226 CAMPBELL, THE CHANCELLOR. but also, unfortunately, as a painful exhibition of the failings which he took pleasure in tracing in the career of his eminent predecessors. His autobiography, perhaps, shows him at his best as an author. He is as honest and garrulous, not so conceited as, and more moral than, Pepys. In 1846, on the return of the Whigs to office, he was made Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster; and in 1850, he had for a third time the ill luck or the good fortune to drive a competitor, Lord Denman, out of a place to which he succeeded, and became Chief-Justice of England. He justified his appointment by displaying the same unremitting industry on the Bench as at the Bar. In 1860 he at last obtained the Chancellorship which he had always in view, and had foretold soon after he came to the Bar he would reach. He died in office on 22d June 1861, in his eighty-second year. The lives of his contemporaries Brougham and Lyndhurst, which he left behind him for publication, are a studied and partially successful attempt to reveal the weakness of two of the greatest of his contemporaries in his own profession. They scarcely can have added, as was said by one of his victims, a new terror to death, but they have cast a stain on his own posthumous fame. Lyndhurst had been his early, and, politics apart, his constant friend; and he owed his advancement largely to Brougham. The virtues of his private life fortunately contrast favourably with the faults of his public career. He was a dutiful son, an affectionate brother, and a good husband and father. We may draw from the records of another Church in Fife another contrast to the character of Lord Campbell, and a fresh illustration of the variety of the men of Fife. The Episcopal Church ceased in the seventeenth century to be the Church of the majority of the people, and the Jacobite sympathies of its ministers led to its per BISHOP LOW, OF PITTENWEEM. 227 secution by the English Government after the Revolution. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, when the Jacobite cause was lost, and the hatred of Prelacy had somewhat moderated, it began to recover ground in Fife as elsewhere in Scotland. Small in numbers, a sect with the tradition and the feeling of a Church retaining the devoted adherence of its followers, it stood the trial of adversity better than of prosperity. Its bishops, with more scanty stipends than the Presbyterian clergy, were men of piety, some of them of learning, and were reverenced by their scanty and scattered flocks. They maintained a sort of old-fashioned demeanour, a quaint simplicity of manners, and a patriotic love of their country as well as their Church. Perhaps they resembled the bishops of the primitive Church more than most of their predecessors. Several deserved the epithet of saintly, which has been applied to one, Bishop Jolly. Fife, one of the least episcopal of Scottish counties, had one of these worthy bishops in David Low, bishop of the united dioceses of Moray and Ross, Argyle and the Isles, who served as pastor of Pittenweem from 1790 till his death in 1856. The poverty and limited numbers of his Church during this period made such a combination, which could not be called a plurality of livings, common and necessary. Low was by birth a native of Angus, but settled early in Fife, where he lived for more than sixty years. When first appointed to Pittenweem, his salary was £40, and it never exceeded £250 for both offices. Yet out of this stipend and a small patrimony, carefully nursed, a frugal and celibate life enabled him to endow a separate bishopric of Argyle with £8000, the College of Glenalmond with £1000, and the clergyman of Pittenweem with a small supplement to his salary, and the old Priory, which he bought for a parsonage. His thin and stooping figure, spindle-legs, and keen small eyes peering out under his shovel-hat, were 228 A BISHOP DIFFERENT FROM SHARP. known in all the little nest of burghs of the East Neuk, and especially, as one who remembers him reports, in the book-shop of Mr Cockburn at Pittenweem, the publisher of 'Anster Fair,' which was the rendezvous of the reading and writing youth of the burghs. But his parishioners were chiefly the landward nobility and gentry, who made him welcome in their homes, and attended his services. Without brilliant talents, he discharged with unostentatious faithfulness the duties of his pastoral charge, and most of the noble lines of Dr Johnson on his friend Levitt might have been applied to him : "His virtues walked their narrow round, Nor made a pause nor left a void. The busy day, the peaceful night, Unfelt, uncounted, glided by. His frame was firm, his powers were bright, No cold gradations of decay, And freed the soul the nearest way." His kindly humour and stores of anecdote, chiefly of the Jacobite generation of Episcopalian clergy and gentry, the rarer because Fife had so few Jacobites, made him a favourite in the little circle in which he lived, and the friend of all his neighbours. One of his parishioners, Mr Conolly, the town-clerk of Anstruther, Pittenweem, and Kilrenny, wrote an appreciative notice of his quiet, uneventful life. It was such a life, typical of other Scottish bishops of his time, which gradually sapped the deep-rooted prejudices of his countrymen against Episcopacy, recalling by practical and everyday examples that there might be bishops of the type of Leighton and Ken as well as of the type of Laud and Sharp. CHAPTER XII. OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS OF FIFE CHARACTER IN THE PROFESSIONS-FIFE SOLDIERS-KIRKALDY OF GRANGE AND THE TWO LESLIES-FIFE ADMIRALS-ALEXANDER SELKIRK-FIFE DOCTORS AND JUDGES-ARCHITECTURE AND ART IN FIFE-LITERATURE OF FIFE -CHARACTER OF THE NATIVES. BESIDES the names which have been taken as representatives of different aspects of character in Fife, the county has contributed probably more than any other in Scotland to the pages of biographical history. Mr Conolly in his 'Dictionary of Eminent Men of Fife,' includes no fewer than 547 in the list, but he has extended the claims of Fife citizenship with a patriotic liberality, not merely to its natives, but to those "connected with it by property, residence, marriage, or otherwise." No one is more anxious to prove a man of eminence his countryman than a Scotsman. Perhaps the present sketch may be thought also not to have erred in exclusiveness. Yet an endeavour has been made to keep in view what is its chief aim, the illustration which the History of Fife affords of the characters of the county and its natives, and their influence on the history and character of Scotland. Before quitting the field of biography and attempting to take a more general view of the art and literature of 230 KIRKALDY OF GRANGE. Fife, there are still some illustrations of Fife character in other walks of life which can scarcely be passed over, though it will be necessary to retrace our steps a little as regards time. Fife has long boasted of the peaceful pursuits of its inhabitants, and in the last and present centuries it was not so good a recruiting-ground as the Highlands. But in earlier times it did at least its share of fighting, and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it produced three famous soldiers who occupy a distinct place in military annals - Kirkaldy of Grange and the two Leslies. William, son of Sir James Kirkaldy of Grange near Kinghorn, Treasurer of James V., "a stout man, who always offered by single combat and at point of sword to maintain whatever he said," was when a boy a page of James V. In early youth, like his father he was one of the Scotsmen who saw that the future of Scotland lay with England and Protestantism, not with France and Rome. Born about 1530, he was present when only sixteen at the death of Beaton, was with Knox first in the castle, afterwards in the galleys, and was sent in 1547 a prisoner to Mount St Michel. Taking advantage of the festivities of the Eve of the Epiphany 1549, Kirkaldy and several of his comrades, the brave Norman Leslie, and "the stout gentleman," Carmichael of Balmaddie, amongst the number, disarmed their keepers and escaped to England. Deprived of a pension by the death of Edward VI., he returned to France and entered the service of Henry II., whose war with the Emperor led him, as the war with England had his predecessors, to secure the aid of Scottish swords. Kirkaldy led a hundred light horse under Anne de Montmorency, the Constable of France, in the desultory wars of Picardy. Of this mode of warfare, more than of |