ambition is satisfied if he earn a living, because a living is success to him who cannot get a living at home. Sandy, however, is a long-headed fellow, and looks a great way beyond the end of his nose: he knows his sound, worldly, hard-handed habits will gain him a living any where, but that does not satisfy him: his dreams by night, for he is wide awake in the day transport him to some sweet little vale among the braes of Balwhidder, where he was reared, and where he means to return a nabob, like Jemmy MacPherson, and buy up the whole territory: his desire is to aggrandize Scotland in his own person, and therefore looks out upon the wide world as the field for the accomplishment of his purpose, indifferent whether his fate consigns him to the Arctic or Antarctic Pole. No man is better calculated to rub along than your Scot: of a hardy race, inured to labour, and no way fastidious in his living, he is sure to fall upon his legs, wherever you fling him. But it is to his education he Owes every thing: he has it at his own door, under the keen eye and watchful care of educated parents; and when we say educated, let it not be understood to mean pedantical humbugs, inflated with Horatian metres, or stuffed up to the gorge with catalectic dithyrambic-iambic anapasts, which, we are given to understand, are the nicknames of crippled syllables that hop up and down the classical world like beggars upon crutches; but men who have studied the philosophy of history in the heroic struggles of their fathers for independence, political and religious, who have acquired their proverbial habits of industry in forcing a niggard soil against nature to be productive, and whose rules of life, con duct, and conversation must be the best, since drawn from the pages of that blessed Book given by God to man for his guide and instructor in his pilgrimage from this world to the world to come. The independence of their country, secured by the indomitable might of men in whose eyes slavery was the worst of deaths, and death in resisting tyranny but the beginning of a better life, has given the sons of Scotland a moral elevation, which is their first and best letter of recom. mendation. Their mode of life, equally removed from squalid poverty which knows no hope, and luxury which en ervates while it refines, adapts him for wrestling with the world, whether abroad or at home, while his system of early education is that best calculated to attain independence, and to teach him to enjoy with moderation and sobriety the blessings independence can bestow. The Scot is never ashamed for a moment of his country; nay, we will go further, and say, that we have never known a Scot indifferent to, or forgetful of, his country; he has a pride in his accent, his physical characteristics, and the garb of Old Gaul. The bagpipe sounds in his ear like the voice of a clansman, and his penny is always ready for the brother Scot who extricates, from elbow-strictured bag, every variety of intonation from grunt to squeak, mellowed into tenderness by the rich luxuriance of the everrumbling drone. If you are skilled in the mysteries of the tartan, you need hardly enquire his name; for in vest, trousers, cap, or neck- kerchief, you will be sure to decipher whether he is a Mackintosh, a Macfarlane, or a Murray. He dresses plainly, but with neatness, and always according to his means and station; he affects gaiters, and is fond of enveloping in weather-defying galligaskins the nether extremities of his visible man. Remembering his primeval attachment to the kilt, we always quote this peculiarity as one of the most striking examples of the strong propensity of human nature to run into opposite extremes. Grave and sober in his general deportment, he is fid. gety and touchy in the extreme upon every question, whether great or small, affecting the honour, character, and conduct of the greatest or meanest of his countrymen, in which he sees involved the honour and character of his country; if you wish to throw him into a nervous fever, you have only to observe, that from the Pastor Fido Allan Ramsay may have derived the idea of the "Gentle Shepherd," or, if he be a Highlander, to hint a suspicion affecting the authenticity of Ossian. He is accused of loving Scotland better than truth, and this, which was intended as a calumny, is one of the highest compliments we can pay him; the manual of his youth, the companion of his manhood, and the consolation of his age, has recorded for him the infamy and punishment of the son who dis played the nakedness of his father; he regards his country as he does his parent, and would as soon suffer imputation upon the one as upon the other. He lives rarely by his wit, for he knows that wit, like service, is no inheritance; still more rarely by his wits, for in addition to the objections of his bringing up, he is well aware that honest enterprize and continuous industry pay better in the long run. He has humour, but it is dry, and for that reason, probably, he is fond of moistening his humour with whisky toddy; whisky toddy, however, potent as it is, cannot overcome his habitual gravity; if he forgets himself so far as to get drunk, he gets drunk soberly and with discretion. As we have said, his spirit of nationality is evidenced alike in great and little things. Although living at the uttermost ends of the town, he will toddle through, wet or dry, to attend public worship at the National Scots Church in Regent Square or Swallow Street; he will "cry tails" with you for a bottle of Edinburgh ale, and walk seven miles to drink it at the sign of the "Three Thistles." If you talk of cookery, he silences you at once with sheep-bead broth and haggis; they who hear him upon those appetizing dainties, have no need of dinner. His views being directed mainly to commercial pursuits, you will find him lodging somewhere in the city, at the house of a countryman of course; but, as we have before said, you seldom find him the habitué of taverns or coffee-houses, for if he does not find a ready market in London for his services, he speedily transfers his services elsewhere. For almost every situation of active and business life he is well qualified; but there are pursuits which he monopolizes, and makes exclusively his own. He is the gardener and practical agriculturist of the eastern and the western hemisphere; he carries the art of production over the globe, and leaves a comparatively niggard soil to fertilize lands more fertile by nature than his own. He is the sheep-farmer of the boundless pastures of Australia; in Canada the pioneer of civilization; he is the confectioner and baker of the three kingdoms, and in London we are mainly indebted to him for our daily bread. He is the working engineer, too, over half the globe; the gigantic power developed, nay, for practical purposes created, by one of his countrymen, he delights to subserve; he is the architect, the controller, and the valet of the steam-engine. He is a labourer, and a successful one, in science, literature, and the arts; trite and tedious would be the task to enumerate the catalogue of eminent persons who claim kindred with him in the range of the learned and other professions. In the church alone do we find Scotland tenacious of the talents and virtues of her sons; physicians, lawyers, merchants, she gives us in abundance, and even presents London with a Lord Mayor; her Chalmers, on the contrary, she refuses to part with, and retains for herself alone. He is great in trade and commerce; nor do the nobility of his country disdain to identify themselves with those pursuits from which so great a proportion of our true glory is derived. We have seen with pleasure the name of the Honourable Mr Frazer figuring upon a brass plate on the door of an eminent mercantile house in the city; and we are vulgar enough to imagine the scion of a noble house looks quite as much to advantage in that place as on the steps of Crockford's, or in the profligate society of the saloon. But it is the excursive character of his enterprize that more than any other quality distinguishes the adventurer of Scotland: "All nations that the eye of heaven visits, Are to the wise man ports and happy havens." He teaches his necessity to reason thus, for "There is no virtue like necessity." The wide world to him seems only a great adventure, and nations merely objects of speculation. He will set off to colonize the undiscovered continent of the southern latitudes, for he knows the early bird catches the worm ; finding this "no go," he is neither disheartened nor disappointed; he makes experiments to discover whether the icebergs will grow larches; failing in that, he concentrates his energies in the destruction of the whales: he goes out for a fortune, and without a fortune he will not return; do or die is his motto, and he sticks to the world like a limpet. There are no such things now-a-days as desolate islands; every desolate island is sure to furnish its enterprizing Scotchman. The coast of Africa has no terrors for him; Borneo is not too hot to hold him he warms his toes on the banks of Slave River to the tune of Tullochgorum, and displays his Paisley shawl or Kilmarnock nightcap to the admiring gazes of Topinambo or Timbuctoo. We happened to be in the tavern, hight Edinburgh Castle, one evening, musing, as is our custom, upon men and manners, when an original in peagreen coat, brass buttons, and thorough-bred plaiding trews, entered, taking his seat vis-a-vis to our bottle of ale; remarking, that he "kittled it was Embro'," and having, upon tasting the liquor, pronounced it "unco guid," we fell naturally enough into conversation. Our North British friend had come up to town in the hope of investing his little capital, amounting only to a few hundred pounds, in some mercantile speculation, but in vain: many were the tempting offers made, as he informed us, of so many hundred per cent for his money in this adventure and in that he was too far north, however, even for the matchless money-snatchers of London; and wherever a bona fide investment offered itself, the capital he possessed was no object. : "Hech me, sirs!" exclaimed he, "thae Lunnon lads talk o' hunners o' thoosans o' punds sterling, as if they were sae mony chucky-stanes! Hech me! it's the place for thae monied whales to mak sma' wark wi' siccan a sprat as I am; sae, I hae jist made up my mind to work my passage till California, whar I hae a brither in the hide an' tallow business. Noo, as ye seem a duce lad, we'll e'en crack anither bottle thegither; ye can pay for't, and I'll do the same for you, the neist time we hae the luck to forgather." The probabilities of success of adventurers in London may be estimated from the short, and for that reason imperfect, sketch we have given of their peculiarities: that their advancement can in any degree be accelerated or retarded by the circumstance of their being strangers, we must be permitted to doubt: by far the greater amount of the London population is denizen : if there are here none of the neighbourly sympathies of citizenship, neither are their here its neighbourly aversions. In insignificant or remote places the arrival of a stranger may be regarded with aversion, as taking the bread out of somebody's mouth: in London the success of every man depends not upon his neighbours, but upon himself. It cannot be denied that he has difficulties to contend with, but the difficulty of prejudice is not one of them: the graduate of Cambridge or Oxford settling in the back-wood of America, will find himself far outdone in his clearing operations by the native Yankee pioneer of civilization, though the bears, 'coons, and wild Indians, like John as much as Jonathan; so it will be in London, where the difficulty of strangers will be found to lie in the want of the same knowledge of business, the same amount of capital, or the same enterprize, as his London competitor. It might be as well imagined that the turbot sold this morning at Billingsgate will not be eaten this evening in Bond Street, because taken in the net of a Dutchman ; that the butter we consume at breakfast will be rejected, because the product of the dairies of Cork or Waterford; or that the mutton expected to-morrow in Leadenhall market will remain unsold, because fattened north of the Tweed; as that industry and enterprize suited to the market, (for every thing centres in that,) will not find in London, as elsewhere, its just and legitimate reward. THE TITTLE-TATTLE OF A PHILOSOPHER. PROFESSOR KRUG of Leipsic is a person of no small consideration in Germany. It is true that the philosophers of the high transcendental school look upon him as the very dirt beneath their feet. They speak of him as belonging to that class of authors of whom it is said-Ils se sont battus les flancs pour être de grands hommes; but let him batter his sides, say they, till they ache again, he is unable to give utterance to a single note of genuine philosophic inspiration. Mystical dreamers, retorts the professor, are ye, one and all of you, you transcendentalists. Your world is but a phantom, and is peopled with phantoms. Your theories are utterly repudiated by common sense, and, unlike the rest of mankind, you make it your pride to be seen walking on your heads. It may be so, answer the transcendentalists, but you have no head to walk upon, worthy Professor Urceus. Still, notwithstanding these asperities, and although our professor is altogether disowned by the genuine children of speculation, it must be admitted that the man who was deemed worthy to be the immediate successor of Kant, in the Chair of Philosophy, at Königsberg, and who presided with courage and ability over the University of Leipsic during the memorable crisis of 1813, when that city, like a convulsed human heart, was the bloody nucleus around which was raging the battle of a nation's life—it must be admitted that such a man has some claims on the consideration of those who are interested either in literary or military history. The industry of Professor Krug has been indefatigable, and the versatility of his talents is prodigious. For the last forty years, scarcely an event has occurred, scarcely an opinion has been broached in Germany, without his having come forward and taken part in the discussion. No subject comes amiss to his hand, from the philosophy of ancient down to the liberation of modern Greece. We are not, however, going to follow him through his multifarious undertakings. We shall merely attempt to lay before our readers an undress picture of the man as he himself has painted it in his autobiography, using our own discretion in curtailing the light-hearted, though somewhat exuberant loquacity of the original. His work is divided into six stages. Stage the first. My Childhood-1770, 1782. I was born, says the professor, at Radis, a small village near Wittenberg, at the midnight hour, between the 21st and the 22d of June 1770. There was not at that time, in all Germany, a more secluded spot than the hamlet in which I first saw the light. But the loveliness of nature is doomed to be every where violated by the march of modern improvement, and the house in which I was born, and the garden in which I played in my infancy, were long ago swept away in order to make room for the great highway which now stretches its weary length between Leipsic and Berlin. The period at which my birth happened, gave rise to much controversy in our small community. My father insisted that the midnight hour belonged to the 22d of the month; and accordingly maintained that I was born on that day. On the other hand, the parson reckoned it to belong to the preceding day, and entered me in the parish register as born on the 21st. Leaving the world to side with either of these worthies as it pleases on this important point, I may remark that, in my progress through life, I have extracted from this uncertainty an advantage not enjoyed by those who have only one birthday to come and go upon. In early life, when one is proud of being thought old, I always declared myself in favour of the 21st; but now that I am getting into the sear and yellow leaf, my predilection for senility is considerably abated, and I am decidedly of opinion that the 22d was the day of my birth. I have been informed, that at the time of my birth a still more animated Meine Lebensreise. In Sechs Stazionen; von Urceus. My Journey through Life. In Six Stages; by Urceus, (i.e. by Krug; urceus, as we may inform our fair readers, being the Latin for krug, which in German means a pitcher or jug.) debate was maintained among the gossips who presided at that event. It was argued by some of them, that the tenor of my future life would necessarily be coloured by the witching hour in which I had been born-that this hour being the solemn time "when night and morning meet" — when ghosts come out of the graves, and license is given to the powers of darkness-the just conclusion was, that I could not escape being a ghost-seer, an animal magnetizer, a mystic, or fanatic of one kind or another. Others, again, of these she-sages, who prided themselves upon greater astronomical or astrological skill, predicted for me a directly opposite fate. This very time, they said, being the crisis of the year in which the sun is highest in heaven, and his light, even at midnight, scarcely sunk beneath the horizon, it followed, most undeniably, that I would be the born foe of darkness, obscurity, and mysticism, in all its shapes the friend of clearness and enlightenment, and the zealous advocate of liberty of thought, if not, perhaps, an absolute freethinker. Upon the breathing of this latter suspicion, I understand that the whole conclave crossed themselves devoutly, and muttered a pious" God forbid," expressive of the hope that the unconscious squaller before them might never become any such devil's brat. Let the world, which has my writings before it, decide whether any of these prophecies have been fulfilled. My extraction was neither mean nor exalted. My father was a respectable farmer; and my mother was nearly related to Oeser, an artist of some celebrity at the period of which I am writing. Though at all seasons of my life I have been partial to exercises which demand bodily exertion, and bring the muscles into play, particularly to riding-as my galloping off upon a butcher's pony when not seven years old, may testify-in which adventure I very nearly met with a broken neck-still, I evinced from my earliest years a yet greater tendency towards the sedentary pursuits of literature. My fondness for study determined my father to make a scholar of me, and an event which occurred about this time, led my family to select theology as the vocation in which I was most likely to make a figure. In these days my grandmother was alive, and a very kind and pious old lady she was. It was her practice every morning to prepare herself for the duties of the day, by singing a spiritual hymn. Now, happening to have an excellent ear for music, I overheard her one morning pouring forth a strain which more than usually took my fancy. I immediately caught the tune, and began to hum in unison. The old lady, attributing my accompaniment entirely to an overflow of precocious piety, was vastly delighted. "Never was such a pious child seen. We must by all means make a minister of him. When he is of age to enter the Church, he will indeed be a great and a shining light." Meanwhile, my mouth was crammed with sugar-plums and lollypops, and, saint or not, I was at any rate in the fair way of being made an incorrigible hypocrite; for from that time I made a point of partaking daily in my grandmother's devotional exercises, and was as devout as gingerbread could make me. Even at this early age, the diligence with which I prosecuted my scholastic and theological pursuits was so great, that I soon exhausted all the knowledge that was to be obtained at our village school, besides draining dry the biblical information of my grandmother. It was therefore fixed that I should be sent to the great national seminary at Pforta. Many and bitter were the tears I shed on leaving the paternal roof in 1782. Pforta, I had been told, was distant two days' journey from Radis, and hence I felt as if I were going to be banished to the uttermost regions of the earth. I be. lieved that I should never more behold the countenances of my home. There are certainly few trials more severe than that which accompanies the first untwisting of a child's affections from around the persons and places familiar to him from infancy. I at least can testify that I left my father's house with a heart laden with the entire affliction of an exile. But the pangs of boyhood are transitory-novelties broke in upon my wondering eyes at every advance of our journey. I became absorbed in the interest of new scenes; so that by the time the mountains of Naumberg, which lay near the place of my destination, were visible, I had entirely got the better of my home-sickness, and was ready to enter upon the new career to which I had been called. |