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The Black Fence, which by an amusing blunder appears as The Black Prince in some catalogues, was published at Rugby as a pamphlet in 1850. It is entitled A Lay of Modern Rome, and is a vigorous denunciation of the inroads of Papistry, written in the metre of Macaulay's Armada: the Black Fence, the garden-boundary of a recent convert to the Romish Church, being regarded as typical of the pale of Rome. The last volume published by Moultrie was Altars, Hearths, and Graves, 1854, which contains many domestic pieces, and a few of wider interest. The two most striking of his later poems are perhaps The Three Minstrels, in which he gives an account of his meetings, on different occasions, with Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Tennyson; and Musa Etonenses, some fine stanzas written as an introduction to an edition of Gray, in which he pays a tribute of affection to Eton, with allusions to the Marquis Wellesley, to the poet Gray, distinguished "with many a graceful fold of learned thought," and lastly, to Shelley, the

"stripling pale and lustrous-eyed," the charm of whose character, no less than the beauty of his verse, seems to have always had an attraction for Moultrie in spite of their wide difference of opinion. During his later life at Rugby, Moultrie was known as an excellent reader of Shakespeare,-as he wrote in his Dream of Life,

"Here, in this study, cramm'd With strangest piles of heterogeneous lore, O'er Shakespeare's magic pages we have laugh'd And wept by turns."

He died on the twenty-sixth of December, 1874, of a fever caught while visiting in his parish.

Moultrie's character is faithfully reflected in his writings. Though his actual accomplishments do not entitle him to be classed among the foremost poets of his age, a position which his early efforts seemed to promise him, yet he certainly possessed a large share of the poetic temperament: he had the poet's vision, and the poet's yearning after ideal truth and beauty. The leading points of his very lovable character, a mixture of humour and pathos, of ruggedness and gentleness, of energy and repose, may be traced throughout all his poems, which at their best reach a high standard of excellence, and at their worst never fail to be harmonious and clear. deserves to be read and remembered among the minora sidera of the times in which he lived, both for the merits of his own writings, and as one of a brilliant circle of friends and contemporaries.

H. S. SALT.

He

No. 338.-VOL. LVII.

K

130

UNCERTAINTIES.

PINK linen bonnet,

Pink cotton gown,

Roses printed on it,

Hands burnt brown.

Oh! blithe were all the piping birds, and the golden-belted bees, And blithe sang she on the doorstep, with her apron full of peas.

Sound of scythe and mowing,

Where buttercups grew tall;
Sound of red kine lowing,

And early milkmaid's call.

Sweet she sang on the doorstep, with the young peas in her lap, And he came whistling up the lane, with the ribbons in his cap. "You called me a bad penny

That wouldn't be sent away-
But here's goodbye to you, Jenny,
For many and many a day.
There's talk of cannon and killing-
Nay, never turn so white!

And I've taken the king's shilling-
I took it last night."

Oh! merry, merry piped the thrushes up in the cherry tree,
But dumb she sat on the doorstep, and out through the gate went he.

Scent of hay and summer;

Red evening sky;

Noise of fife and drummer;
Men marching by.

The hay will be carried presently, and the cherries gathered all, And the corn stand yellow in the shocks, and the leaves begin to fall. Perhaps some evening after,

With no more song of thrush,
The lads will cease their laughter,

And the maids their chatter hush;

And word of blood and battle

Will mix with the sound of the flail,

And lowing of the cattle,

And clink of the milking pail;

And one will read half fearful

A list of names aloud;

And a few will stagger tearful
Out of the little crowd;
And she, perhaps, half doubting,
Half knowing why she came,
Will stand among them, pouting,
And hear, perhaps, his name-

Will weep, perhaps, a little, as she wanders up the lane,
And wish one summer morning were all to do again.

MAY PROLYN.

131

FERGUSON, THE PLOTTER.'

THE Sources of this curious and interesting Apologia are to be found. partly in the State Paper Office, and partly, if we read aright a sentence in the preface, in some family papers in the possession of its author. It would not, therefore, be unreasonable to assume him, though he nowhere directly says so, to be of the same stock as the extraordinary man whose true story he has undertaken to tell. And this And this will help to explain some things which might otherwise be found puzzling. It is not, for instance, easy at first to understand the motive which prompted the volume. Most readers of history will need some stronger assurance than that of the author of Lothair to believe that men like Wildman and Ferguson could at any moment of their lives have been justly called the soul of English politics. The executioner who cut off the head of Charles the First, the pilot who steered the Brill into the harbour of Torbay, made a deeper mark on the page of English history; yet their very names are unknown. Ferguson was indeed often concerned in matters of the most momentous interest to this kingdom; but he was never, in the estimation of any but himself, concerned in them as a principal, and the course of events would neither have been changed nor checked had he been suffered to spend his life in his parsonage at Godmersham, or made to lose it with Walcot and Rumbold on the scaffold. It is perhaps less difficult to understand Mr. Ferguson's inability, or at least disinclination, to draw the conclusions to which this extremely full and coherent statement of his case must inevitably lead less partial readers. This disinclination would in other circumstances have been surprising in a member of Mr. Ferguson's learned profession. In his circumstances it is natural, and,

1 Robert Ferguson, the Plotter; by James Ferguson, Advocate. Edinburgh. 1887.

though we propose to combat it to the best of our ability, has something even of the effect of a grace.

The first of these sources was disclosed about fourteen years ago in a novel called For Liberty's Sake, written by Mr. J. B. Marsh. Mr. Marsh, searching the State Papers for some other purpose, came upon a bundle of letters, all in the same peculiar handwriting, for the most part unsigned, but occasionally subscribed with the initials R. ff., and three times with the full name, R. or Rob. Ferguson. Some were written from Holland, some from various hiding-places in London, the earliest in 1668, the latest in 1683, and all were addressed to the writer's wife, Hannah Ferguson. Not all had reached her. Before the discovery of the Rye House Plot Ferguson had become a marked man for his seditious writings; and even if there be any truth in the suspicion that his person was often designedly overlooked by the agents of the Government, it is certain that his correspondence would have received no such favour. He may sometimes have told secrets enough to keep his own neck safe; but no Minister was fool enough to believe that he told one tenth part of what he knew. Many of his letters, therefore, miscarried through the treachery of his friends (for then, as always, luckily for honest men, when plots are a-foot, there were as many rogues as rebels) or the vigilance of his enemies. Some were probably seized by the officers of the law in their raids upon the various houses where the Plotter's family was known to be lodging: some were doubtless confiscated, with other papers, when he turned Jacobite after the Revolution; and thus, after a perusal which must have often sadly disappointed the eyes for which they were never meant, these letters were consigned to the dust and silence of the

official shelf. But, barren as they may have been to his Majesty's Secretary of State, to Mr. Marsh they seemed to throw such an amiable and unexpected light on the character of a man for whom no one had yet been found to say a good word, that he determined to make them the basis of an apology for their writer; and, doubtless that he might more easily persuade people to read it, he threw this apology into the form of a novel. How far his charitable design may have succeeded we know not; but it is not easy to believe that the large class of readers who prefer their literature light can have been much attracted by For Liberty's Sake. Our purpose, however, is not now with Mr. Marsh's book it is enough for us to know that among its readers was Mr. Ferguson.

To Mr. Ferguson the novel seemed a right-minded but not quite adequate attempt to do justice to a much injured man. Mr. Marsh did not, he thought, know enough, and indeed could not have known enough of Robert Ferguson. The novel only exhibited him in "a half light"; and moreover the novelist had broken the story of his hero's life off with the Revolution, instead of carrying it down to an end which less thorough-going advocates than Mr. Ferguson will certainly think well served with the conventional epithet of bitter. In so doing Mr. Marsh showed, as we conceive, a most sound discretion; but Mr. Ferguson thought otherwise. He determined to supply the missing links, and to turn, after two centuries of darkness, misrepresentation and obloquy, the full light of truth upon a man of genuine piety, sincere convictions, and high political genius; on one whom, associated as he was with the most desperate characters and the darkest intrigues of his time, no stain of personal dishonour or political perfidy has ever rested. Such is the real Robert Ferguson to the eyes of his generous and single-hearted namesake, and as such he has essayed to picture him in this volume.

It is very certain that he did not bear this character in his own time; nor from that to our own has any voice been found to question the unanimous verdict of history. Mr. Ferguson, with a frankness which says much at any rate for his own honesty and for his belief in his client's, has shrunk from no clause of this tremendous indictment. He refers to them again

and again, and he has printed them all, word by word, in one of the appendixes which form not the least interesting part of his volume. We are reminded that his hero was the Judas of Dryden's great satire: that Bishop Sprat, in his True Account of the Rye House Plot, declared him to be the life and soul of the scheme for the assassination of the King and Duke of York, for which his poisonous tongue, virulent pen, and hellish malice especially marked him : that Bishop Burnet called him, on his own knowledge, a profligate knave and swindler: that Oldmixon branded him as an arch-traitor and villain, a spy upon Monmouth and a secret agent for the King: that Calamy, the historian of the Nonconformists, found that his character was as bad in Holland as in England. To come to our own times, Burton, in the studies for his history of Scotland, could find nothing to make him doubt that Sprat was right, and that Ferguson was really the demon of the Assassination Plot, and, so long as the breath was in his body, the demon of all plots against the established form of government; while Macaulay has bitten his portrait in deep with that terrible acid he alone knew the secret of. On the other side two names only can be called the late Mr. Christie, in his edition of Dryden, maintains the Judas of the satirist to have been, though restless and vehement, at least an honest man; and Walter Scott, ever anxious to find some good in things evil, has noted that in all his difficulties the Plotter was never charged with betraying his associates,-high praise, certainly, for such an inveterate conspirator; but, besides disregarding a

very general, though possibly unjust, suspicion, it is not, as Mr. Ferguson seems occasionally to have forgotten, exactly the same thing as saying that he never did betray an associate.

But the head and front of the offence is, of course, Macaulay. Sprat, Burnet, Oldmixon, Burton, even Walter Scott on his historical side, all retire into the back-ground before the "long resounding march and energy divine" of the great historian of the Revolution. Mr. Ferguson, being a just man and unhampered by party politics, being also too wellmannered to permit himself any impertinences against the illustrious dead, does not call Macaulay "a gross and notorious historical malefactor." He writes more in sorrow than in anger, but it is clear that he writes in deep sorrow. Only in one instance does he suffer his feelings to hurry him into foolishness. After the discovery of the Rye House Plot, a large reward was offered for Ferguson's apprehension and a description of his person sent to the English envoys at all the Continental courts. The description was to the following effect :

"A tall, lean man, Dark brown hair, a great Roman nose, Thin-jawed, Heat in his face, speaks in the Scotch Tone, a sharp Pierc ing Eye, Stoops a little in the Shoulders; He hath a shuffling gate that differs from all men, wears his Perriwig down almost over his eyes."

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Macaulay, as his admirable custom invariably was, did not quote this proclamation, but wove its substance into his own narrative. There, in his fifth chapter, appears this passage:

"Nor was it easy for him to escape notice; for his broad Scotch accent, his tall and lean figure, his lantern jaws, the gleam of his sharp eyes, which were always overhung by his wig, his cheeks inflamed by an eruption, his shoulders deformed by a stoop, and his gait distinguished from that of other men by a peculiar shuffle, made him remarkable wherever he appeared."

Mr. Ferguson prints these two descriptions side by side, and adds this

comment:

"Could there be a better instance of verbal caricature? Many would admit stooping a little,' who would not like to be called deformed, and cheeks inflamed by an eruption' suggests a great deal more than heat in the face.' Was it an oversight that, while every bad feature is exaggerated, the Roman nose, which often redeems an otherwise plain face, is wholly ignored? The historian's description gives the impression of a very ugly personage; that in the proclamation is consistent with the reverse, and a picture of Ferguson's brother, who served under Marlborough, shows a face of the same cast, yet represents a strikingly handsome man.'

It is indisputable that many people are dissatisfied with their portraits: we are perfectly willing to allow that Ferguson's brother may have been a strikingly handsome man ; but so long as the words of our language bear their present meaning, so long we submit will the proclamation of the English Government suggest the picture of a man very much the reverse of handsome; and why Macaulay should be blamed, on the strength of a portrait of another man that he had never seen or heard of, for accepting a portrait of this man drawn by contemporaries to whom the original was only too well known, surpasses our comprehension. "She said on the jar,' said the little judge with a cunning look"; and really this is the best comment on such a piece of quibbling as this objection of Mr. Ferguson.

This particular matter is obviously one of the very slightest importance. But it is a characteristic, though an extreme, example of Mr. Ferguson's style of argument. We do not believe

for a moment that he has done so

wittingly, or with any disingenuous intention, but all through his book he shows an almost childish inability to see that he is often basing his case upon distinctions which are no differences; while his more serious arguments at their best rarely, if ever, amount to more than a verdict of not proven, and often practically substantiate that already passed.

As most people whose ideas of literature travel beyond novels and newspapers have read Macaulay's History, we may assume it to be generally known

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