The eldest child of this pair, the third Norman, who may be called Norman the Great, was born in Campbeltown on June 3, 1812. From his earliest years he was remarkable for ardent affections, the eager interest he took in everything, and the humour and imagination with which he seized his little world. Talking and telling stories at the nursery fire, his tongue never lay. When only six he could mimic various characters of the town; and, later, he had an attic fitted up, in which he and his companions acted plays. For study he had no aptitude, and at the burgh school the classics were ill taught; but he entered with a will into the life of the boyish community, making passionate friendships, contending with the ‘shore-boys,’—those raiders of the playground,—and heading expeditions against the French, and chasing pirates in a punt. But his great delight as a boy was to visit the vessels at the quay; he would spend hours on board, learning the name and the use of everything, and consorting with the sailors,—all in a world of romance. Other savours of life on the ocean wave he had in society, which abounded in naval officers, some attached to the revenue cruisers, some ‘half-pays’ who had, perhaps, fought with Nelson. There also were two or three retired soldiers of distinction, and as many aristocratic spinsters (drifts from the county), living on their annuities, and the sheriff with his top-boots and queue. These, with several old families of the place, and the usual dignitaries of a burgh, were the quality; and, cut off as they were from the rest of the world (Campbeltown being then as an ocean isle for isolation), they make a quaint picture, like a set in some ancient novel. Norman mixed in this company, and the heroes of the services, and the queer old maids—he saw them every one, and was glad. Not less did he mark the fishermen’s sons, with their ‘codlike faces and huge hands like flat-fish,’ or the fools and beggars that were the heroes of the streets. This varied and stirring experience, which was of inestimable account in the making of the man, fell in with the ideal of training that had been set at Fiunary.
But in Campbeltown the boy could not grow up to be a Highlander after his father’s heart; so in his twelfth year he was sent to Morven. The old minister was now gone, and his youngest son was reigning in his stead. Norman was boarded with the parish schoolmaster, his business being to learn Gaelic and get acquainted with the peasantry. Many an evening he spent in some hut,—the floor the bare earth, the ceiling a roost for hens; around the fire (which was in the middle of the apartment, the smoke escaping through a hole in the roof) a group would gather,—the lasses knitting, the lads busking hooks; and, heedless of the storm, they made the hours fly, telling tales and singing songs of their land. He gloried in the shore, and was to be seen perched upon a rock, fishing the deep pools. With his relatives, again (who claimed him when the school-week was over), he wandered on moor and mountain, or if they went sailing in the Sound, they would sometimes camp for the night on some distant island, and see the loveliest dawns.
Here the romance of Norman’s boyhood came to an end; he was to exchange Morven, not for ships and sailors, but for a far other environment in the Lowlands. In 1825 his father was presented by the Crown, on the recommendation of all the principal heritors, to Campsie, a parish in Stirlingshire, within twelve miles of Glasgow. The minister accepted the living for the sake of his family, but it cost him some pangs to leave his congregation. ‘I preached my farewell sermon,’ he says in his fragment of autobiography, ‘and could I have known beforehand the scene which I then witnessed, and the feelings that I myself experienced, I do believe that no inducement could have tempted me to leave them.’ In his new parish there was a large manufacturing population; yet he might almost have forgotten that he was not in the Highlands, the rural part being a mountainous wild, and the manse near that goal of excursions, Campsie Glen. The church was a wretched little structure, and away in the country; but the minister set to work, and, after much trouble, had a new one built in the town. For the sake of his countrymen, of whom there were many in the parish, he held special services in their native tongue; and it was during this period of his ministry that he began his career as a literary apostle to the Gaelic-speaking race.
Of Norman as a boy in Campsie there is nothing to tell, except that he attended the parish school; nay, and there is a letter in which he complains, with a twinkle in his eye, of having salmon and legs of roasted lamb crammed down his throat. ‘O my dear mamma, it is only now that a fond mother is missed, when dangers and misfortunes assail us.’ Hardly less meagre is the record of his early college life; indeed, before we get a full view of the student he is a man, and the strange thing is not that he was undistinguished in his classes, but that (so far as appears) he was not even interested in the academic scene. In 1827, when he entered the University, the old College of Glasgow—now a railway station—and the old High Street—now a sanitary thoroughfare—were as they had been in the days of Andrew Melville,—the one with its hoary walls and turrets, the other with its picturesque narrows; and in the grounds there was still that ‘sort of wilderness’ where the duel of the two Osbaldistones was stopped by Rob Roy. But Norman, the most voluminous of diarists, has no word of the history or romance of the place; nor of his fellow-students, though he might have remarked one Tait (already with the grave brows befitting an archbishop), and a certain youth in homespun, with wild eyes and flaming hair, George Gilfillan; nor yet of his professors, among whom at least three were worthy of note,—Sir Daniel Sandford, the brilliant Grecian and fervid orator, Robert Buchanan, of whom, under the name of ‘Logic Bob,’ reminiscences may be heard to this day in manses, and one less distinguished in his place, but likely to be remembered longest, because he was the friend and biographer of Burns, Josiah Walker. Macleod was nicknamed ‘the sailor’; he wore the dress and affected the gait of a Jack tar. For learning, he dabbled in science and read poetry, especially Shakespeare and Wordsworth. At home, whither he repaired on the Fridays, he was all fun and frolic, and carried mimicry so far that he would speak in any character but his own. ‘Cease your buffoonery,’ his father wrote, and (unkindest cut of all) ‘I was much pleased with the manner of the Stewart boys.’ But this humour was an extravagant form of that sympathy which was to make him great. Good Stewart boys! ‘on’y,’ as Long John says, ‘where are they?’ In after years Macleod bitterly regretted his neglect of scholarship, feeling himself at a certain disadvantage in an age of intellectual ferment. But every man to his vocation, and that of Norman Macleod was the therapeutics of religion. For that he was unconsciously preparing himself by his absorption in the panorama of existence. He knew he was to be a minister, but he could never have been the man his country admired, had his boyish thoughts been focused on his destination, and not taken up with comrades, and the appearances of life.
Soon he was to hear, in the lectures of Chalmers, a trumpet call. Having finished the curriculum of Arts, he proceeded in 1831 to the Divinity Hall at Edinburgh, where, at the feet of the first of Scottish ministers and men, he awoke to the seriousness and mystery of life, and anticipated with joy his part in the evangelical crusade. Chalmers, alike by his teaching and his character, was singularly fitted to be the spiritual master of Macleod. Almost at once they recognised each other for kindred natures, and the sympathy of the pupil was repaid by the professor’s trust.
Another influence at this period went to deepen his religious feelings, the death of a brother. He had that passionate attachment to relatives in general which marks the Celt, and between Norman and James there had been a peculiar bond of affection. On the last occasion of their meeting, Norman had engaged in prayer (for the first time in company), and the invalid had said, ‘I am so thankful, mother; Norman will be a good man.’ The death of James was not only an awful blow at the moment, it marks an epoch in the other’s life. Immediately after the bereavement, Norman wrote—’I know not, my own brother, whether you now see me or not. If you know my heart, you will know my love for you, and that in passing through this pilgrimage, I shall never forget you, who accompanied me so far.’ Nor did he ever forget; again and again, and long years after, he recalled that pale face, and