Rab and His Friends and Other Papers. Brown John
his days as the best dog in Roxburghshire. Placide quiescas!
DICK
Still lives, and long may he live! As he was never born, possibly he may never die; be it so, he will miss us when we are gone. I could say much of him, but agree with the lively and admirable Dr. Jortin, when, in his dedication of his Remarks on Ecclesiastical History to the then (1752) Archbishop of Canterbury, he excuses himself for not following the modern custom of praising his Patron, by reminding his Grace "that it was a custom amongst the ancients, not to sacrifice to heroes till after sunset." I defer my sacrifice till Dick's sun is set.
I think every family should have a dog; it is like having a perpetual baby; it is the plaything and crony of the whole house. It keeps them all young. All unite upon Dick. And then he tells no tales, betrays no secrets, never sulks, asks no troublesome questions, never gets into debt, never coming down late for breakfast, or coming in by his Chubb too early to bed – is always ready for a bit of fun, lies in wait for it, and you may, if choleric, to your relief, kick him instead of some one else, who would not take it so meekly, and, moreover, would certainly not, as he does, ask your pardon for being kicked.
Never put a collar on your dog – it only gets him stolen; give him only one meal a day, and let that, as Dame Dorothy, Sir Thomas Browne's wife, would say, be "rayther under." Wash him once a week, and always wash the soap out; and let him be carefully combed and brushed twice a week.
By the bye, I was wrong in saying that it was Burns who said Man is the god of the Dog – he got it from Bacon's Essay on Atheism, or perhaps more truly – Bacon had it first.
QUEEN MARY'S CHILD-GARDEN
If any one wants a pleasure that is sure to please, one over which he needn't growl the sardonic beatitude of the great Dean, let him, when the Mercury is at "Fair," take the nine A.M. train to the North, and a return ticket for Callander, and when he arrives at Stirling, let him ask the most obliging and knowing of station-masters to telegraph to "the Dreadnought" for a carriage to be in waiting. When passing Dunblane Cathedral, let him resolve to write to the Scotsman, advising the removal of a couple of shabby trees which obstruct the view of that beautiful triple end-window which Mr. Ruskin and everybody else admires, and by the time he has written this letter in his mind, and turned the sentences to it, he will find himself at Callander and the carriage all ready. Giving the order for the Port of Monteith, he will rattle through this hard-featured, and to our eye comfortless village, lying ugly amid so much grandeur and beauty, and let him stop on the crown of the bridge, and fill his eyes with the perfection of the view up the Pass of Leny – the Teith lying diffuse and asleep, as if its heart were in the Highlands and it were loath to go, the noble Ben Ledi imaged in its broad stream. Then let him make his way across a bit of pleasant moorland – flushed with maiden-hair and white with cotton-grass; and fragrant with the Orchis conopsia, well deserving its epithet odoratissima.
He will see from the turn of the hillside the Blair of Drummond waving with corn and shadowed with rich woods, where eighty years ago there was a black peatmoss; and far off, on the horizon, Damyat and the Touch Fells; and at his side the little loch of Ruskie, in which he may see five Highland cattle, three tawny brown and two brindled, standing in the still water – themselves as still, all except their switching tails and winking ears – the perfect images of quiet enjoyment. By this time he will have come in sight of the Lake of Monteith, set in its woods, with its magical shadows and soft gleams. There is a loveliness, a gentleness and peace about it more like "lone St. Mary's Lake," or Derwent Water, than of any of its sister lochs. It is lovely rather than beautiful, and is a sort of gentle prelude, in the minor key, to the coming glories and intenser charms of Loch Ard and the true Highlands beyond.
You are now at the Port, and have passed the secluded and cheerful manse, and the parish kirk with its graves, close to the lake, and the proud aisle of the Grahams of Gartmore washed by its waves. Across the road is the modest little inn, a Fisher's Tryst. On the unruffled water lie several islets, plump with rich foliage, brooding like great birds of calm. You somehow think of them as on, not in the lake, or like clouds lying in a nether sky – "like ships waiting for the wind." You get a coble, and yould old Celt, its master, and are rowed across to Inch-mahome, the Isle of Rest. Here you find on landing huge Spanish chestnuts, one lying dead, others standing stark and peeled, like gigantic antlers, and others flourishing in their viridis senectus, and in a thicket of wood you see the remains of a monastery of great beauty, the design and workmanship exquisite. You wander through the ruins, overgrown with ferns and Spanish filberts, and old fruit-trees, and at the corner of the old monkish garden you come upon one of the strangest and most touching sights you ever saw – an oval space of about eighteen feet by twelve, with the remains of a double row of boxwood all round, the plants of box being about fourteen feet high, and eight or nine inches in diameter, healthy, but plainly of great age.
What is this? it is called in the guide-books Queen Mary's Bower; but besides its being plainly not in the least a bower, what could the little Queen, then five years old, and "fancy free," do with a bower? It is plainly, as was, we believe, first suggested by our keen-sighted and diagnostic Professor of Clinical Surgery, 8 the Child-Queen's Garden, with her little walk, and its rows of boxwood, left to themselves for three hundred years.
Yes, without doubt, "here is that first garden of her simpleness." Fancy the little, lovely royal child, with her four Marys, her playfellows, her child maids of honour, with their little hands and feet, and their innocent and happy eyes, pattering about that garden all that time ago, laughing, and running, and gardening as only children do and can. As is well known, Mary was placed by her mother in this Isle of Rest before sailing from the Clyde for France. There is something "that tirls the heartstrings a' to the life" in standing and looking on this unmistakable living relic of that strange and pathetic old time. Were we Mr. Tennyson, we would write an Idyll of that child Queen, in that garden of hers, eating her bread and honey – getting her teaching from the holy men, the monks of old, and running off in wild mirth to her garden and her flowers, all unconscious of the black, lowering thunder-cloud on Ben Lomond's shoulder.
"Oh, blessed vision! happy child!
Thou art so exquisitely wild:
I think of thee with many fears
Of what may be thy lot in future years.
I thought of times when Pain might be thy guest,
Lord of thy house and hospitality,
And Grief, uneasy lover! never rest
But when she sat within the touch of thee.
What hast thou to do with sorrow,
Or the injuries of to-morrow?"
You have ample time to linger there amid
"The gleams, the shadows, and the peace profound,"
and get your mind informed with quietness and beauty, and fed with thoughts of other years, and of her whose story, like Helen of Troy's, will continue to move the hearts of men as long as the grey hills stand round about that gentle lake, and are mirrored at evening in its depths. You may do and enjoy all this, and be in Princes Street by nine P.M.; and we wish we were as sure of many things as of your saying, "Yes, this is a pleasure that has pleased, and will please again; this was something expected which did not disappoint."
There is another garden of Queen Mary's, which may still be seen, and which has been left to itself like that in the Isle of Rest. It is in the grounds at Chatsworth, and is moated, walled round, and raised about fifteen feet above the park. Here the Queen, when a prisoner under the charge of "Old Bess of Hardwake," was allowed to walk without any guard. How different the two! and how different she who took her pleasure in them!
Lines written on the steps of a small moated garden at Chatsworth, called
"Queen Mary's Bower.
"The moated bower is wild and drear,
And sad the dark yew's shade;
The flowers which bloom in silence here,
In
The same seeing eye and understanding mind, when they were eighteen years of age discovered and published the Solvent of Caoutchouc, for which patent was taken out afterwards by the famous Mackintosh. If the young discoverer had secured the patent, he might have made a fortune as large as his present reputation – I don't suppose he much regrets that he didn't.