with their authority the Book of Sports. The merry, unthinking serfs, who, early in the reign of Charles the First, danced on Sabbaths round the Maypole, were afterwards the ready tools of despotism, and fought that England might be enslaved. The Ironsides, who, in the cause of civil and religious freedom, bore them down, were staunch Sabbatarians. In no history, however, is the value of the Sabbath more strikingly illustrated than in that of the Scotch people during the seventeenth and the larger portion of the eighteenth centuries. Religion and the Sabbath were their sole instructors, and this in times so little favorable to the cultivation of mind, so darkened by persecution and stained with blood, that, in at least the earlier of these centuries, we derive our knowledge of the character and amount of the popular intelligence mainly from the death-testimonies of our humbler martyrs, here and there corroborated by the incidental evidence of writers such as Burnet.* In these noble addresses from prison and scaffold, the composition of men drafted by oppression almost at random from out the general mass, we see how vigorously our Presbyterian people had learned to think, and how well to give their thinking expression. In the quieter times which followed the Revolution, the Scottish peasantry existed as at once the most provident and intellectual in Europe; and a moral and * Burnet, afterwards the celebrated Whig Bishop, was one of six divines sent out by Archbishop Leighton, in 1670, to argue the Scotch people into Episcopacy. But the mission was by no means successful. "The people of the country," says Burnet, "came generally to hear us, though not in great crowds. We were indeed amazed to see a poor commonalty so capable to argue upon points of government, and on the bounds to be set to the power of princes in matters of religion. Upon all these topics they had texts of Scripture at hand, and were ready with their answers to anything that was said to them. This measure of knowledge was spread even among the meanest of them, their cottagers and their servants." (Memoirs, vol. i. p. 431.) - instructed people pressed outwards beyond the narrow bounds of their country, and rose into offices of trust and importance in all the nations of the world. There were no Societies for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in those days. But the Sabbath was kept holy: it was a day from which every dissipating frivolity was excluded by a stern sense of duty. The popular mind, with weight imparted to it by its religious earnestness, and direction by the pulpit addresses of the day, expatiated on matters of grave import, of which the tendency was to concentrate and strengthen, not scatter and weaken, the faculties; and the secular cogitations of the week came to bear, in consequence, a Sabbath-day stamp of depth and solidity. The one day in the seven struck the tone for the other six. Our modern apostles of popular instruction rear up no such men among the masses as were developed under the Sabbatarian system in Scotland. Their aptest pupils prove but the loquacious gabbers of their respective workshops, shallow superficialists, that bear on the surface of their minds a thin diffusion of ill-remembered facts and crude theories; and rarely indeed do we see them rising in the scale of society: they become Socialists by hundreds, and Chartists by thousands, and get no higher. The disseminator of mere useful knowledge takes aim at the popular ignorance; but his inept and unscientific gunnery does not include in its calculations the parabolic curve of man's spiritual nature; and so, aiming direct at the mark, he aims too low, and the charge falls short. CHAPTER IV. Quit Manchester for Wolverhampton. - Scenery of the New Red Sandstone; apparent Repetition of Pattern. The frequent Marshes of England; curiously represented in the National Literature; Influence on the National Superstitions. Wolverhampton. - Peculiar Aspect of the Dudley Coal-field; striking Passage in its History. - The Rise of Birmingham into a great Manufacturing Town an Effect of the Development of its Mineral Treasures. - Upper Ludlow Deposit; Aymestry Limestone; both Deposits of peculiar Interest to the Scotch Geologist. The Lingula Lewisii and Terebratula Wilsoni. - General Resemblance of the Silurian Fossils to those of the Mountain Limestone. First-born of the Vertebrata yet known. - Order of Creation. - The Wren's Nest. - Fossils of the Wenlock Limestone; in a State of beautiful Keeping. - Anecdote. — Asaphus Caudatus ; common, it would seem, to both the Silurian and Carboniferous Rocks. - Limestone Miners. Noble Gallery excavated in the Hill. I QUITTED Manchester by the morning train, and travelled through a flat New Red Sandstone district, on the Birmingham Railway, for about eighty miles. One finds quite the sort of country here for travelling over by steam. If one misses seeing a bit of landscape, as the carriages hurry through, and the objects in the foreground look dim and indistinct, and all in motion, as if seen through water, it is sure to be repeated in the course of a few miles, and again and again repeated. I was reminded, as we hurried along, and the flat country opened and spread out on either side, of webs of carpet stuff nailed down to pieces of boarding, and presenting, at regular distances, returns of the same rich pattern. Red detached houses stand up amid the green fields; little bits of brick villages lie grouped beside cross roads; irregular patches of wood occupy nooks and corners; lines of poplars rise tall and taper amid straggling cottages; and then, having once passed houses, villages, and woods, we seem as if we had to pass them again and again; the red detached houses return, the bits of villages, the woody nooks and corners, the lines of taper poplars amid the cottages; and thus the repetitions of the pattern run on and on. In a country so level as England there must be many a swampy hollow furnished with no outlet to its waters. The bogs and marshes of the midland and southern counties formed of old the natural strongholds, in which the people, in times of extremity, sheltered from the invader. Alfred's main refuge, when all others failed him, was a bog of Somersetshire. When passing this morning along frequent fields of osiers and widespread marshes, bristling with thickets of bulrushes and reeds, I was led to think of what had never before occurred to me, the considerable amount of imagery and description which the poets of England have transferred from scenery of this character into the national literature. There is in English verse much whispering of osiers beside silent streams, and much waving of sedges over quiet waters. Shakspeare has his exquisite pictures of slow-gliding currents, "Making sweet music with the enamelled stones, And giving gentle kisses to each sedge They overtake in their lone pilgrimage." And Milton, too, of water-nymphs "Sitting by rushy fringed bank, Where grows the willow and the osier dank; "Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave, The loose train of their amber-dropping hair; or of "sighing sent," by the "parting genius," "From haunted spring and dale, Edged with poplar pale." We find occasional glimpses of the same dank scenery in Collins, Cowper, and Crabbe; and very frequent ones, in our own times, in the graphic descriptions of Alfred Tennyson and Thomas Hood. "One willow o'er the river wept, And shook the wave as the wind did sigh ; And far through the marish green, and still, The tangled water-courses slept, Shot over with purple, and green, and yellow.” Not less striking is at least one of the pictures drawn by "The coot was swimming in the reedy pool, The moping heron, motionless and stiff, The watery flats of the country have had also their influence on the popular superstitions. The delusive tapers that spring up a-nights from stagnant bogs and fens must have been of frequent appearance in the more marshy districts of England; and we accordingly find, that of all the national goblins, the goblin of the wandering night-fire, whether recognized as Jack-of-the-Lantern or Will-of-the-Wisp, was one of the best known. |