Old Mortality | Page 5

fortitude.
He complains of what the Covenanters themselves called "the language
of Canaan," which is put into their mouths, "a strange, ridiculous, and
incoherent jargon compounded of Scripture phrases, and cant terms
peculiar to their own party opinions in ecclesiastical politics." But what
other language did many of them speak? "Oh, all ye that can pray, tell
all the Lord's people to try, by mourning and prayer, if ye can taigle
him, taigle him especially in Scotland, for we fear, he will depart from
it." This is the theology of a savage, in the style of a clown, but it is
quoted by Walker as Mr. Alexander Peden's.' Mr. John Menzie's
"Testimony" (1670) is all about "hardened men, whom though they
walk with you for the present with horns of a lamb, yet afterward ye
may hear them speak with the mouth of a dragon, pricks in your eyes
and thorns in your sides." Manse Headrigg scarcely caricatures this
eloquence, or Peden's "many and long seventy-eight years left-hand
defections, and forty-nine years right-hand extremes;" while "Professor
Simson in Glasgow, and Mr. Glass in Tealing, both with Edom's
children cry Raze, raze the very foundation!" Dr. McCrie is reduced to
supposing that some of the more absurd sermons were incorrectly
reported. Very possibly they were, but the reports were in the style
which the people liked. As if to remove all possible charge of partiality,
Scott made the one faultless Christian of his tale a Covenanting widow,
the admirable Bessie McLure. But she, says the doctor, "repeatedly
banns and minces oaths in her conversation." This outrageous conduct
of Bessie's consists in saying "Gude protect us!" and "In Heaven's name,

who are ye?" Next the Doctor congratulates Scott on his talent for
buffoonery. "Oh, le grand homme, rien ne lui peut plaire." Scott is later
accused of not making his peasants sufficiently intelligent. Cuddie
Headrigg and Jenny Dennison suffice as answers to this censure.
Probably the best points made by Dr. McCrie are his proof that biblical
names were not common among the Covenanteers and that Episcopal
eloquence and Episcopal superstition were often as tardy and as dark as
the eloquence and superstition of the Presbyterians. He carries the war
into the opposite camp, with considerable success. His best answer to
"Old Mortality" would have been a novel, as good and on the whole as
fair, written from the Covenanting side. Hogg attempted this reply, not
to Scott's pleasure according to the Shepherd, in "The Brownie of
Bodsbeck." The Shepherd says that when Scott remarked that the
"Brownie" gave an untrue description of the age, he replied, "It's a
devilish deal truer than yours!" Scott, in his defence, says that to please
the friends of the Covenanters, "their portraits must be drawn without
shadow, and the objects of their political antipathy be blackened,
hooved, and horned ere they will acknowledge the likeness of either."
He gives examples of clemency, and even considerateness, in Dundee;
for example, he did not bring with him a prisoner, "who laboured under
a disease rendering it painful to him to be on horseback." He examines
the story of John Brown, and disproves the blacker circumstances. Yet
he appears to hold that Dundee should have resigned his commission
rather than carry out the orders of Government? Burley's character for
ruthlessness is defended by the evidence of the "Scottish Worthies." As
Dr. McCrie objects to his "buffoonery," it is odd that he palliates the
"strong propensity" of Knox "to indulge his vein of humour," when
describing, with ghoul-like mirth, the festive circumstances of the
murder and burial of Cardinal Beaton. The odious part of his satire,
Scott says, is confined to "the fierce and unreasonable set of
extra-Presbyterians," Wodrow's High Flyers. "We have no delight to
dwell either upon the atrocities or absurdities of a people whose
ignorance and fanaticism were rendered frantic by persecution." To
sum up the controversy, we may say that Scott was unfair, if at all, in
tone rather than in statement. He grants to the Covenanters dauntless
resolution and fortitude; he admits their wrongs; we cannot see, on the
evidence of their literature, that he exaggerates their grotesqueness,

their superstition, their impossible attitude as of Israelites under a
Theocracy, which only existed as an ideal, or their ruthlessness on
certain occasions. The books of Wodrow, Kirkton, and Patrick Walker,
the sermons, the ghost stories, the dying speeches, the direct testimony
of their own historians, prove all that Scott says, a hundred times over.
The facts are correct, the testimony to the presence of another, an
angelic temper, remains immortal in the figure of Bessie McLure. But
an unfairness of tone may be detected in the choice of such names as
Kettledrummle and Poundtext: probably the "jog-trot" friends of the
Indulgence have more right to complain than