—>4/ PUBLICATIONS OF THE SCOTTISH HISTORY SOCIETY THIRD SERIES VOLUME II DIARY OF GEORGE RIDPATH 1755-1761 im DIARY OF GEORGE RIDPATH MINISTER OF STITCHEL 1755-1761 Edited with Notes and Introduction by SIR JAMES BALFOUR PAUL, C.V.O., LL.D. EDINBURGH Printed at the University Press by T. A. Constable Ltd. for the Scottish History Society 1922 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION DIARY—Vol. I. DIARY—You II. INDEX INTRODUCTION Of the two MS. volumes containing the Diary, of which the following pages are an abstract, it was the second which first came into my hands. It had found its way by some unknown means into the archives in the Offices of the Church of Scotland, Edinburgh ; it had been lent about 1899 to Colonel Milne Home of Wedderburn, who was interested in the district where Ridpath lived, but he died shortly after receiving it. The volume remained in possession of his widow, who transcribed a large portion with the ultimate view of publication, but this was never carried out, and Mrs. Milne Home kindly handed over the volume to me. It was suggested that the Scottish History Society might publish the work as throwing light on the manners and customs of the period, supplementing and where necessary correcting the Autobiography of Alexander Carlyle, the Life and Times of Thomas Somerville, and the brilliant, if prejudiced, sketch of the ecclesiastical and religious life in Scotland in the eighteenth century by Henry Gray Graham in his well-known work. When this proposal was considered it was found that the Treasurer of the Society, Mr. C. S. Romanes, had another volume of the Diary dealing with the years immediately preceding these contained in the volume first discovered : this Mr. Romanes with characteristic generosity has put at my disposal. But however interesting the two MSS. might be, it was found impossible to publish them in esdenso in one volume, regard being had to the much increased cost of printing and the limited resources of the Society. They had therefore to be shortened in some way, and on vii viix DIARY OF GEORGE RIDPATH consideration it was decided to omit all or almost all passages dealing with events outside the subject of Scottish life and character. The sacrifice was made unwillingly, as the period treated of includes part of the Seven Years War and the war with the French in Canada. But such information can always be got in 'the ordinary history books, and Ridpath generally confines himself to a bare statement of the news of the day taken from the journals ; he does not indulge in many commentaries on them. If it is objected that with these omissions we are left with a chronicle of very small beer, it may be replied that it is just this small beer that we need and that is so refreshing. Reports of the big things in life are easily found, but it is less easy to get information as to the daily life of the people, their reading, their dinners and drinkings, their quarrels and reconciliations, their loves and hates, their little jaunts, painfully accomplished for the most part on horseback over very inferior roads, and, generally, the home life of the period. All this is chronicled for us in the pages of the Diary, written without the slightest idea of ultimate publication by one who, though he might be described as an obscure country minister, was nevertheless a man of rare culture, a friend of the most celebrated Scots literati of the time, and an earnest student in many branches of science. But we must consider him somewhat more in detail. George Ridpath was the eldest son of another George Ridpath who was minister of Ladykirk from 1712 till 1740. His mother, living with him during the time of the Diary in a more or less invalid state, was Ann Watson, but of her parentage I am ignorant. The name Ridpath, or its variant Redpath, is not uncommon on the Borders. There was still a third George Ridpath, who was minister at Abbey St. Bathans from 1624 to 1628, but whether or not he was an ancestor does not appear. The family at INTRODUCTION ix Ladykirk manse consisted of the diarist, two brothers Philip and Wilham, and two sisters of whom the eldest, Elizabeth, married a Mr. Waite, a merchant in Berwick, and the youngest, Nancy, who ultimately lived with her brother George and their mother at the manse of Stitchel. Ridpath was born about 1717, educated at the University of Edinburgh, and must have been a scholar of some distinction, as may be readily seen from his acquaintance with and appreciation of the classic authors, as shown by many passages in his Diary, and by the rather contemptuous way in which he writes of the linguistic attainments of his brothers who had the same educational advantages as himself. He was licensed by the Presbytery of Chirnside in 1740, three months before his father died, and two years afterwards he was presented to the parish of Stitchel, where he remained till his death in 1772. He married, 6th September 1764, Wilhelmina Dawson, the daughter of a merchant in Kelso, and had three children, a son and two daughters. When he first began his Diary it is impossible to say ; the first of the volumes now extant begins on 13th April 1755 and ends on 25th Januaxy 1758 ; the second records his doings from 21st March 1758 to 15th July 1761. They form a delightful record of the time, and it is interesting to note how curiously modern is their style. Ridpath was a calm, unemotional, level-headed man ; in Church affairs he approached perhaps more nearly to an old ‘ moderate ’ than anything else. Certainly his Diary is entirely free from those spiritual rhapsodies and morbid self-intro- spection which are so characteristic of diaries in the century before his. He writes down his information in an eminently matter-of-fact way. The style is rather slipshod, as might be expected in a work which was not intended for any eye but his own, though no person could be more critical of others on the question of style in DIARY OF GEORGE RIDPATH composition than he was. Plain and unvarnished though his story may be, he is capable of rising to heights to which many a more skilful writer might despair of attaining. Readers of his account of the death of his little niece Nancy Waite, and his attendance through a dangerous illness on her small brother, cannot fail to be touched by the pathetic narrative, poignant as it is, yet without a trace of sentimentality. We can see the dim, unventilated room, the suffering child on the bed, wrestling with the dread and little-understood diphtheria, the worn-out watchers fast asleep, and the weary but alert uncle fighting for the child’s life and at last successfully snatching him from the very jaws of death : then his profound thanks- giving from an overflowing heart. Ridpath was not what we would now call an eminently spiritually-minded man; indeed, in the wide range of his reading, theology is conspicuously absent, the only reference to it being an observation that some magazine he had been reading contained nothing ‘ except some silly articles on theology.’ But, on the other hand, he was an excellent parish minister, and no one can have visited his people with more exemplary regularity and assiduity. And he not only rendered himself responsible for their souls, but also to some extent for their bodies. His tastes were largely scientific, and he had more than a mere smattering of medical lore ; he did not hesitate to prescribe for his parishioners in illness, if he thought he could do them any good, and he knew the virtues of the many ‘ simples ’ that could be gathered in the fields. As to his preaching, I am afraid that much cannot be said to bis credit; he never omits in his Saturday entries to say ‘ prepared for to-morrow ’ or ‘ looked out something for to-morrow,’ but his preparation must have been rather perfunctory. He would have been a terror to modern congregations, as his sermons extended to an hour and a INTRODUCTION xi half or even two hours in duration. It is only fair to state that when this does happen he has a certain measure of compunction, and confesses that he preached ‘ far too long,’ ‘ beyond all bounds,’ or merely ‘ long.’ But in those days people expected long sermons, and would certainly have resented a mere twenty minutes’ discourse. As was the custom in his time, or at all events in the time of his father, he preached many Sundays on the same text; all his texts are duly given in the Diary, but for reasons explained above, these have had to be omitted in the printed pages. There is no mention of a gown, and it is probable that in this little rural parish Ridpath preached clad in his one ‘ black coat,’ only worn on special occasions, his garments in ordinary life being grey, though some of the clergy favoured blue. His parish work kept him busy, though the population of the parish in 1755 was under 1000. But there were always a lot of sick to be visited. Hygiene, as we know it, was non-existent; box beds and unaired rooms took toll of the people in phthisis, while the unenclosed and un- drained lands led to a great prevalence of fever and ague. Cancer, our more modern scourge, is not mentioned, but smallpox seems to have been taken for granted, and lucky were the patients who came through it ‘unspoilt.’ Ridpath was much interested both in the theory and practice of medicine, and, when he was interested in a case, loves to give full particulars of it; the consequence is that we are frequently faced with a mass of sick-room detail which is quite unprintable.