Volume II. Guth na Bliadhna ' leabhar II.]

Appeared without further fuss and trouble on their part, how much better and brighter and pleasanter this world would be, particularly from our (the reviewer's) point of view!

Obviously, however, there are exceptions. Some authors are worth republishing (though their name is not legion) down to their veriest trifles. They have an ingratiating style ; a manner of stating their convictions which is peculiarly their own, or they have improved or inherited a habit of daring and original thought—such gifts are enough for us, as for all reasonable men ; and we cordially approve and welcome the inevitable limited edition, the hand-made paper, wide margins, bold type, and all the rest of it, with a feeling of gratitude, which, though it may be quite unaccompanied with a sense of favours to come, yet is not one jot or tittle the less sincere.

We think that whoever is responsible for the republication of these Essays—they originally ap­peared, it seems, in the Scottish Review—has done wisely. The late Lord Bute was an interesting figure, a scholar, and the possessor of a by no means negligible pen. Moreover, he was an attractive specimen of a class whose intellectual extinction is now merely a matter of time, and on that account alone, if on no other grounds, his appearance in this form is justified. Considered merely as a Scots peer, Lord Bute was, of course, an abounding prodigy; but independently of his rank, his nationality, his wealth and social position, we readily acknowledge him an interesting and even in some respects a remarkable figure. To-considerable reading he united experience, and an acute, and for the most part accurate, observa­tion. Moreover, he had the literary quality in no common degree. His prose, though nowise dis­tinguished—much less " precious "—is at all times easy and dignified, and he had a wholesome horror of the commonplace and contempt of certain familiar aspects of public opinion which though they may have carried him too far at times, yet are decidedly refreshing.

But it is principally as a peer -as a Scots peer-especially—that Lord Bute deserves somewhat more than a mere passing recognition. His scholarship, after all, considerable though we al­low it to be, was but a drop in the vast ocean of European scientific thought; and placed beside the greatest intellects of Christendom, Lord Bute's light would have burned dimly indeed. But set him on his proper pedestal, surround him with his equals in birth, learning and accomplishments, and it will at once be seen that Lord Bute's repre­sentation constitutes a valuable and appropriate addition to that distinguished and interesting gallery of portraiture of which the list of royal and noble authors compiled by Horace Walpole forms at once the nucleus and the symbol.

These Essays are seven in number, and embrace a considerable variety of topics. The first deals with the subject of " Ancient Celtic Latin Hymns," and is a review of the well-known Leabhar Imuiun, and the lesser known, though scarce less valuable-and interesting, Antiphonariwm Benchorense, a MS. belonging to the Ambrosian Library at Milan. The contents of this essay are principally descrip­tive, and do not call for any particular remark. •Cuchuimne's (obiit circa 742) poem in honour of our Blessed Lady should prove interesting reading to] those Protestants who waste their time in trying to collect material to bolster up an impossible theory of "historical continuity" in support of their peculiar religious standpoint, and supplies, as Lord Bute justly remarks, "a proof of the feeling on the subject entertained among the members of the ancient Scoto-Irish Churches", j The next essay is one entitled " The New Light upon St. Patrick," and like its forerunner is a review of a book, in this case the Vita Sancti Pat-ricii, edited by Father Hogan, S.j. We confess we find Lord Bute's constant references to "Patrick M'Calphum " somewhat irritating. If Lord Bute's] design in so stigmatising the Saint was merely to appear as a rigid and unbending stickler for accur­acy at all costs, he should have taken the bull byl the horns and written the appellation in Gaelicj " Patrick M'Calphum " is an unnecessary piece of] affectation.

There is little in these two essays to excite remark. They are interesting performances, andJ ■reveal Lord Bute's learning in a favourable light,] though it cannot be said that they constitute an] important addition to the literature of the subj jects of which they treat. They are rather in the] mature of pleasant excursions, whose purely critical] intention and purpose are necessarily primary] considerations with the author, whose faculty of original and constructive work is here clearly seen] operating in subordination to the exigencies of] :space. We see more of the man himself, and lesa of the critic, in the two following essays—"Tha Scottish Peerage " and " Parliament in Scotland J

—and with these two papers we propose to deal at some length.

The first of these essays is, in our opinion, the best. Lord Bute was evidently well acquainted 'with his subject when he sat down to write on ithe Scottish Peerage, and being a thinker of considerable strength and originality of view, his contribution to the literature of that theme makes exceedingly interesting reading. The subject, in­deed, evidently possessed a melancholy interest for Lord Bute, whose opinions on his order are rendered additionally edifying by reason of the fact that in politics he was a Nationalist. Thus, he deplores the effects of the Union of 1707 upon the Scottish peerage, and mournfully prognosticates [its total extinction at no very distant date. " The Scotch peerage," says he, "cannot be regarded as a body representing political power, any more than Edinburgh Castle can be called a place of military strength. They have both reached the point of being almost purely historical monuments. . . . There is, however, at least one respect in which the peerage of Scotland differs widely from the ancient castle of her metropolis. It is a monu­ment which is rapidly crumbling away." Lord Bute then proceeds to quote chapter and verse for his statement; and considered in the light of these depressing figures, we cannot but say that the outlook seems gloomy enough. The nationality of the peers—of the holders of existing peerages, that is to say—is another subject which troubled Lord Bute. Some, he finds, have been "victims of Hanoverian spite," of which we do not in the least doubt; and somehow or other have fallen away, in the persons of their descendants, from the true salt of the earth. But Lord Bute is evidently happy in finding one or two peers who are (or were) genuine Scotsmen. For our parts, with the exception of the late lord himself, we have not known or met one such. Scottish peers, it seems to us, are no better than Englishmen, which, indeed, is a disagreeable fact which our author himself is obliged to acknowledge. "The young peer very often indeed finds that his mother is an English­woman, and she brings him up in her ways, ideas and national tastes; then he is sent to England, and educated in an intensely Anglican atmosphere, first at a private school, then at a public school, then at an English University ; then follows English society, probably service in an English regiment [or in a ' Highland' one, which is just the same thing], and when his own English wife petitions for the small but elegant chapel [Lord Bute is here referring more particularly to the religious convictions of the peers], he is already 'an alien among his mother's children'."

All this is trenchantly put, and we wish we could gainsay it, but, alas! we cannot. The honour of one's country occasionally compels the patriot to shut his eyes to unpalatable or rather unsightly facts, at all events in the presence of strangers; but here no amount of sophistry or beating about the bush will avail us anything. The peers of Scotland are Anglicised almost to a man; and the best thing which we can wish ourselves under these depressing circumstances is that they will realise Lord Bute's delightful pre­diction as speedily as possible and cease to exist. In Japan there is an institution or custom known as hari-kari, or happy despatch ; we cordially recommend it to the attention of our " Scottish " peers at a loss for something useful to do.

In this essay Lord Bute has been at some pains to probe into the origins of our Scottish peers with a view to determining their racial complexion; and the conclusion he has come to is that the Norman element is the most prevalent in our aristocracy; and in this respect discovers himself more a disciple of Chalmers than of Eobertson, which is a pity; for the modern scientific view is nothing if not destructive of the opinions of the former. We observe that Lord Bute adopts the " Campo bello" version of the origin of the name Campbell, a version which is now entirely discredited; and he seems to have been misled by the fact that the great families of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were essenti­ally feudal institutions into ascribing to them a Norman or English origin. The origins of the Douglases, Hamiltons, etc., are not precisely known; but there is nothing inherently improb­able in the theory that these families were of Celtic rather than of foreign growth. Their attachment to feudal forms and ceremonies, and, above all, the fact that they did not appear upon the stage of history until the feudal system was thoroughly established in Scotland, has caused them to be identified with that system, and to so great an extent that it would seem almost an impossible task successfully to connect them, at all events by blood, with any other. But beneath the feudalism of these great families, we see the kinship feeling strongly surviving. The Douglases were surely a cian (in the Gaelic meaning of the word) if ever there was one; and the tenacity with which they stuck to one another, and promoted one another's interests, by fair means or foul, against all-comers, not even excepting the king himself, points to a

f

native rather than a foreign origin. We shrewdly suspect that comparatively few of our Scottish peers are of Norman or English extraction. Time was, of course, but now is not, we are pleased to observe, in which to ascribe to a great Scottish ruling house any origin save a foreign one would have cost the conscientious genealogist almost his life. We live in more enlightened times, however, nowadays; and it is rather amusing to note the eagerness with which the descendants of these " Normans" agitate their claims to be considered as magnates of native growth! Our peers may be Anglicised out of all semblance to their original selves, as it were; but at least the Celtic Renais­sance has taught them one useful lesson—it has taught them not to be ashamed of their Celtic ancestry.

Lord Bute's next essay is on the subject of " Parliament in Scotland," and this, it appears to us, is one of the best of these papers. Lord Bute, to hold the political language of the day, was a "convinced Home Ruler," and his essay makes interesting reading. We have probably now no Home Rule peer in Scotland; for since Lord Rosebery voluntarily cursed himself and his career —if indeed it be no misnomer to characterise the ragged remnants of his political prospects by so grandiloquent an epithet—with the curse of central government at Westminster we have had, to the best of our knowledge and belief, no patriot peer in the ranks of our aristocracy. With Lord Bute's historical views on this subject we are not so much concerned. It is when he steps down, as it were, into the arena of practical politics, that he is princi­pally interesting. The fact that he could formu­late a " scheme " of Home Rule without losing his temper, or laying himself open to the true blue suspicion of wishing to dismember that blessed thing Empire—we assume for the sake of argument, that blessed it is, since all (or nearly all) men unite in calling it so—speaks as much for his tacfr and moderation as it assuredly does, in our opinion at least, for his genius. Needless to say, we are perfectly at one with Lord Bute in his remarks on this subject; and we cordially recommend his essays to our readers ; for, for the sake of this paper alone, his book is well worth buying and reading— yea, and marking and inwardly digesting.

Almost we think that Lord Bute has been at too much pains to prove his countrymen block­heads. In no other country in the world probably would the array of facts and figures which he brings to bear against the Union of 1707—one of the great causes of our decline in Nationalism—require so much special pleading. Our degraded position speaks, of course, for itself (for from a kingdom we have sunk to a province); but in these pages Lord Bute has taken compassion on the prejudiced ;ind ignorant in our midst—and, alas ! they are the #"and majority of this people—with a kindness and patience which simply baffle description. We are really amazed at the almost sugary reasonableness of his arguments and contentions, and at the amiable manner in which Lord Bute set out to unmask and expose a he which really requires no refutation whatever. Nothing, for instance, could exceed the patience and skill with which Lord Bute de­molishes the familiar argument that the Act of 1707 must stand for all time because it has been a source of prosperity to Scotland. "This question/' says he, " was very clearly, ably and moderately discussed in the article aipon ' The Union of 1707, viewed financially,' which appeared in the Scottish Review for October, 1887. That article, as far as it goes, is unanswered and unanswerable. Those whom it did not please were driven at once to resort to the last refuge of impotence by personal abuse of the anonymous author. It was a striking instance of ' no case: abuse the defendant's soli­citor'. Argument against it there could be none. It is impossible by cursing to delete the printed figures from the pages of blue-books. But there was certainly one thing in which the well-known financier who wrote that article was wrong. He greatly understated his own case. With regard to a particular item, for instance, such a phrase occurs as ' probably £500,000 would not overstate it, but to keep well within the mark, we shall place it at £300,000'. His weakest statement was pro­bably that in which the annual value of land in Scotland, assessed to income tax, being about sevenl and a half millions sterling, of which about three-sevenths belong to peers or baronets, he proposed to name two millions as representing the amount of income spent in London and elsewhere in Eng­land. He left out of calculation any incomes not derived from land, the fact that to a very large number of Scottish proprietors their annual sojourn in London occupies the greater and certainly con­stitutes by far the most costly portion of their year, and that the two classes which he names certainly do not form the half of those whose incomes are thus applied. From the figures upon which he himself went, it is clear that he ought to have set down the annual dead loss in money which is entailed upon Scotland by the Union of 1707 at a sum of eight or ten millions, rather than four. . . . Lastly, with regard to the purely monetary question, it is a singular fact that an idea or belief does actually still extensively prevail that the Union has been beneficial to the material interests of the country. Even the pages of the financial writer just cited are not free from some lingering traces of this superstition, although with the figures before him he is obliged to transfer the benefits of the Union to some vague and undefined sphere. It is curious to conjecture how a delusion so entirely op­posed to facts ever arose. It was one of the false prophesies of the advocates of the Union at the time, and their reputations became, of course, involved in the success of their prediction. On the other hand, while the Union was regarded as irrevocable, the notion that there was at least some compensation of a material character, offered a last consolation to despairing patriotism. The wish was father to the thought on all sides. Hence comes all the nonsense of this sort which Sir Walter Scott—al­though, evidently, much against the grain—thought it necessary to write. Perhaps the popularity of his works has something to do with the survival of a mistake so extraordinary. Anyhow, strange as it may seem in the face of the inexorable logic of facts, it is not an uncommon belief in Scotland even at the present day that the Union has con­ferred great benefits upon the country from a financial point of view. People do not know that as a matter of fact the Union nearly beggared the population for several generations, and that the country is still bled annually at the rate of about £'J per head of the population in deference to a totally extinct dynastic question which happened to exist in the year 1704."

We have already somewhat exceeded the modest limit which we proposed to ourselves when setting out to review these Essays; but. really, the topics of which they treat are so fasci­nating, are handled in so skilful and edifying a manner, and, above all, are discussed by so interesting a personality, that we must plead guilty to having allowed our zeal, in this instance at least, to exceed our sense of proportion. The pity of it is, that the mind which inspired and the hand which wrote these admirable papers are no more. It falls to comparatively few men to die when they are like to be missed, for all men are liars, and merit goes incognito; but Lord Bute expired just when his country had most need of him; and when the loss of so independent, original and accomplished a thinker was most likely to be felt. He has left a fragrant memory behind him, however, and though pessimism may ridicule the suggestion, yet we venture to indulge the hope that the author of these Essays will not be the last of his order and race of whom patriotism and learning will be obliged to take cognisance.
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