The Book-Hunter
wife, from some writings to be hereafter mentioned, seems also to have
enjoyed an allowance of L40 per annum from her father.
Besides William and John Hill, there were born in Aberdeen to William
Burton and Eliza Paton three sons--two of whom died early, one of them
being accidentally drowned in the Don at Grandholm--and one daughter.
The surviving brother of Dr Burton is a retired medical officer of the
East India Company. The sister, Mary, remains unmarried.
The little household established in Aberdeen about the year 1812 knew
the woes of failing health and narrow means, part of the latter doled
out to them by an unwilling hand. Lieutenant Burton's health continued
to decline till his death, about the year 1819. His son John was then
ten years old, and had begun his school education.
His recollections of schools and schoolmasters were vivid and
picturesque. The one schoolmaster--almost the only teacher--to whom he
acknowledged any obligation, was James Melvin. To him, he was wont to
say, he owed his good Scotch knowledge of Latin; and he delighted even
till the end of his life in dwelling on Dr Melvin's methods of teaching,
and on the fine spirit of generous emulation and eagerness for knowledge
which inspired his pupils.
Both before and after the time of his studies under Dr Melvin he had
experience of schoolmasters of a different type. The tales of flogging
under these pedagogues were so absolutely sickening, that Dr Burton's
family used to beg him to stop his narrations to spare their feelings.
He had beheld, though he had never undergone, the old-fashioned process
of flogging by _heezing up_ the culprit on the back of the
school-porter, so as to bring his bare back close to the master's lash.
The trembling victim, anticipating such punishment, used to be sent to
summon the porter. He frequently returned with a half-sobbing message,
"Please, sir, _he says_ he's not in." The fiction did not lead to
escape. Cromar was the name of the chief executioner in these scenes.
Detested by his pupils, he was a victim to every sort of petty
persecution from them, so that cruelty acted and reacted between him and
them. On one memorable occasion he flogged John Burton with such
violence as to cause to himself an internal rupture.
The offence which led to this unmeasured punishment was "looking
impudent!"--and the look of supposed impudence was produced by a
temporarily swollen lip; but the swollen lip was the effect of a single
combat with a schoolfellow; and fighting was so rife, and so severely
repressed, that it appeared less dangerous to meet the consequences of
the supposed impertinent face than those of the battle. The unfortunate
pupil of course continued to grimace, and the wretched schoolmaster to
flog, till the pupil streamed with blood, and the master sat down from
sheer exhaustion and an injury from which he never recovered.
Before John Hill Burton had completed his course at the grammar school
he gained a bursary by competition, and began his studies at Marischal
College. The open competition for bursaries at Aberdeen was a subject
on which he delighted to talk, often with tears of enthusiasm in his
eyes. The entire impartiality, the complete openness of these
competitions to the whole world, the spectacle of high learning freely
offered to whoever could by merit earn it, seemed to Dr Burton, to his
life's end, as fine a subject of contemplation as any the world could
offer. During his last illness, a friend, who knew his strong interest
in his Alma Mater, presented him with Mr M'Lean's 'Life at a Northern
University.' He read it with the utmost delight, often reading passages
aloud with great emotion, on account of the vivid picture they presented
of the scenes of his youth. It was a rough hard life that of an Aberdeen
College student fifty or sixty years ago.
Mr M'Lean says of his fellow-students: "As the most of them came from
the country--generally from the Highlands and Western Islands of
Scotland--they brought with them all their native roughness and
coarseness of manners. The great majority of those who had spent their
lives in town frequented the neighbouring university,[1] where the
entrance and other examinations were not nearly so severe. In general,
the great bulk of the students were far behind in good manners, and that
polish which a large town always gives. Their secluded habits when at
college, and their intercourse only with their own number, prevented any
improvement in this matter. On the whole, their conduct in the class,
and their behaviour towards some of the professors, were anything but
gentlemanly."[2]
[Footnote 1: Marischal College. Mr M'Lean's descriptions refer to
King's; but the two colleges, close together, must have been pretty
similar in their manners and customs even before they were, as they now
are, formally united.]
[Footnote 2: Life in a Northern University. By Neil M'Lean, author of
'Memoirs of Marshal Keith,' 'Romance of the Seal and Whale Fishing,'
&c., &c. Glasgow; John S. Marr & Sons: London; Simpkin, Marshall, & Co.
1874.]
Another quotation from Mr M'Lean may be allowed, as embodying the
descriptions often given by Dr Burton of the motley crew of competitors
for the scholarships and bursaries dispensed by the university: "Gazing
round the room, I noted that my competitors consisted of raw-boned
red-haired Highlandmen, fresh from their native hills, with all their
rusticity about them. All the northern counties had sent their quota to
swell the number, and even the Orkney and Shetland Islands were
represented. Many rosy-faced young fellows were also to be seen, who had
left their country occupations for a little, and who, if
unsuccessful"--_i.e._, in gaining a bursary--"would return to them, and
work in their leisure hours at their favourite classics until another
competition came round. Here and there were to be seen a few rather
better dressed than the rest; whilst amongst the crowd the eye rested on
many a studious, thin, cadaverous, hard-worked face, which made you look
again, and feel in your heart that there sat a bursar. A more motley
crowd, as respects age, dress, and features, could scarcely be found
anywhere; and yet over all there was an intellectual, manly look, a look
of innocence and unacquaintance with the low ways of the world."[3]
[Footnote 3: Life in a Northern University.]
Among this motley crowd John Hill Burton was no model student. He took
his full share of the rough sport so well described in the 'Northern
University'--wrenched off door-knockers and house-bells, transplanted
sign-boards, &c. He was but a schoolboy in years when he left school for
college, and his mother was frequently obliged to provide him with a
private tutor, not so much to assist him in his studies as to keep him
from idleness during his hours at home. Home was, during these years,
for a time sad, and was always quiet. During his father's lifetime it
was diversified by frequent changes of abode within a very narrow
circuit.
The writer has seen some half-dozen small houses, in a rather unlovely
suburb of Aberdeen, all within sight of each other, which had
successively been inhabited by Lieutenant Burton and his family; the
poor invalid craving for the real change which might have benefited his
health, and seeking relief, instead, in constant change of house. Mrs
Burton was entitled to an abode at Grandholm as well as her sisters, and
the little family went there occasionally, at least after Lieutenant
Burton's death. The place, which is a rather interesting one, filled a
considerable space in the affections of the children. Its inmates did
not. Clearly sister Eliza never was forgiven for her unfortunate
marriage. Affection for her husband and for his memory prevented her
apologising for it, and her children were not of the sort to apologise
for their existence. A series of petty slights, small unkindnesses,
imbittered the mind of the poverty-stricken widow against her unmarried
sisters, and her feeling was strongly inherited by her children.
A house in Old Aberdeen has been already mentioned as the abode of Mrs
Margaret Brown, Dr Burton's last surviving aunt. This quaint old house
had been purchased by Mrs Brown's grandmother, mother of the laird of
Grandholm, and at the beginning of the century was inhabited by her
maiden daughter Margaret, or, as she was oftener called, Peggy Paton.
This lady lived to the age of ninety, and at her death left her house
and fortune to her niece and name-daughter, Margaret Paton (Mrs Brown),
who in her turn adopted a grand-niece, the daughter already mentioned of
Dr Burton's eldest brother, William,--the same who, having nursed her
aged aunt till her death, in the last year of his life so tenderly
ministered to her uncle, the subject of this notice.
The second in the line of female owners of the old house, Peggy Paton,
was, for the outer world, what George Eliot calls "a charicter"--one of
those distinguishing features of country-town life which the march of
improvement has swept away: a lady by birth, but owing little to
schools or teachers, books or travel: a woman of strong natural
understanding and some wit, who loved her nightly rubber at whist, could
rap out an oath or a strong pleasantry, and whose quick estimates of men
and things became proverbs with the younger generation.
For her inner circle Peggy Paton was a most motherly old maid. She it
was who, when she found her niece Eliza _would_ marry Lieutenant Burton,
mediated between father and daughter, and arranged matters as well as
might be in an affair in which her good sense found much to disapprove,
and her heart much to excuse. Not only to her niece Margaret, her
adopted daughter, but also to her other nieces at Grandholm, motherless
by death, and fatherless by desertion, did she fill a mother's part as
far as these robust virgins would permit her. Sister Eliza's rough
little children, or rougher great boys, always found kindness in the
house in the Old Town, first in their grand-aunt's[4] time, and
afterwards in that of her successor, Mrs Brown. David, Dr Burton's
younger brother, was lovingly tended by them during part of the
lingering illness of which he died, and the youngest of Eliza Paton's
sons remained an inmate of Mrs Brown's house that he might continue his
education in Aberdeen, when his mother removed to Edinburgh.
[Footnote 4: It may not be counted indelicate, as it refers to a period
120 years gone by, to mention that Peggy Paton once had a lover, and
that this, her first lover, was no other than the son of that Moir of
Stoneywood, whose correspondence is so frequently quoted in Dr Burton's
'History of Scotland.' The young man was Peggy's first cousin, the
lairds of Grandholm and Stoneywood having married sisters--Mackenzie by
name. The laird of Stoneywood is known to posterity by his ingenious
achievement of ferrying the rebel army across the Dornoch Firth in small
fishing-boats collected by Stoneywood all along the coast. On the defeat
of the Pretender, and the suppression of the insurrection in 1746,
Stoneywood's estate was confiscated, and he fled to the Continent.
Family tradition adds that his escape was achieved by his disguising
himself as a miller and swimming across the Don from Stoneywood to
Grandholm, where the laird of Grandholm, who was of opposite politics,
had removed the ferry-boat, and saw but did not denounce his kinsman.
The houses of Grandholm and Stoneywood are exactly opposite each other
on the two sides of the Don. Mrs Moir of Stoneywood did not immediately
follow her husband, but remained with her friends to bring up her
children, among them Miss Peggy's lover, who, soon after his engagement
to her, joined his father on the Continent and there died.]