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THE World, during the Age immediately preceding the Flood, must have been extremely delightfuland we never think of it, without sighing to have been an antediluvian. True, that mankind had waxed very wicked; but just so much more need was there for Christopher North. We verily believe, that had we flourished at that era, somewhere about the root of Mount Ararat, that catastrophe might have been averted by this Magazine. It is scarcely supposable that people could have got so sinful-men, women, and children alike-had we been alive to administer the knout. The most audacious Whigs, whose crimes, it is well known, were the causes of that calamity, as they have been of every other under which the kingdoms of the earth have since groaned, would have quailed beneath our Crutch; and the Tories, true to the principles of their First Founder, Adam, continued in the ascendant. Had Maga then been, there would have been no occasion for the Ark. The great geological general question had never agitated the world-Neptunians and Vulcanists had been unknownWerner might have been a cheesemonger, and Hutton a tailor, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, to a man and a monkey, Phrenologists.

True it is, and of verity, that we were too late in coming into the

world by some thousand years. But better late than never; and to minds like ours, the delay now acts as an additional inducement to more gigantic exertions for the benefit of our species. Nay, in our humbler moods, we are disposed to believe, that, on the whole, it may be better for mankind that we flourish, as we now do, after the Flood. For, after all, the most eagle-eyed are but short-sighted creatures; and who can tell, that, had we been contemporary with Noah, we might not have carried the Noctes Ambrosianæ too far, and perished with Tappietourie in the Deluge?

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However, be that as it may, it is needless now to speculate on the subject. The world is again wicked enough for our purpose; our sale, like the Power of the Throne in the time of Dunning, has increased, is increasing, and, as the Whigs doubtless think, ought to be diminished. It more than keeps pace with the wickedness of the age-that wickedness, indeed, increasing in an arithmetical, and Maga in a geometrical ratio-so that there are hopes of the world still, in spite of French silks and Catholic Emancipation, the apostacy of Peel and the despotism of Wellington, the stoppage of the University of London, and the temporary obstruction thrown at Canton in the face of the Tea-trade.

*An Account of the Great Floods of August, 1829, in the Province of Moray,

and adjoining Districts. By Sir Thomas Lauder Dick.

Longman, London. Forsyth and Greig, Elgin.

VOL. XXVII, NO, CLXIX,

Adam Black, Edinburgh.

K

Yet, speaking of the Flood, we may be permitted to say, that all the descriptions of it in Poetry, in Prose, and in Painting, which we have perused, have always seemed to us calculated to throw an air of ridicule over an otherwise impressive catastrophe. All the stuff, in Greek and Latin, about Deucalion, is miserably poor. What can be more absurd than the image of an elderly gentleman peopling the world by flinging stones over his shoulder? Senseless as such conduct was, that of Barry Cornwall, in as far as the Flood of Thessaly was concerned, was infinitely more so, that ingenious gentleman having appeared in his Poem, like a gentlewoman stirring her tea-cup with a silver spoon to ascertain if it held the due number of lumps of sugar. Poussin's Picture of the Deluge shews us, if we remember rightly, a pond such as might have been rented at thirty shillings per annum by Mr Wordsworth's old leech-gatherer, with a few figures undergoing the process preparatory to resuscitation by the Humane Society, a branch of which, it is made obvious, is established in the neighbourhood, by the judicious introduction of an able-bodied and intrepid young fellow, who, stimulated by the hope of the money and the medal awarded by the Committee to him who has been mainly instrumental in saving a fellow Christian from an early grave, is lugging to the bank a couple as like half-drowned rats as any couple you could mention of the Members of the present Cabinet. Martin again has done the Deluge on a larger, if not on a grander scale. His genius none disputes-notwithstanding his intimacy with Atherstone; but he has spoiled the whole, by perching on a cliff, all by himself, the author of the Fall of Nineveh, who is staring like an owl on the world of waters, with a face sufficiently absurd to raise a titter even on the Last Day. This practice, so rife among Painters, of introducing portraits of their eminent friends into scenes of the deepest tragedy, cannot be too severely reprehended; and we earnestly beseech Mr Martin to brush Mr Atherstone off his seat in the Deluge, and clap him, with his chronometer, into the Ark.

The truth is, that the Deluge-that is, the Universal Deluge-is not a fit

subject for either Poetry, or Painting-and, a fortiori-still less for Statuary, Dancing, or Music. Nothing

can be better than the statement of the event-short-simple and strong in that good old book-the Bible. Let it satisfy us-undiluted. There it stuns the soul that welters wild as the Flood that drowned a sinful world. There it is felt by the heart, in the imagination conscience-stricken, to have poured down death on crime from the windows of wrathful heaven. But when Painters prepare their pallets, and Poets their pens, to get up the Deluge for exhibition or publication, how paltry and pitiful appear a few mountain tops peering, a-crawl with insects, above a few acres of wet, while the great globe is submerged with all its inhabitants, and goes spinning round the sun, all a-gurgle with one death-groan that makes the angels weep!

Henceforth, then, let Painters, and Poets, and Prosers, abjure the Universal Deluge, and be contented to deal with seas, and lakes, and rivers. Let them give us shipwrecks

"Far amid the melancholy main," or dashed to pieces, like the spray, on iron-ribbed coasts. Let them shew us an arm even of the sea, stretched out angrily beneath the thunder and lightning, till navies are tossed into the sky. Does not the earth roar far and wide with rivers cataracted among the mountains, and solemn and stately in their majestic flows as sea-like they exult, after a thousand-league course, in approaching and mingling with the sea? Glens, plains, forests, cities, all belong to these rivers, now spanned with bridges, magnificent as rainbows, once rills scarce seen by the vulture's or eagle's eye, and with a still small voice audible in the wilderness but to the dwellers in the ant-hills!

To our imagination, and, gentle reader, if you put one finger on your organ of ideality, and another on your organ of wonder, also to yours, Rivers have greatly the advantage over Seas. True, that Tides are noble movements. Then, we feel with awe that the mysterious Neptune is expiring and inspiring, with breath as regular as our own; that his lungs work as well in water as ours in air; and that through all his frame, the ebb and the flow tell how the purple circulates

from his heart. But without Rivers, pray what would become of the Sea? He would die of thirst in his own salt. Those gracious feeders, having by nature

"Of the old sea some reverential fear," and also a sort of instinctive-almost filial love, for though they appear to be born of the mountains, yet may the loftiest lineage of them all be traced, through many a strange eventful history, to the bosom of the great Deep, those gracious feeders, we say, hurry each like an Euphrasia, or Grecian daughter, to present, in the hour of need, to their hoary sire their milky breasts. How quakes the Ancient's bosom, as, with all his huge, thick-lipped mouths, greedily he imbibes the restorative delight of Dew purified through ten thousand filtering machines, and haply all along its journey from the mountains of the moon,-save when it glided subterranean or through a night of woods -smitten into radiance

By touch ethereal of heaven's fiery rod!" The sea is but one. A glorious unit indeed is he-and therefore Shakspeare called him "multitudinous." But in spite of all his multitudinousness, his greatest admirers must confess that he is not unfrequently so monotonous, that 'tis not easy even to look at him without falling asleep. Live for a month on the sea-shore, and you will be stupid for life. Shells are beautiful, but, with your leave, not so beautiful as flowers. Shells are but the cottages of fishes-or, if you prefer it, their cradles. Nature often tinges them with the Tyrian die; but they are all dead, although when you put some of them to your ear, you hear, as if far, far away within the wreathed cavern, the singing of some sea-sprite belonging to an incommunicable world. But flowers -why flowers are alive!-as alive as yourself upon your marriage-morn! They are all in love with each other, and with the earth and the heavens, and with men and angels, and where grow they so innumerously bright as by the fresh flowings of rills, and rivulets, and rivers, whose banks, like the milky way, are all inlaid with vegetable stars? Then, we defy a river to be monotonous, if he have but fall enough to turn the tiniest millwheel-and we say so with an indis

tinct remembrance of the Cam him self, who is about as dull as a Senior Wrangler. But the charms of the Cam cannot be properly appreciated without comparing him with a canal, Then he seems

"To murmur in the living brooks A music sweeter than his own," and we feel the wide difference be tween him-monotonous no moreand the New Cut.

But let us not pursue the parallel, lest we get personal; but be contented with a few words more in praise of running streams, and let us panygerize them in SPATES. Then the rill-pretty pigmy no longersprings up in an hour to stream's estate. Like a stripling who has been unexpectedly left a fortune by an old uncle, he gives his home, in a hollow of the broomy braes, the slip, and away off, in full cry and gallop, to "poos his fortune" in the world, down in the "laigh kintra." Many a tum ble he gets over waterfalls, and often do you hear him shouting before he gets out of the wood. He sings al though it be Sunday, and hurries past the kirk during the time of divine service, yet not without joining for a moment in the psalm. As the young lassies are returning from kirk to cottage, he behaves rudely to them, while, high-kilted, they are crossing the fords; and ere their giggle-blended shrieks subside, continues his career, as Dr Jamieson says, in his spirited ballad on the Water-kelpie, "loud nechering in a lauch." And now he is all a-foam in his fury, like a chestnut horse. The sheep and lambs stare at him in astonishment; and Mr Wordsworth's Old Ram, who is so poetically described in the Excursion as admiring his horns and beard, face and figure, in one of the clear pools of the Brathay, the Pride of Windermere, were he now on a visit to Scotland, would die of disappointed self-love, a heart-broken Narcissus. On he goes-the rill-rivulet -"neither to haud nor to bin"-a most uproarious Hobbletehoy. He is just at that time of life-say about seventeen-when the passions are at their worst or their best-'tis hard to say which-at their newest, certainly, and perhaps at their strongest, and when they listen to no voice but their own, which then seems to fill

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heaven and earth with music. But facts would of themselves, be quite what noise is this? Thunder? No a Corra-Linn, or a Stonebyres of waterfall. Lo! yonder a great river sweeping along the strath. The rill rivulet, with one shiver and shudder for now 'tis too late to turn back, and onwards he is driven by his own weight, which is only another name for his own destiny-leaps with a sudden plunge into the redroaring Spate, and in an instant loses his name and nature, and disappears for ever. Just so is it with the young human prodigal, lost in the Swollen River of Life thundering over the world's precipices.

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sufficient to establish our immense. superiority over our brethren in the South, even were we not entitled to point, as we now humbly do, to the superior delicacy, grace, elegance, and refinement of our manners, to say nothing of the unapproachable, and indeed perfect purity of our morals. All this being the case, it would be absurd, nay impious, to suppose for a single instant, that the soil, and consequently the scenery, where this superior race flourish, could be otherwise than superior to the soil, and consequently the nery, where the inferior race, as it were, comparatively speaking, merely vegetate. Accordingly, the superiority is manifest to the dimmest eye and the meanest capacity. England, on the whole, is a flat country -and Scotland, on the whole, quite the reverse; and as we mean at present to confine ourselves to rivers, we have already said more than enough to prove the impossibility, in the very nature of things, of England competing with Scotland, in rivers, with the smallest chance of success. There, for instance, is the Thames, as it is called, a very respectable river in its way, and at London more than respectable, imposing; but it is a river of very hum ble origin. We forget the number of locks between Oxford and Windsor; but the fall from source to sea is nothing to that of the Spey or the Dee, and a hundred other rivers in Scotland of high birth. The north of England, to be sure, is tolerably mountainous, which it owes entirely to its vicinity to Scotland; but then, the streams-rivers there are none. -have very short courses, and before they can gather great bulk, are drowned in lakes. On issuing from them, which some do in good condition for a race, in about some halfdozen or dozen miles, they are worse off than ever, and are lost in the sea. Floods, therefore, in the flat districts of England, are too diffusive to be forcible, and seldom carry off any objects capable of offering a stouter resistance than haycocks; while, in the hilly or mountainous districts, their style is too concise, and after much rumbling among stones, "Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,"

We must not anticipate any of the many admirable things about Rivers in Spate, with which it will be at once our duty and our delight to adorn the body of this article, but content ourselves for the present, with remarking, in an enlightened spirit of nationality, how immeasurably superior are our rivers in Scotland to those in England. The truth is, that the scenery of this the northern part of the Island, is almost as much finer than that of the southern, as the character of its inhabitants is finer than that of those people unfortunately born on the other side of the Tweed. England, with the exception of Sir Isaac Newton, and some score or so of first-rate mathematicians and astronomers, has produced few men of eminence in physical science, whereas Scotland has produced such numbers, that were we to write down all their names, the illustrious list would be as long as a Petition to Parliament. In Mental philosophy again, if you except Bacon, Locke, and about a dozen others, England would have some difficulty, we suspect, in pointing to a single great name; while Scotland could easily put her finger on a shoal of writers who have all swam in the depths of metaphysics. In Poetry, setting aside. Shakspeare, Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth and others, England is poor indeed; while Scotland, it is acknowledged by her bitterest enemies, can shew a Poet in every year of her history, each month indeed down to the present continuing to add a star to the constellation. All the great orators, statesmen, and warriors of Britain, with a few exceptions, have, in like manner, been Scotchmen. These

1830.]

you hear no more of them, and are mortified to find that they have not swept away so much as an old wash

True, that in newspapers one occasionally reads of what, in England, are called Floods. "A whole county is inundated heaven knows how during the night-six inches deep. The waters continue to rise in a most fearful manner, till the inhabitants, in some places, are absolutely up to the knees; and drains bursting, Lincolnshire gets dangerous to stage-coaches. Punts are seen paddling about; and pigs, according to a popular superstition, are cutting their own throats in all directions. Providentially, the waters subside so many inches, in a day or two, that the moles are seen returning from the heights-and the Boston Heavy again looms in the distance, licensed to carry twenty outsides. Shreds and patches more numerously than the week before, tuft the bottoms of hedgerows; and in the ditches there is a livelier croaking of frogs. But, with these exceptions, and that of wayside children raking mud into small heaps with their toes, nothing tells of the Deluge that, were you to believe the newspapers, not only interrupted the Post, drowned the Herald, and lowered the Standard, but darkened the Sun, and disturbed the Globe.

We fervently hope-nay, devoutly trust, that we have not been giving any offence, by these rambling remarks on rivers and what not, to our southern subscribers. Though England be thus inferior to Scotland, she is superior to all the rest of the world. The rest of the world is to her as she is to Us. While, therefore, it is her duty, and her interest-and, therefore, ought to be her pleasure and her pride-to look up to us, it is no less incumbent on her to look down on the rest of the world. Nay, we cheerfully acknowledge that we have seen some Scottish as despicable, every whit, as any English floods. Nothing can be more contemptible than an Edinburgh flood. We have three bridges, and are building a fourth, without one river. A flood, in the New Town, consists of eaves-dropping and gutter-running, which merely carries a few dead cats down to the Water of Leith. In the Auld Town, again, a flood floats upon its raging surface

merely a few bauchles. We perceive
in the newspapers, that there is one
raging this moment in the Cowgate.
"The Cowgate," we quote the words
of an able contemporary," from
Dickson's close to St Mary's Wynd,
presents the appearance of a rapid
river. The street is completely co-
vered to the top of the curb-stones,
and some low houses are flooded.
At the Trinity Hospital, and in
Paul's Work, the water is so deep
that a boat might float; and in the
north back of the Canongate, the
street is in many places impassable.
Where the great drain passes along
the side of the street, which leads to
the Abbey-Hill, the water is very deep
from the narrowness of the drain
damming up the water, and proving,
if proof had been wanting, that an
enlargement of the drain in its whole
course, is absolutely necessary."

From this magnificent picture, cof
Auld Reekie in a flood, turn for a mo-
ment to the Grampians. You are all
alone-quite by yourself-no object
seems alive in existence-for the
eagle is mute-the antlers of the red-
deer, though near, invisible-not one
small moorland bird is astir among the
brackens-no ground bee is at work
on the sullen heather-and the aspect
of the earth is grim as that of heaven.
Hark! From what airt moans the
thunder?-Tis like an earthquake.
Now, it growls. Yonder cloud, a mi-
nute ago, deep-blue, is now black as
pitch. All the mountains seem to
have gathered themselves together
under it-and see-see how it flashes
with fire! Ay, that is thunder-one
peal split into a hundred-a cannon-
ade worthy the battle of the gods and
giants, when the Sons of Terra strove
to storm the gates of Uranus. Would
that Dan Virgil were here-or Lord
Byron! O Dr Blair! Dr Blair! why
didst thou object to the close of that
glorious description" DENSISSIMUS
IMBER?" Jupiter Pluvius has smitten
the Grampians with a rod of light-
ning, and in a moment they are all
tumbling with cataracts. Now every
great glen has its own glorious river

some red as blood, some white as snow, and some yet blue in their portentous beauty as that one thin slip of sky, that, as we are looking, is sucked into the clouds. Each rill, each torrent, each river, has its own peculiar voice, and methinks we distinguish one music from another, as

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