ABSTRACT
In his old age, Robert Chambers began an autobiography. He had written about his life before, in stilted and pedantic language in his thirties, but at sixty-five he let his mind and pen ramble back to his childhood in a gentler and more relaxed way. His handwriting is tired but the picture he paints of Peebles at the beginning of the century is wonderfully alive. Pictures are particularly potent in childhood; an ability, afterwards lost, to enter into them, to walk with a woodman and sail with the swans, makes them unforgettable. Bonaparte was a direct result of the sins of the people of Peebles and only their turning away from their errors would keep him from their shores. Even in Peebles, ‘there were occasional inlets of Whig light into the dark recesses of the council’ as when the provost had persuaded his Town Council to petition parliament for an enquiry into the conduct of the Duke of York.
