Читать книгу Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland - Daniel Turner Holmes - Страница 23

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The miner is still with us, but the weaver is almost obsolete in the Lowlands. You must search diligently for him. In Laurencekirk (a quaint village of one long street, in the shire of Forfar), and in similar out-of-the-way nooks, can still be faintly heard the music of the hand-loom. I went recently into a weaver's shop in Laurencekirk, and found three old men and one aged woman plying their shuttles. The oldest of the men was born four years after the battle of Waterloo, and there he sat, like a vision of the vanished years, striving to weave a few more yards of drugget before going to rejoin his contemporaries of the reign of George III. He told me there were once seven hundred hand-loom weavers in the place, and "that young fellow" said he, pointing to a wrinkled carle of eighty on the loom behind, "remembers it as well as I do."

The industry of hand-loom weaving, which, a century ago, made every town in Scotland resonant with the din of shuttles, is thus almost a thing of the past, and the men who engaged in it have gone the way of their shoe-buckles, knee-breeches, and seventeen-hundred linen. Yet weavers were typical of all that was intellectual in Scottish life: every shop was in its way a miniature university, and every weaver a man who believed himself capable of giving Pitt a lesson or two on the management of the war, and Dundas a few hints on political economy. They had, indeed, far clearer views on politics than most of their legislators; from their ranks at a subsequent period the Chartist agitators—regrettably extreme as they were—were largely recruited; and it is not too much to say that the minds of many of our leading accredited reformers took the ply from these politicians of the loom. These men who, in a way so characteristic of Scotland, managed to make high-thinking subsist on homely fare, can never quite fade from memory while their tuneful poetical exponent, Tannahill, is read and enjoyed. In his works we have a page out of the past; and as we read his life and poems, we behold the Scotch village as it was a century ago; we see the old houses with their outside stairs, the antique boulder-paved cross, and the assemblies of aproned craftsmen discussing news much older than their ale.

In Broadford, Skye, there is an old crofter who, in his early years, worked at the loom with Alexander Bain, late Professor in the University of Aberdeen. Half a century ago, John Stuart Mill said that Bain's erudition was encyclopædic. From long residence in France, I know that few British philosophers are better known than Bain (whose name the French amusingly pronounce to rhyme with vin). This old crofter tells how he used to chaff the future professor for invariably having a book in front of him as the shuttle was plied. Bain, by slow and careful work, overcame prejudice, and secured a high position among the leaders of thought. Long ago, those who had to sit for the London degrees used to regard him as the greatest thinker in Europe. When he retired from the examinership at London, students lost some of their old veneration for him, and when he married a second time, a Miss Barbara Something, they even ventured to make a logical joke on him, and say that he had been fascinated by Barbara's perfect figure. I know that many pupils of our public schools, in love with football more than syntax, often regretted that Bain ever composed his English Grammar. No book (unless perhaps Morell's Analysis) has ever been more cordially execrated, and no book ever more richly deserved it, for though, like Aberdeen granite, it is stately and impressive, it is also ruthless, cold, and implacable. The draught may be wholesome and medicinal, but there is no honey on the rim of the cup.