'The King's mad, and Humfrey's
beat Mendoza' (two celebrated prize-fighters and often matched).
'Nothing
more?' 'Yes, Bonaparty's made his Mother King of Holland!'
"Before his retirement, William Yule was offered the Lieut.-Governorship
of St. Helena. Two of the detailed privileges of the office were residence
at Longwood (afterwards the house of Napoleon), and the use of a certain
number of the Company's slaves. Major Yule, who was a strong supporter of
the anti-slavery cause till its triumph in 1834, often recalled both of
these offers with amusement."[6]
William Yule was a man of generous chivalrous nature, who took large views
of life, apt to be unfairly stigmatised as Radical in the narrow Tory
reaction that prevailed in Scotland during the early years of the 19th
century.[7] Devoid of literary ambition, he wrote much for his private
pleasure, and his knowledge and library (rich in Persian and Arabic MSS.)
were always placed freely at the service of his friends and
correspondents, some of whom, such as Major C. Stewart and Mr. William
Erskine, were more given to publication than himself. He never travelled
without a little 8vo MS. of Hafiz, which often lay under his pillow. Major
Yule's only printed work was a lithographed edition of the Apothegms of
'Ali, the son of Abu Talib, in the Arabic, with an old Persian version and
an English translation interpolated by himself. "This was privately issued
in 1832, when the Duchesse d'Angouleme was living at Edinburgh, and the
little work was inscribed to her, with whom an accident of neighbourhood
and her kindness to the Major's youngest child had brought him into
relations of goodwill."[8]
Henry Yule's childhood was mainly spent at Inveresk. He used to say that
his earliest recollection was sitting with the little cousin, who long
after became his wife, on the doorstep of her father's house in George
Street, Edinburgh (now the Northern Club), listening to the performance of
a passing piper. There was another episode which he recalled with humorous
satisfaction. Fired by his father's tales of the jungle, Yule (then about
six years old) proceeded to improvise an elephant pit in the back garden,
only too successfully, for soon, with mingled terror and delight, he saw
his uncle John[9] fall headlong into the snare. He lost his mother before
he was eight, and almost his only remembrance of her was the circumstance
of her having given him a little lantern to light him home on winter
nights from his first school. On Sundays it was the Major's custom to lend
his children, as a picture-book, a folio Arabic translation of the Four
Gospels, printed at Rome in 1591, which contained excellent illustrations
from Italian originals.[10] Of the pictures in this volume Yule seems
never to have tired. The last page bore a MS. note in Latin to the effect
that the volume had been read in the Chaldaean Desert by Georgius
Strachanus, Milnensis, Scotus, who long remained unidentified, not to say
mythical, in Yule's mind.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 16 of 655
Words from 7953 to 8465
of 342071
