Non-Fiction > Uncollected essays > Volume 6, 1874 - Academy

AuGU.-<T 15, 1874.]
THE ACADEMY.
173
duty to make room for the J'oung men.
Augustus had not by any means decided to
discard him, and begged him to waive his
request, which he saw better than Tiberius
would be taken, and quite rightly, as an in-
sult. But Tiberius was too weak to change
his mind freely, and too headstrong to yield
to pressure. After fasting for fom- days he was
allowed to go to Rhodes ; and, when he asked
to return, he was forbidden to do so until
his wife's son had given his consent. During
the latter part of his exile he was in posi-
tive danger, and with his natural mean-
spiritedness -wTote to Augustus asking to
be placed under surveillance. Wo are told
that he led the hfe of a sullen voluptuary ;
if the charge were true it was not of a kind
to affect his real reputation, though it would
lay him open to a good deal of insincere
invective. Soon after his retiu-n the way
to the throne cleared itself again by the
death of the two elder of Augustus's grand-
sons, whose " will to Uve " might have been
stronger, but for the knowledge that Livia
wished them away, and who may well have
fancied themselves poisoned when they were
simply too liases to throw off colds or fevers.
Augustus had to adopt Tiberiiis " for the
sake of the Commonwealth," and Tiberius,
having no tact to guide him in his new rela-
tion, fell back upon punctilious propriety,
and never allowed Augustus to forget for a
moment that he was under pafria pottstas :
otherwise the years in which he was asso-
ciated with Augustus in the empire were
the best and most prosperous of Tiberius's
life ; they are the time of his brilliant cam-
paign against Marbod, who had established
a formidable power in Bohemia, and of the
reconquest of Pannonia and lllyricum fi-om
which Augustus repeatedly asked him to
withdi-aw, and of the well-conducted mili-
tary promenade in Germany, which did
something to retiieve the honour of the
eagles after the disaster of Varus.
G. A. SiMC'ox.
ScoHlsli Rivers. By the late vSir Thomas
Dick Lauder, Baronet, Author of the
"Morayshire Floods," &c. With Illus-
trations by the Author and a Preface bj-
John Brown, M.D., Author of " Rab and
his Friends," &c. (Ediaburgh : Edmons-
ton & Douglas, 1874.)
Dr. John Brown calls this, in his pleasant
preface to it, a delightful book ; and Dr.
John Brown is a good judge. A delightful
book it certainly is, and delightful in no
ordinary way. Although it is not thirty
years since the author left it unfinished at
his death, it is already in some sense an
antiquity. The style is farther away from us
than many styles older in point of date.
Thei-e is throughout a sort of ponderous
editorial levity, that lias now gone somewhat
iuto disuse. We are saluted as " gentle
reader" and "gentlest of all readers."
Social gossip about men and things and
perpetual compliments to tlie nobility and
gentry, by whose estates the river may
chance to go, speak to lis of a time when
Scotland was to some extent a separate coun-
ti-y and an author could address himself to a
Scottish public, almost small enough to
deserve the name of a clique and with a
clique's special knowledge and special readi-
ness to be pleased. In speaking to ns as he
does, we feel that the author is treating us
as one of the family. His garrulousness
has all the character of personal intercourse.
We begin to regard his " old and much
valued friend. General Sir James Russel," as
an old and much valued friend of our own ;
at least, we are sure the author would be
glad to give us an introduction, not only to
him, but to all the friends and acquaintances
who come in his way, and so frank us, for a
whole holiday, from one country house to
another, all over Tweeddale and the valley
of the Tyno.
This is just one of the qualities that make
the book delightful. It is in no literary
sense, it is merely from the pleasure of
making a loveable acquaintance and going
through interesting scenery, that we can
accoi'd it merit. We have called the style
editorial ; indeed, it is not unlike that of a
provincial editor's description of the annual
games, with just such little touches of per-
sonal compliment as the editor would deal
out to his distinguished fellow-townsmen
and the various successful competitors.
Now, at first sight, one would have thought
that a book like this would depend almost
entirely upon style ; that a book which
merely promises to set forth to us, with ap-
propriate gossip, the changeful character of
the valley of one river after another, if it
failed in the point of vivid descriptive
writing, would be a failure altogether. But
we have a proof to the conti'ary before us.
Scottish Eivers is a delightful book, in virtue
of the delightful character of the author and
the delightful character of his subject. It
is all about things that are in themselves
agreeable. The natural heart of man is
made happy by hearing that the wild cattle
of Ettrick Forest were tliree times the size of
those hcpt at Gliillingham ; and all the more,
perhaps, if we do not know what that was —
there is the more rein for picturesque ima-
gination. We should be very sorry for any-
one who did not care to hear about Thomas
the Rhymer and the Black Dwarf, about
border-i-ievers, fugitive Jacobites, and hunted
Covenanters. The breath of Walter Scott
has gone out over these dry bones of old
Scotch history ; the work of imagination is
done to our hand ; and as we turn over these
leaves, just as when we follow the actual
course of the rivers themselves, we are
accompanied by the pageant world of the
Waverley novels, and Murmioii, and the Lai/
of the Last Minstrel.
Moreover, there is a great deal of quota-
tion in the book ; not only Scott, but all
manner of old ballads and old songs take
the tale, now and again, out of the mouth of
the author ; and the pages are pleasantly
broken up and lightened with these snatches
of verse. It is the fashion, now-a-days, to
run down this good old custom of quotation ;
we write prose so admirably, it seems, that
these scraps would give even pain to the
cultured reader, as an interruption to the
sustained measure of the sentences. It may
be so ; but there is something to be said on
the other side ; and we greet some fiimiliar
passage when we find it in another man's
book, like a friend in strange company.
The great point, however, in this book
upon Scottish Rivers, is the sincerity of the
author's own delight in the stories he repeats,
the verse he quotes, the scenery and the
animals he seeks to describe to us. It is by
this sense of enjoyment that the whole book
is kept alive. Sometimes it croj)s out in one
way, sometimes in another ; sometimes it is
his passion for fishing that adds gusto to
what he has to say of a place — as, for ex-
ample : "Below Kirkurd, the Tairth runs
through a series of valuable water meadows,
in a deep and u.niform stream, resembling in
character an English river; and," he adds,
■' we are much mistaken if it be not full of
fine fat trouts." One can hear the smack of
the bps, in these words. His whole past
life has been so pleasant ; he has such a
host of sunny recollections, that the one
jostles the other and they come tumbling
forth together in a happy confusion : his
basket is so full of those " fine fat trouts " of
the memory, that it is a sight to see him
empty it before us. Even fishing is passed
by in superior ecstacies : —
" This is one of the most heautiful parts of the
Tweed," he s.xys, "and well do we remember the
day when, wandering in our boyhood up hither
from Melrose, we found ourselves for the first time
in the midst of scenery so grand and beautiful.
The rod was speedily put up, aud the flj'-hook was
exchanged for the stetch-hook. We wandered
about from point to point, now and then reclining
on the grass, and sometimes, from very wanton-
ness, wading into the shallows of the dear stream;
and so we passed away some hours of luxurious
idleness, the pleasure of which we shall never
cease to remembfr.''
Is not that passage enough, of itself, to con-
vince the reader ? He will find the book
full of the like. He wiU find that this man,
not very wise perhaps, certainly not very
cunning in words, had a great faculty of
jsleasureable attention and pleasureable re-
collection, thai he had noticed things more
closely than most of us, and liked them
better, and that he could speak of 'what he
thus observed and loved in a plain diffuse
way that is full of gusto and most truly
human.
And the last thing to be thought of, is
that the book was written during the author's
final illness. " What a place for linnets'
nests and primroses in the lovely .springtime
of the year ! " be exclaims, as the name of
Blackford Plill comes from under his pen.
Would one not fancy he was a schoolboy
with forty springtimes before him ? It i.s
easy, after this, to believe what Lord Cock-
burn said of him, that " his dying deserves
to be remembered, for it reconciles one to
the act." Robert Louis Stevenson.
Histonj of the Modern Stijles of Architecture.
By James Fergusson, D.C.L. Second
Edition. (London: John Murray, 1873.)
Brich and Marble in the Middle Ai/es. By
G. E. Street, R.A. Second 'Edition.
(London : John Murray, 1874.)
The reappearance of these two sumptuous
works carries us back in thought a period
of nearly twenty years, to a time when
architectm'e was much less studied, and ex-
cited much less general interest, than it does
at the present day. Those who remember
the first publication of Mr. Fcrgusson's
Handbook of Architecture, in 18-55, will