its work as if it assumed to be the type of all that charity should be. I I cannot help thinking that if it had been called the "Society for Organising Relief," instead of "Charity," it would have shown a truer conception of its own province, and would have been less likely to be misunderstood and therefore misjudged by others. For charity, truly so called, is not a fit subject for organisation, and the very name rather grates upon the spiritual ear as if it implied a material view of that divinest grace.

Material and spiritual things are, however, so interwoven, that even when we have fully recognised that there need be no conflict between the aims of the Charity Organisation Society and those of religion, there may yet remain a misgiving lest the weight of the Society's influence should prove to be thrown into the scale of severity and not of mercy. The great and standing difficulty in dealing with those who depend upon us in any way is to adjust the respective claims of merit and of need. When the two are combined, of course all is easy; but how rarely are they combined in equal degrees! In trying to help the poor this difficulty meets us at every turn. The most "deserving" are very seldom the most in want; the most hopeful cases are by no means those which appeal the most powerfully to our feelings. The Charity Organisation Society seems to recommend a stern disregard of feeling, and a resolute dismissal of all undeserving and unpromising applicants. Of course this dismissal may be, and probably is, only a necessary part of the work of classification. The Society may have no intention whatever of discouraging in others that spirit of Christian chivalry which covets above all things to serve on the "forlorn hopes" of charity. But the fact that the Society does sift out from among the objects of its own beneficence all the "undeserving," must, I think, to some ex

tent, lend the weight of its authority to the theory that it is according to merit, rather than according to necessity, that we should give help. To work out the relation of this view or this practice to the Christian ideal of charity, and to show how they may, as I believe, be reconciled, would be beyond my present scope. I will only say here that they are, I believe, to be reconciled by keeping in view the ancient and obvious, but often forgotten, distinction between almsgiving and charity; between the help which lessens poverty and the help which redeems from evil. For while Christian charity includes the just and the unjust in its universal embrace, spending its life-blood the most freely for the most erring, the very same spirit of charity may well teach us to give money only to those who can be trusted to use it well. We all need mercy, and goodwill is profitable to all, but this is far from being equally true of gifts of money.

I do not know exactly how far the Society can be said to represent any particular theory or ideal, but I see one clear gain in the comparatively modern view of our relations to the

poor which is SO largely represented by it. It is the recognition of the fact, that to help them to do their duty is a greater kindness than to give them to give them food and clothing; and that the worst use we can make of our influence is to tempt them to flinch either from work or from honesty. For the part which it has taken in bringing out this view of the matter, our earnest thanks are due to the Charity Organisation Society. And if there are other sides of truth to which it seems to some of us to do

less complete justice, let those who naturally look on the other side make it their care to supply with equal zeal that which is needed to complete the sphere of perfect fellowship in good

works.

C. E. S.

III.

AFTER the last four lines of the ode on Mrs. Oswald the Common-place Book gives on page 27 :—

Vol. I. pa. 185.

CASTLE GORDON-intended to be sung to
Morag-
1

1 Streams that glide in orient plains,
Never bound by Winter's chains;

1 Currie gives the following account of the circumstances under which this song was composed from information extracted from a letter of Dr. Cowper, of Fochabers' to himself. "In the course of the preceding winter (1786-7) Burns had been introduced to the Duchess of Gordon, at Edinburgh, and presuming on this acquaintance, he proceeded to Gordon Castle, leaving Mr. Nicoll at the inn in the village. At the Castle our poet was received with the utmost hospitality and kindness, and the family being about to sit down to dinner, he was invited to take his place at table as a matter of course. This invitation he accepted, and after drinking a few glasses of wine, he rose up, and proposed to withdraw. On being pressed to stay, he mentioned, for the first time, his engagement with his fellow traveller; and his noble host offering to send a servant to conduct Mr. Nicoll to the Castle, Burns insisted on undertaking the office himself. He was however accompanied by a gentleman, a particular acquaintance of the Duke, by whom the invitation was delivered in all the forms of politeness. The invitation came too late, the pride of Nicoll was inflamed into a high degree of passion, by the neglect which he had already suffered. He had ordered the horses to be put to the carriage, being determined to proceed on his journey alone; and they found him parading the streets of Fochabers, before the door of the inn, venting his anger on the postillion, for the slowness with which he obeyed his commands. As no explanation nor entreaty could change the purpose of his fellow-traveller, our poet was reduced to the necessity of separating from him entirely, or of instantly proceeding with him on their journey. He chose the last of these alternatives, and seating himself beside Nicoll in the postchaise, with mortification and regret, he turned his back on Gordon Castle, where he had promised himself some happy days. Sensible however of the great kindness of the noble family, he made the best

The poem was entered after January, 1789, when the ode on Mrs. Oswald was written, and probably, as Currie says, sent to Castle Gordon, to Mr. James Hoy, the Duke's librarian, with whom Burns had struck up a warm friendship. His letter, dated Oct. 20, 1787, does not mention it, but Mr. return in his power, by the following poem." Burns described Nicoll to Mr. Cunning. ham (Paterson's edition, iv. 274) thus: "In short his mind is like his body, he has a con founded strong inknee'd sort of a soul;" and he compared himself during this excursion (iv. p. 284) to "a man travelling with a loaded blunderbuss at full cock."

2 Currie gives commix'd' for 'immixed,' 'bands' for 'hands,' and 'to' for 'the.' 3. Currie gives spicy' for 'torrid.'

4 Currie gives 'controul' for 'control' and 'bonnie' for 'bonny.'

5 Currie adds in a note: These verses our poet composed to be sung to Morag, a Highfand air, of which he was extremely fond.'

Hoy's answer,-Gordon Castle, 31st October, 1787,-says:

"Your song I shewed without producing the author, and it was judged by the Duchess to be the production of Dr. Beattie" (!). "I sent a copy of it by her Grace's desire, to a Mrs. McPherson in Badenoch, who sings Morag and all other Gaelic songs in great perfection. I have recorded it likewise, by Lady Charlotte's desire, in a book belonging to her ladyship; where it is in company with a great many other poems and verses, some of the writers of which are no less eminent for their political than their poetical abilities. When the Duchess was informed that you were the author, she wished you had written the verses in Scotch."

Burns left Gordon Castle about Sept. 8th. On Oct. 20th he writes to Hoy:

"I shall certainly, among my legacies, leave my latest curse to that unlucky predicament which hurried-tore me away from Castle Gordon. May that obstinate son of Latin prose be curst to Scotch mile periods, and damned to seven league paragraphs; while Declension and Conjugation, Gender, Number, and Time, under the ragged banners of Dissonance and Disarrangement, eternally rank against him in hostile array.'

Hoy answers :

"As for Dick Latine (your travelling companion), without banning him wi' a' the curses contained in your letter (which he'll no value a bawbee), I should give him nought but Stra'bogie custocks to chew for sax ouks."

After Castle Gordon comes the following poem on p. 28. It was first published by Robert Chambers from a "portion of a manuscript book in Burns's handwriting, which is now in the possession of Mr. B. Nightingale, London." It occurs there after the verses on the Stirling window, under the title of a Song by the Same Hand. I note the variations from the version of the Common-place Book, in which it was entered after January 1789.

Scots Ballad.-Tune, Mary1 weep no more for me.

My heart is wae and unco wae,

To think upon the raging sea,
That roars between her gardens 2 green,
And th' bonie 3 lass of Albanie.3_

1 Chambers gives 'Mary's Dream' as the

tune.

Charles died at Rome, and his obsequies were celebrated at Frascati where his brother Cardinal York lived.

''Bonny' for 'bonie,'

'Albanie,' and throughout.

No. 235.-VOL. XL.

'Albany' for

4 'Noble' for 'roya ''they've' for 'they hae.'

5 There's' for 'there is.'

The witless youth' was the 'Prince of Wales,' afterwards George IV., who was born in 1762. In the first three years after his majority, he amassed debts amounting to half a million. It was in 1787 that Parliament granted him 160,000l. to pay them. In the same year he repudiated Mrs. Fitzherbert under the advice of his friend Charles James Fox. She afterwards received a pension of 8,000l. a year from the royal family. The position of the Prince of Wales was discussed in the debates on the Regency, Dec. 1787March 1788, which arose on the apparently permanent disablement of King George III. They were terminated by the King's recovery, but for months in the winter of 1787-1788 the whole country rang with them, and with the struggle between Fox who took the Prince's part and Pitt who took the King's. Knight's History of England, vol. vii. pp.

151-155.

7 Wo' for 'woe.'

6

See

8 Fervently' for 'ferventlie,' 'the time,' for that the time,' 'hame' for 'home.'

D

Mary Stuart's unfortunate husband, and in their infancy on Charles I. and James II. George III. conferred it on his second son, Frederick.

The town referred to in the Frith of Clyde is of course Rothesay, in the Isle of Bute, from which the Prince of Wales takes his first Scotch title.

The story of the Duchess of Albany, daughter and heiress of the unfortunate Prince Charlie, who nursed him till he died, wearied with misfortune and disappointment, and shattered by the habits which had gradually got the mastery over him in the latter years of his despair, is so curious, and so little known in this country, that I may perhaps be forgiven for attempting a brief outline of it founded on Alfred von Reumont's admirable monograph, Die Gräfin von Albany.

The Chevalier de St. George, the Pretender of the Hanoverians and the James III. of the Jacobites, married Marie Clementina Sobieski, granddaughter of the great King of Poland, and goddaughter of Pope Clement XI. The marriage was opposed by the Emperor Charles VI., who was friendly to the house of Hanover, and the young girl was detained by his orders at Innsbruck on her road to Italy in October, 1718. In 1719, she escaped in disguise to Bologna, where she was married by proxy at seventeen years

of age. Her bridegroom was absent organising a Spanish attempt at an invasion of England in his interests, which shattered in the storms of the Bay of Biscay, as the Spanish Armada had done before it, only two ships reaching the Scotch coast. The Pope received his goddaughter with royal magnificence. The Spouses met i September, their marriage was crowned with all the blessings of the Church, and the Palazzo Sacchetti assigned for the residence of their little court of exiles. One of their Courtiers was John Walkinshaw, of Darronsfield, in Lanarkshire, a gentleman who had fought at Sheriffmuir and had acted as James's secret agent in the Emperor's capital. He had made the best of his way to Rome, probably

after the Emperor had shown his rage at the escape of his girl-captive by throwing her father, Prince James Sobieski, into prison. Out of gratitude for his services the Jacobite Queen became godmother to his infant daughter, Clementina Walkinshaw, whose story came to be so closely interwoven after her death with that of her own eldest son.

The King and Queen had two children-Charles Edward Louis Casimir, born on the 31st December, 1720, and named Prince of Wales, and Henry Benedict, Duke of York, born on the 20th March, 1725. At the birth of the heir to the crown of the Jacobites there were great rejoicings. Seven Cardinals were present and the Pope ordered a Te Deum. Before the second son arrived things had altered dreadfully for the worse. Very shortly after his birth his mother left her husband and took refuge from her own jealousy, or from the substantial cause he may perhaps have given for it, in the Benedictine cloister at Trastevere. She remained there for nearly a couple of years, and it was not till after the sudden death of George II. in June, 1727, which for a brief moment renewed their hopes, that the married pair again lived together.

Meanwhile the young Prince Charlie grew up a brilliant boy full of fire and generosity, devoted to athletic sports, a first-rate shot, the worthy heir of a long line of kings, most of whom had been men of far more than average intellectual and moral force. When he was only fourteen he served at the siege of Gaeta, and a year later he was engaged under the title of Count Albany in the Lombard war. About this time his mother died, in her thirty-third year. On her monu

ment in St. Peter's at Rome one still reads the record of the unfulfilled hopes which had danced like Will o' the Wisps before her eyes through all her married life-"Clementina Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae Regina."

I need scarcely touch on the wellknown story of "the Forty-five "—the

final issue of innumerable intrigues at all the European Courts and with half the noble families of Scotland and England. After the meteor splendour of his early successes had faded away when his weary and dispirited troops were prosecuting the siege of Stirling on their way back to their Highland fastnesses, and fighting the last battle of Falkirk in which fortune smiled on their cause, Prince Charlie met his old playmate, his mother's goddaughter, Clementina Walkinshaw, who with her father had come to Scotland after him, at Bannockburn House. The connection then begun lasted till 1760. Clementina followed him to the Continent, lived with him in one city of refuge after another, and bore him a daughter, Charlotte Stuart, in 1753, at Liége. His foreign friends visited and paid court to her, but his English adherents bitterly deplored the connection, believing that their secrets sometimes filtered through her sister who was in the service of the Dowager Princess of Wales, and found their way to the most dangerous quarters. They sent him an ambassador to whose remonstrances he refused to listen, not, he said, from any passion for her, but from his settled determination not to allow an interference in his affairs which would never have been attempted but for his misfortunes.

In 1760, while he was absent, Clementina Walkinshaw and and her seven-year old daughter left his house for ever.

She had been anxious that their little girl should be educated in a convent, and serious differences seem to have arisen between them on the subject. The English ambassadors reported home that by this time Charles had sunk into habits of drunkenness, and that personal ill usage was the cause of Miss Walkinshaw's flight. Whatever the facts were, the Prince did everything possible to recover her after he returned home and found her gone. pealed to Louis XV. in vain. Prince's father took her part and granted her a suitable pension, and

He ap

The

mother and daughter lived comfortably for the next five-and-twenty years in various convents in Paris and at Meaux. In the attempt to drown remembrance, Charles seems to have sunk deeper and deeper into dissipation. A sheet of paper written about this time has the words he scrawled upon it: De vivre et pas vivre est beaucoup plus que de mourir.' In the spring of 1761, H. Stanley, the British ambassador at Paris, writes that the son of the Pretender drinks heavily in the morning, that his people have to put him to bed unconscious at night, and that the emigrants themselves have the poorest opinion of him.

Whether there was ever any written contract of marriage between Clementina Walkinshaw and Prince Charlie must remain uncertain. On March

9th, 1767, she was compelled, by the threat of the stoppage of her pension, to deny that there had ever been any foundation for the report. The day after she signed her declaration to that effect she wished to withdraw it, but it was too late. By that time, in his 78th year, the old Pretender had laid aside the burden of his shadowy crown at the little court he had held in Rome for nearly fifty years. He died on New Year's Day, 1766, before his son and heir could arrive. For months before Charles had been vainly negotiating with the Pope to be recognised as heir-apparent and as King of Great Britain when death should put an end to his father's sufferings. He arrived at Rome on the 23rd January, 1766. James III. had been buried with all the honours due to a reigning sovereign. Forty-six years previously he himself had been recognised by the Pope as Prince of Wales, but the new Pope would grant no recognition except in concert with other European States. A few miles from the city Charles Edward met the Cardinal Duke of York, whose acceptance of the Cardinalate nineteen years before (in 1747) had really, as he foresaw, given the deathblow to the hopes of his house. The act had been