Robert Buchanan | Page 7

for Hercules and a voice like a trumpet. The first was Louis Blanc, a famous exile: the second was Caussidi��re, who had been chief of the police in Paris during the last Revolution. Both spoke English fairly, and Blanc wrote it like an Englishman. It was during a visit of this strange pair that I first heard the 'Marseillaise.' Sung by Caussidi��re in stentorian tones, with kindling eyes and excited gestures, it sounded like a wild conjuration. I listened to these men for hours, as they talked of their country and its sorrows, and named the wondrous words, 'Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.'
"In after years I met Louis Blanc again, and by that time only the faintest trace of a foreign accent remained to show that he was a Frenchman. He was at once the keenest and most enthusiastic of little men, neat in his person, brilliant in his talk, and cultured to the finger-nails. He loved England, which had so long afforded him a home, and hated nothing in the world but one thing, the Empire, and one man, the Emperor. He preached the great Socialistic doctrine of solidarity, in writings which were as brilliant as they were closely reasoned; he was an enemy of tyranny in any form; and he lived long enough to see the foulest tyranny of modern times, a tyranny of the senses, ignominiously overthrown at Sedan.
"Another friend of my father, and a constant visitor at our house, was Lloyd Jones, lecturer, debater, and journalist. An Irishman with the mellowest of voices, he delighted my young soul with snatches of jovial song, 'The Widow Machree,' 'The Leather Bott��l,' and the modern burlesque of that royal ballad, 'The Pewter Quart,' written, I think, by Macguire, and originally published in Blackwood--
'Here, boy, take this handful of brass,
Across to the Goose and the Gridiron pass,
Pay the coin on the counter out,
And bring me a pint of foaming stout,
Put it not into bottle or jug,
Cannikin, rumkin, flagon, or mug,
Into nothing at all, in short,
Except the natural Pewter Quart!'
"Jones 'troll'd' rather than sang, with robust strength and humour. I found out when I was a year or two older, that he knew and loved the obscurer early poets, and could recite whole passages from their works by heart. George Wither was a great favourite of his, and he had a fine collection of that poet's works, many of them very scarce. It was a great treat to hear him sing Wither's charming ballad--?
'Shall I, wasting in despair,
Die because a woman's fair??
If she be not fair to me,?
What care I how fair she be?'
or to hear him recite the same poet's na?ve, yet lively invocation to the Muse, written in prison--?
'By a Daisy whose leaves spread,
Shut when Titan goes to bed,
By a lush upon a tree,
She could more infuse in me
Than all Nature's wonders can
In some other wiser man!'
I owe Lloyd Jones this debt, that he first taught me to love old songs and homespun English poetry. He was a large-hearted, genial man, not to be forgotten in any chronicle of the Socialistic cause.
"It was not, as I have hinted, until I was taken by my parents to reside in Scotland that I came face to face with the Dismal Superstition against which my father and these men, his friends, were passionately struggling. I then learned for the first time that to fight for human good, to be honest and fearless, to love the Light, was to be branded as an Enemy of Society and an Atheist. I saw my father so branded, and I have not forgotten my first horror when children of my own age avoided me, on the score that I was the son of an 'infidel.' But I learned now that there was more real religion, more holy zeal for Humanity, in these revolters against the popular creed than in most of the Christians who preach one faith and practise another.
"Tantum Religio potuit suadere malorum.
"The world has advanced somewhat since those early days of which I have been writing. There is no sign as yet, however, that the warning uttered long ago by Lucretius, and echoed by the minority from generation to generation, has been of much avail."1
1 "Latter Day Leaves."
CHAPTER III
BOYHOOD, 185056
THE poet was about ten years of age when he left the French and German College at Merton, and accompanied his parents to Glasgow, where his father had undertaken to edit a newspaper of advanced liberal views, the Glasgow Sentinel. It was in Glasgow, therefore, that he spent a large portion of his boyhood and early youth. The newspaper office was up a dingy street in the neighbourhood of the Trongate, and all around stretched the darkest slums and dens of the city. Just below it was the newspaper shop of William Love, who had some