brief space allotted for holidays, was a half scornful proverb, and gone trudging in dubious step as regards the prosperity of sun and wind, in rain and snow, from the school. Scarcely less doubtful was the clachan to village, from farm-town to reading of Shakespeare's play to the chil- laird's place, wherever she could hope to dren of sternly matter-of-fact and rigidly-"fend" through such work as she could righteous folk-descendants of the play- still do. banning Covenanters in their chief seat, the West. Doubtless a new and more accommodating schoolmistress would be readily found, whose fruit and satin pieces, in the easily dazzled eyes of the young daughters of the sea captains, would put out fine linen quilting, and whose strength of mind would not be such as to lead her to fly in the face of their fathers' and mothers' principles with regard to the vanity of Othello. - A townsman and gallant biographer of Jean Adam has tried to free her memory from the degradation of having become a beggar at last. Nor is it at all likely that Jean was ever a beggar outright. But it is certain that she was a wandering hawker of whatever ability still remained to her to shape and sew, to bake and brew, to nurse the very young, and wait on the very old. The scant recollections which are handed down, though sorrowful ones in their way, What told sorest on Jean was an exceed-bear out this softened version of Jean's reing rash speculation into which she en- duced condition. Mrs. Fullarton, an old tered. The single edition of her poems scholar, told her daughter of Jean's coming did not all get into the home market. to her house in this character. Mrs. FulThink of this lone woman - her hair grow- larton said that she had offered her old ing grizzled under her bon grace occa- clothes, which she at first proudly declined, sionally having herself rowed up, wind and until, pressed by necessity or rebuked by tide in her favour, on a Wednesday half- her sensitive conscience for haughtiness of holiday or a Saturday afternoon, to make spirit unbecoming her situation, she at searching inquiries of Mr. James Duncan length came back and took away. This was in the Saltmarket as to the sale of her natural behaviour on the part of a poor, halfbooks, her anxiety for his answers balanc-dependent woman, but it was not the being any over-weening vanity of which she haviour of a beggar. might ever have been guilty. Time has robbed these incidents of their prosaicness, but left them their poor human interest. Jean was sanguine still, however, and shipped the surplus copies of her poems to Boston in America, from which she never got any return of sale. In addition to the mortification and disappointment this caused her, it swallowed up what little savings she had gathered; and thus she was left destitute when well advanced in years. Jean eventually returned to the state of service of her youth. Nor was she too old a woman to be capable of it, although the best of her days were past. Her fingers were waxing stiff and her eyes dim. What had been but play to the light heart of youth, with all the world before it, was a dreary drag to the heavy heart of advanced life, that had known better things, and was now without any refuge under the sun save the grave. Probably it was because she was proud in her downfall - - the hardness of her fate having soured the natural sweetness of her temper- that no friend interposed to prevent the end. In her extremity she had no resource but to seek help from the old friends whom she had seemed to have more or less offended and alienated by her waywardness and eccentricity. She had now no home or rest- On the 2nd of April, 1765 — in the spring ing-place among her lass-bairns at the quay- which is so softly balmy and tearfully bright head of Crawfurdsdyke. Calm and storm in that Scotland of the west, Jean stood might succeed each other on the watery once more within the shadow of King Wilhighway; the golden sun might set, and liam's statue and of the grand mansions of the silver moon rise behind the mountains the Virginian merchants. Stumbling into of Cowal; Dutch and French skippers might take the place of the Highlandmen and chatter their gibberish in room of the sputtered Gaelic; more and bigger ships in full sail, and with flags and garlands flying at the masts, might ride in on the rising tide; and happy family groups might sally forth to welcome the returning sailors; but Jean Adam would not be there to see. She had ere this "taken her foot in her hand," according to the old half piteous, the presence of the merchants themselves, she went on in her faded tartan screen and draggled gown till she skirted the Trongate, and vanished in the crowd of the Gallowgate. She was more footsore than if she had made another journey to London, more faint-hearted than when she "swerfed" away after the reading of Othello. Her high spirit and tender heart were fairly broken. But a new dawn was breaking for her, and a Friend was waiting for her in a land that was very far away, yet very near. Jean Adam was admitted into the Poorhouse of Glasgow, by an order from two of the baillies of Greenock, as "a poor woman in distress, a stranger who had been wandering about." She died there the next day, and was buried by the parish. nae luck about the house." It has been settled by competent authorities, and common consent now awards the song to the simple woman, Jean Adam, instead of to the scholar, William Julius Mickle. Tradition has something to say as to the originals of the song. They were popularly held to be a couple named Colin and Jean Campbell, who lived at Crawfurdsdyke. and no necromancy was needed on the part of her neighbour and namesake to interpret and utter Jean Campbell's feelings, on the return of her husband from one of his longer voyages. Jean's champion attempts to establish the fact, that the Poorhouse of Glasgow was then more of a hospital than a poorhouse," Jean made a great work about her man," and that various persons, quite different from modern paupers, found refuge under its roof, and died there. Very possibly he is right. The years since the '45 were not so many but that men and women more highly born and delicately nurtured than Jean had been, might, at the very date of her death, have been thankful to live and die within those despised walls. Nevertheless, even a hospital bed was a woeful last home and death-bed for Jean Adam; and The local scenery throws light on some details of the song; whilst other details, as graphic and still more minute, illustrate the prosperous middle-class condition of the heroine and the hero. "And are ye sure the news is true? the song begins in a fond realization of bliss, "Is this a time to think o' wark?" Jean's poems in their subjects as well as their style bear internal evidence of the source from which their inspiration was drawn. We have such titles as, "On Creation," "On Redemption," "On the Method follows, in the full extravagance of joy. of Grace," "On Abel," "On Joseph," "Ye jauds, fling by your wheel; "On Astrea," "On Lucretia," " On Cleopatra," and so forth. These poems are and then the triumphant, loyal lilt of the what might be expected the unconscious chorus, glad in proportion to the former reflection and echo of Jean's studies. They rueful, lonely independence, sounds out made no pretension to originality, and the clearly: claim which was set up for them - that of correctness of phrase and propriety of figwould not get them a moment's hearing in the present day. Like most echoes, they are momentous, formal, and inflated; frequently they are childish; occasionally they are quaint. The most quaint in plan A Dialogue between the Soul and Curiosity," and "Curiosity and the Soul about the keeping of the Ten Commandments." ure are, 66 But it is unfair to judge Jean Adam by these poems. The English language was, in truth, a foreign tongue to her. She was not playfully coquetting with it, but struggling laboriously and painfully to master it; in such earnest, indeed, that she changed her very name to meet its supposed requirements writing Christian and surname on her title-page, "Mistress Jane Adams." She might have succeeded in reading it with relish, but she could never write it without cramping impediment. But set her to her native dialect, and she could and did write very differently. It is not necessary here to go into the dispute regarding the authorship of "There's "For there's nae luck about the house, There's nae luck at a'; There's little pleasure in the house When our gudeman's awa'. Is this a time to think o' wark When Colin's at the door? Rax me my cloak She has servants to do her bidding; she has already issued her orders to her lasses:"I'll to the quay And see him come ashore." The "bigonet," or high-cauled, starched matron's сар, above the comely face, now flushed with honest delight; the “bishop's satin gown," the "turkey shoon," and "hose o' pearl," were more or less costly articles of dress, proving the rank and wealth of the woman who could afford to wear them. So, too, a hundred and thirty years ago were little Kate's "Sunday gown," and Jock's 66 button coat." The motive for putting them on in each case is the artless art of a heart which both loves and honours its mas ter: ""Tis a' to please my ain gudeman, The two fat hens reposing, unconscious of | followed up quickly by the recovered belltheir doom, on "the bauk," are a picture like ring: "That Colin weel may fare; And spread the table neat and clean, Gar ilka thing look braw." And here how much of the mistress survives in the wife! The duty was discharged ungrudgingly; and most graceful was the compliment paid to the enviable Colin. He must have been a good fellow to have been so doted on after many years had tried his worth. But it is also on the cards that he may have been a gruff and surly bear, or a dry and stiff dog of a man. Still the wistful question is sweet: "For wha can tell how Colin fared When he was far awa'? Sae true his heart, sae smooth his speech, His breath like caller air and the joyful woman runs on: "His very foot has music in't As he comes up the stair." This innocently insane delusion of the wife's, chiming in as it does with a host of similar precious hallucinations, has made so deep an impression, that Jean's townsman thinks it right to append an explanation making known its peculiar significance. Those big, braw houses on the quay-head, with their foreground of land-locked water-ship and boat and mountain, seen doubled by their shadows, and their background of flowery gardens (full of Ayrshire roses as well as cockle-shells) and wooded heights, had also wide outside stairs, with steps of sounding Norway deal, on which women sat and worked, and children played, and which Colin coming back to his jewel of a wife might climb two at a time. The last verse is the climax of the whole - the natural ineffable melting of the tremulous laughter into a sudden shower of tears, all glistening as they temper the broad sunshine of the heart : "And will I see his face again? And will I hear him speak? "For there's nae luck about the house, There's little pleasure in the house From Good Words. TRAVERS MADGE. A BIOGRAPHY. THE name of Travers Madge was probably known to comparatively few before the publication of Mr. Herford's Memoir.* He started in life without the prestige of academical distinctions. He never rose to celebrity as a preacher. He wrote no books. His literary labours were limited to the editorship of a Sunday-school Penny Magazine. He was not conspicuous for wide culture or keen powers of thought. And yet, if I mistake not, most readers of his life will have felt their hearts burn within them, as they followed him in his work and his selfdevotion, with a glow which the memoirs of men much more eminent in the "religious world" often fail to kindle. The nearest approach in contemporary literature to the life of the young Unitarian ascetic is perhaps to be found in that of the Curé d'Ars, which the Contemporary Review, the Christian Remembrancer, and other journals, have brought before English readers. Add to what Travers Madge had, as by the grace of God and the stirrings of his own soul, the superstition and sacerdotalism of the Church of Rome, and he might have become such a one as M. Vianney was. him, by an effort of imagination, in the thirteenth century, in a system which favours organization, and brings all individual energies under hierarchical order, and checks all doubts and inquiries, and he might have developed into a Francis of Assisi, and played a conspicuous part in ecclesiastical history. As it is, his life was spent in comparative obscurity. We have only. but what an only!- the story of a soul seeking after God, hungering and thirsting after righteousness, and led through that righteousness to the Truth, who is its Centre and its Source. It is every way interesting, as bearing witness at once to the high ethical and spiritual excellence which may be produced within the bosom of Unitarianism, and may therefore be regarded Place * Travers Madge: a Memoir. By Brooke Herford. London: Hamilton and Adams. 1867. in some sense as its natural fruit, and, on the other hand, to the inadequacy of the Unitarian system to satisfy the cravings which it has itself created. 66 shelves," and talks of "holding somebody's horse" that he may pick up a few coppers; spends all his leisure time in his Sunday schools, and in the week-day labours that grew out of them. With a touching simplicity, as one who seeks to be a followeran imitator of Christ, he writes: The father of Travers Madge is still living and working as minister of the Unitarian chapel in Essex Street; and that fact forbids one's saying more than that his son never ceased, in the midst of all their divergence of convictions, to hold him in the truest reverence, that he never ceased to treat his son with the kindest indulgence. The relations of the two seem indeed to have been every way, from first to last, in the true sense of the word, exemplary. From earliest childhood there seem to have been in Travers traits of character such as Roman Catholic writers love to note as proof of saintship, such as Calvinistic writers record as evidence of election. At the age of six or seven he shows the calmest patience under sharp pain or long weary illness. At eight he rises before all his schoolfellows that he may get his own work done and have time to help the little ones. Further on in youth, when he enters University College, London, in 1840, at the age of seventeen, he sets his face like a flint against the whole system of competition, examinations, prizes, as "simply minThe istering to selfishness." bright beauty" of childhood ripens into a face of "spiritual joy and sweetness," which wins the heart of all men. He throws himself, with a zeal prophetic of his future work in life, into the labours of a Sunday school, seeking out the lads who came there in their wretched homes, reproaching himself with being better off than they were, seeking to share their poverty. He spends five years at the Manchester New College, in an atmosphere which would seem likely to ripen simply the critical, intellectual side of religious thought. John James Taylor, James Martineau, Francis William Newof time wasted in mere amusement, of money man, were his chief teachers there. Chan- too, of health too, all in amusements and luxuning was his great hero, the pattern which ries, while brothers are by our side, weeping he strove to imitate in his own life. One and wailing and gnashing their teeth. I some who compares the life which Travers Madge times feel ready to sit down and cry. I some led under these circumstances with the times cannot help it when my heart wanders average of what he has known among the from home to home, to different scenes of best men even of religious "sets" at Ox-wretchedness, brutality, and sin. And yet here ford or Cambridge, with what his own we Christians are, sitting at our ease and doing How can the world be academic life has been, is constrained to do nothing. homage to him as to a nature of a higher made happier but by our all working, working, order. He lives upon potatoes and bread, My idea is for a few, who feel this strongly, to taking meat only as an act of filial obedi-unite simply and naturally, and be constantly ence; becomes a teetotaler, and afterwards together, cheering and encouraging and helping a vegetarian; gives up even butter and tea; one another on. . . . . Let us devote ourselves with a strange, almost fantastic desire to entirely to God-not to amusement, idleness, taste the poverty to which he was not born, or pleasure-seeking; not to large houses, fine be earns sixpence a day by “carrying book- | food, or fine clothes, in all of which things per about, to picture to oneself Christ teaching in a "Would not it be a beautiful thing to think Sunday school, with his arm folded round one boy, his hand resting on the head of another, his face smiling, his lips uttering such words as would make the boys love him as much as he loved them?” All this naturally led his father and his friends to think that he would take to ministerial work as a profession. To their astonishment and regret, he resolutely refused, and resolved to earn his livelihood as a shopman. He shrank from the possibility of being a hireling, and therefore would not work for hire at all, just as he had refused before to work for prizes and other college honours. Among detached off-shoot sects of Methodism lapsing into Unitarianism, among a body of Christian brethren who identified themselves with no sect, he finds congregations who accept his services, and to them he preaches, and with them he prays. His words fall on the hearts of men as the good seed of the word of life. This he can do for its own sake. He shudders at the thought of being paid for it. "Should you like to be paid," he wrote to a friend, for teaching in the Sunday schools? Should you like to be paid for visiting in your district? If not, do you not think it is rational for me to object to being paid for visiting - to object to being paid for praying?" In another letter he sets forth more fully what he aims at. "It grieves me to see the amount of idle time .. ... working, harder than we have ever dreamt of? haps we most of us err, but to being and doing with which his work had made him so familgood." 66 And to him, as to ten thousand times ten thousand, a multitude that no man can number, of like sufferers, the message of glad tidings came in thoughts, which to him were new, of the meaning of the death as well as of the life of Christ. iar." The work itself, thus viewed, became stale and unprofitable. He could bear it no For a time his trade-plans fell through, longer. In earlier days something of this and he opened a day-school for boys at feeling led him to give up the ministry and Norwich, working with his usual earnest- to take to school work, then to give up the ness among the poor, taking preaching school at Norwich for a preaching tour in tours in the Staffordshire potteries and in Cornwall, finally to abandon even the Cornwall. It ended in his going back to schools in Manchester that he loved so well, Manchester in 1848, once more to resume and to settle down to the mere mechanic his labours with a recognized office as home drudgery of a printer's office, working in visitor in his beloved schools in Lower shirt-sleeves and apron, black with printers' Mosley Street, infusing a new life in them, ink, carrying his dinner in a pocket-handmaking the roughest lads feel towards him kerchief. Wherever he was there was the as to a brother, getting their parents to- same restlessness in every form of good, gether for an evening service, speaking and the same absence of peace and rest from praying from his heart. doing it. To him, whose life was irreHis religious creed up to this time approachable, there came an " intensity of pears to have been simple, undogmatic, self-reproach," as if "the tears of all eter tending in feeling to mysticism, in life to nity could not wash out the stains of sin.” asceticism. He had not as yet renounced What was in him came out in the almost the negative elements of the creed in which fierce question with which he turned upon he had been taught. The communities with the friend who wrote in his life, "Don't which he fraternized were chiefly those that you feel that you deserve to be tormented may be described as unattached," floating and punished for ever?" off from larger and more organized sects. In the language of his biographer, he was never a sectarian Unitarian ". -was able to sympathize warmly with the devotion of those who worshipped as God Him whom the Unitarians reverence only as the divinest among men. He trusted in the love of God and His readiness to forgive sin, "At last," he writes, in or about 1850 (the without connecting that forgiveness with letter is given without a date), "at last, in the the sacrificial aspect of the death of Christ. deepest shame and uttermost despair, I was led But about the years 1849-50 there came a When I thought I could hardly change. There fell on him, as on so many come to God on account of my sins, it was told strivers after righteousness, a "horror of me that God so loved the world that He gave great darkness." The kind of life which he His only begotten Son, that all that believe in Him should not perish, but have everlasting was leading, through that very effort of life. When I felt that I did not love God as I self-consecration working on a temperament ought, I was told not to think of my own feelnaturally intensely sensitive, may have had ings; that the more I tried to love Him, the its share in the change. Insufficient food, more impossible I might find it, for the very insufficient rest, the constraint strain of effort often rendered it impossible; but still, to that most exhausting of all forms of educa- look to Jesus, to read in Him the expression of tional labour, the instruction of grown boys God's will, to feel in Him the outpourings of in the rudiments of religious knowledge, God's love; and thus, by looking to Jesus all this may have fostered the tendency to Jesus living, praying, and dying on the cross, the intense depression of which the lives of to save me and every wretched, perishing soul to love God because He first loved us." "" saints record so many instances. "All his previous life seemed to collapse miserably and utterly. He would wander off from home and friends aimlessly, simply craving to get right away from comforts, and associations, and ways of life, which seemed to him a mockery of the lost, forsaken misery to look to Jesus. to He notes in the same letter at once the excellences, and what he had found to be the defects of the teaching of his sect. "Unitarian preaching and devotion will help one through many sorrows and trials, will comfort one in many afflictions, will strengthen and purify and bless the heart; but it will not, in general, enable one to pass through the seasons of fierce struggle with the devil, and of reckless, hopeless, despair. The tendency of the Unitarian religion is to be entirely subjective Instead of God hearing and answering |