’ to the Lord Provost and Councillors of Edinburgh, On the Advancement of Learning in Scotland (1855), a thoroughgoing attack on Scottish complacency. Despite all the ‘talk in large terms of the erudition of Scotch Professors’, ‘no person in Germany ever thinks of looking to a Scottish University for any work of profound learning or original research’, Blackie wrote. The name of Sir William Hamilton was not, as Scots imagined, ‘generally known’ in Germany, much less the name of any Professor of classical languages in a Scottish university – the few good Scottish classicists were all private scholars,16 himself excepted, presumably. The University of Halle, which he had visited in the summer of 1851 and 1855, was ‘a

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second-rate Prussian university’, but it still managed to have thirtyeight professors in its Philosophy (i.e. Arts) Faculty, eight more than all the professors at Edinburgh, including those in the faculties of law and medicine. ‘LEARNING IS AT PRESENT AT AN EXTREMELY LOW EBB IN SCOTLAND’ – the capital letters always a sign that Blackie was about to start laying about him. What was ‘preventing the rise of a learned class in Scotland’ was the practice of allowing any raw ploughman’s son, or blinking watchmaker’s apprentice, who conceits himself to have an ‘inward call’ to the Church, to march from the lowest and most ill-taught parish school in the country, freely, and without question, into the Latin and Greek classes of the first University of the land!

By ‘the law of nature’, the proper age to leave behind ‘the circumscribed routine of school drill’ for ‘the large freedom of academical scholarship’ was not ‘the unripe age of fifteen or sixteen’, but eighteen, and ‘any system of public education’ which ignored this was ‘existing in direct contravention of the declared will of God’, and would ‘pay a heavy penalty accordingly’. The startling claim that God was on the side of university reform was probably a dig at his new colleague James Robertson, Professor of Divinity and Church History, who had led the campaign against the introduction of the entrance examination for Greek. Blackie took rather more care with the political sensibilities of Edinburgh town councillors when suggesting the introduction of a certificate of proficiency for intending students, to be issued by a new examination board. Adopting the Prussian Zeugnis der Reise or the Bavarian Absolutorium, did not mean that German ‘bureaucratic despotism’ had arrived in Scotland, he reassured them. It was simply a matter of running a public service more efficiently: ‘If the Scotch wish to have good universities, they must pay for them, just as they pay for street lamps and for water-pipes.’17 The pamphlet was praised by English university reformers, and by some Edinburgh colleagues. Scottish universities had needed ‘some fresh light & air flashed in among their cobwebs & drowsy monotonies’, a friend wrote. ‘I am very glad to see you . . . going about like a young Achilles fluttering the distaffs out of the hands of the old women, & making the young ones turn up the whites of their eyes half in fear & half in admiration’.18 Blackie’s mix of common sense and calculated insult was also very much to Carlyle’s liking: You have told the poor Public there a good few home truths, such as they are not nearly often enough in the habit of hearing, nay have not heard

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for a couple of generations back; the more is their misfortune, poor potbellied blockheads, drinking ‘the Cause of Education’ at public dinners, and asking all men, ‘Did you ever know such a country for Education?’ In a way disgusting to behold. . . . The thickest coat of whale-blubber does yield at last to harpooning long continued in that style, and the point at last brings blood.

Only over Blackie’s admiration for the German university did they part company, though Carlyle’s caricature of the German professor – an ‘entirely worthless flaccid specimen of the genus “Solemnly Ineffective Blockhead” ’ – could be written off as more fuming from ‘the great Iconoclast at Chelsea’.19 Nevertheless, there were more serious objections to Blackie’s claim that Scotland could solve its educational problems by applying German solutions. One of his former Aberdeen students, Peter Bayne, provided cogent criticism along these lines in the Glasgow newspaper The Commonwealth. ‘It is my profound conviction that the Germans have gone utterly wrong in their University Education; they aim at making professors & learned men, not at giving the select portion of the general mind a wide & healthy culture,’ he wrote to Blackie. ‘I perfectly sympathise with your desire for a high Academic culture; I discern its want & its importance: but I am the most radical of the radicals, & I must see the roots of all institutions in the people.’ Bayne was defending the traditional accessibility of the Scottish university, and its uniform, if relatively limited, curriculum, as something well suited to Scottish society. Blackie might cite the syllabus of lectures in Greek literature and art at the University of Berlin which employed eleven professors, and compare it with the one Professor of Greek at Edinburgh, but, Bayne wrote, the comparison should really be between what a student might reasonably achieve under each system: You quoted a scheme of lectures. We infer that the whole University course corresponded. Well: such a course no one student could embrace unless he devoted his life to it. What is the result? That he chooses one, two, three or four branches. He cannot choose all. What then have you to choose between? Between a system previously settled as symmetrical & capable of being embraced by all; and a system on which the symmetricity – the most important point of all – is left to the student. Take the selection made by a German student & the selection made for a Scottish student: that is the comparison. You sketch your circle of languages & sciences & leap to the conclusion that the culture of the student corresponds to it. You forget the conditions of human life & faculty; a selection must be made; will it be done by the thoughtful men, & on wide & philosophical principles – which,

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however imperfect the practice, is the idea of the prearranged Scottish curriculum – or on the spur of the moment by each student?

The Berlin syllabus, for which Blackie had such ‘warm admiration’, was a ‘scheme of professor-culture’ which might have limited application in Scotland, where what Blackie termed ‘soft milky boys, and unkempt lumbering clowns’ – words, Bayne felt, which reflected an ‘aristocratic spirit’, and a lofty disdain for ‘plebeianism’ – needed the structure of the uniform curriculum, rather than the elasticity of the German one.20 This difference of opinion between Bayne and Blackie reflected wider disagreement over the nature of university education, and the path it should follow in nineteenth-century Scotland. This has been seen as a debate between a ‘reform’ party which wished Scottish universities to be more like English ones, and a ‘patriotic’ party which sought to preserve existing educational traditions, but Blackie does not fit this simple division into two camps. He was an unrelenting reformer, but also an Anglophobe; he was a Scottish nationalist, but also an educational elitist.21 He had no time for what he termed the ‘impertinent and short-sighted idea, which some people in Scotland seem to entertain, that the Universities ought to be regulated mainly for the sons of the poorest classes’. ‘The middle classes certainly and the rich have as great a claim on the Universities as the poor,’ he wrote in The Scotsman in 1857.22 This wish to create ‘a learned class’ in Scotland was fully shared by the new Association for the Extension of the Scottish Universities (1853), soon afterwards renamed the Association for the Improvement and Extension of the Scottish Universities. The AIESU was established in the same year as the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights, and shared with it the belief that Scotland’s higher education had been neglected by Westminster, but it was not a defender of open entry to university and the traditional general curriculum, rather the reverse. Its leading spirit was James Lorimer, a ‘literary advocate’, assisted by Leonard Schmitz, Rector of the Edinburgh High School. Both men had first-hand experience of German universities. Lorimer had studied in Berlin and Bonn, and brought back from the latter university the ideas of ‘the German historical school’ in jurisprudence,23 much as Blackie had absorbed the latest developments in classical philology a decade earlier. Schmitz had a Ph.D. from Bonn and had studied under Niebuhr, the great classical historian. Like Blackie, they regarded the German university as the model for Scots to emulate. Lorimer acknowledged the debt owed to

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Blackie’s ‘clear and forcible’ criticisms of the ‘evils and abuses’ of the Scottish system, and the changes advocated by the AIESU were essentially those earlier suggested by Blackie: improved secondary education in burgh schools (breaking the link between the parish schools and the university), university entrance examinations (and an end to ‘junior’ classes in the university), proper endowment of existing university chairs (to make up any reduction in fees when elementary teaching was transferred to the schools), additional funding for new chairs (fifty between all the universities) to cover a range of eighteen new subjects, tutorships and junior professorships to provide a career structure, student halls of residence and common dining to provide some sense of corporate life on the model of Oxford and Cambridge.24 To Blackie, no lover of the two English universities, the last point seemed particularly pressing at Edinburgh where the student displays no symbol, and flaunts no ‘picturesque habilments’, constitutes no club, and rejoices in no organization. In the other universities, indeed, a red gown is worn, and somewhat of a feeling of an academical community is cherished; but the bond is weak where strongest; at college the Scotch student belongs to his family and to himself only; when he leaves college he belongs to the world.25

This vision of the reformed Scottish university, with professorial culture imported from Germany and student life taken from England, is seriously at odds with the description of Blackie’s ‘contribution’ to ‘the cultural and educational life of Scotland’ as an ‘attempt to give the traditional principle of democratic intellectualism an effective nineteenth-century form’.26 The AIESU was based in Edinburgh (Glasgow inevitably had its own pressure group), its membership dominated by lawyers, with some merchants, MPs, ministers (especially Free Church), and professors, including Blackie. It had been established while he was away in Athens, and when he returned to Edinburgh he was content to leave the work of lobbying politicians to Lorimer. From Oxford, he wrote to a friend in June 1857: I have other work for the summer months than to be dusting up and down through Europe knocking at the doors of Parliamentary men for the possible hope of a hope. If the Lord Advocate really had a bill on the carpet my feelings might perhaps be otherwise: at present I see no call on me to break up my whole summer plan. I have devoted almost the whole time of my residence here to the collection of evidence with regard to University Reform: and must now decidedly have some leisure for my own proper studies.27

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The AIESU campaign reached a climax in a great public meeting in Edinburgh in December 1857, with a ‘platform crowded with professors, lawyers, MPs and peers’. A sign of its success was that two of the resolutions passed were moved by the politicians who effectively ‘managed’ Scotland in the 1850s and 1860s when their respective parties were in government – James Moncreiff for the Liberals, and John Inglis (an AIESU Vice-President) for the Tories. In February 1857 Moncreiff had introduced in parliament a bill drawn up by Lorimer, ‘which assumed that the government would “endow” the universities with £20,000 a year’ to pay for tutorships and a national board to control entrance examinations. The bill had got lost amongst the different political priorities of an election year, and it was Inglis, who succeeded Moncreiff as Lord Advocate in February 1858, who was able to guide a rather different bill through parliament.28 Blackie was in England from early May to the end of July 1858, and thus missed the discussions amongst Edinburgh professors on Inglis’ impending bill, much to his relief. ‘I am only too happy to occupy myself with matters more congenial to my habits than newspaper agitation or parliamentary intrigue,’ he wrote to a friend, adding, the ‘Aberdonians will bray like an army of giants about the smallest matter; they have no idea of a University as distinguished from a school’.29 In Aberdeen there was certainly concerted resistance to a ‘union’ of Marischal with King’s College, but in Edinburgh there was equal concern over the issue of university government. In May the Edinburgh Senatus had approved Inglis’ draft bill, but a minority of four professors (including James Simpson) joined a rival deputation from the town council which went to London to lobby against it. The two Edinburgh MPs were also opposed. One (a former Lord Provost) claimed that the council was defending ‘liberal and constitutional government’ of the University against the danger of ‘absolute dominion of the clergy’.30 The Free Church and Dissenter majority on the council viewed with suspicion legislation shaped by a Lord Advocate from a political party (Tory) which was the traditional friend of the Church of Scotland. The prospect of the established church exercising more power because its ministers (as Edinburgh Divinity graduates) had been given a voice in university affairs was disturbing. The Scotsman, previously critical of councillors’ decisions on university appointments, now swung around to support them, giving the battle the dimensions of a party political contest, though it was equally a struggle over which religious denomination would control appointments to university chairs. It was complicated by a separate disagreement between a minority of professors

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who wished to retain town council control (including Blackie),31 and a majority who wished to transfer patronage, as one of them put it, ‘from a large and irresponsible body, composed of the burgher and handicraft population of the city, to a limited responsible board, composed of educated and scientific men’. Or, as Blackie’s friend James Ferrier noted a little snootily, ‘There is nothing wrong in cheese, and there is nothing wrong in Greek; but there is something essentially wrong in an arrangement that permits a cheesemonger to be the patron of a Greek professorship.’ There was a serious point here about lay versus professional control, but it was soon lost in a bizarre argument about the existence of the cheesemonger councillor (no one doubted there were nine law agents, three grocers, and a half-pay captain).32 Inglis’ bill passed into law on 2 August. At Edinburgh, the 1858 Universities (Scotland) Act ended ‘nearly three centuries of total dependence upon the Town Council’. Previously, councillors could fix class fees, set the curriculum, impose qualifications for entry to the Greek class, and even control admission to the University Library during vacation time, these rights being confirmed by the Court of Session in 1825–9, and by the House of Lords in the 1840s, after the Edinburgh Senatus had challenged them. ‘For thirty years the Town Council sought to reduce the University Professors to the status of masters in their High School – that of salaried employees of the Council’ – and the Senatus had resisted. The conflict between ‘town and gown’ had been one of the reasons for the appointment of the 1826 Royal Commission, and in the 1830s it had exacerbated the University’s financial problems caused by falling student enrolments. Edinburgh town council was virtually bankrupt, leaving professorial salaries in arrears, until the intervention of Duncan McLaren as city treasurer in the 1840s. The 1858 act ‘completely remodelled’ this constitutional structure at Edinburgh, as part of a comprehensive reform of university government in Scotland. Each university was provided with a new University Court, to act as ‘the supreme authority in the everyday administrative routine’, chaired by a rector (a new office at Edinburgh) elected by matriculated students. Other Court members were the university principal, and four assessors appointed or elected by, respectively, the Chancellor (a new ceremonial office), the rector, the Senatus (professors) and the graduates (organised into a new General Council). At Edinburgh, ‘in deference to history’, two more assessors were added to the Court, the Lord Provost ex officio and one town councillor. Appointments to existing chairs (except the few where the Crown or a professional

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body was patron), and to the principalship, were also made differently at Edinburgh – by an ad hoc body, the Curators of Patronage, on which town councillors were in a majority of four to three – while at other Scottish universities patronage was simply transferred from professors to the University Court. In all universities the power to administer university property and revenue was retained by the Senatus (until 1889, when it passed to the Court), which at Edinburgh now had legal status for the first time. Edinburgh town council had a reduced though still significant role, the 1858 Act having made little difference to the tensions between town and gown over patronage. Religion and party politics continued to influence appointments to Edinburgh chairs, and not just in theology.33 The founder of antiseptic surgery, Joseph Lister, was rejected for a chair in 1864, just as the equally brilliant physician John Hughes Bennett had been in 1855.34 On the other hand, one of the last appointments made by the town councillors under the pre-1858 rules was one of their best. In 1859 they appointed the Free Churchman Sir David Brewster as principal, the first layman to hold the post, the requirement that the holder should be an ordained minister having been abolished the previous year. Despite Brewster’s reputation as a ‘difficult’ character, and his inability to speak in public, this was a less contentious appointment than that of his successor in 1868. In this bitterly contested election, another famous medical man, Sir James Young Simpson, the town council’s candidate, attempted to tarnish the reputation of Sir Alexander Grant, the successful candidate. One of the allegations against Grant was that he held ‘religious opinions of German origin’,35 the charge used against Blackie in 1852. Rectorial elections were also battles between Conservatives and Liberals, but this was political combat on a ritualised and not very serious level, inherited from Glasgow University and Marischal College, where there had been such elections before 1858. Blackie was on friendly terms with Edinburgh’s first rector, W. E. Gladstone (1860–65), and was closely involved in Carlyle’s election as his successor (1865–6).36 Edinburgh’s first chancellor, Lord Brougham (1859–68), ‘now an extinct volcano’, was overshadowed by these two notable rectors. Carlyle was a nonpolitical choice, but the election of Gladstone provided an excuse for a ‘snowball riot’, and several students found themselves before the magistrates for ‘mobbing, rioting and assault’. Later rectorial elections were rowdy affairs, especially that of Sir William StirlingMaxwell, a Scottish scholar-politician (Tory), in 1872.37 Blackie – ‘that eccentricity’, as Gladstone’s private secretary called him – stood

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unsuccessfully for the rectorship in 1883, splitting the Liberal vote and letting in the Conservative candidate.38 This and other features of the 1858 reform gave Scotland’s ‘metropolitan university’ its distinctive character, the institutional stage on which ‘Professor Blackie’ performed before students and a wider public. Edinburgh was Scotland’s largest university (if the medical teaching was included), but also the ‘most urban and impersonal’. ‘Professors had small retiring rooms adjoining their lecture rooms, but otherwise there were no social or catering facilities for professors or students. They came in for lectures, then went home again.’39 In the classroom each professor was virtually a free agent, subject only to decisions by colleagues on the Senatus. University chairs were treated as a form of personal freehold, with running costs met by the professor from his income. In 1855, for example, Blackie calculated that he paid £20 for porterage, coal and cleaning for his classroom, £15 for books for class prizes and incidental class expenses.40 Apart from the principal, there were only three university officers: the librarian, the secretary and registrar,41 and a janitor. The thirty professors were like members of a large and quarrelsome family many of whose members did not speak to each other. Once or twice a year there was the ‘Symposium Academicum’, a dinner often held at ‘Slaney’s’ (the Douglas Hotel) in St Andrew Square, where the wine flowed, songs were sung, more often than not by Blackie, and silly pranks were played.42 Otherwise Blackie mixed with ‘literary advocates’, publishers, poets and painters, as he had done in his student days in Edinburgh, though now with the addition of ministers of liberal views. In the 1850s he started a dining group, the ‘Blackie Brotherhood’, which also met at least once a year, and charged members one guinea subscription (raised to five guineas in 1877).43 There was also a ‘Hellenic Society’, which met fortnightly during the winter months in the homes of members. Blackie had started this in January 1850 in Aberdeen with ten Humanity students from Marischal as a rather serious reading-group, where bread, cheese and ale were standard fare. In Edinburgh it became a gathering of older men to read Greek, and an occasion for more serious conviviality – the wine provided by Blackie might be Greek as well.44 For the students, perhaps half of whom lived at home, the remainder in lodgings, there were the few theatres, and the rather larger number of taverns, billiard-rooms and brothels of the Old Town, for diversion. This was a matter of some concern, and in the 1860s Blackie and other professors attempted unsuccessfully to raise funds for ‘a College hall’. The fee proposed would have been ‘much nearer to that

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in the Sailors’ Home at Liverpool, than in a college at Oxford’, Lorimer claimed, perhaps to forestall the charge of cosseting students. In the 1870s Edinburgh professors managed to establish a temperance dining club as a private venture, which enrolled some 500 students, but the first hall of residence (also private) opened as late as 1887.45 Otherwise, ‘country students’ concentrated wherever cheap lodgings were available. ‘Although there is no Boulevard St. Michel, and no Jardin du Luxembourg at Edinburgh, the city may be said to have formerly possessed a “students’ quarter”,’ wrote an ex-student: Leaving the castle behind, and proceeding by Hanover Street, across Princes Street and Queen Street, through the Queen Street Gardens, and down past Northumberland Street and Great King Street . . . you arrive at a somewhat sombre, narrow thoroughfare running right and left, which looks dismally monotonous in its uniformity. This is Cumberland Street, where the students from the country dwelt in great numbers before they began to take up their abode in the more lively new roads and terraces on the south side of the city. . . . Here the scholar may read in peace, and in the early evening ramble forth past the solemn villas and overhanging trees of Inverleith Row (without encountering any of that noise and bustle that breaks the thread of reflection in a sensitive mind), until he arrives at an elevated plateau near Trinity, where he has the sweet Forth with its deserted islands stretching out before him, and behind the graceful city, smiling pensive in her eternal mantle of grey.

What Lorimer had called the ‘boorish solitude’ of the Edinburgh student had become a ‘quiet and contemplative’ existence in this account, though the description of ‘celebrating an academical success’ sounds closer to the truth. The ‘fortunate candidate’ would invite his friends to supper, after which ‘a large supply of various inspiriting drinks (including, of course, a considerable quantity of the “white wine of the country”)’ was provided, the door was locked, and no guest could ‘depart, under any pretence whatever, before everything before them was drunk up’.46 Apart from ‘temperance dining’ and strong drink, the other Edinburgh institution was the ‘breakfast party’ or ‘tea party’ for students. Blackie inherited the idea from Pillans, but added his peculiar mode of choosing his student guests, as described by J. M. Barrie: When the Professor noticed any physical peculiarity about a student, such as a lisp, or a glass eye, or one leg longer than the other, or a broken nose, he was at once struck by it, and asked him to breakfast. They were very lively breakfasts, the eggs being served in tureens; but sometimes it was a collection of the maimed and crooked, and the one person at the table – not

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the host himself – used to tremble lest, making mirrors of each other, the guests should see why they were invited.

Blackie would ‘do all the talking, as well as a good share of the laughing’, and always advised the students ‘about the preservation of their bodily health. He strongly recommended a cold bath at six o’clock every morning. In winter, he remarked genially, you can break the ice with a hammer.’ He claimed ‘only one enthusiast’ had ‘followed his advice and died’.47 Joking aside, Blackie’s gospel of hard work and fresh air could be found in On Self-Culture (1874). Windows were, ‘if possible’, to ‘be left open, night and day, both summer and winter’. ‘In breezy Scotland, at least, this practice, except in the case of very sensitive subjects’, could ‘only be beneficial’, though it was not recommended for hot countries with ‘insalubrious vapours’ at night. The body was described as a steam engine, with the mind as ‘a controlling and regulative force’; the ‘faculties’ were ‘like a slow beast’, and required ‘flogging occasionally’, or they would ‘make no way.’ Flogging was clearly an important part of the Blackie regime: Every young student ought to make a sacred resolution to move about in the open air at least two hours every day. If he does not do this, cold feet, the clogging of the wheels of the internal parts of the fleshly frame, and various shades of stomachic or cerebral discomfort, will not fail in due season to inform him that he has been sinning against Nature, and . . . he will certainly be flogged.

No sitting down for a quiet read, as Eliza liked. Blackie preferred his Homer on Ben Cruachan, but if the weather did not permit this, it was better to read ‘more naturally and effectively while walking up and down the room, than when sitting sleepily in a chair. Sitting, in fact, is a slovenly habit, and ought not to be indulged,’ he advised his young readers. ‘An idle man is like a housekeeper who keeps the doors open for any burglar.’ Finally, there was the touchy subject of ‘moral contagion’, which like the infectious power of physical diseases, borrows half its strength from the weakness of the subject with which it comes in contact. . . . [C]onsidering the weakness of the flesh, and the peculiar temptations of puberty, the best thing you can do is to make a sacred vow, on no occasion and on no account to keep company with persons who will lead you into habits of dissipation and debauchery.

From this, it was but a short step to the ‘Scottish Sunday’, its ‘serious and thoughtful observance’ the source of so ‘much of the solidity,

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sobriety, and general reliability of the Scottish character’.48 Clearly, Blackie had made his peace with Scottish Presbyterianism. On Self-Culture was written for ‘young men and students’ at a time when women were still excluded from higher education in Britain. This was about to change, though Edinburgh could hardly be said to have led the way. Blackie was an ‘honorary member’ of the Edinburgh Ladies’ Educational Association (1867), along with the Principal (Brewster) and six Edinburgh professors, some of whom provided classes in Arts subjects for members of the Association.49 The Blackies were also early supporters of Sophia Jex-Blake in her campaign for the medical education of women. When she was in Edinburgh in March 1869, she spent an evening with them: ‘He with clear pure face, white hair and straw hat! Half mad looking, certainly. . . . Mrs Blackie also nice, I think, – not commonplace.’ Blackie showed her the note in his edition of the Iliad advocating ‘the systematic instruction of women in certain departments of the medical art’, and she reported that he would support her ‘unless he hears strong things to the contrary’. In November new regulations of the University Court allowed women to matriculate at Edinburgh, but the Septem contra Edinam, as Jex-Blake and the other female students became known, then found themselves facing the unrelenting opposition of a number of medical professors led by the powerful Sir Robert Christison.50 He was not above stirring things up, and the resulting harassment, including an incident known as the ‘Surgeons’ Hall riot’ (November 1871), involved not just medical students – ‘blackguards’ Blackie called them – but some from the Greek class. This, together with Christison’s success in excluding female students from the Royal Infirmary (where he sat on the Board of Management), depressed Blackie. Eliza wrote to Sophia Jex-Blake: ‘He sat at tea-time shading his eyes, and saying quietly from time to time, “I am ashamed of my sex.” I never saw him so hurt before.’ The Infirmary decision was reversed in 1872, but the University now decided that the female medical students would only be allowed to sit the examinations, not to graduate. Jex-Blake got this quashed by the Court of Session, but the University appealed and got this judgement reversed in 1873. The new principal, Sir Alexander Grant, had just written on Happiness and Utility as Promoted by the Higher Education of Women (1872), but he did not seem to exert himself much in applying the ‘felicific calculus’ to female medical education.51 The University attempted to sweeten the pill by introducing a Certificate in Arts, with honours and pass grades for those who completed courses of the Ladies’ Educational Association, but the Edinburgh Medical School

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remained closed to women. In 1876, when an amendment to the Medical Act removed restrictions on women sitting examinations for medical degrees, Jex-Blake matriculated at the Irish College of Physicians, the first institution to use the new regulations. She passed the examinations early in 1877, and joined the pioneering Elizabeth Garrett-Anderson and Elizabeth Blackwell on the British Medical Register. When the three Scottish medical colleges opened their qualifications to women in 1886, Jex-Blake returned to Edinburgh to establish an independent School of Medicine for Women, modelled on one she had established in London in 1874. It produced its first graduates in 1894, but the Scottish Universities Ordinances of 1892, which admitted women to Scottish universities, still permitted the Edinburgh medical faculty to refuse them full student status.52 Though a supporter of higher education for women, Blackie was opposed to giving them the vote. There were very few middle-class male supporters of votes for women, John Stuart Mill being the best known, and Blackie’s friend Viscount Amberley being another.53 Blackie differed from Bright (and Bright’s brother-in-law Duncan McLaren), however, in being equally opposed to the enfranchisement of working-class males. ‘I am neither a Vote by Ballot, a Suffrage Extension nor a Triennial Parliament man,’ he confessed to a friend in March 1840. A few years later even the moderate Chartism of Aberdeen moved him to write, ‘I believe the majority are good – but are they wise? Can a multitude of passion-moved men be wise?’54 This was his objection to even the very limited extension of the franchise proposed by Lord John Russell in 1860. ‘In Democracy, as a just and wise form of governing mankind, I have no faith,’ he wrote in a long letter to The Scotsman: It is not the indiscriminate masses on the principle of equality, but the wise, the good, and the efficient on a principle of selection, who are naturally entitled to be the governing class. That all men have a natural and equal right to the suffrage is a flattering gospel preached from a demagogic platform; but it is not true.

As a believer in ‘inequality’, ‘physically, morally, or intellectually’, as ‘the great law of creation’, Blackie was expressing the conventional wisdom of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, just as in his reference to the ‘promiscuous multitudes, open to every sort of vulgar trick and clap-trap demonstration’ he was reflecting their fears.55 His appeal to classical precedent was also the traditional stratagem of the educated man. As he told John Blackwood in January 1852, ‘you mistake me

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much if you think that I am or ever was an approver of wild unmitigated unpractical democracy. On the contrary I know Greek & Roman history too well not to be aware, that it was a popular aristocracy, not democratic popularity that made the two great states of antiquity what they were.’ Classical antiquity was slippery ground, though, and could provide arguments for extension of the franchise. ‘If the history of Greece and Rome teaches anything,’ a younger ‘university liberal’ wrote, ‘it teaches us that it is not democracy but the interested government of an upper class which naturally and inevitably produces the worst type of demagogue,’56 exactly the opposite of what Blackie claimed. When franchise reform reappeared on the Westminster agenda in 1866, Blackie issued a challenge in The Scotsman: If you will appoint a night for a lecture, & set Blackie on the one side, & Bright, or Beales, or Jones, or McLaren, or the honourable member the late Lord Advocate [Moncreiff]; for whom I have a great respect, on the other side, then with Aristotle in one pocket, & Plato in the other, & a great deal of Scotch rummelgumption in the front battery I think they will find me a sharp customer.

The challenge was accepted by the Manchester Chartist Ernest Jones, ‘with the proviso that the subject for discussion should not be limited to Athens & New York, but be made more general’. The Edinburgh Working Men’s Club and Institute arranged that Blackie would lecture in the Music Hall in Edinburgh on 3 January 1867, then Jones on the following evening.57 Jones was an unusual Chartist. He had been born in the royal palace in Berlin, and was a novelist and poet, but by 1866 he was no longer the radical figure of twenty years previously, when he had been closely associated with Feargus O’Connor and moved in the same circles as Karl Marx. As a barrister, journalist and experienced public speaker, he too would be ‘a sharp customer’.58 Blackie’s lecture ‘On Democracy’ was a lengthy examination of the concept and its shortcomings in practice, whether in ancient Athens or modern America. Sismondi and de Tocqueville were cited as much as Aristotle, Plato and Polybius. It was an impressive performance, even if one did not accept the initial premise. Its weakness lay in the alternatives proposed as a way of avoiding what Blackie termed ‘the degrading doctrines of American democracy’. Lowering the property threshold for voting in new working-class constituencies (with the country divided into districts for this purpose), or giving a vote to members of ‘publicly recognised corporations, such as the Universities, the Faculty of Advocates and Writers to the Signet, the Colleges of

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Physicians and Surgeons, the Royal Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, the Royal Society, and the like’, or simply giving a plurality of votes to those with more education and property (as advocated by his Edinburgh colleague James Lorimer), simply added further layers of complication to the patchwork of parliamentary representation created in 1832.59 Nevertheless, the idea of weighted representation for ‘corporations’, rather than of the individual, was an idea attractive to a middle class fearful of being swamped by new workingclass voters. ‘Democracy Vindicated’ was Jones’ passionate response, also using classical quotations, historical examples and even biblical references, to defend manhood suffrage. It was much shorter and could not be a considered response to Blackie’s three-hour lecture, a copy of which Jones had only seen the morning before his own lecture.60 The debate attracted much attention. Opponents of reform were enthusiastic with Blackie’s attack on democracy, one of them writing from Oxford: I marvel . . . at your boldness in delivering it in Edinburgh – the modern Athens like her ancient prototype, being far gone in the worship of Demos, so far that it would almost require the courage of an Aristophanes to attack the Cleons of the day. Did you smear your face with wine lees to represent the ancient demagogue, or stuff yourself to the burly dimensions of his modern follower?61

The last comment may have been a reference to the stout figure of Bright, but it was the Tory Disraeli who introduced a Reform Bill to Parliament in March 1867. A month later on 24 April 1867 Blackie, as the guest of the ‘Constitutional Association’, gave a lecture in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall. Since the defeat of Bright as MP in a jingoistic election ten years earlier, the city was not the undisputed heartland of English Liberalism which it had once been. Blackie treated his audience of 1,500 (perhaps the largest he had ever addressed) to a long historical comparison of the constitutions of Sparta, Athens, Rome, Prussia and the United States, before concluding (inevitably) that the ‘mixed constitution’ of Britain was the best, and that the ‘popular insolence’ of America was best avoided. ‘The lecture went off last night in the most swimming style,’ he told Eliza, ‘two hours without weariness to any body but myself – and tremendous cheering &c! &c’. There were cheers at the conclusion also for ‘Lord Derby, Mr Disraeli, and the Government’, and Blackie, who still claimed to be ‘a non-party man’, shortly afterwards had his name removed from the Association’s list of Vice-Presidents.62

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On 6 May 1867 the Reform League organised a mass meeting in Hyde Park in defiance of a government ban (though there was no repeat of the rioting on 23 July 1866 when the park railings were broken), and in August 1867 Disraeli’s much amended Reform Bill passed into law. For Blackie and other opponents of reform it seemed as though their worst fears were being realised – one of his correspondents at this time was the author of a pamphlet entitled The Democratic Frankenstein.63 Even though the change left only one in three adult males with the vote, this was roughly double the previous figure, and the increase occurred almost entirely in boroughs. Blackie was less worried by the Third Reform Act of 1884 since it had the effect of increasing the number of rural voters, and it was the less deferential urban worker who was more a matter of concern to him. He continued, however, to advocate the representation of the group rather than individuals, as a means of protecting the interests of the educated and the propertied. ‘Every class should be represented, rather than every man in a class,’ he told members of the Edinburgh Philosophical Institute in December 1885. Universal suffrage was ‘unreasonable’: the equality of votes which democracy demands, on the principle that I am as good as you and perhaps a little better, is utterly false, and tends to nourish conceit and impertinence, to banish all reverence, and ignore all distinctions in society. Anyhow, there can be no doubt that great masses of men acting together on exciting occasions are peculiarly liable to hasty resolutions and violent opinions; all democracies, therefore, are unsafe which are unprovided with checks in the form of an upper chamber composed of the more cool materials, and planted firmly in a position that makes them independent of the fever and faction of the hour. A strong democracy stands as much in need of an aristocratic rein as a strong aristocracy does of a democratic spur.64

The ‘aristocracy’ would be one of brains, rather than birth, since ‘it must never be forgotten that the higher learning which it is the business of the universities to cherish is of the nature of an intellectual aristocracy’.65 A few years later when there was discussion of reform of the House of Lords, Blackie proposed its transformation into an unelected second chamber ‘on the model of the Roman Senate’, with ‘the ejection of the hereditary element’ and the appointment of ‘all the admirals of our fleets, the generals of our armies, the provosts and mayors of our burghs, the principals of our Universities, the presidents of our academies and learned societies, and the bishops and moderators of our Churches’.66 The only surprise is that he did not add professors to the list.

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By the 1870s Blackie was well-known as a political controversialist, poet and professor. His reputation as a university reformer stretched well beyond Scotland, so that a French or German visitor with an interest in education was likely to call on ‘Professor Blackie’ to learn at first-hand the good and bad points of the Scottish system.67 In 1876 he was featured in the Dublin University Magazine’s ‘Portrait Gallery’ series as ‘one of the most accomplished and versatile of living Scottish authors’. ‘His finely strung nature is cultured in a high degree, by habitual contemplation of all that is beautiful and good in nature, in literature, and in art’, indicating that he was ‘far more than a mere scholar’. In the photograph on the page facing, hand on hip, soft hat on his head, in surtout and shawl, Blackie looked every inch the literary man.68 Notes 1. Scottish Reminiscences (Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1904), p. 175. Geikie (1835–1924), later Professor of Geology, Edinburgh 1870, Director-General UK Geological Survey 1882–1901, President of the Royal Society 1908–13. Knighted 1891, OM 1914. 2. A. P. Laurie, Pictures and Politics (London: International Publishing Co., 1934), pp. 39–40. Arthur Pillans Laurie (1861–1949), son of the Professor of Education (S. S. Laurie), was Principal of Heriot-Watt College 1900–28. 3. J. Payn, Some Literary Recollections (London: Smith, Elder, 1884), p. 175. Thomas Holloway (1800–83) used his fortune to endow a ladies’ college at Egham, and an insane asylum at Virginia Water. 4. E. F. Harden (ed.), Selected Letters of William Makepeace Thackeray (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 302–3. G. N. Ray (ed.), Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), III, p. 457, IV, p. 40. W. A. Miller, The ‘Philosophical’: A Short History of the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution (Edinburgh: C. J. Consland & Sons, 1949), p. 16. 5. On Self-Culture, p. 83. NLS MS 2623 f. 252. 6. ‘Nether Lochaber’ [Rev. Alexander Stewart], ‘Professor Blackie: Part II’, Inverness Courier, 7 January 1898, p. 3a. 7. Blackie quoted in Strand Magazine, III (March 1892), 235. Carlyle’s comments in NLS MS 617 no. 724, MS 518 no. 17. ‘Speech is of Time, Silence is of Eternity.’ Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Book III, chapter 3. Cf. NLS MS 2625 f. 62. 8. NLS MS 2650 ff. 111–13 (May–July 1859). 9. J. A. Wilson, Memoir of George Wilson (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1860), p. 477. NUL N Mc 2/48/1. G. Wyld, Notes of My

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11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23. 24.

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Life (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1903), pp. 18–19. H. Lucy, ‘Sixty Years in the Wilderness. More Passages by the Way. V. Professor Blackie’, Cornhill Magazine, N. S. XXXII, 188 (February 1912), 259. T. Bayne, ‘Our Modern Poets II – The Scotch Professors’, St James’s Magazine, II (1876), 275. W. E. Aytoun and J. C. Shairp were professorpoets, as James Beattie, William Richardson and John Wilson had been. Stoddart, p. 207. ‘Shirley’ [John Skelton], ‘A Raid among the Rhymers’, FM, LXI, 366 (June 1860), 814–23. NLS MS 2625 f. 210. Blackie, University Reform (1848). G. Dunbar, A Defence of the Junior Humanity and Greek Classes in the University of Edinburgh (1848). J. Pillans, A Word for the Universities of Scotland (1848). Glasgow University Library MS 1746 A/9209. For his efforts in 1860, see W. W. Blackie, Walter Graham Blackie (London: Blackie and Sons, 1936), pp. 127–8. SEJ, II, 14 (November 1853), 73–8. William Mure (1799–1860), Tory MP for Renfrewshire 1846–55, wrote A Critical History of Greek Language and Literature (1850–7), George Finlay, A History of Greece (1844–61), James Clyde, Romaic and Ancient Greek (1855), William Veitch, Greek Verbs Irregular and Defective (1848). Francis Adams translated Hippocrates. Advancement of Learning, pp. 3–5, 10–13, 16–17, 21–9, 52, 54n. NBR, XXIII, 45 (May 1855), 91–2, 111. SEJ [N.S.], I, 11 (January 1857), 459–67. Robertson (1803–60) was professor from 1843. Henry Glassford Bell. NLS MS 2624 f. 66. Cf. NLS MS 2624 ff. 120, 139, 70, 72, 114 and MS 2643 f. 16. NLS MS 2624 f. 74 (Carlyle), MS 2625 f. 62 (John Hunter). NLS MS 2624 ff. 95, 99 (emphasis in original). The Commonwealth, 112 (17 November 1855), p. 4; 113 (24 November 1855), p. 4. Blackie, Advancement of Learning, pp. 16–17n., 45–6. Bayne (1830–96), a Free Church journalist and biographer of Hugh Miller (1871). His career suffered from the allegation that he was doctrinally unsound. G. E. Davie, The Democratic Intellect, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1964), pp. 232–42, has Blackie straddling both camps, but fails to register Blackie’s elitism, and claims (without much evidence) his sympathy for the general curriculum and the primacy of philosophy within it. 5 November 1857, quoted in R. D. Anderson, Education and Opportunity in Victorian Scotland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 56. R. Flint, ‘Biographical Notice’, in J. Lorimer, Studies National and International (Edinburgh: William Green, 1890), p. xii. J. Lorimer, ‘The Scottish Universities’, NBR, XIII, 26 (August 1850),

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29. 30. 31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36. 37.

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John Stuart Blackie 295–315; ‘Scottish University Reform’, ER, CVII, 217 (January 1858), 88ff. Anderson, Education and Opportunity, pp. 57–66. NBR, XXIII, 45 (May 1855), 99, On Self-Culture, p. 49. Davie, Democratic Intellect, p. 241. Cf. criticisms in Anderson, Education and Opportunity, pp. 329, 358–61. Charles Rogers. NLS MS 14304 f. 54. Anderson, Education and Opportunity, pp. 65–8. Inglis (1810–91), successively Solicitor-General, Lord Advocate (1852, 1858), Lord Justice Clerk (1858–67), Lord Justice General (1867–91). William Mure. NLS MS 4955 f. 220. Adam Black (Provost 1843–8, MP 1856–65), quoted in D.B. Horn, ‘The Universities (Scotland) Act of 1858’, UEJ, XIX, 3 (Spring 1959), 184. Like Hamilton, Blackie felt town council patronage was the least unsatisfactory, professorial the worst. Daily Courant, 18 April 1860, pp. 3–4. Advancement of Learning, pp. 4–5. Notes, pp. 161–3. Anderson, Education and Opportunity, p. 49. J. H. Bennett (Professor of the Institutes of Medicine 1848–74), quoted in Horn, ‘Universities (Scotland) Act’, 197. Ferrier, quoted in A. Thomson, Ferrier of St Andrews (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985), p. 102. D. B. Horn, A Short History of the University of Edinburgh 1556–1889 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967), pp. 150–4. S. Wallace, ‘ “The First Blast of the Trumpet”: John Stuart Blackie and the struggle against University Tests in Scotland, 1839–53’, History of Universities, XVI, 1 (2001), 171–2. Lister (1827–1912) succeeded his father-in-law (James Syme) in the Edinburgh chair of clinical surgery in 1869. Bennett (1812–76), Professor of the Institutes of Medicine 1848–76, failed to win the more lucrative chair of Physic, which went to Thomas Laycock, the first person without a Scottish training to win an Edinburgh medical chair. ‘Principalship of the University’ (April 1863), NLS Dep. 208 Box 21 F3 (cf. letters from Grant’s wife in Box 8). M. Simpson, Simpson the Obstetrician (London: Gollancz, 1972), pp. 270–1. Simpson (1811–70), Professor of Midwifery from 1839, Baronet 1866. Grant (1826–84) 8th Bart. of Dalvey, educated at Harrow and Balliol. Fellow of Oriel College 1859, then a career in Indian education 1859–68. On Carlyle’s rectorship NLS MS 2626 ff. 283–4, MS 1775C ff. 13, 18. Daily Courant, 3, 10, 11, 17, 18, 20 February 1860. GCA T-SK29/7 22/21. R.D. Anderson, M. Lynch and N. Phillipson, The University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), p. 140. Stirling-Maxwell (1818–78), landowner, historian of Spanish art, MP for Perthshire 1852–68, 1874–8. D. W. R. Bahlmann (ed.), Diary of Sir Edward Walter Hamilton 1880–1885 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), II, p. 498. H. C. G.

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43. 44.

45.

46. 47.

48. 49.

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Matthew (ed.), Gladstone Diaries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), XI, p. 43. NLS MS 2635 f. 35. BL Add. MS 46251 f. 129. Anderson, Lynch and Phillipson, University of Edinburgh, p. 108. Blackie, To . . . The Town-Council of Edinburgh, p. 13. In 1854 the poet Alexander Smith (1830–67) succeeded Blair Wilson (John Wilson’s son) as secretary and registrar. C. P. Finlayson, ‘The Symposium Academicum’, in G. Donaldson (ed.), Four Centuries: Edinburgh University Life 1583–1983 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983), pp. 71–91. See accounts, dining and membership lists 1868–83, NLS MS 2664. Stoddart, pp. 170–1, 384–5. In 1865 he ordered four dozen of Hymettus red and white, Patras white, Boutza, St Elias, Santorin. NLS MS 2626 f. 274. NLS MS 2626 ff. 76, 172. Lorimer, quoted in Anderson, Education and Opportunity, p. 329. R. L. Orr, Lord Guthrie: A Memoir (London: Hodder and Stoughton 1923), pp. 40–2. ‘Eric’, Edinburgh Sketches and Miscellanies (Edinburgh: Menzies, 1884), pp. 49–51. Gavin Ogilvie [J. M. Barrie], An Edinburgh Eleven, 3rd edn (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1896), pp. 31–2. W.S. Dalgleish in J. D. T. Hall (ed.), The Tounis College (Edinburgh: Friends of Edinburgh University Library, 1985), p. 204. On Self-Culture, pp. 20, 41–2, 49, 52, 68, 86, 89. Brewster (principal), Fraser (Logic and Metaphysics), Laurie (Education), Laycock (Practice of Physic), Lee (Biblical Criticism), Masson (English), Playfair (Chemistry). S. Hamilton, ‘Women and the Scottish Universities c. 1869–1939: A Social History’, Ph.D. thesis (Edinburgh University 1987), p. 52. Jex-Blake (1840–1912) had studied medicine in New York under Elizabeth Blackwell. Christison (1797–1882), Professor of Medical Jurisprudence 1822–32, Materia Medica 1832–77, Queen’s Physician 1848. Baronet 1871. Hamilton, ‘Women and the Scottish Universities’, pp. 30–49, 92. J. K. Borthwick, ‘A famous Scotch professor’, UEJ, XXXIII, 2 (December 1987), 103–4. M. Todd, Life of Sophia Jex-Blake (London: Macmillan, 1918), pp. 239, 302–3, 555–63. NLS MS 2643 f. 187. NLS MS 2629 ff. 184, 301–3, MS 2630 ff. 13, 43, 97, 116, 231 (Jex-Blake letters). Anderson, Education and Opportunity, pp. 255–7, 276 n.58. B. and P. Russell (eds), The Amberley Papers (London: Hogarth Press, 1937), II, pp. 34–5. NLS MS 2634 f. 209. J. H. Burton. NLS MS 9392 f. 19. Letters, p. 108. Repr. in Glasgow Herald, 21 April 1860, p. 4d. NLS MS 4097 f. 137 (January 1852). James Bryce (1867) quoted in C.

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59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

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John Stuart Blackie Harvie, Lights of Liberalism (London: Allen Lane, 1976), p. 150. Cf. Grote in F. M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 213–44. NLS 2627 ff. 115, 156, 168, 175–7, 187, 196. Notes, pp. 215–29. Edmond Beales, President of the Reform League. Rummelgumption: Scots for common sense, level-headedness. Ernest Charles Jones (1819–69), named after Ernst, Duke of Cumberland, to whom his father was equerry. Bankrupted himself buying an estate, turned to Chartism, and was imprisoned for sedition and unlawful assembly 1848–50. The only major Chartist leader active after 1852. Editor of The People’s Paper, and defence counsel in many political cases. Democracy: A Debate ([1867] 1885), pp. 44–6. On Democracy went through six editions in a fortnight. Cf. M. Taylor, Ernest Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 222–4. NLS MS 2628 f. 44 (H. L. Mansel). NLS MS 2628 ff. 111, 226. Blackie, On Forms of Government (1867). Notes, pp. 230–5. NLS MS 2627 f. 189 (J. Whitehead). Blackie, What Does History Teach? (1886), pp. 59–60. A Letter to the People of Scotland (1888), p. 18. NLS MS 10279 f. 163. ABS 9.203.01. NLS MS 2622 f. 167, MS 2628 f. 143, MS 2629 ff. 36, 43, MS 2643 f. 92. L. A. Wiese, German Letters on English Education Written During a Tour in 1876 (London: Collins, 1877), and German Letters on English Education (London: Longmans, 1854). The latter was much quoted in Blackie’s On the Advancement of Learning, pp. 32–4. The Frenchman was Henri Montucci who wrote on Scottish secondary and university education 1868–70. DUM, LXXXVIII (April 1876), 404. See Fig. 7.

9 THE SOUTHRONS 1 On a visit to Scotland in 1858, the German writer Theodor Fontane was much struck by the behaviour of a ‘Scottish sailor’ employed at Edinburgh Castle to fire salutes on royal birthdays. The old salt had ticked off an officious young sentry from an English regiment who had forbidden Fontane’s friend to sketch the view, and then had begun to complain to them about the English. ‘The funny thing was that his Scottish patriotism caused him to treat these Southrons as enemies,’ Fontane wrote, ‘as though there was no such thing as a Kingdom of Great Britain, and victorious England had once more appeared to put its garrison into the conquered Scottish capital.’ Far from being an isolated incident, ‘this feeling of conflict between conquerors and conquered’ was something he ‘encountered very often’ during his tour of romantic and picturesque Scotland.1 Had he come across Blackie, he might well have heard the same complaints. Irritation with the English was a leitmotiv in his speeches from the public platform, and in his private correspondence. In a letter to his sister Kit from Berlin in February 1830, he described the idle English tourists ‘who swarm over the Channel merely because they have nothing to do, or can do nothing at home’: What you ask about John Bull is easily answered. John Bull is John Bull everywhere – dinner at 6, breakfast at 10, and speaks no German. To understand this properly you must be informed that the Englishman is not everywhere a great favourite on the Continent. He is proud, selfish, and has a mercantile spirit; thinks no land capable of comparison with his own; and gives himself exceedingly little trouble to accommodate himself in his wide and extended roamings to foreign customs and foreign tongues, or learning anything of vital importance about the country he visits.

In a similar vein, Blackie advised his future brother-in-law, who in 1832 was leaving for Germany and Italy, to ‘beware of associating too much with the swarms of silly Englishmen who are always buzzing about on the Continent like so many drone-bees’. Thirty years on,

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Göttingen still seemed preferable as a place of study rather than Heidelberg or Bonn, both of which had ‘the disadvantage of being much frequented by the English’ – which meant ‘not the studious, but the unsettled, lounging, and for various reasons, Continentalising, English, a dangerous companionship for a certain class of young men, and not particularly desirable for any’.2 The belief that Scots had more in common with the Continentals than with the ‘Southrons’, was commonly held. ‘The Scotchman exhibits less of the insular character, and sympathizes more readily with the German or Frenchman than the Englishman. Our faith is the same with that professed by a large proportion of the Continental Protestants,’ James Lorimer wrote in 1850. Blackie would have agreed with this, and with the belief in ‘the superior thoughtfulness and intelligence of the Scottish character, as compared with that of the other British races’. He differed only in being less interested in the ‘Auld Alliance’, and more interested in the new. Had not Goethe told Carlyle that Scots studied Germany more closely than anyone else? Abroad an Englishman would stick to his own kind, but ‘the plain Scot fraternises more easily with the homely German’, Blackie wrote in 1871.3 By this time the practice of British students going to study in Germany had become more common than when Blackie made his extended Continental tour. The Scots figured disproportionately in this migration because more of them attended university (compared to the English), the Scottish university session lasted only six months (until 1908), making summer study in Germany easier, and, as Lorimer suggested, they shared with Germany a tradition of reformed Protestant theology. Conversely, Anglicanism, social ‘exclusiveness’, and the scholarships and prize fellowships offered by Oxford and Cambridge, explain why the proportion of English students was not higher.4 Blackie’s dislike of Oxford amounted to something of an obsession. If he did not quite rise to the heights of Hugh Miller, whose experience in 1845 of a High Church Anglican service put him in mind of ‘maggots developed into flies by artificial heat amid the chills of winter’,5 ‘Puseyite’ was still Blackie’s favourite term of abuse when describing Oxford before the mid-century reforms.6 In the 1850s Blackie seemed to soften. He exchanged ideas on university reform with Benjamin Jowett, Thorold Rogers and other Oxford liberals. ‘I wish to learn to love them, as much as may be,’ he wrote. In late May 1857, nine years after his first visit, he joined James Ferrier and ‘the whole bevy’ of female Ferriers in Oxford. The publication of the Oxford Essays by reform-minded dons suggested a ‘germ of new life’ which would ‘bear

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fruits in the next generation’, but there were also the traditional pleasures, like dining at high table. On ‘the Oriel barge’ he met the future Principal of Edinburgh University, Sir Alexander Grant, and at the final night of amateur theatricals in Wadham College he ‘sang . . . a German students’ song mounted on his chair with one foot on the table’.7 After Oxford, Blackie travelled with Eliza to Heidelberg to see Bunsen, and, when she left at the end of August for Bonn, he made a brief trip to Berlin. He visited his old friend Gerhard, and ‘took tea . . . with the three brothers Grimm’, two of them folklorists and philologists, the other a painter.8 He saw the great names of the Berlin university world, Boeckh, Ritter, Ranke and others, and was highly impressed by what he saw of leading secondary schools. The previous two summers had been spent in much the same way – Eliza taking up residence in the spa town of Liebenstein, and Blackie making visits to Bunsen in Heidelberg, and professors in Halle and Berlin.9 Every contact with German university men reminded him that Oxford, even after the recent reforms, was something less than a German university. ‘Some persons say that your heart has softened towards us since you paid us a visit,’ Jowett wrote in November 1860, but every contact with Oxford reminded Blackie that it still had more wealth than Edinburgh and all the Scottish universities put together. ‘Our University is prospering upon the whole,’ he wrote to George Finlay in January 1868. ‘We are getting some money, and that is what is chiefly wanted. The Greek that I create or help to create has at least a soul in it: and that is more than can be said generally of British Greek. Oxonians are beginning now to stink even in their own nostrils,’ perhaps a reference to Mark Pattison’s highly critical book, Suggestions on Academical Organization (1868).10 The report of the 1877 Royal Commission on Oxford and Cambridge provided the opportunity for more advice to the English, from ‘an old academical soldier’. Blackie’s article in Macmillan’s Magazine was notable for its unbridled enthusiasm for the German university, ‘by far the most perfect type of the Academical Corporation at present in the world’, and for a vision of higher education which owed something to the Prussian victory at Sedan: The professors are the commander-in-chief and the generals who plan the campaign and direct the movements; they are supreme; whether present or absent, their influence must be everywhere felt, and their commands implicitly obeyed; they are not to be the slaves of a government board, or an examination board, or a board of the heads of houses; for all directing and controlling, fashioning and moulding purposes, they are the university, and can admit of no superior, any more than the bishops in the

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Church, or the chiefs of the clan in the Highlands clan system. Whatever other persons exercising teaching functions may exist in a university, whether as assistants, demonstrators, readers, fellows of colleges, or teaching graduates, are the captains or sergeants of the professorial commander-in-chief, and must be absolutely at his disposal.

To invert this order, as in Oxford where the tutorial system left professors without a role, was ‘to thwart the course of nature’, a side-swipe at Jowett and the 1877 commissioners who advocated an improved collegiate system, not a professorial university along German lines. This, together with Blackie’s customary reference to ‘shoals of young men brought up in habits of idleness and self-indulgence, with no proper academical vocation’, and the ‘immense funds’ of colleges ‘squandered to satisfy the claims of nepotism and all sorts of illegitimate personal preference’,11 help explain why relations between Blackie and Jowett cooled. They had never really been warm. ‘I hope you in Oxford don’t think we hate you,’ Blackie had said to Jowett when he visited Edinburgh in 1866. ‘We don’t think about you,’ was the impassive reply.12 Oxford proved resistant to the arguments of ‘Professor Blackie’, as it had to so many others. ‘In some ways an interesting parallel might be drawn between Oxford and Sodom. But I think the traditions of the place will keep it on its legs for some time yet,’ was the wise advice from one of Blackie’s former students, now carving out a brilliant career south of the Border.13 Another, whose distinguished academic career would culminate in a chair at St Andrews, asked, ‘But why do you always abuse us poor Scotsmen who have been to Oxford?’,14 which was also the question asked by Jowett’s former pupil (and later biographer), Lewis Campbell, a ‘Balliol Scot’ from Glasgow University: Why do you go on calling us names? By ‘us’ I do not mean Oxonians generally; they ‘don’t think about you’, as Jowett said one day. But your compatriots who have been yonder cannot be so indifferent. Many are of the genus perfervidum, and you have hurt them both in their feelings and their reputation. Your luck took you to Göttingen; mine took me to Oxford. I have since returned and laboured for Scotland and for Greek. I may now say without boasting that my name is favourably known in Germany and in America. But I am still more or less an alien in my fatherland. And I owe this to the cry which you have raised and others have taken up. It is not the iteration, but the iteration of abuse which we resent. And why do you go about decrying the pursuit which you yourself at one time professed? If the teaching of Greek is vanity, it matters little how it is taught, but that is by the way. The ‘harmless drudge’ who is still

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engaged in doing it owes little to you for continually denouncing his industry.15

By this time, Blackie had retired from his Edinburgh chair, though the Oxford bee in his bonnet still buzzed as loudly. At least it left Blackie with little to say about Cambridge. A friend from that university once incautiously asked whether a review by Blackie of a recent scholarly work was ‘calculated to give us Southerners the notion that you praise a book chiefly because its author is a Scotchman who has not been to Oxford’. His gentle reminder to Blackie that Oxford prizes were also ‘open to all Scotchmen’, and that the leading Cambridge classicist H. A. J. Munro was Scottish,16 would have done nothing to placate Blackie, since it was the siphoning off of Scottish talent which infuriated him. An Englishman in an Edinburgh chair could be borne if the chair were medical and the man had been trained north of the Border. Joseph Lister passed on both these counts, and his decision in March 1877 to turn down a chair at King’s College, London, had Blackie breaking into verse. ‘To Professor Lister. On Learning His Determination not to Leave Edinburgh for London’ was a celebration of a man choosing his adopted country over all blandishments: . . . When the Southrons laid Their golden snare for thee, and every charm Of that gross-monstered Babylon displayed, To lure thee from thy station for our harm, Thou didst stand firm. For this my humble rhyme Thee honours, and Edina gives thee place High-perched, with the prime patterns of her race.

There followed a list of the great names of Edinburgh medicine from the past, with those of Lister and the recently deceased James Young Simpson. Lister did not ‘stand firm’ in the face of a second offer later the same year, which allowed him to take with him to King’s College his house-surgeon, senior assistant and two dressers, and assured an income adequate for the expense of living in London.17 This was a sign of that ‘Londonisation’ which had struck the Edinburgh literary scene much earlier. Blackie was inclined to play to the gallery when expressing antiEnglish sentiments before a Scottish audience, but only some of it was pose. He had helped gather subscriptions for the proposed Wallace monument in Stirling, including one from W. E. Gladstone’s elder brother,18 and was a speaker at the Edinburgh meeting in late November 1856 to launch the project. At the banquet in Corn

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Exchange Hall in Stirling, after the laying of the foundation stone ‘with due masonic solemnity’ on 24 June 1861, an over-excited Blackie followed the toast to ‘the British Empire’ with one to ‘Scottish Literature’, saying, ‘if the choice were to be made between two alternatives, classical education and Scottish song, I for my share of the business would say at once, burn Homer, burn Aristotle, fling Thucydides into the sea’. He had been provoked by the ‘Cockney prejudice’ of an editorial in The Times which had questioned the historical existence of William Wallace, beginning with the words ‘Scotland is manifestly a country in want of a grievance’, and concluding that ‘Scotch Lords and professors and men of letters . . . continually harping on their nationality and their historical renown’ were evidence of ‘provincialism’ and a ‘general poverty of thought’. Many of the criticisms were those that Blackie had been making – the weakness of secondary schools and universities, the relative absence of scholars amongst the Scottish clergy, the theological ‘cliques’ – but coming from the leading English newspaper he found them intolerable. Not for the last time, Blackie reacted by making silly statements on a public platform.19 Six months later he was poking fun at the ‘great stupidity and ignorance’ of the English, and, in deference to his audience at the Glasgow Athenaeum, also at ‘the young gentlemen in Edinburgh who were Anglified puppies, who grew up without ever hearing a word of Robert Burns in the schools’. This time the lecture on ‘Scottish Nationality’ managed to avoid the choice between the Odyssey and ‘Auld Lang Syne’, and dealt instead with the recently published third volume of H. T. Buckle’s much-acclaimed History of Civilization in England (1861). Apart from disagreeing with Buckle’s criticism of Scottish thought for being deductive rather than inductive (truer, he felt, of ‘the speculative and transcendental’ Germans), Blackie objected to a picture of a Scotland dominated by ‘a sour and fanatical spirit, an aversion to gaiety, a disposition to limit the enjoyment of others . . . hardly to be found anywhere else’, outside Catholic Spain. He dismissed Buckle’s claim that the Disruption had revived ‘the old feelings of religious intolerance’ as the ‘Calvinistic religious bugbear of small Cockney minds’,20 though twenty years earlier he had repeatedly described ‘the Scotch’ as ‘the most priest-ridden people in Europe’. It was the fact that the criticisms had been made by an Englishman (and, worse still, a self-educated London secularist) that provoked him. Blackie was also now far more sympathetic to Presbyterianism than he had been in the 1840s when he had flirted with Unitarianism. He strongly resisted the idea of the Disestablishment of the Church of Scotland as a threat to a Scottish tradition, and from the early 1850s

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publicly embraced political nationalism, though without rejecting union with England. In October 1864 Blackie was among 3,000 signatories to a petition organised by William Burns of the Glasgow St Andrews Society, protesting against the official use of the terms ‘England’ and ‘English’ instead of ‘Great Britain’ and ‘United Kingdom’. Burns had begun his campaign ten years earlier with a letter to The Times denouncing Lord Palmerston’s 1853 rectorial address at Glasgow University which had ‘insulted Scotland’ by using the expressions ‘England’ and ‘Englishmen’. His protests against the use of ‘Scotch’ for ‘Scottish’ was the object of much derision in The Scotsman, but the Scottish press gradually ceased to use the offending terms,21 something which Blackie himself often forgot to do. When the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights (NAVSR) was launched in April 1853, Blackie was in Athens. There is no evidence that he joined it before its demise in 1855, but he shared many of the resentments which led to its formation: delays to Scottish legislation at Westminster, interventions by the (English) Privy Council in the separate Scottish system of schooling, the lack of parliamentary representation for Scottish universities (along the lines enjoyed by Oxford and Cambridge), and the under-funding of universities.22 What Blackie and the NASVR wanted was for Scotland to be treated according to the terms of the 1707 settlement; what they did not like was administrative ‘centralisation’, and the growing power of a ‘parliamentary state’ which did not attend to Scottish business sensitively or promptly at Westminster. Instead of a Scottish Lord Advocate (under an English Home Secretary) juggling political, administrative and legal roles, the NASVR demanded the ‘restoration’ of the post of Secretary for Scotland, as well as an increase in the number of Scots MPs at Westminster. The goal of Blackie and other Scottish nationalists in the middle decades of the nineteenth century was thus ‘more union not less’.23 This is clear from his attempt to define ‘Scottish nationality’, starting from the same question Ernst Renan was famously to pose a few years later in 1882: What is a nation? . . . A certain combination of internal forces and external influences, tending to produce unity of thought, feeling and action, in any considerable congregation of human beings, resulting in a certain marked type of social humanity, makes a people; to which, if there be added the recognition of some common independent authority, and submission to common laws under a penalty, we have a nation. Every people, therefore, is not a nation; but every nation is a people or an association of peoples. . . . [In] this strict and proper sense of the word, it is quite certain

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that Scotland is not a nation; but neither is England nor Ireland. There is a Scottish people, an English people, and an Irish people; but neither of these in itself is a nation; each of them is only part of a nation – that is, the British nation. By a Scottish nationality, therefore, we . . . mean only the distinctive social type of the Scottish people, and the constitutional rights and privileges belonging to them as a separate and recognized aggregate of the British nation. And if the word nationality can be used in reference to any people not having a separate and independent supreme authority, it may with the strongest right be used of the Scotch, as contrasted with the English.

The reason for this was that the union of 1707 had been between ‘two separate and independent political bodies . . . not the adsorption of the one by the other, as when Rome conquered Greece’,24 or as when England conquered Ireland.25 This was an example of what has been termed ‘unionist-nationalism’, the ideal of two ‘peoples’ (to use Blackie’s term), each with its own distinctive ‘civil society’ of church, law and education, both enjoying equal status within the union. When, like many Scots, he was caught up in the popular imperialism of the 1870s and 1880s, Blackie simply added the element of Empire to the notion of twin identities, Scottish and British. ‘Greater Britain’ was an enterprise in which Scots should have an equal share with the English. ‘I shall never cease to thank God that . . . I have become a citizen of an Empire as great in the modern world as the Roman was in the old,’ Blackie wrote, but it should be ‘as an equal partner in the business, not as a flunkey to wait upon his Lord’. If the business of running this empire involved war, then so be it. ‘War should be recognised as one of God’s ordinances’, ‘a great training school, not only of nationality but of moral virtues’.26 Blackie had always been an enthusiast for war. During the Crimean War he had lectured on ‘the philosophy of war’. As Prussian troops were invading Danish territory in April 1864, he treated his audience at the Royal Institution in London, who had come to hear him on Homer, to a ‘eulogy’ on the idea ‘a great national war’ ‘according to the order of Providence’ (at least one member of the audience walked out). ‘In peace every one looks to himself,’ he told Eliza, but war had the effect of making ‘all men unite in well-ordered ranks for a common cause’. On another occasion, quoting Aristotle’s view that ‘the military art contained a great part of virtue’, he asked ‘Was it [war] not full of endurance, of self-denial, of self-sacrifice? Was it not full of blazing virtues, in comparison with our shopkeeper’s virtues?’ Late in life he felt no embarrassment in claiming that ‘the horrors of war, though they

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strike the imagination more’ were ‘less degrading to humanity than the systematic lies and adulterations habitually practised among certain classes of tradesmen and shopkeepers’.27 To the ignorance of an armchair warrior was added nostalgia for a society based on ‘patriotic virtue and unselfish energy’, rooted in Blackie’s reading of classical antiquity. It reminds one of what were later known as the ‘ideas of 1914’, the acceptance of war as a means of enforcing a Burgfriede or truce in social and party conflict. Blackie’s view of war ‘as a school of manhood, and a discipline of virtue’ was not unusual amongst late nineteenth-century British intellectuals, but in his case it derived more from a ‘drums and trumpets’ view of history, than from Social Darwinism. Just as Scotland in the past had fought off foreign invasion to establish its national identity, so his ‘second Vaterland and Mutterland’ Germany was doing in the nineteenth century. Blackie had been an enthusiast for the first liberal phase of German nationalism in the 1830s and 1840s, and saw no reason to change his views now that nationalist goals were being pursued in the 1860s and 1870s through Bismarck’s ‘little wars’. His reasoning was that of Realpolitik, rather than racial theory, though the conclusion was much the same: ‘the foundation of all nationalities had been laid by means of great wars’.28 In 1870 ‘the grave verdict of Providence in a matter of indisputable fact’, was that the French were the aggressors, a view shared by other British intellectuals, most notably Carlyle, though Blackie was amongst its more extreme exponents. Even his otherwise admiring biographer, Anna Stoddart, felt that his ‘enthusiasm for the war-makers’ seemed ‘to border on extravagance’.29 His contribution to the war-effort was War Songs of the Germans (1870), copies of which were sent to Queen Victoria and her daughter, the Crown Princess of Prussia, as well as to German friends. It had been put together on one of Blackie’s Highland holidays, and was dedicated to Carlyle, ‘my old and esteemed friend’. He privately considered the translations ‘blusterous’, but wrote to Blackie praising them: ‘The songs go thundering along with a furious tramp of battle in them; and I suppose if one could sing, would be very musical and heart-inspiring.’30 To the ‘war-songs of the German Liberation war in 1813–14’ Blackie added those connected with Rhine boundary question. With the ‘Burschen melodies’, they represented the Volkslied he considered an important vehicle of national identity. ‘What Homer was, as a common symbol to the ancient Greeks, the war songs of 1813 are to the modern Germans.’31 As a unionist-nationalist Blackie naturally expected that ‘every true Scotsman’ would sing ‘The Battle of the Nile’, or ‘Steady, Boys, Steady’,

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with no less enthusiasm than ‘Scots Wha Hae’ or ‘Auld Lang Syne’, but he was troubled by what he saw as the marginalisation of ‘Scottish song’ in the cultural homogenisation of nineteenth-century Britain. Next to ‘Scottish sermons’, he wrote, the songs of Burns were ‘the most efficient forces expressive of our character as a people’. The Scots language ‘by the necessary course of British culture’ was dying, but in ‘a healthy system of education . . . the songs of Scotland should be habitually sung in all our highest schools, gymnasiums, and colleges’.32 Blackie’s campaign in 1876 for ‘national song and national story’ caused much hilarity in the columns of Edinburgh newspapers, and exasperation to potential sympathisers like Carlyle, who complained to his brother, ‘you have seen a loose blether of a letter about the cultivation of Scotch Music in schools, which is a subject that I wish I could find a better advocate than blethering Blackie’. It won approval in the Scottish diaspora – a ‘manly blast . . . sounded for Scotia’s Harp’, wrote an exile from Hong Kong – but caused problems with Blackie’s colleague, the Professor of Music at Edinburgh, the Oxford-educated son of an English baronet. Sir Herbert S. Oakeley complained to a friend, ‘Blackie has broken out again, & has started up another agitation which seems likely to equal if not surpass “the former shout” ’. Local journalists knew to expect a good story if ‘Professor Blackie’ were involved, and Blackie got the publicity he desired.33 The emphasis on ‘Scottish song’ and ballad poetry as constituent elements of ‘Scottishness’ suggested something of Renan’s ‘nation’ defined as ‘a living soul, a spiritual principle’, a ‘common possession of a rich heritage of memories’,34 but Blackie often descended into sentimentality. The cult of tartanry was never far away, sometimes literally, as in the case of a MacDonald appealing for his assistance in combating the ‘ignoble and insulting practice’ of providing tartan carpets for ‘English visitors to walk upon’, ‘the fashion having been set by the ever detestable Campbells’.35 In situations like this, or in the heat of the moment on the lecture-platform, or in full flight in a letter to a newspaper editor, Blackie’s Scots fervour sometimes threatened to break through the bounds of his unionist-nationalism, but in the end William Wallace or Robert Bruce would be enrolled in the story of Britain and its empire, and presented as a champions of ‘British’ freedom. The Wallace monument in Stirling, completed in 1869, was once likened by Blackie to the ‘stone testimonies to the merits of the mighty dead’ of ancient Rome, yet what it calls to mind is the Hermannsdenkmal on a hill in the Teutoburg Forest, a memorial to another national hero, Arminius, who defeated the Romans in AD 9.36 Plans in 1859 for a

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monument to Wallace and Bruce in Edinburgh failed to materialise, but forty years later there was a large demonstration at Bannockburn on the 575th anniversary of the battle. Blackie, as ‘Scotsman of Scotsmen’, was given the honour of unfurling a flag, said to the world’s largest, on the 120-foot three-ton iron flagstaff, on the spot where Robert Bruce had raised his standard in 1314. He described this as ‘one of the three most elevating and inspiring popular demonstrations’ he had witnessed. ‘The other two were the entry of the Prussian troops into Berlin after the conclusion of the Franco-German war, and the celebration of the Queen’s Jubilee.’37 At the end of the university session in 1871, Blackie decided to view the victory parade in Berlin, the capital of a new German Empire. En route from Edinburgh, he stopped in London for ten days, and ‘fired off a rousing lecture on war to a Sunday evening audience’, and one on Darwinism at the Royal Institution, before embarking for Antwerp on 30 April. He called on Bernays in Bonn, climbed some peaks of the nearby Drachenfels, and made a pilgrimage to the grave of Chevalier Bunsen. At Cassel he penned ‘a couple of sonnets’ after a visit to the Wilhelmshöhe where ‘the imperial gambler’ Napoleon III had been detained after the French capitulation at Sedan. A week in Göttingen enabled him to meet the professors, attend lectures, and read up on ‘Prussian politics and history’ in the university library. In the evening he took ‘tea and cognac with Dr. Pauli’, but found the other professors ‘sadly deficient in the dignified aristocratic outlook of the English gentleman’, with ‘a sort of dry wizened look’ he did not remember from his youth. He travelled on to Eisleben, where he saw a train carrying French prisoners back home, leaving behind the graves of 150 of their comrades. It moved him, but did not shake his belief in the rightness of the German cause. By the time he got to Berlin in the middle of May, he was ready to admire the Reichstag and other new ‘imperial’ buildings, judging them ‘above all praise especially when contrasted with the vile taste of the Sans Souci and the other palaces erected under French influences’. From the visitors’ gallery of the Lower House he spotted Bismarck sitting in the chamber with other members from the Upper House, and then saw him ‘quite close on the street afterwards, with his military cloak and white cuirassier cap on his head’. He dined with one of Bunsen’s sons and gave him a copy of his Bismarck sonnet to give to ‘the most powerful man in Europe’. Since the victory parade was not due to take place until mid-June, he now decided on a quick visit to Russia. He left Berlin on 23 May, stopping first at Königsberg in East Prussia to

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call on professors and pay ‘due homage’ to Immanuel Kant’.38 How Blackie squared his ‘homage’ to the author of Zum ewigen Frieden (1795) with his own belief in war, was one of the mysteries left unresolved as he crossed the Russian frontier. He arrived in St Petersburg on 26 May, the long train-journey eased by the discovery that tea ‘piping hot in a tumbler, with a slice of lemon’ was a ‘great improvement’ on the Scottish brew. With letters of introduction to the British ambassador and the British consul, he was able to dine out for a week in the company of diplomats and their wives, and on one occasion with Count Davidoff, who had been one Dunbar’s students in Edinburgh.39 Blackie was in his element, and wrote to Eliza, ‘I have this morning notes from half a dozen princesses!!!! eager for the poor Pro to dine with them. I took tea with three of them yesterday at the [Tsarskoe] Palace, and came back with them in the railway.’ He gave ‘instructive and intoned reading to the princesses in Greek’; one of them was ‘an excellent Greek scholar’. By 1 June he was in Moscow, admiring ‘the truly strange, wonderful, and grand’ view ‘from the esplanade of the Kremlin’. It was like standing ‘on the Castle Hill, Edinburgh’, except that there was ‘a perfect forest of gilded domes and green roofs . . . glancing in the sun like in a fairy tale’, with close at hand ‘gleaming globes of gold topping a whole museum of thrice holy churches, intermingled with all sorts of towers and pyramids and cones and long stretches of palatial architecture’. It was ‘to a grey Scotsman like entering heaven for the first time’. His Presbyterianism survived the visual assault of Orthodox Christianity, but his appearance at a service in the Cathedral of the Assumption ‘excited attention’, leading to reports in the Moscow Gazette that he was in fact a leading French politician. Copies were despatched to Eliza in Edinburgh, with translations provided by his former student Donald Mackenzie Wallace, now the Moscow correspondent of The Times and his expert guide to the city. Returning to St Petersburg, he visited the monastery of St Sergius, Kronstadt – ‘the Greenock of St. Petersburg’ – and the Hermitage, where he was particularly struck by the Rembrandts, ‘the perfection of art, not second to Velasquez, and beyond Raphael and Michael Angelo’. It had been ‘worth travelling 3,000 miles to see these pictures alone’.40 He returned to Berlin via Warsaw and the ‘bog and forest and sand’ of the North European plain, in time to witness the three-hour march-past (Einzug) of forty to fifty thousand Prussian troops on 16 June from a viewing-platform in front of the University. ‘It was a wonderful sight to see’,

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billow after billow of armed warriors coming out of the Linden and spreading out to a glittering ocean in the great open square. . . . Flags of all kinds, and paintings with pious and patriotic mottoes taken from popular songs and the royal speeches, with gigantic emblematic statues at the principal entrances, all combined to give the grey North for a day the aspect of a Southern city – a Rome, a Naples, or a Madrid on a festal day.

The bad weather of ‘the grey North’ continued on his return journey to Edinburgh via Hamburg and Leith, as did the skin irritation which was a sign he had been overdoing things. In Edinburgh he collected his books on the Franco-Prussian War to study during the remainder of the summer at Oban. Here he found Eliza ‘suffering from nervous depression, to which she had become more than ever prone’.41 Blackie set to work on articles describing his tour, using the opportunity to publicise his new enthusiasm for conscription. In the 1840s he had opposed the Prussian system of ‘military drilling’, but its role in the victory of 1871 had been decisive. History would show ‘that the universal arming of the people . . . was a part of social organisation equally congruous with Spartan discipline, Athenian freedom, Roman strength, and Christian grace’. There is an echo here of the opening sections of Ruskin’s lecture on ‘War’, first published in The Crown of Wild Olive (1866), though Blackie (unlike Ruskin) rather admired the technological progress which had ensured Prussian victory. In Britain, he wrote, ‘this admirable system of national soldiership’ would help ‘in potentiating the patriotism, in improving the physical fibre, and in giving firmness to the reins of a healthy social discipline’ in ‘this nativeseat of rank individualism and inorganic liberty’. Blackie was not the only exponent of ‘compulsory military drilling’ in the 1870s, nor was he alone in his admiration for the way in which Prussia had been shaped by ‘manly characters’ like Stein, and more recently by ‘the farsighted intelligence, manly purpose, firm will, strong hand, and astute management’ of Bismarck.42 Impatience with parliamentary democracy and a preference for strong leaders permeated the British intelligentsia in the later nineteenth century. It was a common complaint that British politicians exhibited either the ‘moral baseness’ of Disraeli, who sacrificed principles to political advantage in deciding to extend the franchise in 1867, or the tendency ‘to over-estimate the goodness of human nature’, as in Gladstone’s attacks on British foreign policy in the Balkans in the 1870s. Blackie always claimed to be a Liberal, but his was the liberalism of the Nationalliberale Partei of Bismarck’s Germany, rather than that of the Gladstonian party. ‘A warlike attitude is the best guarantee for peace,’ he wrote in response to an article

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by Gladstone which had accused Disraeli of breaking international law, ignoring the rights of other states, and using imperial expansion as a distraction from problems at home.43 Rather oddly for a philhellene, this meant that Blackie was now closer to the pro-Turkish Tories. On Ireland it was the same. Blackie started from a position of sympathy with the Irish peasant whose interests, like those of the Highland crofter, had been neglected by absentee landlords and a ‘foreign’ government, but this changed with the introduction of Gladstone’s Irish Home Rule Bill in June 1886. Now, instead of damning the history of Britain in Ireland as ‘a system of oppression and repression, perhaps unexampled in Europe’,44 Blackie turned on ‘a rash and illadvised and dangerous measure’, driven forward by Gladstone’s ‘speculative tendency’, his desire ‘to control a real world from a purely ideal point of view’, his ‘intellectual despotism’. The ‘ideal was great, a stroke of genius on paper, but it did not fit the people’. The Irish were ‘fretful, feverish, disaffected, and disunited’, and self-government could only be entrusted to ‘a well-compacted, well-affected, sober, sensible, moderate, and well-conducted people’45 – in other words, the Scots. Gladstone had accepted ‘Home Rule all round’, for Wales and Scotland as well as Ireland, but the idea of replacing the union with a new federal structure was soon forgotten The Irish MPs at Westminster presented a more pressing problem to resolve. Scottish Liberals seemed happy with the concession in 1885 of a new ministerial post (Secretary of State for Scotland), even if it did not carry membership of the British cabinet (until 1892), and had its headquarters in London (until 1939). ‘I have not as yet seen any facts to lead me to suppose the H. R. [Home Rule] movement in Scotland likely to take any dangerous shape,’ Gladstone wrote to a Scottish Liberal. ‘I feel every confidence that Scotland will make up her mind quietly & cautiously, whatever Blackie may do & that England will not fight against a deliberate demand from beyond the Tweed.’ Gladstone was accurate in his estimate both of Blackie, whom he had known for over twenty years, and Scotland, one of whose constituencies he now represented in parliament.46 The ‘fretful’ and ‘disaffected’ Irish were more effective in gaining concessions from the British government than the ‘sober’, ‘sensible’, and ‘moderate’ Scots. During the early 1880s Blackie was involved in the successful campaign to preserve old Scottish regimental colours, and in the drive by William Leask’s Scottish National Rights Association to purge ‘the unnational dirt’ from school textbooks.47 By the latter was meant the predominance of English history in the curriculum, something which

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had long concerned Blackie as much as the absence of chairs in Scottish history in the universities. This ‘lamentable process of selfobliteration’ Blackie blamed on his old hobby horses, the ‘spread of Episcopacy’, the neglect of ‘middle schools’ and universities, which encouraged Scottish aristocrats (the ‘titled traitors’) ‘to send their hopeful progeny to Harrow and Oxford’, and the absence of ‘patriotic traditions and national furnishing’ in education for the rest of Scots. All these combined ‘to knaw at the roots of a truly national culture in Scotland, and to render the production of men of a distinctively Scottish type, such as Walter Scott, Lord Cockburn, and Dr Guthrie, more and more difficult’: So much easier is it to juggle a people out of its proudest heritage by the enervating seductions of a pseudo-civilization, than to spoil them of it by the rude arts of conquest and oppression; and thus it may come about that the Union of 1707 shall have achieved what the embattled ranks of the Plantagenets at Stirling and Bannockburn tried in vain – the absorption of little Scotland into big England, as Samnium was swallowed up by Rome.48

The ‘picturesque figure of John Stuart Blackie’ with his ‘graceful shepherd’s plaid’ was an obvious choice as chairman of the Scottish Home Rule Association (SHRA) when it was established in 1886 to pursue the objective of a Scottish parliament to deal with ‘non-imperial’ (i.e. Scottish) affairs. He shared the right-wing Liberalism of the SHRA leaders in Edinburgh, who were generally opposed to Irish Home Rule. At Westminster, however, the task of lobbying government was carried out by younger, more radical MPs like Robert Bontine CunninghameGraham, a socialist aristocrat who managed to outdo Blackie both in flamboyance and literary talent.49 He and other Scottish socialists, approached Home Rule from a class-based perspective, which troubled Blackie almost as much as the lumping together of the deserving Scots with the undeserving Irish.50 Gladstone, rightly, saw the SHRA as a minor irritation, though leading Scottish Liberals were more apprehensive. James Moncreiff, who as Lord Advocate had worked hard at Westminster on behalf of Scottish education, wrote to Blackie: As to ‘Home Rule’ it may well chance that we lose more than we gain, as the smaller nation – 7 to 1 – is almost certain to do. If our Scots members would make a determined stand on finance, there is not much more that we need. A Scottish Parliament would be an enlarged Town Council or School Board & prone – without remedy, to all the vices which haunt such places, & no glory or distinction to tempt the abler sort. I doubt we should soon be sick of it.51

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Blackie and the SHRA leadership rejected such advice from Liberal ‘insiders’, and instead courted Joseph Chamberlain, a much less dependable character, who had interesting ideas on administrative devolution. As a member of the Liberal government he had proposed ‘provincial councils’ in Scotland and Ireland, largely to avoid conceding a separate parliament to the Irish, and then resigned when Gladstone committed himself to Irish Home Rule. ‘I quite agree with you that Scotland has historical claims to be treated as a nation which certainly cannot be accepted in the case of Ireland,’ he wrote to Blackie. ‘I think that I also agree with you in desiring that the individuality of the component parts of the United Kingdom should be maintained.’52 Blackie admired Chamberlain’s mixture of social reform and imperialism, which must have reminded him of Bismarck, and was thus willing to overlook a populist streak in ‘Joe’ which scandalised his friends. ‘To see you – an honest Scotchman throwing yourself in abject worship at the feet of the pug-nosed vulgarian of politics!!’, complained one about what he called Blackie’s ‘Chamberlain-cult’.53 Yet Chamberlain, by resigning, destroyed any hope he might have had of leading the Liberal party, and had little to offer the SHRA. Scottish Home Rule remained official policy of the Scottish Liberal Association, but was blocked by the defeat of Gladstone’s Irish Home Rule Bill in the Commons in June 1886 by 343 votes (including 93 Liberal MPs) to 313, and the subsequent split in the Liberal party. Scottish Home Rule would only be considered once an Irish bill had been passed, not a situation to Blackie’s liking. He made an uncharacteristically measured intervention in January 1890, though he was, as ever, unable to resist the urge to break into verse: Well done old Gladstone! if Home Rule is the cry, Let it uprise for Scotland! ’Tis high time That we, being made of sterner stuff, should try Some other way to make our lives sublime Than licking England’s paws, and making fat That monstrous London with our heart’s blood, And spreading out the softly plaited mat For Cockney feet in servile flunkeyhood.54

Gladstone was forgiven for neglecting ‘Home Rule all round’ in 1886, on condition that he remembered it on the next occasion he addressed the demands of the Irish. When Gladstone returned to office in August 1892, Blackie sent him a copy of his pamphlet The Union of 1707 and its Results: A Plea for Scottish Home Rule, which presented

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the unionist-nationalist case in homely terms. Like a poor man married to a rich wife, the Scots needed to be ‘firm’ with their English partner in the union, even though the ‘marriage’ in the main had been ‘a happy one’, like that of Hungary and Austria, ‘of diverse race and character’, but bound together in ‘imperial unity’.55 The defeat of a second Irish Home Rule Bill in the House of Lords in September 1893, and the advent of Lord Salisbury’s Tory government in June 1895 (with Chamberlain in the cabinet), dashed further hopes for a Scottish measure. In February 1895, a fortnight before his death, Blackie finally conceded to the Irish that right which he had always claimed for the Scots – an Irish parliament in Dublin, to join the proposed Scottish parliament in Edinburgh, and an English parliament in London, with the existing British Parliament to handle ‘imperial’ matters. ‘This would be a bona fide Union, a brotherly Union, not a swallowing up of the smaller by the one great member.’56 Blackie has been called a ‘Tory nationalist’,57 perhaps as the result of the Chamberlain episode, though ‘Liberal Unionist’ would be a more accurate label. Blackie described himself as ‘a good sound Liberal’ with ‘a strong constitutional tendency to . . . rebel against authority when it in any way stifles the freedom of the individual’. ‘I can scarcely imagine the combination of circumstances which would win me over permanently to the Tory camp.’ For three centuries, Church and school had been ‘impressing an essentially popular and democratic stamp on the Scottish mind’, so that Liberalism came ‘as naturally’ to Scots ‘as Highland honey from heather braes and Highland rivers from granite wells’. ‘A people who deem it a religious duty to interpret their own Bibles and hold for a divine right the election of their own clergy . . . can never be anything but democratic in its political action.’ On a more personal level, Blackie argued that he was simply following ‘the divinely moved forces of Nature’ whose ‘grand object’ was ‘ to produce the greatest amount of richly varied life, and with that the greatest happiness of the greatest number of free individuals’: I am a Liberal as having, from a boy, imbibed the doctrine of spiritual democracy from the New Testament, which teaches me that all men are brethren, the members of one family, and the children of one Father; and, though subordination in function and position must exist in every social organism, this subordination exists for the sake of co-operation, not for the sake of domination. Christian ethics teach me that LOVE, and love only, ought to be the supreme law which dictates the relation of classes in a well-ordered community; and this love can never put forth its power so long as laws are allowed to exist, made as our land laws historically were,

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by the self-aggrandising few, for the express purpose of asserting an unbrotherly authority over the many. The maintenance of such laws, as they have been handed down to us from our aristocratic ancestors, has always been the prime article in the creed of the Tory Party; and with this party, as one that believes that Christianity should permeate the whole structure of society, and as a religion of love strive specially to support the weak against the strong, I can in nowise co-operate.

The Tories were thus ‘acting in opposition to the declared will of God in the constitution of the universe’.58 Clearly, God was a Liberal, and probably a Scot as well. Notes 1. T. Fontane, Beyond the Tweed (London: Libris, 1998), pp. 38–9. 2. Letters, p. 44. NLS MS 2621 f. 56. Notes, p. 38 (written 1869). 3. J. Lorimer, ‘The Scottish Universities’, NBR, XIII, 26 (August 1850), 325. M. von Herzfeld and C. M. Sym, Letters from Goethe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1957), p. 488. Dark Blue, II, 8 (October 1871), 195. 4. At Göttingen 1837–1914 over 50 per cent of UK students were Scots, at Heidelberg over 25 per cent, at Bonn nearly 14 per cent. Only 9 to 11 per cent of the UK population was Scottish. S. J. Wallace, ‘Scottish university men and German universities’, in R. Muhs, J. Paulmann and W. Steinmetz (eds), Aneignung und Abwehr (Bodenheim: Philo, 1998), p. 245. 5. Miller, quoted in H. J. Hanham, ‘Mid-century Scottish Nationalism: romantic and radical’, in R. Robson (ed.), Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain (London: G. Bell, 1967), p. 150. 6. TM, XII (N.S. VIII), 93 (September 1841), 561, and XX (N.S. XVI), 188 (August 1849), 526. 7. NLS MS 2643 f. 16, MS 4122, f. 125, MS 4956, f. 19. BSA B6 [Q.9 16–17]. B. H. Jackson (ed.), Recollections of Thomas Graham Jackson (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 40. 8. Letters, p. 128 (misdated 1851). Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Karl Grimm (1786–1859), professors at Berlin from 1840. Cf. NLS MS 2624 f. 388, MS 2625 f. 35. S. Heyer, ‘Jacob Grimm und John Stuart Blackie: ein Beitrag zur Datierung des Ossians-fragments Jacob Grimm’, Brüder Grimm Gedenken, X (1993), 123–33 9. Stoddart, pp. 203, 209. Karl Ritter (1779–1859) professor of Geography. 10. NLS MS 2643 f. 24. BSA B9.J.h.171 (emphasis in original). 11. Macmillan Archive (Reading University) 208/14. MM, XLV, 266 (December 1881), 126–7, 132. A. J. Engel, From Clergyman to Don (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), chapters 3 and 4.

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12. Quoted in E. Abbott and L. Campbell, Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett (London: John Murray, 1897), I, p. 399. Blackie had sung ‘unasked’ his composition ‘The Burning of the Heretic’ in the drawing room of W. Y. Sellar, Professor of Humanity at Edinburgh and former pupil of Jowett. 13. NLS MS 2636 f. 18. J. W. Mackail (1859–1945), a son of the manse (Free Church), Edinburgh and Balliol, civil servant (Board of Education 1903–19), Oxford Professor of Poetry 1906. Virgil scholar, biographer of William Morris. 14. NLS MS 2642 f. 134. John Burnet (1863–1928), Edinburgh and Balliol, Prize Fellow Merton, Professor of Greek, St Andrews, 1891–1926. Wrote on Plato and Greek philosophy. 15. NLS MS 2638 f. 44 (emphasis in original). Campbell (1830–1908), Edinburgh-born, Glasgow and Balliol, Professor of Greek, St Andrews, 1863–92. Wrote on Sophocles and Plato. 16. NLS MS 2626 f. 160 (W. G. Clark). 17. Quoted in R. B. Fisher, Joseph Lister 1827–1912 (London: Macdonald and Jane’s, 1977), pp. 229–30. Lister remained at King’s College until 1892. He received a baronetcy 1883, a peerage 1897, an O.M. in 1902. 18. Flintshire Record Office, Glynne-Gladstone MS 579. NLS MS 2624 f. 210. Robertson Gladstone (1805–75) ran the family business in Liverpool. His brother, Sir Thomas (1804–89) of Fasque, Kincardineshire, was a NAVSR member. 19. Edinburgh Courant, 25 June 1861, pp. 2–3. C. Rogers, Leaves from My Autobiography (London: The Grampian Club, 1876), pp. 139, 177. The Times, 4 December 1856, quoted in Hanham, ‘Mid-century Scottish Nationalism’, pp. 171–6. G. Morton, Unionist-Nationalism (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1999), pp. 177–81. 20. Glasgow Daily Herald, 4 January 1862, p. 2. H. T. Buckle, On Scotland and the Scotch Intellect (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. xxviii–xxix (quoted in H.J. Hanham’s introduction). Buckle (1821–62) acquired 14 languages and a huge library in order to write his ‘scientific’ history. 21. PRO HO 45/7928 (petition). Hanham, ‘Mid-Century Scottish Nationalism’, pp. 161–3. Burns (1809–76) made his living as a lawyer acting for local mine owners and iron masters. 22. Hanham, ‘Mid-Century Scottish Nationalism’, pp. 156–71. Morton, Unionist-Nationalism, pp. 135–54. J. D. Myers, ‘Scottish Nationalism and the antecedents of the 1872 Education Act’, Scottish Educational studies, IV, 2 (November 1972), 74–6. D. B. Horn, A Short History of the University of Edinburgh 1556–1889 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967), p. 148. 23. Morton, Unionist-Nationalism, pp. 3–4, 190. C. Kidd, ‘Sentiment, race and revival: Scottish identities in the aftermath of the Enlightenment’, in

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24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42.

John Stuart Blackie L. Brockliss and D. Eastwood (eds), A Union of Multiple Identities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 122. CR, XXXIII, 1 (August 1878), 99–100. Blackie knew Renan’s earlier writings on Celtic philology and literature. Essays (1890), pp. 178–9. ‘On Burns Clubs and Scottish Education’, ‘On Nationality’, ‘On the Politics of Christianity’, NLS ABS.9.203.01. NAS GD88/1/26 3. Letters, p. 148. Lay Sermons, p. 237, Essays, pp. 55, 77–81. Edinburgh Courant, 23 March 1877, p. 6 e–f. Scottish Song (1889), pp. 142–4, What Does History Teach?, pp. 17–22. Stoddart, p. 264. Carlyle, E. A. Freeman and J. R. Seeley were notable Germanophiles in 1870. War Songs, p. 88. NLS MS 527 f. 34, MS 2629 f. 291 (emphasis in original). Letters, p. 208. BM, XLVIII, 302 (December 1840), 748. Edinburgh Courant, 25 June 1861, p. 3. CR, XXXIII, 1 (August 1878), 98. Language and Literature of the Scottish Highlands (1876), pp. 238–48. Scottish Song, chapter 1, and p. 160. Cuttings in NLS ABS 9.203.01 and 6.208 (29). Edinburgh Courant, 23 March 1877, p. 4. NLS MS 528 f. 57 (Carlyle). NLS MS 2632 f. 94. EUL MS Dk.7.38.5/3, and MS Gen.1733/72. Herbert Oakeley (1830–1903), Professor of Music 1865–91, knighted 1876. E. Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’ in The Poetry of the Celtic Races (London: Walter Scott, 1896), p. 80. NLS MS 2631 f. 336. CR, XXXIII, 1 (August 1878), 101. On the Hermannsdenkmal (built 1841–75), see G.L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), plate 7 (and pp. 58–61). Press-cutting, [26 June 1889], NLS ABS.9.203.01. For Blackie’s speech with verses, see The Student, N.S. II, 8 (28 June 1889), 116. Stoddart, pp. 265–8. Letters, pp. 197–201. Reinhold Pauli (1823–82), a Prussian liberal who wrote on British history, was Bunsen’s private secretary in London 1849–52, then Professor of History at German universities (from 1870 at Göttingen). Vladimir Davidoff (Edinburgh 1825–7). Letters, pp. 201–7. Wallace (1841–1919), The Times correspondent in Constantinople 1878–84, Director of its Foreign Section 1891–9. Wrote the classic Russia (1877). Letters, pp. 207–8. Stoddart, pp. 270–1. WR, XXXVII, 1 (January 1842), 164. Dark Blue, II, 9 (November 1871), 322–6. Newcastle Critic, 12 February 1876, pp. 65–6. CR, XXIX, 4 (March 1877), 681. NLS MS 2632 f. 52.

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43. Notes, pp. 234, 239–47, 255–8. NLS MS 10306 f. 134. R. T. Shannon, Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation 1876 (London: Nelson, 1963), for the debate amongst British intellectuals. 44. The Highlander, VIII, 401 (19 January 1881), p. 8d. 45. Notes, pp. 258–61. NLS MS 10085, ff. 180, 186, 188, MS 4481 f. 74. 46. H. C. G. Matthew (ed.) Gladstone Diaries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), XI, p. 634 (November 1886). Gladstone was MP for Midlothian 1880–95. 47. NLS MS 2637 f. 100, 2635 f. 67 and 2636 f. 219. Leask (1857–?), Aberdeen and Oxford-educated, wrote on Scottish literature, and later for the nationalist journal The Thistle 1909–18. 48. The Forum, V, 1 (March 1888), 77. Blackie, The Union of 1707 (1892), p. 12n. Undated press-cuttings NLS ABS.9.203.01 49. NLS Acc. 11335, MS 2638 f. 164. Cunninghame-Graham (1852–1936), son of a Highland laird, Harrow-educated, learnt Spanish as a gaucho. MP for North-West Lanarkshire 1886–92, and first MP to say ‘damn’ in the Commons. A disciple of William Morris, imprisoned after the ‘Bloody Sunday’ demonstrations (May 1887), helped found the Scottish Labour Party 1888. First SNP president 1928. 50. LUL GP/1/1/21–3. NLS MS 2636 f. 309. Correspondence with J. Bruce Glasier of the Socialist League in Glasgow. 51. NLS MS 2637 f. 117 (emphasis in original). 52. NLS MS 2637 ff. 282, 289. P. Fraser, Joseph Chamberlain (London: Cassell, 1966), pp. 41–2. Chamberlain (1836–1914), Liberal President of the Boards of Trade 1880–5 and Local Government 1886, Tory Colonial Secretary 1895–1906. 53. Donald MacLeod. NLS MS 2636 ff. 117, 134. 54. WR, CXXXIII, 1 (January 1890), 61–3. 55. pp. 5–6. A parliament would include Scots MPs and peers, lord provosts, university principals, church moderators, but no bishops (p. 14). BL Add MS 44107 ff. 458, 464. 56. Kennedy, p. 215. 57. R. Coupland, Welsh and Scottish Nationalism (London: Collins, 1954), p. 250. A. C. Naylor, ‘Scottish Attitudes to Ireland 1880–1914’, Ph.D. thesis (University of Edinburgh, 1985), p. 24. 58. Notes, p. 211 [written March 1889]. Forum, V, 1 (March 1888), 76. A. Reid (ed.), Why I Am a Liberal – Definitions and Personal Confessions of Faith by the Best Minds of the Liberal Party (London: Cassell, 1885), pp. 31–3.

10 ‘FRIEND OF THE CROFTER’ 1 Blackie made his first Highland tour in August and September of 1847, travelling from Inverness through the Great Glen to Fort William and Ballachulish. From the latter he wrote to his sister-in-law Augusta Wyld, ‘If you are as ignorant of your native Caledonia, as I was, before I undertook the present tour, you will, of course, not know where Ballahulish [sic] (a most Highland like name) is.’ At Inverness and Fort William, ‘a most vile place’, it had been impossible to avoid ‘the wandering nobility & gentry’, but Ballachulish had ‘all the advantages of easy communication both by coach and steam, without the inconvenience and the disturbance of tourists’. Blackie walked the narrow precipitous Glen Roy, a thirty-five-mile round trip, and the following day climbed Ben Nevis with ‘two English gentlemen’ and a guide. They set out when the mists cleared at midday, followed the track made by the Geological Survey, and made the final ascent through ‘a swirling curtain of mist, which became thicker and thicker’ until the summit was reached at 4 p.m.: I am convinced that for a truly sublime effect on the imagination we were much the better of the mist. I shall never forget the huge black frowning cliff hanging over the misty Infinities – infinite certainly in comparison of us, small human pigmies. There was not a breath of wind – perfect stillness every where, only the murmur of the deep-running water in the glen 4,000 feet beneath. The cold was considerable, and the distillation of dew on our hair and hats constant. We did not therefore stay long on the summit: with solemn deliberation, however, we sat down on the top of the highest cliff, and emptied our whisky-flask twice: once to the health of Ben Nevis, and then to the health of each man’s nearest & dearest. I, of course, like a good husband drank publicly to ‘my excellent wife now living at Gilston in Fife!’ which toast was received with great applause. We then inscribed in our note-books the names of our fellow-climbers, and after breaking off a chip of the porphyry rock from the highest [cliff] we gave three cheers and commenced the descent.

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It was ‘a sort of event in a Scotchman’s life’, and the first of many summits ‘bagged’ by Blackie. The next day he walked through Glencoe, and composed ‘an historical ballad’ which began: The snow is white on the Pap of Glencoe, And all is white and dreary, But gladness reigns in the vale below, Where life is blithe and cheery.1

In fact, these were the years of the potato famine in the Highlands (1846–7), but Blackie was not yet interested in the condition of the crofters. He left for Greece on 18 April 1853, and so missed the controversy following the visit to Scotland of the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe. Highlanders were struck by the irony of an American anti-slavery writer being feted at Stafford House by the Duchess of Sutherland, when her mother-in-law, the first Duchess – described by Marx as ‘a female Mehmet Ali, who had well digested her Malthus’ – had been the driving force behind the Sutherland Clearances from 1803 onwards.2 Blackie’s relations with the later generations of the Sutherland family were good, and it was Aberdeenshire which sparked his interest in Highland land reform. During ‘a very cold, cloudy summer’ spent at Braemar in 1856, he noticed deserted cottages on one of his walks composing poems – ‘breeze and movement were favourable to my Muse’. At the suggestion of ‘an Aberdeen philanthropist’, he wrote to The Times on ‘deer-stalking and depopulation’ in October. His letter, with a supporting editorial, aroused some controversy. Later that year in his essay on Plato, he remarked on how far ‘British society’ was from the morality of the New Testament when ‘the respectable Highland proprietor will refuse to renew the lease to the industrious poor cottar on his estate, that the people, for whom he cares nothing, may make way for red deer, whom it is his only passion to stalk’.3 The following year he appended a long note to his ‘Braemar Ballads’ on ‘the causes of the sad aspect of desolation’ in ‘so many once densely peopled glens’: absolute property rights which favoured landed proprietors; their political power which blocked parliamentary redress; ‘unlimited primogeniture and entail laws’ which allowed property to be ‘managed in large masses by lawyers and factors’; the game laws, which encouraged clearance for deer-stalking and grouse-shooting; the ‘meagre political economy’, which taught ‘landlords to consider their consciences as clear before man and God’ even when they ignored their social obligation.4

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For the next decade Blackie’s public interventions on the Highland question were few, but from 1862 onwards his summer tours of the Highlands became more frequent, and when he was given a free pass in 1866 and 1867 on the West Highland steamers of David Hutcheson, he could cover even more ground, since travelling by land was generally slow. ‘I am using my eyes and my memory, so that now I know every glen and Ben of Sutherland as well as I know the streets of Edinburgh,’ he wrote to Eliza from Loch Inver, suggesting that he knew ‘the etymology of all the names of all the lochs and clachans better than the parish minister sometimes’. The weather was often a problem, though Blackie claimed to ‘prefer an atmosphere such as we have in Scotland, fretful with alternate gloom and glory, to the cloudless brightness of an eternal summer’, and had anyway ‘acquired a Highland facility of imbibing whisky’.5 Apart from place-names, the Gaelic language was his new passion, sparked in May 1863 while he was staying with Eliza at an inn at Kinlochewe, at the head of Loch Maree, and heard a stable-boy call a horse each, which to his ears sounded very like the Latin equus. He took Gaelic lessons from the landlady, though he was anything but the ideal student. ‘He would come in with a Celtic Bible below his arm, and, opening the sacred volume, read a chapter or two at a terrific rate of speed, and whistle triumphantly when he had finished.’6 In November 1864 he used the occasion of the opening lecture to his Edinburgh Greek class to argue that Gaelic should not be looked on ‘with contempt and even hatred, as a barbarous jargon and a “bar to civilisation” ’, but should be studied as an example of a language which, like Greek, German and Sanskrit, had retained more of it original character than had English. Why not a chair of Celtic to complement the new chair of Sanskrit at Edinburgh? I cannot see that the academic claims of Greek and Latin . . . can justify us in the habitual neglect of that most venerable member of the Aryan family, which lies at our own doors . . . [T]o a philologer the rude address of a Celtic boatman in lively Oban, or of a Celtic shepherd in desolate Sutherland, may possess a greater interest than the sounding periods of an Oxford-bred man, who, in his maiden speech in Parliament, thinks it his duty to quote Horace, and to indicate by some graceful allusion that he can spell Homer.

On the basis of comparison of etymology and form, Blackie rejected the old idea of affinity between Gaelic and Hebrew in favour of one between Gaelic and Latin. Though his philology was weak, there was

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no doubting the passion of his conclusion: ‘The moment the Gaelic language dies, the Highland people die with it (for no people survive the death of its language).’ The references to ‘doctrinaire lectures on political economy’ and ‘improving’ landlords made it clear that this was more than a lecture on comparative philology.7 It made Blackie known to a number of private scholars, many of them ministers in Gaelicspeaking parishes,8 but also to more eminent figures like the collector of Highland folklore John Francis Campbell of Islay,9 the philologist Isaac Taylor,10 and the antiquary William Forbes Skene.11 Blackie also began to receive the first of many letters from Gaelic-speakers, some from far afield.12 He became a regular at the dinners of the Highland Society in London, where there was always good ‘Scotch haggis, Scotch whisky, and Scotch snuff’, supplied by Grieve of Edinburgh. In 1872 he spoke in Edinburgh at the inaugural meeting of the Lorne Ossianic Society, and on ‘Nationality’ at the first annual assembly of the Gaelic Society of Inverness. The latter quickly became the leading Highland cultural body, and gave Blackie the honorary titles of ‘chieftain’ and ‘chief’ in subsequent years.13 From 1866 Blackie had his own base in the Highlands, a holiday cottage designed by Eliza, and built at Altnacraig, just to the south of Oban, overlooking the Sound of Kerrera. The money spent on this meant that Blackie had to give up the idea of travelling again to Greece,14 underlining the decision he had made to devote himself to his new field of study. Instead, the Mediterranean came to ‘the Celtic Naples’, in the celebratory verses of ‘Nether Lochaber’: Fair Oban! Naples of the north! By the wild Scottish sea. Thy bay so bright recalls the sight Of far Parthenope I miss, ’tis true the orange groves ’North Posillipo’s road; But fire as dire has shaped the scene, And man in manlier spirit roves Thy seas and mountain sod; And, noblest, dwells a friend I wean. I’ll sing of his abode.15

The friend was Blackie, also remembered by Robert Buchanan as the rain-drenched figure who used to visit him at the ‘White House’, where the poet lived between 1866 and 1874: ‘over a dreary sweep of marshes and pools, lay the little town of Oban, looking, when the mists cleared away a little, exactly like the woodcuts of the City of

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Destruction in popular editions of “Pilgrim’s Progress” ’. It was a wet spring. ‘Day after day the rain descended, sometimes in a dreary “smurr”, at others in a moaning torrent. . . . In a kind of dovecot perched on a hill, far from human habitation, I dwelt and watched, while the gloomy ghillie came and went, and dogs howled from the rain-drenched kennel’, and Blackie ‘might be seen toiling upward to Doubting Castle, exactly like Christian on his pilgrimage, but carrying, instead of a bundle on his back, the whole of Homer’s hexameters in his brain, set to such popular tunes as “John Brown”, and “Are ye sleepin’, Maggie?” ’.16 For Blackie the attraction of Oban was that he could jump on a steamer and be ‘whirled’ to most of the islands and to ports on the north-west coast of Scotland, or through the Caledonian Canal to Inverness, or be transported aboard the Chevalier south to the Crinan Canal, and there transfer onto the Iona for the journey to Greenock. Until the railway from Callander reached Oban in early summer 1880, this sea voyage of nine to ten hours was the quickest means of getting to Glasgow. In September 1867, Blackie left Eliza at Altnacraig and set off on the steamer for Ballachulish, with the intention of revisiting Glencoe. As always, he travelled light (a ‘one shirt journey’), carrying bitter ale and some bread and cheese, but the weather was bad. After climbing Buachaille Etive Mor (and incurring the wrath of the local landowner), he took ‘two tumblers of sherry negus, with a single glass of sherry in each’ at the King’s House Inn in Glencoe before walking on to visit the local landowner, Campbell of Monzie at Kinloch Leven. Here he enjoyed ‘a splendid dinner of venison-tripe and full-bosomed grouse, with a magnum of the most excellent claret, capped with a tumbler of brandy and water’, and felt very much at home with the laird and his family. He wrote to Eliza, ‘we had all sorts of laughing and talking and explosive outbursts’. Monzie’s ‘mingled deer-stalking and good fellowship with pious scraps of Gospel and Revival hymns’ was very much to his liking. ‘I should not have missed the acquaintance of this man for £100. . . . He and I got on like gunpowder, and came down the glen in the dark singing song for song.’ He left with a gift of a deer horn, and the promise of ‘a haunch of venison’ for Eliza. He planned to return to Oban by way of Moidart and Ardnamurchan, and so from Corpach turned west along Loch Eil, visiting landowners along the way. He reached Arisaig, and saw the column erected to Bonnie Prince Charlie, but, before turning south along the rocky coast, he was halted at Kinloch-Aylort (Lochailort) by ‘hard-driving pitiless drifting rain, with a strong S. W. gale’. At the inn there was no landlord, and no

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coals, only wet peat. ‘I have to walk about the room with my plaid on, or sit with a pillow at my back,’ he wrote to Eliza. There was ‘not a single book in the house’, though there was a maid, ‘good natured and clean, but not otherwise attractive’, who could offer lessons in Gaelic. With the bad weather there was no chance of catching a steamer, so he walked south ‘along the hard rocks of the coast in the face of the buffeting blast’, with one of his boots full of holes.17 The following year (1868) was a little less strenuous, with visits to friends at Loch Ba (Mull), and Ardgour on Loch Linnhe, then a tour of Orkney, Shetland, Inverness and Tain – in all, two months away from Altnacraig. He was much impressed by the cliffs at Marwick and the ‘Orcadian Stonehenge’, the standing stones at Stenness, all of which was grist to the poetic mill, in the form of ‘Sketches from Orkney’.18 In August 1870 Blackie took the steamer to Iona for a ten-day visit, and was spotted by the young Robert Louis Stevenson on the islet of Earraid (which later figured in Kidnapped), viewing the construction of the Dhu Heartach lighthouse, which had been designed by a member of the Stevenson family.19 In August 1872 he scaled Schiehallion in Perthshire with J. C. Shairp and an elderly English geologist, but further peregrinations were cut short when he sprained his ankle on a visit to Ardgour. He spent the next two months confined to Altnacraig, but was able to lecture to the local Scientific and Literary Association on ‘Health, Strength and Comeliness’ in October.20 The poetic result of all these wanderings was Lays of the Highlands and Islands (1872). The poems were prefaced by ‘A Talk with the Tourists’, a chatty itinerary with some words on the ‘clearance question’, aimed very much at the English excursionist (the book was reissued in a pocket edition in 1888). Some years earlier, Alexander Russel, editor of The Scotsman and a convinced believer in laissez-faire, had taken Blackie’s poetry to task as sentimental and misleading. Set against the conventional wisdom in agricultural economics, all the talk of ‘depopulation of the Highlands’ was ‘erroneous in fact and vicious in sentiment’. What if the Clearances were part of an inevitable process of economic change which had been ‘done willingly and long ago by the population of other and happier districts’, and was ‘being done at this day in every other class and almost every family of the British community?’ What if the crofters were ‘leaving behind them chronic and hopeless misery – a misery that has lasted from time immemorial, and threatened to last in all time to come?’ Viewed thus, clearance was ‘a work of necessity and mercy’, Russel concluded.21 This was a restatement of the orthodox

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view that only free trade in land (which could thus go to the most efficient landlords and tenants), together with emigration (for the less efficient), would solve the endemic problems of low productivity and overpopulation in the Scottish Highlands and the West of Ireland. From this perspective, customary tenants’ rights (such as those claimed by the crofters) were seen as outdated impediments to a self-regulating market in land, just as trade unions were viewed as obstacles to the proper working of the labour market. The free market, freedom of contract, the sanctity of property, and the more technical aspects of neo-classical economic theory, were still unquestioned truths for ‘the great majority of educated persons’ in Britain.22 Even the non-economically minded were unlikely to question the dogmas associated with decades of economic progress. Thus we find Theodore Martin in September 1872 writing to his old friend Blackie from the Welsh holiday home where he was working on the official life of the recently deceased Prince Consort: ‘It is no use mourning over the Highland any more than the Irish past. What we have rather to think of is the making of a better future for both.’23 For Blackie, however, these were not mutually exclusive options, and his writing on the Highlands continued to combine polemic with poetry, or with scholarship. When he went to Germany in the summer of 1873 (May to August), he visited old friends in Göttingen, enjoyed evenings of beer and song, but also took the opportunity to observe the state of peasant agriculture. Eliza was left at a spa, and Blackie departed on a series of excursions, including one to the Harz mountains, which he had first visited in 1829. Back at Altnacraig, he wrote up his impressions of the tour in eight articles for The Scotsman, and spent the rest of his time pursuing his new interest in Gaelic and Irish.24 Language and Literature of the Scottish Highlands (1876) was an example of scholarship mixed with polemic, the reference to language as a ‘living expression’ of nationality, suggesting Blackie’s familiarity with Herder’s view of folk poetry, language and education as the constituents of national identity. Blackie’s aim was ‘to break down the middle wall of partition . . . fencing off the most cultivated minds in England and in the Lowlands of Scotland from the intellectual life and moral aspirations of the Scottish Highlanders’. Gaelic, even if ‘stunted . . . as an organ of intellectual expression’ (apart from the Bible and ‘popular theology’), deserved to be treated as ‘a field of broad historical sympathy, after the manner of the Germans’, through comparative philology and ‘topographical etymology’.25 Approached

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thus, the long debate over the authenticity of the Poems of Ossian (1759) would be revealed as: a Gaelic harbinger of the famous question as to the character and genuineness of the Homeric poems raised by the mighty German Aristarch, Friedrich Augustus Wolf. James Macpherson is unquestionably either the Homer or the Pisistratus of the Caledonian Celts; if the former he is the Celtic poet who fused into epic wholes the floating ballad literature of the Grampians, just as the genius of the great Smyrnean minstrel caused the heroic traditions of the Greeks of the Aegean to crystallise around the plain of Troy and the rock of Ithaca; if only the Pisistratus, then he must be content with the lesser praise of having collected the scattered limbs of a previous Celtic Homer, and put the pieces together of a great work. . . .26

Blackie was neither an outright sceptic like John Francis Campbell, nor a believer in their absolute authenticity, but clearly hoped that Gaelic too had its own Homeric epic-poet – perhaps a little too fervently, according to the respected Revue Celtique, though it generally approved his parti pris.27 Further signs of this came in Blackie’s comments on ‘the systematic depopulation’ of the Highlands, which he called one of John Bull’s three ‘great blunders’ (the other two being Ireland and ‘the Education of the People’). Highlanders ‘had begun to live like the Swiss, by making a show of their mountains’, and there were those ‘in influential quarters’, who argued ‘that the only euthanasia for the fragment of the Celt that yet remained in the country was to get the Tent on his back, and be ridden out of his identity, as the Poles are by the Russians’ – a striking image for readers more used to celebrations of the British Constitution. The book closed with a passage strongly criticising the Clearances, which included a translation of ‘The Emigrant Ship’ by the noted Gaelic preacher and critic of eviction, Dr Norman McLeod.28 The book’s mixture of painful regret and righteous anger with passages of scholarship alarmed some of Blackie’s friends. John Francis Campbell warned: I have just read a leader in the Highlander which smells of agrarian outrage and a land league against land lords on the Irish model. It is probably wind but it blows that way. So mind you manage your ghosts now that you have raised them. They won’t recover their ‘more material possessions’ from their ‘masters the English’ but if they try, the landowners may treat them as ‘wild beasts & savage men’ and pack them off to the colonies to enrich emigration agents, & keep down the price of labour in yankeedoodledom.

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In another letter shortly afterwards, with a sketch of Blackie being blown away by exploding ‘Celtic unity’, he wrote: The writers will find it hard to get Scotch Celts to fire raising and landlord shooting but that is the road at which they point in the Highlander, and you most innocent professor have been used when you were set to preach unity in literature and to fire an explosive.29

Campbell was politically a Liberal and he feared that Blackie’s campaigning on land rights for Highland crofters would work against his efforts on behalf of their language, in particular the campaign to raise money for a chair of Celtic at Edinburgh. After years of campaigning by Matthew Arnold, Oxford (or rather Jesus College) established a chair of Celtic in 1877. Blackie’s efforts to establish a something similar at Edinburgh were also well under way. Much was at stake in the success of the venture, he told Robert Browning. An Edinburgh Celtic chair would ‘be a notable achievement, and may be to me what König-grätz was to the Prussians. People will believe in me now, and consider after thirty years experience, that all my “eccentricity” was only sobriety in disguise!’30 In the past there had been proposals for a professorship at either Aberdeen or Glasgow, because of the large number of Highland students at these universities.31 That it was Edinburgh which established the first such chair in a Scottish university in 1882 was almost entirely due to Blackie. A committee, chaired in a desultory fashion by James Macgregor of New College, had set its sights no higher than a lectureship, but once Blackie took over he transformed the campaign into a more ambitious one.32 In March and April 1874 he was in London having his portrait painted by James Archer (appropriately, against a background of Highland scenery), and seeking promises of financial support for the Celtic chair from Scots in the capital. At least £12,000 would be needed to give an endowment of £500 per annum, and the university committee had managed to raise very little. Blackie had the advantage of boundless energy, and a wide range of contacts amongst the influential and wellheeled. He got several promises of £100. In late May he visited Ireland for just over a month to investigate the position of the Irish language. He stayed at Donnybrook and Rathmines outside Dublin, and met professors from Trinity College (Dowden and Mahaffy), and scholars from the Royal Irish Academy, to whose collection of antiquities he was introduced by Sir William Wilde. He made a good impression on the formidable Lady Wilde (mother of Oscar) who described him as ‘one of the most charming of men, with the wisdom of Socrates, and

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the fire of a true poet. A Greek of the Greeks fit to be crowned at an Olympic festival.’33 Blackie found many similarities with the situation in Scotland – an urban middle class which disdained Celtic culture, schools which taught only in English, and universities which largely ignored Irish34 – though the recent history of penal laws against the Irish language went well beyond anything seen in Scotland, as Archbishop John McHale, a native Irish-speaker, reminded him.35 Blackie began his tour on 9 June in the company of the Scottish painter Erskine Nicol,36 travelling in a long sweep south through Cashel, Queenstown, Cork and Glengariff, before turning north. At Kenmare he stayed with Lord Lansdowne’s agent, and heard the landlords’ side of the debate which was beginning to convulse the Irish countryside.37 He visited Killarney, Limerick, Tuam, Galway and Kylemore, with some climbing in the Connemara Hills, before returning via Belfast and Edinburgh to Altnacraig for 4 July. ‘I look upon the Highlands, in some views, as altogether in an exceptional state, pretty much as Ireland,’ he later wrote; ‘extraordinary measures are justifiable in its interest’. A chair in Celtic would also ‘be a grand victory over the spirit of vulgar Utilitarianism’, which had ‘tended so much to lower the character of Scottish Universities’.38 The summer and autumn were spent in writing a countless number of what Blackie called ‘begging letters’. Even sceptics were persuaded to contribute, though one of these rather naughtily suggested ‘a terminable endowment’ for the chair ‘to lapse when the Gaelic ceased to be a spoken language, and the Professor of the day to bag the whole funds’, and asked, ‘Could this desirable consummation . . . not be accomplished in your own time?’39 Once the session had finished the following year (1875), Blackie was again off in search of contributions. In late April he travelled to Birmingham and London to speak at meetings, viewed the portrait by Archer at the Royal Academy, and then returned to address the General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church on 27 May. Two days later, he was on a night train back to London for a fund-raising lunch at ‘Willis’ Rooms’ – it would ‘bring in at least £1,000’ – and a lecture on Gaelic (illustrated with his own translations) in Oxford’s new Museum of Natural History on 8 June. ‘I have taken Oxford by storm, and without bloodshed!’, he reported to Eliza. At the luncheon which followed he sat between two of Queen Victoria’s sons, mingled with aristocrats over tea in the garden, and settled the question of Latin pronunciation ‘by singing one of the odes of Horace to a well-known Scottish tune’. He met Ruskin again – ‘we embraced publicly’, Blackie wrote.40 After two weeks, rest at

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Altnacraig in the second half of June, he left by steamer to Inverness for a meeting of the Ossianic Society, and some ‘pocket-picking’ amongst ‘the big sheep lairds, the wool-buyers and wool-brokers’. This time he was less successful – ‘only a drunken schoolmaster promised me £5 for the Celtic Chair’. A visit to another ‘good Celt’, Major Grant of Glen Urquart, cheered him, as did being in the company of William Jolly, a schools inspector who was a strong supporter of Gaelic teaching, though he was an Englishman who did not speak the language. Jolly invited Blackie to accompany him on a tour of schools, and they travelled westwards by boat, dog-cart and on foot through torrential rain. At Drimisdale and Portree on Skye Blackie gave lectures, before setting off on 19 July with Jolly for the Outer Hebrides, the Uists and Barra. In South Uist Blackie ‘preached the gospel according to Ossian to eager audiences on the green machars that fringe the sand of the Atlantic’, and picked some ‘grey lichen and forget-me-not’ for Eliza from the overgrown ruins of Flora MacDonald’s cottage.41 On his return to Altnacraig in mid-August he found a summons to an audience with Queen Victoria at Inverary Castle. She had pledged £200 for the chair, after Blackie had approached her through the Duke of Argyll. ‘I thought the Queen would have given £500, but I suppose her name is worth a good deal,’ commented Isabella Bird, who had managed herself to find £100. The rest of the royal family together did not even manage this much, not having ‘the Queen’s enthusiasm about all things Scotch’, as Argyll had warned Blackie. The Prince of Wales later turned down a request, citing ‘the disuse into which, as a written language the Celtic has fallen’.42 Along with a letter from a Scottish-born Archbishop of Canterbury, this was one of the few outright refusals, at least amongst the letters that survive.43 Matthew Arnold sent good wishes and the ‘guinea of a poor struggling English literary hack’ (his description), but Carlyle complained to his brother: Blackie has sent me this morning the enclosed blash of a letter, which is worth nothing at all, & may be burnt immediately. It was accompanied by a number of papers about the ‘Celtic professorship’ which Blackie is endeavouring to found. I send you his list of subscribers, which amounts he says to £8,000 the only one of said papers which can be of the least interest as throwing light on the posture of the matter. The subscriptions are nearly altogether from Highland Lairds & dignitaries; & I have not for the moment opened my purse on the affair at all; but perhaps shall; if people take it up.44

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The Queen’s promise of £200 was equalled by Sir William McKinnon, the shipping magnate,45 and by Allan McLean, owner of the largest sheep-run in New Zealand.46 Contributions from Scottish aristocrats and landowners ranged from £100 by the Dukes of Argyll and Sutherland, the Earls of Crawford and Zetland, the Marquis of Bute, Macdonald of Skeabost and Chisholm of Chisholm, down to the £25 of Lord Rosebery and Duncan Davidson of Tulloch.47 The network of clan organisations channelled contributions from overseas. The largest, one hundred guineas from the Clan Mackay, ‘chiefless and landless as they are’, was gathered from England, Ceylon and New Zealand by the indefatigable John Mackay, with almost as much from Blackie’s old friend Daniel Wilson and the Caledonian Society of Toronto, perhaps stirred by the recent visit of John Murdoch.48 There were many smaller contributions, including one from Adelaide, South Australia, with the note: As I do not wish my soul to be snuffed out with a Saxon snuffer I send you the enclosed Post Office order of the amount of £1 st[erling] as an instalment towards the Gaelic Chair. I propose if I have my health to transmit to you a pound a year for the next two years making in all £3 (three pounds). Being only a Working man and what would be called in the old country a Peasant I cannot afford more at the present time.49

Blackie hoped for a contribution from the government, but he was to be disappointed. Gaelic was very far from its concerns as it prepared to appoint another Royal Commission on Scotland’s universities early in 1876. Blackie’s fund-raising took him to Cardiff and Swansea early in May 1877, and back to the North of Scotland in July, where he started writing a series of ‘Highland Sketches’ later published in The Highlander.50 By early in 1879 the figure of £12,000 had been raised or pledged, and the problem now was to find someone to fill the chair. Eminent Scottish Gaelic scholars were either too elderly (Thomas Maclauchlan), or disinclined to commit themselves to the grind of undergraduate teaching (Alexander Nicholson, John Francis Campbell).51 Younger men with a background in Irish rather than Gaelic (Standish Hayes O’Grady, Kuno Meyer) were also considered,52 since the chair was in Celtic. Even ‘Sergeant Duncan MacTavish o’ the Hoose Guards, wha is the stootest man in the county’, might have been a candidate, wooden leg notwithstanding – in the satirical The Gaelic Chair: Our New Candidate. An Adventure in the Winter of ’79 by Andrew Lyell, Schoolmaister in Cawmeltoun

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(1880) – but he was unable to lobby Blackie who was out making a speech on ‘Aristotle and the Game Laws’.53 Sober reality intervened, and in December 1882 the chair went to a former country schoolmaster, Donald Mackinnon, a native of Colonsay.54 He was an unexciting though sensible choice, given that the most pressing task for the new professor would be the preparation of Gaelic teachers for Highland schools. For the previous seventy years, they had been provided by the Gaelic Schools Societies, and the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. After the Disruption, the Free Church also entered the field, though the Hebrides remained a black spot, its schools too small and poor to qualify for government grants, as Alexander Nicolson’s report for the Argyll Commission (1867) graphically illustrated. The Board of Education in Edinburgh, created under the 1872 Education Act, was generally unsympathetic to Gaelic, as was much of Scottish opinion. It was one thing to argue that it had a place in the university alongside classical languages, but quite another to suggest that Highland schoolchildren should devote as much attention to Gaelic as to English. The Board conceded its use only to test a pupil’s comprehension of English. Blackie urged the teaching of Gaelic for its own sake, writing in The Highlander that, ‘To neglect the mother tongue is to pass a sponge over the brightest traditions of the past, and to make a tabula rasa of that memory which ought to be the picture-gallery of the soul.’55 Only after a determined campaign by the Gaelic Society of Inverness, the Gaelic Schools Societies, and the MP for Inverness, Charles Fraser Mackintosh,56 did the Scottish Education Department (SED) in 1878 release funds for classes in the language. Blackie’s pamphlet Ought Gaelic to be Taught in Highland Schools? (1877) may have helped change minds, but it must also have confirmed opponents (including Gaelic-speaking SED inspectors) in their view of ‘the revival campaign as the work of sentimentalists and outsiders’ who ‘were more interested in preserving the highlands as a picturesque tourist reserve than in economic progress’.57 The latter charge was unfair in Blackie’s case, though his view of the Highlands was socially conservative, despite his support for land reform. He had made the effort to learn the language, but he was notorious for his inability to make himself understood to native-speakers, who seem to have regarded him as an amiable eccentric.58 He was always ready, though, to encourage Gaelic, even in small ways. In September 1879 on a school inspection in Skye, he was appalled to find that children could sing only ‘the well-known English and Scotch songs, generally sung in

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Lowland schools’. ‘I took a pound-note out of my purse and wrapping a shilling in it . . . proclaimed a guinea prize for the best Gaelic song to be sung at the next examination,’ he told Eliza. His reward was to be treated to a ‘Pindaric celebration’, a song in his honour, composed and sung in Gaelic by the ‘Ban-bhaird or poetess’, Mhàiri Mhòr nan Oran.59 Blackie’s labours on behalf of the Celtic chair had taken their toll. In January 1878 he was given leave of absence from his duties at Edinburgh University on grounds of ill health, and decided on a trip to Egypt. Eliza had also been suffering for some time from nervous illness, and chose to go to Italy with her friend, the sculptress Amelia Paton, and her niece Alice who knew the country and language well.60 They all travelled to Marseilles together, from where Blackie left for Egypt on 1 February, while Eliza’s party went on to Rome. The sixday sea voyage was stormy. Blackie sat out the bad weather in Alexandria, singing Scots songs ‘in a mood of resentful patriotism’ on his first evening there, but later practised his language skills with a local Greek family. The rain was followed by ‘heat, dust and baleful winds’, which produced in Blackie ‘lassitude and physical depression’, though he was still alert to enough to notice that ‘the lowest types of humanity’ in the street seemed ‘to enjoy their existence more than the same types in the Cowgate of Edinburgh’. He battled on to Cairo through more gales, arriving there on 10 February. Two days later he was on one of Cook’s Nile steamers travelling south to Luxor, where he found John Francis Campbell. They joined a party led by two English Egyptologists to view the antiquities, but Blackie was soon bored with the ‘far-stretching sameness’ of ‘the tombs and pyramids’. He sat ‘on the white mealy sand’ in a palm grove and tried ‘to taste something’ of the ‘serene liquid clearness of the bright and broad blue sky’. ‘Of course, I need not tell you’, he told Eliza, ‘that I much prefer the fragrant thymy bank beside a bickering burn and an old pine forest in my own country, to all the brightness and dryness of this paradise of monotony.’ In the evenings the ‘glorious sunsets’ had a ‘mild yellow-green radiance’ that reminded him of Oban. On the return journey to Cairo he entertained his fellow passengers, reciting poetry and singing Scots songs, and exchanged his wideawake61 for a pith helmet. Blackie returned to Cairo and stayed for another two weeks visiting the museums. On 29 March, with two other Scots, he climbed to the top of Akhet Khufu (the Pyramid of Cheops) and sang ‘Scots Wha Hae’, but felt faint in the heat once he had descended. His verdict on Egypt was succinct: ‘the East does not suit me either physically or

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morally’. At Luxor he had composed a ‘Nile Litany’, which invoked the ancient gods against the modern Egyptians, as seen by the tourist, and vowed: Far from Scotia’s darling seat, Nevermore with weary feet To dust it up the Nile-stream.

He had not found either ‘intellectual elevation or imaginative enjoyment’ in Egypt, and had to content himself with the original reason for his visit: ‘planting firmly the roots of topographical and historical fact’. Present-day Egypt seemed sunk in ‘puerility, servility, falsehood, and flattering’, the result of ‘centuries of despotism’, while the Khedive wasted money on ‘the erection of infinite palaces’. It was ‘a joy’ to mix with the ‘charming people’ at the British embassy ‘after two month’s kicking about amid dust and decay and moral decrepitude’.62 Blackie left Alexandria on 12 April on board the Tage, a steamer of the French Messageries Maritimes. He began to recover his spirits in the company of his fellow passenger, who shared his enthusiasm for German universities.63 The steamer called at Jaffa, Beirut and Smyrna. At the latter port there was time to visit Tarsus and Ephesus, and pay homage to St Paul. At Palermo (30 April) Blackie spent some time visiting sites of classical interest. At Agrigento he ‘was mobbed by a crowd of youths’, attracted by the sight of a strange-looking, white-haired old gentleman, walking on his own legs, with a many-coloured Turkish sash about his loins, and having his head topped with one of Watson & Co.’s Bombay ventilator-caps, of a conical shape, very much like the head-gear of . . . Prussian soldiers.

After visiting Syracuse, Taormina and Messina, Blackie joined Eliza’s party in Naples on 5 May. They travelled north to Rome, Florence and Venice, where Eliza’s niece fell ill with typhoid in early June. Eliza spent the next six weeks nursing her in the humidity of Venice, exhausting herself in the process. The journey north by train via Innsbruck, Munich and Bonn with two invalids was slow. Blackie passed the time composing verses: O for one quiet careless hour beside My own Scotch hearth, or ’mid my green grass dells, With breezy pine-trees waving, and the pride Of purple heather, foxglove and bluebells! Grant me this, God, and teach my soul to cease From thoughts that travel far, and ways that find no peace.

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By the end of July the Blackies were back at Altnacraig, where Blackie rested until the start of the university session in late October, while Eliza retreated to Wemyss Bay to recuperate. All winter she was far from well, and in the spring of 1879 she went for a cure at Dunblane Hydropathic, then stayed in a cottage at Moulin, near Pitlochry.64 Despite the bad experience in Egypt, this was too tempting an opportunity for Blackie to miss. Once the session ended in April, he decided to make his long-planned trip to Italy to investigate the land question. Blackie knew well Pliny’s dictum, latifundia perdidere Italiam, and he was familiar with the history of ‘the land laws and land tenure in connection with the agrarian feud between the plebeian and patrician party in classical Rome’.65 He contacted a former student, now practising as a doctor to the British community in Rome, who offered to arrange a meeting with ‘at least one ex-minister of Agriculture’. There was also the prospect of visiting the German Archaeological Institute in Rome (founded by Bunsen fifty years earlier), and meeting the Irish classicist Sir William Gregory, more famous to posterity as the husband of Yeats’ friend, Lady Gregory.66 By mid-April 1879 Blackie was ‘free at last from the four B’s – business, bothers, blether, and beggary’, and on the 21st he left Edinburgh. He passed the train journey to London, reading up on ‘the mysteries of wages, rent, profits and other matters quite eccentric to the usual orbit of my imagination’. In the capital one of his calls was on Theodore Martin, who ‘gave a sad account of the landed proprietors’ facing ruin because of cheap agricultural imports. ‘Let Free Trade digest that!’, Blackie told Eliza. In Paris, the Hotel Brighton – its ‘very title’ had ‘something awful about it, and rather depressing’ – was made bearable when he ran into an old student. He found the French capital ‘more magnificent and more artistic’, but London was ‘more exuberant and more natural’, and more to Blackie’s taste. He travelled south via Turin, Genoa and Pisa, reaching Rome on 3 May. Here he exchanged his surtout for ‘a suit of light tweed, and a white wideawake’, and went to St Peter’s, his first visit in fifty years. A week later he attended the ceremony where J. H. Newman received his cardinal’s hat, and was placed close enough to ‘the great pervert’ to get ‘a distinct impression of his physiognomy; strong in the upper region, especially the nose, but rather weak below’, which was oddly like his estimation of Catholicism, a formidable superstructure placed on weak foundations: A building already deeply undermined may be beautifully painted outside and hung all round with banners, but, as the undermining process goes on

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quietly but irresistibly, cannot long stand, and may fall to the ground with a crash any day.67

At about this time (mid-May), he moved from 20 Via dei Condotti, the apartment of his former student in the ‘English Quarter’ near the Spanish Steps, to his own rooms on the top floor of 15 Piazza di Monte Vecchio, a quiet spot near Piazza Navona. He was as far away from tourists as the Canongate was from Charlotte Square, he informed Eliza. The area was plebeian, the apartment clean but dilapidated, with ‘signs of a certain antique gentility, . . . pictures of Roman ruins on the panelling of the doors, a huge gilded mirror, and a pair of tall cylindrical jars enclosing artificial flowers’. There were no carpets, and the floors were ‘plain brick’, but he was in his element, ‘getting into a sea of engagements’. His routine was to rise at 8 a.m., go for a stroll, and then to buy a newspaper (one penny) to read over breakfast: I sip my coffee and bite my bread, and pay two pence for the meal! In the forenoon I stay at home and study. At 1 p.m. I sally out and take my lunch. . . . Of course ‘old Eggie’ prefers an omelette – semplice – to anything else; this and a roll of bread and a piece of the most choice Gorgonzola cheese, with a mezzo of chianti . . . and a slice of the most celestial butter, for which he pays 2s. . . . In the afternoon I stay at home and study all sorts of Italian books, which are fast growing into a library, and at 6.30 I sally out to where Providence may have kindly prepared a bountiful and gratuitous evening meal for me. I suffer no discomfort of any kind, and could stay here six months with the most perfect delight, were it not for the troublesome monster called Conscience.68

It meant ploughing through Marco Minghetti’s Dell’ Economia Pubblica (1859), but he got the chance to meet this leading politician and to discuss ‘the economic condition of the agro romano’. The inescapable conclusion was that the wretched state of the peasantry in Lazio was due to ‘the enervating effects of centuries of sacerdotal and secular absolutism’.69 Perhaps it was Minghetti who suggested that Blackie visit Tuscany to see the system of mezzadria or mezzeria (sharecropping), which existed also in his native Emilia. It was quite distinct from both the capitalist agriculture of Northern Italy, and the latifundia of Lazio and the South. The latter Blackie knew from the work of Leopoldo Franchetti and Sidney Sonnino, two Tuscan intellectuals who had written the first serious studies of Italy’s ‘Southern Question’. The backward agriculture, illiteracy and criminality of the Mezzogiorno presented a far more intractable set of problems than anything Scotland or even Ireland had

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to offer.70 He also consulted Pasquale Villari, author of Lettere meridionali (1878), though it was information on the Tuscan peasantry which he now sought. Villari’s English wife, Linda White – Blackie’s ‘Stimatissima Signora’ – acted as go-between.71 He travelled north in late May, making a two-day stop at Orvieto to view Etruscan tombs, and in Tuscany noted (as he had in 1830) the prosperous appearance of the countryside. This he ascribed to the system of cultivation, as much as to the richness of the soil. Sonnino’s pamphlet, La Mezzeria in Toscana (1875), had convinced him that agricultural improvement was not impeded by the small to medium-sized holdings, and there seemed to be lessons here for the Scottish Highlands. No ‘sane man would dream of changing a Sutherland strath into an Italian Val d’Arno by Act of Parliament’, but the way in which mezzeria operated, ‘in practice, as a lease with fixity of tenure, during good conduct, and on a rent varying in a fixed ratio with the produce’, seemed peculiarly suited to the needs of the crofters. Blackie was also much struck by the observation, made forty years earlier by the Tuscan landowner Gino Capponi, that ‘the highly democratic form of government in the Florentine republic of the middle ages’, and the absence of a powerful aristocracy such as existed in Lazio, had allowed the mezzeria to flourish in Tuscany.72 It seemed to confirm the views that he had expressed in his letter to The Times in 1856. Blackie made his way north by carriage to Lugano, and then ‘crossed the Alps by the Splügen Pass with post and sledge’ to Chur on 8 June. He stopped at the Abbey of St Gall (an abortive search for an ancient Celtic manuscript), before travelling on to see Pauli in Göttingen. He reached Edinburgh on 18 June. After two weeks with Eliza at Moulin, he had recovered his old energy sufficiently to climb Ben Vrackie, before recommencing his campaign against landlordism with renewed vigour. A speech on this theme in Inverness was probably connected with the proposal that he might stand for the seat if the local MP resigned. Blackie then returned to Perthshire for the rest of July and most of August. Now that the railway was approaching Oban, Altnacraig had lost its attraction.73 At the end of August he again set off on his travels. He visited his friend Lady Breadalbane at Taymouth Castle, near Aberfeldy, mingled with her aristocratic guests, and was relieved to find one who dabbled in Gaelic. More to his taste was the round trip from Kingussie to Dingwall, and then Skye, visiting the landowners he dubbed ‘true Highlanders’: the Gaelic-speaking Ewen MacPherson of Cluny, Sir Kenneth Mackenzie of Gairloch, a non-evicting landlord, and Lachlan Macdonald of Skeabost, who

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sought to revive crofting on his Skye estate.74 Macdonald was most sympathetic to Blackie’s ideas,75 Mackenzie more cautious, believing that Blackie’s proposals went too far in the direction of interference in the affairs of landowners. ‘I rather think my dear Professor you are at heart a communist,’ he wrote after reading Blackie’s inaugural address to the Gaelic Society of Perth: I admit the attractiveness of the communistic theory, and its accord with the Christian system: but till humanity becomes more perfect and men will work & toil for their neighbours as they will for themselves, the commercial philosophy which you so scorn is the one I fear which must be regarded as most fitted for practical use in every-day politics.76

Used in its contemporary sense of advocating common ownership of property, ‘communistic’ was too strong a term for what Blackie was proposing – encouraging the break-up of large estates by changes to the laws on entail, primogeniture and settlement – but applied Christianity it certainly was. In 1879 Blackie had been invited by the minister of St David’s church in Edinburgh to deliver a series of Sunday evening ‘lay sermons’ on subjects of his own choosing. They were ‘amusing and entertaining as well as instructive’, and popular, though they were much disapproved of by the local presbytery, and were later discontinued when Blackie gave a musical illustration in a lecture on ‘Scottish Song’.77 His sermon in December used Isaiah 5: 8, ‘Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth’, a text which had been used at the beginning of the century to protest against evictions.78 The onset of an agricultural depression in the 1870s, and the passing of the Irish Land Act (1870) had made ‘land’ the key issue in British politics,79 and Blackie’s broadside against the ‘landocracy’, the absentee owners of oversized estates, found a wide audience when it was published in the Contemporary Review. His starting-point was to advocate free trade in land, as a means of reducing its unnatural and ‘unhealthy’ accumulation in few hands. To assist this, he advocated compulsory public registration of land titles, and abolition of primogeniture and entail, the two ‘feudal’ impediments whose removal would allow the ‘natural’ process of growth of small proprietorship to resume. No evidence was adduced to support this claim, but free trade in land seemed to have a historical logic, as a second phase (following the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846) in the attack on the continuing political power of the aristocracy. In the Scottish context it was also

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presented as a means of recompensing ‘the people’ for the ‘robbery’ of their ‘rights’ at the time of the clearances.80 These ideas Blackie shared with a large number of middle-class reformers, ‘progressive’ landlords, liberal politicians,81 and the occasional political economist.82 A smaller group wished to go further, but the proposal of the American Henry George for a ‘single tax’ on the ‘unearned increment’ Blackie considered too ‘Radical’ ‘for an old country like England’, by which he meant Britain, even though he conceded it might be ‘very beneficial in the allotment of land in new colonies’.83 He also opposed the ‘socialist’ ideas of the Land Nationalisation League (1881). On the Aristotelian principle that all extremes were wrong, Blackie plumped for mediumsized private land-holding as the ideal. Landowners who lacked a sense of responsibility for their tenants were condemned, as he told the Federation of Celtic Societies in Glasgow in 1881, by ‘moral law’: I say there is something far higher than economical laws, and that is moral laws, the laws that bind one class to another – the law of love. God is love, and love is the fulfilling of the law, but not the love of money. (Applause) . . . I object to that kind of economical political economy, enabling a man to pursue his private ends to the prejudice of society.

The leading radical land reformer in Scotland, John Murdoch, criticised Blackie’s decision ‘to halt short of the abolition of the present land system’,84 but shared his religious convictions. The two men had a certain admiration for each other, with Blackie breaking into verse in July 1879: God save thee, Murdoch! thou art a man to stand On thine own legs; and very good legs they be!

To which Murdoch responded, ‘Long live Blackie! say we; and may the millions render him the homage due to a prophet!’ Murdoch had links to the Scottish Land Restoration League (1884), which publicised George’s ideas, and to land nationalisers like Michael Davitt. For Blackie he was the ‘unfortunately not always wise advocate of the rights of crofters’,85 to which Murdoch could reply that Blackie’s position was the classic half-way house of the cautious liberal reformer, attacking large land-holdings while defending other forms of property. In Blackie’s case, it was also an ambiguous position since he advocated free trade in land as a political objective, while at the same time criticising the political economy which underpinned it. Blackie had comprehensively attacked nineteenth-century materialism in lectures to the Royal Institution in April 1870, published as Four

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Phases of Morals: Socrates, Aristotle, Christianity, Utilitarianism (1871). It was a book very much in tune with a new mood amongst liberal intellectuals, critical of Utilitarianism in ethics and in jurisprudence. In political economy the neo-classical orthodoxy which underlay free trade also came under attack. To a younger generation of economists it seemed irrelevant in the face of the particular needs of underdeveloped agrarian regions like the West of Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland. Instead, they drew on the writings of the German historical school, which held that law, economics, and culture in general were best understood in terms of their historical evolution, rather than in relation to the a priori assumptions of universal validity which underlay Utilitarian ethics and neo-classical political economy, as well as Sensationalist psychology.86 In the same period, Gladstone’s Irish Land Acts of 1870 and 1881 moved landlord–tenant relations away from strict adherence to free market principles, and towards acceptance of aspects of customary practice. Echoes of this new approach could also be seen in Blackie’s contribution to the debate, The Scottish Highlanders and the Land Laws: An HistoricoEconomical Enquiry (1885)87 – the subtitle is significant – though the book’s dedication to John Bright, a leading advocate of free trade, reminds us that Blackie’s ‘historicism’ was selective.88 This we can see by comparing his comments on the ‘modern’ economy, where he argued, for example, that ‘the rate of wages must be left to adjust itself’, to his proposals for the ‘pre-modern’ sectors of agriculture. In the same essay Blackie wrote, ‘it is better for the State to maintain a numerous population of well-conditioned agricultural labourers than breed swarms of mechanical waiters on mechanism in large towns’.89 The Highlands were thus to be treated as a special case, and the crofters who had survived earlier periods of clearance and emigration were to be protected from the rigours of the market economy, a concession not extended to the industrial worker. The intellectual justification for this (as opposed to the moral one), Blackie derived from the work of W. F. Skene, a Highlander who shared Blackie’s background in German philology and Scots law. Skene was never a propagandist for crofters’ rights in the way that Blackie was, but his scholarship provided the means by which one of the orthodoxies of classical political economy, absolute property rights, could be questioned by others.90 In the third volume of his Celtic Scotland (1876–80), Skene had ‘rehabilitated’ the concept of the crofter ‘township’ (that is, settlements of three or more holdings with common pasture, or a history of such within a forty-year period), whose legal recognition was one of the features of the Report

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of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the Condition of the Crofters and Cottars in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (1884). Several members of the Commission had antiquarian and scholarly interests which made them sympathetic to such historical arguments,91 and the chairman Lord Napier had first-hand knowledge of India and Russia, where the notion of ‘village community’ had been fundamental to discussion of agrarian reform within governing circles.92 Blackie’s own evidence to the Commission laid much emphasis on the ‘historical case for the restoration of lands which had been removed from their use by proprietors over the previous century and more’. He was much indebted to Skene’s book, even though he called it ‘a work of hard reading, which demands iron teeth in some places, and stout digestion’.93 The other ‘historicist’ inspiration for Blackie came directly from one of the founding fathers of the historical school of political economy. Wilhelm Roscher’s condemnation of the ‘one-sided stupidity’ of the Highland Clearances in his National-Oeconomik des Ackerbaues (1878),94 was very much to Blackie’s taste. In the new more critical phase in the Highland land debate in the 1880s, Blackie would also find plenty of scope to exercise his talent for polemic. The evictions at the Leckmeln estate in Wester Ross late in 1879, and then the sudden worsening of economic conditions the following year, raised tensions and transformed sporadic and isolated incidents, such as the ‘land riot’ at Bernera in 1874, into a campaign throughout the Highlands. Local ministers took up the case of the Leckmeln crofters, and Blackie needed little encouragement to step into a controversy which seemed to illustrate his point about the application of Christianity to relations of landlord and tenant. In a speech to the Celtic Societies in Glasgow on 28 December 1880, he used Leckmeln, where the landlord was a wealthy Aberdonian paper merchant, as a case-study of all that was wrong with absenteeism. ‘Did not the Irish landlords suck the blood of the country?’ he asked his audience, just as ‘every systematic absentee sucks the blood of the country’. His solution was a tax on any landlord absent for more than six months in a year, and another on deer forests (to pay village schoolmasters, presumably to teach Gaelic), compensation for improvements by crofters, and two of the ‘three Fs’ of the 1881 Irish Land Act, fixity of tenure and fair rents.95 This made Blackie sound more radical than he really was, as did his description of rural violence there as ‘the natural and necessary outcome of the system of government by confiscation, penal disabilities, and absenteeism which the English have for centuries practised in Ireland’. The Liberal government was about

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to introduce the Irish Coercion Act of March 1881, and even Nicolson thought Blackie’s remarks had been ‘imprudent’.96 His ‘Highland Sketches’ in The Scotsman also aroused controversy,97 but this was soon overshadowed by the notoriety which attached itself to his book, Altavona: Fact and Fiction from My Life in the Highlands (1882). Altavona is an entertaining mix of Highland geology, history and folklore, with songs and poetry in Gaelic, German and English, presented in a series of eight conversations over pipes or cigars, following picnics of bread with Highland butter, milk and cream, washed down by claret, Rüdesheimer, and champagne. For Blackie, the four main characters represented different ‘points of view’. Roderick Gillebride MacDonald, an Edinburgh advocate, educated at Christ Church, Oxford, and Göttingen, was the Gaelic-speaking ‘Presbyterian type’. His old Göttingen friend, Hermann Bücherblume, was a professor from Berlin who approached the Highlands with the mind of a ‘philosophic German’. Macdonald’s Oxford chum, the Rev. Christopher Church, curate of Chitterby in Yorkshire, was ‘an English Episcopo-Oxonian type’ who knew rather less, but who was willing to learn from MacDonald, or from his cousin Flora who represented an ‘old Catholic and Highland type’. Some of Blackie’s friends made fleeting appearances, lightly disguised, as in the case of William Jolly (‘Hilarius’); Reinhold Pauli was Bücherblume. Sir Kenneth Mackenzie of Gairloch, to whom the book was dedicated, was mentioned as a ‘good landlord’, while the ‘Titanic operations at Lairg’ of the third Duke of Sutherland were judged agricultural improvement of the best kind.98 Those of his grandmother, the first Duchess, were another matter. Blackie did not mince his words in condemning the ‘Sutherland Clearances’ in the first decades of the century, though he followed Highland opinion in laying the blame at the door of the Duchess’ factor, Patrick Sellar. In 1816 he had been charged with ‘culpable homicide’ of an elderly woman who had died of shock when her cottage was set on fire, and Blackie referred to the long-dead Sellar by name, implying he was morally culpable even though acquitted by a jury.99 One of Sellar’s sons, Alexander, was a well-connected Liberal MP,100 another, William, was Professor of Latin at Edinburgh, and the eldest, Thomas, was a merchant who regarded himself as the guardian of his father’s reputation. It was he who pursued the matter, putting pressure on David Douglas, the Edinburgh publisher of Altavona, to purge all references to Patrick Sellar from the second edition. Although Blackie had legal advice suggesting that a libel action by

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Sellar was unlikely to succeed, the Principal of Edinburgh University, Sir Alexander Grant, informed Douglas that Blackie’s words were ‘actionable’, and if not withdrawn that he would recommend Sellar take legal proceedings for libel. Grant told Blackie, clearly less than a gentleman, that he had committed an ‘an unnecessary & unfeeling outrage’ on a university colleague, a view shared by J. C. Shairp.101 In the end, the non-expert opinion of Grant prevailed. Douglas suspended sale of the book and insisted that Blackie make changes, only to find that the Sellars then insisted on even more.102 The Sellar ‘thunderbolt’ also fell on Trübner, the London publisher of Alfred Russel Wallace’s Land Nationalization (1882), which had a short section dealing with Scotland. Trübner bowed to pressure, cut the references to Patrick Sellar, and also withdrew an offer to issue a second edition of Altavona, for fear of a libel action. Blackie tried another London publisher (Kegan Paul), only to find they too withdrew their offer as soon as they learned of the Sellar problem.103 A third edition (with cuts) was finally published in 1883 by Chapman and Hall, who also published Scottish Highlanders and the Land Laws two years later. Alexander Mackenzie’s highly popular History of the Highland Clearances (1883) attracted a Sellar ‘thunderbolt’ as well, but its Inverness publisher did not cave in. Blackie satisfied himself by advising the Sellar family that ‘the best thing . . . would be to confess honestly’ their ‘unhappy’ connection ‘with a great social wrong’.104 They had not, he wrote, been effective in a campaign ‘to falsify history’ by erasing the name of Patrick Sellar from the record of the clearances, or to ‘convince the Highlanders generally that he played a considerate, kindly and humane part in these transactions’.105 Blackie’s services to the crofters’ cause earned him a winter plaid from the women of Skye,106 but also a reputation for holding extreme opinions. Friends and colleagues backed off when he tried to recruit them to the newly formed Highland Land Law Reform Association (HLLRA), of which he was Vice-President. ‘One begins to interfere by legislation with freedom of contract, and in these days you open the door for all kinds of radicalism,’ J. C. Shairp wrote, declining permission for the reprinting of his poem on the evictions from Glen Dessary in 1806. ‘I wd. rather my poem never saw the light than that it should side with Bright & Chamberlain.’ Shairp also entered the classic plea in mitigation for the clearances: Great mistakes have been made, wrongs done, but they cannot be undone now. You may as well try to put to rights all the injustices done by the violent measures that followed the Forty-Five – the butcheries,

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confiscations, exiles, as set to rights now the mistakes & injustices done.107

Blackie’s academic colleague, and (now) relative by marriage, James Lorimer, excused himself on the grounds that the problems of the Highlands were attributable ‘to the faults of the race by which they are peopled, far more than to the laws by which they are governed’. Lorimer was not an admirer of the ‘Celtic peasantry’, which he classed with the Slavs in terms of social development and political maturity, but spoke glowingly of the small proprietors of Switzerland and Germany. These were judgements based on memories of a winter spent in a peasant village in northern Germany as a student, limited experience of Ireland (a visit to Maynooth in the 1860s), even less of the Highlands (a visit to Eigg with Blackie), and a strong element of racial prejudice.108 Like many nineteenth-century Scots, Lorimer believed in the existence of ‘a Lowland Teutonist identity’. Blackie was just as ready to use racial arguments, to argue that the Scots were a hybrid ‘Celto-Scandinavian race’, though he also emphasised the ‘Aryan’ roots of the Gaelic language, an approach shared by the other leading home-grown Scottish classicist, W. D. Geddes of Aberdeen.109 On peasant agriculture there was little to be gained from a ‘Celticist’ perspective. Ireland was still depressed by the effects of the Famine over thirty years earlier, which left just one other example of peasant proprietorship within the United Kingdom. In June 1883 Blackie travelled to Jersey to see the grave of his half-brother Gregory. On Lorimer’s suggestion (he had visited in 1850), he spent some time examining its agriculture. Blackie found an island blessed by its climate (the Highlands’ weak point), and by a system of land tenure half-way between the ‘equal division of all heritage’ (morcellement) of post-revolutionary France and the ‘unlimited primogeniture’ of Britain, and apparently avoiding the disadvantages of both.110 Was this, rather than the Tuscan mezzeria, the best illustration for a Highland audience of that ‘happy mean’ which Blackie sought? One thinks at this point of the letter written from Florence in March 1884 by the leading Highland Free Churchman, the Rev. John Kennedy, a critic of Blackie’s ‘stage antics’ in his Sunday evening lectures, but a strong supporter of land reform.111 On a trip to Italy for his health, he too became an enthusiast for share-cropping, but tempered this with the conviction that ‘the gospel privileges of the Highland crofters’ were infinitely preferable to that ‘the state of darkness and degradation in which the Tuscan peasantry are sunk so low’. ‘Such is

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the contrast that the poor men, who can only raise a miserable crop of potatoes and oats, need not think enviously of the vines and olives of the Tuscans,’ he reassured a fellow-minister.112 Anti-Catholicism, anti-Irish prejudice, Teutonic racialism and ‘panCelticism’, either singly or in combination, were just some of the contradictory elements influencing the land debate in Scotland.113 A land reformer might be a ‘pan-Celticist’ like John Murdoch, whose lack of sympathy with the ‘Saxons’ of the Scottish Lowlands was the mirrorimage of Lorimer’s Lowland prejudice; or he might be a ‘Teuto-Celt’ like Blackie, whose Scottish identity was strong, and for whom the Irish Land League (supported by Murdoch) seemed too ‘socialistic’. Amongst the landowners there were opponents of reform who nonetheless identified with Gaelic culture, like the six-foot-three, kilted Lieutenant-Colonel Greenhill-Gardyne of Glenforsa House, Aros, on the Isle of Mull,114 but also those, like George Douglas Campbell, 8th Duke of Argyll, who believed firmly in ‘Teutonist ethnology’. Blackie had got to know the Duke when giving lectures at the Royal Institution in 1867. He became a regular caller at Argyll Lodge on trips to London, and stayed several times at Inverary Castle on Loch Fyne. He found ‘the little Duke’ to be ‘an intelligent well-girt systematic well-ordered man’, well-versed in ‘scientific knowledge specially in Geology and Zoology’, but also in theology. Blackie liked the seriousness of the Argyll household, with its daily routine of ‘Prayers at 9.30 A.M. Breakfast 10 A.M. Lunch at 2 P.M. Dinner – 7.30. No drinking after dinner, and generally great sobriety & propriety’.115 He dedicated Language and Literature of the Scottish Highlands to Argyll’s first wife, the eldest daughter of the 2nd Duke of Sutherland, and enjoyed baiting the Anglican sensibilities of Argyll’s second wife, the daughter of the Bishop of St. Albans.116 Blackie shared Argyll’s dislike of materialism, his opposition to Darwinism, and his strong Presbyterianism. Argyll had subscribed to the Celtic chair, and on ‘Gaelic in schools’ believed, as Blackie did, that ‘Bilingualism’ was ‘an immense instrument of Education – the mere fact of having to translate from one language to another being a great evoker of intelligence’.117 Over land reform, however, he and Blackie parted company. The Duke was an able defender of the property rights of the landowner, both at the level of economic theory and of practical experience, but he followed a harsh free market logic. He was, Blackie noted, ‘too much of a man of business for a Highland Duke: a slight seasoning of sentiment would make the pudding palatable’ – or, as Alexander Nicolson commented after reading an article by Argyll

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‘On the Economic Condition of the Highlands’, ‘What a cold blooded little beggar he is!’118 Blackie’s reply to Argyll was a splendid rebuttal of what Carlyle had called ‘the Dismal Science’: The condition of the Highlands is not merely or mainly an economical question; it is that, no doubt, partly; but it is in the main a moral, a social and a political question – as indeed, all economical science . . . or pecuniary science, is in its very nature a subsidiary and a servile science, and can of itself neither prescribe any rational end of action for moral beings, nor teach the means by which that end may be attained. It is merely a science of the tools necessary, indeed, for the workman, but utterly incapable either of giving him work to do, or telling him how to do it. Of itself, indeed, it is a science without a reasonable soul; and therefore, when it appears in isolated action necessarily destitute of all sanity – either mad, drunk or fevered.119

It was obvious that there could be no meeting of minds. Argyll told Blackie a few months later: there is not the least use in my discussing what you call the ‘Land Laws’ with you. If I were to go into your old class and instruct you about Plato’s Republic I could not possibly talk more arrant nonsense than you seem to me to talk about Land. This arises from ignorance of the A.B.C. of all agricultural matters. You know practically nothing about them – any more than I do about Greek.

Argyll wanted no truck with the ‘historicist’ approach of Gladstone’s Irish land legislation. He had reluctantly supported the 1870 Irish Act as a one-off, and in 1881 resigned from the Government when Gladstone pressed ahead with a second bill. He was also deeply antagonistic to the Napier Report,120 which he regarded as signalling the end to 130 years of agricultural improvement. To Blackie he wrote: My belief is that if you had yr. way the Highlands of Scotland wd. now be like the West coast of Donegal in Ireland – covered with a half-starving, semi-barbarous population – instead of being as it is one of the most thriving & prosperous parts of the kingdom.121

As for land agitation in Scotland, it was ‘the mere reverberation of the Irish Land Act among a population somewhat similarly situated’, he told Gladstone. It might ‘blow over’, but ‘Gaelic sentimentalism led by Professor Blackie has fanned the flames, and the general unsettlement of ideas on all questions of property has its part in the matter’.122 Blackie did not find a sympathetic reader when he sent Gladstone his

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writings on the Highlands. ‘I am reading Blackie on the Crofters, thus far wholly without advantage,’ the Prime Minister confided to his Home Secretary, who responded, ‘Blackie is a commentator whom too little learning has made mad’.123 This was the view, as far as there was one (pace Jowett), in governing circles. Gladstone finally bowed to the pressure exerted by the Highland land campaign, or rather, in the time-honoured Westminster way, he chose a compromise solution designed to satisfy most of the crofters and a sufficient number of landlords, thus isolating the more intransigent elements on both sides. Despite the alarm of Argyll and other landowners, Gladstone had realised that the crofters ‘were not demanding the end of landlordism’, but a ‘redefinition of the landlord–tenant relationship’, something which could ‘be accommodated within the existing social structure’.124 The Crofters’ Holdings (Scotland) Act passed into law just before the government was defeated over Irish Home Rule (June 1886). It defined an area of special action (the ‘crofting parishes’), and granted protected status (security of tenure) to ‘crofters’, defined as those, on the day the Bill received royal assent (25 June 1886), meeting specific criteria (yearto-year tenants without a lease, paying £30 or less rent per annum). As a solution to the ‘Highland problem’, this was something less than what Napier had recommended, and much less than the HLLRA vision of ‘cleared’ land being reclaimed by crofters. Blackie’s connection with this body had been severed almost five months earlier, when he discovered that he might be liable to contribute to legal costs in cases where the Association was a defendant. This occurred against the background of a ‘fracturing’ of the crofters’ movement, as senior figures like Fraser Mackintosh, John Murdoch and John Mackay began ‘distancing themselves from the movement’, especially after the Conservative election victory in 1886.125 Blackie’s romantic view of the Highlands had little in common with daily realities of peasant agriculture, but, like other sympathetic ‘outsiders’, he had undoubtedly assisted the process of change, limited though it was. In 1885 his portrait was featured on the front page of The Crofter, newspaper of the London HLLRA. ‘Every great social and political movement has its Prophet and Poet’, and for ‘the Highland Land Law Reform movement he was the Vates, Seer, and Singer’.126 His image as ‘friend of the crofter’, was added to the folklore of the Scottish diaspora, his use of Isaiah much quoted by New Zealand land reformers, like John Mackenzie, the son of a Ross-shire tenant farmer.127

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Notes 1. NLS MS 2622 f. 77. ‘Glencoe: An Historical Ballad’, GW, IX, 33 (1 August 1868), 511–14. 2. G. Shepperson, ‘Harriet Beecher Stowe and Scotland, 1852–3’, SHR, XXXII, 113 (April 1953), 40–6. K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1979), XII, pp. 491–2. Mehmet Ali (1769–1849) was the ruthless reformer of Egypt. Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) in Principles of Population (1797) argued for the natural tendency of population to increase faster than the means of subsistence. 3. Times, 27 October 1856, p. 4f. NLS MS 2643 f. 6, MS 1000 f. 39. Blackie, ‘Plato’, p. 35. Notes, pp. 189–92. In 1856 Stowe returned to Scotland, and made her first visit to the Sutherland estates. Blackie does not mention this. 4. Lays and Legends of Ancient Greece (1857), pp. 360–3. 5. EUL Gen. 1730/28. NLS MS 2643 f. 11. Stoddart, p. 233. Letters, pp. 152–3. Hutcheson ran a steamer service, 1851–76, with his brother Alexander, and partner David MacBrayne. 6. Blackie, Language and Literature, pp. 11–12. D. T. Holmes, Literary Tours in the Highlands of Scotland (Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1909), p. 56. 7. The Gaelic Language (1864), pp. 2–4, 9, 24, 30–2. 8. Alexander Cameron (Brodick), author of Reliquiae Celticae (1892–4). Archibald Clerk (Kilmallie), author of a revised Gaelic Bible (1880). Alexander Stewart (North Ballachulish). Duncan McInnes (Oban). 9. Campbell (1822–85), raised on the family estate on Islay (later sold to pay massive debts), Eton and Edinburgh University. Civil servant and officer of the Royal Household. Inventor and photographer. Died at Cannes. 10. Taylor (1829–1901), Anglican clergyman, and pioneer in applying German philology in Words and Places (1857). 11. Skene (1809–92) learnt Gaelic while at school in Edinburgh, studied philology at Hanau (1824), and worked as an Edinburgh lawyer. He was appointed Historiographer Royal (1881). 12. NLS MS 2626 f. 132 (Donald Ross, a Nova Scotia merchant). 13. Letters, pp. 173–4. NLS MS 2630 f. 306. Transactions of the Lorne Ossianic Society (1872–3), 32–5. The Gail, I, 6 (August 1872). 14. H. Lucy, ‘Sixty Years in the Wilderness. More Passages by the Way. V. Professor Blackie’, Cornhill Magazine, N. S. XXXII, 188 (February, 1912), 260. BSA B9.Bh.171. Letters, p. 154. 15. ‘Altnacraig Oban’ quoted in M. Stewart-Allen, ‘Professor Blackie of Altnacraig’, The Stewarts, XVIII, 1 (1988), 19. ‘Nether Lochaber’ was the nom de plume of the Rev. Alexander Stewart. 16. R. Buchanan, The Hebrid Isles (London: Chatto and Windus, 1883), pp. 3–4, 7. Buchanan (1841–1901), English-born, Glasgow-educated,

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known for his attack on Rossetti, ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’ (1871), was later bankrupt and died in poverty. 17. Letters, pp. 163–70. 18. NLS MS 2628 f. 316. ‘Sketches from Orkney’, GW, XI, 38 (1 August 1870), 527–31. 19. [A. Ross] ed. Memoir of Alexander J. Ross (London: Isbister, 1888), p. 131. B. A. Booth and A. Mehew (eds), Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994) I, p. 202. Stevenson was then studying law at Edinburgh. 20. Oban Times, 5 October 1872 in NLS ABS.9.203.01. 21. Lays of the Highlands and Islands, 2nd edn (1888), pp. 49–54. Russel, ‘The Highlands: Men, Sheep, and Deer’, ER, CVI, 216 (October 1857), 467–507. Russel (1814–76) was editor from 1848. 22. Henry Sidgwick quoted in C. J. Dewey, ‘Celtic agrarian legislation and the Celtic revival: historicist implications of Gladstone’s Irish and Scottish Land Acts 1870–1886’, PP, 64 (August 1974), 34. The belief that there was a fixed ‘wage fund’, and that value derived solely from the cost of production, were, with Malthusianism, the other articles of faith. 23. NLS MS 2630 f. 272. 24. Booth and Mehew (eds), Letters of Stevenson, I, p. 499. Scotsman, September 1873. EUL MS Gen. 524. 25. Blackie contributed a place-names glossary to Murray’s Scottish Handbooks, and an introduction to Christina Blackie’s Etymological Geography (1875). 26. Language and Literature, p. 197. 27. ‘On a reproché à M. B. son excès d’enthousiasme; on l’a blâmé, du haut de la science économique, d’avoir pris le parti du peuple et des émigrants contre les propriétaires et l’émigration; mais n’est-ce pas reprocher à l’avocat d’une belle cause sa génerosité et son ardeur?’ Revue Celtique, III (1876–8), 487. 28. Language and Literature, pp. ix, 1–8, 17–18, 60–1, 79, 236–7, 307–29. McLeod (1783–1862) was the father of Blackie’s friend Norman McLeod (1812–72). Both were Gaelic-speaking Church of Scotland ministers. 29. 29 July, 17 August 1876. NLS MS 2632 ff. 117, 121. See Fig. 9. 30. 26 April [?1875], Beinecke Library. 31. Proposal of the Highland Society of London, 18 May 1846. FJNS, XII (6 March 1847), 175–6. 32. The Highlander, I, 26 (8 November 1873), 11–12; II, 41 (21 February 1874), 4 (letter from Blackie); II, 51 (2 May 1874), 12. Macgregor (1829–94), a Gaelic-speaker, Professor of Systematic Theology 1868–81. In 1882 he emigrated to New Zealand, where he was a leading spokesman for traditional Presbyterianism.

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33. NLS MS 2643 f. 224, MS 2631 f. 138. For Archer see below, chapter 11, n. 7. 34. NLS MS 2631 ff. 154, 281. C. Mooney, ‘The beginnings of the language revival’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, Ser. 5, LXIV (July 1944), 13. The Trinity College chair was part of the divinity school. Those at the three Queen’s Colleges had lapsed with the deaths of the first incumbents. The chair at Maynooth College (Catholic) was being revived. 35. NLS MS 2631 f. 160. McHale (1791–1881) had translated the Iliad into Irish. 36. Nicol (1825–1904) lived in London and painted Irish peasant life. 37. John Townsend Trench, agent for the 5th Marquess of Lansdowne. 38. GCA T-SK 24/21, 25/18. 39. J. R. Findlay (proprietor of The Scotsman). NLS MS 2631 f. 227. Cf. the refusal of a Highland laird (John Malcolm of Poltalloch, Lochgilphead), MS 2631 f. 197. 40. Letters, p. 243. J. Evans and J. H. Whitehouse (eds), Diaries of John Ruskin (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1959), III, p. 848. 41. Letters, pp. 245–7. NLS MS 2631 f. 297. A. Carmichael, Carmina Gadelica (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1928), I, p. xx. GCA T-SK 25/17. 42. NLS MS 2631 f. 293, MS 2632 ff. 187, 194. 43. NLS MS 2632 f. 227 (A. C. Tait). 44. NLS MS 2631 ff. 227–8 (Arnold). NLS MS 528 f. 57 (Carlyle). Blash: a Scots term for battering. 45. McKinnon (1823–93), born in Campbeltown, founded the British India Steam Navigation Co., ran the Imperial British East Africa Co. A strict Free Churchman. Died of quinsy and left over £500,000. Letters, p. 248. 46. McLean (1822?–1907), son of a Coll crofter, with two brothers owned 500,000 acres in Otago and Canterbury. 47. NLS MS 2631 ff. 230, 236, 261, MS 10074 ff. 144, 148. Davidson (1800–89), Chief of Clan Dhai, an ex-soldier, MP for Cromarty 1826–32, was about to marry his fifth wife. 48. NLS MS 2631 f. 172. MS 2633 f. 132. The Highlander, VII, 350 (23 January 1880), 5. Mackay (1823–?), son of a Rogart crofter, civil engineer, witness for the Sutherland crofters before the Napier Commission. 49. NLS MS 2631 f. 249 (Donald Beaton). 50. The Highlander, V, 226, 228, 230 (8, 22 September, 6 October 1877), 3, 7, 3. 51. The Highlander, VIII, 373 (30 June 1880), 3. NLS MS 2634 f. 204, MS 10079 f. 95. Maclauchlan (1816–86), Convenor of the Free Church Highland Education Committee, edited The Dean of Lismore’s Book (1862), Knox’s Book of Common Order (1873), translated Macpherson’s Ossian into Gaelic, wrote on Celtic Christianity. Nicolson (1817–93), ‘a Celtic genius’ of ‘easy disposition and desultory habits’ (A. C. Fraser), preferred life as Sheriff–Substitute of Kirkcudbrightshire.

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52. NLS MS 2633 ff. 48, 228, MS 2634 ff. 161, 215, 217, 223, 242, 253. O’Grady (1832–1915), for thirty years a civil engineer in the US, before returning to work on Irish manuscripts in Dublin and London. Meyer (1858–1918) had lived in Edinburgh 1874–6. Professor at Liverpool 1895–1911, Berlin 1911–18. Probably the leading Celtic scholar. 53. The anonymous author was John Skelton. 54. NLS MS 2631 f. 40. Mackinnon (d. 1914) had worked for the Edinburgh School Board. 55. The Highlander, II, 41 (21 February 1874), 4. 56. Mackintosh (1828–1901), Gaelic-speaking MP for Inverness Burghs 1874–85, Inverness-shire 1885–92. 57. R. D. Anderson, Education and the Scottish People 1750–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 215–17. Gaelic was treated separately in the curriculum only in 1886. 58. Holmes, Literary Tours, pp. 56–7. A. Geikie, Scottish Reminiscences (Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1904), p. 272. Inverness Courier, 7 January 1898, p. 3. 59. Letters, pp. 267–8 (12 September 1879). On Mhàiri Mhòr (Mary MacPherson), see E. A. Cameron, The Life and Times of Fraser Mackintosh (Aberdeen: Centre for Scottish Studies 2000), pp. 50–1, 94, 154. 60. NLS MS 2631 f. 358. Paton (1820–1904), widow of the photographer D. O. Hill, sister of the painter Joseph Noel Paton. Alice Lewis had lived in Rome 1856–72 where her father (James Lewis) founded the first Presbyterian church. His brother George had married Marion Wyld. 61. A soft felt hat with a broad brim, low crown, and no nap (hence, wideawake). 62. NLS MS 2633 ff. 61, 67, 88. ABS.9.203.01. Letters, pp. 249–53. Stoddart, pp. 330–6. 63. Charles Edward Appleton (1841–79), founder-editor of The Academy (1869), which reviewed scholarly publications, and lobbied for endowment of research. 64. NLS MS 2633 ff. 22, 38, 52, 68. Stoddart, pp. 333–6. 65. Notes, p. 190. What Does History Teach?, pp. 42–4. Pliny, Historia Naturalis, XVIII, 35: ‘the large estates destroyed Italy’. 66. NLS MS 2633 ff. 44, 78 (Dr James Steel Peddie). William Henry Gregory (1817–92) had been Governor of Ceylon 1871–7. Isabella Augusta Persse became his second wife in 1880. 67. Letters, pp. 254–7. ‘I have always felt, that the strength of Popery lies in the heart of women, not in the head of men.’ 68. Ibid., p. 260. 69. Ibid., p. 257. Marco Minghetti (1818–86), Minister of Agriculture in the 1860s, Prime Minister 1863–4, 1873–6.

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70. Franchetti, Condizioni economiche e amministrative delle Province napoletane (1875), and with Sonnino, La Sicilia nel 1876, 2 vols (1877). They were moderate conservatives (like Minghetti), and parliamentary deputies from the 1880s. 71. Bodleian Library MS Eng. Lett. d. 487 ff. 149–51.Villari (1827–1917), Professor of History at Florence 1865–1909, a parliamentary deputy 1870–6, 1880–2, Minister of Education 1891–2. Linda White (1836–1915) wrote on Italy. 72. Scottish Highlanders and the Land Laws (1885), pp. 148, 157–8. The comments of Capponi (1792–1876) were in Sir John Bowring’s 1837 report on Tuscany for the British government. Capponi visited Edinburgh in April 1819, and knew Scott and Jeffrey. 73. Stoddart, pp. 344–5. NLS MS 2633 f. 99. The proposer, Alexander Mackenzie, called Blackie ‘a Jacobite radical’. Charles Fraser Mackintosh transferred to the Inverness-shire seat in 1885. 74. Letters, pp. 263–8. All had some experience of the wider world: MacPherson (1804–85) was an ex-soldier, Macdonald had been in India, Mackenzie (1832–1900) had a Ph.D. in chemistry (1851) from Giessen. 75. NLS MS 2631 f. 319, MS 2633 ff. 241, 305, MS 2635 f. 117. Letters, pp. 246, 267. 76. NLS MS 2633 ff. 293, 121, 237, MS 2634 ff. 61, 198, MS 2635 ff. 107, 139, 172, MS 2642 f. 112. Blackie, Gaelic Societies, Highland Depopulation and Land Law Reform (1880), also printed in The Highlander, VIII, 388 (13 October 1880), 6, with supporting editorial, 390 (27 October 1880), 4. 77. Stewart, Haud Immemor (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1901), p. 110. The Rev. Alexander Webster was an old Marischal student of Blackie’s. 78. The Highlander, VII, 346 (26 December 1879), 7. EUL E98 55. D. E. Meek, ‘ “The land question answered from the Bible”; The land issue and the development of a Highland theology of liberation’, SGM, 103, 2 (September 1987), 84–9. 79. H. J. Perkin, ‘Land reform and class conflict in Victorian Britain’, in J. Butt and I. F. Clarke (eds), The Victorians and Social Protest (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1973), pp. 177–217. 80. CR, XXXVII, 1 (January 1880), 31–47, repr. in Lay Sermons (1881). 81. NLS MS 2633 f. 152 (James Moncreiff). 82. NLS MS 2632 f. 232. William Ballantyne Hodgson (1815–80), Edinburgh Professor of Political Economy 1871–80. 83. New York Public Library, George MS reel 2. George (1839–97) sent Blackie Progress and Poverty (1879) which proposed replacing taxes on industry and ‘thrift’ with a single tax on land values exclusive of improvements. He visited Britain in 1882, 1888–9 and 1884–5 when he toured thirty-five Scottish towns, the Highlands and Islands.

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84. The Highlander, VIII, 400 (5 January 1881), 4, 6. Murdoch (1818–1903) founded The Highlander (1873–85), worked for the Scottish Land Restoration League and the English Land League, and later helped establish the Scottish Labour Party. 85. Ibid., 4 (Murdoch). NLS ABS 9.203.01 (Blackie’s verses). Blackie, Altavona, 3rd edn (1883), p. xi. Davitt (1846–1906), in prison 1870–7 for Fenianism, founded the Irish Land League (1879), supported land nationalisation, and was an Irish Nationalist MP 1892–3, 1895–9. 86. G. S. Jones, Outcast London (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), pp. 1–11. Dewey, ‘Celtic agrarian legislation’, 31–42, 69–70. 87. Blackie (p. 113 n.1) cites C. K. Ingram and Cliff Leslie, Irish economists of the ‘historical school’. 88. Bright and Cobden, ‘the two Gracchi of Rochdale’, had advocated free trade in land, though Bright doubted the crofters’ lot could be improved through reform. Bright to Blackie, 13 April 1885, University of London Library AL.13. 89. Essays (1890), pp. 33, 41. For Blackie on poor relief, see, below, chapter 11 n.40. 90. Dewey, ‘Celtic agrarian legislation’, 50–4. During the 1846–7 potato famine, as Secretary of the Central Relief Board, Skene used the destitution test to weed out unproductive small crofters. J. Shaw, ‘Land, people and nation: historicist voices in the Highland land campaign, c.1850–1883’, in E. F. Biagini (ed.), Citizenship and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 314. 91. Blackie’s friend, Sheriff Alexander Nicolson, who had refused the Edinburgh Celtic chair, its first holder, Donald Mackinnon, and Charles Fraser Mackintosh. The other members, Sir Kenneth Mackenzie and Sir Donald Cameron of Lochiel, signed the report but added notes dissenting from the main recommendations. 92. Cameron, Fraser Mackintosh, pp. 117–19. Sir Francis Napier (1819–98), ambassador to St Petersburg (1860–4), Berlin (1864–6), Governor of Madras (1866) and temporarily of India (1872). Blackie had visited Russia, and could get advice on its land tenure from Donald Mackenzie Wallace (NLS MS 2630 f. 99). 93. E. A. Cameron, Land for the People? (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1996), p. 20. Blackie, Altavona, 3rd edn (1883), p. 210 n.1. On the Commission, see letters from Napier and Nicolson, NLS MS 2635 ff. 65, 70, 150, 170. 94. Altavona, 3rd edn (1883), p. 271. NC, XIII, 74 (April 1883), 606. Roscher (1817–94), professor at Leipzig from 1848. 95. NLS MS 2633 ff. 174, 241, 248. The Highlander, VIII, 400 (5 January 1881), 6. 96. The Highlander, VIII, 402 (19 January 1881), 8; 403 (26 January 1881), 3. Blackie, Essays (1890), pp. 184–5. NLS MS 2633 f. 11. Irish

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violence was as justified as the assassination of Archbishop Sharp in July 1679 by Covenanters, Blackie claimed. 97. NLS MS 2634 f. 92. 98. George Granville William Sutherland Leveson Gower (1828–92), Duke from 1861, enjoyed riding on steam engines, and watching the fire brigade at work. He was Garibaldi’s host in London (1864), and took him back to Caprera in his yacht. Cf. his letters to Blackie, NLS MS 2639 f. 13, MS 2643 ff. 192–3. 99. E. Richards, Patrick Sellar and the Highland Clearances (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1999), pp. 363–6. Sellar (1780–1851), remained factor until 1818, but clearances continued until 1821. 100. Alexander Sellar (1835–90) reported on secondary education for the Argyll Commission (1868). Legal secretary to the Lord Advocate 1870–4, MP for Haddington Burghs 1882–5, for Partick 1885. Liberal Chief Whip 1885–8. 101. Legal opinion by John Trayner (later Lord Trayner, judge of the Court of Session), 25 July 1882, NLS MS 2644 f. 115. NLS MS 2634, ff. 242, 249 (Grant, Shairp). 102. NLS MS 2634 ff. 230–2, 238–40 (Douglas). NLS MS 2644 f. 111 (Sellar). 103. NLS MS 2634 ff. 265, 251, 270. BL Add. MS 46440 ff. 44, 50. NLS MS 2635 ff. 29, 33, MS 2644 f. 125. 104. Athenaeum, no. 2890 (17 March 1883), 344. Cf. Blackie’s review of Mackenzie’s book, with Thomas Sellar’s rejoinders, ibid., no. 2888 (3 March), 275–6, no. 2889 (10 March), 313, no. 2890 (17 March), 343. 105. NLS MS 2644 f. 121. Cf. MS 2634 ff. 341, 355. 106. NLS MS 2634 f. 246. 107. NLS MS 2634 f. 147. 108. NLS MS 2633 f. 273, MS 2635 f. 11. 109. Blackie, Scottish Highlanders and the Land Laws, p. 1. C. Kidd, ‘Teutonist ethnology and Scottish Nationalist inhibition, 1780–1880’, SHR, LXXIV, 1, no. 197 (April 1995), 64–7. 110. MM, XLIX, 289 (November 1883), 33–6. On Danish peasant farming, see NLS MS 2635 f. 156. 111. NLS MS 2634 f. 73. Kennedy (1819–84) was Free Church minister at Dingwall. 112. Quoted in A. Auld, The Life of John Kennedy [1887] (Stoke-on-Trent: Berith, 1997), p. 179. A Tuscan peasant would reply with the proverb, ‘Non c’è peggior minestra che quella de’ frati’: religion offers a thin soup. 113. The 1884 Reform Act enfranchised poorer Catholic voters, thus fuelling Protestant anxieties in the West of Scotland, but in the Highlands five ‘Crofter’ candidates were elected, one of them a Catholic. 114. [Ross] ed., Memoir of Alexander J. Ross, p. 131. Letters, p. 183. Cf.

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NLS 2631 f. 188, MS 2633 f. 259, MS 2634 ff. 255, 295, MS 2636 ff. 172, 185, 196. Gardyne (1831–1923), formerly of the Coldstream Guards. 115. Letter to Marion Ross, 20 September [1874] (private owner). Letters, p. 235. 116. NLS MS 2637 ff. 57, 64. 117. NLS MS 2632 f. 187 (January 1877). 118. NLS MS 10085 f. 186, MS 2643 f. 114. For Argyll’s article, see NC, XIII, 71 (February 1883), 173–98. 119. NC, XIII, 74 (April 1883), 604–16. 120. NLS MS 2635 f. 90. J. W. Mason, ‘The Duke Of Argyll and the land question in late Victorian Britain’, VS, XXI, 2 (Winter 1978), 153–62. Cameron, Fraser Mackintosh, pp. 118–19, 134. 121. NLS MS 2633 f. 271. Cf. MS 2633 ff. 160, 246, MS 2634 f. 49, MS 2635 ff. 24, 27, 78, 109, MS 2636 f. 165, MS 2637 f. 293, MS 2638 ff. 116, 271, 279, MS 2639 ff. 17, 25. 122. 10 February 1883, quoted in H. J. Hanham, ‘The problem of Highland discontent, 1880–1925’, TRHS, Ser. 5, XIX (1969), 32. 123. 15, 17 January 1885, H. C. G. Matthew (ed.) Gladstone Diaries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), XI, p. 42. Bodleian Library Dep. 203 f. 6 (and Dep. 728 f. 251). Cf. BL Add. MS 46048 f. 179, NLS MS 2633 f. 291, EUL Dc2.76.14. Sir William Harcourt (1827–1904), Home Secretary 1880–5, Chancellor of the Exchequer 1894. 124. Cameron, Land for the People?, p. 31. 125. NLS MS 2636 ff. 150, 180–1. Cameron, Fraser Mackintosh, pp. 180–1. NLS MS 2636 f. 315 (John Mackay). 126. J. S. S. G. [Glennie] in The Crofter, 4 (July 1885), 51. Vates: prophet, soothsayer. See Fig. 11. 127. T. Brooking, Lands for the People? (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1996), pp. 83, 306 n.35 calls Blackie ‘Rev’.

11 EMERITUS 1 In March 1881 Blackie suffered a series of colds, which weakened him. Summer at Altnacraig and a tour of the Highlands did little to help, and friends pressed him to retire from his chair. He and Eliza had decided to buy a house at 9 Douglas Crescent, in a residential development constructed between 1875 and 1879, ‘a fancy fringe to the solid fabric of the Western New Town’. It was further from the University, and was well insulated from working-class and industrial Edinburgh to the west by Donaldson’s School, a ‘Jacobethan palace’ standing in extensive grounds. To the North it looked over the Water of Leith to the neo-classical John Watson’s Hospital. The West End of the New Town and the large neo-Gothic mass of St Mary’s Episcopal cathedral were immediately to the East. The houses in Douglas Crescent were substantial three-storey residences, with basement and attic flats leaving plenty of space for domestic servants. The architectural detail – ‘jolly arched dormers with fish-scale roofs on top of canted bays’ – was somehow reminiscent of Blackie himself. The social tone (almost half the houses were bought by lawyers) dictated a price in excess of £2,700. Had the Blackies needed a mortgage, the machinery for using trust funds for this purpose was well established in Edinburgh.1 While they spent their last summer at Altnacraig,2 one of Eliza’s female friends organised the move to Douglas Crescent. The pattern of serious winter colds was repeated in January and February of the following year (1882), with Blackie, bedridden for part of the time, afflicted with temporary blindness. Young female friends (one was his future biographer Anna M. Stoddart) read to him and wrote his letters, but by mid-March he was well enough to invite members of his Hellenic Society to his house to read ‘Medea 1000 – to the end’, and to write a paper ‘On the Definite Article in Greek with special Relation to the Revised Version of the New Testament’ for the Royal Society of Edinburgh.3 In May he made his usual trip south, while Eliza went with her friend Amelia Paton to the Wemyss Bay Hydropathic Hotel, presumably to recover from a Blackie back to his

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old ways. He wrote to her from London on 9 May, ‘I have had a busy day. . . . First, I wrote out my article for ‘The Scotsman’, dashed off twenty letters, lunched, and then went out on a dander’, by which he meant a round of social calls: Murray the publisher, Millais the painter, the Duke of Sutherland, Lord Rosebery and the Duke of Argyll. Blackie’s campaigning for the crofters had done nothing to lessen his liking for a lord. There was a short visit to Oxford to lecture on Greek pronunciation at the Museum. He saw Jowett, Max Müller and Mark Pattison, but met his match in Pattison’s formidable young wife, Emilia – ‘she contradicted me always,’ he told Eliza. He was able to bask in the admiration of Balliol students, including some of his old Edinburgh pupils, and (inevitably) sang ‘Jenny Geddes’. Then it was back to London and breakfast on 18 May with Gladstone, where the talk was on ‘Goethe, Carlyle, German Literature, the Thames Tunnel, Walter Scott, Wedgwood china’. At the Lyceum Theatre he saw Ellen Terry, a ‘perfect’ Juliet, ‘very chaste and classical’, but found Henry Irving’s Romeo ‘destitute of the soft gracious dignity that should belong to a young Italian in love’. He met them both backstage. At the end of May he made his way north by way of Stroud, where he stayed with Sidney Dobell, the poet. Together they visited his friends Lord and Lady Amberley. ‘We lay on the grass, or sat on cane bottomed chairs, for two hours, with brisk debate on the rights of men and of women,’ he told Eliza. Dobell ‘with his characteristic bland & chivalrous deference, contradicted or modified some of the flaming Radicalism of the noble lady & lord’. He returned to Edinburgh via Stratford-on-Avon and Coventry, and joined Eliza in their summer quarters at Pitlochry in July. Here the decision was made to resign his Edinburgh chair, but not before a dash north to Inverness for a banquet of the Highland Society. In the last week of July Blackie travelled to Edinburgh to hand in his resignation, and to deal with the controversy provoked by Altavona – a fitting end to an academic career which had begun the same way in Aberdeen fortythree years earlier. Back in Pitlochry he wrote to his publisher William Blackwood, ‘I am as brown as the heather on the Ben Vrackie, and quite resigned to my “resignation”.4 In the late summer he toured the Highlands, calling in on aristocratic friends and favourite lairds, and then in mid-October he returned to Edinburgh. For the first time in thirty years there was no need to prepare for a new university session. Apart from this, retirement seemed to make little difference to his life, which remained one of study, writing and lecturing in the autumn and winter, socialising in London in spring, and relaxing in the Scottish

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countryside in the summer. When in Edinburgh, the day began at 7.30 a.m. (which Blackie did not consider ‘early rising’), with porridge for breakfast, then work and correspondence for two hours. Lunch (he recommended pottage) was followed by an hour’s nap, and later a walk two hours before dinner. There would be no hard work after 9 p.m., and, unless there were a lecture or guests, a game of backgammon with Eliza, before bed by midnight.5 Blackie was a familiar face on the London summer scene, noted for his plaid, his ‘high cackling laughter and . . . peculiar cawing voice’,6 and his readiness to sing a ‘Scotch song’. He usually stayed with his brother-in-law George Wyld, a London doctor, or his old friend James Archer, the painter,7 and made the round of visits, soirées, and evening dinner parties, which he claimed to dislike but secretly enjoyed. He was a regular at Gladstone’s ‘breakfasts’, which could last until well after midday if a hot subject like church disestablishment was being discussed.8 In 1883, after spending May in London, he visited Jersey for two and a half weeks. He bought his ‘kail runt’ walking-stick, lunched with the Lieutenant-Governor, lectured on the Highlanders (‘illustrated with song and recitation’), and visited the grave of his half-brother Gregory. Back in London he did the rounds of ‘literary men’, Carlyle’s biographer J. A. Froude, Browning, and Sir Edwin Arnold, and had several meetings with Lord Napier, who was ‘full of the most liberal ideas’ on Highland land reform.9 A visit to the Grosvenor Gallery in New Bond street in July was less satisfactory. We ‘feasted our eyes on the singular conceits and ingenious peculiarities of Whistler & other gentlemen, who cannot be made to understand the object of art is not to make people stare, but to make them feel, and love, & act in harmony with the best of Nature’, he complained to Eliza.10 He met the painter Holman Hunt, though it was his young wife Edith who made more of an impression on him. He presented her with a copy of his Natural History of Atheism (1877), ‘as she dabbles in Buddhism’, he told Eliza, who probably knew of how Edith had been forced to leave home because of family opposition to her marriage to Hunt. Perhaps she was reminded of how she had done the same thing herself over forty years earlier.11 She had not been well in Blackie’s absence, and when he returned to Edinburgh they went to Eliza’s brother William in St Boswells to spend August in restorative Roxburghshire. There Blackie devoted the mornings to reading about the Scottish land laws, but by the end of the month he decided that he needed to extend his comparative study of peasant proprietorship to Ireland.12 His successor in the Edinburgh Greek chair, S. H. Butcher, had invited him to

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come and stay in Killarney where he owned an estate. Blackie returned to Edinburgh in early September, and managed to fit in a midnight banquet in honour of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry at the new Royal Lyceum Theatre in Grindlay street, before leaving for Dublin. He was in Ireland for a month, staying with the Butchers ‘as in the bosom of my own family’, and with other Anglo-Irish landlords. He felt Butcher talked ‘high good sense on the Land Laws’, and generally tried to understand the more enlightened proprietors, as he had in Scotland. He took Eliza to task, for ‘blaming Popery for the low physiognomy of the low Irish’. ‘The people are what they have been made, not by Romanism, which produces very good people in Tuscany, Belgium, and elsewhere, but by maladministration.’ Not that Blackie was incapable of indulging in a little racial stereotyping himself. After a visit to the Killarney Races he wrote to Eliza: But oh! such a people: such slouching, dangling, unbraced, inefficient, loutish men, with heavy, brutish physiognomies, and such ugly, wide, broad, low-hanging mouths! I never saw anything in human shape lower, except perhaps some Croatian Sloavits and other brown long-haired wild creatures sunning their lazy fronts in the market-places at Vienna. I went into a tent with Butcher and drank a little of their yellow whisky in honour of Old Ireland; but they seemed to look, not without suspicion, upon us, taking me perhaps for a detective; however, I expiated upon the essential identity of Scotch and Irish, and how we are altogether different from the Saxon that colonised these parts.13

He was now absorbed in the campaign to reform the land laws. In December he toured Scotland addressing meetings (at St Andrews the professors refused to attend), and also lectured in Manchester in January 1884. On this occasion he stayed in Birkenhead with his nephew ‘Alick’ who now worked for a Liverpool merchant house.14 In February the Positivist Frederic Harrison came to Edinburgh to speak on land reform at the Philosophical Institution, and described the aged Blackie ‘banging his gold-headed cane on the platform, shouting “At last I found a Radical who has common sense!” ’.15 Literary men visiting Edinburgh would call on Blackie, as an earlier generation had sought out Francis Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review. Oscar Wilde was the most notable of these visitors to Douglas Crescent. He had begun a British lecture tour in September 1883, and the following month reached Galashiels, where he lectured on his recent trip to the United States, adding some extempore comments on art and education. ‘He expressed himself quite as earnestly as you did of earnest children muddling their brains with books, & against

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existing school systems of teaching’, one of the audience wrote to Blackie.16 Wilde remembered Blackie from his visit to his parents in Dublin in June 1874, and when he arrived in Edinburgh in February 1884, he wrote as a ‘sincere admirer’ to Blackie: I am in Edinboro’ for three days, and the man who comes to Scotland without scenting the heather on the mountain, or talking to you among your books, misses what is best in the land. So as I can see no glory of purple on the hillside, may I come and see you, when you have, if you ever have, an idle hour? My excuse must be that all Celts gravitate towards each other.17

Wilde returned to Edinburgh to deliver lectures on ‘Dress’ and ‘The Value of Art in Modern Life’ on 20 December 1884. Later, in London, Blackie met Wilde’s new wife Constance, ‘a sweet quiet well favoured lassie with good sense and much worship of her husband whose character is much improved by nursing babies’, he informed Eliza, adding ‘my old friend Oscar Wyld [sic] has become quite smooth and fine with all his eccentricities elegantly shaven off’.18 In Edinburgh Wilde had stayed at the Balmoral Hotel. Peter Kropotkin, ‘the anarchist prince’, however, was a guest of the Blackies at 9 Douglas Crescent. In November 1886 he was in Edinburgh to lecture on ‘The Moral Effects of Prisons on Prisoners’, a subject on which he could speak with authority, having escaped from a Tsarist jail ten years previously. He and Blackie shared an interest in land reform and a distrust of the cruder forms of Darwinism, but Blackie was probably too absorbed in writing and lecturing on Burns, and in giving his ‘lay sermons’, to make much of the interesting guest. He soon departed for Yorkshire, leaving Eliza to look after Kropotkin. She was a sympathetic hostess. After his visit Kropotkin wrote to her about the recent suicide of his brother, who had also been in prison, and enquired ‘How are you, dear Madam? Do you well support the winter?’19 He had stayed a fortnight, lecturing also in Glasgow and Falkirk, meeting sympathisers like Patrick Geddes and James Mavor, and arguing with an interesting young Marxist student of Blackie’s, Thomas Kirkup.20 With anarchism Blackie had little sympathy, and socialism he regarded as the creed of ‘hot-brained crotchet-mongers’. He told a Glasgow member of William Morris’s Socialist League: I am a moralist, a thinker and a bit of a poet: but I am no economist; and Socialism I do not understand. The little that I have heard of it sounds to my sober mind somewhat dreamy: so you must not expect me to meddle with it. With the working men I have great sympathy, and have done a

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great deal for them in my way: but I never could see how society was to be regenerated by any schemes tending to palsy the arm of individual action.21

Blackie’s Christianity, on which he claimed to base his political views, was highly selective, and one feels a certain sympathy with the ‘working man’ who wrote to him a few years later, ‘Away with you Professor Blackie go back to school again and study Christianity and economics.’22 The trips to London continued to be a busy round of social calls, samplings of the latest play or preacher, and meetings on the crofter question. In May 1884 he stayed with James Archer and sat for another portrait, this time wearing his ‘light-figured dressing-gown’. He saw Wilson Barrett in The Claudian at the Princes Theatre, but thought it ‘false Art’ and inferior to the sermon of a ‘young prophet’, R. F. Horton, a Nonconformist preacher. The presence of ‘the Greek Archimandrite’ at one of Gladstone’s breakfasts gave Blackie an opportunity to show off his modern Greek. He explored Whitehall, the Temple and the Tower, as part of research for a long historical poem on London, called on Frederic Leighton, the painter, and the Holman Hunts in Putney, where he met Theodore Watts, the minder of Swinburne. He wrote to Eliza that he wished to avoid ‘society’, but he called on the Duke and Duchess of Argyll, and the Duchess of Breadalbane. At the opening of a ‘People’s Recreation Ground’, ‘behind Russell Square’, he hob-nobbed with Argyll’s son, the Marquess of Lorne and his wife, Princess Louise, but was also much struck by the scheme’s author, ‘the interesting and intelligent’ Octavia Hill. She seemed to possess ‘many of the detached mental qualities of the male, without losing many of the sensibilities of the female’. Without this balance, ‘in the mass, women are less happy then men’, he sermonised Eliza, who was in Edinburgh suffering with ‘troubled nerves’. This balance between ‘a keen sensibility to faults’ and ‘cool judgement’, and between ‘zeal’ and ‘discretion’, he found at the ‘big Crofter meeting in the City’ on 14 July. ‘Moderation and good sense’ prevailed, and the ‘radical Land Restoration gentlemen’ were kept in check. When Blackie returned to Scotland, he spent a quiet July with Eliza at Peebles, and then set off to the Highlands to investigate the land issue.23 He travelled to Oban, which looked ‘hideous, with gigantic houses high-up-piled higher and higher, like a bit out of Cromwell Road London’. He stayed first with the head of the Highland Temperance League, but gratefully accepted an invitation to tour Skye

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and Mull as a guest on the Santa Maria, the steam launch of Sir Donald Horne Macfarlane, a Liberal MP sympathetic to the crofters and to drink. To Eliza he wrote, ‘invent some occupation for yourself, other than that eternal stupid reading’, and promised to return to Edinburgh by 25 August. Blackie made speeches at Portree and Stornoway, and then visited sites where crofters had pulled down fences on common land. He assured Lord Rosebery that he had not been stirring things up. ‘We have been studying men more than mountains, and instructing the natives on the philosophy of the Land Laws, which will do them a great deal of good, as some of them have been seduced by a few wild men to dream of the possibility of an Agrarian Law by process of general confiscation.’ 24 He returned to Edinburgh as he had promised, but a week later was again travelling north to enjoy the hospitality of the Duke of Sutherland and Sir Kenneth Mackenzie, while agitating on the crofter question. ‘I enjoyed the familiar society of Radical agitators, Tory Dukes, Liberal Baronets and deer-stalking bankers in the most instructive alternation. Surely I shall know something of what human beings are made of before I die!’, he wrote to Rosebery. He got himself into trouble with his favourite young aristocrat by quoting the Duchess on the boorishness of a ploughman at Mentmore, compared to one at Dalmeny. Blackie had been delivering a ‘lay sermon’ on Burns at St David’s in Edinburgh, and had made joking reference to the innate superiority of the Scottish peasant, always one of his favourite themes. Since he could not plead inaccurate reporting (his usual excuse), he simply said that he was not responsible for what journalists wrote.25 Blackie was now lecturing more than ever. In November 1885 he delivered lectures on Goethe in Kelso and Airdrie, in December on relations of church and state at the Edinburgh Philosophical Institute, and then in January 1886 undertook a long tour of Manchester, Leeds, Leicester, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Walsall, Kendal, Carlisle and Newcastle, speaking on the land laws, ‘Beauty in Nature and Art’, Scottish song, and Burns. From Bolton he wrote to William Blackwood: I am wandering about here in a very pleasant and profitable way, measuring out the philosophy of Scottish song, to English rollers of steel & twiners of wool, and spinners of cotton, at the rate of £8.8/- an hour, quite a respectable value I fancy, for a Scottish Professor’s talk.

A Life of Robert Burns (1888) and a book on Scottish Song (1889) were the fruits of this activity.26 When he lectured on ‘Jacobite Song’ in Edinburgh in February he was assisted by a singer, Annie Grey, and

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he used the same arrangement for lectures in England (with local singers) and in Fife in the autumn.27 Blackie had always been a performer, and he enjoyed being on the road even in his late seventies, though there were the usual hardships, such as hosts who served ‘nothing stronger than beer’. Blackie continued these song tours until he was over eighty, and the last occasion on which he sang ‘Jenny Geddes’ from a platform was in Hawick on 9 March 1891. His summer holidays still involved walking or even climbing, as in the summer of 1888 when (aged seventy-nine) he scaled peaks in the Cairngorms despite bad weather.28 In January 1889 Blackie again suffered a series of colds with associated eye problems, but the following month was off to lecture on Goethe and ‘Beauty in Nature and Art’ in Newcastle, Sunderland, Huddersfield, Birmingham and Carlisle. In March and April he toured Scotland speaking on the Covenanters, and then in May he went to London to attend meetings on Scottish Home Rule, and to look up friends in Oxford. He spent the summer at Kirkstead, near St Mary’s Loch in Yarrow, where he turned eighty on 28 July. When Gladstone reached the same age at the end of December, Blackie sent greetings from an ‘octogenarian of 80 years and 5 months to an octogenarian of 80 years & 5 days’, together with Psalm 92: 14 in Greek, and some verses: Bless thee brave year, thou well deservest to my benison Who Gladstone brought to light of day and Tennyson And Blackie too – all three with wisdom weighty But light as larks beneath the load of eighty!29

As good as his word, Blackie spent November and December in a walking tour of Perthshire. In early February 1890 he listened to proceedings at the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and declared Darwinism – ‘everything out of nothing, unity out of multiplicity’ – to be ‘utter nonsense!’ Journalists seized on another story from ‘Good Old Blackie!’, and ignored the detail of his objection. An Edinburgh scientist gently suggested that Blackie’s view of the profession was ‘as much like the reality, as a smoked haddock is like the original fish’, but also that there was ‘common ground’ between them. Blackie was in no mood to compromise: a theory of evolution which made no reference to ‘that self-existent, and self-energising, self-plastic first Cause’ to be found in ‘all philosophies and all prophets from Moses to Plato and Aristotle, and from St. Paul to Lord Bacon, Spinoza, Hegel, and Goethe’, was ‘a hollow nut, a pretentious windy body without a soul’.30

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The long Edinburgh winter took its revenge. Blackie suffered another bout of illness, recovered, and carried on as before. There were lectures in early March to the Royal Society of Edinburgh on the modern Greek language and on its creator, Adamantios Korais. In early May he travelled to Oxford, Cambridge and London, where he stayed for a month. He lectured to the Goethe Society, and visited a nephew who was a master at Haileybury College, where he was shocked to find that the service in chapel lasted only twenty minutes.31 He went to ‘leafy’ and ‘picturesque’ Dorking to see the novelist and literary critic Grant Allen, whose writings on the Celtic element in the ‘British race’ had attracted his attention. Allen was the first writer to identify a ‘Celtic revival’ in literature and art, including Blackie (rather oddly) along with the Socialist League, as an example of ‘New Radicalism’ which was ‘essentially a Celtic product’.32 Allen knew the Welsh philologist John Rhys, with whom Blackie now stayed on his visits to Oxford from 1887 onwards.33 Rhys provided expert guidance on the Welsh language, which Blackie had first investigated twenty years earlier as the result of his friendship with Elizabeth Johnes. ‘Betha’ was a Welsh native-speaker, and a protégée of the formidable Lady Llanover of Abergavenny, the campaigner for the Welsh language, the Welsh harp, national costume and the Eisteddfod. Blackie always had a weakness for intelligent young ladies – Janet Chambers, daughter of the Edinburgh publisher, Lady Amberley (‘Kate’), mother of the philosopher Bertrand Russell, Lady Middleton (‘Dora’), the Countess of Breadalbane (‘Alma’), Constance Gordon Cumming (‘EKA’), inventor of a simplified alphabet for blind Chinese – but the friendship with his ‘Calypso’ Betha was the most intense of all, amounting to an infatuation in its early stages. By the 1880s it had petered out. Betha had married,34 and Blackie had found a new penfriend in Gladstone’s daughter Mary.35 On 1 April 1891, a few months short of his eighty-second birthday, Blackie left for his last grand tour. He had a deck cabin on the steamer RMS Chimborazo, sailing from London for Constantinople. Eliza had bought him a soft cap ‘to cover his ears at sea’, and he had Greek newspapers to read on the voyage. He was pleased to find that some fourteen of the sixty passengers were Scottish, mostly of the ‘patriotic’ variety. Stops were made at Tangier (7 April), and Palermo (10–17), where Blackie was horrified by ‘the hideous pageantry’ of the catacombs. Later hearing a concert in the beautiful gardens of the city, however, he was moved to write, ‘what a contrast to the sad and sour face . . . in the aspect of a Sunday afternoon twenty miles N.N.W.

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from Inverness’. His Italian, spoken with a strong Scottish accent, was incomprehensible to the locals. Another stop was made at Nauplia for sightseeing at Mycenae, where at a luncheon spread in front of the ‘heroic citadel’ Blackie proposed a toast in Greek ‘to the King of Men’. After two days in Athens, he arrived on 21 April in Constantinople, where he stayed for two busy weeks. ‘The combination of the historical and picturesque here beats anything that we have of a kindred nature on the Firths of Clyde and Forth’, he wrote of the Bosporus at the point where Darius had passed with his army in 489 BC, but behind it lay ‘a rottenness and hollowness in all directions from which my aesthetical and moral instincts violently revolt’. He saw the Sultan on a ceremonial visit to the old mosques of the city, and was horrified to see Turkish women walking ‘through the streets in the garb of the sheeted dead’, or peeping through ‘caged windows, like captives in a prison’. At a Greek Orthodox service he was much struck by the contrast with the ‘greyness of the act of communion in Dingwall or Kingussie’. There were visits to the Museum of Antiquities, guided by ‘one of the most learned of modern Greek historians’, and to St Sophia. The British Ambassador invited Blackie to join him for a cruise of the islands in the Sea of Marmara on the official yacht, and he was soon teaching Greek to a young lady. He met a former student, now teaching in the English College, and on various occasions sang Scots songs. There were all the classic ingredients of Blackie on tour, with little concession to age. In Constantinople the Scottish wife of the head of the British School of Archaeology in Athens invited him to stay, but when he arrived in the Greek capital he was struck down by ‘a very violent recurrence of a constitutional ailment’, and he spent most of the time in bed. On his journey back to Scotland he was chaperoned by a doctor as far as Lucerne, and then on 25 May he made his way to London. He had been away for almost two months and clearly had been overdoing things. He recuperated at Boat of Garten on Speyside with Eliza, and was soon busy writing on his travels.36 In early October he met Gladstone at the celebration of the Glenalmond Jubilee, and over the winter he lectured – ‘jumping about in my usual style’, Blackie called it – until in February 1892 he was struck down by influenza. The effects of this were still visible at the Blackies’ golden wedding celebrations in April, but he managed a lecture on the ‘Development of Modern Greek’ to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In May he addressed the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland on the Greek Travelling Scholarship. In June, at the inauguration of a monument at Cumnock to the Covenanter Alexander Peden, he gave

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a speech on the ‘martyrs of Drumclog’, without whom ‘in Britain a monstrous ecclesiastical and civil despotism would have stamped out all moral manhood from the island’. The only concession to age was that there was no visit to London. The Blackies rented a house in Kingussie in Inverness-shire from June to August, suffering ‘wretched weather’ in the last month, and in September Blackie joined a friend to walk from Aberlour to the mouth of the Spey. The winter was spent sitting for yet another portrait, writing Christianity and the Ideal of Humanity in Old Times and New (1893), his last book, and lecturing in Scotland and the North of England, generally on ‘Beauty in Art and Religion’.37 For some time Blackie had been a Scottish celebrity. His character was played in pantomime at the Theatre Royal in Edinburgh by John Wilson’s great-nephew – the posthumous revenge of ‘Christopher North’ on one of his imitators, one might say.38 He had been apostrophised many times in verse, most recently by ‘Q.Q.’ in The Scotsman of 27 February 1892: Blackie, thou art a Scotsman to the core, No ‘Oxford prig episcopizer’, fed On cates and comfit, and the ruby red Of alien grape; but one who loveth more Cauld kail from Aberdeen’s granite shore, Haggis and the Athole brose, Kebbuck instead Of Gorgonzola; for thy dress a plaid, For lyre, the pipes; for letters, Celtic lore. Thou hear’st not Beethoven; and thy spirit loathes The idiot song of west-end coteries, ‘Oh for some lilt of love and lovers’ oaths, Sung by some Hebe of the Hebrides, Or Oban, auburn maid trampling the clothes, And standing in her tub, as erst Diogenes.’39

Now he featured as a ‘celebrity of the day’ on the pages of London illustrated papers, with visiting journalists making the journey north to visit him. They could always be sure of an interview at Douglas Crescent, despite Blackie’s belief that they were most likely to misquote his remarks. He would receive them in his book-lined study, wearing his straw hat (to protect his eyes from gas-light), scarlet sash, and a darkcoloured coloured dressing-gown with a red border. Sometimes they were invited to join him and Mrs Blackie at lunch – for ‘the Pro’ a glass of warm milk and home-made gingerbread. Blackie would say, ‘I am only a philosopher,’ and then launch into one of his monologues, with

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a least one startling view firmly stated. ‘I deny, I tell you, that the State is bound to prevent people dying from starvation,’ he told the reporter from the Pall Mall Gazette who had suggested that school boards could undertake the feeding of poor children. ‘I think there should be no Poor Law. I would suffer these children to die rather than abolish the spontaneity of charity. This work belongs to the domain of practical Christianity,’ a view repeated later in an essay on ‘Christianity and Social Organisation’.40 The more ‘popular’ the magazine, the more emphasis there would be on Blackie ‘the character’, the snatches of song, the quotations from Goethe in ‘faultless German’, the anecdotes about him. ‘The Two G.O.M.s: a Sunday morning with Professor Blackie’ in the Westminster Gazette 41 gave the views of the Grand Old Man of Scottish letters on that other Grand Old Man, Mr Gladstone. In the Strand Magazine for March 1892 the second item, placed well before the latest of the ‘Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ (‘The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb’), was an ‘illustrated interview’ with Blackie, written ‘from a distinctly homely point of view’. There were eight photographs of the public rooms at 9 Douglas Crescent, and two of Blackie – one as a young man, the other seated at his desk, dressed in a long blue coat, instead of the usual dressing-gown, but still with his trademark red silk sash and ‘broad-brimmed Panama straw hat’. This was an early example of celebrity photo-journalism, with descriptions of interiors, furnishings, objects and photographs which prompted anecdotes about famous friends, biographical details, the working day. The photographs – two reproductions of details from Raphael’s Sistine Madonna visible on the walls of the dining room – gave an impression of a comfortable and cultured middle-class life.42 As Blackie’s eighty-fifth birthday approached, there were similar interviews for The Woman at Home43 and the English Illustrated Magazine.44 There were also articles in American magazines, largely due to the popularity there of Blackie’s On Self-Culture which was being sold in a ten cents paperback edition.45 Blackie’s well-known vanity, the subject of many an affectionate anecdote, may well have got out of hand under all this attention. There is a strong hint of this in a description of Blackie as an ‘awful guest’ from 1892. He was in Glasgow to give a lecture, and had asked the chairman to put him up for the night. His reputation as an inveterate kisser of both sexes was alarming enough to the chairman’s sisters, but meeting him was worse. ‘He is evidently quite spoiled with flattery and thinks he is conferring a tremendous benefit on us by coming,’ one of them wrote to her mother. ‘His conversation is rather full of the great ones he has had

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intercourse with – savants, poets, etc.’ The following morning Blackie departed, much to everyone’s relief, and she continued her letter: He did not kiss us but he is certainly a dreadful old man. He is most fearfully egotistical and everything that is said he turns round to himself. One absurd thing he said in talking of levees was ‘Levees are unsatisfactory sort of things. Now what I like is to have a chat with the Queen over afternoon tea.’

One thinks inevitably, and perhaps unfairly, of ‘tea with Homer’, but the account has a ring of truth – we also learn that Blackie polished off the sherry bottle on his return from the lecture.46 In a letter of March 1895 the Marquess of Bute described a Blackie blissfully unaware of social convention, and convinced of his skills as a linguist: The last time I met him (by invitation) he was dressed in a long velvet gown bound with a bright cherry-coloured sash, and a big sombrero hat. There was a middle-aged lady present, to whom he introduced me, and whom he insisted on my kissing. I think we kissed to please him. His accent (pronunciation) was so vile in Greek, and I believe in Gaelic, as almost to argue a physical defect of ear.47

An editor of The Scotsman recalled Blackie’s anger when he was discovered in the attempt to pass off an error in his Gaelic as the mistake of some unfortunate printer. His estimation was that: He believed in himself, and did not trouble much about others. He praised dead writers; they could not be rivals. Sometimes he praised living workers, with an ex cathedra manner, and an air of patronage which no one could mistake. I am sure he had kindly emotions; he could not otherwise have had the esteem of so many good men. But it was not for his kindness that the public liked him, and he knew the fact.48

‘Good old Blackie’ or ‘a dreadful old man’? No doubt both are true. Anyone who set out as determinedly as Blackie did to become a ‘great man’ runs the risk of becoming unbearable. Since the influenza attack early in 1892 there had been a slowing in Blackie’s activity. He had a long rest from lecturing in the first months of 1893. In early April he read a paper to the Royal Society of Edinburgh on the Greek scholar-politician Alexander Rhangabes, and then travelled to London. Alone in the railway carriage for much of the journey, he relieved the tedium by singing Scots songs. He stayed with his sister Helen and her family in Hampstead, and spoke at Home Rule meetings on the other side of London. He met former students, one a rising literary star (J. M. Barrie), the other The Times Berlin

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correspondent.49 In May he lectured in Oxford on ‘The Power and Place of Language in Modern Culture’, and visited Cambridge. In July the Blackies rented a cottage near Pitlochry, but the days of walking tours had now passed.50 The winter was spent in writing more articles, and in January 1894 Blackie was again on the lecture circuit. In Aberdeen he spoke on ‘Education and the Age’, and took ‘a grateful tumbler of toddy before going to bed at 11 P.M.’. There was also an English tour to talk on ‘The Gospel of Song’, with musical accompaniment. The report of the lecture to the Barnsley Literary Society noted: Except when mounting or descending the steps of the platform, Professor Blackie’s agility was really marvellous for a gentleman of nearly 85 years of age. He is a man of medium height, and somewhat spare figure, but he is as straight as a lath, and occasionally, when he warmed up to his subject, he skipped about the platform in a light and airy fashion that was more after the manner of a boy than an aged veteran. Several in the audience remarked on the striking resemblance his face bore to two famous men – Mr Gladstone and the late Lord Tennyson – and indeed, at times, the likeness was very striking. His voice, too, is wonderfully preserved.

Here too there was ‘a tumbler of whisky toddy’ before bed at 11 p.m. It was very cold. ‘The barometer has today made a notable leap downwards, or rather upwards I should say from 16 below the freezing point to 4 above it,’ he wrote to Eliza, ‘so I am no longer in need of the bog-berry stockings which so encumbered me at my departure yesterday.’ There were further lectures in February, when Eliza noted with worry ‘Pro is sleeping badly, and looking fagged,’ and more in March and April. There was also a constant stream of letters to The Scotsman in favour of the Greek Travelling Scholarship and against the disestablishment of the Church of Scotland. The reckoning came in April when Eliza suffered a painful illness. Anxiety over this brought on two attacks of ‘cardiac asthma’, Blackie beating the air with his hands as he fought for breath. By the summer he had recovered a little, and spent all of July and August in Pitlochry. Here he wrote to a friend: Thanks for your birthday greeting, and especially for the substantial addition of MARMALADE of which the soul-restoring virtue is even now in my mouth. As to my bodily state I am sorry to inform, that, though only once a week or so visited by any violent attack of what I call Pantie & Beatie! I suffer generally from weakness of the breathing function, and want of firmness of the legs. This no doubt at the sublime age of 85 is quite in the natural course of things; and I must study to bear the burdens, and to enjoy the honours of any elevated station with pious equanimity.51

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Gladstone was also holidaying there, having resigned as Prime Minister in March 1894. Blackie was taken in his ‘invalid carriage’ to visit the aged statesman whose ‘locomotive power’ was also ‘limited’. Gladstone asked advice on a matter which had troubled him at least since the time of his valedictory address to Edinburgh students in November 1865, ‘On the Place of Ancient Greece in the Providential Order of the World’. This had praised the Homeric world for having escaped ‘those shameless lusts, which formed the incredible and indelible disgrace of Greece’ in Plato’s time. Now Gladstone wanted answers on ‘the position of Socrates’, or rather the difference between ‘the Socrates of Xenophon and the Socrates of Plato’. He later wrote to Blackie ‘apologising for the abrupt manner’ in which he raised ‘the loathsome question’. Blackie’s reply from the depths of his study in Douglas Crescent was a classic denial of the unthinkable. None of the authorities gave the slightest support to the notion that the love of Socrates for boys, had anything in it of that gross sensuality condemned by St. Paul, Romans.I.27 & 2 Cor.VI.9. On the whole I am convinced that this is only one of the slanders that are apt to follow the best men, as the mud leaves the blackest marks on the whitest shoes. If there is any English or foreign writer of authority who takes a different view on this point, you will oblige me by giving me the exact reference.52

The matter was closed as far as Blackie was concerned, as it was for most English classicists, though not for Grote. For the Hellenic Society meeting at Douglas Crescent in December Blackie suggested the safer ground of Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound.53 Late in September 1894 Blackie’s cardiac asthma returned, though he still read without spectacles. As Blackwood’s Magazine’s oldest contributor (he had published a poem in 1832) he pestered them to print something on Scottish place-names, or on modern Greece and Greek. His old friend Max Müller, who had been unable to read or write, sent the following message from Oxford: Es geht zu Ende mit uns zwein, Es muss, mein Freund, geschieden sein! Still it is wonderful how even an old machine recovers.54

‘The old machine’ was in fact rapidly running down. Blackie’s favourite pupil John Forbes White described his farewell visit: ‘As he¸ awakened¸ from his sleep he took me by the hand and said, ¸ “α ληθευ´ων ε ν αγα´ πη ˛ ; agape, do you hear?”. . . . “Speaking the truth in love, in love.” ’ Then he added, ‘The sun gives light and heat;

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light for knowledge, heat for love.’55 Blackie died on 2 March 1895 aged eighty-five years and seven months. For the next four days he lay in the dining-room at Douglas Crescent, clad in the dressing gown with scarlet sash, while mourners came to pay their respects. The funeral at St Giles’ Cathedral on 6 March was a farewell from ‘official’ Edinburgh – the churches, Corporation, University, Faculty of Advocates, Writers to the Signet – but there was also a large ‘Highland’ contingent. The procession to the Dean Cemetery, led by nine pipers of the regiment of the Black Watch, took two hours through streets lined with people, despite the raw spring drizzle. The poet William McGonagall was moved to write ‘Lines in Praise of Professor Blackie’ which began: Alas! the people’s hearts are now full of sorrow For the deceased Professor Blackie, of Edinboro’.

Other verse tributes were of a similar quality, including the anonymous poem in Celtic Monthly: Again a tale of dread import, – It tells us Blackie is no more! That he has crossed the harbour bar And left old Scotia to deplore.56

The obituaries and tributes were generous, apart from the Graphic and Pall Mall Gazette, whose criticisms upset Eliza and old friends like Theodore Martin.57 ‘Except that the one was massive, the other meagre in form, he had much in common with “Christopher North” ’, noted The Times, comparing Blackie to the flamboyant John Wilson. So did Mrs Oliphant in Blackwood’s. They were ‘both Ours’, she wrote, and of Blackie, ‘The race of the individual, the original, the vernacular, ends (does it?) with him.’ Comparisons were also inevitably made with the recently deceased Jowett, silent and reserved, ‘endowed with the Scottish caution in which the Scotchman was lacking’.58 In the wake of the emotion generated by the funeral, The Evergreen echoed Blackie’s old cry against an anglicised educational system and an absence of a spirit of ‘true patriotism’: Never before . . . has there been so large a proportion of Scotsmen conscientiously educating their children outside every main element of that local and popular culture, that racial aptitude and national tradition, upon which full effectiveness at home, and even individual success elsewhere, have always depended, and must continue to depend.

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The effects of the loss of talent since the time of Carlyle were clear to see: The vacant place of native literature supplied with twaddle and garbage in varying proportion, settled by the fluctuation of newsagents’ imports; cities corresponding medleys of the squalid and the dull; people in keeping – mean or intemperate in mood, when not also in body, canny to one fault, fanatical to another, – even the few wise timidly discreet, the few noble indiscreetly valiant.

The funeral called to mind ‘that solitary Samoan hill up which dusky chiefs and clansmen . . . were so lately bearing our other greatest dead – the foremost son of Edinburgh and Scotland’ – this comparison with Stevenson being the oddest feature of Patrick Geddes’ overwrought article.59 Blackie’s portrait on a terracotta plaque, flanked by a thistle and a harp, was placed on a restored seventeenth-century tenement in Bank Street, which was given the name ‘Blackie House’. It was one of several halls of residence, started on the private initiative of Geddes, then a Lecturer in Botany at Edinburgh University, with the intention both of providing student accommodation and of regenerating Edinburgh’s Old Town, both objects of which Blackie would have approved. 60 Blackie left £4,988 in his will and a library of over 7,000 volumes. A large number of these were donated to the University Library, and the remainder were sold at auction over three days, not very successfully.61 His name was still before the public, whether in the form of the ‘Blackie Tartan’ produced in Kingussie, or in the advertisement for the ‘Royal Drooko’ umbrella, which featured a statuette of Blackie, battling against the wind (no doubt an Edinburgh easterly), and his verse, ‘I walk the world a rain-tight fellow, Beneath the Joseph Wright umbrella.’62 On Self-Culture continued to be Blackie’s bestselling book, and presumably provided a steady income for Blackie’s widow and heirs, especially once US royalties became easier to obtain after 1891. It remained in print in Britain at least until 1916, and in the US until 1913. By 1910 there had been thirty-seven large British editions, including versions in Pitman’s phonetic shorthand in 1882 and 1901. It was also translated into eleven languages – German, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Swedish, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Bengali, Marathi and Punjabi.63 Grateful readers continued to write to its British publisher, David Douglas of Edinburgh, long after Blackie’s death.64 Eliza lived with her nephew ‘Archie’ Stodart Walker at 33 Walker Street for another thirteen and half years. She died on 13 November 1908, in her ninetieth year.65

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Notes 1. J. Gifford, C. McWilliam and D. Walker, The Buildings of Scotland: Edinburgh (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 371–2. R. Rodger, The Transformation of Edinburgh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 152, 156, 240, 249, 338. The previous occupant had been Sir William Hunter, a retired Indian civil servant. 2. Wet Highland summers did not agree with Eliza, and Altnacraig was let from 1885. 3. Stoddart, pp. 354–60. NLS MS 2634 f. 234. NAS GD 492/201. CR, XLII, 1 (July 1882), 95–110. 4. Letters, pp. 290–6. NLS MS 2634 f. 209, MS 4429 f. 46. Emilia Pattison (1840–1904), the original for Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch, wrote on eighteenth-century French art, and actively supported women’s trade unions. When Pattison died (1884), she married Sir Charles Dilke, though he had just been cited as correspondent in a divorce case. 5. H. How, ‘Illustrated Interviews No. IX – Professor Blackie’, Strand Magazine, III (March 1892), 226. On Self-Culture, pp. 46, 50 (‘early rising’ was ‘a virtue which I was never able to practise’). 6. A. W. Price, The Ladies of Castlebrae (Gloucester: Alan Sutton 1985), p. 179. 7. Archer (1822–1904), a successful portraitist in Edinburgh and (from 1863) London. He painted Blackie three times. 8. R. A. J. Walling (ed.) Diaries of John Bright (London: Cassell, 1930), p. 499. L. Masterman (ed.), Mary Gladstone (London: Methuen, 1930), p. 290. Letters, p. 308. 9. Stoddart, pp. 391–2. Letters, pp. 302–8. 10. NLS MS 2642 f. 89. In November 1878 Whistler had won a farthing in damages against Ruskin, who had accused him of ‘throwing a pot of paint in the public’s face’ and being a ‘coxcomb’. 11. NLS MS 2642 ff. 93, 7. Letters, p. 308. Hunt married Fanny Waugh in 1865. She died in Florence in 1866 giving birth to a son. He married her younger sister Edith in 1875 in Switzerland, where it was not illegal to marry a deceased wife’s sister, as it was in Britain until 1907. Blackie advocated reform of the law in T. Paynter Allen (ed.), Opinions of the Hebrew and Greek Professors of the European Universities . . . . On the Scriptural Aspect of the Question Regarding the Legalisation of Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister (London: Marriage Reform Association, 1884). 12. NLS MS4442 f. 37, MS 2635 f. 70. MM, XLIX, 289 (November 1883), 27–38. William Wyld (1817–1902) had retired as a major from the army of the East India Company in 1865. 13. Letters, pp. 308–18. 14. Alexander Watt Blackie, and his brother Gregory, were brought up by the Blackies after the death of Gregory Blackie (1867). Educated at Edinburgh

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15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

John Stuart Blackie University, Alexander married the daughter of William Hanna, leading Free Church minister, and biographer of Thomas Chalmers. M. Vogeler, Frederic Harrison (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 194. NLS MS 2635 f. 254. Richard Lees. NLS 2635 f. 85 (25 October 1883). Blackie had lectured on ‘The Philosophy of Education’ at the Galashiels Mechanics’ Institute, 16 October 1883. Scottish Border Record, 20 October 1883, in NLS ABS 9.203.01. M. Holland and R. Hart-Davis (eds), Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), p. 242, date this as ?18/19 December 1884, but more likely it was February, when the painter George Reid wrote to Blackie to arrange a meeting with Wilde the following day. NLS MS 2635 f. 135 (5 February 1884). NLS MS 2636 f. 233, MS 2637 ff. 234, 241 (1886, 1888). Wilde was at a lecture at Grosvenor House on ‘the nursing system’, a mostly female audience, ‘with an extremely small sprinkling of female-minded males’. NLS MS 2636 ff. 289, 318, 323, MS 2637 f. 43. Kropotkin had lived in Edinburgh in 1876, and previously lectured there in 1882. James Mavor, My Windows on the Streets of the World (London: J. M. Dent, 1923), II, pp. 91–2. P. Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist [1889] (New York: Grove Press, 1973), pp. 442, 493. Kirkup (1844–1912), son of a Northumberland shepherd, a brilliant classical scholar, attended Continental universities after Edinburgh, but was something of a recluse. J. Bruce Glasier. LUL GP 1/1/23. Blackie, Essays, pp. 56–8. NLS MS 2637 f. 328. (Robert Montgomery, December 1888). NLS MS 2635 f. 161. Letters, pp. 321–7. R. F. Horton (1855–1934). Hill (1838–1912), housing reformer, founder of the National Trust. NLS MS 2635 f. 196, MS 10081 f. 198. Macfarlane (1830–1904), East India merchant, Catholic convert, MP County Carlow 1880–5, Argyllshire 1885–6, 1892–5. NLS MS 10081 f. 233 (emphasis in original). NLS MS 2636 f. 9, MS 10082 ff. 37–41. NLS 4481 f. 67 (emphasis in original). Stoddart, pp. 402–5. NLS MS 2637 f. 138. Hawick News, 13 March 1891. BL Add. 44107 f. 448. Great Scot, I, 17 (7 February 1890), 3, 6. ‘Evolution Today: Plato’, ‘Atheistical Science’, ABS 9.203.01. NLS MS 2638 ff. 114, 180 (J. H. Haycraft). College Echoes, IV, 11 (12 January 1893), 85–7. NLS MS 2642 f. 75. The nephew, Wardlaw Kennedy, ‘kept a menagerie including an alligator, a python, and an armadillo in his rooms and wrote about them’. I. Thomas, Haileybury 1806–1987 (Haileybury: The Haileybury Society, 1987), p. 59.

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32. ‘The Celt in English Art’, FR, LV (NS XLIX) 49 (1 February 1891), 267–77. Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen (1848–99), son of an Irish father and Scots mother, in 1880 had written ‘Are We Englishmen?’, also in the Fortnightly Review. Author of The Woman Who Did (1895), the most notorious ‘new woman’ novel of the 1890s. 33. Rhys (1840–1915), first Professor of Celtic at Oxford 1877, Fellow 1881, Principal 1895, of Jesus College. On visits to Cambridge Blackie stayed with another Welshman, Samuel Savage Lewis, at Corpus Christi College. 34. Letters, pp. 179–83. National Library of Wales L4389–93. Betha Johnes (1834–1927), daughter of a landowner and county court judge murdered in 1876 by his Irish butler, married in 1882 Lieutenant-General Hills (later Hills-Johns), hero of the Indian Mutiny, Abyssinian, Lushai and Afghan campaigns. 35. BL Add. MS 46251 ff. 59–64, 74, 80, 129–33, 156–61. Letters, pp. 283, 293, 298. 36. NLS MS 2638 f. 231. Letters, pp. 377–87. Stoddart, pp. 423–7. 37. NLS MS 2639 f. 294. EUL D.2.76.14 f. 4. Letters, pp. 387–90. Stoddart, pp. 428–38. The portrait by Sir George Reid was exhibited at the RSA in January 1893. 38. R. J. Wilson [‘Waldegrave’]. NLS MS 2638 f. 101, asking for cast-off ‘kail runts’. 39. NAS GD 492/69, p. 21. Cates: delicacies. 40. ‘Professor Blackie on Topics of the Day – I. An Interview at Edinburgh’, Pall Mall Gazette, XLI (17 February 1885), 11. ‘To make Poor Laws is to remove one of the great incentives to thrift in a class whose besetting sin is improvidence. . . . No man has a right to be saved from starvation. Starvation may, in certain cases, be the best thing for him, as it certainly is the best thing for society to be saved from the necessity of prolonging the existence of an altogether worthless character.’ Essays, pp. 31–2. Cf. the comments on ‘street Arabs’ p. 76. 41. I, 38 (15 March 1893), 9. 42. How, ‘Illustrated Interviews No. IX – Professor Blackie’, 225–30 See Fig. 14. 43. A. Warren, ‘Professor Blackie’, The Woman at Home, II, 26 (1894), 406–18. 44. A. H., ‘Morning Calls – Professor Blackie’, English Illustrated Magazine, XI, 31 (August 1894), 1072–7. 45. Literary World (Boston), Pennsylvania Monthly, Illustrated American (New York). For On Self-Culture in the US, see NLS MS 2639 f. 12. 46. Margaret Smith to Susan Emma Smith, 5 December 1892, Mitchell Library TD1/953. The Smiths of Jordanhill were a Tory family active in the affairs of Glasgow University. See Fig. 15.

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47. D. H. Blair, John Patrick, Third Marquess of Bute (London: John Murray, 1921), p. 202. Bute (1847–1900), Catholic convert, medieval enthusiast, benefactor of Glasgow and St Andrews universities. 48. C. A. Cooper, An Editor’s Retrospect (London: Macmillan, 1896), pp. 327–8. Cooper (1829–1916) succeeded Russel as Scotsman editor 1876–1906. 49. Charles Lowe (d. 1931) The Times Berlin correspondent 1878–91, author of several books on Bismarck. 50. Letters, pp. 391–7. NLS MS 2639 ff. 184, 210. Stoddart, pp. 439–41. 51. NLS MS 2640 ff. 6, 12–14. Stoddart, pp. 442–4. NLS MS 3813 f. 249. 52. NLS MS 2640 f. 57. BL Add. MS 44107 f. 471. Blackie cited Zeller, Philosophie der Griechen (1859), I, p. 59 and Brandis’s entry in Smith’s Classical Dictionary. Gladstone died in 1898 in his eighty-ninth year. 53. NLS MS 10526 f. 80. On homosexuality, see F. M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 424–7, L. Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). 54. NLS NS 4611 ff. 1–17, MS 4627 f. 22, MS 2640 f. 116. Müller adapts Adelbert von Chamisso’s ‘The Beggar and his Dog’: ‘We two are coming near our end, / And we will have to part, my friend!’ He died in 1900 at the age of seventy-seven. 55. I. M. Harrower, John Forbes White (Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1918), p. 25. Eliza Blackie gave White a small statuette of Goethe with a lock of hair which Blackie had received from Goethe’s daughter. For Blackie’s views on death, see Essays (1890), pp. 81–5. 56. W. McGonagall, Last Poetic Gems (1971), p. 126. Celtic Monthly, June 1895, p. 167. 57. NLS MS 2640 ff. 151, 159, 201–3. 58. The Times, 28 October 1895, p. 8. BM, CLVII, 954 (April 1895), 662–3. ER, CLXXXIII, 376 (April 1896), 469. 59. Geddes, ‘A Scottish Renascence’, The Evergreen . . . 1895, pp. 134–5. For Stevenson’s less than enthusiastic remarks, see ‘Some College Memories’, The New Amphion (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1887), pp. 233–5, and B. A. Booth and A. Mehew (eds), Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), III, p. 184. 60. Strathclyde University Archives Geddes MS 9/1956. Geddes (1854–1932) opened the first hall in Ramsay Gardens in 1887. Professor of Botany at Dundee (1883–1920), he also wrote on town planning and educational reform. In 1950 Blackie House was sold and turned into flats. 61. Probate, NAS. Catalogue of the Valuable Library . . . Belonging to the Late Professor John Stuart Blackie to be Sold by Auction by Mr Dowell.. . . (Edinburgh, 1895). The Times, 11 October 1910, p. 11b. NLS MS 2640 f. 190.

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62. Inverness Courier, 10 September 189? in NLS MS 2643 f. 219. Glasgow and Lanarkshire Illustrated, 1904. See Fig. 16. On Joseph Wright’s ‘Gladstone umbrella’, see NLS MS 2637 f. 147. 63. Notes, p. 203 note. A. S. Walker, ‘Appreciation’ in Selected Poems of John Stuart Blackie (1896), p. 22. In Britain it reached the 25th edition in 1896. In its first year (1874) it earned Blackie and his publisher £113 each. NLS MS 2631 f. 218. 64. See the request for a portrait bust or etching from the Netherlands, NLS MS 2641 f. 23 (1900). 65. Glasgow Herald, 14 November 1908, p. 6g.

EPILOGUE. ‘TONALD SHAW’ 1 The following verses appeared in The Scotsman in 1881. It was clear to readers that Blackie was the butt of the anonymous author, only later identified as George Merry, a master at the Edinburgh Academy.1 Professor Macgregor of New College translated them into Gaelic and read them to his class, accompanied, it seems, by a blind Highlander who normally played his barrel-organ on the Mound. This was censured by the New College Senatus. Macgregor shortly afterwards emigrated to New Zealand, for reasons of health.2 They are included here as a final comment on the inimitable John Stuart Blackie. I My name is Tonald Shaw, and I come from Lochinva. I know ta Gaelic well, but I wushed to know ta Greek too; I cam to Embro’ toun, and three guineas I paid doun To the man in Embro’ College, a pleasant man to speak to. He said he loved the Highlands, and called Skye ta queen of islands; And he sang a Gaelic song as well as Tugald Tavish; And he tanced ta Highland fling - he could tance as well as sing – And he called ta Gael a shentleman, ta Sassenach a savage. II He said ta kilt was good; all should wear ta kilt who could, But it did not suit ta calves which frequented Embro’ College, ‘About ta kilt and tartan hose, about ta tartan no one knows, I shall speak to you ta morn, for I’m fond of general knowledge.’ So I went unto his class, and an awful noise there wass, Till ta shentleman appeared and pegan one of his speeches: ‘Ta schoolmaster’s an ass, he can’t teach Greek unto his class, Ta subject of my lecture is “Ta kilt or Highland breeches”.’ III Ta students made a cheer, and he said ‘I cam not here For to be interrupted and insulted by jackasses;

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This is not ta pantomime, where you hear ta vulgar rhyme, And pehold ta pretty scenes and admire ta pretty lasses; You cam here to learn ta Greek, not to cheer me when I speak; If you do not love ta kilt, I shall read you “Tam o’ Shanter”; I shall lecture on ta land laws, or shall speak apout ta grand cause, For which there fought and died ta noble Covenanter.’ IV Ta students raised a stoure, and they shouted ‘Magus Moor’; And called Claverhouse a shentleman, ta Covenanter savage, He said, ‘What apout Shon Broun whom ta Claverhouse shot doun? Ta Highlander was porn to murder and to ravage; You cam here to learn ta Greek, and you have no right to speak; I shall leave ta Covenanter and take pulpit reformation; I shall lecture on ta priests and on those conceited peasts Who pretend to teach ta Greek without accentuation.’ V I went there to learn ta Greek, of which I rarely heard him speak, But I heard ta Irish lords deserved assassination; I heard that Muster Smith had proved Moses was a muth, And Sir Hairy’s Highland stirks ta genuine bulls of Bashan;3 That ta preacher could not preach; that ta teacher could not teach; That ta theatre was good; pantomimes abomination; That ta ladies from ta West loved Italian songs ta best, And scorned ta grand old songs of ta noble Scottish nation. VI And thus, from week to week, I went there to learn ta Greek, And when ta session closed, I took a good examination; With ta medal Tonald Shaw took ta boat to Lochinva, And very proud he wass of his college education. When I went to say ‘Good-bye’, he said, ‘Tonald you must try For ta vacant Celtic Chair I have founded in ta College; For you know ta Gaelic well, and I’ve taught you Greek mysel’, And I want a Gael who knows every pranch of human knowledge.’ TONALD SHAW, of Lochinva Notes 1. Macdonald, ‘Presidential address. The Classics in Scotland: a retrospect’, Proceedings of the Classical Association of Scotland, 1935/7, pp. 39–42. Merry (1842–1930), Glasgow and Oxford, later Rector of Dundee High School. 2. Highlander, VIII, 412 (30 March 1881), p. 3.

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3. In 1881 William Robertson Smith was deprived of his chair of Hebrew at Free Church College, Aberdeen, for holding heterodox opinions. Sir Henry Moncreiff, supported by virtually all the Highland ministers, was his chief accuser.

SOURCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Blackie Papers in the National Library of Scotland (MS 2621–64) contain mostly incoming correspondence, apart from letters written by Blackie to Mrs J. R. Stodart in 1841, and to his wife whenever he was away from Edinburgh. Blackie’s letters are in the Blackwood, Rosebery and other NLS collections, the University of Edinburgh Library, National Library of Wales (Dolaucothi Correspondence) and British Library (most in the Gladstone Papers). Other libraries in Britain, Ireland and the United States contain a smaller number of letters. The originals for The Letters of John Stuart Blackie to his Wife (1909) have not survived, dating of letters and transcription of names is not always precise, and there are many cuts. Anna M. Stoddart, John Stuart Blackie: A Biography (1895) used the manuscript autobiography (published as Notes of a Life in 1910), letters (some of which survive), and personal reminiscences. Blackie was known for his bad handwriting and frequently did not date letters with the year. The envelopes often bore his favourite ¸ inscription ¸ ¸ from the Greek New Testament (Ephesians 4:15), α ληθευ´ων ε ν αγα´ πη ˛ ‘speaking the truth in love’. His contributions to magazines and newspapers were so numerous that it has only been possible to list articles (unsigned for Blackwood’s Magazine, Foreign Quarterly Review, North British Review, Tait’s Magazine) in the major journals and periodicals, though not his verse. There is a two-volume scrapbook of letters to newspapers, and printed poetry in the NLS (ABS.9.203.01). For Blackie’s letters to The Times, see Palmer’s Index; for those to The Scotsman, see www.scotsman.com. BOOKS, PAMPHLETS, ESSAYS (MOST IMPORTANT PUBLICATIONS, IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER) Faust: A Tragedy, by J. W. Goethe, translated into English Verse with Notes, and Preliminary Remarks, Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1834. Disputatio Juridica Ad Lib. IV Tit. III Digest. De Dolo Malo . . . , Edinburgh: Alex. Smellie, 1834.

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On the Subscription to Articles of Faith: A Plea for the Liberties of the Scottish Universities with Special Reference to the Free Church Professors, Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843. De Latinarum Literarum Praestantia atque Utilitate; Orationem Academicam in Collegio Mariscallano Abredonensi, London: Taylor and Walton, 1845. A Letter to the Citizens of Aberdeen on the Improvement of their Academical Institutions, Aberdeen: Lewis Smith, 1846. Education in Scotland: An Appeal to the Scottish People on the Improvement of their Scholastic and Academical Institutions, Edinburgh: William Tait, 1846. University Reform: Eight Articles Reprinted from The Scotsman Newspaper; with A Letter to Professor Pillans, Edinburgh: Sutherland and Knox, 1848. The Water Cure in Scotland: Five Letters from Dunoon, Originally Published in the ‘Aberdeen Herald’, Aberdeen: George Davidson, 1849. The Lyrical Dramas of Aeschylus from the Greek; Translated into English Verse, London: J. W. Parker, 1850 [repr. in Everyman’s Library, London: J. M. Dent, 1906]. On the Studying and Teaching of Languages: Two Lectures Delivered in the Marischal College of Aberdeen, Edinburgh: Sutherland and Knox, 1852. Classical Literature in its Relation to the Nineteenth Century and Scottish University Education: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered in the University of Edinburgh, November 2, 1852, Edinburgh: Sutherland and Knox, 1852. On the Rhythmical Declamation of the Ancients, Edinburgh: Sutherland and Knox, 1852. The Pronunciation of Greek; Accent and Quantity. A Philological Inquiry, Edinburgh: Sutherland and Knox, 1852. On the Living Language of the Greeks, and its Utility to the Classical Scholar. An Introductory Lecture Delivered in the University of Edinburgh at the Opening of the Session 1853–4, Edinburgh: Sutherland and Knox, 1853. ‘Aeschylus’ and ‘Homer’, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 8th edition, Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, vols II (1853), XI (1856). On the Advancement of Learning in Scotland: A Letter to the Right Honourable the Lord Provost and Town Council of Edinburgh, Patrons of the University, Edinburgh: Sutherland and Knox, 1855. To the Honourable the Town-Council of Edinburgh, Patrons of the University and the Very Learned Senatus Academicus anent the Greek Classes. The Representation and Petition of John Stuart Blackie, Professor of Greek, Edinburgh, 1857. ‘Plato’, in Edinburgh Essays by Members of the University 1856 (ed. Alexander Nicolson), Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1857.

Sources and Bibliography

327

Lays and Legends of Ancient Greece, With Other Poems, Edinburgh: Sutherland and Knox, 1857 [2nd rev. edn, Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1880]. On Beauty: Three Discourses Delivered in the University of Edinburgh. With an Exposition of the Doctrine of the Beautiful According to Plato, Edinburgh: Sutherland and Knox, 1858. Lyrical Poems, Edinburgh: Sutherland and Knox, 1860. The Gaelic Language: Its Classical Affinities and Distinctive Character. A Lecture Delivered in the University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1864. On the Pronunciation of Greek, Edinburgh: Neill, 1865. Homer and the Iliad, 4 vols, Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1866. On Democracy: A Lecture Delivered in the Working Men’s Institute on the 3rd January 1867, Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1867 [repr. in Democracy: A Debate between Professor Blackie, of Edinburgh; and the Late Ernest Jones, of Manchester Held at Edinburgh, January 1867, Manchester: Abel Heywood, 1885]. On Forms of Government: A Historical Review and Estimate of the Growth of the Principal Types of Political Organism in Europe, from the Greeks and Romans Down to the Present Time. A Lecture Delivered in the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, by the Request of the Constitutional Association, April 24, 1867, London: Whitaker, 1867. On Government (Political Tracts no. 1), Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1868. On Education (Political Tracts no. 2), Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1868. Musa Burschicosa: A Book of Songs for Students and University Men, Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1869. War Songs of the Germans with Historical Illustrations of the Liberation War and the Rhine Boundary Question, Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1870. Four Phases of Morals: Socrates, Aristotle, Christianity, Utilitarianism, Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1871 [2nd edition, 1874]. Greek and English Dialogues, London: Macmillan, 1871. Lays of the Highlands and Islands, London: Strahan, 1872 [2nd edn, London: Walter Scott, 1888]. The Philological Character and Genius of the Modern Greek Language. Lecture by Professor John Stuart Blackie at the Royal Institution, London, April 26, 1872, Manchester: Manchester Greek Club [1872]. Horae Hellenicae: Essays and Discussions on Some Important Points of Greek Philology and Antiquity, London: Macmillan, 1874. On Self-Culture, Intellectual, Physical, and Moral: A Vade Mecum for Young Men and Students, Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1874.

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Language and Literature of the Scottish Highlands, Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1876. Songs of Religion and Life, Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1876. Natural History of Atheism, London: Daldy, Isbiter, 1877. The Wise Men of Greece in a Series of Dramatic Dialogues, London: Macmillan, 1877. Ought Gaelic to be Taught in Highland Schools?, Edinburgh: Maclachan and Stewart, 1877. Professor Blackie on the Relations of the Church and the Theatre [Edinburgh: Theatre Royal, 1877]. The Egyptian Dynasties, with Principal Kings, according to Manetho and the Monumental History of Brugsch, Edinburgh: James Thin, 1879. Faust: A Tragedy by Goethe translated into English Verse with Notes, and Preliminary Remarks . . . Second Edition Carefully Revised and Largely Rewritten, London: Macmillan, 1880. Gaelic Societies, Highland Depopulation and Land Law Reform: Inaugural Address to the Gaelic Society, Perth, October 7, 1880, Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1880. Lay Sermons, London: Macmillan, 1881. Altavona: Fact and Fiction from My Life in the Highlands, Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1882 [2nd and 3rd edition, London: Chapman and Hall, 1883]. The Wisdom of Goethe, Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1883. The Scottish Highlanders and the Land Laws: An Historical-Economical Enquiry, London: Chapman and Hall, 1885. What Does History Teach? Two Edinburgh Lectures, London: Macmillan 1886. Messis Vitae, London: Macmillan, 1886. Languages: How to Learn and How to Teach Them: Two Articles reprinted from ‘The Pupil Teacher’s Monthly’, Edinburgh: James Thin, 1888. A Letter to the People of Scotland on the Reform of their Academical Institutions, Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1888. Life of Robert Burns [‘Great Writers’ series], London: Walter Scott, 1888. Scottish Song: Its Wealth, Wisdom, and Social Significance, Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1889. Essays on Subjects of Moral and Social Interest, Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1890. A Song of Heroes, Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1890. Greek Primer, Colloquial and Constructive, London: Macmillan, 1891. ‘Robert Burns 1759–1796’ in Walter Jenkinson Kaye, Leading Poets of Scotland from Early Times, London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1891, pp. 97–102. The Union of 1707 and its Results: A Plea for Home Rule, Glasgow: Morison, 1892. Christianity and the Ideal of Humanity in Old Times and New, Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1893.

Sources and Bibliography

329

The Selected Poems of John Stuart Blackie, edited with an Appreciation by Archibald Stodart Walker, London: John MacQueen, 1896. The Day-Book of John Stuart Blackie, selected and transcribed from the Manuscript by his Nephew Archibald Stodart-Walker, London: Grant Richards, 1901. Notes of a Life by John Stuart Blackie, edited by his Nephew A. Stodart Walker, Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1910.

JOURNAL ARTICLES (CHRONOLOGICAL LIST – FOR ABBREVIATED TITLES, SEE LIST ON PP. IX–X) ELJ, II, 41 (Saturday 22 August 1829), 163–6. ‘The Importance of the German Language, and Reasons for its more General Cultivation in this Country (a communication from Gottingen [sic])’ [signed ‘J. S. B.’]. ELJ, V, 135 (Saturday 11 June 1831), 372–4. ‘Etruscan Antiquities: A Letter from Rome’ [signed ‘A Scotchman in Rome’]. Annali dell’Istituto di Corrispondenza Archaeologica (1831). ‘Intorno un sarcofago rinvenuto nella Vigna Amendola sulla Via Appia’. FQR, XVI, 31 (October 1835), 1–26. ‘Menzel German Literature’. FQR, XVI, 32 (January 1836), 328–60. ‘Goethe’s Correspondence with Zelter and Bettina Brentano’. FQR, XVII, 34 (July 1836), 253–71. ‘Prince Pückler-Muskau and his new tour’. BM, XL, 251 (September 1836), 384–88. ‘Thoughts and Sentiments from J. P. Richter’. FQR, XVIII, 35 (October 1836), 1–30. ‘Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe’. DUM, VIII, 47 (November 1836), 524–34. ‘The Plundersweiler Fair, A New Ethico-Political Puppet-Play, from Goethe. By J. S. Blackie, Esq.’. TM, VIII (N. S. IV), 39 (March 1837), 162–8. ‘Politics and Poetry: A Word from Goethe and a Word to Goethe’. FQR, XIX, 38 (July 1837), 293–337. ‘Ludwig Uhland and the Swabian Poets’. FQR, XX, 40 (January 1838), 221–53. ‘Knebel’s Posthumous Works and Correspondence’. TM, IX (N.S. V), 49 (January 1838) 1–5. ‘Lord Brougham’s Education Bill’. FQR, XXI, 42 (July 1838), 247–83. ‘Religious Literature of Germany’. FQR, XXII, 44 (January 1839), 407–41. ‘K. O. Müller’s Eumenides: German and English Scholarship’. FQR, XXIII, 46 (July 1839), 241–94. ‘Greek Metres and English Scholarship’. TM, X (N.S.VI), 72 (December 1839), 797–804. ‘Burschen Melodies: No. I’. FQR, XXIV, 48 (January 1840), 229–67. ‘Euripides and the Greek Drama: its Musical and Religious Importance’.

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TM, XI (N.S.VII), 74 (February 1840), 69–84. ‘The Rights of Christian People – lay patronage – the Veto’. TM, XI (N.S.VII), 76 (April 1840), 258–63. ‘Burschen Melodies: No. II’. TM, XI (N.S.VII), 79 (July 1840), 409–22. ‘Burschen Melodies: No. III. Songs of the Liberation War’. BM, XLVIII, 297 (July 1840), 119–34. ‘Germany, by Charles Julius Weber’. FQR, XXV, 50 (July 1840), 233–53. ‘Lessing’s Life and Writings’. TM, XI (N.S. VII), 81 (September 1840), 545–53. ‘Robert Owen and Socialism’. BM, XLVIII, 300 (October 1840), 487–505. ‘The Austrians’. TM, XI (N.S.VII), 82 (October 1840), 666–72. ‘Burschen Melodies: No. IV. A Niche for Körner’. BM, XLVIII, 302 (December 1840), 746–63. ‘Reminiscences of 1813 in Germany’. FQR, XXVI, 52 (January 1841), 241–65. ‘Memoirs of Varnhagen von Ense’. BM, XLIX, 304 (February 1841), 167–80. ‘Memoirs of Strombeck’. TM, XII (N.S.VIII), 86 (February 1841), 69–77. ‘Burschen Melodies: No. V. A Batch of Genuine Commers-Lieden’. FQR, XXVII, 53 (April 1841), 57–74. ‘Rahel: her Life and Writings’. TM, XII (N.S. VIII), 88 (April 1841), 205–14. ‘Protestantism’. TM, XII (N.S. VIII), 99 (May 1841), 273–7. ‘What Should the Kirk do Now?’. BM, L, 310 (August 1841), 143–60. ‘Traits and Tendencies of German Literature’. TM, XII (N.S. VIII), 93 (September 1841), 561–7. ‘Oxonian Ethics’. WR, XXXVII, 1 (January 1842), 134–71. ‘Prussia and the Prussian System’. TM, XIII (N.S. IX), 107 (November 1842), 747–54. ‘On the Study of Languages’. Montrose Standard V, 256 and 258 (20 May and 3 June 1842) pp. 4a, 4. ‘Translations from Horace’. FQR, XXX, 60 (January 1843), 439–65. ‘Klopstock’. FQR, XXXI, 61 (April 1843), 130–9. ‘Facts and Feelings from the Life of Steffens’. FQR, XXXI, 61 (April 1843), 169–81. ‘Reminiscence of Arndt’. TM, XIV (N.S. X), 116 (August 1843), 505–12. ‘Styria and the Styrian Alps’. BM, LIV, 335 (September 1843), 311–24. ‘Friedrich Schlegel’. TM, XIV (N.S. X), 117 (September 1843), 578–81. ‘The Scottish Universities and the Established Church’. FQR, XXXII, 63 (October 1843), 34–60. ‘Arndt’s Sketches of Swedish History’. TM, XV (N.S. XI), 126 (June 1844), 364–8. ‘German Lyrical Poetry: Uhland’. TM, XV (N.S. XI), 128–9 (August–September 1844), 515–21 and 565–70. ‘Parochial Schools of Scotland’.

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INDEX

Abercromby, Robert, 76 Aberdeen, 19–20, 75–6, 100–1, 137, 145, 160, 171 Aberdeen, Presbytery of, 103, 104, 107–10, 131 Aberdeen Constitutional, 108 Aberdeen Grammar School, 20, 23, 99 Aberdeen Philosophical Society, 143, 220 Adams, Dr Francis, 76, 93n8, 122n20, 137, 156n36 Aeschylus, 92, 102, 103, 114, 143, 146–52, 167, 176, 183, 187, 202, 203, 314 Allen, Grant, 308, 319n32 Amberley, Lord and Lady, 196, 213n54, 234, 301, 308 Anderson, Alexander, 109 Anderson, Rev. William, 76–8, 81, 93n9, 139–40 Annuity Tax, 168, 178n27 Appleton, C. E., 278, 295n63 Archer, James, 272, 273, 302, 305, 317n7 Argyll, Duke and Duchess of, 202, 274, 275, 289–90, 301, 305 Argyll Commission Report (1876), 276 Arnold, Matthew, 189–90, 194, 197–8, 272, 274 Association for the Improvement and Extension of the Scottish Universities (AIESU), 225–7 Associationism, 192–4, 213n42 Athenaeum, 84, 189 Athens, 182–6, 222, 309 Aytoun, W. E., 1, 79, 86, 94n19, 144, 149, 158n68 Bain, Alexander, 100, 121n5, 130, 135 Baldassari, Clementina, 73n80, 80 Baldassari, Clothilde, 67, 73n80 Bannerman, Alexander, 75, 76, 93n7, 100–2, 160 Bannerman family (Manchester), 117, 123n61, 163 Barrett, Wilson, 305 Barrie, J. M. (‘Gavin Ogilvie’), 209, 231–2, 312 Bayne, Peter, 224–5, 239n20 Beales, Edmund, 242n57 Beaton, Donald, 275, 294n49

Bell, Henry Glassford, 41, 59, 69n6, 223 Bell, Jonathan A., 59, 72n58, 80 Bennett, J. H., 229, 240n34 Berlin, 51–5, 86–7, 224–5, 245, 253–4 Bernays, Jacob, 163, 177n6, 253 Betjeman, John, 4 Bird, Isabella, 6, 9n22 Bismarck, Otto von, 41, 251, 253, 255, 258 Black, Adam, 227, 240n30 Blacker, Captain, 67 Blackie, Agnes Miller Gibson (half-sister), 14 Blackie, Alexander (‘Sandy’) (brother), 12, 23 Blackie, Alexander Gibson Weld (brother), 12 Blackie, Alexander Stuart (father), 11, 13–14, 15, 17, 23, 55, 57, 59, 74, 81, 91–2, 93nn6 and 33, 102, 119, 137, 142, 153, 170 Blackie, Alexander Watt (‘Alick’) (foster son), 303, 317n14 Blackie, Alison Stuart (sister), 12 Blackie, Archibald (brother), 12 Blackie, Archibald Gibson (‘Mr Pecker’) (halfbrother), 14 Blackie, Christina (‘Kit’) (sister), 12, 16–17, 24, 25, 32, 55, 64, 81, 90–1, 120, 243, 293n25 Blackie, Eliza Helen (wife) see Wyld, Eliza Helen Blackie, Dr George Stodart (half-brother), 14, 15, 36n14, 163 Blackie, Gregory Robert Watt (foster son), 317n14 Blackie, Gregory Watt (‘the Pope’) (halfbrother), 14, 15, 288, 302 Blackie, Helen (mother) see Stodart, Helen Blackie, Helen (aunt), 11, 24 Blackie, Helen (‘Podler’, ‘Dodle’) (sister), 12, 120, 138 Blackie, James Hamilton (brother), 12 Blackie, Jemima Elizabeth (half-sister), 14, 15 Blackie, John Stuart (‘Hans’, ‘the Pro’) birth, 12 childhood, 16–17 schooling, 17–19 Marischal College (1821–4), 19–23 Edinburgh University (1825–6), 24, 26–32 Divinity Hall Aberdeen (1826–9), 32–5

336

John Stuart Blackie

Göttingen (1829), 35, 40–50, 55, 87 Berlin (1829–30), 52–7, 86–7 Rome (1830–1), 56, 59 law in Edinburgh (1832–9), 78–92 marriage (1841), 5, 114, 120–1 books Faust (1834), 84–5, 147, 148 On the Subscription to Articles of Faith (1843), 132 Education in Scotland (1846), 134 The Water Cure in Scotland (1849), 146 Classical Literature in its Relation to the Nineteenth Century (1852), 175–6 The Pronunciation of Greek (1852), 175–6, 186 On the Living Language of the Greeks (1853), 187, 188 On the Advancement of Learning in Scotland (1855), 222 Lays and Legends of Ancient Greece (1857), 221 On Beauty (1858), 192–4 Lyrical Poems (1860), 220 Homer and the Iliad (1866), 200–2 Musa Burschicosa (1869), 45 War Songs of the Germans (1870), 251 Four Phase of Morals (1871), 284 Greek and English Dialogues (1871), 204 Horae Hellenicae (1874), 204 On Self-Culture (1874), 176, 232–3, 311, 316, 321n63 Language and Literature of the Scottish Highlands (1876), 289 Natural History of Atheism (1877), 302 Ought Gaelic to be Taught in Highland Schools? (1877), 276 The Wise Men of Greece (1877), 204 Faust (1880), 86 Altavona (1882), 286–7, 301 The Wisdom of Goethe (1883), 86, 97n63 Scottish Highlanders and the Land Laws (1885), 68, 284–5, 287 Life of Robert Burns (1888), 306 Scottish Song (1889), 306 Christianity and the Ideal of Humanity (1893), 310 crofters and land reform, 282–3, 285–91, 303, 305–6 daily routine, 302 death and will, 315–16 dress and appearance, 143, 168–9, 178n30, 202, 218, 277–8, 295n61, 311 eccentricity, 3–4, 202, 218–19, 302, 312 Edinburgh rectorship (1883), 229–30 England and the English, 243–4, 247–8, 257–8 favourite inscription (Ephesians 4:15), 314, 325 foreign travel Germany, Italy (1829–31), 40–2, 50–1, 58–9, 60–2, 67–8

Germany (1852), 162–3 Greece (1853), 182–4, 186 Germany (1855, 1856, 1857), 245 Germany, Russia (1871), 253–5 Germany (1873), 270 Ireland (1874), 272–3 Egypt, Italy, Germany (1878), 277–8 France, Italy (1879), 279–81 Ireland (1883), 302–3 Sicily, Greece, Constantinople (1891), 308–9 Gaelic, 198, 266–7, 269–70, 273–7, 289, 312 Germanophilia, 56, 61, 245–6, 251, 253–4, 255 Greek, modern (Romaic), 184–7, 314 Greek and Latin pronunciation, 187–90, 211n30, 312 health, 4–5, 23–4, 50, 62, 145–6, 186, 300, 307, 308, 309, 312, 313, 314 Home Rule, 256–9, 312 homes Aberdeen (Marischal St), 14; (67 Dee St), 120; (113 High St), 138; (Union St), 147 Edinburgh (43 Castle St), 171, 182; (24 Hill St), 196; (9 Douglas Cres), 300, 311 Oban (Altnacraig), 4, 267–8, 269, 270, 274, 279, 281, 300, 317n2 homosexuality in ancient Greece, 314 income Marischal College, 137–8, 156nn36 and 39 Edinburgh University, 173–5 lecturing, 306 journalism, 83, 92, 114, 306 Ireland and the Irish, 256–9, 284–6, 303 ‘kail runt’, 3, 8n11, 302 kissing, 140, 220–1, 273, 311–12 lectures and ‘lay sermons’, 282, 304, 306–7, 309–10, 313 parliamentary reform (1831–2), 74–5; (1866–7), 234–7, 255; (1884), 237 poetry, 6, 9n31, 10n32, 149–50, 196, 203, 220, 221, 265, 269, 278, 307 political economy, 284–5, 311, 319n40 religion, 4, 23–6, 57, 61–4, 76, 139–41, 152–3, 248–9 reputation lifetime, 207–9, 218–19, 238, 291, 310–12 posthumous, 2–3, 8, 315–16 ‘Royal Drooko umbrella’, 316, Fig.16 Scotland and the Scots, 193, 247–53, 256, 259–60 Scottish Highlands, 146, 198, 256, 264–9 Scottish song, 252, 282, 306–7, 313 socialism, 304–5 student breakfast and tea parties, 231–2 teaching Marischal, 127–9, 136–8 Edinburgh, 174, 176, 189, 204–7 translation, 148–51 war, 250–1, 253, 255 women’s education, 233–4

Index Blackie, John (grandfather), 11 Blackie, Margaret (formerly Paterson, stepmother) see Miller, Margaret Blackie, Marion (‘Fish’) (sister), 12, 116, 146 Blackie, William (brother), 12 Blackie Brotherhood, 230 Blackie House, 316, 320n60 Blackie Tartan, 316 Blackwell, Thomas, 194, 213n45 Blackwood, John, 169, 179n32, 234 Blackwood, Alexander and Robert, 83–4, 95n40, 114 Blackwood, William II, 142; William III, 301, 306 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 82, 83, 114, 187, 312 Blaikie, W. G., 129, 154n7 Blumenbach, J. F., 48, 70n29 Board of Education (Scotland), 276 Boeckh, August, 54, 62, 72n49, 245 Bonn, 163, 244, 245, 253 Bradfield, 189 Brandis, C. A., 68, 73n81, 163, 186 Breadalbane, Lady (‘Alma’), 281, 305, 308 Brewster, Sir David, 123n28, 132, 139, 155n19, 163, 229, 233 Bright, John, 161, 199, 213n66, 234, 235, 284, 287, 297n88 Brougham, Lord, 74–5, 78, 79, 85, 92n2, 134, 229 Brown, Rev. Andrew, 31–2, 39n59 Brown, Dr John, 81, 95n28, 121, 142, 162 Brown, Dr R. J. (‘Dorian’), 130, 131, 154n10 Brown, Samuel, 81, 95n28, 145 Brown, Dr W. L., 32, 33, 39n62, 130 Browning Elizabeth Barrett, 147, 158n63, 202, 221 Browning, Robert, 202–4, 272, 302 Bryce, James, 235, 242n56 Buchanan, George, 99, 121n2 Buchanan, Robert, 267–8, 292n16 Buckle, H. T., 192, 248, 261n20 Bunsen, Baron, 7, 63–4, 65, 68, 73n68, 78, 102, 147, 163, 245 Burnet, John, 246, 261n14 Burns, Robert, 89, 193, 252, 306 Burns, William, 249, 261n21 Burschenschaft, 43, 45, 46 Burton, J. H., 135, 155n28, 173 Butcher, S. H., 208–9, 217n104, 302–3, Fig.10 Bute, Marquess of, 275, 312, 320n47 Byron, Lord, 23, 87–8, 103 Caird, Edward and John, 172, 180n44 Calderwood, Henry, 172, 180n42 Caledonian Society of Toronto, 275 Cambridge, 26–7, 65, 104–5, 150, 185, 186, 188, 189, 190, 199, 226, 244, 247, 308, 313 Campbell, J. F., 267, 270–2, 275, 292n9 Campbell, Lewis, 246, 261n15

337

Campbell of Monzie, 268 Campbell-Bannerman, Henry, 117, 125n61 Capponi, Gino, 281, 296n72 Carbonari, 66, 67 Carlyle, J. A., 148, 163 Carlyle, Thomas, 1, 4, 7, 20, 85–7, 88, 90, 140, 144, 146, 147–8, 157n43, 194, 203, 220, 221, 223–4, 229, 244, 251, 252, 274, 290, 316 Carswell, Catherine, 9n27 Carswell, Donald, 3 Celtic Monthly, 315 Chalmers, Dr Thomas, 7, 32, 35–6, 39n67, 88, 136 Chamberlain, Joseph, 258–9, 263n52, 287 Chambers, Janet, 308 Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal, 83 Chapman and Hall, 287 Chartism, 101, 234, 235 Christison, Sir Robert, 233, 241n50 Church of England, 104, 105–6 Church of Scotland, 104–6, 110–12, 134–5, 139, 160, 165, 171–2, 273, 276, 309 Cicero, 128 Clark, Thomas (‘Hotblast’), 130, 154n11 Clark, W. G., 200, 214n70, 247 Classical Museum, 150, 204 Clough, A. H., 150, 159n72 Clyde, James, 183, 209n1, 216n88 Cockburn, Lord, 3, 79, 93n16, 135, 257 Coleridge, H. N., 84, 86, 96n46 Coleridge, S. T., 74, 77, 194 College of Preceptors, 189 Colquhoun, J. C., 102–3, 122n16 The Commonwealth, 224 Confession of Faith see Westminster Confession Congregationalists, 123n32, 162, 164; see also Dissenters Contemporary Review, 282 Cook, Thomas, 40 Cooper, C. A., 320n48 Craik, G. L., 200 Crawford, Earl of, 275 The Crofter, 291 Crofters’ Holdings (Scotland) Act (1886), 291 Cruikshank, Dr John (‘Homo’), 130, 154n10 Cunninghame, Lord, 103, 122n16, 110, 111, 112, 121 Cunninghame-Graham, R. B., 257, 263n49 Darwin (Charles) and Darwinism, 2, 191, 196, 253, 288, 304, 307 Davidoff, Count Vladimir, 254, 262n39 Davidson, Duncan, 275, 294n47 Davidson, James, 129–30 Davitt, Michael, 283, 297n85 D’Eichthal, Gustave, 188 Demosthenes, 176 Derby, Lord, 199, 201, 215n73 Dewar, Daniel, 131, 154n12 Dick, Thomas, 170, 179n37

338

John Stuart Blackie

Dindorf, Wilhelm, 207, 216n99 Disraeli, Benjamin, 236–7, 255–6 Disruption (1843), 106, 131–2, 134, 171–2, 248, 276 Dissenters (Voluntaries), 104, 106, 123n32, 132–3, 135, 160–1, 164, 167, 171, 227 Dobell, Sidney, 301 Doering, Minna, 56 Donaldson, Sir James, 174, 180n54 Douglas, David, 286–7 Dublin University Magazine, 82, 238 Dunbar, George, 27–8, 104, 153, 160, 162, 165–6, 174, 175, 204, 254 Duncan, Rev. John G., 3 Duncker, Maximilian, 163, 177n6 East, Dr Rowland, 145, 157n56, 171 Edinburgh, 82, 160–1, 163, 171–3, 177nn4 and 9 Edinburgh Evening Courant, 207 Edinburgh, University of, 26–32, 47, 52, 104, 105, 137, 138, 160, 162, 165, 172, 173–6, 180n52, 204–9, 220, 222–3, 227–31, 233–4, 245, 247 Edinburgh Academy, 153, 175, 190 Edinburgh High School, 165, 175, 204, 225 Edinburgh Ladies’ Educational Association, 233, 241n49 Edinburgh Literary Journal, 42–3, 56, 64 Edinburgh Philosophical Institution, 142–3, 170–1, 187, 237, 303, 306 Edinburgh Review, 82, 83, 103, 171, 269, 303 Edinburgh Town Council, 160–71, 227–9 Edinburgh Working Men’s Club and Institute, 235 Education, elementary, 134–5 Educational Institute of Scotland, 209 Eliot, George, 152, 196 Emerson, R. W., 31, 85, 143 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 194 English Illustrated Magazine, 311 Episcopalians, 104, 105, 165–6 Eton, 189 Euripides, 159n76, 176 Evangelicals, 34–5, 78, 106–7, 131–3, 160–1, 171 The Evergreen, 315–16 Faculty of Advocates, 79 Faucit, Helena (Lady Martin), 152, 159n77, 202, 215n79 Federation of Celtic Societies, 283, 285 Ferrier, James, 29, 164, 169, 172, 180n43, 228, 244–5 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 53 Finch, Rev. Robert, 62, 72n64 Findlay, J. R., 273, 294n39 Finlay, George, 183, 185, 188, 200, 209n1, 245 Fitzgerald, Edward, 147, 158n64 Fleming, Rev. John, 132, 155n20

Flint, Robert, 180n43 Fontane, Theodor, 243 Forbes, Edward, 81, 95n28, 146 Forbes, Francis, 41, 47, 50, 51, 69n5 Forbes, John, 41, 47, 50, 51, 69n5 Forbes, Dr Patrick (‘Old Prosody’), 33–4, 39n63, 109 Foreign Quarterly Review, 82, 83, 84, 91–2, 103 Forsyth, Dr Alexander, 34, 39n65, 109 Franchetti, Leopoldo, 280, 295n70 Fraser, Rev. A. C., 172, 180n42 Fraser’s Magazine, 83, 221 Fraser Mackintosh, Charles, 276, 291, 295n56, 296n73 Free Church of Scotland, 131–4, 140, 144, 160–1, 164, 165, 171–2, 227, 273, 276 Freeman, E. A., 188, 210n17 Fritsche, Franz, 103, 122n19 Froude, J. A., 302 Gaelic Schools Societies, 276 Gaelic Society of Inverness, 267, 276, 301 Geddes, Patrick, 304, 316, 320n60 Geddes, W. D., 201, 215n74, 288 Geikie, Archibald, 218, 238n1 Geldart, E. M. 188, 211n22 George, Henry, 283, 296n83 Gerhard, F. W. E., 64, 65, 73n72, 92, 102, 128, 147, 245 German universities, 40–1, 244, 245–6, 260n4 Gibson, Archibald (uncle), 24 Gibson, Archibald (cousin), 24 Gibson, Helen (aunt) see Blackie, Helen Gibson, John and Charlotte (cousins), 25 Gibson, John (painter), 59 Gibson, William (cousin), 24 Gladstone, Mary, 308 Gladstone, W. E., 2, 117, 184, 194–5, 198–9, 200, 201, 203, 204, 214n63, 229, 255–8, 284, 290–1, 301, 302, 305, 307, 311, 313, 314 Gladstone family, 117, 247, 261n18 Glasgow, University of, 27, 105, 137, 174, 222, 229, 246, 249 Glasier, J. Bruce, 303–4, 318n21 Glennie, George, 130, 154n9 Goethe, J. W. von, 7, 50, 54, 83–7, 88–9, 97n62, 112–13, 151, 155n23, 244, 320n55 Göttingen, 40–50, 52, 53, 103, 206, 244, 253, 270, 281 Göttingen Seven, The, 49, 71n36, 133, 155n24 Goodsir, John, 170, 179n34 Gordon Cumming, Constance (‘EKA’), 308 Gossenrecht, 43 Grant, Sir Alexander, 229, 233, 240n35, 245, 287 Grant, Major, 274 The Graphic, 315 Gregory, Sir William, 279, 295n66

Index Greenhill-Gardyne, Lieutenant-Colonel, 289 Grimm, Jakob and Wilhelm, 245, 260n8 Grote, George, 191, 192, 194, 195, 198, 200, 204, 212n37, 314 Guthrie, Dr Thomas, 88, 97n63, 257 Haileybury College, 308 Haldane, Elizabeth, 12 Haldane, R. B., 206, 216n93 Halle, 52, 222, 245 Hamilton, Sir William, 48, 92, 96n45, 103, 105, 112, 121, 122n17, 163, 172, 213n42, 222, 240n31 Hannah, Rev. John, 165–6, 169, 178n19 Hannay, James, 207, 216n98 Hardie, W. R., 189, 211n27 Hardy, Thomas, 203 Hare, Julius, 150, 158n70 Harrison, Frederic, 303 Harrow, 189, 257 Harvey, George, 81, 94n27, 121 Hausmann, J. L. F., 48, 70n30 Hayward, Abraham, 83, 84 Heeren, Arnold, 46, 48, 70n21 Hegel, G. W. F., 54, 192, 212n41 Heidelberg, 41, 244, 245 Heine, Heinrich, 42 Held, Aurora von, 56, 57 Hellenic Society, 230, 300, 314 Hermann, J. G. J., 103, 122n19 Highland Land Law Reform Association (HLLRA), 287, 291 Highland Society (London), 267 The Highlander, 276 Hill, D. O., 81, 94n27, 121 Hill, Octavia, 305, 318n23 Hodgson, W. B., 283, 296n82 Holloway, ‘Professor’, 219 Homer, 54, 143, 176, 182, 186, 194–202, 248, 251 Hope, John, 103, 122n16 Hope, Thomas, 31, 38n58 Horace, 59, 60, 99, 128, 148–9 Horn, Robert, 79, 80, 94n22, 109, 121, 127, 138, 149, 163 Horton, R. F., 305, 318n23 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 64 Hume, Joseph, 74, 92n1 Hunt, Leigh, 147, 220 Hunt, W. Holman and Edith, 302, 305, 317n11 Hunter, John, 169, 179n31, 200 Hutcheson, David, 266, 293n5 Hydrotherapy (water cure), 145–6, 157n56, 162, 171, 196, 279, 300 Inglis, John, 227–8, 240n28 Ireland, 256–8, 272–3, 282, 284–6, 288, 290, 294n34, 303 Irving, Sir Henry, 301, 303 Istituto di Corrispondenza Archaeologica, 65

339

Jahn, F. L. (‘Turnvater’), 176, 181n60 Jebb, Richard, 189, 190, 201, 206, 208, 211nn20 and 25 Jeffrey, Francis, 135–6, 156n32, 303 Jena, 43, 45, 47 Jerdan, William, 74, 92n1 Jersey, 288, 302 Jex-Blake, Sophia, 233–4, 241n50 Johnes, Elizabeth (‘Betha’), 308, 319n34 Johnston, Arthur, 99, 121n2 Johnstone, Mary, 115–16, 118, 125n59 Jolly, William, 274, 286 Jones, Ernest, 235–6, 242n58 Jowett, Benjamin, 143, 157n51, 191, 192, 244–6, 262n12, 301, 315 Juridical Society, 78, 80 Kelland, Philip, 105, 123n26 Kennedy, Helen (sister) see Blackie, Helen Kennedy, Howard Angus (nephew), 8n6 Kennedy, Rev. John, 288–9, 298n111 Kennedy, Wardlaw (nephew), 308, 318n31 Kerner, Justinus, 89–90, 98n75 Kestner, August, 62, 72n64 Kilgour, Alexander, 135, 156n31 King’s College, Aberdeen, 19–20, 27, 100, 101, 106, 132, 135, 137, 227 King’s College, London, 247 Kingsley, Charles and Henry, 188, 196–7, 211n21, 213n56 Kirkup, Thomas, 304, 318n20 Knebel, Karl von, 89, 97n70 Knight, William, 22–3, 129 Knox, Thomas, 163 Kombst, Gustav, 84, 96n44 Korais (Coraïs), Adamantios, 210n7, 308 Kropotkin, Prince Peter, 304, 318n19 Lachmann, Karl, 195, 213n50 Land Nationalisation League, 283 Landsmannschaften, 45 Lane, E. W., 196, 213n53 Laurie, A. P., 218–19, 238n2 Leask, William, 256, 263n47 Lee, Rev. John, 170, 179n36 Lee, Rev. Robert, 168, 170, 179n35 Lehrfreiheit, 133, 155n24 Leighton, Sir Frederic, 305 Leslie, Sir John, 31, 39n58 Lessing, G. E., 89, 97n70 Lewes, G. H., 88, 196 Lewis, Alice (Eliza’s niece), 277, 278, 295n60 Lewis, Rev. George, 155n26, 295n60 Lewis, Rev. James (brother-in-law), 295n60 Lister, Joseph, 229, 240n34, 247 Lockhart, J. G. (cousin), 9n24, 11, 26–7, 28, 74, 82, 103–4 Londonisation, 1–2, 247

340

John Stuart Blackie

Lorimer, James, 9n25, 225–6, 230–1, 236, 244, 288, 289 Lorne, Marquess of, 305 Lorne Ossianic Society, 267, 274 Lotze, R. H., 206, 216n93 Lowe, Charles, 312–13, 320n49 Lucian, 176 Lucy, Sir Henry, 221 Lushington, Edmund, 208 Luther, Martin, 50–1, 88 Macaulay, Thomas, 104, 123n25, 160–1, 173, 176n1 Macdonald, Lauchlan, 275, 281–2, 296n74 Macdonald, W. B., 148–9, 158n68 McDouall, Rev. Charles, 165, 167, 169, 177n15 McDougall, P. C., 165, 172, 173, 177n16 Macfarlane, Sir Donald, 305–6, 318n24 Macgillivray, William, 131, 154n13 McGonagall, William, 315 Macgregor, James, 272, 293n32 McHale, Archbishop John, 273, 294n35 Mackail, J. W., 246, 261n13 Mackay, John, 275, 291, 294n48 Mackenzie, Alexander, 287 Mackenzie, John, 291 Mackenzie, Sir Kenneth, 281–2, 286, 296n74 Mackinnon, Donald, 276, 295n54 McKinnon, Sir William, 275, 294n45 McLaren, Duncan, 161, 163, 167, 169, 170, 171, 176n2, 178n26, 228, 234, 235 Maclauchlan, Thomas, 275, 294n51 McLean, Allan, 275, 294n46 MacLeod, Rev. Norman (junior), 173, 180n50; (senior), 271, 293n21 Macmillan, Alexander and Daniel, 171, 179n39 Macmillan’s Magazine, 245 Macpherson, Ewen, 281, 296n74 Macpherson, James and Ossian, 200, 201, 271 Macrobin, John, 131, 154n12 Maginn, William, 90, 98n78 Marischal College, 19–23, 49–50, 78, 91, 92, 99, 106, 109–11, 117, 121, 127–31, 135–8, 141, 163, 175, 227, 229, 230 Martin, Theodore, 79, 94n19, 121, 144–5, 149, 200, 202, 270, 279, 315 Martineau, James, 140, 157n43 Marx, Karl, 235, 265 Mavor, James, 304 Maynooth College, 160, 176n1 Mearns, Rev. Duncan, 32, 33, 39n62 Melbourne, Lord, 101, 110 Melvin, James (‘grim Pluto’), 99–100, 107, 110, 121n2, 128, 204 Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Felix, 59 Merry, George, 322–3 Merson, Rev. Peter, 17–18, 36n21 Meryon, Captain, 184 Meyer, Kuno, 275, 294–5n52 Mezzadria (mezzeria), 68, 280–1, 288–9

Mhòr, Mhàiri (MacPherson, Mary), 277 Middleton, Lady (‘Dora’), 308 Mill, J. S., 83, 90, 135, 234 Millais, J. E., 220, 301 Miller, Hugh, 244 Miller, Margaret (step-mother), 14–15, 50, 56 Minghetti, Marco, 280, 295n69 Mitscherlich, C. W., 48, 71n31 Moderates, 32–5, 78, 106–7, 109, 131, 160, 171 Moir, George, 96n45, 102, 122n15 Mommsen, Theodor, 218 Moncreiff, James, 93n13, 198, 227, 235, 257, 283, 296n81 Montucci, Henri, 242n67 Morris, William, 221 Muir, R. J., 211n24 Müller, F. Max, 188, 210n18, 301, 314, 320n54 Müller, K. O., 48–9, 64, 71n32, 103, 147 Munro, H. A. J., 190, 212n32, 247 Murdoch, John, 275, 283, 289, 291, 296n84 Mure, Sir William, 239n16 Murray, John (publisher), 82, 199, 301 Murray, Rev. John, 124n41, 131, 154n17, 163 Naismith, Christian (grand-mother), 11 Napier, Lord, and the Napier Report, 284–5, 290, 297n92, 302 Naples, 59–60 National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights (NAVSR), 170, 249 National Education Association of Scotland (NEA), 135, 155n27 Neander, J. A. W., 54, 62, 72n49 Neology (rationalism in theology), 55, 72n50, 218 ‘Nether Lochaber’ (Rev. Alexander Stewart), 267, 292nn8 and 15 Neuhumanismus, 41 New College, Edinburgh, 133, 165, 272 New Monthly Magazine, 82, 83 New Zealand, 209, 275, 291 Newman, F. W., 143, 152–3, 157n51, 163, 187–8, 194, 197 Newman, J. H., 129, 143, 279 Nichol, John, 191, 212n38 Nicol, Erskine, 273, 294n36 Nicolson, Alexander, 275, 276, 286, 289–90, 294n51 Niebuhr, B. G., 64, 136 Non-Intrusionists, 109, 124n43 North British Review, 171–2 Oakeley, Sir Herbert, 252, 263n33 O’Connell, Daniel, 75, 93n5, 133–4, 155n25 O’Connor, Feargus, 235 O’Grady, S. H., 275, 294n52 Oineromathic Society, 81 Oliphant, Margaret, 315 Ossian see Macpherson, James

Index Ovid, 128 Oxford, 26–7, 65, 104–5, 143–4, 150, 186, 187, 188, 189, 191, 192, 199, 226, 244–7, 257, 273, 300, 308, 313 Paley, F. A., 199–200, 214n68 Paley, William, 34, 107, 123n34, 140 Pall Mall Gazette, 315 Parker, J. W., 146 Parliamentary reform, (1832) 75, (1867) 235–7 Paton, Amelia, 277, 295n60, 300 Patronage (ecclesiastical), 110–11; (university), 100–1, 160, 172, 228–9, 240n31 Pattison, Emilia, 301, 317n4 Pattison, Mark, 188, 210n17, 245, 301 Pauli, Reinhold, 253, 262n38, 281, 286 Pausanias, 176 Payn, James, 173, 180n48, 219 Peacock, Thomas, 104, 123n22 Pillans, James, 103, 162, 174, 177n5, 204–5, 231 Pirie, W. R., 108, 124n38, 131, 154n15 Pirrie, William, 131, 154n14 Pius VIII, Pope, 65, 73n78 Plato, 143, 190–2 Poppo, E. F., 207, 216n99 Porson, Richard, 103, 122n20, 151 Pote, Benjamin, 122n18 Potter, Robert, 148 Price, Bonamy, 166–7, 178n19 Puseyism, 144, 191, 192, 244 Quarterly Review, 82, 83 Ramsay, William, 128, 154n4 Ranke, Leopold von, 54, 72n49, 245 Raumer, Friedrich von, 54, 72n49 Renan, Ernst, 249, 252, 262n24 Revolutions of 1830–1, 65–6 Revue Celtique, 271, 293n27 Rhangabes, Alexander, 153, 159n79, 183, 184, 312 Rhys, Sir John, 308, 319n33 Richter, J. P. F. (Jean Paul), 89, 97n70 Ritchie, A. H., 84, 96n43 Ritchie, David, 29, 38n50 Ritchie, D. G. (cousin), 6, 9n28 Ritschl, F. W., 177n6 Ritter, Karl, 245, 260n9 Robertson, John, 83 Roediger, Emil, 163, 177n6 Roman Catholics, 104, 132, 160, 279–80 Roods, Thomas, 62 Roscher, Wilhelm, 285, 297n94 Rosebery, Lord, 275, 301, 305 Royal Commission on Scottish Universities (1826), 28, 100, 104, 129, 130, 136, 174, 228 Royal Institution, London, 198, 202, 204, 253, 283

341

Royal Society of Edinburgh, 143, 204, 208, 218, 300, 308, 309, 312 Ruddiman, Thomas, 19, 99, 121n2 Rugby, 189, 204 Ruskin, John, 94n 22, 187, 193, 255, 273 Russel, Alexander, 269, 293n21 Russell, John, 43, 45, 47, 52, 234 Russell, Lord John, 102, 134, 196, 213n54 Russia, 254 Rutherfurd, Andrew, 102 Saalfield, Friedrich, 46, 54, 70n21 Sabbatarianism, 173 St Andrews, University of, 27, 105, 111, 132, 137, 138, 155n19 St James’s Magazine, 221 Sandford, Sir Daniel, 105, 123n26, 127, 204 Sandford, R. J., 169, 179n32 Schleiermacher, F. E., 54, 72n49, 172, 192 Schmitz, Dr Leonard, 165–6, 178n17, 196, 204, 225 The Scotsman, 225, 227, 234, 249, 270, 286 Scott, Sir Walter, 32, 183, 190, 193, 257 Scottish Education Department (SED), 276 Scottish Educational Journal (SEJ), 187 Scottish Home Rule Association (SHRA), 257–8 Scottish Land Restoration League, 283 Sellar, Alexander, 286, 298n100 Sellar, Patrick, 206, 286–7, 298n99 Sellar, Thomas, 286–7 Sellar, W. Y., 206, 216n89, 261n12, 286 Semple, J. W., 79, 94n21, 102 Severn, Joseph, 59 Sewell, William, 191, 192, 212n36 Shairp, J. C., 6, 9n30, 269, 287–8 Sidgwick, Henry, 191, 212n38 Simpson, Sir James, 227, 229, 240n35, 247 Skelton, John, 221, 239n12, 275–6, 295n53 Skene, Caroline, 183 Skene, W. F., 267, 284–5, 292n11, 297n90 Smellie, William, 79, 91, 94n20 Smith, Alexander, 242n41 Smith, Lucy, 6, 9n21 Smith, Sidney, 175 Smith, Dr William, 167, 169, 178n25, 200 Smith family (Jordanhill), 319n46 Socinianism, 34 Socrates, 204, 314 Sonnino, Sidney, 280–1, 295n70 Spalding, William, 79, 94n19, 149 Speculative Society, 78 Spencer, Herbert, 198, 214n62 Stein, Baron von, 52–3, 71n46, 255 Sterling, John, 83 Stevenson, R. L., 269, 293n19, 320n59 Stirling, J. H., 180n43 Stirling-Maxwell, Sir William, 229, 240n37 Stodart, Christian (grand-mother) see Naismith, Christian Stodart, George Tweedie (Eliza’s cousin), 163 Stodart, Helen (mother), 11–13, 15–16, 23

342

John Stuart Blackie

Stodart, John Riddle (Eliza’s uncle), 126n65, 142, 163 Stodart, Mrs J. R. (‘my lady confidante’), 119, 120, 126n65, 129 Stodart, Margaret (‘douce Margaret’) (aunt), 11 Stodart, Marion (Mennie, ‘Toodum’) (aunt), 11, 13, 15, 32, 35, 44–5, 54, 56, 120, 129 Stodart, Marion (mother-in-law), 25, 117 Stoddart, Anna M. (biographer), 2, 8n5, 114, 116, 138, 251, 300 Stoddart, Thomas Tod, 2 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 265, 292n3 The Strand Magazine, 311 Strangford, Viscount, 188, 211n22 Stuart, Alison (grandmother), 11 Stuart, Dr Archibald (great-uncle), 1 Sutherland, Duke and Duchess of, 265, 275, 286, 298n98, 301, 306 Tait, William, 114 Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, 82, 84, 114 Taylor, Isaac (theologian), 105, 123n27, 171 Taylor, Isaac (philologist), 267, 292n10 Taylor, William, 83 Tennyson, Lord Alfred, 2, 145, 148, 150, 188, 190, 198, 200, 313 Terry, Ellen, 301, 303 Thackeray, W. M., 199, 219–20 Thilenius, E., 68 Thirlwall, Connop, 143, 150, 157n51, 198 Thompson, W. H., 188, 211n20 Thorvaldsen, Bertel, 59, 72n57 The Times, 248, 249, 265, 281 Torlonia, Maria Duchess of, 63, 67, 73n65 Trench, J. T., 273, 294n37 Tricoupis, Spyridon, 186 Tulloch, John (‘Principal Jubbles’), 207, 216n97 Uhland, J. L., 89, 97n70 Unionist-nationalism, 249–50 Unitarianism, 39n64, 139–41, 157n43, 191, 193, 204, 248 United Presbyterians, 164, 166, 178n18 Universities (Scotland) Act 1853, 111 Universities (Scotland) Act 1858, 101, 228–9 University reform, 100–1, 135–6, 222–9 University test (subscription), 104, 111–12, 124n51, 132–3, 140, 170 Varnhagen von Ense, Rahel, 89, 97n73 Vaughan, C. J., 167, 178n23 Veitch, Rev. William, 167, 207 Victoria, Queen, 274 Villari, Linda (White) and Pasquale, 281, 296n71 Virgil, 60 Voluntaries see Dissenters Wales, Prince of, 274 Walker, Dr Archibald Stodart (nephew), 8n7, 15, 316

Walker, David (brother-in-law), 15 Walker, Jemima Elizabeth (sister) see Blackie, Jemima Elizabeth Wallace, A. R., 287 Wallace, D. M., 254, 262n40, 297n92 Wallace Monument, 247–8, 252–3 Watt, James, 14 Watts, Theodore, 305 Webster, Rev. Alexander, 282, 296n77 Weir, Janet, 95n29, 114–15 Weir, Thomas, 41 Welcker, F. G., 65, 73n76, 147, 163, 200 Westminster Confession (1645–7), 104, 107–13 Westminster Gazette, 311 Westminster Review, 83, 89, 104 Whewell, William, 198, 214n63 White, John Forbes, 128, 153n2, 314–15, 320n55 Wiese, L. A., 242n67 Wilde, Oscar and Constance, 272, 303–4, 318n18 Wilde, Sir William and Lady, 272–3 Williams, Rev. John, 170–1, 179n37, 190 Wilson, Daniel, 155n22, 163, 166, 167–8, 169, 275 Wilson, George, 81, 95n28, 132, 155n22, 162, 220 Wilson, John (‘Christopher North’), 1, 30–1, 38n55, 41, 83–4, 142, 169, 172, 201, 218, 315 Wolf, F. A., 52, 71n46, 194, 195, 197, 200 The Woman at Home, 311 Wordsworth, William, 88, 116, 148 Wright, Ichabod, 199, 214n67 Wyatt, Richard, 59 Wyld, Augusta Georgina (‘Gus’) (sister-in-law), 264 Wyld, Eliza Helen (‘Oke’, ‘Oakum’) (wife), 3–6, 15, 114, 116–17, 118–21, 138–9, 140–3, 144–6, 153, 158n61, 168, 171, 175, 182, 184, 186, 196, 198, 202, 220, 233, 236, 245, 254–5, 266–8, 273–4, 279–80, 281, 300–1, 302, 303, 304, 305–6, 309, 313, 315, 316 Wyld, George (brother-in-law), 125n61, 220, 302 Wyld, Henry Cecil (nephew), 6, 9n26 Wyld, Isabella (‘the Pythoness’) (sister-in-law), 119 Wyld, James (father-in-law), 25, 117–19, 125n61 Wyld, Janet (sister-in-law), 138, 163 Wyld, Marion (mother-in-law) see Stodart, Marion Wyld, Robert Stodart (brother-in-law), 18–19, 80, 94n25, 116, 118, 138, 243 Wyld, William (brother-in-law), 302, 317n12 Zetland, Earl of, 275