ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901)

Notes on David Gray - continued

6. Extract from ‘Chapter I: Some Old Acquaintances’
from Sketches: Personal and Pensive by William Hodgson
(Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1884. pp. 11-13).

. . .
     I will now draw towards a close by raising a broken shaft to youth, to beauty, and to genius. The ancients, you know, had a saying that whom the gods love die young. A man need not be a cynic to sternly deny that. He need only be a bereaved father to feel that it passes an affront on his blighted affections. He need, indeed, be only a thoughtful onlooker to perceive how it fails as a consolation for such a death as that of Chatterton. It failed, too, with thousands in the West Country on the news of the death of David Gray. “Will Gurney”—so his nom de plume ran in the Glasgow Citizen—was the son of a weaver near Kirkintilloch. There ran past the row of houses which were the scene of his birth the inconsiderable “Luggie,” a stream of vaster expanse to the boy’s untravelled gaze than the majestic Mississippi, and more inspiring, with its reeds, its brawling shallows, and its glistening pebbles, than the classical memories which, like an atmosphere, bathe the Isles of Greece. He wrote verses from mere childhood; but persecuting fate made a normal school student of him. See him disdainfully walking the city streets as if spurning them! Has Shelley come to earth again? you ask as you watch the vision of the willowy and shapely form with its erect, defiant head, from which stream locks of flaxen hair, go cleaving through the crowd. It is a young man who passes, whom every one turns to look at as towards a rarely graceful girl. We follow him, and overtake him, in a tavern in St Enoch’s Square. He tells us the story which Lord Houghton afterwards told in the preface to his memoir. No one in Glasgow, in tones of anguish, he says, will publish his book; the world is cold; God is unkind; he is very hungry for fame, and has that within him, he feels, which would rival Keats. All he wants is utterance, and who will publish his poems? He has just come back from London, he adds; but Richard Moncton Milnes has done little for him. Sage counsel, he supposes he must call it, he almost screams, is all his gains from spending his miserable savings in going to and from London in the sure hope that the biographer of Keats would give him a place among the poets by commanding some publisher to print his “Luggie and Other Poems.” The tempest of passion blows over; and the beautiful young man of twenty, with Shelley’s bust and the pale face, goes away again to his classroom drudgery through a lane of gazing pedestrians. The book on which he had set his heart and staked his reputation got into the printer’s (Macmillan’s) hands at last through the exertions of Sydney Dobell, but not before its marvellous author lay down to die. He took eleven months to die; and each spasmodic assault of the fell consumption, caught from cold in London, wrung from him a sonnet which was in the nature of a passionate cry. The intellectual arrogance calls out for sweet life; anon there is the submissive prayer from the imploring depths; now there flows from the lips the demand for some explanation of all this mystery of death and pain, this dying by inches when scarcely twenty-one, and this going on crutches of useless and dotard age. Now the tone subdues itself into the child’s prattle; and the utmost want of the dying poet, like that of any mother for her baby’s voice, is just to see his book which is at the printer’s, and then he will quit the green earth in peace for ever. Once more the rebel is himself again, as when you cage an eagle. He literally screams for life, and will not die. In these wonderful sonnets, in short, you can read the progress of his disease, and trace his varying moods with the same certainty that you can refer Beethoven’s sonatas and Bach’s fugues back to the ultimate gamut. It was kindly to us in Death to linger so long; for otherwise we should not have known through these sonnets how sweet a singer fell asleep in David Gray. His name and Chatterton’s will henceforth be linked together for the melancholy similitude that was between their poetical gifts and their early way-going. A number of years ago eminent citizens in Glasgow, headed by the late Sheriff Glassford Bell, took the sculptor’s art with them to the modest graveyard near which brawls David Gray’s Luggie, and established there a memorial which will last, as we mortals say, for eve, and which is nothing less than a shrine to all who knew the living minstrel.

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7. Extract from ‘Chapter XIII: The Friend of Men of Letters’
from The Life, Letters, and Friendships of Richard Monckton Milnes, First Lord Houghton, Vol II by T. Wemyss Reid (Cassell & Co., Ltd., 1890, pp. 46-59).

. . .
     I have said that cases like that which I have just described were happily exceptional, and against them may fairly be set such stories as that which deals with Milnes’s connection with David Gray, the Scotch poet. Ample justice has been done in Gray’s memoir to the tender—one might say, the paternal—kindness which Milnes showed towards the unfortunate young genius. The story is, indeed, one of the most pathetic in the annals of our literature. It opens in the spring of 1860, when Milnes received from David Gray, a youth of twenty-two, then resident in Glasgow, a request that he would read a poem of his. In accordance with his invariable custom, Milnes wrote promising to do so, and a few days afterwards the following letter reached him in London:—

David Gray to R. M. M.

                                                                                     65, Deveril Street, Boro’, Feb., 1860.

     SIR, You promised to read my poem. I travelled from Glasgow to give it to you, and to push my fortune. Looking two days before me, I see starvation. Shall I send or bring it? I know that you do not want to be troubled with people of my sort coming about you—that is what makes me ask. Whatever you do, do it quickly, in God’s name.
                                                                                               Yours here below,
                                                                                                                     DAVID GRAY.

     ⁴⁷ Little did the writer of this letter know Milnes, when he spoke of his desire not to be “troubled with people of his sort.” It was just such a man, a poet possessing something like real genius—a fact which Milnes had quickly perceived on reading some of the shorter pieces which Gray had sent him—just entering upon life, and oppressed by adverse circumstances which the kindly hand of a friend could remove, whom Milnes most desired to meet; and he who never turned a deaf ear even to the cries of the professional mendicants who constitute the camp-followers of the army of letters, responded instantly to the appeal of Gray. He did not write inviting him to send his manuscript to him—he did not even ask him to come to his house as a guest; but within a couple of hours from the delivery of the touching note I have just printed, Milnes himself entered the humble lodging-house in the Borough, bearing with him a load of delicacies such as he believed the writer of such a letter must absolutely need. Having made some provision for Gray’s subsistence whilst he remained in London, he took back to his own house the MS. of the beautiful poem of “The Luggie,” which Gray had written, and upon which he was so anxious to have the opinion of his fellow-poet. A few days afterwards, whilst he was sitting at breakfast in Brook Street, Gray was shown into his room. Milnes saw in a moment that something was wrong, and by-and-by he extracted from him the fact that he had spent the previous night in the park. There had been no actual necessity to do so—there could have been ⁴⁸ none with Milnes in London; but the young man was in a state of hysterical excitement, and to indulge some morbid fancy of his own had condemned himself to this terrible punishment—a punishment which laid the seeds of the fatal disease that carried him off little more than eighteen months later. He was warmed, and fed, and clothed before he was allowed to leave Milnes’s house; and during the acute illness which followed this act of folly, Milnes visited him as regularly as a physician, and tended him as carefully as a nurse. As soon as the youth had recovered sufficiently, he sent him back to his native place, the village of Merkland, near Kirkintilloch, cheered by the fact that he had found a powerful friend to recognise his genius, and that the way to the fame which he coveted seemed to be opening before him.*
     Whilst he was still ill, and Milnes was watching over him, the latter received this touching letter from the poet’s father—a letter at least as honourable to the writer as to the recipient:—

     — * On some points the account I have given above differs from that which is to be found in Milnes’s introductory notice to Gray’s poems. I can only say that it is founded, first, upon original letters now in my possession, and, secondly, upon Milnes’s own account given to me of his connection with Gray. That, writing immediately after the young poet’s death, he should have drawn a veil over some of the incidents of his tragic story was but natural. No one can suffer, however, by a full statement of the truth. It ought to be said that Milnes from the first was anxious that Gray should return home, and should, if possible, pursue the path marked out for him by his parents. He urged this upon the youth with what the latter thought was undue persistence; but this was the only point upon which he acted in such a way as to ruffle the sensitive temperament of the young genius. —

⁴⁹ David Gray, Sen., to R. M. M.

                                                                               Merkland, Kirkintilloch, June 26, 1860.

     DEAR SIR,—We received your very kind letter to-day. David told us that you had always been his friend from the first time he had seen you, and told us that you had said something to him which was worth coming to London for; and when he took badly, that you had been kind to him, and sent a doctor to see him and tend him. Neither himself nor I can recompense you for it, I rather doubt; but it is a great comfort to us to know that he is in want for nothing, and he tells us that it has depended all on yourself. We hope it will not last long, but that he will be able to come home soon. I am sorry to say I can do him very little good at such a great distance, as I suppose you will know I am but a tradesman, and there are eight to the family, David being the eldest. If he were at home, he would be very well; but we cannot do him much good where he is. I cannot say any more. I feel very much, owing to the kindness you are giving him. I don’t like to ask you to write me what you think about him—all I wish is he were home in the meantime.
                                                                                       I am, Sir,
                                                                                                   Yours respectfully,
                                                                                                                         DAVID GRAY.

     P.S.—David had always a wish for two or three years to go to London; he would not be kept back. We think he always read and wrote too much, and all the learning he has got he has done it chiefly himself. We have wished him always to be a Scotch minister, and he had not given up thought of it when he left, but said it would not be easy done. He told us you had given him advice and support every way.

     The advice and support were continued after the youth had returned to his home. The next letter of the series, painful, but most interesting, from which I am quoting, is dated November 4th, 1860, and is written ⁵⁰ by an eminent Glasgow physician who had been consulted by Gray.

     At the request [says the writer] of my friend Mr. Sydney Dobell, I visited poor Gray some days ago at his father’s cottage, Merkland, near Kirkintilloch, and found, from the state of his general health and the physical condition of his chest, that in my opinion a continued residence there, and under his present circumstances, would give him little chance of life. . . . Although poor Gray has many bad points in his case, I should look upon it as far from hopeless, provided he could at once be removed to a more genial climate.

     The kind doctor went on to say that he had already opened a subscription for the purpose of covering the cost of a voyage to South Africa for Gray.
     Milnes wrote instantly, offering to do what he could in the matter, and suggesting that, pending his removal to such a distance as Port Natal, he might go to Torquay, where he would himself be able to see after his comfort.
     Gray came up to London, and was placed for a time in a hydropathic establishment near Richmond. The following letters tell their own tale, and leave no room for comment.

David Gray to R. M. M.

                                                             Sudbrook Park, Richmond, Surrey, Dec. 5th, 1860.

     DEAR SIR,—Four months ago I had a letter written for you which I was afraid to post, and ultimately burned, and since then I have been going to write you at least fifty times. I saw your name often in the news, read your speech at Pontefract and your article in Fraser, and what, thought I, have I, a poor, weak, diseased, far-away youth to do with you? Rightly ⁵¹ so. Better, since I should die, to die with broken hopes, than with a letter from you which would but have made me regret my destiny. Therefore I burned your letter. From July to October I received numerous letters, but answered none, wishing to let the world outside go on without me, since I could not go on with it. Truly I lived a “posthumous existence,” as you say of poor Keats in his biography, waiting patiently and, as I thought, bravely for death, and truly expecting it. You told me that “to be a brave man was above being a poet.” I laid aside even my hopes of being a poet and tried to put on manhood. Have I succeeded? Alas! no. I wish yet to live, but do not greatly wish it. For God’s sake let me go away—how far? For my parents’ sake let me live—how long? Yet I fear not death or a future existence, but oh! I fear dying. Let these boyish words pass, and I will tell you how I am here. In October I got a kind note of inquiry from Dobell. I hesitated whether or no to answer it. He had come to me before, like the dayspring spreading joy. He had got me introductions to men in London; he assisted me when I was ill. He had followed me with a love that was a mystery to me. He had lost sight of me, he said, since I had left London; what was I doing? Was I better? Here are two guineas; and so on. I answered him, telling all. Thus commenced that interest in my affairs which has ended in Sudbrook. Dobell sent his friend Dr. Drummond: his verdict was instant removal if I wished to live. I had no money, could get no money. A female cousin of Dobell’s said she thought she could get me into Brompton Hospital, but my life hung on instant removal. The kind, excellent Dr. Lane, of this hydropathic establishment, immediately offered to receive me as a guest, till a berth in Brompton could be secured; but I had no suitable clothes to start with. I got them; but how, I don’t know. Somebody must have advanced the money, for I got underclothing, &c. &c., to the amount, I suppose, of about £15. A cab came to take me away, a railway ticket was put into my hand by the gentleman who had looked after the proper fulfilment of the matter and, after getting from him a small ⁵² purse containing fifty shillings the train moved off, and I am here.
     This morning I got word through Dr. Drummond of your many efforts in my behalf; how much I thank you, God knows. Looking, as I do, not so much at the effect as the cause—the sweet cause of your kindness—I am doubly grateful. I must say at once that I like your plan better than the other. The beautiful, mild, pleasant Torquay is surely, surely better than the dolorous, weary Brompton; but wherever I go or am taken, Mr. Milnes, I must be kept gratis. My family could not raise a sovereign for me; that is a literal fact. You mean, I think, that the subscription (how I hate the word!), with my father’s assistance, could keep me at Torquay. The amount of the subscription which I possess is thirty shillings, and my father’s assistance may be valued at nil. So that, you see, the sweet and goodly idea of Torquay must be given up, and I, a consumptive myself, cough with consumptives in the hospital. I dread it—dread it. I don’t like to ask it, but if you will send me a little explanatory note—I don’t mean explanatory, but just a little note with something in it—not money—for dear sake not money, I have enough—I mean, a few sentences with your name signed, I shall be very happy. How Dr. Drummond must have bothered you! It seems so cold and stiff all the gratitude one can write on paper that I hate to be grateful in a letter.
                                                                               So believe me yours here below,
                                                                                                                         DAVID GRAY.

                                           Sudbrook Park, Richmond, Surrey, Dec. 17th, 1860.

     DEAR SIR,—Your letter was looked forward to with great anxiety. No one can know the fear I have to enter Brompton. Would you not think it awful to be constantly among dying or sick people, to sleep in the same room with them, to walk in the same bit of ground with them? But your kindness gives me an alternative which I accept with gladness. I shall start for the Water Hospital at Torquay as soon as you will send me a little programme of my journey. E. W. Lane, the kind physician here, authorised me to use his name decidedly ⁵³ in approval of my choice. Torquay, he says, is superior to Brompton in almost every requisite for consumption, and the one dreadful idea of cohabitation of sickness is dispelled. Tell me then, my dear sir, as quickly as your numerous duties will allow you, when and how I may go there, and where I shall go when I do get there. It were better that it were got over at once. I write, you know, in a very feverish state, and may have gone wrong somewhere, being so unwell; but you will gather from my scrawl that I most thankfully take your offer, and only wish to be settled as soon as possible. That all good may surround you is the true wish of
                                                                                                             Yours sincerely,
                                                                                                                         DAVID GRAY.

                                         66, Upper Stamford Street, Waterloo Road, London,
                                                                                                 Saturday Morning.

     DEAR SIR,—Your letter was the most welcome Christmas gift that could have reached me. On receiving it, I left Sudbrook, to be in readiness to start when your answer and advices arrive. I think I can manage to get the money for my journey to Torquay, if you could settle all the rest. In the nomination sheet, which I return, some gentleman must lend me £3, to be drawn upon in case of ill-conduct. My conduct will surely not be of such a character; and so, if you will lend me the money required by the Honorary Secretary, it will be returned to you as it is returned to me by them. I know of no other party who can lend it me. As this severe weather tries me sorely, I would beg of you, dear sir, to be as quick as possible. With many sincere thanks for the trouble I have caused and am causing you,
                                                                         Believe me to remain yours ever truly,
                                                                                                                         DAVID GRAY.
     Remember the address.

     Milnes hardly needed the last injunction. Gray had found a refuge with a friend of his, a fellow-countryman, also a poet, still happily living in the ⁵⁴ enjoyment of a well-deserved fame—Mr. Robert Buchanan; and from a letter of his, written to Lord Houghton in 1864, I may quote a line or two, which need no addition from me:—

     You will not have forgotten the melancholic young gentleman whom you were accustomed to see when you carried beef-tea to Gray at Stamford Street.

     Gray was a somewhat difficult person to deal with. He was fighting death with a feverish anxiety that at times made him hardly accountable for his actions. It was an act of imprudence, for example, to leave Sudbrook Park before he was quite sure of being received at Torquay; but Milnes stood by him in spite of all his eccentricities, and having looked after him whilst he remained in London, duly despatched him to Torquay early in the year.
     At Torquay were Milnes’s aunts, and, at his request, they were anxious to do what they could for the young poet. But his stay at Torquay came to an abrupt end. He had hardly been in the place two days before he was seized with another fit of depression, and made a wild appeal to the medical men, to whom Milnes had introduced him, to provide him with the means of leaving Torquay and returning to his own home. The poor lad again received what he wanted, and went back to Kirkintilloch there to die.

David Gray to R. M. M.

                                                                             Merkland, Kirkintilloch, March 1st, 1861.

     DEAR SIR,—Knowing your kindness, do not think I traffic on that knowledge; on the contrary, I feel much to trouble you ⁵⁵ again, engaged as you are, but I have no other hope. The poem or book I spoke of so vaingloriously is nearly finished. In my self-laudation and irreflective impulsion I forgot to ask your consent to have your name connected with it—not in a formal cold dedication, but after Thomson’s manner recollect, which necessitates that the poem shall not be unworthy of the person to whom it is dedicated. Therefore, to insure thine own fame, and not to be mocked through me, you might—if not for your own sake, then for mine—read the production as I have re-written and methodised it, being all the while in my weakness spurred on by the thought that you would read it. If it is in any way unworthy, your name must not suffer; for I think that to dedicate a petty and incapable work to a famous man is an insult. Why I always cling to you I know not, except it be that you were the first and only poet that ever told me I was a poet—a keen, intense pleasure, which can never, never be forgotten. Perhaps, in my dreamy blindness, I anticipate a renewal of that pleasure. You must excuse my late race from Torquay: set it down to temper, impulse, want of reflection; I could not help it. No person could have been more willing to stay, but the sight of the invalids threw me into a nervous distemper. This season is very severe, and more dangerous symptoms appear; but I have myself to blame. If you read the poem, and judge favourably, I will first of all try Moxon and Co. I risk this letter, as we say in Scotland, with a happy-go-luck.
                                                                                                           Yours truly,
                                                                                                                         DAVID GRAY.

     Milnes wrote thanking him for this letter, and promising to assist him in revising his poem.

     Your recognition [wrote Gray, in response] gives me confidence. Your letter outbalances drugs innumerable. With morphia I shall manage to transcribe what remains of MSS., and the whole shall not make much over one hundred pages of a book. It might be printed in Glasgow, but never published, because it would fall dead from the press. . . . Forgiveness ⁵⁶ shames the repentant soul. I am ashamed, for my own sake; this kindness is almost persecution. Believe me, when I say these lines of yours give me confidence—:

“I take all men for what they are;
     They wear no masks to me.”

So you must know me to be impulsive, foolish, burning with hectic desire, yet aiming for the best always.

“I never bowed but to superior worth,
     Nor ever failed in my allegiance there.”

 I shall not trouble you again till considerable progress is made.

     It was later in the year—not long, indeed, before the end came—that Milnes received the following sad letter:—

David Gray to R. M. M.

                                                                                         Merkland, near Kirkintilloch, N.B.

     EVER DEAR SIR,—I know that it is a bother to receive letters neither concerning business nor from old friends, and that, too, at a period when probably you are busiest; but my case has become worse. I would have written to you immediately on the intelligence; but I grew so blunt and stupid about the heart, that I lost my spirit altogether. It is this—my right lung is affected. Now, Mr. Milnes, if I could get into a vessel (I would like one bound for the Mediterranean) bound to any warm place, as Persia, or anything, my life might be prolonged. At all events, I would not like to die at home, among weeping friends and all the horrible paraphernalia of the dissolution. They told me that Colonel G. wrote you a letter of thanks for your great kindness to me. He is a man who does much good hereabouts. I dreamed I was there when you proposed poor dear Tom Hood’s health. The letters in the newspapers which I have read of his are as good as Lamb’s. But where am I going? I wish often that I was near the calm, kind, patient skill of Dr. Tweedy. I could write a very, very long letter to you now; but I know how precious your time is, and forbear. Think of me for a moment ⁵⁷ when you receive this, and though your memory may be stored with recollections of great and more worthy men, my crown is laid in the dust, and I weep over it. I shall tremble if I receive a letter from you. Dum spiramus speramus.
                                                                                                       Yours gratefully,
                                                                                                                         DAVID GRAY.

     Alas ! the poor boy’s case was far beyond the remedy at which he thus sought eagerly to clutch. It was but a few days after Milnes received the foregoing letter, and on the very day after the first proof-sheet of “The Luggie” had been placed in Gray’s hands, that the youth died.

     DEAR SIR [writes his father, with the stern reticence and self-repression of his race],—My son David died on Tuesday, Dec. 3rd, at two o’clock, afternoon. Born 29th January, 1838.
                                                                                                 Your obedient servant,
                                                                                                                         DAVID GRAY.

     Milnes’s efforts on behalf of the young poet who had died in the very dawn of his life, did not cease at his death. He made it his business to bring his poetry before the world, writing a warm and generous critical notice of the published book in one of the leading reviews, bearing testimony not only to his genius, but to his irreproachable personal character, and the scrupulous honour and strong sense of independence which accompanied his hopeless poverty. Nor was this all; some years later he collected subscriptions for the purpose of placing a suitable monument above the grave in which the remains of the author of “The Luggie” had been placed. There were those who, knowing that Gray sprang from a humble stock, thought that Milnes’s ⁵⁸ aid should have been given to the living rather than to the dead, and one letter at least lies before me in which he is bitterly upbraided by a man of letters for having provided a stone for the dead Gray when his living parents stood in need of bread. To the cheap sarcasm which was showered upon Milnes by the writer of this letter, who understood his real character just about as well as most of the casual acquaintances of that period in his life understood it, the only answer that need be made is to quote the following letter, which, as it happens, was written at the very time when Milnes was being upbraided for his indifference to the fate of Gray’s parents.

David Gray, Senior, to Lord Houghton.

                                                                                           Kirkintilloch, 13th March, 1865.

     DEAR LORD HOUGHTON,—You have quite astonished us this morning with your letter. It was unexpected; we are short-sighted. We send you our blessing, and there is no doubt you have God’s blessing, as He does not lose sight of things given in that manner. It is true I have not been able to work for some time, and I am not getting better yet; but your good money, £10, a large sum to us, will be carefully gone about. You do not know the good it will do for a long time. My lord, as to David, you was the first that saw anything about him, and you have always kept up his reputation. I could say more, but I think it is quite needless.
     My Lord Houghton, with many thanks,
                                                                                                             I remain yours,
                                                                                                                         DAVID GRAY.

     The reader will, I think, agree with the writer of this manly and touching letter that to say more of ⁵⁹ Milnes’s connection with David Gray and his family is “quite needless.” Nor should I have said so much had it not been that this story is typical of a side of Milnes’s character to which his contemporaries never did justice, chiefly because he himself was eager to conceal from their observation his tenderest and noblest actions.

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8. ‘David Gray’ and ‘William Freeland’
from Kirkintilloch: Town and Parish by Thomas Watson
(Glasgow: John Smith and Son, 1894).

(pp. 307-313)

David Gray, Poet.*

EVERY town and village of Scotland has produced its poet, but not every one can boast, like Kirkintilloch, of a son who wrote such pure English verse as that of David Gray, the author of “The Luggie,” a work which has raised his

     — * We are indebted for the articles on David Gray and Walter Watson to Mr. James Blackwood. —

³⁰⁸ name among the greatest of minor poets of Britain, and which must be a never-dying one to those who value genius.
     David Gray was born on 29th January, 1838, in a small cottage, situated at Merkland, about a mile from Kirkintilloch, and was the eldest of a family of eight, five boys and three girls. His father was a handloom weaver, of honest, Scottish nature, and it was the wish of his parents’ hearts to see David, one day, a minister of the Free Church of Scotland.
     With this object he was sent to the parish school of Kirkintilloch, and afterwards to attend Glasgow University. As time passed, however, he evinced no love for a ministerial calling, but dreamed of poetry and song, occasionally contributing small pieces to the columns of the Glasgow Citizen, and spending his spare moments in wandering about the banks of his native Luggie, a stream which meanders through many a delightful scene of nature’s handiwork.
     His parents viewed all this with mingled feelings. They were proud of the praise which was beginning to pour upon the head of their eldest born, but anxious that he should settle down to some permanent calling. Meantime “The Luggie” was composed, the result of his love for his home’s surroundings, but how was he, an unknown youth, just out of his teens, to make his influence felt in a great world, and obtain even a publisher willing to bring it forth? In 1859 he wrote to men of influence, asking their assistance, but some of these must have smiled at the wild enthusiasm of the author, and he met with little encouragement.
     What could they think of a young man speaking thus? “I am a poet, let that be understood distinctly. I tell you that if I live, my name and fame shall be second to few of ³⁰⁹ any age, and to none of my own. I speak this, because I feel power.” At his lowest estimate, he would be a second Wordsworth.
     For all this self-importance, he must not be taken as a conceited youth. He was diffident and humble in manner, reverent in mind, and conscious of many failings. All he wanted was a helping hand.
     On the 5th May, 1860, he took an imprudent step, which may have been the cause of his after sufferings and early death. He suddenly left Glasgow for London, bent on making a name for himself in that great city of light and leading, as many a wandering literary adventurer had done before him. He had little money, was bewildered at the hurry and bustle of the huge metropolis, and, for economy’s sake, wandered about Hyde Park all night.
     It was always thought that this foolish freak brought on that consumption which took hold of his hitherto healthy frame, and added his name to the long list of those who have died young, the gods having loved them.
     Amongst the few friends he made in London was Mr. Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton, who interested himself in the young poet, treated him with great kindness, and endeavoured to find a publisher for his verse, but David often wished he were back in Glasgow, for waiting was weary work.
     Robert Buchanan, one of his dearest friends, lent his aid, but his health continued to fail, and at last he was sent back to his old home by the Luggie, where his parents received him with every tenderness. It was declared that if he were to live it must be in a warmer climate, and Natal, Italy, or Jamaica was spoken of, but, through want of funds, these projects fell through.
     Sydney Dobell, and others, had him sent to Richmond, ³¹⁰ and then to Torquay, but it all ended in his return to his mother’s care.
     In April, 1861, he knew he was dying, and yet his poem had not appeared. To die unknown was a deep grief to him. In asking Mr. Buchanan to help him, he says:—“Freeland has possession of the MSS., and with what ignoble trembling I anticipate its appearance! How I shall bless you should you succeed.”
     Mr. Dobell’s influence was untiring, and on 2nd December, 1861, a proof was sent out to the little cottage. What a moment that was to the poet when he took the paper in his hands! At last the dream of a lifetime was about to be realised, and that at the latest hour. On the following day he passed away. “God has love, and I have faith,” were almost his last words. Truly had he called himself, “A piece of childhood thrown away.”
     He was buried in the Auld Aisle, where he had often wandered, and which is also the subject of his song, and, on the 29th July, 1865, a plain obelisk was erected to his memory, subscribed for by his admirers. The inscription is the work of Lord Houghton:—

This Monument
OF
AFFECTION, ADMIRATION, AND REGRET,
IS ERECTED TO
DAVID GRAY,
The Poet of Merkland,
BY FRIENDS FROM FAR AND NEAR,
DESIROUS THAT HIS GRAVE SHOULD BE REMEMBERED
AMID THE SCENES OF HIS RARE GENIUS
AND EARLY DEATH,
AND BY THE LUGGIE, NOW NUMBERED WITH THE STREAMS
ILLUSTRIOUS IN SCOTTISH SONG.
BORN 29TH JANUARY, 1838; DIED 3RD DECEMBER, 1861.

³¹¹ But, like Burns, he left his own epitaph, and who can say it is not a beautiful one?—

Below lies one whose name was traced in sand,
He died, not knowing what it was to live;
Died, while the first sweet consciousness of manhood
And maiden thought electrified his soul,
Faint beatings in the calyx of the rose.
Bewildered reader! pass without a sigh,
In a proud sorrow! There is life with God,
In other kingdom of a sweeter air;
In Eden every flower is blown. Amen.

                                                         DAVID GRAY.
27th September, 1861.

Thus lived and died one who left a few words only behind him; but these have been described as “the truest, purest, tenderest lyrical note that has floated to English ears this half century.”
     Space will permit only of a few remarks upon them.
     The “Luggie” opens with the wish of the writer that his thought and verse may run as smoothly as his beloved river:—

That impulse which all beauty gives the soul,
Is languaged as I sing. For fairer stream
Rolled never golden sand into the sea,
Made sweeter music than the Luggie, gloom’d
By glens whose melody mingles with her own.
The uttered name my inmost being thrills,
A word beyond a charm; and if this lay
Could smoothly flow along and wind to the end
In natural manner, as the Luggie winds
Her tortuous waters, then the world would list
In sweet enthralment, swallowed up and lost.

     It would be too much to say that the world has listened to him, but it is no exaggeration to state that those who have heard have appreciated. He then proceeds to describe scenery and circumstances pertaining to the ³¹² seasons of the year in an inimitable manner. The winter scene of curling every one who knows the game will admit is realistic enough:—

Now underneath the ice the Luggie growls,
And to the polished smoothness curlers come
Rudely ambitious. Then for happy hours
The clinking stones are slid from wary hands,
And Barleycorn, best wine for surly airs,
Bites i’ the mouth, and ancient jokes are cracked,
And, oh, the journey homeward, when the sun,
Low-sounding to the west, in ruddy glow
Sinks large, and all the amber-skirted clouds,
His flaming retinue, with darkening glow,
Diverge! The broom is brandished as the sign
Of conquest, and impetuously they boast
Of how this shot was played—with what a bend
Peculiar—the perfection of all art—
That stone came rolling grandly to the Tee
With victory crown’d, and flinging wide the rest
In lordly crash, etc.

     The attachment of youthful, boyish friendship is beautifully described:—

We sat together on one seat,
Came home together thro’ the lanes, and knew
The dunnock’s nest together in the hedge,
With smooth blue eggs, in cosy brightness warm;
And as two youngling kine on cold spring nights
Lie close together on the bleak hill side
For mutual heat, so when a trouble came
We crept to one another, growing still
True friends in interchange of heart and soul.

     These are but glimpses into the beauty of the poet’s mind, and at the close he asks you if you note any failings in his work, to

Forgive youth’s vagaries, want of skill,
And blind devotional passion for my home.

     ³¹³ This tribute to the memory of David Gray would be incomplete without giving the reader a copy of a sonnet which is one of a number he wrote, entitled, “In the shadows.” His description of a wet October day will indicate how keenly he observed nature:—

October’s gold is dim—the forests rot,
The weary rain falls ceaseless, while the day
Is wrapped in damp. In mire of village way
The hedge-row leaves are stamp’d, and, all forgot,
The broodless nest sits visible in the thorn.
Autumn, among her drooping marigolds,
Weeps all her garnered sheaves, and empty folds,
And dripping orchards—plundered and forlorn.
The season is a dead one, and I die!
No more, no more for me the spring shall make
A resurrection in the earth and take
The death from out her heart. O God, I die!
The cold throat mist creeps nearer, till I breathe
Corruption. Drop stark night upon my death!

(pp. 315-316, 317-321)

Poets and Poetry of Kirkintilloch.

THE author of “Poets and Poetry of the Lennox” [Donald MacLeod (of Garelochside)]—whose accounts of James Moffat and William Freeland we also give—says:—
     “This venerable town, hoary with years, yet full of lusty life, hath produced a perfect galaxy of poets. In each of its coteries you will find at least one man who is a stringer of verses. I have been embarrassed with the local poetic riches at my disposal from which to make selections.
     With few exceptions, the bards and bardlings of the place have been sons of toil, and some of them children of penury. I know not how to account for this rich harvest of song which the place has garnered. Other places in the country are at least as fair, but the fact is patent that the Kirkintillochians are a songful race beyond many of their compeers. Doth the click clack of the swiftly moving shuttle urge them on to weave tuneful verse? Doth the ³¹⁶ hum-drummeries of the dye-shop or the print-work make their souls yearn for the fair face of nature, and urge on their spirits to drink in its beauty and sound forth its praise?
     These are mysteries I cannot solve. Sufficient to say that Kirkintilloch is a nest of singing birds.”
. . .

                                                                                                                                                                 317

WILLIAM FREELAND,

     “Editor of the Glasgow Evening Times, and founder and president of the ‘Glasgow Ballad Club,’ was born in the venerable town of Kirkintilloch, Dumbartonshire, in March, 1828. In far past years his forbears were landed proprietors in the district, but when the subject of our sketch first saw the light, like the MacGregors of the song, the family were landless and fallen from their high estate.
     Young Freeland’s early education under these circumstances was confined to the famous three R’s, but it is amazing what can be done with these by an ambitious, persevering, talented Scot. They are sufficient to open for him the golden gates of fame. Early in life he was apprenticed to the art of block cutting in a local calico print work. After the lapse of a few years he removed to Glasgow, where his insatiable thirst for knowledge and literary acquirements was in some measure satisfied. In that city he was employed by Messrs. Henry Monteith & Company, Bridgeton. He began early in manhood to contribute poetry to the newspapers, principally to the columns of the Glasgow Weekly Citizen, in which so many men of mark in the literary world essayed their first poetic flights. Mr. Freeland’s trade of block-cutting showing symptoms of decay, he applied to Mr., now Dr. Hedderwick, to whom he was known, for a post on the Citizen, and he was successful in securing the sub-editorship of that journal. From this period Mr. Freeland became a member of the great republic of letters. The influence of such a fine mind as that of Mr. James Hedderwick upon his sensitive, poetic, gifted sub., must have been of the most important nature, and eminently calculated to equip him thoroughly for the honourable and onerous position he now ³¹⁸ holds. At this period William Freeland and David Gray of ‘Luggie’ fame, became unto each other sworn brothers, and the tender tie was only broken on the lamented death of the latter. Very beautiful were they in their lives and in their loves. In 1866 Mr. Freeland transferred his services to the Glasgow Herald, and there, with the exception of a brief interval, he has remained. His newspaper leaders have a cultured poetic ring about them, and being further informed with sound judgment and common sense, they add much to the popularity of the Evening Times, over the columns of which he presides. In 1870 he published a three-volume novel, yclept ‘Love and Treason,’ founded on the Radical Rising of 1820, which was handsomely received. In 1882 there was published for him by Maclehose, Glasgow, a selection of his poems, which bears the title of ‘A Birth Song, and other Poems.’ These are most musical and diverse in ring, very high-toned, and tend to make those who peruse them better men and women. This volume has also been a success, and has added much to its author’s popularity. William Freeland is one of our foremost living Scotch bards, and one of the most lovable of men. In addition to the above, he has written hundreds of poems, but those subjoined are from his published works:—

REAPING.

     The last verse of this fine product of the poet’s fancy has been honoured with a place on the title-page of Princess Beatrice’s charming Birth-day Book, published in 1881:—

Up, mortal, and act, while the Angel of Light
     Melts the shadows before and behind thee;
Shake off the soft dreams that encumber thy might,
     And burst the fool’s fetters that bind thee:
Soars the sky-lark—soar thou; leaps the stream—do thou leap;         319
     Learn from nature the splendour of action,
Plough, harrow, and sow, or thou never shalt reap;
     Faithful deeds bring divine benefaction.

The red sun has rolled himself into the blue,
     And lifted the mists from the mountain;
The young hares are feasting on nectar of dew,
     The stag cools his lips in the fountain ;
The blackbird is piping within the dim elm,
     The river is sparkling and leaping;
The wild bee is fencing the sweets of his realm,
     And the mighty limbed reapers are reaping.

To spring comes the budding; to summer the blush;
     To autumn the happy fruition;
To winter repose, meditation and hush;
     But to man every season’s condition:
He buds, blooms, and ripens, in action and rest,
     As thinker, and actor, and sleeper;
Then withers, and wavers, chin drooping on breast,
     And is reaped by the hand of a reaper.

[Note:
‘Reaping’ was also included in Wayside Posies, a Christmas gift-book, edited by Robert Buchanan and published by George Routledge & Sons in December 1866. The following poem was published as ‘The Town’ in Freeland’s A Birth Song, and other Poems, but here the first six verses were omitted, so I have reinstated them.]

THE TOWN— KIRKINTILLOCH.

HERE let me linger—let me scan
     The features of my native town,
Where first I saw the face of man
     And fortune’s shadowy smile and frown.
My heart is thawed! Why, yonder stands
     The steeple, glimmering as of old,
Where Time, with grey, eternal hands,
     Repeats the tale for ever told—
That men, like phantoms, come and go—
The fools of joy, the slaves of woe.

Oft in yon graveyard have I lain
     Top-full of dreams—too much alone,
When thought was weltering in my brain—
     And mused on the memorial stone.
Around me slept, in peaceful death,
     The mortal masters of their clime:
“Here lies,” sweet Reputation saith,
     “The quintessential dust of time!”
Nought of the legend may I bate,
For truth is more with love than hate.

I grew—a lawless cub I grew:
     I scampered thorough field and wood;
And every morn that dawned was new,
     And all the feast of life was good.
Yet soon the inevitable years
     Brought deeper music—darker dreams:
I felt the scalding track of tears—
     The pressure of unsolvéd themes.
A spell of gloom was laid on me
By the black witch, Necessity.

But then came love—the subtle sprite—
     And, whispering, bade my heart aspire,
Whereat a shock of wild delight
     Convulsed me like electric fire;
And, night and day, where’er I went,
     The vision of a nameless face
Filled me with holy ravishment,
     Like a new soul of heavenly grace.
Vain fool! to think that she could be
More than a beauteous dream to me!

But that was many years ago.
     I left the town; it was too small—
Too small for truth; too old for woe:
     Besides, I heard stern voices call
Out of the future: I obeyed:
     The primal vision of my youth
Slid silently into the shade
     Before the larger form of truth.
I hated then my native town,
And deemed it had a stained renown.

But slowly have the rounding years
     Evolved the sweeter thoughts of man,
Which dry and soothe the bitter tears
     That flow at youth’s defeated plan.
So, standing here, where paced of old
     The warriors of Imperial Rome,
I feel that it is sacred mould,
     And holy with the name of home:
Now, ancient town, thy worth hath won
A loyal and repentant son!

Since first I wandered hence, the grave
     Has swallowed many a saintly face,
And many an honest fool and knave—
     God take them all into his grace!
And where are they with whom I played—
     Gay schoolmates of my early prime?
Not one now fills his native shade;
     To mock the scattering hand of Time;
They voyage wide with restless feet,
Through polar cold and tropic heat.

Ah, comrades! were you here awhile,
     Where Kelvin rolls his tremulous flood,
Anew both heaven and earth would smile,
     And love’s old vintage warm our blood:
Again our laughter and our glee                                                      320
     Would shake the drowsy echoes up;
Our joy would spite cold Destiny,
     And spill the poison from his cup:
But far by other vales and streams
Ye seek fulfilment of your dreams.

And where is he, dear son of song,*
     Who walked beside me, bright as morn,
Burning to cope with that high throng
     Of men, the first and mightiest born?
I heard him sing; I saw him shine,
     The moon of love, the sun of truth;
He thrilled me with his tender line,
     The beauty of his mortal youth:
God loved him most—the sweet lamb-souled—
And took him to his starry fold.

One joy the less, one grief the more,
     Are mine, since Life’s pale shadow, Death,
Met him on Fame’s illusive shore,
     Wailing to heaven a passionate breath—
“Oh! to be known among my kind!”
     That wish was like bewildering fire;
It blurred the beauty of his mind,
     And clouded each divine desire,
Said Death—“So be it; yet thou must die
To gain thine immortality.”

A sudden and a fearful phrase,
     With double scope, and doubly true;
For in his soul was nothing base—
     So God made Paradise his due.
And now that he is known in heaven,
     His name is dearly loved on earth—
A May-white bloom untimely riven
     In the green valley of his birth:
The earnest songs he warbled then,
Still sing within the hearts of men.

He sleeps between his native streams,                                            321
     In that “Auld Aisle” that fronts the south.
Where he was lapped in living dreams;
     Where low he lies with songless mouth.
The Luggie flows by Oxgang woods,
     The Bothlin Burn by Woodilee,
In whose enchanting solitudes
     He woo’d his darling Poesy,
Who, sorrowing, sits by Bothlin Burn,
Or broods beside her hero’s urn.

     — * David Gray. —

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9. Literary Landmarks of Glasgow by James A. Kilpatrick
(Glasgow: Saint Mungo Press. 1898).

(From the Prologue pp.viii-ix)

. . . In the course of a charming letter to me about his young days in Glasgow and those early struggles in London, in which poor David Gray, Charles Gibbon, and William Black shared, Mr. Robert Buchanan wrote*:—

     The thought of these old days is very dear to me, and my heart still goes out to the scene of my boyhood and first friendship—the more tenderly as that scene is associated with the memory of my dear father (he died in 1866), and of the beloved mother I lost only a year ago under circumstances of infinite sadness. My mother was the sainted and holy influence of my life,

     — * October 25, 1895. —

^ix and the whole world grew dark the day she left me. She was seventy-eight years old, but I did not realise that she was so near the Great Silence. All my troubles, and I have had many, became as nothing in presence of that crowning sorrow. My soul is in my mother’s grave, and I, a worn man, am only a child crying for the breast.

     To me there is no more interesting passage in the book than that touching the period to which Mr. Buchanan refers, but Glasgow had then been awake to the pursuit and encouragement of literature for fully two hundred years.

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(pp. 252-266)

XVIII.—MEMOIRS OF MODERN MEN.

FORTY years ago a group of earnest youths in Glasgow, then merely boys, made up their minds to be famous. One of them, David Gray, declared that the dream of his life would not be fulfilled, if his fame did not equal, at least, that of Wordsworth; another, Robert Buchanan, wrote to Philip Hamerton “I mean, after Tennyson’s death, to be Poet-Laureate”; like aspirations, if less openly expressed, fluttered into the day-dreams of William Black; and infinite hopes, longings, and ambitions, crowded upon the view of Charles Gibbon as he sat, ²⁵³ far into the morning, in his little upstairs bedroom plying his busy pen over some snatches of romance with which he thought to astonish the whole novel-reading world.
     All these youths were about the same age. Four decades ago David Gray was nineteen, Robert Buchanan and William Black in their sixteenth year, and Charles Gibbon about fourteen. What dreams for such boys, and how sanguine they all were! They stopped at nothing. The world might stand still if it cared, but their intellectual progress went on and on. Nights and days they spent reading books, planning great literary schemes, and writing amazing letters to celebrated authors in the hope that they might disclose their young genius to advantage in the high places of literature. Some of the letters they wrote were full of vanity, no doubt, but they were very sincere even in their self-assertion. One of Gray’s to a notable writer did not fail in its mission for lack of assurance at least, for it contained the remarkable passage: “I am a poet—let that be understood distinctly”; and further, “I tell you that, if I live, my name and fame shall be second to few of any age, and to none of my own.”
     Robert Buchanan, however, in spite of his determination to succeed Tennyson as Laureate, was more modest in his correspondence, and confined ²⁵⁴ himself to sending huge MSS. to distinguished writers and demanding, as in one letter to George Henry Lewes, “Am I, or am I not, a poet?”
     All this is very interesting to read, but one marvels at the unlimited assurance of these youths. Poets they all were in a measure, but Gray and Buchanan were the favourites of the Muse, and it was at a very early age that the author of “The Luggie” began to chant his sad, sweet music.

Poor Gray! his life was a real tragedy. Somehow it seems to have been all wrong. Save by a few friends, who loved and cherished him to the very end, he was strangely misunderstood. It was never meant that he should be a school-master, and accordingly, when for a time he acted as pupil-teacher under the late Matthew Aitken in Rutherglen School, he would return home to his lodging in the Calton, after the worry of a day’s “schooling,” nervous and agitated. His temperament was quite unsuited for the work. It was too delicate, too highly strung.
     For a time he contributed fugitive verse to the Weekly Citizen, edited by Dr. Hedderwick, Mr. ²⁵⁵ William Freeland being then sub-editor. Both of these gentlemen—themselves men of genuine poetic and literary gifts—describe Gray as a tall youth, broad-shouldered, but otherwise slightly built, and with a stooping gait. Mr. Freeland remembers his face as “calm and beautiful, recalling the features of Shelley”; while Dr. Hedderwick gives a pleasant pen-portrait of the gifted boy: “His dark hair curled over a forehead of Keats-like formation, and I remember being struck with his delicate complexion, softly luminous eyes, and sensitive mouth.”
     In Glasgow, Buchanan and Gray were fast friends, and the latter was a constant visitor to Buchanan’s father’s house, 9 Oakfield Terrace, Hillhead.* Their literary bent made this friendship mutually helpful, and while Gray penned his verses for the Citizen, Buchanan wrote in a desultory way for his father’s paper, the Sentinel. “Friend Bob,” as Gray called him, was a Bohemian from the first, and a characteristic picture is sketched of him, as a youth in his father’s newspaper office in Howard Street, lolling back in an easy-chair with a smoking cap on his head, and a long pipe in his mouth, taking the world good-naturedly, and leisurely thinking out his plots and verses. These were the days before he had counted, or even guessed, the cost of that pursuit of fame which

     — * See illustration on page 252. —

²⁵⁶ enticed Gray and himself to London. For a time afterwards there were no smoking-caps or easy-chairs for Bob. In his delightful recollections of David Gray,* Buchanan tells how one day in May, 1860, he came to him and said with eyes full of hope and exultation—
     “Bob, I’m off to London.”
     “Have you funds?” Buchanan asked.
     “Enough for one, not enough for two,” was the reply.
     “If you can get the money anyhow, we’ll go together.”
     So together they arranged to go, but somehow they missed each other on the evening of their departure, and, going by different railway lines, arrived in different parts of London, and each with the proverbial half-crown or so in his pocket, found himself homeless and alone in the great city. In order to save his few shillings for sterner purposes, Gray spent his first night in London under the stars in Hyde Park. At the moment it seemed very romantic, but how tragic it proved for the spirited lad is told with fine sympathy by Buchanan himself in the essay before referred to. Oh, those terrible days in that cheerless lodging in the Borough, whence he was rescued by “Friend Bob,” and borne up three flights

     — * “David Gray, and other Essays, chiefly on Poetry,” 1868. —

²⁵⁷ of stairs to his own “dear old ghastly bankrupt garret” at 66 Stamford Street. Then, after many attentions at the hands of Monckton Milnes and Sydney Dobell, poor Gray was sent home to die. Buchanan came north to Glasgow to see him in April, 1861, and found the boy-poet calm and resigned. “I am dying, Bob,” he said to his old friend, and alas! it was too true. Through the summer, however, he lingered, but the winter came, and with the close of the year he passed peacefully away.

     William Black was another youth who went to London in pursuit of fame, but Black, in spite of his flirtations with the Muse, was of a more practical turn of mind than Buchanan or Gray, and a lad of great zeal in everything he turned his mind to. When in Glasgow he was enthusiastic in almost every kind of sport, and to his unwavering devotion to the gentle art of angling are due the glowing descriptions of salmon-fishing that distinguish his novels. He was born in the same year as Buchanan (1841), and first saw the light in a ²⁵⁸ high building in Trongate, just opposite the Tontine.* Schooling over, he soon took to scribbling verse, and from his boyhood was fond of pictorial description, always giving full sway to his panoramic imagination in his writings. Verse he could not resist, and when Dr. Hedderwick or Mr. Freeland declined his poems, he just wrote a descriptive article and ingeniously worked the verses in! He was a great worker, and as a journalist his industry was prodigious, so much so that when the little circle of ambitious Glasgow youths found themselves struggling together in London, Black, it is said, would be up with the muffin man, and have an article ready for the Press long before his mates were out of bed.
     For a time, in Glasgow, Black attended the School of Art, but eventually gave up the idea of adopting painting as a profession. “I was a complete failure,” he says with fine irony, “so qualified myself for a time in after life as an art critic.” His first book was entitled “James Merle,” and was described as an “autobiography,” and he published it at his own risk, but it is to be feared that the copies sold might be

     — * In reply to a query of mine as to the number and flat of this house, Mr. William Black wrote: “I am sorry I cannot give you the number in the Trongate, but certain I am I was not born ‘in the top flat.’ That would have been altogether too poetic!” —

²⁵⁹ reckoned on the fingers of both hands. Still it was a serious effort, and he went off to London with the consciousness that he was already a published author.
     Charles Gibbon, the last of the four youthful adventurers, was more akin to Black than the others in bent and temperament. Yet Gibbon and Buchanan were very good friends, and the latter greatly encouraged Gibbon in his literary career. Charlie is described by his father (who is still a vigorous old man, and lives at Wood-end Cottage, Mount Vernon) as a bright, curly-haired boy, of somewhat girlish features, who was continually “pondering” over a book, or scribbling away his brains on paper. Both at Bellgrove Street, when his father was employed at Market Street grain mill, and later on when the family lived at the Olive Branch Tavern in Trongate on the old man turning publican, Charlie was to be found sitting up far into the night over his books and papers. Time after time his father interrupted these late sittings, knocking at the door of his boy’s bedroom, and complaining, “Charlie! Charlie! are ye no’ in yer bed yet? This is perfectly ridic’lous. I’m tellin’ ye ye’re jist killin’ yersel’.” Then Charlie would turn down the light and slip into bed, only to resume his book or his writing when the household was still, and finally fall asleep over some tale of mystery or imagination with the book in his hand.
     ²⁶⁰ Thus young Charles Gibbon spent his early days, and many of the plots of his novels were thought out in that little upstairs bedroom at the Olive Branch Tavern. For a time after leaving school he was employed in an apothecary’s shop, as Smollett had been in the same neighbourhood more than a century before, and no doubt, like Smollett, he projected many of his customers into his books. The apothecary business, however, was by no means to his mind, and he speedily left it to enter the office of the doughty Peter Mackenzie, who was then editing and managing the Reformer’s Gazette. This was his first start m journalism, and a very good start it was, for Gibbon had been there but a short time when a notice of one of Charles Kean’s performances at the Dunlop Street Theatre so attracted the actor, that he called at the Reformer office and asked to see the writer. When the curly-headed boy in his teens was presented to him as the dramatic critic, Kean was amazed, and to a shower of compliments he added a few guineas “which might get him some books,” remarking that so capable a youth must come to distinction.

     ²⁶¹ After a period of service under old Peter Mackenzie, young Gibbon went to Dumfries as a reporter, and ultimately, like his three fellow fortune-hunters, he found himself on the high road to London. In like manner with the rest, Gibbon endured the hardships of impecuniosity, for his half-crown (to arrive in London with more than half-a-crown seems to be considered discreditable!) could not last very long even reckoned by its equivalent in muffins, to say nothing of the irresistible temptation to squander it recklessly upon a rasher of bacon. Cold, cheerless lodgings in some two-pair back, with occasional dinnerless days and supperless nights, were the lot of Charles Gibbon in common with his companions.* For him, however, the lights of London never grew very dim, and if there were times when he feared that they might fail, there were times also when they flared up very brightly.
     One of Gibbon’s early efforts at authorship in the great Metropolis was a story called “The Rathboys; or, Erin’s Fair Daughter,” which was dramatised by “Friend Bob,” and actually saw the footlights at the

     — * “Neither Black nor Gibbon,” Mr. Robert Buchanan wrote to me, “ever knew Gray. Gibbon came to London when Gray had gone home to die, and lodged with me at 66 Stamford Street, Blackfriars. We were sleeping together the night Gray died, and I woke Gibbon and said to him, ‘David Gray is dead.’ This was confirmed the second morning afterwards.” —

²⁶² Standard Theatre, London, both Buchanan and Gibbon appearing in the cast.* From this onward the youths seem to have fared very well. Buchanan had much greater versatility than Gibbon, and poems, essays, novels, and plays were speedily called into existence by the talisman of his pen. Gibbon, however, confined himself to fiction, and the score of novels to which his name is attached went very near placing him among the foremost members of his craft. At his death seven years ago, an able writer in the Athenæum declared that “Auld Robin Gray” and “For Lack of Gold” displayed “that sympathetic insight which, in its highest development, was the secret of Scott’s mastery of detail.” And the same critic added this interesting comment, which is peculiarly appropriate to the Kailyairders of to-day—:

     In these days, when fashion is doing so much to induce all sorts and conditions of writers to try their hands at something Scotch, one cannot help looking back with a certain amount of fond regret to one of the two or three masters of their native tongue who were also true exponents of the nature of their countrymen. Two or three are with us yet perhaps five but the circle is distinctly impoverished by the loss of Charles Gibbon.

     — *An interesting recollection mentioned by Gibbon’s father is Charlie’s appearance at Dunlop Street Theatre, Glasgow, as Meg Merrilees, in a performance of “Guy Mannering” for the benefit of the Macdonald family. This would be about 1862. —

     ²⁶³ It was on the homely seaboard of East Anglia that he spent his closing days, and thence in his last illness he often looked back upon his fateful journey to London when he first left his old home. What a multitude of young provincials have trodden that same highway even since then! Many, no doubt, like Buchanan, Black, and Gibbon, have gone forth to distinction, and have seen the lights of London burn bright and luminous at their approach, but for how many, think ye, have these lights been extinguished for ever?

²⁶⁴

XIX:—A POET’S CORNER.

IN the midst of the great multitude of latter-day poets who have been associated with Glasgow, it is difficult to make a selection, yet impossible, without weariness, to deal with all. The swift and tragic end of David Gray robbed the company of Glasgow bards of a poet of great promise. Remember his own words: “I tell you that, if I live, my name and fame shall be second to few of any age, and to none of my own. I speak this because I feel power.” This was extraordinary language for a boy, but Gray was no ordinary youth, and, had he lived, his poet- voice must have been heard among the best bards of the day. How sad, how woefully sad, was his end! ²⁶⁵ The day before his death (December 2, 1861), he had been brought the proof-sheets of his poem, “The Luggie,” and his eyes had kindled with a beautiful light as he beheld the printed page. It was “good news,” he said, though, alas! it seemed but a vanity to him now, and he passed tranquilly away in his old home, almost within hearing of the ripple of the Luggie, that sweet, sparkling stream among the trees which had. first inspired his pen to poesy. It was but a short life that Gray lived, and it was full of pathos—pathos almost as deep as the tragedy of Chatterton or of Tannahill.

             ’Twas not a life,
’Twas but a piece of childhood thrown away,

was the beautiful epitaph he suggested for himself. Why were not these lines chiselled on his tombstone in the Auld Aisle Burial-ground at Merkland?
     In the “Idyls and Legends of Inverburn,” Robert Buchanan, Gray’s friend and comrade, describes in “Poet Andrew” his young companion’s sad life, from his childhood up, in verse which is powerful and moving. It is the boy’s father who is made to speak of his son’s poetry-making in Glasgow—

               It puzzled us,
How a big lad, down-cheeked, almost a man,
Could pass his time in silly childish joys,
Until at last a hasty letter came
From Andrew, telling he had broke awa’
From College, packed his things and taken train                            266  
To London city, where he hoped (he said)
To make both fortune and a noble fame
Through a grand poem, carried in his trunk.
           .         .          .         .          .         .
Ye aiblins ken the rest. At first there came
Proud letters swiftly writ, telling how folk
Now roundly called him “Poet,” holding out
Bright pictures, which we smiled at wearily—
As people smile at pictures in a book,
Untrue but bonnie. Then the letters ceased;
There came a silence cold and still as frost.

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10. Memoir by Henry Johnston
from Ballads and Other Poems by William Freeland
(Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1904, pp. xi-xiii).

. . .
     It was shortly after this period that I, as a juvenile contributor to the Citizen, made the acquaintance of the new sub-editor. I remember his striking personality even then—medium height, with keen but kindly grey eyes and a pale dome-like brow surmounted and surrounded by a great luxuriance of fair curly hair. His manner was genial, and his converse on literary matters critical but encouraging. David Gray and William Black, the novelist, were regular contributors to the Citizen at that time. Although David Gray, or “Will Gurney” as he signed himself, was born in Kirkintilloch, he and Freeland met for the first time in the house of the latter in the east end of Glasgow in 1859. Gray was Freeland’s junior by ten years, but having literary impulses and ambitions in common, they soon became closely attached friends. Gray had extravagant dreams of literary achievement, inspired by the stirrings of conscious power. He dared to prophesy he would yet be Laureate of England and have his honoured bones laid in Westminster Abbey. Freeland’s sympathies went forth to the youthful dreamer, but prudence, acquired from wider experience, ^xii cautioned control of inordinate ambition. Poor Gray’s career was pathetic and short. His adventure to London with Robert Buchanan in 1860 brought on an illness, under which he returned to his home at Merkland to die. Freeland made frequent and welcome visits to the invalid after his clandestine escape from Torquay, where he had been placed for restorative purposes by generous friends. “Only a few brief words,” Gray wrote. “Come soon. It is hard to say, but death presses. That silly book (The Luggie) is my only wish here below next to life; write and come; but oh, that you were living with me, how much happier, how much braver!” Again (30th September, 1860), “My dream is about to be fulfilled; my book is to be printed. Through the kindness of Sydney Dobell do I anticipate this pleasure. He says by the time my MSS. are ready the printer will be waiting for them. Pray, then, look very carefully over the crude, unmethodical rhymes, marking with your pencil anything you see false, weak, or unintelligible, and I shall be heartily grateful.” Gray died on 3rd December, 1861, but The Luggie, which had been revised by his friend, was published through the influence of Sydney Dobell and Marian James,* the novelist.
     ^xiii Gray saw the first page in type just as he was dying. This he sent on to Freeland with an extravagant dedication, ending in these words: “Before I enter that nebulous, uncertain land of shadowy notions and tremulous wonderings—standing on the threshold of the sun, and looking back, I cry to thee, O beloved! a last farewell, lingeringly, passionately, without tears.” Thus passed away a true but over-impulsive son of genius, whose fate and memory ever held a reverent abiding place in Freeland’s mind.

     — * This lady wrote to Gray four days before his death: “My dear Mr. Gray, I have heard from Mr. Macmillan this morning. He speaks highly of the poem, and expresses his readiness to undertake its publication. He says the MS. will form a volume like Edwin of Deira, and the enclosed is a specimen page, sent with the printer’s estimate. I cannot resist the impulse to send it on to you, because I think it will give you so much pleasure to see even this small portion of your work already in the form in which I hope before long we may see it published.
     “After Mr. Dobell’s praise of your poetry you will hardly care for mine, yet I will say briefly that those sonnets which I found time to read before sending off the MSS. to Cambridge impressed me deeply with the truth and beauty and rare simplicity of pathos. It seems to me, too, that in your poetry, even the most mournful, there is a shining forth of that hopeful, loving faith in God’s love which it is indeed a good thing for poets to teach, and which I earnestly trust is the abiding solace and rest of your own spirit.
     “I only write these few lines now, but believe that I am always, with much sympathy,
                                                                                   “Sincerely your friend,
                                                                                                                   “MARIAN JAMES.”

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11. Chapter Ten: V-VI
from Monckton Milnes - The Flight of Youth: 1851-1885 by James Pope-Hennessy
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, Inc., 1951, pp. 220-227).

. . .
     Although Houghton had ceased writing poetry himself, and had allowed his prerogative of editing Keats to pass to the conscientious care of William Rossetti, he was willing (as we have seen in the signal instance of Swinburne) to do everything he could to help young and unrecognised genius. Concurrently with his discovery of Swinburne, he had been trying to save the life of another young poet, condemned by consumption, and by his own febrile temperament, to an early and despairing death. This youth was the Scots poet, David Gray, the writer of a long poem on the Glasgow river the Luggie, and of several other pieces posthumously published in 1862, with a preface by Richard Monckton Milnes. In 1865 a monument to Gray had been unveiled, in Lord Houghton’s presence, in the ‘burying ground’ at Kirkintilloch. An obelisk of white Wigtown Bay granite, with a wreathed harp upon its summit, this monument bore a short and human epitaph composed by Houghton, who continued to help Gray’s widowed mother and his two brothers until as late as 1879. The brief and tragic life of David Gray is one which shows Houghton at his best. It may equally be judged to show some aspects of Victorian England at their worst.

VI

     In January 1838, a year which Richard Monckton Milnes had spent finding his feet in the House of Commons and in the drawing-rooms of London, a Mrs. Gray, wife of a young hand-loom weaver living eight miles from Glasgow, gave birth to her first child, a son. Called David after his father,  the boy was the eldest of eight children whom the Grays reared in a tiny, damp, one-storied cottage with a slate roof at Kirkintilloch. The cottage had three rooms—the work-room, devoted to the looms; the kitchen, paved with stone; the cabin-like bedroom with one piece of carpet on the floor. The ten members of the Gray family slept in ‘extraordinary mural recesses’ and lived and ate in the kitchen; the children ²²¹ played along the banks of the local stream, the Luggie, and on the nearby Campsie fells. Seven Grays, boys and girls alike, were brought up to follow their father’s trade; of their first-born, David, the Gray parents, dour and undemonstrative but high-minded and well-intentioned, hoped for greater things. David’s exceptional powers of concentration and his general intelligence had persuaded them to back him in his wish to go to Glasgow University, whence he returned to work as a pupil-teacher in his own home town. By 1859, when David was twenty-one, his time as pupil-teacher was up. His own conscience (and his parents) clearly indicated that he must earn his living, and here the cleavage between David Gray and his relatives began: for while they had secretly clung to the conviction that he was destined for what seemed the highest of all offices to their simple, earnest minds, that of Minister in the Church of Scotland, David was equally convinced that he was born to be a poet—and not merely a great poet, but the greatest poet of his generation. He had for some time been contributing verses to The Glasgow Citizen under a pseudonym, and he was always working upon the draft of the long Thomsonian poem on which his reputation rests. Long after his son’s death, Gray’s father confided to an enquirer that the family had often wished The Luggie ‘in the fire’; but with an absolute tenacity of purpose David Gray continued to work at his poetry, postponing or evading any decision about the Ministry. His tenacity was that of a fanatic; had he lived longer and developed his remarkable gift we might to-day recognise it as that of a genius. ‘I am a poet: let that be understood distinctly,’ he once wrote to a stranger; and according to Lord Houghton, who has described him as strongly resembling a cast of Shelley in his youth, David Gray’s face, of which no portrait or photograph exists, bore the stamp of the poet. Light, well-built, with a slight stoop, black curling hair and dark lustrous eyes, Gray had a mouth that struck observers as ‘feminine’ and the skin and complexion of a beautiful girl. By temperament he was hysterical, but self-confident: bashful in person, he was ‘bold’ on paper, writing long letters in which pride, despair, self-pity, the conviction of genius and requests for money alternated one with another.
     Scottish literary history offers many instances of poets of peasant stock, whose gifts have blossomed in hovels like that of Burns’s father at Alloway. Robert Burns himself is the most obvious example: but the cowherd Robert Nichol, who died at twenty-four, the stone-breaker John Bethune, who died before he was thirty, and the weaver William Thom of Newtyle are all lesser examples of the species. Gray himself, who died at twenty-three, was certainly ²²² greater than these last, and had he lived he might perhaps have fulfilled even his own lofty expectations. These expectations he pitched high, partly in reaction to his parents’ opposition, partly from the natural excitement of a self-educated man who discovers his own talents, partly because he feared he might not live. In the busy port of Glasgow—in the words of Gray’s friend Buchanan, that ‘most hideous of cities, wherein the very clangour of church bells is associated with abominations’—Gray acquired his thirst for fame. It never left him. ‘My whole short life,’ he wrote to Monckton Milnes from his death-bed, ‘has been set to the tune of that line from Cowley—“What shall I do to be for ever known?”’
     Like many other obscure youths with literary aspirations, Gray soon began to ask for help and advice from those who had succeeded in this field. Pathetically, all he wanted was that someone should read The Luggie: He wrote to Disraeli, to G. H. Lewes, to Professor Masson of Miltonic fame, to Professor Aytoun editor of the Lays. None took the slightest notice. Gray next wrote to Sydney Dobell, who responded warmly, and they exchanged letters. In the spring of 1860 he wrote, enclosing some verses and explaining his origins, to Richard Monckton Milnes.
     We know that David Gray’s letter was one of many such missives which piled up on Milnes’ writing-table in Upper Brook Street. Milnes might have been justified in answering as the others did or, like some of them, in not answering at all. Instead, ‘struck with the superiority of the verses to almost all the productions of self-taught men’ that he had ever seen, he answered Gray at length, praising his verse, but begging him not to try to build his career on poetry or to ‘make the perilous venture of a London literary life.’ In David Gray’s lonely and overwrought state Milnes’ letter seemed like a summons from Heaven; seizing his carpet-bag, and accompanied by his Glasgow friend the journalist Buchanan (from whom he separated on his arrival) Gray caught the express for London, and, after drifting about the streets of the metropolis in a mazy state, he settled on a lodging-house in Deveril Street on the Dover Road and wrote to Milnes:

You promised to read my poem. I travelled from Glasgow to give it to you, and to push my fortune. Looking two days before me, I see starvation. Shall I send or bring it? I know that you do not wish to be troubled with people of my sort coming about you: that is what makes me ask. Whatever you do—do it quickly in God’s name.

He followed this up with a personal visit, or more probably he had brought the note by hand.

²²² I was dismayed at this unexpected result of my advice [wrote Houghton in his Introductory Note to Gray’s posthumous poems], ¹ and could do no more than press him to return home as soon as possible. I painted as darkly as I could the chances and difficulties of a literary struggle in this great city. . . . ‘No—he would not return.’ I determined in my own mind that he should do so before I myself left town for the country, but at the same time I believed he might derive advantage from a short personal experience of hard realities. He had a confidence in his own powers, a simple certainty of his own worth, which I saw would keep him in good heart and preserve him from base temptations. He refused to take money, saying he had enough to go on with; but I gave him some light literary work.

The work was copying, and Milnes also arranged for him to act as a part-time amanuensis to Laurence Oliphant, just back from Tokyo. Gray called again, and Milnes and he ‘went over’ some of his writing together. When Milnes told him he was ‘an undeniable poet,’ Gray felt intoxicated, but when his new friend tried to get Thackeray to print The Luggie in the Cornhill, it was refused, and Gray found the disappointment hard to bear. About this time Milnes seems to have presented him with a copy of his Life of Keats. Gray devoured this book, and suddenly perceived a dangerous similarity between his own situation and that of John Keats; shortly afterwards he arrived at Upper Brook Street ‘apparently under the influence of violent fever,’ saying that (being ‘insufficiently clothed’) he had caught cold from the rain in Hyde Park, and had fallen ill, but had not wanted to bother anyone. Milnes immediately sent him back to his lodgings, despatched the excellent Dr. Tweed to look after him, and frequently visited him himself with food and drink from Upper Brook Street, his only regret being ‘that imperative circumstances’ did not permit him to instal the boy in his own house. It was soon clear that David Gray’s lungs were affected. On learning this, he knew himself to be doomed.
     From his first illness in London in the spring of 1860, until his painful death in December 1861, David Gray’s life became a torment. The sense of unfulfilled renown and a terror of dying, both much aggravated by the relentless course of his consumption, tortured him. ‘I fear not death or a future existence: but O how I fear dying,’ he wrote to Milnes in December 1860 from a nursing home at Richmond where some London friends had sent him while he was waiting admission to a hospital at Torquay, which Milnes was

     — ¹ The Luggie and Other Poems by David Gray, appeared after the poet’s death in 1862, with a Memoir by James Hedderwick and a ‘prefatory notice’ by Milnes. The poems were again published in 1874. —

²²⁴ trying to arrange through his Torquay aunts, and at his own expense. In the meanwhile, Gray had been back to Kirkintilloch and had told his father that Milnes had said things to him that had been ‘worth coming to London for alone’: ‘You told me once that to be a brave man was above being a poet,’ he wrote. Like all abnormally sensitive people, poor David Gray was difficult to handle, but Milnes never flinched. He noticed that Gray’s boastful ‘over-confidence’ gave way when ‘he knew he was really appreciated and cared for,’ and that he began comparing his own achievements with those of others, and to draw lessons therefrom.

I know how easy a thing is to give counsel, and how poor is consolation [Milnes wrote most feelingly to his young friend]; but still I must expect you to be brave and resigned. . . . There is much in this world far sadder and crueller than the thought of leaving it; and the old Greeks counted every man happy who died young.
     Of course I am sorry at the failure of the Torquay venture [he wrote later]. . . .  I knew the conditions of hospital life would be painful and embarrassing to you; but I hoped that the medical advice, the climate, and the scenery would have proved compensations . . . but it is not for one in health and comfort to analyse the feelings of one in your position.

     ‘The Torquay venture,’ Milnes’ well-intentioned plan to have David Gray admitted as a patient at the ‘water-hospital’ there, had ended lamentably. After a few hours in the place Gray had ‘escaped’ to a Torquay hotel, where he kept to his room in a state of hysterical fear lest the hospital officials should ferret him out and drag him back to their verminous wards. Those who have formed the habit of regarding the Victorian period with nostalgia, and of investing it with all the virtues of a Golden Age, should read extracts from the long letter in which David Gray described to his benefactor the reasons for his flight from the water-hospital at Torquay. Before perusing this letter, which is dated January 1861, it is instructive to recall that since 1853 Torquay had been the chief seaside resort of wealth and fashion in this country, comparable to Brighton in the days of the Regency. Huge villas—the largest of them being Baroness Burdett-Coutts’ palace, ‘Ehrenburg’—had been constructed; the yachts of foreign royalties lay out on the smooth waters of the bay; London carriages, carriage-horses, powdered footmen and coachmen in livery were transported from the capital for the Torquay season, as well as London’s favourite clergymen, to preach. Yet in the hospitals of this sophisticated and salubrious town there prevailed conditions of filth and squalor that would have surprised almost every contemporary except perhaps Milnes’ friend Miss Nightingale.

     ²²⁵ Now that my brief struggle for life is past [David Gray began his letter from Kirkintilloch], and I am once more at home, let me write you this last letter. And let me explain to you why I am here. After receiving a note from Mr. Pollard the Hony Secy saying that I could get into the Hospital immediately, I started next day by the earliest train, and arrived in Torquay at 4 o’clock PM. Taking a cab I drove to the Institution. . . . Driving along the seashore I was most happy. I looked forward to five months of agreeable companionship and easy labour with my book. . . .  Arriving at the door of the Hospital I was met by a nurse who . . . led me without saying a single word thro’ long not-very-clean corridors; then thro’ a lobby where the clothes of the patients were stuffed in open boxes and ticketed as in a pawnshop. How it smelt! Then thro’ a large room with 8 or 10 beds in it: through another with 6 or 8 beds and pointing to one at the corner said ‘This is your bed.’ I asked if it was not necessary for me to see the physician or the matron. It was not. Having taken off my overcoat . . . I enquired where I should go now. She said she would take me where ‘the rest’ sat, and repassing the same lobby and corridor I was introduced to my fellow sufferers—23 of them. I could have borne everything but what I saw here. Not one of them was clean. They all sat round a fire, and loud empty laughter was heard at every vulgar joke. One man about 30 years of age was roasting some piece of meat with a spit and as I entered held it up to me with some rude remark and then the loud laughter rose again. Two young fellows were evidently very far gone, and they were assisting each other to walk across the room; while their poor weak attempts at walking  were greeted with loud shouts of ‘Quick march!’ There were no easy chairs for persons in this condition—no quiet corner to think of home . . . no comfort but sleep—and how much of that would they have? I sat among them for some time, but the constantly recurring thought that I was to live here was too much and my heart overcame me till I fainted.

When he recovered he appealed to a nurse, and then to the Matron, for permission to sit in a room alone for an hour or two till he felt better—a request roughly refused. Gray next demanded to see the Honorary Secretary who curtly sent him about his business. ‘They are all poor uneducated men here,’ the Matron remarked. If he stayed, she told him, he must behave like his fellows. Waiting till the Matron’s back was turned, he fled from the hospital, to an hotel room in the town.

On returning from our drive [wrote Milnes’ aunt Caroline, who, with her two sisters, still lived at Fryston Lodge, Torquay], I find a note enclosing this wild epistle from David Gray. What steps are to be taken to maintain him, as he writes from the expensive Hotel below, where he was before & expressed so little thankfulness for the ²²⁶ attentions & very small charge they made? The man can scarce be in a sound state of mind . . . probably he would not be a pleasant inmate anywhere.

The Misses Milnes were known throughout Torquay for their persistent church-going and their zeal in good works, but excellent though these ladies were they were not equipped to understand the neurotic behaviour of Richard’s protégé. To them David Gray appeared as the ungrateful working-class recipient of their brother’s bounty. No doubt they felt that Gray should have stayed in the water-hospital, and that Richard Milnes had done enough.
     Worldly people are lavish in their praise of some slight act of duty or affection, of some faint aspiration towards beneficence. By magnifying the effort involved in the most trivial and natural act of human kindness, they contrive to make more strenuous exertions seem impossible, greatly reduce the standard of potential self-sacrifice, and thus insulate themselves from disturbing or exacting demands. Like Florence Nightingale, who was invariably implored by her family and friends to ‘do less’ and to ‘rest’ and to ‘give it all up,’ Richard Monckton Milnes was born and bred among such people. It is to his eternal credit that he was never influenced by them, and that he was never deterred by conventional worldly considerations from doing what he thought right in difficult or thankless circumstances. So far as David Gray was concerned, Milnes was as disinterested as he was solicitous. He had early conceived a moderate opinion of Gray’s talents. he had not the glorious illusion that he was saving a second Keats; he knew that he was merely doing what he could to alleviate the close of a sad young life.

What would David Gray have done without you? [a friend wrote to Milnes in January 1864]. Is it not a deep satisfaction to you to feel that you contributed to that poor boy’s happiness & that he blessed you when he died? If you had been Horace Walpole, he might have met the fate of Chatterton.

Milnes, however, reproached himself for not having done more for Gray earlier on: he told his wife that had he thought of buying him an overcoat on his first trip to London, the boy might never have caught consumption at all.
     After Gray’s death, Lord Houghton did everything in his power to help his family and to increase his fame. He wrote an introduction to the collection of Gray’s poetry published by Macmillan in 1862; from time to time he quietly sent money to Gray’s parents, ²²⁷ two of whose other children were ‘sinking’ from tuberculosis in the dank little house beside the Luggie; and he personally gave nearly half the sum required to raise the monument in the Auld Aisle Burying Ground on the hill above Kirkintilloch, as well as composing for it an inscription which he hoped would have gratified the ‘poor boy,’ its subject.

This Monument of Affection, Admiration, and Regret, is
erected to DAVID GRAY, The Poet of Merkland, By
friends from far and near, Desirous that his grave should be
remembered amid the scenes of his rare genius and early
death, and by the ‘Luggie.’ now numbered with the
streams illustrious in Scottish song.

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Notes on David Gray - continued (ii)