Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

2 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD.
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who cajne to any note could, if he took trouble
enough, or if the Lyon Office and court of honour
had been as active as it is now, have proved easily
enough his own descent from, or attachment to, some
rural house of great or small gentry, the vigorous and
continually multiplying race which threw out offshoots
in every generation, not only into the learned pro-
fessions, chiefly law, and into the army, but also into
the humbler medium of the trades, when the house
was too full to hope for commissions and appointments
enough to take them all in. The world was tolerably
full then, though not so crowded as now ;
and though
a boy's living did not in those days hang on the un-
certain chance of an examination, yet there was a
limit, very quickly reached, to a country laird's means
of influence and patronage. It was the hackneyed
thing to say, which every noble father says accordingly
to every son, in fiction and the drama, that the only
profession which could be adopted by a gentleman was
that of arms. If the Scots lairds were ever so foolish,
which we doubt, they changed their minds when there
were seven or eight Quentin Durwards to send forth
into the world. Sir Walter Scott puts into the mouth
of King James himself a very graphic account of this
process, by which the young man put his pedigree and
his blazon in his pocket, and set up his booth and sold
his stuffs until the lucky day when he could cock his
beaver once more with the best, and assert the old
pretensions of the stock from which he came. This
national tendency shows itself perhaps for the last
time with bewildering effect in the black lists of the
Fifteen and the Forty-five, where a number of names,
" fifth son of the laird of Drumthwacket," " seventh