America's Philosopher: John Locke in

American Intellectual Life Claire Rydell

Arcenas
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A m er i c a ’s
P h i lo s o p h e r
A m er i c a ’s
P h i lo s o p h e r
John Locke in American Intellectual Life

C l a i r e Ry d el l A rc en a s

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago & London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2022 by The University of Chicago
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Published 2022
Printed in the United States of America

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226820415.001.0001

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Names: Arcenas, Claire Rydell, author.

Title: America’s philosopher : John Locke in American intellectual life /
Claire Rydell Arcenas.
Other titles: John Locke in American intellectual life
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2022. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021054529 | ISBN 9780226638607 (cloth) |
ISBN 9780226820415 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Locke, John, 1632–1704—Influence. | United States—
Intellectual life. | United States—Civilization—English influences.
Classification: LCC B1295 .A73 2022 | DDC 192—dc23/eng/20211123
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For my parents
And for Scott
 Contents

Preface 1

1 Locke’s Legacy in Early America 8

2 Locke’s Authority in the Revolutionary and Founding Eras 31
3 Problematizing Locke as Exemplar in the Early United States 58
4 Locke Becomes Historical 84
5 Making Locke Relevant 103
6 Locke and the Invention of the American Political Tradition 121
7 Lockean “-­isms” 147

Epilogue 163
Acknowledgments 167
List of Abbreviations 171
Notes 173
Bibliography 227
Index 251
Preface

T hree thousand miles east across the Atlantic Ocean, in a

quiet English churchyard, America’s Philosopher lies buried
amidst green grass and clover.1 Though he never set foot on
American soil and died long before the creation of the United
States, John Locke stands—­and has always stood—­at the center
of American intellectual life. In this book, I explain how and why
a seventeenth-­century English philosopher has captivated our
attention for more than three centuries, exerting an unparalleled
influence on the development of American thought and culture.
What follows is the story of Locke in America.
When I first set out to write about Locke in America, in the
early 2010s, I thought it would be a straightforward task. I knew
Locke as the author of the Two Treatises of Government (1690),
honorary founding father, and particular favorite of the libertar-
ian right. And everything I read, heard, and saw—­from Louis
Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America (1955) to episodes of
Parks and Recreation (2009–­15)—­suggested that Americans had
always known him as such. Effortlessly packaged as an adjective—­
“Lockean”—­Locke seemed to have inspired an American politi-
cal tradition that continued uninterrupted across the centuries.
All I needed to do was investigate the one part of the story that
2 P R E FA C E

seemed a bit murkier—­the part that spanned the long nineteenth century,
between the founding era and the twentieth-­century publication of so many
articles and books, like Hartz’s, that set Locke at the heart of this political
tradition.
As soon as I started asking questions about Locke’s legacy in Amer-
ica, however, I discovered something unexpected. The Locke I knew and
thought I would find in the historical record was missing. He was nowhere to
be found. And the text I thought defined Locke’s relevance—­his Two Trea­
tises—­was conspicuously absent as well. Between 1773 and 1917, it wasn’t
even published in an American edition.2
John Locke himself, however, was far from absent. Indeed, he seemed
to be everywhere I looked, though in unfamiliar guises and in unexpected
places. While nineteenth-­century American presses did not publish his Two
Treatises, they churned out editions of his (much better known, as I discov-
ered) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).3 The Essay’s influ-
ence at colleges was so pervasive that one Massachusetts-­based observer
declared it “undoubtedly the best known of all his works.”4 Indeed, familiar-
ity with the Essay was so widespread that, in San Francisco, the editors of
the Daily Evening Bulletin could reward their readers for making it through
the Saturday news with a good Locke joke: “Can a curl over the forehead be
called, ‘Locke on the Understanding’?”5
Nineteenth-­century men and women also knew Locke as a moral au-
thority who promoted generosity, temperance, and effective communica-
tion; as a religious writer, whose A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of
St. Paul (1705–­7) provided the best “method of studying the scriptures”;
and as the developer of a popular approach to taking notes on one’s read-
ing.6 They admired his preference for good conversation over the fleeting
pleasures of a card game and applauded his (perceived) distaste for alcohol.
And, in the pages of popular histories, they encountered him as the author
of the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669)—­“an American law-
giver,” as George Bancroft put it, whose disastrous attempt at real-­world
legislation could be held up as an example of the fact that abstract political
theories often failed when put into practice, no matter how virtuous or wise
their creators.7
Moving backward in time, I discovered that Locke was everywhere in
eighteenth-­century America too. He appeared in diaries, newspapers, personal
letters, and magazines as an immediate, pervasive, and essential presence. He
taught both men and women how to raise children, cultivate friendships, rise
above controversy, retain knowledge, form neighborhood associations, and
 Preface 3

make sense of their everyday experiences through empirical reasoning. And

his “reasonable” Christianity and persuasive arguments in favor of toleration
provided sustenance and inspiration for generations of Americans seeking a
more enlightened, hopeful future free from persecution and religious strife.
This Locke, “the great Mr. Locke,” who taught mothers to immerse their tod-
dlers in ice water, urged young men away from frivolous pursuits, and di-
rected old ministers back to their Bibles, was relevant in ways unfathomable
today.8
The story of Locke in America is not, then, one of continuity or absence
but rather one of striking transformation. Variously idolized, marginalized,
embraced, and rejected, Locke has, since the early eighteenth century, im-
pacted every corner of American intellectual life. But his influence, his role
in the story, has changed substantially over time.
In the chapters that follow I chart these changes from 1700 until the
present day. I show that, over the course of this period, Americans trans-
formed Locke, his works, and his ideas in five interrelated ways. First and
most visibly, Locke went from being known primarily as the epistemologist-­
author of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding to being known
primarily as the political-­philosopher-­author of the Two Treatises of Govern­
ment. Second, and more importantly, Locke’s significance both narrowed
and diminished. Once an omnipresent influence in the daily lives of early
Americans, a model and guide for cultivation of the self through proper ac-
tion and education, Locke became a role-­player—­essential when the time
came to address certain topics, such as political institutions, but otherwise
irrelevant. Third, Americans moved away from thinking about Locke the
man, a historical figure whose shortcomings and celebrated qualities alike
were worthy of serious consideration, to invoking Locke’s name as an ad-
jective and an ism—­an ideological abstraction that could be used to invoke,
symbolize, or represent a variety of concepts: for example, “Lockean lib-
eralism.”9 Fourth, Americans began to claim Locke as their own. While
earlier Americans generally emphasized Locke’s Englishness, beginning in
the mid-­twentieth century, they came to represent Locke as fundamentally
American. Finally, and largely as a consequence of the other four changes,
Americans weaponized Locke, making him into an avatar of what seemed
to them uniquely and quintessentially American political ideals of individ-
ual liberty, property rights, and limited government. Locke was so central
to the new concept of an American Political Tradition that, by the 1950s, he
and his Second Treatise had become nothing less than “a massive national
cliché.”10
4 P R E FA C E

Locke’s American story is worth telling—­ and worth knowing—­ for

many reasons. It reveals and elucidates major transformations in American
intellectual life. It is as much about the major transformations in American
intellectual life over the past three hundred years as it is about Locke. For ex-
ample, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Locke helped Americans
address concerns about the moral and intellectual character of individuals
and their communities. He provided guidance for living virtuously, learn-
ing effectively, and improving both self and society. By the mid-­twentieth
century, Locke’s importance for the American public was no longer about
achieving virtue and understanding. Instead, Locke was important insofar
as the perceived influence of his political philosophy revealed something ex-
ceptional about American political institutions. No longer taken as a model
for how to live one’s life, Locke in the middle of the twentieth century was
deployed as a weapon of liberal democracy and capitalism in the ideologi-
cal battles of the Cold War. In short, Locke’s story reveals how Americans
have, over time, addressed what is arguably the central question of any
democratic-­republican society: how to ensure its (continued) flourishing.
The argument that follows places American intellectual life in conversa-
tion with processes of transatlantic cultural, political, and intellectual ex-
change among nations, organizations, and other groups that looked quite
different at my story’s start than at its end. From James Logan’s travails sell-
ing imported copies of Locke’s works in early-­eighteenth-­century Phila-
delphia to American reviews of Englishman Maurice Cranston’s 1957 John
Locke: A Biography, Locke’s American story demonstrates the extent to
which the scope of American intellectual history transgresses both national
and disciplinary boundaries. When, for example, nineteenth-­century schol-
ars and students of the historical and political sciences understood Locke’s
political philosophy as standing in opposition to their modern theories of
Staatswissenschaft, they did so as participants in a transatlantic conversa-
tion that extended from Cambridge, England, to Heidelberg, Germany, to
New York City. It is important to emphasize, however, that this book does
not provide a global reception history of Locke. Nor does it offer a compre-
hensive survey of Locke, his works, and his ideas in American thought and
culture over the last three hundred years. Rather, it seeks to capture who
both Locke the historical figure and “Locke” the symbolic representation of
certain ideas (and ideals) were for the widest possible variety of American
men and women—­ranging from journalists to judges, students to profes-
sors, private citizens to members of Congress.
This, then, is not a book about John Locke, the seventeenth-­century
 Preface 5

English philosopher, but rather a book about how Americans over time
have understood and made sense of him, his work, his ideas, and his rel-
evance.11 I present interpretations of Locke’s life, ideas, and works through
the eyes of my subjects—­not the lenses of modern scholars. What we know
or think about Locke is not always what earlier Americans knew or thought
about him. Nor is it how they would have conceptualized “Locke” in the
abstract. For example, observers before roughly 1960 knew—­or, rather,
thought they knew—­that Locke wrote his Two Treatises to justify the so-­
called Glorious Revolution of 1688 and thus frequently labeled him an apol-
ogist for the revolution. Today, we know that Locke wrote his Two Treatises
in the late 1670s or early 1680s, not in response to the events of 1688.12 It is
tempting to say that we are “right” and earlier Americans were “wrong,” but
doing so would lead to another misunderstanding—­the projection of our
present back onto their past. When it comes to Locke, humility seems sen-
sible. Even today, Locke’s authorship of and involvement in the creation of
another document, the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, is debated.13
And we still do not have complete or “objective” knowledge about his life,
writings, and thoughts. New writings by Locke are still being unearthed.
Thanks to the discovery and publication in 2019 of a new text weighing the
merits of extending toleration to Catholics, for example, we know a great
deal more today about Locke’s intellectual development vis-­à-­vis the ques-
tion of religious toleration than we did only a few years ago.14
While this is not a book about Locke the man, it will be helpful to know
a bit about him.15 Born in 1632 in Somerset, England, Locke lived during
some of the most tumultuous and transformative times in English history.
His seventy-­two years encompassed the English Civil War (1642–­51), the
Glorious Revolution (1688–­89), and the rapid growth of English coloniza-
tion in North America. He bore witness—­and contributed—­to transforma-
tions in science, medicine, and metaphysics. By the end of his life, Isaac
Newton’s Principia (1687) and its account of terrestrial gravity had replaced
the Aristotelian scholasticism that had dominated European centers of
learning for centuries. Locke was, as one historian has put it, “a child of the
Reformation and a progenitor of the Enlightenment.”16
Locke was a well-­educated man, known for his quick mind and sharp wit.
He studied, and later taught, at Christ Church, Oxford, where he found him-
self drawn to René Descartes and the natural philosophy of Robert Boyle
rather than the classical and scriptural texts that formed the foundation of the
scholastic tradition.17 A medical doctor by training, Locke in 1667 became
the personal physician, secretary, and confidant of Lord Ashley, later the Earl
6 P R E FA C E

Figure 0.1 John Greenhill, John Locke, 1672.

© National Portrait Gallery, London.

of Shaftesbury. A year later, in 1668, Locke was elected a fellow of the Royal
Society. Twice in exile (once in France from 1675 to 1679 and once in Hol-
land from 1683 to 1689), Locke was no stranger to church censorship and
absolute monarchy. The author of hundreds of essays, tracts, and letters, he
wrote to oppose political tyranny and religious persecution, and to free the
mind, body, and soul from the shackles of mysticism and skepticism. At the
same time, he condoned slavery, denied women full inclusion in civil society,
and, ultimately, excluded atheists and Catholics from his calls for toleration.18
Although popular with several female friends, including Lady Masham
(née Damaris Cudworth), Locke never married. Nor did he have children.
Accounts of his close friendships and love for rousing conversation and good
company have fascinated Locke’s biographers across the centuries; so too
have his many personal travails, including his lifelong struggle with asthma.
 Preface 7

Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689; title page

1690) showed readers that, born without innate ideas, they could think for
themselves and acquire knowledge about the world around them through
the use of their five senses. Ideas, Locke argued, were formed by sensory
perception and reflection. His Essay contains among the most important
early modern accounts of a philosophy of language. In Some Thoughts Con­
cerning Education (1693), Locke provided strategies for compassionate
childrearing and proposed plans for education in accordance with his un-
derstanding of how people gained knowledge. Baptized into the Church of
England and raised a Calvinist, he argued for (limited) toleration, freedom
of religious practice and conscience, and separation between church and
state in numerous writings, including A Letter Concerning Toleration (1685;
1689, trans. William Popple). And, as he explained in works such as The
Reasonableness of Christianity (1695), Locke saw Christianity as entirely rea­
sonable and, quite simply, good for mankind.
Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689; title page 1690) comprises,
as the title suggests, two essays. The first refuted Sir Robert Filmer’s theory
of the divine right of kings in his Patriarcha (1680). The second provided an
account of the origins and purpose of civil society and government. Born
free and equal in a state of nature in accordance with natural law, men,
Locke argued, join together to create a political society and system of gov-
ernment to ensure protection of their rights. He subsumed these rights—­
men’s “Lives, Liberties and Estates”—­under the term “Property.”19 Having
originated government through consent, those who create it can likewise
destroy it. Like several of Locke’s other writings, the Two Treatises re-
mained anonymous until after his death.20
No cloistered philosopher, Locke wrote in response to the real-­world
events of the seventeenth century. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than
in the impact English colonial endeavors in North America had on his life and
work. Early in his career, he was a secretary and adviser to the proprietors of
the English colony of Carolina. Decades later, in the 1690s, he served on the
Board of Trade, a vital instrument of imperial policy. Following his return from
exile in Holland in 1689, Locke was a high-­level civil servant in the English
government and played an important role in debates over coinage in the 1690s.
By the time he died in 1704, many of Locke’s works had made their first
appearance in England’s North American colonies. This New World was a
place the philosopher never visited, but it was a place about which he knew,
thought, and had read a great deal.21 For Locke, “in the beginning all the
World was America.”22
1
Locke’s Legacy in Early America

J ohn Locke’s debut in America was a minor disaster. In 1700,

William Penn, proprietor of the Pennsylvania colony, ordered
a shipment from the London booksellers Awnsham and John
Churchill.1 Among the 125 titles that arrived in Philadelphia,
then a provincial outpost on the west bank of the Delaware River,
John Locke was the author most represented; nearly a quarter of
the books were written by him.2 They included An Essay Con­
cerning Human Understanding, Some Thoughts Concerning Edu­
cation, Several Papers Relating to Money, Interest and Trade, &c.,
three letters on toleration, three essays on the reasonableness of
Christianity, three responses to criticism of the Essay, and the
Two Treatises of Government.3
Once the books arrived in Philadelphia, Penn’s agent and
secretary, James Logan, was tasked with their sale. Unfortunately
for Logan, however, buyers proved scarce. Two years later, he
reported to Penn that “many of ye Books” remained “unsold.”4
In 1706, he was forced to write the Churchills to “request [their]
further Patience” regarding payment for the books’ sale.5 After
nearly a decade, many of the books were still without buyers,
leaving Logan exasperated and Penn in debt.6 Locke’s story in
America, it seems, was off to an inauspicious start.
 Locke’s Legacy in Early America 9

But it was just beginning. Locke’s writings would soon be well known
throughout the North American colonies. Indeed, several—­especially his
Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Some Thoughts Concerning
Education—­would become some of the most important books in early Amer-
ica.7 What is more, eighteenth-­century men and women would come to
celebrate Locke, follow his example, and invoke his authority in ways quite
unimaginable to us today. The following chapter explains how and why this
came to be.

: : :
Who was Locke to early Americans? One answer is that Locke meant differ-
ent things to different people—­that engagement with Locke was multifac-
eted and diverse.8 Locke had something to say about practically everything,
and early Americans listened. Indeed, they used Locke and his writings to
think about issues relating to education, knowledge acquisition, religion,
money, civil government, childrearing, community improvement, old age,
and friendship—­to name just a few. Consequently, it would be possible to
write many different histories of Locke’s influence during this period. One
can imagine, for example, histories of Locke’s influence on currency de-
bates in Massachusetts in the 1730s, politics in Maryland in the 1740s, or
education in Pennsylvania in the 1750s.9
But focusing on the diversity of Americans’ engagement with Locke
obscures a more important truth—­that the ultimate source of Locke’s au-
thority in all of the aforementioned areas was the same: namely, his status
as the author of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, his reputation
as a man of good character, and his crucial role as a guide, model, and moral
exemplar—­an immediate and pervasive presence in people’s daily lives, who
taught them how to rear children, study scripture, and pursue a variety of
other activities related to improving both themselves and their communities.

: : :
In the early 1740s, South Carolinian Eliza Lucas was a tenacious, deter-
mined young woman. Tasked with managing her family’s expansive Wap-
poo Plantation and its enslaved residents when she was not yet seventeen
years old, Eliza quickly became an expert in cultivating both rice and, after
much experimentation, indigo. Afforded the luxury of a home library, she
woke up before five o’clock most mornings to read and study, a habit that
served her well. When she died in 1793, Eliza was remembered for her “un-
derstanding” and “uncommon strength of memory.”10
10 Chap ter One

These observations should not surprise us. Eliza, after all, knew her
Locke. In 1741, her friend, and eventual husband, Charles Pinckney, recom-
mended that she read An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Charles’s
suggestion proved timely. With Locke’s Essay in hand, Eliza embarked
on a period of dogged self-­reflection. After a particularly fun-­filled visit
to nearby Charleston—­“the Metropolis . . . a neat pretty place,” as she de-
scribed it—­Eliza found herself down in spirits, a change in mood she attrib-
uted to “that giddy gayety and want of reflection wch I contracted when in
town.” In search of answers that might explain and improve her sorry state
of mind, Eliza observed, “I was forced to consult Mr. Lock over and over to
see wherein personal Identity consisted and if I was the very same self.”11
From book 2, chapter 27, section 19 of the Essay, Eliza gleaned that “per­
sonal Identity consists, not in the Identity of Substance” but rather “in the
Identity of consciousness.”12 Consulting Locke on this matter made her confi-
dent of his relevance for further self-­improvement. “In truth,” she explained
to a correspondent, “I understand enough of him to be quite charmed.” “I
rec[k]on,” she continued, “it will take me five months reading before I have
done with him.”13
Charles and Eliza’s shared engagement with Locke’s Essay in the early
1740s is, in many respects, unremarkable. The Essay was, far and away,
Locke’s most popular and influential work in early America.14 And as Eliza’s
experience reveals, it made a deep impression on its readers. From the Es­
say, they learned that people were born without innate ideas and that they
acquired knowledge about themselves and the world around them from
a combination of sensation and reflection. They learned of the humbling
difficulties associated with putting their ideas into words—­that is, of the
shortcomings of language for conveying meaning. And they learned, to use
Locke’s own words, that people “are fitted for moral Knowledge, and natu­
ral Improvements” and that “Morality is the proper Science, and Business of
Mankind.”15
However many months she spent with the Essay, Eliza’s devotion to
Locke was only just beginning. Sometime around 1742, she read the sec-
ond part of Samuel Richardson’s popular epistolary novel Pamela, or Vir­
tue Rewarded, which endorsed—­explicitly, in over a hundred pages of
references—­Locke’s approach to pedagogy and childrearing.16 When she
first read Pamela, Eliza was unmarried with no children of her own, so it
is not surprising that aspects of Pamela’s apparent vanity made more of an
impression than the novel’s retelling of Locke’s emphasis on, for example,
the importance of teaching young children self-­sufficiency. Before long,
 Locke’s Legacy in Early America 11

however, Eliza seems to have decided that Locke’s educational recom-

mendations demanded not only careful investigation but also scrupulous
implementation.
In 1746, now married to the man who had introduced her to Locke, Eliza
gave birth to a baby boy. And when the time came to raise her son, Eliza
knew one thing for certain: she would “teach him according to Mr. Locks
method.”17 This method, explained in Locke’s popular Some Thoughts Con­
cerning Education and grounded in his theory of human understanding and
dismissal of long-­standing beliefs regarding the innate sinfulness of children,
transformed childrearing practices on both sides of the Atlantic.18 Locke’s
approach made—­or, at least, was intended to make—­learning how to read
and write more enjoyable. He pushed back against the “ordinary Road of the
Horn-­Book, Primer, Psalter, Testament, and Bible” in which learning was in-
centivized by a child’s fear of punishment. Instead, he advocated for making
learning seem “another sort of Play or Recreation.”19
Eliza was an eager and enthusiastic adopter of Locke’s recommenda-
tions. She “carefully studied” Some Thoughts Concerning Education and from
it concluded that it was best for her baby boy “to play him self into learning,”
as Locke advised.20 Unfortunately, however, she was missing one key piece
of the puzzle: the right sort of toy to facilitate this sort of learning-­through-­
play. Lacking options at home, but determined to do as Locke directed, she
dashed off a request to an English friend for an ivory ball with lettered sides
such as the philosopher described.21 By any measure, Eliza’s efforts to follow
Locke were successful. Before he was two years old, Charles Cotesworth
Pinckney—­later a Revolutionary leader, signer of the Constitution, and two-­
time presidential candidate—­was learning to read and spell, whether he liked
it or not, thanks to his mother and Locke.22

: : :
Not two years after John Locke died in Essex, England, Benjamin Franklin
was born in Boston, Massachusetts. A self-­described “bookish” boy, Frank-
lin first encountered Locke in the 1720s, when he read the Essay as a teenage
apprentice to his older brother, the Boston printer James Franklin.23 Per-
haps James had brought Locke’s Essay back with him from London, where
he had been working, or perhaps young Ben himself found it on the shelves
of a Boston bookseller.24
Locke’s Essay had an immediate and profound influence on Franklin.25
It formed the basis of his resolution, at age twenty, to reform his life accord-
ing to a plan “for regulating my future Conduct in Life,” which included
12 Chap ter One

commitments to be frugal, sincere, industrious, and honest.26 Several years

later, these resolutions became Franklin’s now-­famous “bold and arduous
Project of arriving at moral Perfection,” which included precepts along the
lines of “eat not to Dulness.”27 In his Essay, Locke emphasized the impor-
tance of tackling pain, unease, and unhappiness through action, especially
habitual action.28 Here and elsewhere, Locke set Franklin on the path of
cultivating—­or, at least, extolling the benefits of cultivating—­strong habits
of moderation, even self-­denial, to achieve virtue.29 It seems fitting then that
once he had established himself as a bookseller in Philadelphia, Franklin
sold copies of “Lock of Human Understanding”;30 that his Poor Richard’s Al­
manack was advertised as containing references to “Locke, the famous John,
Esq”;31 and that the catalog Franklin printed for the Library Company of
Philadelphia called attention to Locke’s Essay with the notation “esteemed
the best Book of Logick in the World.”32
More than just motivating Franklin’s personal pursuit of self-­responsibility,
however, Locke provided guidance on public pursuits as well. These in-
cluded, for example, his Philadelphia association, the Junto, founded in
1727. Franklin scoured Locke’s “Rules of a Society, which met once a Week
for their Improvement in useful Knowledge, and for the Promoting of Truth
and Christian Charity” for guidance on a proper format for the Junto. Like
Locke’s proposed society, the Junto met weekly on Friday evenings, and its
meetings were structured around debating and discussing questions of in-
terest. In sizing up prospective society members, Franklin required answers
to four questions:

1. Have you any particular disrespect to any present members? –­Answer.

I have not. 2. Do you sincerely declare that you love mankind in general;
of what profession or religion soever? –­Answ. I do. 3. Do you think any
person ought to be harmed in his body, name or goods, for mere specula-
tive opinions, or his external way of worship? –­Ans. No. 4. Do you love
truth for truth’s sake, and will you endeavour impartially to find and re-
ceive it yourself and communicate it to others? –­Answ. Yes.33

These queries mirrored Locke’s almost exactly.34

Following Locke, Franklin envisioned the Junto as a space for ensuring
the “mutual Improvement” of its members and their community through
charitable projects such as a volunteer fire station and a library.35 Rather
characteristically, Franklin did not acknowledge the source of his idea for
the Junto, but he was certainly familiar with “Rules of a Society.” It was, after
 Locke’s Legacy in Early America 13

all, part of Locke’s A Collection of Several Pieces, which Franklin donated to

the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1733.36
Franklin also turned to Locke for help while developing a plan to
educate young Philadelphians in accordance with the principles he had
employed during his own self-­education.37 In his Proposals Relating to the Edu­­
cation of Youth in Pensilvania (1749)—­a prospective outline of his vision for
the academy he established in 1751—­he identified “the great Mr. Locke,
who wrote a Treatise on Education, well known, and much esteemed, being
translated into most of the modern Languages of Europe” as one of his major
sources of inspiration.38 He also adopted many of the specific practices pro-
mulgated by Locke. For example, he recommended that students cultivate
their writing style by “writing Letters to each other, making Abstracts of
what they read; or writing the same Things in their own Words,” noting
that “this Mr. Locke recommends.”39 He also relied on Locke’s authority
to support his recommendations for specific curricular content, including
that students read Hugo Grotius and Samuel von Pufendorf, whose De Jure
naturali & gentium Locke regarded as “the best book” on society’s origins.40
And in a later discussion of the academy’s curriculum, he recommended
that students read Locke for themselves in their final year of study.41 Frank-
lin’s academy had a lasting impact on education in Philadelphia; it became
the Academy and College of Philadelphia in 1755 and was eventually incor-
porated into the University of Pennsylvania.
Locke, then, was clearly an important influence on Franklin throughout
his life. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Franklin was, in
many ways, an eighteenth-­century “Lockean.”42 Insofar as we wish to apply,
retrospectively, the adjective to Franklin, however, it would have little to
do with another retrospectively applied term—­“liberal”—­or with Franklin’s
donation of the Two Treatises to the Library Company of Philadelphia.43
And it would have rather more to do with his dedication to Locke’s Essay,
his invocation of Locke’s authority as author of Some Thoughts Concerning
Education, and his familiarity with the range of Locke’s writings on strate-
gies for self-­improvement. Locke provided Franklin with critical guidance
on matters of self-­cultivation, inspiring him to undertake certain personal
reforms in his youth and later to motivate others in his broader community
to do the same. For Franklin, Locke was, in other words, an exemplar, an
immediate presence across many areas of his life, not a narrowly construed
philosopher—­political or otherwise. In Locke, with his wide-­ranging inter-
ests and expansive expertise, Franklin doubtless saw some of himself—­and
some of the man he wanted to become.44 He was not alone.
14 Chap ter One

: : :
Before he became president of Harvard in the early 1770s, Samuel Locke
(no relation) wanted to be a minister. He also knew that this would take
hard work, industry, and careful study. Luckily for him, young Samuel had
another Locke by his side. More specifically, he had John Locke’s model and
method of keeping a commonplace book, which was widely recognized as
the “best” by the 1720s.45
As a young man like Samuel knew all too well, it could be downright
tedious to keep track of what one read—­not to mention what one thought
about it. Honed over decades of trial and error, Locke’s method for com-
monplacing, posthumously published as A New Method of Making Common-­
Place-­Books (1706), streamlined, simplified, and regimented this process.46
Specifically, Locke’s method entailed indexing entries on a grid, in cells,
based on an assessment of a reading’s most appropriate title or subject head,
using both the first letter and first vowel of the subject. Locke recommended

Figure 1.1 The index from John Locke’s popular method of keeping a commonplace book.
John Locke, A New Method of Making Common-­Place-­Books (London, 1706). EC65
L7934 706n, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
 Locke’s Legacy in Early America 15

using capital letters for the heads or titles and Latin for these as well as for
the index. One could, for example, record notes from a reading under the
title “EPISTOLA,” writing it in large letters in the margin of a page for notes
and then index this entry by writing the page number for these notes under
the first letter “E” and the first vowel “I” in the index. Locke’s approach
meant that someone like Samuel could create the index as he went, rather
than waiting until the notebook was full. But because the titles were not
written out fully in the index, the user had to accurately remember that he
had, for example, selected “EPISTOLA” as the appropriate categorization.
In contrast to more free-­form approaches, Locke’s demanded precision.
Samuel considered Locke his surest guide for reading with maximum
comprehension and retention. More than a tool for straight content reten-
tion, however, commonplacing was a key component of Samuel’s efforts to
make something of himself—­to cultivate his intellect and character.47 Fol-
lowing “Lock’s plan” allowed Samuel to follow the great Puritan minister
Cotton Mather’s “direction,” as Samuel recorded it, for aspiring ministers to
keep a commonplace book.48 Each and every time they sat alert (or fidget-
ing) at their desks, poised to read and study as Locke advised, young Ameri-
cans like Samuel experienced, firsthand, the authority of “that great Master
of Order Mr. Locke,” a man who had “above all things, loved Order.”49 That
their efforts did not always meet Locke’s exacting standards—­measured
margins! headings in Latin!—­says less about their shortcomings than about
the lengths to which they were willing to go to fulfill even a semblance of
Locke’s recommendations. Samuel, for example, though he did not adopt
Locke’s preferred Latin headings or margin formatting, followed Locke’s
instructions to keep the index to two pages and referred to his collection as
an Adversaria (from the Latin adversariorum methodus), just like Locke.50
Samuel was a diligent notetaker. Under the heading “Education, mine
at College,” for example, he wrote “see Locke on Education p[e]r totum”
along with a list of expenses he had incurred.51 He also referred to many
other works by Locke, including An Essay Concerning Human Understand­
ing, Two Treatises of Government, A Letter Concerning Toleration, and The
Reasonableness of Christianity. Samuel almost certainly got his Locke from
an edition of the popular three-­volume Works, which had recently, in 1751,
entered a fifth, and significantly expanded, edition.
Samuel’s example provides us with an opportunity to consider what
it would have been like to read Locke in the eighteenth century. With the
notable exception of the Essay and Some Thoughts Concerning Education,
which were widely available in stand-­alone editions, Locke’s writings were
 Figure 1.2 The index from Samuel Locke’s commonplace book on
John Locke’s method. Samuel Locke, Commonplace Book, 1755–­[1778?].
Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.
 Locke’s Legacy in Early America 17

most commonly encountered in multiwork editions, such as A Collection

of Several Pieces of Mr. John Locke (1720) and Locke’s three-­volume Works,
first published in 1714. For readers of these collections, simply finding any
given work would have required some effort. In the three-­volume Works,
for example, the Two Treatises were buried in the middle of volume 2, be-
tween three works on money and three letters on toleration. Consequently,
readers rarely encountered any single text in isolation. Every time they
opened a volume to read one of Locke’s writings, they would have paged
by, and perhaps lingered to peruse, a range of Locke’s other works. They
would also have encountered biographical sketches of Locke: for example,
Pierre Coste’s The Character of Mr. Locke, which accompanied A Collection
of Several Pieces of Mr. John Locke (1720), or an abstracted version of Jean
Le Clerc’s “Life of the Author,” first published in 1706, which appeared in
editions of Locke’s Works beginning in 1751.
From these accounts of Locke’s life, as well as those that appeared in
magazines and newspapers, readers learned a great deal about Locke’s ex-
emplary character and conduct.52 They learned, for example, of Locke’s
honesty, abstemiousness, and self-­discipline, as well as his skill at storytell-
ing, dislike of time wasting, and deep regard for basic civility.53 They en-
countered Locke as a man devoted to truth and order and as someone who
achieved “the respect of his inferiors, the esteem of his equals, the friend-
ship and confidence of the greatest quality.”54 And they learned how Locke
“instructed others by his own Conduct.”55
The experience of reading Locke in a collected volume has important
implications. The close and unavoidable juxtaposition of individual texts
with both other works by Locke and biographical accounts of the man
himself would have encouraged early Americans to read texts like the Two
Treatises holistically—­as works written by a real man of exemplary charac-
ter who had also written on a variety of other topics that mattered to them.

: : :
New York’s second newspaper, the New-­York Weekly Journal, first appeared
in November 1733 to galvanize opposition to the colony’s royal governor,
William Cosby. Printed and published by John Peter Zenger (who, in 1735,
was tried for seditious libel in one of the century’s most famous court cases),
the popular opposition-­party paper was the brainchild of a cohort of po-
litically minded New Yorkers that included James Alexander, Lewis Morris,
Lewis Morris Jr., William Smith, and Cadwallader Colden. Much to the displea­
sure of Cosby and his associates, they essentially “wrote every word of it.”56
18 Chap ter One

In the summer of 1734, the Journal printed a story designed to high-

light the superiority of men from the “Country” (i.e., those in line with the
Journal’s anti-­Cosby sentiments) over men of the “Town” (i.e., those with
Tory, pro-­Cosby sympathies). Though the story was attributed to a citizen
of New York, who went by the pseudonym “Paterculus,” we can assume that
it was written by one or more of Alexander et al. According to the story,
Paterculus goes out to Long Island to visit a friend whose many qualities—­
among them honesty, charity, and tolerance—­he venerates and whom he
extolls as being “as communicative as the Sun of its Beams” for his ability to
impart wisdom to others. Paterculus and his country friend are conversing
on the present “state of Affairs in this Province,” that is, the political situa-
tion under Governor Cosby, when the friend’s son appears and asks to speak
with his father. Excusing himself to counsel his wayward son—­whose time
in town has produced a host of financial and moral vices—­the host implores
his visitor to “entertain” himself “with the first Volumn of Mr. Locke’s Essay
on Humane Understanding, which then accidentally lay on the Table.”57
As Paterculus reads, his host listens to the circumstances of his son’s fail-
ures and—­with great fatherly affection—­provides him with several pieces
of advice along the lines of “keep a fair Book” and “let your home be the
Place where you are most to be found.”58 We are privy to their heartwarm-
ing exchange through a dialogue Paterculus reconstructs for his readers.
The presence of Locke’s Essay in the story is no accident. Rather, it serves
a crucial function. Retrospectively, it confirms the author’s earlier descrip-
tion of his friend’s sterling qualities and offers a partial explanation for them.
Prospectively, it foreshadows the ensuing conversation and ensures that
knowledge of the friend’s celebrated character remains in the reader’s mind
throughout. Like an artist selecting objects for a patron’s portrait, Paterculus
uses the physical presence of the Essay to symbolize the upstanding charac-
ter and conduct of his host, explain how he developed such exemplary quali-
ties, and, in so doing, increase the persuasive capacity of his story.
This story tells us a great deal about the position of Locke and his Essay
in early American intellectual life. In the first place, it clearly indicates that
the author himself knew the Essay well—­well enough to know that it was
an appropriate text to convey both good sense and good character, that it
appeared in two volumes, and that the first volume contained the chapters
most relevant to the points at hand. It is both tempting and plausible, more-
over, to interpret the conversation between the country gentleman and his
son as an allusion to Locke’s own well-­known writings on the qualities of
good parenting in Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Second, the story
 Locke’s Legacy in Early America 19

suggests that the author was far from alone in possessing this knowledge.
Symbolic deployment of the Essay would have made little sense unless a
substantial portion of the Journal’s readers could be counted on to under-
stand it. Third, the story tells us a good deal about what Locke meant to both
the author and his intended audience. In the story as told, the Essay is used
not as a demonstration of academic excellence or intellectual pedigree—­the
way a copy of Ulysses or Les mots et les choses lying on a twentieth-­century
table might have been. Rather, it is used as a symbol of upstanding charac-
ter. In so doing, it suggests that familiarity with Locke and his Essay was
taken to be an indication not of erudition but rather of moral authority.
The Journal’s story—­more parable than reporting—­makes sense only in
a world where recognition of Locke’s authority was so widely dispersed and
deeply held that a reference to his Essay could be used to demonstrate a
man’s good character. It makes sense only in a world where the reputation
and authority of Locke, as author of the Essay, can be taken for granted and
assumed—­even in the pages of a popular, rabble-­rousing newspaper.
Eighteenth-­century America was such a world. Across the first part of
the eighteenth century, Locke’s reputation and authority developed in tan-
dem with Americans’ deep familiarity with—­if not wholesale acceptance
of—­his work on the nature and limits of human understanding. Like their
British counterparts, American commentators unfailingly concurred with
the observation of Locke’s friend and translator, the seventeenth-­century
theologian Jean Le Clerc, that the Essay was the “work, which has made
[Locke’s] name immortal.”59 When, for example, many decades after his tra-
vails selling Penn’s shipment of books, James Logan probed Locke’s Essay
and noted a point of disagreement between the Englishman and himself, he
knew one thing for certain: that in the colonies of the 1730s, Locke’s “Repu-
tation and Authority” were “so firmly established . . . that what ever carries
an appearance of inconsistency with his Doctrine [as presented in the Essay]
will scarce fail of meeting with strong prejudices against its Reception.”60

: : :
By the 1730s, young men teaching or studying at a college in Britain’s North
American colonies would have immediately associated Locke with his Es­
say and its philosophy of human understanding, especially its central claims
regarding the acquisition and retention of ideas and knowledge and the rela-
tionship between these ideas and the words people used to express them.61
But the process by which Locke’s Essay became a curricular cornerstone
was not without contestation.
20 Chap ter One

At the turn of the eighteenth century, students at Harvard, America’s

first colonial college, founded in 1636, pursued a fixed curriculum in sub-
jects such as rhetoric and grammar that were part of a deep scholastic tra-
dition.62 Harvard’s curriculum also mandated the study of logic, and it is
here that Locke first appeared.63 At the time, Harvard’s logic curriculum
was grounded in the teaching of philosopher and mathematician René Des-
cartes (1596–­1650).64 In contrast to earlier Aristotelian and Ramist forms
of logic, Cartesian logic emphasized the acquisition of knowledge through
introspection rather than the application of abstract external formulas such
as the three-­part syllogism. Most relevantly, Descartes argued that there
were certain truths lodged in the mind that existed a priori or apart from
external experiences. Like Descartes, Locke argued that substances could
be divided into two categories: mind and matter. In stark contrast, how-
ever, he gave no credence to innate principles, ideas, or notions. According
to Locke, arguments that there were “certain innate Principles” or “some
primary Notions . . . Characters, as it were stamped upon the Mind of Man,
which the Soul receives in its very first Being” were demonstrably false.65
All knowledge came from a combination of sensation (that is, experiencing
the physical, material world using the five senses) and reflection (an internal
process, based on the active power of the mind).
The popularity of Cartesian logic was one of the obstacles that compli-
cated the early reception of Locke’s Essay at Harvard. Two others related to
religion and mere expediency. In the first place, the theological implications
of Locke’s text were problematic. Locke’s arguments against the existence of
innate ideas, for example, extended to the knowledge of God—­which he saw
as certain, but not innate—­and thus sat uneasily alongside the theological
commitments of the college’s Puritan ministers.66 As Locke put it in book I
of the Essay, “Though the knowledge of a GOD, be the most natural discov-
ery of humane Reason, yet the Idea of him, is not innate.”67 Furthermore, in
accordance with his belief that the mind was a tabula rasa—­a “white Paper,
void of all Characters, without any Ideas”—­the English philosopher rejected
the possibility of original sin, a key tenet of Puritan belief.68
In the years to come, these arguments would become the very back-
bone of Locke’s lasting appeal and smooth integration into a seculariz-
ing American society. But at the time, they did his reputation among the
Harvard Puritan elite no favors. Furthermore, many of Harvard’s leading
theologians were followers of the philosopher’s ardent critics back in Eng-
land. For example, during his tenure as Harvard’s president between 1708
and 1724, John Leverett was immersed in works by the English reverend
 Locke’s Legacy in Early America 21

William Sherlock, dean of St. Paul’s.69 In 1696–­97, Sherlock had used his
pulpit to denounce Locke’s arguments against the existence of innate ideas
and attack the Essay for espousing atheism. Sherlock’s thorough rejection of
Locke was published in London in 1704 as part of A Discourse concerning the
Happiness of Good Men, and the Punishment of the Wicked, in the Next World.
Challenging Locke, Sherlock made the case for “inbred Knowledge” in the
soul, explaining “that the Soul of Man . . . is not a Rasa Tabula, without any
Notions or Ideas of Truth imprinted on it; but that it has its most natural
and perfect Knowledge from within.”70 Locke, who died only a few months
later, never found time to respond to Sherlock as he had to Edward Stilling-
fleet, the bishop of Worcester.71 For readers such as Leverett, it probably
seemed providential that Sherlock got the last word.
The final obstacle that faced Locke’s Essay at Harvard was more mun-
dane. In short, the text was long and unwieldy. What had started out as a
single page of notes, sparked by a conversation among friends, ballooned
over the years into four books and roughly 200,000 words.72 It took dedica-
tion to read—­much less teach—­the Essay in its entirety. Accordingly, it gen-
erally appeared in more digestible abridgments and abstracts.73 In fact, the
Essay appeared in abridged form (in French) before its full publication. And
it seems likely that Harvard faculty and students first encountered Locke
through the periodical The Young Students Library, containing Extracts and
Abridgments of the Most Valuable Books Printed in England and in the Foreign
Journals (1692).74 John Dunton, the London bookseller who published The
Young Students Library, had visited Harvard in 1686 and had connections in
Cambridge that may have helped him circulate his work there.75 The Young
Students Library was present in Harvard’s first library catalog of 1723, two
years before any unabridged version of Locke’s writings.76
If at first Locke could be brushed aside by those deeply enmeshed in stud-
ies of Cartesian logic or rejected by those swayed by his theologian critics,
this was not the case for long. At Harvard, Locke’s Essay was read and taught
by individual tutors decades before the faculty voted in 1743 to include it as
part of the formal curriculum.77 And when, in the 1750s, faculty began shift-
ing Locke from his place in the logic curriculum to that of metaphysics—­that
is, the study of the limits and nature of human understanding more broadly—­
students were still required to confront Locke’s most important claims. In
1755, for instance, degree candidates were examined on the proposition that
“non dantur Ideae innatae”—­there are no innate ideas.78
Locke’s first appearance at Yale was also in the logic curriculum.79 Be-
ginning in the late 1710s, his work was taught together with Isaac Newton’s
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spake beseechingly and passionately as if to that other youth, and
implored him to break not the heart of a poor simple shepherdess
who was willing to kiss his feet.
Neither the father of poor Amy nor Walter Harden had known
before that she had ever seen young George Elliot—but they soon
understood, from the innocent distraction of her speech, that the
noble boy had left pure the Lily he loved, and Walter said that it
belonged not to that line ever to enjure the helpless. Many a pang it
gave him, no doubt, to think that his Amy’s heart, which all his life-
long tenderness could not win, had yielded itself up in tumultuous
joy to one—two—three meetings of an hour, or perhaps only a few
minutes, with one removed so high and so far from her humble life
and all its concerns. These were cold, sickening pangs of humiliation
and jealousy, that might, in a less generous nature, have crushed all
love. But it was not so with him; and cheerfully would Walter Harden
have taken the burning fever into his own veins, so that it could have
been removed from hers—cheerfully would he have laid down his
own manly head on that pillow, so that Amy could have lifted up her
long raven tresses, now often miserably dishevelled in her raving,
and, braiding them once more, walk out well and happy into the
sunshine of the beautiful day, rendered more beautiful still by her
presence. Hard would it have been to have resigned her bosom to any
human touch; but hideous seemed it beyond all thought to resign it
to the touch of death. Let heaven but avert that doom, and his
affectionate soul felt that it could be satisfied.
Out of a long deep trance-like sleep Amy at last awoke, and her
eyes fell upon the face of Walter Harden. She regarded long and
earnestly its pitying and solemn expression, then pressed her hand to
her forehead and wept. “Is my father dead and buried—and did he
die of grief and shame for his Amy? Oh! that needed not have been,
for I am innocent. Neither, Walter, have I broken, nor will I ever
break, my promise unto thee. I remember it well—by the Bible—and
yon setting sun. But I am weak and faint. Oh! tell me, Walter! all that
has happened! Have I been ill—for hours—or for days—or weeks—or
months? For that I know not,—so wild and so strange, so sad and so
sorrowful, so miserable and so wretched, have been my many
thousand dreams!”
 There was no concealment and no disguise. Amy was kindly and
tenderly told by her father and her brother all that she had uttered,
as far as they understood it, during her illness. Nor had the innocent
creature anything more to tell. Her soul was after the fever calm,
quiet, and happy. The form, voice, and shape of that beautiful youth
were to her little more now than the words and the sights of a dream.
Sickness and decay had brought her spirit back to all the humble and
tranquil thoughts and feelings of her lowly life. In the woods, and
among the hills, that bright and noble being had for a time touched
her senses, her heart, her soul, and her imagination. All was new,
strange, stirring, overwhelming, irresistible, and paradise to her
spirit. But it was gone; and might it stay away for ever: so she prayed,
as her kind brother lifted up her head with his gentle hand, and laid
it down as gently on the pillow he had smoothed. “Walter! I will be
your wife! for thee my affection is calm and deep,—but that other—
oh! that was only a passing dream!” Walter leaned over her, and
kissed her pale lips. “Yes! Walter,” she continued, “I once promised
to marry none other, but now I promise to marry thee; if indeed God
will forgive me for such words, lying as I am, perhaps, on my
deathbed. I utter them to make you happy. If I live, life will be dear
to me only for thy sake; if I die, walk thou along with my father at the
coffin’s head, and lay thine Amy in the mould. I am the Lily of
Liddisdale,—you know that was once the vain creature’s name!—and
white, pale, and withered enough indeed is, I trow, the poor Lily
now!”
Walter Harden heard her affectionate words with a deep delight,
but he determined in his soul not to bind Amy down to these
promises, sacred and fervent as they were, if, on her complete
recovery, he discovered that they originated in gratitude, and not in
love. From pure and disinterested devotion of spirit did he watch the
progress of her recovery, nor did he ever allude to young Elliot but in
terms of respect and admiration. Amy had expressed her surprise
that he had never come to inquire how she was during her illness,
and added with a sigh, “Love at first sight cannot be thought to last
long. Yet surely he would have wept to hear that I was dead.” Walter
then told her that he had been hurried away to France the very day
after she had seen him, to attend the deathbed of his father, and had
not yet returned to Scotland; but that the ladies of the Priory had
sent a messenger to know how she was every day, and that to their
kindness were owing many of the conveniences she had enjoyed.
Poor Amy was glad to hear that she had no reason to think the noble
boy would have neglected her in her illness; and she could not but
look with pride upon her lover, who was not afraid to vindicate the
character of one who, she had confessed, had been but too dear to
her only a few weeks ago. This generosity and manly confidence on
the part of her cousin quite won and subdued her heart, and Walter
Harden never approached her now without awakening in her bosom
something of that delightful agitation and troubled joy which her
simple heart had first suffered in the presence of her young, noble
lover. Amy was in love with Walter almost as much as he was with
her, and the names of brother and sister, pleasant as they had ever
been, were now laid aside.
Amy Gordon rose from her sickbed, and even as the flower whose
name she bore, did she again lift up her drooping head beneath the
dews and the sunshine. Again did she go to the hillside, and sit and
sing beside her flock. But Walter Harden was oftener with her than
before, and ere the harvest moon should hang her mild, clear,
unhaloed orb over the late reapers on the upland grain-fields, had
Amy promised that she would become his wife. She saw him now in
his own natural light—the best, the most intelligent, the most
industrious, and the handsomest shepherd over all the hills; and
when it was known that there was to be a marriage between Walter
Harden and Amy Gordon, none felt surprised, although some,
sighing, said it was seldom, indeed, that fortune so allowed those to
wed whom nature had united.
The Lily of Liddisdale was now bright and beautiful as ever, and
was returning homewards by herself from the far-off hills during one
rich golden sunset, when, in a dark hollow, she heard the sound of
horses’ feet, and in an instant young George Elliot was at her side.
Amy’s dream was over—and she looked on the beautiful youth with
an unquaking heart. “I have been far away, Amy,—across the seas.
My father—you may have heard of it—was ill, and I attended his bed.
I loved him, Amy—I loved my father—but he is dead!” and here the
noble youth’s tears fell fast. “Nothing now but the world’s laugh
prevents me making you my wife—yes, my wife, sweetest Lily; and
what care I for the world? for thou art both earth and heaven to me.
 The impetuous, ardent, and impassioned boy scarcely looked in
Amy’s face; he remembered her confusion, her fears, her sighs, her
tears, his half-permitted kisses, his faintly repelled embraces, and all
his suffered endearments of brow, lip, and cheek, in that solitary dell;
so with a powerful arm he lifted her upon another steed, which, till
now, she had scarcely observed; other horsemen seemed to the
frightened, and speechless, and motionless maiden to be near; and
away they went over the smooth turf like the wind, till her eyes were
blind with the rapid flight, and her head dizzy. She heard kind words
whispering in her ear; but Amy, since that fever, had never been so
strong as before, and her high-blooded palfrey was now carrying her
fleetly away over hill and hollow in a swoon.
At last she seemed to be falling down from a height, but softly, as if
borne on the wings of the air; and as her feet touched the ground, she
knew that young Elliot had taken her from that fleet courser, and,
looking up, she saw that she was in a wood of old shadowy trees of
gigantic size, perfectly still, and far away from all known dwellings
both on hill and plain. But a cottage was before her, and she and
young Elliot were on the green in its front. It was thickly covered
with honeysuckle and moss-roses that hung their beautiful full-
blown shining lamps high as the thatched roof; and Amy’s soul
sickened at the still, secluded, lovely, and lonely sight. “This shall be
our bridal abode,” whispered her lover into her ear, with panting
breath. “Fear me not—distrust me not; I am not base, but my love to
thee is tender and true. Soon shall we be married—ay, this very
evening must thou be mine; and may the hand that now clasps thy
sweet waist wither, and the tongue that woos thee be palsied, if ever I
cease to love thee as my Amy—my Lily—my wedded wife!”
The wearied and half-fainting maiden could as yet make no reply.
The dream that she had believed was gone for ever now brightened
upon her in the intense light of reality, and it was in her power to
become the wife of him for whom she had, in the innocence and
simplicity of her nature, once felt a consuming passion that had
brought her to the brink of the grave. His warm breath was on her
bosom; words charged with bewitching persuasion went thrilling
through her heartstrings; and if she had any pride (and what human
heart has it not?) it might well mingle now with love, and impel her
into the embrace that was now open to clasp her close to a burning
heart.
A stately and beautiful lady came smiling from the cottage door,
and Amy knew that it was the sister of Elliot, and kneeled down
before her. Last time the shepherdess had seen that lady, it was
when, with a fearful step, she took her baskets into the hall, and
blushing, scarcely lifted up her eyes, when she and her high-born
sisters deigned to commend her workmanship, and whisper to each
other that the Lily of Liddisdale deserved her name. “Amy,” said she,
with a gentle voice, as she took her hand, “Amy Gordon! my brother
loves you; and he has won me to acknowledge you as my sister. I can
deny my brother nothing; and his grief has brought low the pride—
perhaps the foolish pride—of my heart. Will you marry him, Amy?
Will you, the daughter of a poor shepherd, marry the young heir of
the Priory, and the descendant, Amy, of a noble race? Amy, I see that
thou art beautiful; I know that thou art good; may God and my
mother forgive me this, but my sister must thou be; behold my
brother is at his shepherdess’s feet!”
Amy Gordon had now nothing to fear. That sweet, young, pure,
noble lady was her friend; and she felt persuaded now that in good
truth young Elliot wished to make her his wife. Might she indeed live
the Lady of the Priory—be a sister to these beautiful creatures—dwell
among those ancient woods, and all those spacious lawns and richest
gardens; and might she be, not in a dream, but in living reality, the
wife of him on whose bosom her heart had died with joy in that
lonely dell, and love him and yield him her love even unto the very
hour till she was dead? Such changes of estate had been long ago,
and sung of in many a ballad; and was she to be the one maiden of
millions, the one born in hundreds of years, to whom this blessed lot
was to befall? But these thoughts passed on and away like sun-rays
upon a stream; the cloud, not a dark one, of reality returned over her.
She thought of Walter Harden, and in an instant her soul was fixed;
nor from that instant could it be shaken by terror or by love, by the
countenance of death, or the countenance, far more powerful than of
death—that of the youth before her, pale and flushed alternately with
the fluctuations of many passions.
Amy felt in her soul the collected voice, as it were, of many happy
and humble years among her hills, and that told her not to forsake
her own natural life. The flower that lived happily and beautifully in
its own secluded nook, by the side of the lonely tarn or torrent, might
lose much both of its fragrance and its lustre, when transplanted into
a richer soil and more sheltered bed. Could she forget for ever her
father’s ingle—the earthen floor—its simple furniture of day and
night? Could she forget all the familiar places round about the hut
where she was born? And if she left them all, and was taken up even
in the arms of love into another sphere of life, would not that be the
same, or worse than to forget them, and would it not be sacrilege to
the holiness of the many Sabbath nights on which she had sat at her
widowed father’s knees? Yet might such thoughts have been
destroyed in her beating heart by the whispered music of young
Elliot’s eloquent and impassioned voice. But Walter Harden, though
ignorant of her present jeopardy, seemed to stand before her, and
she remembered his face when he sat beside her dying bed, his
prayers over her when he thought she slept, and their oaths of
fidelity mutually sworn before the great God.
“Will you, my noble and honoured master, suffer me, all unworthy
as I am to be yours, to leave your bosom? Sir, I am too miserable
about you, to pretend to feel any offence, because you will not let me
go. I might well be proud of your love, since, indeed, it happens so
that you do love me; but let me kneel down at your beautiful sister’s
feet, for to her I may be able to speak—to you I feel that it may not
be, for humble am I, although unfortunately I have found favour in
your eyes.”
The agitated youth released Amy from his arms, and she flung
herself down upon her knees before that lovely lady.
“Lady! hear me speak—a simple uneducated girl of the hills, and
tell me if you would wish to hear me break an oath sworn upon the
Bible, and so to lose my immortal soul? So have I sworn to be the
wife of Walter Harden—the wife of a poor shepherd; and, lady, may I
be on the left hand of God at the great judgment-day, if ever I be
forsworn. I love Walter Harden. Do you counsel me to break his
kind, faithful heart? Oh, sir—my noble young master! how dare a
creature such as I speak so freely to your beautiful sister? how dare I
keep my eyes open when you are at your servant’s feet? Oh, sir, had I
been born a lady, I would have lived—died for you—gone with you all
over the world—all over the sea, and all the islands of the sea. I
would have sighed, wept, and pined away, till I had won your love,
for your love would have been a blessed thing—that do I well know,
from the few moments you stooped to let your heart beat against the
bosom of a low-born shepherdess. Even now, dearly as I love Walter
Harden, fain would I lay me down and die upon this daisied green,
and be buried beneath it, rather than that poor Amy Gordon should
affect the soul of her young master thus; for never saw I, and never
can I again see, a youth so beautiful, so winning, so overwhelming to
a maiden’s heart, as he before whom I now implore permission to
grovel in the dust. Send me away—spurn me from you—let me crawl
away out of your presence—I can find my way back to my father’s
house.”
It might have been a trying thing to the pride of this high-minded
and high-born youth, to be refused in marriage by the daughter of
one of his poorest shepherds; so would it have been had he loved
less; but all pride was extinguished, and so seemed for ever and ever
the light of this world’s happiness. To plead further he felt was in
vain. Her soul had been given to another, and the seal of an oath set
upon it, never to be broken but by the hand of death. So he lifted her
up in his arms, kissed her madly a hundred times, cheek, brow, neck,
and bosom, and then rushed into the woods. Amy followed him with
her streaming eyes, and then turned again towards the beautiful
lady, who was sobbing audibly for her brother’s sake.
“Oh! weep not, lady! that I, poor Amy Gordon, have refused to
become the wife of your noble brother. The time will come, and soon
too, when he and you, and your fair sisters and your stately mother,
will all be thankful that I yielded not to entreaties that would then
have brought disgrace upon your house! Never—never would your
mother have forgiven you; and as for me, would not she have wished
me dead and buried rather than the bride of her only and darling
son? You know that, simple and innocent as I am, I now speak but
the truth; and how, then, could your noble brother have continued to
love me, who had brought dishonour, and disagreement, and
distraction, among those who are now all so dear to one another? O
yes—yes, he would soon have hated poor Amy Gordon, and, without
any blame, perhaps broken my heart, or sent me away from the
Priory back to my father’s hut. Blessed be God, that all this evil has
not been wrought by me! All—all will soon be as before.”
 She to whom Amy thus fervently spoke felt that her words were
not wholly without truth. Nor could she help admiring the noble,
heroic, and virtuous conduct of this poor shepherdess, whom all this
world’s temptations would have failed to lure from the right path.
Before this meeting she had thought of Amy as far her inferior
indeed, and it was long before her proper pride had yielded to the
love of her brother, whose passion she feared might otherwise have
led to some horrible catastrophe. Now that he had fled from them in
distraction, this terror again possessed her, and she whispered it to
the pale, trembling shepherdess.
“Follow him—follow him, gentle lady, into the wood; lose not a
moment; call upon him by name, and that sweet voice must bring
him back. But fear not, he is too good to do evil; fear not, receive my
blessing, and let me return to my father’s hut; it is but a few miles,
and that distance is nothing to one who has lived all her life among
the hills. My poor father will think I have died in some solitary
place.”
The lady wept to think that she, whom she had been willing to
receive as her sister, should return all by herself so many miles at
night to a lonely hut. But her soul was sick with fear for her brother;
so she took from her shoulders a long rich Indian silk scarf of
gorgeous colours, and throwing it over Amy’s figure, said, “Fair
creature and good, keep this for my sake; and now, farewell!” She
gazed on the Lily for a moment in delighted wonder at her graceful
beauty, as she bent on one knee, enrobed in that unwonted garb, and
then, rising up, gathered the flowing drapery around her, and
disappeared.
“God, in His infinite mercy, be praised!” cried Walter Harden, as
he and the old man, who had been seeking Amy for hours all over the
hills, saw the Lily gliding towards them up a little narrow dell,
covered from head to foot with the splendid raiment that shone in a
soft shower of moonlight. Joy and astonishment for a while held
them speechless, but they soon knew all that had happened; and
Walter Harden lifted her up in his arms and carried her home,
exhausted now and faint with fatigue and trepidation, as if she were
but a lamb rescued from a snow-wreath.
Next moon was that which the reapers love, and before it had
waned Amy slept in the bosom of her husband, Walter Harden. Years
passed on, and other flowers beside the Lily of Liddisdale were
blooming in his house. One summer evening, when the shepherd, his
fair wife, and their children were sitting together on the green before
the door, enjoying probably the sight and the noise of the imps much
more then the murmurs of the sylvan Liddal, which perhaps they did
not hear, a gay cavalcade rode up to the cottage, and a noble-looking
young man, dismounting from his horse, and gently assisting a
beautiful lady to do the same, walked up to her whom he had known
only by a name now almost forgotten, and with a beaming smile said,
“Fair Lily of Liddisdale, this is my wife, the lady of the Priory; come—
it is hard to say which of you should bear off the bell.” Amy rose from
her seat with an air graceful as ever, but something more matronly
than that of Elliot’s younger bride; and while these two fair creatures
beheld each other with mutual admiration, their husbands stood
there equally happy, and equally proud—George Elliot of the Priory,
and Walter Harden of the Glenfoot.
 THE UNLUCKY PRESENT.

By Robert Chambers, LL.D.

A Lanarkshire minister (who died within the present century) was

one of those unhappy persons who, to use the words of a well-known
Scottish adage, “can never see any green cheese but their een reels.”
He was extremely covetous, and that not only of nice articles of food,
but of many other things which do not generally excite the cupidity
of the human heart. The following story is in corroboration of this
assertion. Being on a visit one day at the house of one of his
parishioners, a poor, lonely widow, living in a moorland part of the
parish, Mr L—— became fascinated by the charms of a little cast-iron
pot, which happened at the time to be lying on the hearth, full of
potatoes for the poor woman’s dinner, and that of her children. He
had never in his life seen such a nice little pot. It was a perfect
conceit of a thing. It was a gem. No pot on earth could match it in
symmetry. It was an object altogether perfectly lovely.
“Dear sake! minister,” said the widow, quite overpowered by the
reverend man’s commendations of her pot; “if ye like the pot sae
weel as a’ that, I beg ye’ll let me send it to the manse. It’s a kind o’
orra pot wi’ us; for we’ve a bigger ane, that we use oftener, and that’s
mair convenient every way for us. Sae ye’ll just tak a present o’t. I’ll
send it ower the morn wi’ Jamie, when he gangs to the schule.”
“Oh,” said the minister, “I can by no means permit you to be at so
much trouble. Since you are so good as to give me the pot, I’ll just
carry it home with me in my hand. I’m so much taken with it, indeed,
that I would really prefer carrying it myself.”
After much altercation between the minister and the widow, on
this delicate point of politeness, it was agreed that he should carry
home the pot himself.
Off, then, he trudged, bearing this curious little culinary article
alternately in his hand and under his arm, as seemed most
convenient to him. Unfortunately, the day was warm, the way long,
and the minister fat; so that he became heartily tired of his burden
before he had got half-way home. Under these distressing
circumstances, it struck him that if, instead of carrying the pot
awkwardly at one side of his person, he were to carry it on his head,
the burden would be greatly lightened; the principles of natural
philosophy, which he had learned at college, informing him, that
when a load presses directly and immediately upon any object, it is
far less onerous than when it hangs at the remote end of a lever.
Accordingly, doffing his hat, which he resolved to carry home in his
hand, and having applied his handkerchief to his brow, he clapped
the pot in inverted fashion upon his head, where, as the reader may
suppose, it figured much like Mambrino’s helmet upon the crazed
capital of Don Quixote, only a great deal more magnificent in shape
and dimensions. There was at first much relief and much comfort in
this new mode of carrying the pot; but mark the result. The
unfortunate minister having taken a by-path to escape observation,
found himself, when still a good way from home, under the necessity
of leaping over a ditch, which intercepted him in passing from one
field to another. He jumped; but surely no jump was ever taken so
completely in, or, at least, into, the dark as this. The concussion
given to his person in descending, caused the helmet to become a
hood: the pot slipped down over his face, and resting with its rim
upon his neck, stuck fast there; enclosing his whole head as
completely as ever that of a new-born child was enclosed by the filmy
bag with which nature, as an indication of future good fortune,
sometimes invests the noddles of her favourite offspring. What was
worst of all, the nose, which had permitted the pot to slip down over
it, withstood every desperate attempt on the part of its proprietor to
make it slip back again; the contracted part or neck of the patera
being of such a peculiar formation as to cling fast to the base of the
nose, although it found no difficulty in gliding along its hypothenuse.
Was ever minister in a worse plight? Was there ever contretemps so
unlucky? Did ever any man—did ever any minister—so effectually
hoodwink himself, or so thoroughly shut his eyes to the plain light of
nature? What was to be done? The place was lonely; the way difficult
and dangerous; human relief was remote, almost beyond reach. It
was impossible even to cry for help. Or, if a cry could be uttered, it
might reach in deafening reverberation the ear of the utterer; but it
would not travel twelve inches farther in any direction. To add to the
distresses of the case, the unhappy sufferer soon found great
difficulty in breathing. What with the heat occasioned by the beating
of the sun on the metal, and what with the frequent return of the
same heated air to his lungs, he was in the utmost danger of
suffocation. Everything considered, it seemed likely that, if he did
not chance to be relieved by some accidental wayfarer, there would
soon be Death in the Pot.
The instinctive love of life, however, is omni-prevalent: and even
very stupid people have been found when put to the push by strong
and imminent peril, to exhibit a degree of presence of mind, and
exert a degree of energy, far above what might have been expected
from them, or what they have ever been known to exhibit or exert
under ordinary circumstances. So it was with the pot-ensconced
minister of C——. Pressed by the urgency of his distresses, he
fortunately recollected that there was a smith’s shop at the distance
of about a mile across the fields, where, if he could reach it before the
period of suffocation, he might possibly find relief. Deprived of his
eyesight, he could act only as a man of feeling, and went on as
cautiously as he could, with his hat in his hand. Half crawling, half
sliding, over ridge and furrow, ditch and hedge, somewhat like Satan
floundering over chaos, the unhappy minister travelled, with all
possible speed, as nearly as he could guess in the direction of the
place of refuge. I leave it to the reader to conceive the surprise, the
mirth, the infinite amusement of the smith and all the hangers-on of
the “smiddy,” when, at length, torn and worn, faint and exhausted,
blind and breathless, the unfortunate man arrived at the place, and
let them know (rather by signs than by words) the circumstances of
his case. In the words of an old Scottish song,
Out cam the gudeman, and high he shouted;
Out cam the gudewife, and low she louted;
And a’ the town-neighbours were gathered about it;
And there was he, I trow!

The merriment of the company, however, soon gave way to

considerations of humanity. Ludicrous as was the minister, with such
an object where his head should have been, and with the feet of the
pot pointing upwards like the horns of the great Enemy, it was,
nevertheless, necessary that he should be speedily restored to his
ordinary condition, if it were for no other reason than that he might
continue to live. He was accordingly, at his own request, led into the
smithy, multitudes flocking around to tender him their kindest
offices, or to witness the process of his release; and having laid down
his head upon the anvil, the smith lost no time in seizing and poising
his goodly forehammer.
“Will I come sair on, minister?” exclaimed the considerate man of
iron in at the brink of the pot.
“As sair as ye like,” was the minister’s answer; “better a chap i’ the
chafts than dying for want of breath.”
Thus permitted, the man let fall a hard blow, which fortunately
broke the pot in pieces without hurting the head which it enclosed, as
the cook-maid breaks the shell of the lobster without bruising the
delicate food within. A few minutes of the clear air, and a glass from
the gudewife’s bottle, restored the unfortunate man of prayer; but
assuredly the incident is one which will long live in the memory of
the parishioners.—Edinburgh Literary Journal.
 THE SUTOR OF SELKIRK:
A REMARKABLY TRUE STORY.

By one of the Authors of “The Odd Volume.”

Once upon a time, there lived in Selkirk a shoemaker, by name

Rabbie Heckspeckle, who was celebrated both for dexterity in his
trade, and for some other qualifications of a less profitable nature.
Rabbie was a thin, meagre-looking personage, with lank black hair, a
cadaverous countenance, and a long, flexible, secret-smelling nose.
In short, he was the Paul Pry of the town. Not an old wife in the
parish could buy a new scarlet rokelay without Rabbie knowing
within a groat of the cost; the doctor could not dine with the minister
but Rabbie could tell whether sheep’s-head or haggis formed the
staple commodity of the repast; and it was even said that he was
acquainted with the grunt of every sow, and the cackle of every
individual hen, in his neighbourhood; but this wants confirmation.
His wife, Bridget, endeavoured to confine his excursive fancy, and to
chain him down to his awl, reminding him it was all they had to
depend on; but her interference met with exactly that degree of
attention which husbands usually bestow on the advice tendered by
their better halves—that is to say, Rabbie informed her that she knew
nothing of the matter, that her understanding required stretching,
and finally, that if she presumed to meddle in his affairs, he would be
under the disagreeable necessity of giving her a topdressing.
To secure the necessary leisure for his researches, Rabbie was in
the habit of rising to his work long before the dawn; and he was one
morning busily engaged putting the finishing stitches to a pair of
shoes for the exciseman, when the door of his dwelling, which he
thought was carefully fastened, was suddenly opened, and a tall
figure, enveloped in a large black cloak, and with a broad-brimmed
hat drawn over his brows, stalked into the shop. Rabbie stared at his
visitor, wondering what could have occasioned this early call, and
wondering still more that a stranger should have arrived in the town
without his knowledge.
“You’re early afoot, sir,” quoth Rabbie. “Lucky Wakerife’s cock will
no craw for a good half hour yet.”
The stranger vouchsafed no reply; but taking up one of the shoes
Rabbie had just finished, deliberately put it on, and took a turn
through the room to ascertain that it did not pinch his extremities.
During these operations, Rabbie kept a watchful eye on his customer.
“He smells awfully o’ yird,” muttered Rabbie to himself; “ane
would be ready to swear he had just cam frae the plough-tail.”
The stranger, who appeared to be satisfied with the effect of the
experiment, motioned to Rabbie for the other shoe, and pulled out a
purse for the purpose of paying for his purchase; but Rabbie’s
surprise may be conceived, when, on looking at the purse, he
perceived it to be spotted with a kind of earthy mould.
“Gudesake,” thought Rabbie, “this queer man maun hae howkit
that purse out o’ the ground. I wonder where he got it. Some folk say
there are dags o’ siller buried near this town.”
By this time the stranger had opened the purse, and as he did so, a
toad and a beetle fell on the ground, and a large worm crawling out
wound itself round his finger. Rabbie’s eyes widened; but the
stranger, with an air of nonchalance, tendered him a piece of gold,
and made signs for the other shoe.
“It’s a thing morally impossible,” responded Rabbie to this mute
proposal. “Mair by token, that I hae as good as sworn to the
exciseman to hae them ready by daylight, which will no be long o’
coming” (the stranger here looked anxiously towards the window);
“and better, I tell you, to affront the king himsel, than the
exciseman.”
The stranger gave a loud stamp with his shod foot, but Rabbie
stuck to his point, offering, however, to have a pair ready for his new
customer in twenty-four hours; and, as the stranger, justly enough
perhaps, reasoned that half a pair of shoes was of as little use as half
a pair of scissors, he found himself obliged to come to terms, and
seating himself on Rabbie’s three-legged stool, held out his leg to the
Sutor, who, kneeling down, took the foot of his taciturn customer on
his knee, and proceeded to measure it.
“Something o’ the splay, I think, sir,” said Rabbie, with a knowing
air.
No answer.
“Where will I bring the shoon to when they’re done?” asked
Rabbie, anxious to find out the domicile of his visitor.
“I will call for them myself before cock crowing,” responded the
stranger in a very uncommon and indescribable tone of voice.
“Hout, sir,” quoth Rabbie, “I canna let you hae the trouble o’
coming for them yoursel; it will just be a pleasure for me to call with
them at your house.”
“I have my doubts of that,” replied the stranger, in the same
peculiar manner; “and at all events, my house would not hold us
both.”
“It maun be a dooms sma’ biggin,” answered Rabbie; “but noo that
I hae ta’en your honour’s measure——”
“Take your own!” retorted the stranger, and giving Rabbie a touch
with his foot that laid him prostrate, walked coolly out of the house.
This sudden overturn of himself and his plans for a few moments
discomfited the Sutor; but quickly gathering up his legs, he rushed to
the door, which he reached just as Lucky Wakerife’s cock proclaimed
the dawn. Rabbie flew down the street, but all was still; then ran up
the street, which was terminated by the churchyard, but saw only the
moveless tombs looking cold and chill under the grey light of a
winter morn. Rabbie hitched his red nightcap off his brow, and
scratched his head with an air of perplexity.
“Weel,” he muttered, as he retraced his steps homewards, “he has
warred me this time, but sorrow take me if I’m no up wi’ him the
morn.”
All day Rabbie, to the inexpressible surprise of his wife, remained
as constantly on his three-legged stool as if he had been “yirked”
there by some brother of the craft. For the space of twenty-four
hours, his long nose was never seen to throw its shadow across the
threshold of the door; and so extraordinary did this event appear,
that the neighbours, one and all, agreed that it predicted some
prodigy; but whether it was to take the shape of a comet, which
would deluge them all with its fiery tail, or whether they were to be
swallowed up by an earthquake, could by no means be settled to the
satisfaction of the parties concerned.
Meanwhile, Rabbie diligently pursued his employment, unheeding
the concerns of his neighbours. What mattered it to him, that Jenny
Thrifty’s cow had calved, that the minister’s servant, with something
in her apron, had been seen to go in twice to Lucky Wakerife’s, that
the laird’s dairy-maid had been observed stealing up the red loan in
the gloaming, that the drum had gone through the town announcing
that a sheep was to be killed on Friday?—The stranger alone swam
before his eyes; and cow, dairymaid, and drum kicked the beam. It
was late in the night when Rabbie had accomplished his task, and
then placing the shoes at his bedside, he lay down in his clothes, and
fell asleep; but the fear of not being sufficiently alert for his new
customer, induced him to rise a considerable time before daybreak.
He opened the door and looked into the street, but it was still so dark
he could scarcely see a yard before his nose; he therefore returned
into the house, muttering to himself—“What the sorrow can keep
him?” when a voice at his elbow suddenly said—
“Where are my shoes?”
“Here, sir,” said Rabbie, quite transported with joy; “here they are,
right and tight, and mickle joy may ye hae in wearing them, for it’s
better to wear shoon than sheets, as the auld saying gangs.”
“Perhaps I may wear both,” answered the stranger.
“Gude save us,” quoth Rabbie, “do ye sleep in your shoon?”
The stranger made no answer; but, laying a piece of gold on the
table and taking up the shoes, walked out of the house.
“Now’s my time,” thought Rabbie to himself, as he slipped after
him.
The stranger paced slowly on, and Rabbie carefully followed him;
the stranger turned up the street, and the Sutor kept close to his
heels. “’Odsake, where can he be gaun?” thought Rabbie, as he saw
the stranger turn into the churchyard; “he’s making to that grave in
the corner; now he’s standing still; now he’s sitting down. Gudesake!
what’s come o’ him?” Rabbie rubbed his eyes, looked round in all
directions, but, lo and behold! the stranger had vanished. “There’s
something no canny about this,” thought the Sutor; “but I’ll mark the
place at ony rate;” and Rabbie, after thrusting his awl into the grave,
hastily returned home.
The news soon spread from house to house, and by the time the
red-faced sun stared down on the town, the whole inhabitants were
in commotion; and, after having held sundry consultations, it was
resolved, nem. con., to proceed in a body to the churchyard, and
open the grave which was suspected of being suspicious. The whole
population of the Kirk Wynd turned out on this service. Sutors,
wives, children, all hurried pell-mell after Rabbie, who led his
myrmidons straight to the grave at which his mysterious customer
had disappeared, and where he found his awl still sticking in the
place where he had left it. Immediately all hands went to work; the
grave was opened; the lid was forced off the coffin; and a corpse was
discovered dressed in the vestments of the tomb, but with a pair of
perfectly new shoes upon its long bony feet. At this dreadful sight the
multitude fled in every direction, Lucky Wakerife leading the van,
leaving Rabbie and a few bold brothers of the craft to arrange
matters as they pleased with the peripatetic skeleton. A council was
held, and it was agreed that the coffin should be firmly nailed up and
committed to the earth. Before doing so, however, Rabbie proposed
denuding his customer of his shoes, remarking that he had no more
need for them than a cart had for three wheels. No objections were
made to this proposal, and Rabbie, therefore, quickly coming to
extremities, whipped them off in a trice. They then drove half a
hundred tenpenny nails into the lid of the coffin, and having taken
care to cover the grave with pretty thick divots, the party returned to
their separate places of abode.
Certain qualms of conscience, however, now arose in Rabbie’s
mind as to the propriety of depriving the corpse of what had been
honestly bought and paid for. He could not help allowing, that if the
ghost were troubled with cold feet, a circumstance by no means
improbable, he might naturally wish to remedy the evil. But, at the
same time, considering that the fact of his having made a pair of
shoes for a defunct man would be an everlasting blot on the
Heckspeckle escutcheon, and reflecting also that his customer, being
dead in law, could not apply to any court for redress, our Sutor
manfully resolved to abide by the consequences of his deed.
Next morning, according to custom, he rose long before day, and
fell to his work, shouting the old song of the “Sutors of Selkirk” at the
very top of his voice. A short time, however, before the dawn, his
wife, who was in bed in the back room, remarked, that in the very
middle of his favourite verse, his voice fell into a quaver; then broke
out into a yell of terror; and then she heard a noise, as of persons
struggling; and then all was quiet as the grave. The good dame
immediately huddled on her clothes, and ran into the shop, where
she found the three-legged stool broken in pieces, the floor strewed
with bristles, the door wide open, and Rabbie away! Bridget rushed
to the door, and there she immediately discovered the marks of
footsteps deeply printed on the ground. Anxiously tracing them, on—
and on—and on—what was her horror to find that they terminated in
the churchyard, at the grave of Rabbie’s customer! The earth round
the grave bore traces of having been the scene of some fearful
struggle, and several locks of lank black hair were scattered on the
grass. Half distracted, she rushed through the town to communicate
the dreadful intelligence. A crowd collected, and a cry speedily arose
to open the grave. Spades, pickaxes, and mattocks, were quickly put
in requisition; the divots were removed; the lid of the coffin was once
more torn off, and there lay its ghastly tenant, with his shoes
replaced on his feet, and Rabbie’s red night-cap clutched in his right
hand!
The people, in consternation, fled from the churchyard; and
nothing further has ever transpired to throw any additional light
upon the melancholy fate of the Sutor of Selkirk.
 ELSIE MORRICE.

From the “Aberdeen Censor.”

Oh, wert thou of the golden-wingèd host,
Who, having clad thyself in human weed,
To earth, from thy prefixèd seat didst post,
And, after short abode, fly back with speed,
As if to show what creatures Heav’n doth breed,
Thereby to set the hearts of men on fire,
To scorn the sordid world, and unto Heav’n aspire?—Milton.

In the neighbourhood of the pleasant village of ——, on the east

coast of Scotland, lived Janet Morrice and her grand-daughter Elsie.
A small cottage, overlaid with woodbine on the exterior, and neat
and clean in the interior, contained this couple; and a small farm
attached to it served to supply all their humble desires. The place was
no doubt agreeable to look on; but it was a pair of bright blue eyes,
some light brown locks, and a sweet and modest face, that drew all
the male visitors to the house of Janet Morrice. Elsie Morrice, her
grandchild, had been left a young orphan to her charge. She was the
only child of an only son, and thus came with a double call on the
feelings of her old grandmother. Dearly was she loved by her, and
well did she deserve it; for a better and a kindlier girl was not in all
the country round. Out of the many young men that paid their
attentions to Elsie, it was soon evident that her favourite was William
Gordon. In his person he had nothing particular to recommend him
above his companions; but there was in him that respectful
demeanour, that eagerness to please, and that happiness in serving
the object of his affections, which the eyes of a young woman can so
soon perceive, and her heart so readily appreciate. In their
dispositions, though not similar, they were drawn to each other. She