Michael Scott (born 1789, died 1835), humorist, was educated at the High School and University of Glasgow, his native town, and in 1806 went to Jamaica, where he remained until 1822. He returned to Scotland, and became engaged in mercantile transactions. His admirably conceived sketches, “Tom Cringle’s Log,” were at first published incognito in Blackwood’s Magazine, and appeared in volume form in 1834; “The Cruise of the Midge,” which was hardly so successful, appeared in 1836.

Personal

  Of what manner of man he was, how he bore himself among his fellows, his comrades in pleasure and business, in sport, travel, and adventure by sea and land, no memory remains. His name alone survives as the author of two works which have taken their place among the classics of English fiction, and in their pages, if anywhere, must this shadowy figure find shape and substance. It is but sixty years since he died, a mere moment of time in the world’s history; and yet we know no more of him than, after six hundred years, we know of his namesake, the great wizard who spoke.

  There used to be a tradition at Cambridge to the effect that an undergraduate, being called on in examination to give some account of John the Baptist, returned the answer, “Little or nothing is known of this extraordinary man,”—a reply which probably did not go far enough to satisfy the examiner. Scarcely more satisfying, however, must be the response of the biographer who is called on to gratify natural curiosity regarding the author of “Tom Cringle’s Log”—scarcely more satisfying, though with apparently so much less of excuse. For it is only a little over sixty years since the death of Michael Scott. Neither was his a case of posthumous reputation, or a rehabilitation after long neglect, which might have accounted for the obscuring of biographical detail—his work, though it has lost nothing of popularity, or certainly of readableness in the interim, having been received with acclamation on its first appearance. And yet, after diligent and eager inquiry, the present writer finds himself forced to acknowledge that all but a meagre outline of the facts of Scott’s life is lost. This is the more remarkable in that he was obviously no bookworm or literary recluse, and that all who know his writings will feel instinctively that one so characterised by humour and the love of good company—to say nothing of practical joking—should have strewn anecdote thick behind him wherever he went…. He is buried in the Necropolis, where an unpretending monument marks his resting-place and that of his wife and several of their children. In the inscription which it bears, no allusion whatever is made to his literary achievements. I have been told that in private life Scott was a quiet, easy-going man, of modest and retiring disposition, and also, on the authority of an old lady who remembers his death, that great was the surprise in Glasgow when it became known that he had been the author of thrilling tales of adventure by sea and land.

General

  Mullion. “Marryat himself is enough almost to bear the concern through. A capital writer, sir—beats the American, Cooper, to shivers—he’s only second, in fact, to Tom Cringle.” North. “That’s high praise, I promise you, sir. Cringle, indeed, is a giant.”

  “Tom Cringle’s Log,” by Michael Scott, and “The Cruise of the Midge”—both originally published in “Blackwood’s Magazine”—are veritable productions of the sea—a little coarse, but spirited and showing us “things as they are.”

  Two sea tales of Mr. Michael Scott still worthily survive in “Tom Cringle’s Log” and the “Cruise of the Midge.”

  It is not only, nor even mainly, perhaps, for the qualities assigned to him by the critics of the “Noctes Ambrosianæ” that Michael Scott has won and kept his place in fiction. His pictures of the sea and seafaring life are, beyond question, extremely vivid and striking; startling, indeed, they might sometimes be called, with a wild, lurid picturesqueness which, no doubt, gave Fonblanque his idea of Salvator Rosa. No landsman has ever matched him in this respect, nor come near to him; but Marryat and Cooper were not landsmen, and it would be hard to grant Scott all the superiority that Wilson assumed for him. Good as his sea-pieces certainly are, he was as much a master on land,—in that wonderful panorama, for instance, unfolding scene after scene through all the phases of the great storm in Cuba. Scott surely holds his place by right of many qualities rather than of pre-eminence in one. He had a keen eye for the picturesque, wherever it was to be found; but, liberally as he loved her, he was no mere court-painter of nature. Always, wherever his scene is laid,—among the fogs and shoals of the North Sea or the sunny waters of the Caribbean Archipelago, in the breezy highlands of Jamaica, on the wooded slopes of Hayti, or the sweltering lowlands of the Spanish Main,—there are human figures in the foreground, always through his pages beats the pulse of human life.

  He employed his experiences in composing for Blackwood’s Magazine, and afterwards reducing to book shape, the admirable miscellanies in fiction entitled “Tom Cringle’s Log” and “The Cruise of the Midge,” which contain some of the best fighting, fun, tropical scenery, and description generally, to be found outside the greatest masters. Very little is known of Scott, and he wrote nothing else.

  Would be not unworthy to be bracketed with Marryat if a man could be judged by parts of his books without regard to the whole; but unfortunately “Tom Cringle’s Log” (1829–30) and “The Cruise of the Midge” (1836) are little more than scenes and incidents loosely strung together. Perhaps Scott was influenced by the genius loci; at any rate his books resemble the “Noctes Ambrosianæ” in so far as they are the outlet to every riotous fancy and every lawless freak of the writer’s humour.

  “Tom Cringle’s Log” appeared in “Blackwood’s Magazine,” beginning with the September number of 1829; the final chapters appeared in August 1833. The instalments were intermittent at first, and each had its own title. Blackwood advised that the papers should be connected so as to make a continuous narrative, and in the June issue of 1831 “Tom Cringle’s Log” was first used as a title, but then only as the title of a single paper. As the story appeared it received a warm welcome. Coleridge pronounced it to be “most excellent,” but Captain Marryat thought it melodramatic. There is some doubt as to where the chapters were written, and Anthony Trollope in “The West Indies and the Spanish Main” refers to a tradition that the work was written at Raymond Lodge, the house which Scott occupied in Jamaica. It was probably written in Glasgow in the intervals of business. It first appeared in book form at Paris in 1836, after Scott’s death. Scott so successfully concealed his identity that he was dead before his authorship of “Tom Cringle” was known.

  Granting, then, that rarely if ever have more brilliant pictures of more interesting incidents been more lavishly set before a reader than in the pages of “Tom Cringle’s Log,” we are impelled to enquire what are the corresponding weaknesses which have debarred the author from taking the highest rank as a writer. The answer is not far to seek; it is a defect of constructive power. If he possessed much genius, Michael Scott had but little art. The effect of his fine pictures is not cumulative; each is alike revealed, as it were, by a powerful flash, and the result is that they obliterate one another…. Scott’s stories have here been considered together, for though the “Log” is on the whole justly the favourite of the two, in general characteristics they are almost identical. Quite towards the close, both books display some slight tendency to “drag,” but in this respect the “Cruise” is the worse transgressor. It is also the more loosely put together, and this despite the fact that in the relations subsisting between Lennox and Adderfang, and the mystery which surrounds young De Walden, the author has obviously been at pains to sustain interest by something in the nature of a plot…. On the whole, such fine books are they both that to criticise either is deservedly to incur the imputation of being spoiled with good things.