[RESERVED] Vastly ambitious spiritual commonplace book by a Scottish Congregationalist, Shakespeare fan, and cousin of the Glaswegian Presbyterian preacher Ralph Wardlaw.
Octavo sized volume, rebacked in half calf over green paper covered boards; paper lining to inner hinges. 2 blanks precede a 10 page list of Contents; 12 blanks then 322 pages of manuscript text on red ruled pages; ‘G Wilmott 1811’ watermarked paper. The writer uses a miniscule handwriting, about 500 words per page totalling c175,000 words in the whole manuscript. He - almost certainly - signs himself only by the initial ‘S’, but repeatedly. The entries date from between January 1812 and November 1815 with a later set of pencilled annotations which seem to relate to the writer’s return to the MS in the 1830s. The family connection to Ralph Wardlaw is revealed in a passage quoted from one of the Glasgow preacher’s sermons about the death of a brother in the Peninsular Wars which is glossed with our writer’s manuscript footnote: ‘This is an allusion here to the Authors Brother and Cousin german to the Writer of this Note - Capt. John Wardlaw, of the 4th Portugese... a young gentleman, of very amiable manners and great merit, who fell in the Battle of Salamanca [22nd July 1814], while gallantly leading on his Company to victory, on that memorable day.” The writer’s Congregationalist beliefs are confirmed by his detailed summaries of 8 Congregationalist Sermons that he attended in Edinburgh. First ‘the Substance of an Exhortation spoken in the Tabernacle, Leith Walk, Edinburgh, 17th July 1813’ (pp163-4); 9th January, 1814 (pp 175-6); 8 August 1813 (pp179-181); 2nd May 1813 (pp209-210); 17th Oct, 1813 (pp220-1) 3rd April 1814 (pp283-4) 29th May 1814, (pp296-7) and 30th May 1813 (pp313-4)
This manuscript comprises paragraph-length excerpts from writers, - both secular and sacred - which appear to the right of the manuscript leaves; these are then linked back to a brief passage from scripture, recorded to the left: a sort of reverse catena. As the manuscript’s writer ‘S’ became more confident so he injected more personal comments and glosses. S questions the assertion that the Book of Job was written in Arabic: ‘When did this writer learn that Job was kinsman of Moses.... Or that the book of Job was originally written in Arabic?’ Or Thomas Francklin’s translation of Lucian: ‘Which is altogether an excellent satire on the folly of man, and enmity of human life’ and later, on lines from Bland’s Collections from Greek: ‘I have inserted these lines, on account of their beautiful simplicity’ (p263).
The chosen texts are evidence of deep and scholarly reading. Here are passages from Anna Seward’s Letters, Thomas Love Peacock’s Philosophy of Melancholy and, most interestingly, from Shakespeare’s Tempest (p86) which is related back to passages from Proverbs, Genesis and 2 Peter III - ‘Our revels now are ended’. Later S quotes from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII (p251/ 259). Particular favourites among his source texts are Chateaubriand’s, Travels in Greece (pp89-90), John Newton Hymns, Walpole’s Journal and Bogue and Bennett, History of Dissenters as well as Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden (p155) and Grant Essays on the Superstitions of the Highlanders p289. Favoured journals include the Missionary Magazine; Edinburgh Review.
