First Impressions of England and its People

Front matter

<i.;isU Uthnn^tmt 5SWd.d. FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE. BY HUGH MILLER, :\UTnoR DP ■' MI SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS, " THE OLD HED SANDSTONE, POOTPRINTS OP THE CUKATOB," "THE TESTIMONY OP THJS EOCK9." i.tc. etc. " Do you not think it man may be the wiser (I had almost said the better for going a hundred or tvro of miles ?"— Cray's Lhttbbs. EDINBURGH: THOMAS CONSTABLE AND CO. HAMILTON, ADAMS, AND CO., LONDON. MDCCCLVIII. TO THE READER. Times have changed since our earlier British Novelists, when they sought to make the incidents lie thick in their fictions, gave them the form of a journey, and sent their heroes a tra velling over England. The one-half of "Tom Jones," two-thirds of " Joseph Andrews," not a few of the most amusing chapters in " Eoderick Kandom " and " Launcelot Greaves," and the whole of " Humphrey Clinker," are thrown into this form.

They are works of English travels ; and the adventures with which they are enlivened arise by the wayside. It would be rather a difficult matter in these later times to make a novel out of an English tour. The country, measured by day's journeys, has grown nine-tenths smaller than it was in the times of Fielding and Smollett. The law has become too strong for Captain Macheath the highwayman, and the public too knowing for Mr. Jenkinson the swindler. The journeyer by moonlight, who accidentally loses his road, stumbles on no " Hermit of the Hill," wrapped up in a grotesque dress of skins ; but merely encounters, instead, some suspicious gamekeeper, taking his night-rounds in behalf of the Squire's pheasants. When mill-dams give way during the rains, honest Mat Brambles b VI TO THE EEADEE. do not discover, in consequence, their affinity to devoted Humphrey Clinkers : there is merely a half-hour's stoppage of the train, barren of incident, save that the male passengers get out to smoke, while the ladies sit still.

And as for the fre quent tragedy of railway collision accidents, it has but little of the classic about it, aDd is more appropriately recorded in news paper columns, struck off for the passing day, than in pages of higher pretensions written for to-morrow. England has become a greatly less fertile field of adventure than when, according to the Anglice Metropolis for 1690, the "weekly waggon of Richard Hamersly the carrier" formed the sole conveyance, for passengers who did not ride horses of their own, between Brumegham and the capital. But though the age of personal adventure has to a certainty gone by, the age which has succeeded is scarcely less fertile in incident on a larger scale, and of a greatly more remarkable character. It would seem as if the same change which has abridged the area of the country had given condensation to its history.

Chapter I

Led to convert an intended voyage to Orkney into a journey to England — Objects of the journey — Carter Fell— The Border Line — Well for England it should have been bo doggedly maintained by the weaker country — Otterburn — The Mountain Limestone in England, what it is not in Scotland, a true Mountain Limestone — Scenery changes as we enter the Coal Measures — Wretched weather — Newcastle — Methodists — Controversy on the Atonement — The popular mind in Scotland mainly developed by its theology — Newcastle Museum ; rich in its Geology and its Antiquities ; both branches of one subject — Geologic history of the Roman invasion — nurham Cathedral — The monuments of Nature greatly more enduring than those of man — Cyathophyllum Fungites— The spotted tubers, and what they indicated — The destiny of a nation involved in tbe growth of a minute fungus.

I had purposed visiting the Orkneys, and spending my few weeks of autumn leisure in exploring the Old Eed Sandstone of these islands along the noble coast sections opened up by the sea. My vacations during the five previous seasons had been devoted to an examination of the fossiliferous deposits of Scot land. I had already in some degree acquainted myself with the Palæozoic and Secondary formations of the northern half of the kingdom and the Hebrides. One vacation more would have acquainted me with those of Orkney also, and completed my survey of Scotland to the north of the Grampians ; and I would have reckoned at least half my self-imposed task at an end. When labouring professionally, however, during the previous winter and spring, I had, I am afraid, sometimes failed to re- A member what the old chivalric knights used never to forget, that "man is but of mould ;" and I had, in consequence, sub jected the " mould " to a heavier pressure than, from its yielding nature, it is suited to bear.

And now that play-time had once more come round, I found I had scarce health and strength enough left me to carry me in quest of more. I could no longer un dertake, as formerly, long journeys a-foot in a wild country ; nor scramble, with sure step, and head that never failed, along the faces of tall precipices washed by the sea. And so, for the time at least, I had to give up all thoughts of visiting Orkney. " I will cross the Border," I said, " and get into England. I know the humbler Scotch better than most men — I have at least enjoyed better opportunities of knowing them ; but the humbler English I know only from hearsay. I will go and live among them for a few weeks, somewhere in the midland districts. I shall lodge in humble cottages, wear a humble dress, and see what is to be seen by humble men only — society without its mask.

I shall explore, too, for myself, the formar tions wanting in the geologic scale of Scotland — the Silurian, the Chalk, and the Tertiary ; and so, should there be future years in store for me, I shall be enabled to resume my survey of our Scottish deposits with a more practised eye than at pre sent, and with more extended knowledge." August was drag ging on to its close, through a moist and cloudy atmosphere ; every day had its shower, and some days half a dozen ; but I hoped for clearer skies and fairer weather in the south ; and so, taking my seat at Edinburgh on the top of the Newcastle coach, I crossed Carter Fell a little after mid-day, and found myself for the first time in England. The sun on the Scottish side looked down clear and kindly on languid fields surcharged with moisture, that exhibited greener and yet greener tints as we as cended from the lowland districts to the uplands ; while on the southern side, though all was fair in the foreground, a thick sullen cloud hung low over the distant prospect, resembling the smoke of some vast city.

And this was the famous Border-line, made good by the weaker against the stronger nation — at how vast an amount of blood and suffering ! — for more than a thousand years. It wore to-day, in the quiet sunshine, a look of recluse tranquillity, that seemed wholly unconscious of the past. A tumbling sea of dark green hills, delicately chequered with light and shadow, swelled upwards on either side towards the line of boundary, like the billows of opposing tide-ways, that rise over the general level where the currents meet ; and passing on and away from wave top to wave-top, like the cork baulk of a fisherman's net afloat on the swell, ran the separating line. But all was still and motionless, as in the upper reaches of the Baltic, when the winter frost has set in. We passed on the Scottish side a group of stalwart shepherds — solid, grave-featured men, who certainly did not look as if they loved fighting for its own sake ; and on the English side, drove by a few stout, ruddy hinds, engaged in driving carts, who seemed just as little quarrelsome as their Scottish neighbours.

War must be intrinsically mischievous. It must be something very bad, let us personify it as proudly as we may, that could have set on these useful, peaceable people — cast in so nearly the same mould, speaking the same tongue, possessed of the same common nature, loveable, doubtless, in some points, from the development of the same genial affections to knock one another on the head, simply because the one-half of them had first seen the light on the one side of the hill, and the other half on the other side. And yet such was the state of things which obtained in this wild district for many hundred years. It seems, however, especially well for England, since the quarrel began at all, that it should have been so doggedly main tained by the weaker people — so well maintained, that the border hamlet, round which they struggled, in the days of the first Ed ward, as a piece of doubtful property, is a piece of doubtful property still, and has, in royal proclamation and act of Parliament, its own separate clause assigned to it, as the " town called Ber wick-upon-Tweed."

It is quite enough for the English, as shown by the political history of modern times, that they conquered Ire land ; had they conquered Scotland also, they would have been ruined utterly. " One such victory more, and they would have been undone." Men have long suspected the trade of the hero to be a bad one ; but it is only now they are fairly beginning to learn, that of all great losses and misfortunes, his master achievement — the taking of a nation — is the greatest and most incurably calamitous. The line of boundary forms the water-shed in this part of the island ; the streams on the Scottish side trot away northwards toward the valley of the Tweed ; while on the English side they pursue a southerly course, and are included in the drainage of the Tyne. The stream which runs along the bare open valley on which we had now entered, form3 one of the larger tribu taries of the latter river.

But everything seemed as Scottish as ever — the people, the dwelling-houses, the country. I could scarce realize the fact, that the little grey parish church with the square tower, which we had just passed, was a church in which the curate read the Prayer-Book every Sunday, and that I had left behind me the Scottish law, under which I had been living all life long till now, on the top of the hill. I had proof, however, at our first English stage, that such was actually the case. "Is all right." asked the coachman, of a tall lanky Northumbrian who had busied himself in changing the horses. " Yez, all roit," was the reply ; " roit as the Church of Eng land." I was, it was evident, on Presbyterian ground no longer. We passed, as the country began to open, a spot marked by two of the crossed swords of our more elaborate maps * they Ke thick on both sides of the Border, to indicate where the old battle-fields were stricken ; and the crossed swords of this especial locality are celebrated in chronicle and song.

A rude, stragghng village runs for some one or two hundred yards along both sides of the road. On the left there is a group of tall trees, elevated on a ridge, which they conceal; and a bare, undulating, somewhat wild country spreads around. All is quiet and solitary ; and no scathe on the landscape corresponds with the cross swords on the map. There were a few children at play, as we passed, in front of one of the cottages, and two old men sauntering along the road. And such now is Otterburn — a name I never associated before, save with the two noble ditties of Chevy Chase, the magnificent narrative of Froissart, and the common subject of both ballads and narrative, however various their descriptions of it; — that one stern night's slaughter, four hundred years ago, " When the deadDouglas won the field " It was well for the poor victors they had a Froissart to celebrate them.

For though it was the Scotch who gained the battle, it was the English who had the writing of the songs * and had not the victors found so impartial a chronicler in the generous Frenchman, the two songs, each a model in its own department, would have proved greatly an overmatch for them in the end. The wilder tracts of Northumberland are composed of the Millstone Grit and Mountain Limestone; and never before had I seen this latter deposit developed in a style that so bears out the appropriateness of its name. It is in Northumberland, what it is rarely or never in Scotland, a true Mountain Limestone, that rises into tall hills, and sinks into deep valleys, and spreads laterally over a vast extent of area. The ocean of the Carboni ferous era in England must have been greatly more persistent and extended than the ocean whose deposits form the base of the Coal Measures in the sister country : it appears to have lain further from the contemporary land, and to have been much less the subject of alternate upheavals and depressions.

We were several hours in driving over the formation. As we entered upon the true Coal Measures, the face of the country at once altered : the wild, open, undulating surface sunk into a plain, laid out, far as the eye could reach, into fields closely reticulated with hedge-rows; the farm-houses and gentlemen's seats thickened as we advanced; and England assumed its pro per character. With a change of scenery, however, we experi enced a change of weather. We had entered into the cloud that seemed so threatening in the distance from the top of Carter Fell ; and a thick, soaking rain, without wind, accompanied by a lazy fog that lay scattered along the fields and woods in de tached wreaths of grey, saddened the landscape. As we drove on, we could see the dense smoke of the pit-engines forming a new feature in the prospect ; the tall chimneys of Newcastle, that seemed so many soot, black obelisks half lost in the turbid atmosphere, came next in view ; and then, just as the evening was falling wet and cheerless, we entered the town, through muddy streets, and along ranges of melancholy-looking houses, dropping from all their eaves, and darkened by the continuous rain of weeks.

I was directed by the coachman to by far the most splendid temperance coffee-house I had ever seen; but it seemed too fine a lodging-house for harbouring the more cha racteristic English, and I had not crossed the Border to see cosmopolites; and so, turning away from the door, I succeeded in finding for myself a humbler, but still very respectable house, in a different part of the town. There were several guests in the public room : some two or three smart commercial gentlemen from the midland trading towns ; two young Sheffield mechanics, evidently of the respect able class, who earn high wages and take care of them ; and a farmer or two from the country. In the course of the evening we had a good deal of conversation, and some controversy. The mechanics were Methodists, who had availed themselves of a few days' leisure to see the north country, but more especially, as I afterwards learned, to be present at a discussion on controverted points of theology, which was to take place in Newcastle on the following evening, between a prodigiously clever preacher of the New Connexion, very unsound in his creed, of whom I had never heard before, and a more orthodox preacher of the same body, profound in his theology, of whom I had heard just as little.

From the peculiar emphasis placed by the two lads on the word orthodox, I inferred that neither of them deemed orthodoxy so intellectual a thing as the want of it ; and I ultimately discovered that they were partisans of the clever preacher. One of the two seemed anxious to provoke a controversy on his favourite points ; but the commercial men, who appeared rather amused to hear so much about religion, avoided all definite statement; and the men from the country said nothing. A person in black entered the room — not a preacher apparently, but, had I met him in Scotland, I would have set him down for at least an elder : and the young mechanics were gratified. The man in black was, I found, a Calvinist, not, however, of the most profound type ; the Methodists were wild nondescripts in their theology, more Socinian than aught else, and yet not consistently Socinian either.

A Scottish religious controversy of the present time regards the nature and extent of the atone ment; the two Wesleyans challenged, I found, the very existence of the doctrine. There was really no such thing as an atone ment, they said : the atonement was a mere orthodox view taken by the Old Connexion. The Calvinist referred to the ordinary evidences to prove it something more ; and so the con troversy went on, with some share of perverted ingenuity on the one side, and a considerable acquaintance with Scripture doctrine on the other. A tall, respectable-looking man, with the freshness of a country life palpable about him, had come in shortly after the commencement of the discussion, and took evidently some interest in it. He turned from speaker to speaker, and seemed employed in weighing the statements on both sides.

At length he struck in, taking part against the Calvinist. " Can it really be held," he said, " that the all powerful God — the Being who has no limits to his power — could not forgive sin without an atonement? That would be limiting his illimitable power with a vengeance ! " The remark would scarcely have arrested a theologic controversy on the same nice point in Scotland — certainly not among the class of peasant controversialists so unwisely satirized by Burns, nor yet among the class who, in our own times, have taken so deep an interest in the Church question ; but the English Calvinist seemed un furnished with a reply. I was curious to see how the metaphysics of our Scotch Cal vinism would tell on such an audience ; and took up the subject much in the way it might be taken up in some country church yard, ere the congregation had fully gathered, by some of the " grave-livers " of the parish, or as it might be discussed in the more northern localities of the kingdom, at some evening meeting of " the men."

I attempted showing, step by step, that God did not give to himself his own nature, nor any part of it ; that it exists as it is, as independently of his will as our human nature exists as it is independently of ours ; that his moral nature, like his nature in general, is underived, unalterable, eternal ; and that it is this underived moral nature of the Godhead which forms the absolute law of his conduct in all his dealings with his moral agents. " You are, I daresay, right," said the countryman ; " but how does all this bear on the doctrine of the atonement ?" " Very directly on your remark respecting it," I replied. " It shows us that the will and power of God, in dealing with the sins of his accountable creature man, cannot, if we may so speak, be arbitrary, unregulated power and will, but must spring, of necessity, out of his underived moral nature.

If it be according to this moral nature, which constitutes the go verning law of Deity — the law which controls Deity — that without the ' shedding of blood there can be no remission,' then ENGIsAND AND ITS PEOPLE. 9 blood must be shed, or remission cannot be obtained : atonement for sin there must be. If, on the contrary, there can be remission without the shedding of blood, we may be infallibly certain the unnecessary blood will not be demanded, nor the superfluous atonement required. To believe otherwise would be to believe that God deals with his moral agent man, on prin ciples that do not spring out of his own moral nature, but are mere arbitrary results of an unregulated will." " But are you not leaving the question, after all, just where you found it?" asked the countryman. " Not quite," I replied : " of God's moral nature, or the conduct which springs out of it, we can but know what God has been pleased to tell us : the fact of the atonement can be determined but by revelation ; and I be lieve, with the gentleman opposite, that revelation determines it very conclusively.

But if fact it be, then must we hold that it is a fact which springs directly out of that underived moral nature of God which constitutes the governing law of his power and will ; and that, his nature being what it is, the antagonist fact of remission without atonement is in reality an impos sibility. Your appeal in the question lay to the omnipotence of God : it is something to know that in that direction there can lie no appeal. Mark how strongly your own great poet brings out this truth. In his statement of the doctrine of the atone ment — a simple digest of the scriptural statement — all is made to hinge on the important fact, that God having willed the sal vation of men, an atonement became as essentially necessary to Him, in order that the moral nature which He did not give himself might not be violated, as to the lapsed race, who might recognise in it their sole hope of restoration and recovery.

Man, says the poet, * To expiate his treason hath nought left, But to destruction, sacred and devote. He, with his whole posterity, must die : Die he, or justice must,, unless for him Some other able, and as willing, pay The rigid satisfaction, death for death.' " The countryman was silent. "You Scotch are a strange people," said one of the commercial gentlemen. " When I was in Scotland two years ago, I could hear of scarce anything among you but your Church question. What good does all your theology do you ? " " Independently altogether of religious considerations," I replied, " it has done for our people what all your Societies for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and all your Penny and Saturday Magazines will never do for yours : it has awakened their intellects, and taught them how to think.

The development of the popular mind in Scotland is a result of its theology." The morning rose quite as gloomily as the evening had fallen ; the mist-cloud still rested lazily over the town ; the rain dashed incessantly from the eaves, and streamed along the pavement. It was miserable weather for an invalid in quest of health ; but I had just to make the best I could of the circumstances, by scraping acquaintance with the guests in the travellers' room, and beating with them over all manner of topics until mid-day, when I sallied out under cover of an umbrella, to see the town museum. I found it well suited to repay the trouble of a visit ; and such is the liberality of the Newcastle people, that it cost me no more. It is superior, both in the extent and ar rangement of its geologic department, to any of our Scotch collections with which I am acquainted ; and its Anglo-Roman antiquities, from the proximity of the place to the wall of Hadrian, are greatly more numerous than in any other museum I ever saw — filling, of themselves, an entire gallery.

As I passed, in the geologic department, from the older Silurian to the newer Tertiary, and then on from the newer Tertiary to the votive tablets, sacrificial altars, and sepulchral memorials of the Anglo- Roman gallery, I could not help regarding them as all belonging to one department. The antiquities piece on in natural sequence to the geology ; and it seems but rational to indulge in the same sort of reasonings regarding them. They are the fossils of an extinct order of things, newer than the Tertiary — of an extinct race — of an extinct religion — of a state of society and a class of enterprises which the world saw once, but which it will never see again. And with but little assistance from the direct testimony of history, one has to grope one's way along this com paratively modern formation, guided chiefly, as in the more ancient deposits, by the clue of circumstantial evidence.

In at least its leading features, however, the story embodied is remarkably clear. First, we have evidence that, in those remote times, when the northern half of the island had just become a home of men, the land was forest-covered, like the woody regions of North America, and that its inhabitants were rude savages, unacquainted with the metals, but possessed of a few curious arts which an after age forgot — not devoid of a religion which, at least, indicated the immortality of the soul — and much given to war. The extensive morass, in which huge trunks lie thick and frequent — the stone battle-axe — the flint arrow-head — the Druidic circle — the vitrified fort— the Picts' house — the canoe hollowed out of a single log — are all fossils of this early period. Then come the memorials of an after formation.

This wild country is invaded by a much more civilized race than the one by which it is inhabited : we find distinct marks of their lines of march — of the forests which they cut down — of the encampments in which they en trenched themselves — of the battle-fields in which they were met in fight by the natives. And they, too, had their religion. More than half the remains which testify to their progress consist of sacrificial altars and votive tablets dedicated to the gods. The narrative goes on : another class of remains show us that a portion of the country was conquered by the civilized race. We find the remains of tesselated pavements, baths, public roads, the foundations of houses and temples, accumu lations of broken pottery, and hoards of coin. Then comes another important clause in the story : we ascertain that the FIEST IMPRESSIONS OF civilized people failed to conquer the whole of the northern country ; and that, in order to preserve what they had con quered, they were content to construct, at an immense expense of labour, a long chain of forts, connected by a strong wall flanked with towers.

Had it been easier to conquer the rest of the country than to build the wall, the wall would not have been built. We learn further, however, that the laboriously built wall served its purpose but for a time : the wild people beyond at length broke over it ; and the civilized invader, wearied out by their persevering assaults, which though repelled to-day, had again to be repelled to-morrow, at length left their country to them entire, and, retreating beyond its furthest limits, built for his protection a second wall. Such is the history of this bygone series of occurrences, as written, if one may so speak, in the various fossils of the formation. The antiquities of a museum should always piece on to its geologic collection.1 1 Some of the operations of the Romans in Scotland have, like the catastrophes of the old geologic periods, left permanent marks on the face of the country.

It is a curious fact, that not a few of our southern Scottish mosses owe their origin to the Roman in vasion. Of their lower tiers of trees — those which constituted the nucleus of the peaty formation — many have been found still bearing the marks of the Roman hatchet — a thin-edged tool, somewhat like that of the American woodsman, but still narrower. In some instances the axe-head, sorely wasted, has been detected still sticking in the buried stump, which is generally found to have been cut several feet over the soil, just where the tool might be plied with most etfect ; and in many, Roman utensils and coins have been discovered, where they have been hastily laid down by the soldiery among the tangled brushwood, and forthwith covered up and lost. Rennie, in his " Essay on Peat Moss," furnishes an interesting list of these curiosities, that tell so significant a story.

" In PonsiU Moss, near Glasgow," he says, " a leathern bag, containing about two hundred silver coins of Rome, was found ; in Dundaff Moor, a number of similar coins were found about forty years ago : in Annan Moss, near the Roman Causeway, an ornament of pure gold was discovered ; a Roman camp-kettle was found, eight feet deep, under a moss, on the estate of Ochtertyre ; in Flanders Moss a similar utensil was found ; a Roman jug was found in Locker Moss, Dumfries-shire ; a pot and decanter, of Roman copper, was found in a moss in Kirkmichael parish in the same county ; and two vessels, of Roman bronze, in the Moss of Olanderhill, inStrathaven." And thus the list runs on. It is not difficult to conceive how, in the circumstances, mosses came to be formed. The felled wood was left to rot on the surface ; small streams were choked up in the levels : pools formed in the hollows ; the soil beneath, Bhut up from the light and the air, became unfitted to pro duce its former vegetation : but a new order of plants— the thick water-mosses— began to spring up ; one generation budded and decayed over the ruins of another ; and what had been an overturned forest became, in the course of years, a deep morass— an unsightly but permanent monument of the formidable invader.