Travellers' Tales of Scotland

The following is from Travellers' Tales of Scotland by R. H. Coats:

XIV - Sydney Smith

(1798-1803)

AMONG those whom the agitated state of the Continent during the French Revolution drove to Edinburgh rather than to Weimar or to Paris for a university education was one Michael Beach, of Williamstrip, together with his tutor, the Rev. Sydney Smith. Smith, in 1798, was a young clergyman of twenty-seven, who had gladly embraced the opportunity of migrating to the northern capital from an obscure country curacy near Salisbury. In Edinburgh he found himself in the midst of a galaxy of brilliant and able men, such as Dugald Stewart, Francis Jeffrey, Henry Mackenzie, Thomas Campbell, and Walter Scott. Yet five years were not to elapse before the young curate from England would take a foremost place even among these celebrities. This rapid success was brought about partly by the fame of his preaching at Charlotte Chapel, but still more by the part he played in the founding of the Edinburgh Review, and in the pungent and witty articles contributed thereto. It was evident that, whether he expressed himself by the voice or by the pen, here was a man whose opinions could not be overlooked.

We are not here concerned with the general story of Smith's doings while in Edinburgh, his chemical experiments, or his marriage with Miss Pybus, but solely with his impressions of Scotland and the Scots. These have been fully recorded for us by his daughter, Lady Holland, in a paragraph, the opening sentence of which has long become famous. "It requires a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch understanding. Their only idea of wit, or rather that inferior variety of this electric talent which prevails occasionally in the North, and which, under the name of WUT, is so infinitely distressing to people of good taste, is laughing immoderately at stated intervals. They are so imbued with metaphysics that they even make love metaphysically. I overheard a young lady of my acquaintance, at a dance in Edinburgh, exclaim, in a sudden pause of the music, 'What you say, my Lord, is very true of love in the aibstract, but' here the fiddlers began fiddling furiously, and the rest was lost. No nation has so large a stock of benevolence of heart: if you meet with an accident, half Edinburgh immediately flocks to your door to inquire after your pure hand or your pure foot, and with a degree of interest that convinces you their whole hearts are in the inquiry. You find they usually arrange their dishes at dinner by the points of the compass; 'Sandy, put the gigot of mutton to the south, and move the singet sheep's head a wee bit to the nor-west.' If you knock at the door, you hear a shrill female voice from the fifth flab shriek out, 'Wha's chapping at the door?' which is presently opened by a lassie with short petticoats, bare legs, and thick ankles. My Scotch servants bargained they were not to have salmon more than three times a week, and always pulled off their stockings, in spite of my repeated objurgations, the moment my back was turned.

"Their temper stands anything but an attack on their climate. They would have you believe they can ripen fruit; and, to be candid, I must own in remarkably warm summers I have tasted peaches that made most excellent pickles; and it is upon record that at the siege of Perth, on one occasion, the ammunition failing, their nectarines made admirable cannon balls. Even the enlightened mind of Jeffrey cannot shake off the illusion that myrtles flourish at Craig Crook. In vain I have represented to him that they are of the genus Carduus, and pointed out their prickly peculiarities. In vain I have reminded him that I have seen hackney-coaches drawn by four horses in the winter, on account of the snow; that I have rescued a man blown flat against my door by the violence of the wind, and black in the face; that even the experienced Scotch fowls did not venture to cross the streets, but sidled along, tails aloft, without venturing to encounter the gale. Jeffrey sticks to his myrtle illusions, and treats my attacks with as much contempt as if I had been a wild visionary, who had never breathed his caller air, nor lived and suffered under the rigour of his climate, nor spent five years in discussing metaphysics and medicine in that garret of the earth that knuckle-end of England that land of Calvin, oat-cakes, and sulphur."

That Smith did not always dip his pen in irony may be judged from the following more serious and judicious extract. "The best way of giving you an idea of the Scotch is to show you in what they principally differ from the English. In the first place (to begin with their physical peculiarities) they are larger in body than the English; and the women, in my opinion (I say it to my shame) are handsomer than the English women. Their dialect is very agreeable. The Scotch certainly do not understand cleanliness; they are poorer than the English; they are a cautious and a discreet people; they are very much in earnest in their religion, though less so than they were. In England I maintain (except amongst ladies in the middle class of life) there is no religion at all. The clergy of England have no more influence over the people at large than the cheesemongers of England. In Scotland the clergy are extremely active in the discharge of their functions, and are, from the hold they have on the minds of the people, a very important body of men. The common people are extremely conversant with the scriptures; are really not so much pupils as formidable critics to their preachers; many of them are well read in controversial divinity. They are perhaps in some points of view the most remarkable nation in the world; and no country can afford an example of so much order, morality, economy, and knowledge amongst the lower classes of society."

Smith never forgot his stay in Scotland, and often looked back to it with the fondness of regret that it was so soon over. "I left Edinburgh with great heaviness of heart; I knew what I was leaving, and was ignorant to what I was going. My good fortune will be very great, if I should ever again fall into the society of so many liberal, correct, and instructed men, and live with them on such terms of friendship as I have done in Edinburgh

When shall I see Scotland again? Never shall I forget the happy days I spent there, amidst odious smells, barbarous sounds, bad suppers, excellent hearts, and the most enlightened and cultivated understandings."

XV - Dorothy Wordsworth (1803)