LONDON, SATURDAY, JANUARY 4, 1873.

CONTENTS.-No. 44.

MISCELLANEA:-Macaulay's New Zealander, 1-Excerpts from the
Baptismal Register of Dundee, 2.

larities of ideas which are frequently met with in different
authors whose honesty and originality cannot be questioned.
The discoveries of modern science have brought much of
the startling agency to light, and the speculations of Bab-
bage and Hitchcock develop the theory of a telegraphic
system through Cosmos. Their principle converts creation
Into a vast sounding gallery,
Into a vast picture gallery,
And into a universal telegraph.

NOTES: Contemporary History, 3-Ancient Punishment-Francois de Chevert-Scamels-Prices of Corn in 1587-Cruikshank Illustrations Numismatic Portrait of Queen Elizabeth-Christmas Toast-Pin-Caesar's Landing-place- Professor Conington's Grave-Singing Combat, Greenland-Inscribed Cross, Endellion, Cornwall-Albert Durer-Bruce of Clackmannan's Apology It is told of the late Lord Macaulay that he had read to Dame Margaret Schaw-Herefordshire New Year Customs- everything, and that he forgot nothing he ever read. It is Edinburgh and Dublin: Contest for Precedence (1863)—Folk | possible, therefore, that in his multifarious literary excursions Lore-Ear Nailed to a Post-Old Ballad. QUERIES:-Landscapes Burned into Wood, 8-Quotations: Authors which he developed in the celebrated New Zealander, who, he had more than once come upon the germ of the idea Wanted-Lord Justice Selwyn-River Lossie, N.B.-Arms of Playfair-Abbey Church, Paisley-Hoax-The Cruel Black-it has been well said, has certainly earned the privilege of a Leslie Controversy-Factology: Factologist-Vicarage House, free seat on London Bridge, by the frequency with which Cranbrook, Kent. he has "pointed a moral and adorned a tale." M. Volney, in his "Ruins, or a Survey of Empires" [Ruines ou Méditations sur les Revolutions des Empires], thus wrote:-. "Who knows but that hereafter some traveller like myself will sit down upon the banks of the Seine, the Thames, or the Zuyder Zee, where now, in the tumult of enjoyment, the heart and the eyes are too slow to take in the multitude of sensations; who knows but he will sit down solitary amid silent ruins, and weep a people inurned, and their greatness changed into an empty name?" [Pp. 7, 8, of the fifth edition, published in 1811.]

REPLIES:-Gavelkind, 9-Monumental Brasses-Burn-Curmudgeon
-Side Saddle-Ready Reckoners-Merton College Hall-Tulip
Mania-Theydon Gernon Church, Essex-The Admirable Crich-
ton-Lairg, Largs, Largo-Fly-leaf Scraps - Churchwardens'
Accounts of Horley, Surrey-Church Property.
REPLIES TO QUERIES AB EXTRA:-Finger: Pink, 12.
PROCEEDINGS OF SOCIETIES, 12.

OBITUARY, 12.

NOTICES TO CORRESPONDENTS, 12.

Miscellanea.

In our "Table Talk" (see No. 84) attention was called to" Macaulay's New Zealander," and several instances were given of the idea having been used long before the time of our brilliant historian. A most alarming influx of letters upon the subject has induced us to insert this article, giving the information so earnestly requested :

Gibbon, in the "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," before this, however, had written :-" If, in the neighbourhood of the commercial and literary town of Glasgow, a race of cannibals has really existed, we may contemplate in the period of the Scottish history the opposite extremes of savage and civilised life. Such reflections tend to enlarge the circle of our ideas, and to encourage the pleasing hope that New Zealand may produce in some future age the Hume of the southern hemisphere." [Vol. iv. c. xxv. p. 298.]

Horace Walpole, in one of his celebrated letters to Mann [Nov. 11, 1774], thus wrote:-"For my part I take Europe to be worn out. When Voltaire dies we may say Good night! The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will perhaps be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and in time a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul's, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra." [Vol. ii. pp. 297, 301.]

Henry Kirke White, in his poem "Time" [Poetical Works, and Remains, 1837], pp. 83, 84, thus expresses the idea.

Where now is Britain?

O'er her marts,

Dryden, I believe, somewhere said that it is not unamusing to track a favourite author "in the snows of others." I remember, however, that Sir Walter Scott deprecated this species of research, and characterised it as the favourite theme of laborious dulness. Opposed to Scott is the authority of D'Israeli. In his chapter on "Poetical Imitations and Similarities," this well-known bibliographer says, " One of the most elegant of literary recreations is that of tracing poetical or prose imitations and similarities. Assuredly, among the curiosities of literature, few are more interesting than the coincidences which are to be found in the ideas of authors. "A book," says D'Israeli, "professedly on the History and Progress of Imitation in Poetry" (and prose, he might have added), "written by a man of perspicuity, and an adept in the art of discerning likenesses, even when minute, with examples properly selected and gradations duly marked, would make an impartial accession to the store of human literature, and furnish rational curiosity with a high regale." Our French neighbours seem to be more alive to this interest than we are, since the scholars of that Shelley, in his "Dedication of Peter Bell the Third " nation have made volumes of such collections. The gather-[Works vol. ii. p. 377], employs thus the idea. ings of Nodier and Querard are rich in the extreme, and their books are, as contributions to the library, quite without equal in this country.

It is not always, as Scott said, that the search is with the view to bring the author to a level with his critic. The cultivated man of letters knows that similarity is not always imitation, and he does not confound accidental likeness with studied resemblance. His distinctions are just, and the entertainment he affords cannot be deemed despicable.

It would be an interesting inquiry to ascertain how far the electric genius of thought will account for the curious simi

Her crowded ports, broods Silence; and the cry
Of the low curlew, and the pensive dash
Of distant billows, breaks alone the void.
Even as the savage sits upon the stone
That marks where stood her capitol, and hears
The bitterns booming in the weeds, he shrinks
From the dismaying solitude. Her bards
Sing in a language that hath perish'd;
And their wild harps suspended o'er their graves,
Sigh to the desert with a dying strain.

*

"In

the firm expectation that when London shall be an habitation of bitterns, when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some transatlantic commentator will be weighing it in the scales of some new and unimagined system of criticism."

Mrs. Barbauld, in a poem [see the Works of Anna L. Barbauld, in 2 vols. 1825, vol. i. pp. 239, 240], entitled, "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven," speaks of a time, whenEngland, the seat of arts, be only known

By the grey ruin and the mouldering stone.

I have found the idea, I think, four times in the productions of Macaulay. In "The Prophetic Account of a Grand National Epic Poem, to be written by Bichard Quongti, and to be entitled 'The Wellingtoniad, and to be published A.D. 2824," I believe we possess the crude embryo of the New Zealander. [See pp. 674 & 5, of the 7th vol. of his Works, edited by his sister.] This piece was one of his contributions to "Knight's Quarterly Magazine," and appeared in November, 1824.

slumber. It is more likely than that these islands will ever
contain human beings for whom sustenance cannot be ob-
tained, that the fields will return in the revolutions of society
to their pristine desolation, and the forest resume its wonted
domain, and savage animals regain their long-lost habi-
tations; that a few fishermen will spread their nets on the
ruins of Plymouth, and the beaver construct his little dwell-
ing under the arches of Waterloo Bridge; the towers of
York arise in dark magnificence amid an aged forest; and
the red deer sport in savage independence round the Athe-
nian pillars of the Scottish metropolis." Mr. Lockhart, in
his "Life of Sir Walter Scott," thus introduces the idea:
" The civilised American or Australian will curse these
have heard but for Scott, as he passes through them in some
[Jedburgh and Hawick,]" of which he would never
places
distant century, when perhaps all that remains of our national
glories may be the high literature adopted and extended in
lands, planted from our blood." [Page 725, of New
Edition in i. vol.]

It would seem that we are indebted, after all, to a very ancient Hebrew writer for the germ of this thought. The prophet Ezekiel, who wrote B.C. 595, in the 26th and in the 47th chapters of his Book, undoubtedly furnishes the suggestion which Macaulay has so felicitously employed,

OF DUNDEE.

The first distinct sketch is in his eloquent description of the influence of Athenian literature. It is in these words:-new "The Dervise in the Arabian tale did not hesitate to abandon to his comrade the camels with their load of jewels and gold, while he retained the casket of that mysterious juice which enabled him to behold at one glance all the hidden riches of the universe. Surely it is no exaggeration to say that no external advantage is to be compared with that purification of the intellectual eye, which gives us to contemplate the infinite wealth of the mental world; all the hoarded treasures of the primeval dynasties; all the shapeless ore of EXCERPTS FROM THE BAPTISMAL REGISTER its yet unexplored mine; this is the gift of Athens to man. Her freedom and her power have for more than twenty cen- THE subjoined memoranda are excerpts from the Register turies been annihilated. Her people have degenerated into of Baptisms of the town of Dundee, in North Britain. They timid slaves; her language into a barbarous jargon, her are in the handwriting of my late father, Mr. Charles Roger, temples have been given up to the successive depredations still well remembered as an antiquary of local note, and at of Romans, Turks, and Scotchmen; but her intellectual the time of his decease (March 26th, 1865) one of the oldest empire is imperishable. And, when those who have rivalled inhabitants of that ancient burgh. They were extracted by her greatness shall have shared her fate; when civilisation him many years ago for genealogical purposes. It has and knowledge shall have fixed their abode in distant con-occurred to me that they may be of sufficient importance to tinents; when the sceptre shall have passed away from find a place in the columns of the Antiquary. The excerpts England; when, perhaps, travellers from distant regions in question have reference to the families of Balgay and shall in vain labour to decipher on some mouldering pedestal Wedderburn (local magnates of the county of Forfar), and the name of our proudest chief; shall hear savage hymns include incidental mention of individual members of the chanted to some misshapen idol, over the ruined dome of families of Fintrie, Dudhop, Duntroon, Claverhouse, and our proudest temple; and shall see a single naked fisher- others. John Graham of Claverhouse, afterwards Viscount man wash his nets in the river of the ten thousand masts-Dundee, was cousin german of Elizabeth Graham of Dunher influence and her glory will still survive-fresh in eternal youth, exempt from mutability and decay, immortal as the intellectual principle from which they derive their origin, and over which they exercise their control." [See Article on Mitford's Greece; Works edited by his Sister, vol. 7, p. 703.]

may

He employs it again in his Review on "Mill's Essay on Government." Thus: "Is it possible that in two or three hundred years a few lean and half-naked fishermen divide with owls and foxes the ruins of the greatest European cities? may wash their nets amidst the relics of her gigantic docks, and build their huts out of the capitals of her stately cathedrals?" [Ibid., vol. v. pp. 264, 265.] In his finished form the New Zealander, busy at his melancholy work, appears in the article on "Ranke's History of the Popes," to illustrate the learned author's opinion of the perpetuity of the Roman Catholic Church. "She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot in Britain-before the Frank had passed the Rhine-when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch-when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand upon a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's." [Idem, vol. vi. p. 455.]

66

Since Macaulay, several writers have appropriated the figure. Sir Archibald Alison, in the first volume of his Principles of Population," worked it thus into his florid Appendix, No. III., p. 571: "A long decay is destined to precede the British empire. . . . and at length the Queen of the Waves will sink into an eternal though not forgotten

trune, the wife of Robert Davidson of Balgay, hence the presence of that gallant but ill-starred nobleman at the several baptisms recorded. William Duncan of Sea Side (afterwards of Lundie) was one of the progenitors of Admiral Adam Duncan, who was raised to the peerage of Great Britain in reward of distinguished service at the battle of Camperdown. The beginnings of great families, where such can be satisfactorily determined, can hardly fail to

interest and instruct.

1648. Nov. 7th. Robert Davidson, younger, merchand, a man childe, named Robert. Robert Davidson, elder, Robert Bultie, and Rob. Stirling Witnesses.

1650. Jan. 17th. Robert Davidson, younger, merchand, a woman childe, Margaret. John Scrimger, uncle to the Vicount of Dudop, John Peirson, &c., Witnesses.

"1651. May 15th. Robert Davidson, younger, merchand, a man child, named Alexander. Alex. Bowar, younger, bailie, Alex. Bowar, elder, Alex. Edward, younger, Alex. Davidson, and Alex. Alison, Witnesses.

"1652. Sept. 21st. Christian Davidson law, daughter to Robt, Davidson Thesaurer, & Grissell Browne, was baptized.

1693. April 1st, Saturday. Robt. Davidson, of Balgay, & Eliz. Graham had ane daughter, bap. in the meeting

"1656. Sept. 9th. Bessie Davidson Law", daughter to Robt. Davidson & Grissell Brown; Bap: Wit: Wm. Dun-house be, Mr. Milne, called Margrat. can Bailyea, Geo. Brown & Patrick Tindel.