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CHAPTER VI.

GLASGOW.

It was in October 1819, that Irving began his work in Glasgow-the first real work in his own profession which had opened to him. He was then in the full strength of early manhood, seven-and-twenty, the "Scottish uncelebrated Irving," whom his great countryman regretfully commemorates. His remarkable appearance seems, in the first place, to have impressed everybody. A lady, who was then a member of Dr. Chalmers's church, and who had access to the immediate circle surrounding him, tells how she herself, on one occasion, being particularly engaged in some domestic duties, had given orders to her servants not to admit any visitors. She was interrupted in her occupation, however, notwithstanding this order, by the entrance of one of her maids, in a state of high excitement and curiosity. "Mem!" burst forth the girl, "there's a wonderful grand gentleman called; I couldna say you were engaged to him. I think he maun be a Highland Chief!"-"That Mr. Irving!" exclaimed another individual of less elevated and poetical conceptions-"That Dr. Chalmers's helper! I took him for a cavalry officer!" "Do you know, Doctor," said a third, addressing Chalmers himself, " what things people are

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DR. CHALMERS'S HELPER.

saying about your new assistant? They say he's like a brigand chief." "Well, well," said Dr. Chalmers, with a smile, "whatever they say, they never think him like anything but a leader of men." Such was the impression he produced upon the little mercantile-ecclesiastical world of Glasgow. There, as everywhere, people were instinctively suspicious of this strange unconventional figuredid not know what to make of the natural grandeur about him-the lofty fashion of speech into which he had already fallen, and which seems to have been entirely appropriate to the garb and aspect in which nature had clothed him. But he found warm friends here, as everywhere, and by means of all his qualities, mental and bodily, his frankness and warmth, and habit of making himself the friend of the humblest individual he encountered, his splendid person and stately manners, took the hearts of the poor by storm. They are now dying out of those closes and wynds of Glasgow, who remember Irving as Dr. Chalmers's helper; but there still lingers here and there a recollection of that kindliest genial visitor. Chalmers himself, though a man of the warmest humanity, had at all times a certain abstract intentness about him, which must have altered the character of individual kindness as coming from his hands. His parishioners were to him emphatically his parishioners, the "body" (not vile, perhaps; but still more profoundly important for the experiment's sake than for its own) upon which one of the most magnificent of experiments was to be tried. But to Irving they were the Johns and Sandys, the Campbells and Macalisters, -the human neighbours who were of his personal acquaintance and individually interesting to himself.

CONDITION OF GLASGOW.

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Such a distinction makes itself known involuntarily. The position he held was one completely secondary and auxiliary, not even answering to that of a curate; for he was still only a probationer, unordained, without any rights in the Church except the license to preach, which was his sole qualification. He was not responsible for any part of the working of that huge machinery which Dr. Chalmers bore up on his Herculean shoulders, and which naturally collapsed when his mighty vital force was withdrawn. The "helper" went about more lightly, unburdened by social economy; and gained for himself among the poor people whom it was his daily work to visit, the place of an undoubted and much-prized friend.

Glasgow was at this period in a very disturbed and troublous condition. Want of work and want of food had wrought their natural social effect upon the industrious classes; and the eyes of the hungry weavers and cotton-spinners were turned with spasmodic anxiety to those wild political quack remedies, the inefficacy of which no amount of experience will ever make clear to people in similar circumstances. The entire country was in a dangerous mood; palpitating throughout with deep-seated complaint and grievance, to which the starving revolutionaries in such towns as Glasgow acted only as a kind of safety-valve, preventing a worse explosion. The discontent was drawing towards its climax when Irving received his appointment as assistant to the minister of St. John's. In such a large

poor parish he encountered on all sides the mutterings of the popular storm. Chalmers, always liberal and statesmanlike, saw the real grievance, which finally

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IRVING'S POLITICAL SENTIMENTS.

laboured and struggled, through the contest of years, into that full redress and establishment of popular rights, which seems to make any such crisis impossible now. But Irving's mind was of a different construction. He was one of those men of inconsistent politics, governed at once by prejudices and sympathies, whose “attitude" it is impossible to foretell; and of whom one can only predict that their political opinions will take the colour given by their heart; and that the side most strongly and feelingly set forth before them will undoubtedly carry the day. His nature was profoundly conservative; and yet the boldest innovation might have secured his devoted support, had it approved itself to his individual thoughts. His political opinions, indeed, seem to have been such as are common to literary men, artists, and women, entirely unconnected with politics, and who only now and then find themselves sufficiently interested to inform themselves upon public matters. Accordingly, he appears in after-life in strong opposition to every measure known as liberal; while in Glasgow, with those poor revolutionary weavers round him on every side, his heart convincing him of their miseries and despair, and his profound trust, not in human nature, but in the human creatures known to himself, persuading him that no harm could come from their hands, he stands perfectly calm and friendly amid the panic, disdaining to fear. That the crisis was an alarming one everybody allows. Nothing less than the horrors of the French revolution-battle and murder and sudden death-floated before the terror-stricken eyes of all who had anything to lose. Whig Jeffrey, a non-alarmist and (in moderation) friend of the people,

STATE OF THE COUNTRY IN GENERAL.

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declares, solemnly, that "If the complaints of the people are repressed with insults and menaces—if no step is taken to relieve their distresses and redress their real and undeniable grievances—if the whole mass of their complaints, reasonable and unreasonable, are to be treated as seditious and audacious, and to meet with no other answer than preparations to put them down by force, then indeed we may soon have a civil war among us and a civil war of a character far more deplorable and atrocious than was ever known in this land — a war of the rich against the poor; of the Government against the body of the people; of the soldiery against the great bulk of the labouring classes; —a war which can never be followed by any cordial or secure peace; and which must end, or rather begin, with the final and complete subversion of those liberties and that constitution which has hitherto been our pride, our treasure, and our support and consolation under all other calamities.”

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It was a conjunction of many troubles: foremost among which was that sharp touch of starvation, which makes men desperate; that Want-most pertinacious and maddest of all revolutionaries, who never fails to revenge bitterly the carelessness which lets him enter our well-defended doors,―he was there, wolfish and seditious, in Glasgow in the winter of 1819, plotting pikes and risings, with wild dreams of that legislation never yet found out, which is to make a paradise of earth; dreams and plots which were to blurt out, so far as Scotland was concerned, in the dismal little tragi-comedy of Bonnymuir some months later; and there be made a melancholy end of. But

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