Born: Sir William
Jones, oriental scholar, 1746, London.
Died: Emperor Lothaire
I, 855; Henry VI, emperor of Germany, 1197; Jean Baptiste Massillon, celebrated
French preacher, 1742;
Thomas Day, author of Sandford and Merton, 1789, Wargrave-upon-Thames;
Granville Penn, miscellaneous writer, 1844, Stoke Park, Bucks; Thomas Amyot,
literary antiquary, 1850, London; Dr. Karl Ritter,
distinguished geographer, 1859, Berlin.
Feast Day: St.
Eustochium, virgin, about 419. St. Exuperius, bishop
of Toulouse, beginning of 5th century. St. Lioba,
abbess, about 779. St. Wenceslas, Duke of Bohemia,
martyr, 938.
THOMAS
DAY
Rousseau's ideal of education
was a cross between the Red Indian and the Spartan.
The influence of his fervid advocacy was greatest in
France, but he did not lack thorough-going disciples
in England, who reduced some of his most questionable
dogmas to practice. Mrs. Gaskell, in her Life of
Charlotte Bront�, relates that she had an aunt who,
in her childhood, was adopted by a wealthy couple,
with the purpose of training her on French and
philosophic principles. Her food and clothing were of
the simplest and rudest description; but for this she
did not mind, being healthy and merry, and indifferent
to dress and eating; her hardship lay in the fact,
that she and a favourite dog were taken for an airing
in the carriage on alternate days; the creature whose
turn it was to be left at home being tossed in a
blanket�an operation which the girl especially
dreaded. Her aversion to the tossing was the reason
why it was persevered in. She had grown indifferent to
dressed-up ghosts, and so the blanket-exercise was
selected as the next mode of hardening her nerves.
One of the most notable of
Rousseau's English followers was Thomas Day, the
author of Sandford and Merton, a book which several
generations of children have heartily enjoyed for its
stories, without a thought of its philosophy. Day was
born in Wellclose Square, London, in 1748. His father
held a place in. the custom-house, and left him a
fortune of �1200 a year. He was educated at the
Charterhouse and Oxford, and spent some summers in
France, where, with all the enthusiasm of youth, he
received the new philosophy of education, condemning
old systems as wholly vicious, and believing that no
perfection of character was unattainable under
Rousseau's.
Having resolved on marriage, he determined
that his wife should be modelled in accordance with
the new light. He therefore went to an orphan asylum
at Shrewsbury, and picked out a fiaxen-haired girl of
twelve, whom he named Sabrina Sidney, after the Severn
and Algernon Sidney; and then to the Foundling
Hospital in London, where he selected a second, whom
he called Lucretia. In taking these girls, he gave a
written pledge, that within a year he would place one
of them with a respectable tradesman, giving �100 to
bind her apprentice, and that he should maintain her,
if she should turn out well, until she married or
commenced business, in either of which cases he would
advance �500. With Sabrina and Lucretia he set off for
France, in order that, in quiet, he might discover and
discipline their characters. He, however, and the
girls quarrelled; next they took small-pox, and he had
to nurse them night and day; and by and by he was glad
to return to London, and get Lucretia off his hands by
apprenticing her to a milliner on Ludgate Hill. It is
pleasant to know that she behaved well; and that on
her marriage to a substantial linen-draper, Day
cheerfully produced his promised dowry of �500.
Poor
Sabrina was reserved for further trial, but by no
means could she qualify for Mrs. Day; against the sense
of pain and danger no discipline could fortify her.
When Day dropped melting sealing-wax on her arms, she
flinched; and when he fired pistols at her garments,
she started and screamed. When he tried her fidelity
by telling her pretended secrets, she divulged them in
gossip with the servants. Finally, she exhausted his
patience by wearing thin sleeves for ornament, instead
of warmth, when out on a visit. He packed her off to
an ordinary boarding-school, kept her there for three
years, allowed her �50 a year, gave her �500 on her
marriage to a barrister; and when she became a widow
with two boys, he pensioned her with �30 a year.
Failing to educate a wife, he was content to marry, in
1788, Miss Milnes of Wakefield, a lady whose opinions
nearly coincided with his own, and who was willing to
abjure all vanities in dress. Day was killed in 1789
by a kick from a young horse, which he was trying to
train on a new method.
GHOST WITNESS-SHIP
In the year 1749, the remote
Highland district of Braemar, in Aberdeenshire, was
the scene of a murder, which was subsequently alleged
to have been discovered through the instrumentality of
the ghost of the murdered person; to which effect
evidence was given on the trial of two men before the
High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh. From the
details of the trial, which have been printed in a
separate volume by the Bannatyne Club, Sir Walter
Scott framed a brief narrative, which may serve on the
present occasion, with the help of a few additional
particulars:
'Upon the 10th of June 1754,
Duncan Terig alias Clark, and Alexander Bain
Macdonald, two Highlanders, were tried before the
Court of Justiciary, Edinburgh, for the murder of
Arthur Davis, sergeant in Guise's Regiment, on the
28th of September 1749.
The accident happened not long after the civil war [of
1745], the embers of which were still reeking, so
there existed too many reasons on account of which an
English soldier, straggling far from assistance, might
be privately cut off by the inhabitants of these
wilds.
[Davis had a fowling-piece, and money and rings
upon his person, and some of his valuables were
afterwards seen in possession of the accused. Robbery
seems to have been the sole object of his murderers.]
It appears that Sergeant Davis was amissing many years
without any certainty as to his fate. At length an
account of the murder appeared from the evidence of
one Alexander Macpherson [or Macgillies], (a
Highlander [a farm-servant at lnverey, and about
twenty-six years of age], speaking no langnage but
Gaelic, and sworn by an interpreter), who gave the
following extraordinary account of his cause of
knowledge; He was, he said, in bed in his cottage,
when an apparition came to his bedside, and commanded
him to rise and follow him out of doors. Believing his
visitor to be one Farquharson, a neighbour and friend,
the witness did as he was bid; and when they were
without the cottage, the appearance told the witness
he was the ghost of Sergeant Davis, and requested him
to go and bury his mortal remains, which lay concealed
in a place which he pointed out, in a moor-land tract,
called the hill of Christie. He desired him to take
[Donald] Farquharson as an assistant.
Next day the
witness went to the place specified, and there found
the bones of a Human body, much decayed. The witness
did not at the time bury the bones so found; in
consequence of which the sergeant's ghost again
appeared to him, upbraiding him with his breach of
promise. On this occasion, the witness asked the ghost
who were the murderers,, and received for answer that
he had been slain by the prisoners at the bar. The
witness, after this second visitation, called the
assistance of Farquharson, and buried the body.
Farquharson was brought in
evidence, to prove that the preceding witness,
Macpherson, had called him to the burial of the bones,
and told him the same story which he repeated in
court. Isabel Machardie, a person who slept in one of
the beds which run along the wall in an ordinary
Highland hut, declared that upon the night when
Macpherson said he saw the ghost, she saw a naked man
enter the house, and go towards Macpherson's bed.
[More in detail her evidence was this: I She saw
some-thing naked come in at the door; which frighted
her so much that she drew the clothes over her head:
that when it appeared, it came in a bowing posture;
that she cannot tell what it was; that next morning
she asked Macpherson what it was that had troubled
them the night before ? and that he answered, she
might be easy, for it would not trouble her any
more.']
Yet, though the supernatural
incident was thus fortified, and although there were
other strong presumptions against the prisoners, the
story of the apparition threw an air of ridicule on
the whole evidence for the prosecution. It was
followed up by the counsel for the prisoners asking,
in the cross-examination of Macpherson: "What language
did the ghost speak in?" The witness, who was himself
ignorant of the English language, replied: "As good
Gaelic as I ever heard in Lochaber." "Pretty well for
the ghost of an English sergeant," answered the
counsel. The inference was rather smart and plausible
than sound, for the apparition of the ghost being
admitted, we know too little of the other world to
judge whether all languages may not be alike familiar
to those who belong to it. It imposed, however, on the
jury, who found the accused parties Not guilty,
although their counsel and solicitor," and most of the
court, were satisfied of their having committed the
murder.'
Scott's hypothesis for the
explanation of the alleged apparition, is that giving
information is unpopular in the Highlands, and
Macpherson got up the ghost-story, 'knowing well that
his superstitious countrymen would pardon his
communicating the commission intrusted to him by a
being of the other world.' This hypothesis (whatever
other may be adopted) is not only without support in
positive fact, but it assumes a degree of anxiety for
the execution of justice wholly gratuitous, and
certainly far from characteristic of the Braemar
Highlander of that day. It also ignores the
corroborative evidence of Isabel Machardie. What is
even more important, it is out of harmony with the
chronology of the story, for Macpherson related his
ghostly visitation and buried the sergeant's bones
three years before any measures for the vindication of
justice were taken, and' for anything that appears, no
such measures would ever have been taken, but for the
active interference of a retired officer of the army,
named Small.
This gentleman seems to have been
inspired with a strong feeling as a friend of the
government and of the army, in contradistinction to
the Jacobite sentiments which then largely prevailed.
So vigorous were his efforts to make out evidence
against the murderers of Davis, that it was taken
notice of in the formal defences of the accused, and
orally by their counsel, the eminent Mr. Lockhart, who
was notoriously a Jacobite. Small felt so much
exasperated by the insinuations of the counsel, that
he next day appeared in the Parliament Close, with his
sword by his side, and made an assault upon Mr.
Lockhart, as the latter was walking to the court; for
which offence he was put in prison by the Lords, and
only liberated on his making an apology. It seems to
have been to this circumstance that
Wedderburn alluded in his famous retort upon Lockhart,
in the Court of Session in Edinburgh, when, stung by
the overbearing manner of his senior, he reminded him
of his having been disgraced in his person and
dishonoured in his bed�a burst of sarcasm followed by
his laying down his gown, and deserting the Scotch for
the English bar.
The case of Sergeant Davis,
remarkable as it is, does not stand quite singular. A
similar one, which occurred in the county of Durham in
the year 1631, has been related in many books, and is
the subject of a critical historical inquiry in
Surtees's History of Durham. The circumstances
can be made out with tolerable clearness as follows:
'One Walker, a yeoman of
good estate, and a widower, living at
Chester-le-Street, had in his service a young female
relative named Anne Walker. The results of an amour
which took place between them, caused Walker to send
away the poor girl under the care of one Mark Sharp,
a collier, professedly that she might be taken care
of as befitted her condition, but in reality that
she might no more be troublesome to her lover in
this world.
Nothing was heard of her
till, one night in the ensuing winter, an honest
fuller, named James Graham, who lived about six
miles from Walker's house, coming down from the
upper to the lower floor of his mill, found a woman
standing there, with her hair hanging about her
head, in which were five bloody wounds. According to
the man's evidence, afterwards given,* be asked her
who she was, and what she wanted; when she gave an
account of her sad fate, having been killed by Sharp
on the moor in their journey, and thrown into a
coal-pit hard by, while the instrument of her death,
a pick, had been hid under a bank, along with his
clothes, which were stained with her blood. She
demanded of Graham that he should undertake the
business of exposing her murder, and having her
murderers punished.; a task he did not enter upon
till she had twice reappeared to him, the last time
with a threatening aspect.
The body, the pick and the
bloody clothes being found as Graham described,
little doubt remained that Walker and Sharp were the
guilty men. They were tried at Durham before Judge
Davenport in August 1631. The mode of discovery
could not fail in that age to make a great
impression, and produce much excitement at the
trial. Hence it is not very surprising to hear that
one of the jury, named Fairbair, alleged that he saw
a child sitting on Walker's shoulder. The men were
found guilty, condemned, and executed.'
