The scantiness of our acquaintance with Roman Christianity in Britain is the more to be regretted, because it would have been very interesting to compare its manifestations with those of the Church which found refuge in the West during the dark days of Rome—the days when the temporal empire was crushed, and the spiritual empire had not arisen. As we might expect from the ecclesiastical conditions already noticed, the persons who first exercise ecclesiastical authority in the two islands did not derive their strength from any foreign hierarchy, and had no connection with Rome. Any reference, indeed, to the influence of a Roman pontiff, either actual or prospective, in the life of any of our early saints, will prepare the critic for finding that the life has been written centuries after the era of the saint, or has been tampered with. In Adamnan's Life of Columba, Rome is mentioned once or twice as a very great city, but there is no allusion throughout that remarkable biography to any spiritual central authority exercised by the bishop there over the presbyters in Scotland and Ireland. This is, of course, nothing more than the statement of what the reader of a book has not found in it. Any other reader may find allusions to the supremacy of the popedom over these early Christian communities, if he can. But I think he is likely to find none; and any one who desires to study the real history of the rise and progress of the spiritual dominion of Rome would, with more profit, take up the books and records referring to events three or four hundred years after the age of Columba.
Self-sustained as they were, these isolated communities had a very strong vitality. The picture exhibited in the hagiographies is truly the reign of the saints. Their power was of an immediate, abrupt, and purely despotic kind, which would have been neutralised or weakened by anything like a central control. Prompt and blind obedience to the commands of the saint-superior was the rule of Hy or Iona, and of all the other religious communities of the West. Perhaps there were even here feuds, disputes, and mutinies of which no record has been preserved. The hagiographer can only commemorate those which were suppressed by some terrible manifestation of Divine power, for the person whose life he commemorates is only conventionally and nominally to be spoken of as a mortal; he is in reality superhuman, wielding, whenever he pleases, the thunderbolts of the Deity, annihilating dissent and disobedience to himself, as if it were blasphemy in the Deity's own presence, and crushing by an immediate miracle any effort to oppose his will, were it even about the proper hour of setting off on a journey, or the dinner to be ordered for the day.
The rank which those primitive clergy of Ireland and the Highlands occupy is almost invariably that of the saint, a rank as far separated from that which can be conferred by any human hierarchy as heaven is from earth. They were, as we have seen, independent of Rome from the beginning, and this great host of saints had lived and left their biographies to the world long before the system of judicial canonisation. How a boundary is professed to be drawn between the genuine and the false among these saints of the North, cannot be easily understood. No one seems to object to any of them as spurious. Many of them are so very obscure that only faint and fragmentary traces of them can be found, yet it seems never to be questioned that they occupied the transcendent spiritual rank usually attributed to them. Of others nothing is known but the bare name, yet it is never doubted that the owner was entitled to his attribute of saint.
The brethren at Iona seem sometimes to have lived well, for we hear of the killing of heifers and oxen. A pragmatical fellow declines to participate in the meal permitted on the occasion of a relaxation of discipline—the saint tells him that since he refuses good meat at a time when he is permitted to have it, it is to be his doom to be one of a band of robbers who will be glad to appease their hunger on putrid horse-flesh. The ruling spirit, however, of this first Christian mission, as we find it recorded, is undoubtedly asceticism. The mortification of the flesh is the temporal source of spiritual power. Some incidents occur which put this spirit in a shape bordering on the ludicrous. A saint is at a loss to know how his power is waning. There is some mysterious countervailing influence acting against him, which manifests itself in the continued success of an irreverent king or chief, whom he thought he had taken the proper spiritual methods to humble. He at last discovers the mystery; the king had been fasting against him—entering the field of asceticism with him, in short, and not without success.
The biography of an Asiatic despot, so far as other persons are concerned, is merely the history of his commands and their obedience. It is only incidentally, therefore, that one is likely to acquire any information from it about the people over whom he rules. In like manner, the life of an Irish saint is the history of commanding and obeying; yet a few glimpses of social life may be caught through occasional chinks. The relation which the spiritual held towards the temporal powers is sufficiently developed to give ground for considerable inquiry and criticism. The more eminent of the saints had great influence in state affairs, ruling in some measure the monarchs themselves. Some monarch is occasionally mentioned as the friend of Columba, much as a bishop might allude to this or that lay lord as among his personal friends. We find him settling the succession of Aidan, the king of the Dalriadic Scots, through an influence to which any opposition was utterly hopeless. Send your sons to me, he says to Aidan, and God will show me who is to be your successor. The sign falls on Eochoid Buidh, and the saint tells the king that all his other sons will come to a premature end, and they drop off accordingly, chiefly in battle. This power of fixing the evil eye, of prophesying death, is found in perpetual use among the early saints. It is their ultimate appeal in strife and contest, and their instrument of vengeance when thwarted or affronted; and a terrible instrument it must have been. Who could gainsay those believed to hold in their hands the issues of life and death?
In our conception of the kings with whom these saints were familiar, it may be well not to be misled by words. We shall realise them better at the present day by looking to Madagascar or the Marquesas Islands than among the states of Europe. The palace was a shanty of log or wattle, protected, perhaps, by a rampart of earth or uncemented stones, and the king had a stone chair with a few mystic decorations scratched on it, which served for his throne on state occasions. The prospect of acquiring a gold torque or a silver drinking-cup would have a material influence over his imperial policy. Were we to believe the fabulous historians, Ireland was for centuries a compact kingdom under one imperial sovereign, who presided over subsidiary rulers in the provinces. But although sometimes one provincial king was powerful enough to keep the others in subjection, old Celtic Ireland never was a kingdom, properly speaking, for it never had a nationality. Some people maintain, not without reason, that the facility with which a nationality resolves itself into existence depends much, not only on race, but on geological conditions. The Celtic Irish seem to have always been too busy with local feuds and rivalries to achieve any broad nationality. And the nature of their country—a vast plain intersected by morasses and rivers, and here and there edged with mountain ranges—is unfavourable to the growth of a nationality, since it presents no general centre of defence against a foreign enemy, like that great central range of mountains in Scotland, which Columba's biographers call the Dorsum Britanniæ—the Backbone of Britain. Ireland, indeed, seems to have had no conception of a nationality until such a thing was suggested by the Normans and the Saxons, after they had been long enough there to feel patriotic. And so it has generally happened that any alarming outbreaks against the imperial government have been led by people of Norman or Saxon descent.
Still there is no doubt, difficult as it may be to realise the idea, that at the times with which we are dealing, Ireland enjoyed a kind of civilisation, which enabled its princes and its priests to look down on Pictland, and even on Saxon England, as barbarian. The Roman dominion had not penetrated among them, but the very remoteness which kept the island beyond the boundaries of the Empire, also kept it beyond the range of the destroyers of the Empire, and made it in reality the repository of the vestiges of imperial civilisation in the north. Perhaps the difference between the two grades of civilisation might be about the same as we could have found ten years ago between Tahiti and New Zealand.
An extensive and minute genealogical ramification, when it is authentic, is a condition of a pretty far advanced state of civilisation. Abandoning the old fabulous genealogies which went back among the Biblical patriarchs, the rigid antiquaries of Ireland find their way through authentic sources to genealogical connections of a truly marvellous extent. Such illustrious men as the saints can, of course, be easily traced, as all were proud to establish connection with them; while Columba himself and several others were men of royal descent. But of the casual persons mentioned in the Life of Columba, Dr Reeves hunts out the genealogy—fully as successfully, one would say, as that of any person of the country-gentleman class in Britain, living at the beginning of this century, could be established. There are, indeed, many characteristics in the hagiologic literature bearing an analogy to modern social habits so close as to be almost ludicrous; and it is not easy to deal with these conditions of a very distant age, brought to us as they are through the vehicle of a language which is neither classical nor vernacular, but conventional—the corrupt Latin in which the biographers of the saints found it convenient to write. It would appear that when he was in Ireland, St Columba kept his carriage, and the loss of the lynch-pin on one occasion is connected with a notable miracle. Dr Reeves, as appropriate to this, remarks that "the memoirs of St Patrick in the Book of Armagh make frequent mention of his chariot, and even name his driver." It is difficult to suppose such a vehicle ever becoming available in Iona; but there Columba seems to have been provided with abundance of vessels, and he could send for a friend, in the way in which MacGillicallum's "carriage," in the form of a boat, was sent for Johnson and Boswell.
There are many other things in these books which have a sound more familiar to us than any sense which they really convey. Here the saint blesses the store of a "homo plebeius cum uxore et filiis"—a poor man with a wife and family—a term expressively known in this day among all who have to deal with the condition of their fellow-men, from the chancellor of the exchequer to the relieving-officer. In the same chapter we are told "de quodam viro divite tenacissimo"—of a very hard-fisted rich fellow—a term thoroughly significant in civilised times. He is doomed, by the way, to become bankrupt, and fall into such poverty that his offspring will be found dead in a ditch—a fate also intelligible in the nineteenth century. In another place we have among the saint's suitors "plebeius pauperrimus, qui in ea habitabat regione quæ Stagni litoribus Aporici est contermina." The "Stagnum Aporicum" is Lochaber; so here we have a pauper from the neighbourhood of Lochaber—a designation which I take to be familiarly known at "the Board of Supervision for the Relief of the Poor in Scotland." We are told, too, of the saint being at a plebeian feast, and of a plebeius in the island of Raghery quarrelling with his wife.
The thoughtful student will find a more distinguished analogy with the habits of later civilisation in the literature of these early churchmen. The subject of the introduction of letters into Ireland, and the very early literature of that country, is too large to be handled here. It is certain that in Columba's era, the middle of the sixth century, books were written and used in Ireland. The respect paid to a book in that age was something beyond that of the most ardent book-hunter. Many of the most exciting of the saintly miracles have for their end the preservation of a book in fire or in water. The custody of the Book of Armagh, containing St Patrick's canons, was a great hereditary office; and the princely munificence which provided the book with a suitable case or shrine in the tenth century is recorded in Irish history. Besides their costly shrines already referred to, these books often had for an outer covering a bag or satchel, in which the sacred deposit was carried from place to place. The heart must be dead to all natural sensations that does not sympathise with Dr Reeves in the following triumphant announcement:—
"Of leather cases the cover of the Book of Armagh is the most interesting example now remaining. It came, together with its inestimable enclosure, into the writer's possession at the end of 1853, and is now lying before him. It is formed of a single piece of strong leather, 36 inches long and 12 broad, folded in such a way as to form a six-sided case 12 inches long, 12-3/4 broad, and 2-3/4 thick, having a flap which doubles over in front, and is furnished with a rude lock and eight staples, admitted through perforations in the flap, for short iron rods to enter and meet at the lock. The whole outer surface, which has become perfectly black from age, is covered with figures and interlacings of the Irish pattern in relief, which appear to have been produced by subjecting the leather, in a damp state, before it was folded, to pressure upon a block of the whole size, having a depressed pattern, and allowing it to remain until the impression became indelible."
A pleasing peculiarity in the personal habits of these recluses is their frequent communion with birds and the gentler kind of beasts. Their legendary histories speak of these animals as apt mediums of vaticination and miraculous intervention; but we must be content, in the present age, to suppose that their frequent appearance, their familiar intercourse with the saints, and the quaint and amiable incidents in which they figure, are in reality characteristic memorials of the kindly feelings and the innocent pursuits natural to men of gentle disposition and retired life. Thus Columba one day gives directions to a brother to be on the watch at a certain point in the island of Iona, for there, by nine o'clock on that day, a certain stranger stork will alight and drop down, utterly fatigued with her journey across the ocean. That stork the brother is enjoined to take up gently, and convey to the nearest house, and feed and tend for three days, after which she will take wing and fly away to the sweet spot of her native Ireland, whence she had wandered. And this the brother is to do because the bird is a guest from their own beloved native land. The brother departs, and returns at the proper time. Columba asks no questions—he knows what has taken place, and commends the obedient piety of the brother who had sheltered and tended the wanderer.
Another saint, Ailbhe, had a different kind of intercourse with certain cranes. They went about in a large body, destroying the corn in the neighbourhood, and would not be dispersed. The saint went and delivered on oration to them on the unreasonableness of their conduct, and forthwith, penitent and somewhat ashamed, they soared into the air and went their way. "St Cuthbert's ducks" acquired a long celebrity. When that reverenced ascetic went to take up his residence in the wave-bounded solitude of the Farne Islands, he found the solan-geese there imbued with the wild habits common to their storm-nurtured race, and totally unconscious of the civilisation and refinement of their kinsmen who graze on commons, and hiss at children and dogs. St Cuthbert tamed them through his miraculous powers, and made them as obedient and docile a flock as abbot ever ruled. The geese went before him in regular platoons, following the word of command, and doing what he ordered—whether it might be the most ordinary act of the feathered biped, or some mighty miracle. Under his successors their conduct seems to have been less regular, though certainly not less peculiar; for we are told that they built their nests on the altar, and around the altar, and in all the houses of the island; farther, that, during the celebration of mass, they familiarly pecked the officiating priest and his assistants with their bills. It is curious enough that the miraculous education of these birds makes its appearance in a Scottish legal or official document at the close of the fifteenth century. It is an instrument recording an attestation to the enormous value of the down of these renowned birds; and seems, indeed, to be an advertisement or puff by merchants dealing in the ware, though its ponderous Latinity is in curious contrast with the neat examples of that kind of literature to which we are accustomed in these days.[82]
One of the prettiest of the stories about birds is divided between St Serf, the founder of a monastery in Loch Leven, and St Kentigern, the patron of Glasgow, where he is better known as St Mungo. Kentigern was one among a parcel of neophyte boys whom the worthy old Serf, or Servanus, was perfecting in the knowledge of the truth. Their teacher had a feathered pet—"quædam avicula quæ vulgo ob ruborem corpusculi rubisca nuncupatur"—a robin-redbreast, in fact, an animal whose good fortune it is never to be mentioned without some kindly reference to his universal popularity, and the decoration which renders him so easily recognised wherever he appears. St Serf's robin was a wonderful bird; he not only took food from his master's hand and pecked about him according to the fashion of tame and familiar birds, but took a lively interest in his devotions and studies by flapping his wings and crowing in his own little way, so as to be a sort of chorus to the acts of the saint. The old man enjoyed this extremely; and his biographer, with more geniality than hagiographers usually show, sympathises with this innocent recreation, applying the example of the bow that was not always bent, in a manner suggestive of suspicions that he was not entirely unacquainted with profane letters. One day, when the saint had retired to his devotions, the boys amused themselves with his little pet; and a struggle arising among them for its possession, the head was torn from the body—altogether a natural incident. Thereupon, says the narrator, fear was turned to grief, and the avenging birch—"plagas virgarum quæ puerorum gravissima tormenta esse solent"—arose terribly in their sight. It was at this moment that an unpopular pupil, named Kentigern—a new boy, apparently—a stranger who had not taken in good-fellowship to the rest of the school, but was addicted to solitary meditation, entered the guilty conclave. Their course was taken—they threw the fragments of the bird into his hands, and bolted. St Serf enters, and the crew are awaiting in guilty exultation the bursting of his wrath. The consecrated youth, however, fitting the severed parts to each other, signs the cross, raises his pure hands to heaven, and breathes an appropriate prayer—when lo! robin lifts his little head, expands his wings, and hops away to meet his master. In the eucharistic office of St Kentigern's day, this event, along with the restoration to life of a meritorious cook, and other miracles, inspired a canticle which, for long subsequent ages, was exultingly sung by the choristers in the saint's own cathedral of Glasgow, thus:—
A bird proper, on the shield argent of the city of Glasgow, has been identified with the resuscitated pet of the patron saint. The tree on which it is there perched is a commemoration of another of the saint's miracles. In a time of frost and snow his enemies had extinguished his fire; but immediately drawing on the miraculous resources ever at the command of his class on such emergencies, he breathed fire into a frozen branch from the forest; and it was centuries afterwards attested that the green branches of that forest made excellent firewood.
Another element in the blazon of the Venice of the west is a fish, laid across the stem of the tree, "in base," as the heralds say, but not, as generally depicted, conformable either to their science or that of the ichthyologist. This fish holds in its mouth something like a dish—in reality a ring—and thus commemorates a miraculous feat of the same saint, which has found its way into the romances of the juvenile portion of the reading public, where it is a standard nuisance. Queen Cadyow, whose conduct was of such a character that it is wonderful how any respectable saint could have prevailed on himself to serve her, gives her bridal ring to a paramour. Her husband lures the rival away to the bank of the Clyde, to sleep after the fatigues of the chase, and there, furtively removing the ring, pitches it into the river. The reader knows the result by instinct. St Kentigern, appealed to, directs the first salmon that can be caught in the Clyde to be opened, and there, of course, is the ring in the stomach. This miracle is as common in the "Acta Sanctorum" as in the juvenile romances. It served St Nathalan in such a manner as to preclude the supposition that the saint had invoked it on the occasion. He locked himself into iron chains, and threw their key into the river Dee, in order that he might be unable to open the fetterlock before he had made a pilgrimage to the tombs of St Peter and St Paul; but the water did its duty, and restored the key in the stomach of a fish.
We have naturally many fishing anecdotes connected with the northern saints. Columba is described as out a-fishing one day with a parcel of his disciples, who are characterised as "strenui piscatores," a term which would be highly applicable to many a Waltonian of the present day. The saint, desirous of affording them a pleasant surprise, directs them to cast their net where a wonderful fish was prepared for them; and they drag out an "esox" (whatever that may mean) of wonderful size.
Some of the inhabitants of the deep familiar to these saints were animals of a formidable kind. Columba and a band of his disciples are going to cross the river Ness, when they meet those who bear on their shoulders the body of one who, endeavouring to swim across the same river, had been bitten to death by a monster of the deep. The saint, in the face of this gloomy procession, requires that one of his disciples shall swim across the Ness, and bring over a boat which is on the other side. A disciple named Mocumin, whom the saint had miraculously cured of a bleeding of the nose, confident in the protecting power of his master, pulls off all his clothes save his tunica (whatever that may be—coat, kilt, or leathern shirt), and takes to the water. The monster, who is reposing deep down in the stillness of the profoundest pool, hears the stir of the water above, and is seen to rise with a splash on the surface, and make with distended jaws for the swimmer. The saint, of course, orders the beast back just at the moment when all seemed over, and is instantly obeyed. The characteristics of the monster could not be more closely identical with those of the crocodile or alligator, had the incident been narrated in Egypt or America.
Adventures with such monsters in our northern waters supply many of the triumphs attributed to the saints. St Colman of Drumore actually extracted a young girl alive from the stomach of an "aquetalis bestia." She had been swallowed while standing on the edge of a lake, "camisiam suam lavantem"—washing her chemise, poor simple soul. St Molua saw a monster, of the size of a large boat, in pursuit of two boys swimming unconscious of danger in a lake in the county of Monaghan. He showed good worldly sense and presence of mind on the occasion; for, instead of alarming them with an announcement of their perilous condition, he called out to them to try a race and see which would reach the bank first. The beast, balked of his prey, took in good part an admonition by the saint, and returned no more to frighten boys.
From fishes and aquatic monsters the law of association naturally leads us to the waters themselves. There are throughout the United Kingdom multitudes of wells, still bearing the names of the saints to whom they were dedicated. The legends of miracles performed by their waters, through the intercession of their special saints, are countless. It is, perhaps, because cures effected by the use of waters may be accounted for otherwise than by supernatural intervention, that modern writers of the old faith speak with less reserve of the miracles at fountains than of the others they have to record, and even bring them down to modern times. Many of them may be found recorded in his usual slipshod manner in the amiable pages of Butler—as, for instance, in the life of St Winfrid (November 3), where we are told how "Roger Whetstone, a Quaker, near Bromsgrove, by bathing at Holywell, was cured of an inveterate lameness and palsy by which he was converted to the Catholic faith." Some of the old saints' wells, remote from cities and advanced opinions, are still haunted by people who believe them to be endowed with supernatural healing virtues. It is in Romish Ireland, of course, that this belief has its most legitimate seat; but even in the most orthodoxly-Presbyterian districts of Scotland, a lingering dubious trust in the healing virtues of sanctified fountains has given much perplexity to the clergy.
Some of these fountains are in caverns, and if in any one of these the well falls into a rude-hewn basin like a font, we may be sure that a hermit frequented the cave, and that it was the place of worship of early converts. Such a cave was the hiding-place, after the '45, of the worthy single-minded Lord Pitsligo, no bad prototype of the Baron of Bradwardine. It is entered by a small orifice like a fox's hole, in the face of the rugged cliffs which front the German Ocean near Trouphead. Gradually it rises to a noble arched cavern, at the end of which is the font cut into the stone, where it would catch the outpourings of a small spring. When I saw it long years ago, it was filled with clear living water, which, save when it had been the frugal drink of the poor Jacobite refugee, had probably been scarcely disturbed since the early day when heathen men and women went thither to throw off their idolatry and enter the pale of Christendom. The unnoticeable smallness of many of these consecrated wells makes their very reminiscence and still semi-sacred character all the more remarkable. The stranger in Ireland or the Highlands of Scotland hears rumours of a distinguished well miles on miles off. He thinks he will find an ancient edifice over it, or some other conspicuous adjunct. Nothing of the kind—he has been lured all that distance over rock and bog to see a tiny spring bubbling out of the rock, such as he may see hundreds of in a tolerable walk any day. Yet, if he search in old topographical authorities, he will find that the little well has ever been an important feature of the district—that, century after century, it has been unforgotten; and, with diligence, he may perhaps trace it to some incident in the life of the saint, dead more than 1200 years ago, whose name it bears. Highlanders still make pilgrimages to drink the waters of such fountains, which they judiciously mix with the other aqua to which they are attached. They sometimes mimic the spirit of the old pilgrimage, by leaving behind them an offering at the fountain. I have seen such offerings by the brink of remote Highland springs, as well as in Ireland. The market value of them would not afford an alarming estimate of the intensity of the superstition still lingering in this form in the land. The logic of the depositors probably suggests, that the spiritual guardians of the fountain, though amenable to flattery and propitiation by gift, are not really well informed about the market value of worldly chattels, and are easily put off with rubbish.
A historical inquiry into the worship or consecration of wells and other waters would be interesting. In countries near the tropics, where sandy deserts prevail, a well must ever have been a thing of momentous importance; and we find among the tribes of Israel the digging down a well spoken of as the climax of reckless, heartless, and awful destructiveness. To find, however, how in watery Ireland and Scotland a mere dribblet of the element so generally abounding should have been an object of veneration for centuries, we must look to something beyond physical wants and their supply.
The principal cause of the sanctification of springs must, of course, be explained by the first of Christian ordinances. The spring close by the dwelling or cell of the saint—the spring on account of which he probably selected the centre of his mission—had not only washed the forefathers of the district from the stain of primeval heathenism, but had applied the visible sign by which all, from generation to generation, had been admitted into the bosom of the Church. This might seem to afford a cause sufficient in itself for the effect, yet it appears to have been aided by other causes more recondite and mysterious. Notwithstanding all the trash talked about Druids and other persons of this kind, we know extremely little of the heathenism of the British Isles. The little that we do know is learned from the meagre notices which the biographers of the saints have furnished of that which the saints superseded. It is not their function to commemorate the abominations of heathenism; they would rather bury it in eternal oblivion—premat nox alta—but they cannot entirely tell the triumphs of their spiritual heroes without some reference, however faint, to the conquered enemies.
The earliest recorded conflicts between the new and the old creed are connected with fountains. In one page of the Life of Columba we find the saint, on a child being brought to him for baptism, in a desert place where no water was, striking the rock like Moses, and drawing forth a rill, which remained in perennial existence—a fountain surrounded by a special sanctity. In the next page he deals with a well in the hands of the Magi. They had put a demon of theirs into it to such effect, that any unfortunate person washing himself in the well or drinking of its water, was forthwith stricken with paralysis, or leprosy, or blindness of an eye, or some other corporeal calamity. The malignant powers with which they had inspired this formidable well spread far around the fear of the Magi, and consequently their influence. But the Christian missionaries were to show a power of a different kind—a power of beneficence, excelling and destroying the power of malignity. The process adopted is fully described. The saint, after a suitable invocation, washed his hands and feet in the water, and then drank of it with his disciples. The Magi looked on with a malignant smile to see the accursed well produce its usual effect; but the saint and his followers came away uninjured: the demon was driven out of the well, and it became ever afterwards a holy fountain, curing many of their infirmities. Another miracle, bearing against the Magi, introduces us to one of their number by name, and gives a little of his domestic history. His name is Broichan, and he is tutor to Brud, king of the Picts, with whom he dwells on the banks of the Ness. It might have relieved the mind of the historical inquirer to be told that Brud built for himself the remarkable vitrified fort of Craig-Phadric, which rises high above the Ness, and to be informed of the manner in which its calcined rampart was constructed; but nothing is said on the subject, and Craig-Phadric stands on its own isolated merits, still to be guessed at, without one tangible word out of record or history to help any theory about its object or construction home to a conclusion. One is free, however, to imagine Brud, the heathen king of the Picts, living on the scarped top of the hill, in a lodging of wattled or wooden houses, surrounded by a rampart of stones fused by fire, as the only cement then known. Such we may suppose to have been the "domus regia," whence the saint walked out in a very bad humour to the river Ness, from the pebbles of which he selected one white stone, to be turned to an important use. Broichan, the Magus, had in his possession a female slave from Ireland. Columba, who seems to have held with him such intercourse as a missionary to the Chocktaws might have with a great medicine-man, desired that the Magus should manumit the woman, for what reason we are not distinctly told; but it is easy to suppose strong grounds for intervention when a Christian missionary finds a woman, of his own country and creed, the slave of a heathen priest. Columba's request was refused. Losing patience, he had resort to threats; and at length, driven to his ultimatum, he denounced death to Broichan if the slave were not released before his own return to Ireland. Columba told his disciples to expect two messengers to come from the king to tell of the sudden and critical illness of Broichan. The messengers rushed in immediately after to claim the saint's intervention. Broichan had been suddenly stricken by an angel sent for the purpose; and as if he had been taking his dram in a modern gin-palace, we are told that the drinking-glass, or glass drinking-vessel, "vitrea bibera," which he was conveying to his lips, was smashed in pieces, and he himself seized with deadly sickness. Columba sends the consecrated pebble, with a prescription that the water in which it is dipped is to be drunk. If, before he drinks, Broichan releases his slave, he is to recover; if not, he dies. The Magus complies, and is saved. The consecrated stone, which had the quality of floating in water like a nut, was afterwards, as we are told, preserved in the treasury of the king of the Picts. It has been lost to the world, along with the saint's white robe and his consecrated banner, both of which performed miracles after his death. But the sanitary influence attributed to the water in which consecrated stones have been dipped, is a superstition scarcely yet uprooted in Scotland.
One of the clubs has lately deviated from the printing of letterpress, which is the established function of clubs, into pictorial art. As it threatens to repeat the act on a larger scale, it is proposed to take a glance at the result already afforded, in order that it may be seen whether it is a failure, or a success opening up a new vein for club enterprise. In distributing a set of pictorial prints among its members, the club in question may be supposed to have invaded the art-unions: but its course is in another direction, since its pictures are entirely subservient to archæology. The innovator in question is the Spalding Club, which has already distributed among its adherents a collection of portraits of the sculptured stones in Scotland, and now proposes to do the same by the early architectural remains of the north. In giving effect to such a design, it will produce something like Dugdale's Monasticon and the great English county histories.
If that which is to be done shall rival that which the club has achieved, it will be worthy of all honour. No one can open the book of The Sculptured Stones without being almost overwhelmed with astonishment at the reflection that they are not monuments excavated in Egypt, or Syria, or Mexico, but have stood before the light of day in village churchyards, or in marketplaces, or by waysides throughout our own country. As you pass on, the eye becomes almost tired with the endless succession of grim and ghastly human figures—of distorted limbs—of preternatural beasts, birds, and fishes—of dragons, centaurs, and intertwined snakes—of uncouth vehicles, and warlike instruments, and mystic-looking symbols—of chains of interlaced knots and complex zigzags, all so crowding on each other that the tired eye feels as if it had run through a procession of Temptations of St Anthony or Faust Sabbaths. When this field of investigation and speculation is surveyed in all its affluence, one is not surprised to find that it has been taken in hand by a race of bold guessers, who, by the skilful appliance of a jingling jargon of Asiatic, Celtic, and classical phraseology, make nonsense sound like learning too deep to be fathomed. So, while Rusticus will point out to you "the auld-fashioned standin' stane"—on which he tells you that there are plain to be seen a cocked hat, a pair of spectacles, a comb, a looking-glass, a sow with a long snout, and a man driving a gig,—Mr Urban will describe to you "a hieroglyphed monolith" in the terms following:—
"The Buddhist triad is conspicuously symbolised by what the peasantry call a pair of spectacles. It consists of two circles, of which the one, having its radius 1-3/4 inch wider than the other, is evidently Buddha, the spiritual or divine intellectual essence of the world, or the efficient underived source of all; the other is Dharma, the material essence of the world—the plastic derivative cause. The ligamen connecting them together, completes the sacred triad with the Sangha derived from and composed of the two others. Here, therefore, is symbolised the collective energy of spirit and matter in the state of action, or the embryotic creation, the type and sum of all specific forms, spontaneously evolved from the union of Buddha and Dharma. The crescent, likened by the vulgar-minded peasantry to a cocked hat, is the embodiment of the all-pervading celestial influence; and the decorated sceptres or sacred wands of office, laid across it at the mystic angle of forty-five degrees, represent the comprehensive discipline and cosmopolite authority of the conquering Sarsaswete. The figure of the elephant—undoubted evidence of the oriental origin of this monoglyph—represents the embryo of organised matter; while in the chariot of the sun the never-dying Inis na Bhfiodhlhadth threads the sacred labyrinth, waving a branch of the Mimosa serisha, which has been dipped in a sacred river, and dried beneath the influence of Osiris. The figures called a comb and a looking-glass are the lingal emblems of the sacred Phallic worship. The whole hierograph thus combines, in an extremely simple and instructive unity, the symbolisation of Apis, Osiris, Uphon, and Isis, Phallos, Pater Æther, and Mater Terra, Lingam and Yoni, Vishnu, Brama, and Sarsaswete, with their Saktes, Yang and Yiri, Padwadevi, Viltzli-pultzli, Baal, Dhanandarah, Sulivahna and Mumbo Jumbo."
The honest transcripts in the club book clear away a great deal of that unknown which is so convertible into the magnificent. It was extremely perplexing to understand that the elephant was profusely represented upon memorials familiar to the eyes of the inhabitants of Scotland, at a period, if we might credit some theories, anterior to the time when Roman soldiers were appalled in the Punic war by the sudden apparition of unknown animals of monstrous size and preternatural strength. The whole flood of oriental theory was let loose by this evidence of familiarity with the usages of Hindostan. But it is pretty evident, when we inspect him closely, that the animal, though a strange beast of some peculiar conventional type, is no elephant. That spiral winding-up of his snout, which passed for a trunk, is a characteristic refuge of embryo art, repeated upon other parts of the animal. It is necessitated by the difficulty which a primitive artist feels in bringing out the form of an extremity, whatever it may be—snout, horn, or hoof. He finds that the easiest termination he can make is a whirl, and he makes it accordingly. Thus the noses, the tails, the feet of the characteristic monster of the sculptured stones, all end in a whirl, as the final letter of an accomplished and dashing penman ends in a flourish. The same difficulty is met in repeated instances on these stones by another ingenious resource. Animals are united or twined together by noses or tails, to enable the artist to escape the difficulty of executing the extremities of each separately.
There is a propensity to believe that whatever is old must have something holy and mysterious about it. It is difficult to suppose that, in making an ornament, men who would be so venerable, were they alive now, as our ancestors of many centuries ago, can have been in the slightest degree affected by the pomps and vanities of this wicked world. Hence there is never a quaint Gothic decoration, floral or animal, but it must be symbolic of some great mystery. So the reticulated and geometrical tracery on the sculptured stones has been invested with mythic attributes, under such names as "the Runic Knot." It has been counted symbolical of a mysterious worship or creed, and has been associated with Druids and other respectable, but not very palpable, personages.[83]
Good theories are such a rarity in the antiquarian world, that it is a luxury to find one which, in reference to this sort of decoration, merits that character. The buildings, both ecclesiastical and civil, of the early Christians of the North were, as we have seen, made of wattles or wicker-ware. The skill, therefore, of the architectural decorator took the direction of the variations in basket-work. We know that in the Gothic age those forms which were found the most endurable and graceful in which stone could be placed upon stone, became also the ruling forms which guided the carver and the painter; so that all wood-work, metal-work, seal-cutting, illumination of books, and the like, repeated the ornaments of Gothic architecture. It would only, then, be a prototype of an established phenomenon were it to be found that the sculptor of an earlier age adopted the decorations developed by the skillful platting of withes or wattles; and accordingly, this is just the character of the platted ornaments so prevalent on the sculptured stones.[84] But, however these may have been suggested, they show the work of the undoubted artist, and furnish, as the advertisements say, "a varied assortment of the most elegant and attractive patterns."
Every one who in future attempts to unravel the mystery of these primitive sculptures must not only in gratitude but in common justice pay homage to the services of Mr John Stuart, the secretary of the Antiquaries' Society of Scotland, to whose learning and zeal he owes the collective means of examining them. It will interest many to know that Mr Stuart has been at work again, and has a second collection of transcripts, in some respects even more instructive than the first. These will show, for instance, the point of junction between the sculptures of the East and of the West, which, in their extreme special features, are widely unlike each other.
In the mean time, as the reader is perhaps tired of all this talk about books, and I would fain part with him in good humour, I venture to take him on an imaginary ramble in the wilds of Argyllshire, in search of specimens of ancient native sculpture, that he may have an opportunity of noticing how much has yet to be gleaned off this stony field. So we are off together, on a fresh summer morning, along the banks of the Crinan Canal, until we reach the road which turns southward to Loch Swin and Taivalich. After ascending so far, we strike off by a scarcely discernible track, and climb upwards among the curiously broken mountains of South Knapdale. When we are high enough up we look on the other side of the first ridge, and see the brown heather dappled with tiny lakes, looking like molten silver dropped into their hollows; while far below, one of the countless branches of Loch Swin winds through a narrow inlet, among rocks cushioned to the water's edge with deep green foliage. We are not to descend to the region of lake and woodland, betrayed by this glimpse, but to keep the wilder upland; and at last, in a secluded hollow near the small tarn called Lochcolissor, we reach a deserted village—a collection of roofless stone houses, looking, if one judged from mere externals, as if they might in their early days have given shelter to Columba or Oran. In the centre of this group of domestic ruins is an affluent fountain of the clearest water. Standing over it is the object of our search—a tall, grey, profusely-lichened stone. At first it seems amorphous, as geologists say; but a closer view discloses on the one side a cross incised, on the other a network of floral decorations in relief. To trace these in their completeness, it would be necessary to accomplish the not easy task of removing the coating of lichen; and, by the way, if adepts in the cryptogamic department of botany shall succeed in finding a test of the precise age of those lichens, which they believe they have proved to be the growth of centuries, a key of the most valuable kind will be obtained for discovering the age of stone monuments.[85]
Turn now in another direction. At the head of Loch Fyne, near Dunderar, the grim tower of the Macnaughtons—which, from some decorations on it, looks hugely like as if it had been built in the seventeenth century with the stones of an old church—we find a tuft of trees with a dyke round it, called Kilmorich. It is a graveyard evidently, though it may not have been recently opened; the surface is uneven, and several rough stones, which may have been placed there at any time, stick through the earth. These, after a deliberate inspection, are found to have nothing of a sculptural character. But a small piece of rounded stone appears above the grass, and a little grubbing discloses a font, faintly decorated with some primitive fluting, on which a stone-mason would look with much scorn, and a scratching of a galley, the symbol of the Argyll family, or some other of the races descended from ancient sea-kings. This gives encouragement, and a sharper glance around betrays a singular-looking rounded headstone, in which are two crescent-shaped holes. There are corresponding holes on the portion under the sod, which thus completes the rounded head of an ancient Scoto-Irish cross. The next point is to find the shaft—it lies not far off, deep in the turf. And when we take the grass and moss from its face, it discloses some extremely curious quadrilateral decorations, quite peculiar, and not in conformity with any type of form which would enable its date to be guessed at within a century or two of the reality.
Passing through the rich woods of Ardkinglas, in a few miles we reach the burying-ground, called of old Kilmaglas, but now the well-kept churchyard, in which stands the modern church of Strachur. There are many who will remember the white house glimmering through the trees, and lament that memory is now all that it contains for them. Here are several curious specimens of sculpture. Some stones, not of the oldest type, have the crossed sword, symbolical alike of the warrior character of the dead and the religion of peace in which he rests. There is one with a figure in full chain-armour; and others, again, of an older date, ornamented with the geometric reticulations already discussed. Descending a few miles farther, in the small fertile delta of the Lachlan, and overshadowed almost by the old square castle of the M'Lachlans, there is a bushy enclosure which may be identified as the old burial-place of Kilmory. A large block of hewn stone, with a square hole in it, sets one in search of the cross of which it was the socket. This is found in the grass, sadly mutilated, but can be recognised by the stumps of the branches which once exfoliated into its circular head. Beside it lies a flat stone, on which a sword is surrounded by graceful floral sculpture.
Let us cross over again to the valley perforated by Loch Crinan. Northward of the canal there is a remarkable alluvial district, through which, although it seems crowded with steep mountain summits, one can travel over many a mile of level turf. From this soil the hills and rocks rise with extreme abruptness, in ridges at the border of the plain, and in isolated peaks here and there throughout its flat alluvial surface. Conspicuous, in a minor degree, is a great barrow like a pyramid, with a chamber roofed with long stones in its centre. Near it is one of those circles of rough stones called Druidical, and farther on there is another, and then another; some of them tall pillars, others merely peeping above ground. They literally people the plain. This must have been a busy neighbourhood, whatever sort of work it may have been that went on around these untooled fragments of the living rock, which have so distracted our antiquaries in later centuries. If they were the means or the object of any kind of heathen worship, then the existence close beside them of the vestiges of early Christianity may be set down as an illustration of the well-known historical opinion, that the first Christian missionaries, instead of breaking the idols and reviling the superstitions of those whom they went to convert, professed to bring a new sanctity to their sacred places, and endeavoured to turn their impure faith, with the least possible violence, into the path of purity.
Our next trial is at Kilmichael, about three miles from Loch Gilp. The churchyard is extremely fruitful in sculptured stones of various kinds—some floral, others geometrical, with wild beasts, monsters, and human figures. One of them was pointed out as the tomb of a member of the house of Campbell, who bore the name of Thomas, and was a great bard, and lived in London and other great cities—Thomas Campbell, in short. It seems to be true that his ancestors were buried in Kilmichael churchyard, but my informant seemed to struggle with an idea that the stone covered with the sculpture of a far-past century had been really raised to his honour. The next generation will probably assert this as a fact. The genesis of such traditions is curious. The stone called Rob Roy's tomb, which lies beside an ancient font in the churchyard of Balquhidder, is a sculptured stone raised for some one who had probably died in wealth and honour hundreds of years before Rob stole cattle.
By a slight ascent westward of the alluvial plain we reach Kilmartin, a village with a large modern church. Its graveyard is graced with many sculptured stones—twenty-five may be counted, conspicuous for their rich carving and excellent preservation. On one or two of the latest in date, there are knightly figures clad in chain-mail. A local antiquary could probably trace these home to some worshipful families in the neighbourhood, but there are others beyond the infancy of the oldest authentic pedigrees. While the stones in the eastern counties are all of extremely remote antiquity, offering no link of connection with later times, these Highland specimens seem to carry their peculiarities with modified variations through several centuries into times comparatively late. There are among them stones bearing some types of extreme antiquity, and others which undoubtedly proclaim themselves as no older than the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries. It is sometimes a difficult task, in judging of antiquities, to make a sufficient allowance for the spirit of imitation. There is nothing certainly more natural than that a new tombstone should be made after the fashion of time-honoured monuments, the pride of the graveyard in which it is to be placed. In Kilmartin there are two decided imitations of the more ancient class of the western sculptured stones. Though the symbols and decorations which they bear are of ancient outline, the heavy, and at the same time accurate and workmanlike, way in which they are cut, would mark them indubitably as modern, even if the one did not bear the date of 1707, and the other of 1711.
But the sun is dropping behind Ben Cruachan and the Jura hills. The time of holiday reading and holiday rambling has come to its end; and a voice calls the wanderer back to more sedate and methodical pursuits.